Dr. Who - BBC New Series 28 (15 page)

Poor Miss Oladini had made it look so easy when she’d hotwired that car, but Donna didn’t have a clue where to begin.

Great.

She tried the door just in case.

It was open.

She glanced up the street but no one in the mêlée of people was yelling at her or claiming the van as theirs.

She hauled herself into the driver’s seat and put her hand under the seat to adjust it. God knew why – she wasn’t going anywhere, because no one in this day and age was stupid enough to put their keys under the seat of an unlocked van.

She brought up her hands, a bunch of car keys in them.

‘And I want a tricycle and a pony and a lifetime’s supply of milk chocolate,’ she said aloud, putting her hand back under the seat just in case her Christmas wishes from when she was eight came true too.

No ponies, no bikes, not even a melted chocolate bar.

But the keys – that was good.

She ramped the van into reverse, and seconds later she was on her way back down towards Chiswick High Road, planning her second journey out towards Essex in twelve hours.

She threw a last look in the wing mirror at her house as she swung the van around and then shot off, hoping that her mum hadn’t seen her do this. Cos then there’d be hell to pay. And quite right too!

Before she had even got to the main road, the crowds were in the street, staring and pointing, and she could hear sirens from ambulances, police and fire engines all around her, all heading down towards the west, towards the M4.

Towards where the pillar of light had struck the ground.

She was heading towards London and that side of the street was relatively empty, even for a Sunday.

Donna’s attention was drawn by the number of people outside the various electrical shops that dotted both sides of the street. Chiswick High Road had mostly been cafés and show shops when she was growing up, but this invasion of gadget shops was weird. She remembered the Doctor saying he’d met the Carnes boys in one.

All this went through her mind in a brief second, probably because there on the streets in front of her were Lukas and Joe Carnes.

Like they’d been waiting for her.

Literally.

Standing in the street. One minute, the road had been empty. The next, two lads were right in front of her.

Donna hit the brakes, and just avoided skidding to a halt, actually making quite a graceful stop, although a man behind her hit his horn.

‘Yeah? What else didja get for Christmas, sunshine?’

she screamed back at him. ‘Shove it up yer—’

The passenger door opened, and Joe and Lukas clambered in.

‘Joe says we need to be somewhere called Copernicus,’

Lukas said quietly. ‘He also knew you’d be here. At this time.’

‘Course he did,’ Donna replied, driving forward as the irate driver overtook her, one hand off the wheel and gesturing at her. Shrugging, Donna continued driving towards Hammersmith. ‘Morning, Joe,’ she called to the boy, who was now in the back.

Joe didn’t reply but got something out of his pocket.

‘What’s that then? New MP3 thingy?’

‘It’s an M-TEK,’ Lukas replied on Joe’s behalf.

‘You what?’ Donna tried to sound interested, but wasn’t. She was more focused on how they’d known she would be there.

‘It told him where you’d be,’ Lukas continued. ‘It talks to him.’

That sort of answered her question, Donna decided, but annoyingly threw up a couple of dozen other ones. ‘Is that how he knew the Doctor’s name the other day, then?’

Lukas shrugged. ‘Dunno. Man in the shop gave it to him. Said it was a demo version. Gave out about ten of ’em. Said Joe was the right person to have one. He didn’t tell me till we’d got home and I found him downloading music onto it.’

That made sense to Donna, although it didn’t really make any sense at all. When you travelled with the Doctor, you began to accept that things that didn’t make sense really
did
make sense in a not-making-sense-to-normal-people kind of way.

So this M-TEK thing made Joe Carnes know things. Or it told him things. Things to attract the Doctor’s attention.

‘Didn’t your dad ever tell you boys about accepting gifts from strange men?’

‘My dad did,’ Lukas said, glancing at Joe. ‘Joe’s dad didn’t stick around long enough.’

