I am indebted to a number of people who have helped me in producing Judgement of the Judoon, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them all.
First of all thanks to Albert DePetrillo, Nicholas Payne and Caroline Newbury at BBC Books, who all do such a great job, not only on this book but across the Doctor Who range. Thanks in particular to Justin Richards for giving me the opportunity to contribute to the world of Doctor Who fiction once again, and a big thanks to Steve Tribe for his excellent and efficient editing!
I also need to thank my patient family – my wife Kerry and my children Cefn and Kassia – who have had to put up with me wandering around the house muttering Judoon catchphrases for months on end.
Thanks, of course, must also go to the guv’nor, Russell T Davies, for creating the wonderful Judoon in the first place, and to the design team at BBC Wales for their brilliant realisation on screen, which helped make this such a fun book to write. Thanks also to Terrance Dicks who made the Judoon’s first appearance in print so memorable. It was an honour – and a challenge – to produce the Judoon’s next appearance after two RTD scripts and a Terrance Dicks book!
Thanks, too, to David Tennant, whose energy, enthusiasm and dedication to the role has made the Tenth Doctor such a joy to write.
The biggest thanks of all to everyone at BBC Wales, who all work so hard to bring Doctor Who to our screens. For those of us who can count our time as Doctor Who fans in decades, the last few years have been an incredible time. The Doctor promised us an incredible journey, and he hasn’t let us down. So my final thanks, if you’ll excuse the strange timey-wimeyness of it all, is a thank you for the future of Doctor Who! Thanks, then, to Steven Moffat, Piers Wenger and, of course, Matt Smith and all the writers who are busy creating the Eleventh Doctor’s first series of adventures even as you read this book . . . This really is just the beginning!
GHOSTS OF INDIA
Mark Morris
THE DOCTOR TRAP
Simon Messingham
SHINING DARKNESS
Mark Michalowski
THE STORY OF MARTHA
Dan Abnett
BEAUTIFUL CHAOS
Gary Russell
THE EYELESS
Lance Parkin
THE SLITHEEN EXCURSION
Simon Guerrier
PRISONER OF THE DALEKS
Trevor Baxendale
‘AH, THERE YOU are. Welcome back!’
Kareel groaned as she regained consciousness. Her beliefs about any possible afterlife were vague to say the least, but one thing she had been certain of was that death wouldn’t be followed by a cheerful voice welcoming you back. She blinked a couple of times and made a renewed attempt to focus. She had a blinding headache and felt nauseous, but somehow she was still alive.
She found that she was looking up at the humanoid face of a complete stranger. From the familiar look of the ceiling above the man’s head it was obvious that she was still on board her ship. She really had survived!
‘That’s it, take it easy,’ said the stranger, kindly, noticing her confused expression.
Kareel took a closer look at her rescuer. He appeared to be a human male in his thirties and had a shock of untidy hair on top of a thin but friendly face. The trainee pilot also noted that he was wearing old-fashioned dark-rimmed spectacles. The eccentricity seemed to accentuate the man’s natural good looks, and Kareel found herself hoping that she didn’t look too much of a mess. For his part, the man was grinning wildly, as if seeing her regain consciousness was the highlight of his day.
‘I’m alive?’ she managed to croak.
‘Oh yes!’ said the stranger triumphantly, and disappeared from view for a moment, before reappearing with a cup of water. ‘Here, drink this,’ he suggested, helping her to sit up and passing her the water.
‘Who—’ she began to ask, but the stranger interrupted her.
‘I’m the Doctor,’ he told the recovering pilot. ‘I happened to be passing, heard your SOS, thought I’d better check it out, fixed your hull breach, repaired your life support, and here I am.’
The Doctor smiled, slipping his glasses off and pocketing them with one smooth, practised movement. ‘Lucky I was passing, eh?’
Having made sure that Kareel was making a good recovery, the Doctor left her and went to attend to the rest of the crew. A few minutes later he returned with a more sombre expression on his face.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he began, and Kareel could sense from his tone that he genuinely meant his words. ‘I did what I could, but your captain was trapped in a section right next to the hull breach. I think it would have been quick . . .’ The Doctor trailed off.
Kareel nodded and sniffed back a sob. ‘Captain Pakola,’ she said simply. ‘He was trying to shut the bulkhead doors, to isolate the hull breach . . .’
‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ the Doctor demanded, and Kareel did. As her tale unfolded, the Doctor became more and more agitated. ‘Judoon!’ he muttered furiously, when Kareel described the intruders.
‘You know them?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Oh yes. All too well,’ answered the Doctor airily. ‘Great big hulks, clumsy and blinkered. “Justice is swift,” that’s one of their mottos. Truth is, with the Judoon around, justice is usually brutal and dangerous. They’re like the Canadian Mounties – they always get their man. But it’s usually at a pretty high price.’
The Doctor looked around the bridge of the freighter, still bathed in emergency red-hued lighting. ‘I think they call this collateral damage.’
‘Maybe someone should point out the error of their ways to them,’ suggested Kareel, not entirely seriously. To her surprise, the Doctor just nodded in agreement.
‘Maybe someone should,’ the Doctor told her. ‘Can’t have the Judoon blundering around like rhinos in a restaurant, dispensing justice and causing untold mayhem along the way, can we? Where did you say they were going next?’
‘They were looking for this passenger who was heading for New Memphis,’ Kareel told him.
‘Right then,’ he said. ‘I’d better get on my way. Before the Judoon cause chaos at the New Memphis spaceport.’
Despite everything, Kareel couldn’t help but laugh out loud at that.
The Doctor frowned. ‘Did I say something funny?’ he asked.
‘No, not really. It’s just the idea of these Judoon causing chaos at Elvis the King Spaceport, that’s all,’ explained Kareel. ‘As if they didn’t already have enough problems!’
Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor fed the coordinates for New Memphis into the destination controls and took a moment to tune in to local newsfeeds to discover what Kareel had been talking about. It didn’t take long to find out.
The year was 2487. The Doctor knew that this was an important time in the long saga of humanity’s exploration of the universe. At this point in the twenty-fifth century, the human race was well established amongst the stars and had colonies scattered throughout known space. Hyperspace travel had made journeys of incredible distances commonplace, and gigantic spaceport terminals had developed to handle the millions of spacecraft criss-crossing the universe. One such hub of intergalactic travel was Elvis the King Spaceport, a massive construct on an otherwise barren and uninviting planet close to a major hyperspace nexus point, where traffic from a hundred different star systems crossed daily.
The unexceptional planet now known as New Memphis was a typical spaceport. Originally it had been an uninhabited small planetoid of little interest to anyone. Then it had been made the site of a small refuelling base. Slowly the base had become more and more permanent, growing from an automated fuel dump to a fully fledged spaceport. The pace of development had then picked up, and the spaceport had begun to grow in both importance and stature. Physically it grew too, and around it a wider settlement began to emerge. Over the course of a hundred years, the quiet frontier outpost turned into a sprawling city-state – New Memphis – with a permanent population living on and off the trade and traffic that passed through the spaceport.
New Memphis, the city-state surrounding the spaceport, had soon taken on a character of its own. It was a place of extreme contrasts, of glittering haves and downtrodden have-nots, of wealth and glamour, grime and crime.
The spaceport had also continued to develop, but now it found itself having to seek permission from the city it had spawned for every new stage of growth. A plan for a much-needed thirteenth terminal had been discussed and argued over for decades before construction work had finally begun in 2479. Terminal 13 had finally opened just a few days ago, after a long and inglorious development period beset by delays, protests and enquiries.
It was meant to be a state-of-the-art facility that would service both passengers and freight customers with hitherto unheard of levels of efficiency and automation.
It was meant to be the most advanced transit terminal ever constructed, making travel between the stars comfortable, easy and painless.
It was meant to make Elvis the King Spaceport the most popular nexus point for journeys across the sector.
Unfortunately, things had not gone according to plan.
‘Mr Golightly, it’s been seven days now; how long are these “teething problems” of yours going to trouble you?’ demanded the pretty blonde journalist. She stepped forward at the end of her question and her floating camera-bot had to adjust focus to catch her intense expression of considered indignation. Standing opposite her, Jase Golightly, General Manager of Elvis the King Spaceport, desperately tried to recall the media training he’d once been forced to undertake and managed to smile back. Keep smiling, stay calm and use her name, he repeated to himself. If only he could remember her name.
The journalist, whose name was Stacie Jorrez, waited patiently while he gathered his thoughts, no doubt hoping he would make a fool of himself.
