Doctor Who_ The Dying Days Part 25

Greyhaven pointed out one of the images.

The picture rippled, filling with an aerial view of the Doctor half-running, half-stumbling along a main street littered with human corpses. He was running towards the cloud, waving his arms.

The Red Death was getting nearer and nearer.

'It's almost as though he wants to be found,' Staines observed.

Xznaal leant forward, almost dipping his head into the hologram. 'You can feel its hatred of him,' he hissed, his pincers clattering together in antic.i.p.ation. 'Kill him!' he shouted, 'Kill the Doctor!'

He was at the corner of the main street. The red cloud was surging towards him like a tidal wave, breaking over the roof of Mrs Darling's little shop. It had gathered itself together, and now it was lit from within. Tiny lightning flashes revealed billowing crenellations and blossoming stegosaur spines built up from layer after layer of blood-red fumes.

There was a cras.h.i.+ng from inside the building. There was someone in the shop, directly in the path of the cloud.

Some instinct within the gas knew it too. It paused and began scuttling across the roof. It had clearly decided that it could have some sport with whoever was in the building, and then be able to return to its primary target. The Doctor jogged ahead and peered in through the window.

The door was locked, but that didn't pose a barrier to someone with a sonic screwdriver. Once inside, the Doctor closed the door behind him and switched on the light.

There was a plaintive miaow from underneath a col apsed row of shelving.

The cat had probably brought the shelves down on himself - he was a heavy old thing. It was Stevie, the big white moggie that Mrs Darling had owned for as long as the Doctor could remember, which was a very long time indeed.

He was blocked in on al sides by shelves weighed down by heavy tin cans. The Doctor moved a couple of tins aside, and cleared a way through. Stevie looked dopily up at him, as though he'd been planning to bury himself alive and wouldn't tolerate such interference in his sleep patterns.

The fog was thickening outside, enveloping the building. The Doctor didn't have long.

He prompted Stevie, trying to tempt him out of the hole by smacking his lips and rubbing his fingers together. He'd never worked out why, but universally cats seemed to recognise that as meaning "come here". The cat struggled to comply, but still couldn't move. The Doctor tried to ease the shelving unit back, but it was wedged against the wall.

A sickly red mist crept past the shop window, pausing there.

If there was a chance that the Doctor could save a life, then he would always try.

He had to work around the cat, to dislodge one shelf rather than the whole unit. He began removing tins.

The Doctor could end wars, repel invasions, track the villain to his lair, expose master plans and wipe out evil across the universe of time and s.p.a.ce, he could do all that before breakfast.

A tendril of cloud slapped against the window pane with surprising strength, but not enough to crack the gla.s.s.

The cat looked up, its eyes wide, its ears swept back. "Get out," it was warning him, "Save yourself".

But if the Doctor couldn't use his unique abilities and special powers to save the life of one little cat, then what was the point of having them?

The cat looked at him, c.o.c.king his head to one side, acknowledging the Doctor's help for the first time.

'I won't leave you,' the Doctor a.s.sured him.

Because when it comes down to it, doctors save lives and any life is worth saving.

Death came drifting through the cracks in the doorframe.

The Doctor eased the shelf up, opening an escape route. Almost before he had finished, the cat had scurried away, over the counter. For an instant it paused, granting his saviour one of the rarest things in the universe: feline grat.i.tude. And then he had gone, out through the catflap in the back door.

The Doctor grinned.

There was a crackling, popping sound like bacon under a grill.

The Doctor stood, brus.h.i.+ng a cat hair from his frock coat.

It was forming and reforming the whole time, but there was a central ma.s.s there, a writhing, sulphurous thing with a hundred eyes, al watching him.

Tendrils of crimson vapour wafted towards him, sensing a trap.

It smelt of cigarettes, of exhaust fumes, of week-old dustbins. It smelt of decay. It smelt of Death.

The Doctor straightened, his hands behind his back.

Time Lords have many lives and that means that they die many times. That didn't mean it was ever easy.

Death moved tentatively, finding no fear from its prey. It instinctively knew that in killing him it would kill itself.

The Doctor knew now that someone else would liberate Britain from the Martians, someone else would confront the traitors, organise the rebels and destroy the monsters. He had no regrets, why would he? For twelve hundred years and in every corner of time and s.p.a.ce he had helped others to hold back death, he'd helped them to go forward in all their beliefs. Then by their own achievements, their own heroism, their own sacrifices, his companions - his friends - had proved his actions right. He could wish for no better epitaph.

88.The Doctor prepared himself.

Death drew itself into a red circle around him, filling the whole of the shop, hissing all the time.

'h.e.l.lo,' the Doctor said softly, holding out a paper bag. 'Would you like a jelly baby?'

It was steeling itself to pounce, savouring the moment. It began tensing panther muscles made of smoke. A carnivore mouth was forming, vaporous jaws and hazy fangs.