Well, thought Donna, that’s a conversation killer. She made a sudden turn into the Hammersmith roundabout that caused someone to toot their horn. Maybe it was the same driver as before, but she didn’t know or care. She turned onto the Talgarth Road.

It was empty. Really empty. This was a big six-lane roadway towards Central London, via Earls Court then Knightsbridge, then Hyde Park and eventually into Piccadilly. It should’ve taken twenty minutes, maybe thirty to get to Piccadilly on a Sunday lunchtime, and that was without any road works. Donna did it in ten and she wasn’t exactly speeding.

It was as if all the people in London were going away… no, going towards something. That light. They were all heading towards that.

Rubberneckers, eager to take photos on their mobiles and say ‘oh look, we saw the carnage!’ or something more sinister? In which case why wasn’t she affected?

‘Scuse me, boys, more law-breaking…’ Donna got out her mobile as she drove and called her mum. No reply.

That wasn’t good news.

So here she was, in a stolen transit van, driving through a deserted London, off to darkest Essex to rescue her granddad and her friend from killers, unable to contact home, complete with the Children of the Damned at her side.

‘Cheers, Doctor,’ she said to no one in particular.

Some twenty miles away from Donna and the boys, there was a massive police and ambulance presence around the Ruislip Woods area, with even more emergency services arriving from nearby RAF Hillingdon.

The massive bolt of white energy had struck the woodlands – one of Britain’s first protected woods –although there wasn’t too much to protect right now. It had created a massive bowl-shaped crater about a quarter

of a mile wide, decimating the trees, grasses and shrubbery. A small waft of smoke drifted on the morning air and crowds of startled onlookers huddled close by, partly out of amazement, partly out of shock, but mostly out of fear.

Was it a plane crash? An al-Qaeda bomb? Something from the RAF base gone wrong? Casualties? Oh my God, my kids were playing here? Has anyone seen my dog, a lab cross? Excuse me, have you seen my husband, he was out jogging? Have you seen that awful face in the sky? Is it a movie stunt? I never trusted that IRA ceasefire…

Police Sergeant Alison Pearce was trying to control the crowds and her own officers and get the emergency crews through. The Sunday morning shift had seemed such a good idea. Three kids meant that doing night shifts was out, but her mum could babysit on a Sunday while she did her shift. Normally, she’d be home by ten, see them asleep and get them off to school in the morning. She’d already called home and warned her beloved mother that grandparental care might be the order of the next couple of days. The paperwork alone on this would keep her busy. And that’s assuming she ever actually got away from the site.

‘Oi, you, excuse me?’ she yelled out to a young guy who was trying to get under the red and white tape. ‘Sir?

You can’t come through…’

The man ignored her. Sergeant Pearce grabbed her radio and called a couple of colleagues over as she stepped under the line herself and hurried over to him.

‘Welcome back,’ he said to… well, to nothing. Just to

the fine white ash that had once been trees and goodness knows what else.

‘Sir, I must ask you to get back behind the line. This is a crime scene.’

The man continued to ignore her, and Pearce noticed that five other people had done the same thing all around the perimeter. ‘Guys,’ she said into her radio, ‘what’s going on?’

One of her constables reported back. ‘We couldn’t stop them, Sarge, they just got away from us.’

Pearce sighed and reached out to the man, but he was on his knees now, reaching out to the ashen ground.

‘Welcome back,’ he said again.

And his fingers connected with the ground as Sergeant Pearce reached out to his arm.

She felt a shock, small, electrical, but powerful, and found herself a good couple of feet away, flat on her back, shaking her head to clear it.

The man was standing now, back to the crater of ash.

Pearce realised that the other people, now seven in total had done the same. It was like they were guarding the site.

The young constable who had spoken to her over the radio was at her side. ‘You OK, Sarge?’ he said, helping her up.

She pushed him away. ‘I’m fine, Steve. What the hell is this?’ PC Steve Douglas shrugged. Sergeant Pearce tried her radio but all she got was static crackle.

PC Douglas tried his. Same result. ‘OK, this is dead weird,’ he said.