Golightly was a short human in his forties, with thinning hair trimmed tightly to his oval-shaped head. His chubby features were decorated with a pair of old-fashioned steel-rimmed spectacles, a touch of eccentricity that was confirmed by his classic pinstriped suit and the vivid red braces supporting his trousers. Sweating a little despite the aggressive air-conditioning in his office, he pulled at the neck of his shirt.
‘Obviously things haven’t gone quite as well as we hoped Sallie,’ he began, still maintaining the smile, albeit with more than a hint of desperation.
That’s a bland understatement, he thought to himself, but aloud he continued on a different tack.
‘But then this project has had a lot of bad luck over the years,’ he heard himself saying.
Bad luck! There was more to it than bad lack. But where had it all gone wrong? he wondered. After all the years of planning, how had things gone so spectacularly pear-shaped? And what did that mean anyway? What was a pear? And why were things that were the same shape as pears such bad news? He realised that he was on the verge of hysteria and tried to pull himself together.
‘Bad luck!’ repeated Stacie, as if the very idea was an affront to her personally. ‘This project has been planned for decades but has been mismanaged at every single stage. It has failed to meet each and every deadline, the costs have spiralled out of control, and delays have become the norm.’ She cast an arm in the direction of the arrivals hall behind them and added with heavy irony, ‘As passengers have been discovering since you opened a week ago.’
‘Well, yes, I am not going to stand here before you and pretend there haven’t been . . . problems, Sallie,’ he replied.
Stacie smiled coolly at him. ‘It’s Stacie, actually.’
Golightly started sweating more profusely and stammered an apology. ‘We . . . we have, er, had some system failures, and, er, baggage complications . . . software glitches . . .’ he continued lamely.
‘But these problems have persisted, Mr Golightly, day after day, with no sign of improvement. I’ve been talking to some of your customers, some of those travellers who have been inconvenienced by these “systems failures”. And they are far from happy.’
Stacie stepped closer again, her body language totally confrontational now.
‘Admit it, Mr Golightly, this entire opening has been nothing short of a disaster, a disaster of crisis proportions,’ she suggested. The hovering camera-bot switched angles to take a full-screen shot of Golightly, perspiring and desperate.
‘I think you’re exaggerating slightly,’ he managed to reply. ‘I mean, it’s not as if anyone has died.’
‘Cut!’
Within minutes, the woman and her camera-bot had left his office, which was placed high in the administrative block that formed one end of the massive terminal building. Golightly’s command centre, as he liked to think of it, had one large multifunctional wall which, at a voice command, could shift from opaque screen to transparent window overlooking the arrivals hall. The wall was currently in window mode, and Golightly rested his head against the cool plastiglass surface and looked out over the crowds below.
He sighed heavily. Despite his bluster with Stacie, he had very little idea how long it might take to get things right. He knew he shouldn’t have bowed to the pressure from the board to open when they did, but the investors had poured so much capital into the new terminal that they hadn’t been prepared to wait a moment longer to go live. Now they were all facing the consequences but, somehow, it was still his problem. He had told them to be patient, to wait, but they had insisted that the declared opening date was to be kept. The media were calling it a shambles and, looking down at the sight below him, Golightly had to agree with their analysis.
The lines were getting out of hand. There were queues at the various spaceliner company enquiry desks, queues at the departure gates, queues at the customs hall, queues at the shops, queues at the food outlets and even queues in the toilets.
Most of the passengers were humans, but there were a number of aliens of various races, not to mention some robots and androids, amongst the crowds as well. Complaining voices, speaking a variety of languages, filled the air from every direction.
Golightly ordered the wall to switch to its opaque state and sat down heavily at his desk. He checked his diary and sighed again. It was time for another meeting with the senior management team, to hear the latest list of problems and the ever-lengthening estimated timescales for putting things right. Surely something would buck the trend and start to go right for him soon?
His secretary appeared at the door with an apologetic look on her face. Golightly looked up and sighed when he saw her expression. Whatever it was, this was not going to be good news.
‘Mr Salter called,’ Miss Fallon told him. ‘He said he’ll be dropping by for a word before your meeting.’
That was all he needed. Derek Salter was the largest of the private investors in Terminal 13 and the personification of all the pressures to get things right. An unscheduled meeting with Salter was the last thing Golightly needed right now. It had been Salter who had led the charge to open Terminal 13 on the originally announced date rather than accept a delay, and it had subsequently been Salter who had been first in line to blame Golightly for everything that had gone wrong.