The Doctor smiled, and welcomed Death as it swept over him.

89.

Chapter Twelve

The No Doctors

Thursday, May 15th 1997 Benny stretched her arms and yawned.

When she opened her eyes, the Doctor was standing there, his umbrella in one hand, a tray full of breakfast things carefully balanced in the other. She was in her room at Allen Road, the one opposite Chris Cwej's on the first floor.

'Good morning, Benny,' he said, standing in a shaft of warm spring sunlight. 'I've brought you some strong black coffee and lightly-done toast, just how you like it. I'm afraid that Chris has taken the last of the marmalade.' His face wrinkled up. 'Are you al right?'

She shook herself. 'I've just had a dream.'

'What do you remember?' he asked, clearly curious about such a human little thing. The Doctor was the sort of person that had dream sequences instead of dreams: his subconscious continued to plot away even while he was trying to get some shut-eye. No wonder he rarely slept.

'I don't think it was anything significant. It was so vivid. You know the sort of thing? A dream that goes on for so long that when you wake up you have to spend the first few minutes working out what's real.'

He smiled. 'The sort of dream that haunts you all morning?'

'Yeah.' She sipped her coffee. 'Where's Jason?'

The Doctor frowned. 'Who?'

'My husband.'

The Doctor grinned a goofy grin. 'Ms Summerfield, you are renowned throughout the galaxy for your singular lack of interest in that sphere of human affairs.'

Benny munched on the toast. 'Lack of success, rather than interest, I a.s.sure you. I dreamt I got married.'

'A white wedding, with guests from across time and s.p.a.ce, all getting on perfectly wel together despite their different creeds and histories?'

'Yes,' she admitted glumly. 'Simple girlie wish-fulfilment, I suppose. There was even a unicorn there. The man I married was a bit of a rough diamond with a heart of gold and a roving eye, but he loved me and only me and I loved him back. We interrupted our honeymoon and found dad. He was running a teashop in Berks.h.i.+re. I got a professors.h.i.+p. A real one that I earned.'

'It sounds like a nice dream,' the Doctor said wistful y, 'if a little far-fetched. I wish I had dreams like that.'

Benny hesitated, and sipped her tea. 'Well, yes and no. It all went sour after that. Roz died. I had an argument with Jason and we split up. Chris left you. Then ... wasn't this coffee a minute ago?'

'Then?' the Doctor prompted.

'Then you changed.' She looked over at the little man, frowning. 'And the government were working with the Martians and we were framed for murder and the Martians invaded and they blew up UNIT HQ and dropped a poison gas on Adisham and all the animals were dying and the people and the Brigadier was driving me away in Bessie and I couldn't stop you and you went running into the cloud and then you - '

Extract from the memoirs of Professor Bernice Summerfield I woke, screaming.

I was bolt upright with a rough hand over my mouth, in the darkness. Holding me down.

'Bernice,' a firm voice was saying. 'It's all right.'

I had stopped screaming, my mouth hoa.r.s.e. I lay there, my heart pounding, pumping all that adrenaline around and around my body.

The rain was pattering against the corrugated iron roof of the officer's mess. It was the middle of the night.

'Are you all right?' Alistair asked me.

I slumped back. 'I've just had a dream.'

'The Doctor?'

'The Doctor.'

It was light just before six.

I was woken by the sound of the radio. The UNIT operators were collating information from the resistance cells, making a list of enemy positions and activity, just as they had been when I went to sleep. The toothpaste and soap were in the provisions box and I made my way outside. I didn't take my gun, and knew that would earn me a reprimand from Alistair when I got back.

I pulled the door open and stepped outside. The privates on guard duty saluted me, which I admit gave me a bit of a thril . The air was chil y and there was a haze of mist still hanging around. The ground was still damp from the overnight rain.

As you can imagine, I was at a low ebb. The Doctor had come back as someone else, and then just as I was getting used to him, he'd been taken from me, and this time he wouldn't be coming back.

90.This was my second morning here. It had taken us a week to edge this far around London, avoiding the main roads. We had arrived in the area yesterday afternoon, and the UNIT people had been expecting us, or Alistair at any rate. The Royalist encampment had been set up in a natural dip in the earth, a clearing surrounded by woodland deep within Windsor Forest, south of Windsor itself. In it sat a dozen tanks and as many Harrier jets, not to mention armoured cars, jeeps, trucks and motorbikes. The hardware was either tucked underneath the trees or covered in camouflaged netting. We had known where it was, but driving along the track straining to see it, the camp had been completely invisible until we were within twenty yards - by that time, a dozen snipers concealed in or among the trees could have picked us off. If that wasn't impressive enough, the base would also be virtual y invisible from the air - not that anything was flying. The Provisional Government were enforcing a strict 'no fly' rule, at the insistence of the Martians. Bambera's men didn't have to worry about satellites, either: the resistance movement's first action was to disable the surveil ance network. This had been a disconcertingly easy task, they told us, with a little covert help from the CIA.

