‘Is that… a lid?’
‘Only one way to find out.’ He reached out gingerly and tried to lift the lid off. It wouldn’t come.
‘Doctor…?’ said Rory again.
‘Not now, Rory,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m trying a very delicate manoeuvre here…’ He aimed his screwdriver at the crack. Nothing happened.
‘Doctor,’ said Rory. ‘There’s a… cockroach.’
‘I’ve seen them, Rory,’ said Amy. ‘They’re everywhere.
Just don’t fuss at it and nothing will…’
‘I don’t think… I don’t think you’ve seen one like this…’
Amy heard a chitinous clicking from behind her.
She’d never heard a cockroach click before. She turned her head very slowly.
Beside Rory was a cockroach.
It was about the size of a kitten, but several million times less cute.
And it was growing as she watched.
‘Doctor…’ she said. ‘Doctor…’
‘Hang on.’ He was holding his sonic screwdriver in his teeth, aiming it at the glass box, while trying to lift the top part of it up.
The cockroach clicked its mouthparts. It waved its long antennae. They were as thick as a pencil now, about a metre long and, like the rest of it, growing.
‘Doctor…’ said Amy again.
‘Hang on a minute, this thing just won’t…’
‘This is more important, Doctor!’
The Doctor looked up. He saw the cockroach.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘yes, I thought that might happen.
Automatic defence system set up by the very wise and prudent Yomalet-Ram.’
‘All very interesting, Doctor, but - cockroach!’
shouted Amy, backing away. She thought of picking up one of the glass bricks and hurling it at the insect, but remembered what the Doctor had said about destroying the whole universe and thought better of it.
‘Probably not actually just a cockroach?’ said the Doctor, backing away too, keeping Amy, Rory and Andrew behind him as they slowly moved out of the storage unit. The cockroach was the size of a Labrador now, but a lot less friendly. ‘You see how it’s not damaging any of the stored items?’ The cockroach was feeling its way towards them, brushing its antennae softly along the shelves. ‘But it knows we’re intruders.
Genius! Probably at least genetically modified, maybe some kind of mind-control chip embedded in it, very clever. Do you see?’ He stopped moving momentarily and turned round to face Amy. ‘Actually the cockroach is just reverting to normal size, whereas we’re still tiny, probably takes a lot less energy than actually creating an enormous cockroach. It’s very clever.’
‘Doctor!’ Amy screamed, the cockroach was almost on him, its mandibles opening and closing, showing their serrated edges, its horrible little head-legs reaching for them.
‘Right, yes,’ said the Doctor, ‘out!’
Chapter
13
They ran back out onto the gantry. Andrew had grabbed the block with his name on it as they left and clutched it to his chest. The cockroach was following them, dribbling a yellowish liquid.
‘Oh, that’s new,’ said the Doctor. ‘That must be some kind of modification. How fascinating. Just a moment.’
He rooted around in his pockets, found a notebook, a gobstopper, a ball of string and finally a handkerchief.
He rolled the handkerchief up and threw it at the giant cockroach. A little of the yellow fluid splashed onto the fabric and it dissolved with an acid hiss.
‘Hmm,’ said the Doctor. ‘Clever!’
‘Never mind about that, Doctor, let’s just get out of here!’ screamed Amy.
She started randomly punching numbers into the keypad. The gantry lurched first to the right, then up, then rapidly down again. The movement made the cockroach skitter from side to side. A few drops of its acid saliva dripped onto Rory’s coat, which immediately
started to hiss and blacken. He pulled it off and threw it to the floor where the yellow acid continued to eat away at it.
‘Don’t. Do. That. Again!’ shouted Rory.
‘All right! So what do we do?’
The Doctor examined the keypad frowning. ‘There must be a way to make it go back up to the entrance, there must be a…’
The cockroach advanced slowly, but inexorably.
‘Wait,’ said Rory. ‘We’re all right! I know what to do!’ He rummaged in the partially dissolved coat at his feet and pulled the fully intact Super Lucky Romance Camera from his pocket.