Golightly sighed again as the screen slipped from opaque to newsfeed mode, and he caught sight of himself looking fat, sweaty and rather like a rabbit caught in headlights. ‘I mean, it’s not as if anyone has died,’ he was saying, with a peculiar half-smile.
Golightly hoped those words wouldn’t come back to haunt him.
The Doctor skipped around the TARDIS central console, flicking controls and adjusting his approach to New Memphis. Materialising near a busy spaceport was a dangerous exercise, and the Doctor didn’t want to be the cause of a multiple pile-up. He needed to make a precise and controlled landing inside one of the terminals itself rather than make any kind of official approach; the TARDIS’s lack of pre-authorised flight details would only lead to awkward questions. Thankfully, it appeared that one of the terminals – the newest – had some kind of technical glitch with its security system. With luck – and some skilful steering – the TARDIS could slip in unnoticed and unannounced.
‘Terminal 13 it is then,’ muttered the Doctor to himself. ‘Unlucky for some!’
Deep inside the ‘spaceside’ section of Terminal 13 a series of connected warehouses contained the automated baggage-handling system that had so completely failed, thus far, to operate according to design. Integral to the system was a security circuit, designed to ensure that all baggage was tracked during its entire journey through the terminal. Like many of the Terminal 13 systems, the security circuit had only operated erratically since going live, occasionally going offline for protracted periods. Unfortunately, as the TARDIS began to materialise in one of the darkest corners of the complex, the system flickered back into life.
Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor shrugged into his long brown coat and headed for the exit. ‘Right then,’ he said to himself, ‘let’s sort out these Judoon.’ He stepped out and, not for the first time in his many lives, found a hostile reception waiting for him. A squad of security officers had the TARDIS surrounded and were pointing weapons in his direction. The Doctor quickly pulled the TARDIS door shut and locked it before spinning around to face his reception committee.
‘Were you expecting me?’ he asked, raising his hands.
IN THE ARRIVALS hall of the troubled Terminal 13 of Elvis the King Spaceport, a traveller destined to go right to the head of Jase Golightly’s list of problems had just arrived on a shuttle from Heddon Two. The new arrival was currently shuffling through the slow-moving line of people passing through the customs hall. He looked somehow less concerned about the chaos than most of his fellow travellers. He had one of those faces that are impossible to remember or to describe; a plain, unremarkable face that is instantly forgotten.
According to his passport, his name was Dedrik Gallajer, but that was not a name he had ever answered to before. In the previous forty-eight hours, he had used three different identities – Gallajer, Gorgie Kenrite and Aroon Manish – but none of these was his real name. In fact, the man had so many different identities to choose from that he had all but forgotten his original given name. These days, he preferred to think of himself in terms of his role in life, which was also the way his employers designated him. To those that paid for his services, he was merely ‘the Courier’.
The Courier passed his recently acquired identity document to the bored-looking customs officer, giving her a friendly smile that was not reciprocated. Without giving the passport a second look, the woman waved it through a scanner and passed it back to the man, who took it with a grunt of thanks and moved forward into the arrivals hall.
The Courier cast a quick glance at his watch – he was running late. Nevertheless he didn’t increase his pace; drawing attention to himself now would be a waste of all his hard work thus far. Anonymity was important to him. He needed to be just another face in the crowd – not special, not remarkable, not memorable. Muttering ‘Excuse me’ again and again like a mantra, he began to push through the crowds, squeezing between the queuing hordes.
The Courier followed the signs for the left luggage area and made his way there as quickly as he could. He kept a firm grip on his solitary piece of carry-on luggage, a plain grey suitcase on wheels, as he manoeuvred through the crowds and selected a suitable locker. Stowing the suitcase within the locker, the man closed the door and pocketed the reclaim chip. He took another look at his watch and stepped up his pace. Now unburdened by the luggage, he was able to move a little faster. Or at least he might have been able to had it not been for the mass of passengers blocking every path. He began to duck and dive, weaving through the crowd, taking advantage of any sliver of space between people to slip sideways and make progress towards his goal. In the main he managed to do this without making contact with anyone, but once or twice he had a small bump and had to mutter an apology. Occasionally, someone making a similar effort to thread themselves through the masses would collide with him. At one point, a humanoid alien with blue skin had actually managed to knock him off his feet. The alien had been terribly embarrassed. He had helped him to his feet and apologised in a dozen languages as he brushed the Courier down.
