Starman [ Life on Mars / Doctor Who Crossover ]

Chapter 3 Iron Man

is he alive or dead
has he thoughts within his head
we'll just pass him there
why should we even care

---

Sam Tyler was insane.

He spent the better part of the car ride contemplating this fact, including the voices, the hallucinations, and the distinct probability that every storefront and pedestrian racing by the Cortina's window was nothing more than the obsessive-compulsive detail of a comatose dream.

But at least it'd been a consistent dream. At least it'd stuck to its own bloody rules of engagement, and hadn't let its madness slip past the confines of phone receivers and radio speakers and television screens. Sam could handle the odd replying voice here, a mixed-up headline there, but he'd never encountered anything like Doctor Detective Inspector Obviously-a-Bloody-Pseudonym John Smith, and now he hadn't a clue what the hell 1973's game had changed to. That the bastard had appeared in tandem with this whole Mangler mess only made his presence all the more unsettling. It was hard to ignore that they only had his word about the struggle in Lupei's flat and it was even harder to neglect now, on their way to the site of a fifth victim, that he'd been absent from the station the entire day.

And yet, it was Sam who looked the part of a mad bastard. Because Smith could fool them. And Sam couldn't.

Smith had enough sense to keep silent in the back seat all the way until they parked in front of the victim's multi-storey, but Sam realized as he opened the car door that even that had been eerie, controlled, like Smith's eyes hadn't spent any time on the outside scenery and all their time on the back of Sam's head.

Sam shuddered.

"Neighbors last saw the victim yesterday evening," Gene said as soon as they went up the steps and into the hall -- "they" meaning the three of them, with Smith wearing a strange little frown of concentration as if he was an invested party instead of a mental glitch designed specifically to make Sam's life even worse. "Apparently, Miss Kenton would take a evening constitution before retiring to her flat."

Sam raised a brow, momentarily distracted from his predicament. "She exercised?"

Gene grunted. "If that's your fascist word for it."

Several officers stood in a group by a cordoned door, with Ray mulling about at their center. As Sam and the others approached, Ray raised his eyes mid-gesture and then narrowed them. "Next wave of the Hyde invasion," he muttered aside to one of the plods.

Sam found himself annoyed, for once, not because of the slight but because of who it associated him with. Smith reinforced this by replying cheerily, "Oh, not an invasion, really -- more like a pair of diplomatic scouts," and then he patted Sam's shoulder with such friendliness -- such familiarity -- that Sam wanted to slam him against the floor and wrench cuffs on him then and there.

Instead, he forced a smile and said, "Yes, we're our own little sovereign nation." He shoved past Ray into the flat.

The place had, at one point, been a tidy affair -- beyond tidy, really, from the spotless walls to the minimalist shelves and the clean countertops, all attended to with the kind of care Sam associated more with his own twenty-first century sensibilities than the rustic brand of Manchester he'd become accustomed to.

And, like his own twenty-first century sensibilities, it was all rendered obsolete to the point of absurdity by the gory mess at its center.