‘We just need to trap it, and we’re OK!’ he shouted.
The cockroach was advancing on them. Amy noticed that there were another three or four tiny cockroaches on the gantry. They were just ordinary size, but she didn’t trust them to stay that way. The giant cockroach moved closer. One of its antennae brushed her sleeve.
She shuddered uncontrollably.
‘Now!’ she shouted.
Rory clicked the Super Lucky Romance Camera button. There was a whirring noise. A small bubble appeared around the cockroach. It probed the bubble with its antennae and the wobbling exterior popped with a faint sighing sound. Rory stared at the cockroach.
He shook the camera. He tried again. Nothing happened at all. The screen on the back of the camera displayed a message: ‘LOW POWER, PLEASE TO RECHARGE
BATTERIES FOR MORE LUCKY ROMANCE
MOMENTS.’
‘Low battery!’ shouted Rory at the camera. ‘ Low
battery? You’re supposed to be a fifty-first-century piece of technology! You’re supposed to have a cosmic radiation battery that picks up the background energy of the universe!’ He looked at Amy, panic rising in his voice. ‘It’s not supposed to be able to run out of battery!’
The cockroach was feeling for Amy with its antennae.
She shuddered again, looked the thing in the face and shouted: ‘I’ve stomped your cousins into mush!’
She dived forward and kicked the cockroach hard in the mouthparts. The sole of her boot hissed at the contact with the acid. The cockroach fell back off the gantry, but flipped in mid air and clung on to a doorway ten floors below them. It began to crawl back up towards them.
And it wasn’t alone. From the bottom of the basin, more cockroaches were coming. Some were smaller, some were bigger. There was one cockroach slowly lumbering up the side of the basin which was the size of a Mini.
‘Doctor!’ screamed Amy. ‘They’re coming!’
‘Right, no choice!’ shouted the Doctor. ‘Come here.
We’re going to look in my storage locker!’
He pressed a series of numbers into the keypad far too quickly for Amy to see what they were. With a dreadful lurch, the gantry swung round, but instead of swooping up and away from the approaching giant cockroaches, it started to descend towards the centre.
Nadia had never even used her own watch that much -
she felt pretty aggrieved about that. She knew for a fact that the Head of Human Resources had borrowed weeks at a time - once he’d done it to go skiing with his family the same week the legal department were downsized.
And since it had started going wrong she hadn’t dared to borrow any more time. But, well, it was worth a try She ran back to Storeroom F. She didn’t want to be around the Symingtons and Blenkinsops when she tried it - that really might make them notice her. She fixed her watch with a steely stare, willing it not to go on the fritz while she was trying this. It rewarded her with a tiny shower of sparks. Right.
She turned the dial back an hour. She looked around.
Nothing had changed, but the clock on the wall read an hour earlier. She chuckled softly. It had worked. She looked around. Something heavy would come in handy, but there wasn’t much in this storeroom. She noticed the telephone directories on the shelf on the far wall.
She walked over and picked one up, riffling the pages, lief ting it in her hand to feel the weight. Smiled. Yes, this would do. She walked back to the storeroom with th
e TARDIS in it.
She didn’t notice the echo she left, rippling backwards in time from her broken watch.
They were lucky the gantry moved so quickly. Even with the scuttling pace of the roaches, they swung round too fast for the creatures to quite keep up. But, Amy realised, if they had to try another fifty doors they’d be sunk. There was no way that they’d be able to fend the cockroaches off for long enough. She could feel where the sole of her boot she’d kicked the first one with was now much thinner than the other - paper thin. They only had seven boots left between them. Not enough.
But when the gantry lurched to a halt, there was only one door. They all ran to it. It was large and black and
had the words ‘ Don’t Come In Here - Seriously’ painted on the front in white paint. There was a single handprint-shaped pad on the door where the lock should have been.
The gantry started to rock. Underneath it, they could see through the grille, the cockroaches were climbing up the supporting struts, waving their vast antennae and drooling their foul yellow liquid.