‘So sorry am I. Please. You not hurt?’ he enquired, in a stuttering approximation of human speech.
The man travelling under the name Gallajer pushed the alien’s hands away. ‘I’m fine, no damage done,’ he insisted and continued on his way, quickly blending into the crowd again, just another traveller amongst the masses.
Elsewhere in the terminal, other visitors were making much more of an impact. There were two of them – humans but of such a striking appearance that many would mistake them for aliens. They were abnormally tall, nearly two metres, and dressed in suits so deeply black that they seemed to suck the light out of the air around them. Identical designer shades covered their eyes, and their hair was a brilliant white. To anyone looking at the pair as they strode through the crowds (which parted before them, without being asked), it appeared as though they were the only monochromatic element in a world of colour. They reached a particular café with a terrace area that allowed diners to look out over the arrivals hall and loomed over a pair of Draconians, who quickly finished their drinks and vacated their table.
Across the arrivals hall, the Courier caught a glimpse of the two men and began to sweat. Why had Uncle sent the Walinski brothers, of all people? For a moment he hesitated and considered his options. The Courier knew that Uncle was the big noise in the criminal underground of New Memphis, but he also knew that there was a new gang in town, an upstart criminal organisation run by the mysterious Madame Yilonda. His job was to take items from one place to another and not to ask too many questions about what he was carrying or why. Right now, he was meant to be handing over the reclaim chip to the agents Uncle had sent to the rendezvous point, and if those agents happened to be the Walinski brothers then Uncle must have his reasons. As far as the Courier was concerned, sending the Walinski brothers was akin to putting a huge spotlight on his arrival and calling up Madame Yilonda directly to tell her to take a closer look. It was a worrying thought. Why arrange for something to be delivered from off-world with such secrecy and then make such a public showing of making the collection? Something didn’t smell right, and the Courier was very tempted to cut and run.
The Walinski brothers were more than just albino freaks, though. The Courier knew their reputation well. They were Uncle’s most trusted enforcers; cross Uncle, and the Walinski brothers would travel the length of the universe to track you down. Cutting and running was just not an option.
‘You can lower the weapons, you know,’ the Doctor told the security men brightly. ‘I’m not about to do a runner.’
There were four security officers in the squad, all dressed in smart, matching uniforms with polished boots and shiny weapons. They looked young, keen and, perhaps, just a little bit nervous. Beyond their original instruction to the Doctor to raise his hands, they had not said a word. The Doctor guessed they were waiting for someone with more authority to arrive and take charge.
A moment later, a man in a similar but slightly grander uniform appeared in a distant doorway and began marching towards them. As he approached, the Doctor could see that he was significantly older than his officers. His lined and scarred face, coupled with his gait, told the Doctor all he needed to know. Ex-military, he decided.
‘Transit documents?’ demanded the man before he had even reached the group.
One of the young security guards shook his head.
The older man came to a halt directly in front of the Doctor and subjected him to an intensive visual appraisal.
‘You realise that this is a secure area of the spaceport?’ he asked eventually, maintaining eye contact as he spoke.
The Doctor nodded and pulled his psychic paper from his jacket pocket, leaning forward to whisper in the man’s ear. ‘Undercover agent, Galactic Law Authority,’ he told him. Without replying, the ex-soldier took the wallet and gave it a long cool look before handing it back.
‘Looks like a blank sheet of paper,’ he retorted. ‘Don’t try any of your psychic mind games on me, sonny, not to a veteran of the Telepath Uprising of ’54.’
The Doctor quickly slipped the wallet back into his pocket and changed tack without missing a beat.
‘Veteran of the Uprising, eh? I should have guessed. If they’ve called someone of your standing in here, things must be worse than I thought.’
The ex-soldier nodded to two of the guards who moved in and twisted the Doctor’s arms behind his back.
‘And don’t think you can flatter me, either,’ he told the Doctor, turning his back on him. ‘This way please.’ The man began marching off in the direction from which he had come. The Doctor found himself manhandled along in his wake by two of the fresh-faced security men.
As they walked, one of the guards gave the Doctor a sympathetic look before hurrying off after his commanding officer.
