Inmate 280 (short story)
Inmate 280 was the tenth short story in the Short Trips anthology Short Trips: Steel Skies. It was written by Cavan Scott. It featured the Seventh Doctor.
Summary
After meeting an enigmatic young man, Travers recounts his time spent as a prison warden at the infamous Alcatraz Island.
After stopping a break-out attempt by the brutish Chinese criminal Wai-Chan, Travers encounters inmate 280, otherwise known as Richard A. Fells, a strange Scottish prisoner with a very unnerving manner.
Fells later baits Wai-Chan, causing the criminal to incite another riot; as events escalate out of control, Travers is forced to release a deadly gas in a last attempt to quell the fighting. But as the gas kills the inmates, Travers finds that he, Wai-Chan and Fells are still alive, held inside a telekinetic bubble. Fells confronts Wai-Chan, believing him to be the host for a Threckon, an alien creature that feeds off negative emotion which he imprisoned under San Francisco centuries ago until a recent seismic shift along the fault line freed it.
However, Travers looks on in astonishment as the corpse of his superior, Leech, is suddenly reanimated, and the Threckon within promptly kills Wai-Chan. As the creature then attacks Fells, Travers pushes it outside the bubble, where it is destroyed by the gas. Without the alien to maintain it the bubble collapses, but Fells somehow manages to prevent Travers from dying.
As Travers concludes his story he tells the man that the events have left him with cancer, and the young man sadly walks off into the darkness.
Characters
References
- The Fifth Doctor trapped the Threckon under the fault line beneath San Francisco three millennia before the story takes place.
- The Seventh Doctor reads The War of the Worlds.
- The Eighth Doctor makes a cameo at the end of this story.
Notes
- The stories in Short Trips: Steel Skies are divided into four sections dealing with different types of confinement. This story deals with incarceration, that is, "stories of punishment and imprisonment".
Continuity
to be added