The Doctor was running his fingers along the paintwork on the front of the door. ‘I wouldn’t warn myself unless there was a good reason,’ he muttered.
‘But then since I knew I was going to be here why would I take a unit at all if I didn’t want me to come in?
Puzzling, very puzzling.’
‘They’re coming!’ shouted Amy. The car-sized cockroach had crested the top of the gantry and was putting its hairy articulated legs very carefully down onto the platform across from them. It wasn’t hurrying.
It had all the time in the world.
The Doctor looked round. ‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘Yes, good point well made’. He pressed his hand into the palm-shaped space.
The door opened. There was darkness behind it.
The cockroaches were swarming across the gantry now.
Amy, Rory and Andrew were trying to kick at them, but they were encroaching ever nearer nonetheless.
‘Come on!’ said the Doctor, walking into the darkness.
Rory and Andrew followed without hesitation.
Amy, thinking of the vertigo she’d experienced on the roof, lingered for a moment. But only a moment. In a choice between vertigo and giant cockroaches, there was
no comparison. She walked through the door, bracing herself for whatever weirdness lay beyond.
‘Oh,’ said Amy.
The four of them were crammed into a tiny vestibule the size of a small lift. There was another locked door in front of them, with another hand-recognition plate on the front of it. There was barely any room to move at all in the little cubicle. A groping antenna started feeling its way round the door they’d just come through. Amy slammed that door. The space got a little tighter. They were safe, but they couldn’t stay here very long.
‘Go on then, Doctor,’ said Amy. ‘Open the next door.’
The Doctor wormed his arm up from where it was pressed between him and Andrew and pressed the palm of his hand to the plate on the door.
Nothing happened
He stared at his hand, shook it vigorously and tried again.
A little window opened in the front of the door, with a message on a dot-matrix screen: ‘I DON’T THINK
YOU SHOULD COME IN HERE.’
The Doctor kept his hand pressed to the panel.
The message changed. ‘YOU REALLY SHOULDN’T
BE HERE YET AT ALL.’
The Doctor waited.
The message changed again. ‘OH, ALL RIGHT.
HAVE THESE. BUT REALLY, DON’T COME IN.’
A drawer pushed out from the middle of the door, hitting Rory in the solar plexus. Inside it were an enormous aerosol can, about as long as the Doctor’s
forearm, and what looked like a magazine article and a couple of batteries in a sealed freezer bag. The Doctor took them out and the drawer closed.
‘Honestly,’ said the Doctor, ‘my other selves can be so patronising. Do this, go there, be careful not to destroy the whole of space and time.’
‘But does that mean that some future version of you has been here?’ said Rory.
‘When you travel in time as much as I do,’ said the Doctor, ‘you learn not to ask questions of yourself. Only leads to trouble. Anyway, look what we have here!’
He thrust the magazine article and batteries in the bag into his jacket pocket and held up the aerosol can.
It was labelled ‘Super Zap Cockroach Spray. Made on Kotorsk-Bejal, the fun-loving planet where the roaches are three metres tall!’ There was a picture of a man -
wearing jeans and a T-shirt, perfectly normal-looking in every way apart from having seven arms - holding the spray up to a cockroach towering above him.
‘A… bug spray?’ said Amy, unconvinced.
‘There are planets with… giant cockroaches?’ said Rory, wondering whether the Doctor would have to visit one some time soon to pick up the spray.
‘You’re really an… alien?’ said Andrew.
They all looked at him.
‘I thought maybe you were joking,’ he said, plaintively.
Nadia was there, this time, before the Symington put the bomb on the TARDIS door. She saw the wave of expectation again as he arrived, watched the glimmering thing in his hand as he reached for the door and -
WHAM! - hit him sharply on the back of the hand with her hefty telephone directory.
The bomb fell to the floor. The Symingtons and Blenkinsops pushed against each other, trying to grab it, but Nadia was quicker. As she picked it up, she felt the effect on her watch again, the pull tugging the time out of her. Was this what it was supposed to do to the TARDIS?