‘Upsetting General Moret was a really bad idea,’ he told the Doctor in a whisper as he passed him.
Considering the way things had gone, the Doctor had to agree with the analysis. Things were not looking good.
The Courier swallowed hard as he sat down at the table with the Walinski brothers. Three steaming cups of coffee were waiting on the table, but something still felt odd, something didn’t look quite right. Was there something unusual about the bubbling liquid in the cup in front of him or was he just being paranoid?
‘Surprised to see you boys on this errand – what happened, did one of you do something to upset Uncle?’ he asked, realising that he sounded a little nervous. How could he let the Walinski brothers get to him like this – where was his professionalism? The brothers treated the question as if it was rhetorical and said nothing. The Courier glanced down at the coffee cup in front of him. It was still bubbling suspiciously. Better safe than sorry. He moved the cup and swapped it with one of the brothers’ drinks.
‘Not that I don’t trust you or anything . . . but, well, I don’t!’ he explained.
To his surprise both brothers just grinned at this and, in perfect synchronisation, they slipped their dark glasses up onto their foreheads. Two pairs of pink eyes now looked directly at him.
‘No offence meant . . .’ said one brother.
‘No offence taken . . .’ concluded the other, completing the sentence as if the two were part of the same consciousness.
The two continued to look at him, their expressions as illegible as a medic’s handwriting. The Courier picked up the cup of coffee and raised it to his lips. He hesitated for a beat and then, under the intimidating eyes of the brothers, he took a sip. He was relieved to find that it tasted completely normal.
‘Is the “package” secure?’ asked the first brother, with the same casual tone that one might use to discuss the weather.
The Courier took another sip of his coffee before answering.
‘Left luggage,’ he said simply, replacing the cup on the table.
The Walinski brother on his left held out a hand.
‘Reclaim chip?’
The Courier noted with surprise that he was sweating. Either the Walinski brothers were getting to him or the coffee had been hotter than he had realised. He reached into his pocket and felt a sharp stabbing in his stomach – the chip wasn’t there. Quickly he checked his other pockets. He was sweating profusely now, heartbeat racing – how was this possible? He had pocketed the chip just minutes ago.
Both brothers kept looking at him with intense expressions. It was as if they were both heat sources pouring down on him. Sweat was now running off him as if he were in a sauna. His clothes were drenched, his hair sodden. Carefully, methodically, he checked each and every pocket of his clothing. The chip was nowhere to be found.
‘I had it a moment ago,’ he told them desperately, but they seemed to have lost patience with him. They exchanged a look and a nod then abruptly pushed back from the table and stood up. Without looking back at the Courier, they quickly moved away from the café and disappeared into the crowd.
The Courier didn’t know what to do. When the Walinski brothers reported this failure to Uncle, he would be as good as dead. Unless, somehow, he could turn this around and make good on his error. What could have happened to that chip? It had been safe in his pocket and now it was gone . . . Of course! Suddenly he remembered the blue-skinned alien who had run into him. What a fool he had been; it was a classic pickpocket technique. The thief would ‘accidentally’ run into their mark and then, under cover of helping the victim to their feet, they would stealthily pick their pockets.
The Courier realised that his only hope of surviving was to find the pickpocket and get that chip back. He got up and was surprised to find that he was unsteady on his feet. He swayed, his head spinning. He was still sweating profusely, unnaturally. All in all, he felt quite unwell.
Pushing himself away from the table, he staggered to the nearest washroom. He almost fell through the doors and stumbled across to the washbasins. People were avoiding him now, unnerved by the sight of a man sweating and shivering so badly. He realised that he must look quite ill to people, perhaps even dangerous. He looked up at his reflection in the mirror above the sink and was horrified at the sight that met his eyes. His skin was actually glowing – changing colour from a burnt orange to a deep blood-red even as he watched. He looked like he’d been exposed to some kind of terrible radiation source. He jerked the tap on and splashed cold water onto his face. It hissed, instantly turning to steam as it touched his overheating skin. Flailing now, he splashed more and more water upwards onto his person but it wasn’t enough. He could feel himself getting hotter and hotter, brighter and brighter.
Suddenly his clothes burst into flame, and seconds later his entire body was engulfed with fire. For a moment he burned with the intensity of an inferno and then – with a deafening bang – he exploded.