Sergeant Pearce walked away and back under the line,

telling Douglas to stay put and keep an eye on them. ‘But don’t go near them.’

She hurried over to a growing group of fire and police officers, which now included her superintendent. ‘Sir, we have a problem,’ she reported, and explained that seven people were guarding the crater.

Superintendent Shakiri frowned and started to move forward, towards the perimeter. ‘Get the public further back, Sergeant. Move the line another six metres.’

She nodded, but still her radio wasn’t working. Shakiri tried his. Nothing.

‘It was working ten minutes ago,’ he muttered.

‘So was mine,’ Pearce said. ‘It must be something electrical.’

‘Why’d you say that?’

She told him about being touched by the man and the shock she’d had.

‘Get yourself seen to by one of the paramedics, Sergeant.’

‘I’m fine, sir…’ she started, but he waved her away.

‘Delayed reaction, Sergeant. You’d tell anyone else to do the same. And if they say you’re fine, I’ll see you in five minutes.’ He smiled at her. ‘Please?’

Sergeant Pearce shrugged and walked towards one of the ambulances, while she listened to Shakiri yelling orders that the line was to be manually eased back.

As she reached the waiting paramedic, something…

something instinctive made her look back. It was like a slow-motion moment in a movie, so much happened at once, she couldn’t tell whether she saw it all or her brain

pieced it together later.

A flash of purple light, like a bolt of electricity shot through the crowd of onlookers, flooring each and every one of them.

PC Steve Douglas vanished, although, for a split second, Pearce was convinced she saw him throw his arms up to protect himself from the purple flash, and she could see him – no, his
skeleton
– just for a second, then he was gone.

The seven ‘guards’, no longer hidden by the crowds, had stretched out their arms towards one another, and the purple electricity was connecting them all, like a rope.

Superintendent Shakiri threw himself down, dragging a couple of other officers with him in a rugby tackle, probably saving their lives.

There was a flash in the sky, like a sunburst, just for a second, and Pearce swore the whole sky flashed purple.

And then it was over. Sort of.

People were getting up and running further away. No one wanted to be near the electrical whatever-it-was. This was good in the sense that the public were going, but it was disorganised, and that was dangerous. If just one person fell… She remembered the story of a disaster in an East London tube tunnel during the war when it was being used as a shelter to hide from air raids. As the panicking public had scampered down the steps, one woman fell, bringing the whole crowd to the ground, killing almost two hundred people in the crush.

The panic going on right now, whilst not as confined, could be just as deadly. She saw Shakiri haul himself up,

shouting to the officers around him to try and help the public. He threw a glance at where Steve Douglas had been standing – so he’d clearly witnessed it, too – and then back at her.

Waving the paramedic away, she ran over to join him at the scene. ‘What the hell was that?’ she breathed.

He pointed at the seven ‘guards’ around the crater. ‘I imagine they wanted us all to go away.’ He looked at the fleeing crowds. ‘Any casualties?’

Pearce just looked at where her young PC had been.

‘Would we know?’ she said. ‘There’s nothing left of Steve Douglas.’

Shakiri caught her eye. ‘And that’s why we need to know if there are others. If we hold them accountable for one death, we need to hold them accountable for any others.’

Both their radios crackled into life.

‘Good morning everybody everywhere around the world.’ It was a female voice, speaking clear, precise English. ‘My name is Madam Delphi and I am the only voice you need ever listen to. I’m speaking to you all on every wavelength, every radio, TV, PC and PDA the world over. You have now seen what I can do and will continue to do. This planet is mine. You can all go back to your dreary little lives and wait for me to tell you what to do next. I now return you to your scheduled programming.

Oh, sorry, except for those countries currently broadcasting any version of
Big Brother
. Sorry, all the contestants and presenters of that show, wherever they are, are dead. You can thank me later.’

The two police officers looked back at the seven people guarding the crater, that purple electricity still binding them together.