Her watch fizzed and hissed. The Symingtons and Blenkinsops looked towards her, puzzled. She wouldn’t have a chance if they saw her now. And the bomb was ticking fast. It was pulling strangely towards her watch now - as if they were both magnetised. She stopped trying to pull them apart. Better whatever was going to happen should happen to her, not to the TARDIS.
Anything to stop the Symingtons and Blenkinsops getting in.
She smashed the bomb onto her watch, just as the ticking grew so fast that it was just a line of noise, a white flash inside the device.
Nadia’s watch blew sparks and showers of glass dust.
She wondered, her mind wandering already, whether it was the watch’s broken state which had saved her.
Her hands wrinkled. Her back bowed. The Symingtons and Blenkinsops backed away nervously from the time machine which seemed to have more tricks up its sleeve than they could hope to understand.
And Nadia crawled out into the corridor. Her watch’s face was flashing up random numbers. Some of it was hanging off by a few wires. But the thing still wouldn’t come off. And she was still ageing.
Confused, and so old now, much older than she’d
ever been before, she crawled half-conscious back to her station outside the Bank by the warm air vents.
‘How are we going to get out, though?’ Rory whispered.
They could hear the cockroaches scuttling all over the door.
‘If we try to get one, the rest of them will get us,’
whispered Amy.
Andrew slowly rolled up his left sleeve. ‘Give me the spray,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Amy. ‘Andrew, you can’t. You already owe them so much, you…’
‘Hey, on top of 55,000 years, what’s another few years? Give me the spray.’
The Doctor passed it to him.
‘Right,’ said Andrew.
They watched him do it. Holding the spray, he opened the door and began spritzing the contents all around him with his left hand, while simultaneously turning back the watch with his right hand. Another Andrew appeared next to them, spray in hand, attacking the cockroaches in a different direction. And another, and another, each one yelling a battle cry and running through the cracked-open door spraying giant-insecticide as fast as they could.
After a few seconds, Amy, Rory an
d the Doctor saw that there was no yellow fluid trickling down the inside of the door and ventured out behind the Andrews.
There were ten of them, spraying the insects, which were rolling over, choking, kicking their head-legs. They turned to Amy, grinning, pointing at her wrist.
‘Want to join in?’ one of them said, proffering a spray can at her.
Amy shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve borrowed enough already.’ She couldn’t meet Rory’s eyes.
The Andrews shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ He went back to spraying the bugs with more glee than Amy had ever seen on his face.
When the last one was gone, the platform, as if on command, started to glide smoothly up the side of the upside-down Dome towards the exit level. The Yomalet-Ram was waiting for them, hovering in mid air, when they got there.
‘Ah, Doctor,’ it said, with all appearance of courtesy.
‘I can’t tell you how glad I am you survived. Of course, “I knew you would. But you know how these things are. I have certain contractual obligations to protect the property in my care. I can’t call off the roaches for just anyone. No matter how… aheheh… lucrative a client’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Time to go now.’
The Yomalet-Ram made a sweeping motion with his hand to indicate the exit door. ‘The tissue decompressor will have stored your bio-imprint to a 99.99999 per cent accuracy. You may find the odd, aheh, hair on your head in the wrong place.’
Amy looked at the Doctor.
‘Let’s go,’ said the Doctor.
‘Oh, before you do,’ said the Yomalet-Ram, ‘do take my card. I know you’ll have a use for it In the past.’
The Yomalet-Ram smiled properly for the first time since they’d met it Its teeth were small and pointed. Its smile was not a comforting tiling.
The Doctor glanced at the card and thrust it into his pocket. ‘I rather hope I find another way,’ he said.
‘Oh, I know,’ said the Yomalet-Ram. ‘But you won’t.’
It was dawn when they left the Little Green Storage. Amy didn’t quite know how that’d happened. She knew they’d been in there a while, but it had felt like a few hours, not a whole night. The Doctor muttered something about compression causing temporal distortions, what with matter being the same as energy, but it went over her head. She found a scrubby patch of grass to sit on. She’d rarely felt so glad to see daylight.
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