There were a dozen resistance bases like this. Al of them were well away from the population centres, but close to the motorway network. The military were keeping their heads down, collecting intelligence, content to stay hidden.

Despite all the soldiers and their hardware here it was a world away from the chaos of the Martian Invasion.

The "officers' mess" was an old garage on the edge of the site, at the end of a mud track, off a disused country road. A decade ago someone had used it to fix up cars, it had probably been a barn or something of the sort before then. The UNIT troops had set up temporary stalls that made the garage look like the casualty department of a hospital, but did allow some form of privacy. The other troops slept in bivouac tents. The thrusting young archaeologist in me yearned for the romance of sleeping under the stars, but secretly I was rather glad to have walls and a roof around me.

There was already a well-trodden path to the "ladies", really nothing more than a screened off section of stream with makes.h.i.+ft chemical toilets and shower stal s. On arrival, I'd been surprised to see how many female soldiers there were there. Including Brigadier Bambera the commanding officer, there were about twenty. The precautions in place to keep the men and women from, ahem, 'fraternising', were rather comical. The girlies had their own little area of the camp, and the men weren't al owed in there. Fascinating from an anthropological view. Bambera and I slept in the officer's mess, suitably screened off from our male colleagues. Thankfully, none of the other women were about their ablutions when I got to the stream. What little contact I had had with them had convinced me that they weren't really my kind of people.

I was right at the edge of the camp, so I had to check that there was no-one hiding beyond the perimeter. That done, I decided to wash in the stream itself. When I was sixteen, I had lived out in the woodlands beyond the walls of s.p.a.cefleet Academy. My exploits there had become legendary among the travel ers and traders of a dozen galaxies. 'See that woman at the bar?' they'd say, interrupting some vital business transaction, 'Don't talk to her, she's forever going on and on about how she lived out in the wild and how she became a bit of a guru to the other students'. 'Oh yeah,' one of their companions would invariably reply, 'Her boyfriend kept tortoises, and he had - ', ' - freckles and a wicked laugh!' everyone would shout out in unison.

Mockery is the sincerest form of jealousy. Besides, the skills I had picked up then had come in useful time and time again. I sat on a fallen tree trunk, cupped my hands and drank a mouthful of very cold stream water. It was too cold to wash properly, so I settled for wiping my face and neck.

The echoing, rumbling noise of an aeroplane overhead broke the still of the morning. The first repat airliner of the day, taking another five hundred people back to their home country. The flights had started yesterday, all from Heathrow. It was like the Berlin Airlift in reverse, wave after wave of plane flying due south until they were over French airs.p.a.ce, and then off in al directions. The radio news said that there were half a mil ion people camped at the airport - they'd need a thousand jumbo jets in total. That probably wasn't far off Heathrow's normal capacity.

The other airports weren't being used to simplify the task, apparently. According to all the reports we had received not even ProvGov planes were in the air, they'd only flown once, a quick sortie over Edinburgh.

A week ago, I'd been waiting for the Brigadier on the road out of Adisham. We'd been sitting in Bessie, parked in a lay-by that overlooked the vil age and we cheered as the red poison gas dispersed. The Doctor had managed to do that within ten minutes of his arrival. All the police cars and army vans that had been sent to Adisham to track us down had ended up as disaster relief. The Martian s.h.i.+p vanished over the horizon, heading back to London at a speed the Brigadier found incredible. On the radio - resistance frequencies, not the BBC - we learnt that about a hundred people had died, not the couple of thousand it might have been. The village had been completely sealed off. A week later, as I washed myself in a cold stream, the village was still surrounded by a police cordon.

So, the Doctor had saved everyone in the nick of time, and any minute now he'd appear and cheerfully underplay his achievements. The Brigadier and I bored ourselves sil y recounting the number of times that had happened.

When the Doctor didn't emerge straight away, that was fine, too. The Brigadier a.s.sured me that it often looked like he'd died, but he hadn't really, it had all been a misunderstanding. Tell me about it, I'd replied. The Doctor had cheated death so often that death didn't play anymore. He was alive, and he'd catch up with us sooner or later.

We didn't believe it, even then.

As I sat in that forest, the Martians and the Provisional Government were in London, preparing the second stage of their plan.

91.Xznaal moved slowly through the large chambers of the East Wing of the National Gallery. After a week he was almost fully acclimatised to England. He could almost feel his veins coursing with the blood coolants developed by Vrgnur. The first sunlight of the morning was creeping through the skylights.

Xztaynz was waiting for him in the green-wal ed Sackler Room, and was baring his stumpy human teeth. 'Morning good, Kingman Snal,' he began.

'Your Martian improvess, human.'