All she wanted, she realised, was for him to appear, grinning, through the trees ahead. Anything else she couldn’t allow to cross her mind.
Well, she told herself sternly. He might be trapped. He might need help. He certainly needed her, and she was perfectly capable of getting there under her own steam. Right. North north west. And water. She definitely needed water. She looked around.
It was boiling hot and she’d discarded the blanket she’d had wrapped around her outside the train. Her light cotton pyjamas weren’t doing a very good job of protecting her fair skin from the sun, but it was fairly easy to stay in the shade of the heavy trees. Donna’s only problem was wondering what else was sheltering from the sun in the shade of the heavy trees. Already she could feel the little pique pique stinging of something on her exposed ankles.
Continuing in as straight a line as she could manage, she came to a wide, murky stream with a dangerous-looking current. It didn’t seem to narrow, as far as she could see, either up or down.
‘Right, Donna Noble,’ she said to herself, out loud.
The jungle was a noisier place than she’d realised. It was full of creatures chuttering and tweetering to themselves, calling across the canopies of vines. Birds of extraordinary foliage and colours flew across the tops of the trees, but Donna was too worried about what was writhing beneath her feet to pay them much attention.
She spoke out loud to convince herself that everything was fine. It was just a park with slightly larger animals, that was all.
‘And also, everyone’s hunted all the really scary animals to extinction,’ she said, again out loud. ‘A bunch of horrible American dentists has probably made my life a lot easier. Yeah.’
She knelt down on the thick rotting vegetation by the side of the water to take a drink. It would be all right, wouldn’t it? I mean, animals drank out of it, didn’t they?
And she was getting so horribly thirsty and dizzy. She had moved far too fast to begin with; she had pushed herself through high vines and climbed over tree trunks with reckless abandon in her fever to find the Doctor. But in this incredible heat . . . How could anyone move in this?
She knelt down, feeling exposed in the break in the jungle cover. The sun beat harder than ever on her exposed neck and she tried to pull up the collar of her pyjamas to cover it. The river was full of weeds and old logs floating downstream. She leaned in to scoop up some water . . .
‘Stop!’
A voice! And there was a thundering crashing sound through the trees. She looked up, startled, hopeful and frightened, all at the same time.
Standing there behind her in the clearing was the man with the yellow eyes.
Donna jumped up. ‘Get away from me,’ she said, glancing around. There was a large, hard fruit down by her feet. She picked it up. ‘Or I’ll throw this at you.’
The man looked at her, his glasses back on, his earpiece in place. His face was inscrutable, his body language, as ever, extremely calm. ‘You do that,’ he said, seemingly unconcerned.
Donna hurled it at him. It was heavier than it looked; like a bowling ball. She got it nowhere near him.
‘Right, can we talk now?’ he said.
Donna glanced around for another. ‘You stay away!’ She stepped backwards, starting to splash in the water.
‘Stop!’ he said and this time, unusually, moved quickly. He grabbed at her arm, just as what Donna had taken for a dead log floating downstream leapt out of the water at incredible speed, opened its jaws and let them crash down shut exactly where her arm had been merely seconds before.
‘Argh!’ Donna screamed and leapt backwards as the crocodile flailed its great head around, desperately searching the source of its prey. It thrashed its tail and started to run out of the water onto the bank.
The man sighed, as if he’d briefly mislaid his car keys. ‘Quick,’ he said, and swung himself up to the lowest branch of the nearest tree with ease.
Donna blinked at him.
‘Come on!’ he said.
The crocodile was running up the bank, raising its head blindly to try and stumble onto what it was searching for. Its huge jaws once again closed on thin air.
Donna didn’t need to be told twice. With a feat of agility that would have surprised her weary gym teacher, she grabbed the man’s outstretched arm, and swung herself up onto the same branch. The beast found the tree and ran around it. Donna stared at it. It looked like something from the prehistoric era; a relic, a pet of the dinosaurs they had forgotten and left behind. It was fascinating in its way.
‘What do we do now?’ she said.
‘We wait for it to get tired of us,’ said the man with the yellow eyes. ‘Or we start throwing coconuts down on it. Mind you, given your aim we may just have to wait for it to grow old and die. Here.’ He handed her a large bottle of water.
Donna looked at it suspiciously. ‘What’s this?’
‘It’s sealed,’ said the man quickly as if he was expecting her objection.
Donna took a long pull. She hadn’t realised how thirsty she was; even warm, the water tasted fantastic. Then she stopped and they sat there awkwardly.
‘So, do you run into the jungle often?’ the man said in a companionable tone of voice.
There was a long pause, punctuated only with the scuttling of the crocodile down below.
‘What’s wrong with your eyes?’ she said eventually.
‘Well, nothing,’ said the man. ‘But you knew that, I think.’
Donna paused for a while. ‘So you . . . you’re . . . Where are you from, then?’
‘You wouldn’t have heard of it,’ said the man.
‘Try me,’ said Donna. ‘I’ve been further than you think.’
‘Cadmia,’ said the man. ‘Lower cycle of what you call GJ504 and we call Cadmia.’
Donna nodded.
‘So,’ said the man. ‘Me being alien not a surprise?’
‘Not really,’ said Donna. ‘Most people I meet are.’
‘But you’re local.’
‘To here?’
There was a pause as Donna watched, amazed, as four flamingos delicately wandered down to the river and started dipping their heads daintily. The crocodile went crazy, charged after them then charged back as they elegantly fled, then returned to its sentry post.
‘It doesn’t feel like I am,’ she admitted. ‘But, theoretically, yeah. I’m from Earth.’
‘It’s nice,’ said the man.
‘Why are you here?’ said Donna. ‘Bad stuff? Are you just like the bad guy they hire when they need bad stuff doing? Do you get, like, a visa? Like if you can do bad stuff worse than anyone on Earth can do, you get a special work visa?’
The man tilted his head. ‘I’m . . . useful in certain situations.’
‘Because of all the torturing?’
‘No.’ He shrugged mildly. ‘I have no idea why you humans like it so much. On Cadmia, it simply wouldn’t cross our minds.’
‘But you know it’s wrong.’
He took off his glasses to polish them. ‘Is it?’
‘Seriously, you don’t know it’s wrong?’
The man shook his head. ‘Well, my first job was in a vivisection lab, so I just assumed that all the species on this planet cut each other up for fun from time to time. I mean, there’s no violence on Cadmia . . .’
‘None at all?’
The man shrugged. ‘How would there be?’
‘What happens when people get angry with each other?’
The man shrugged again. ‘We don’t. I mean, I didn’t actually understand what the word meant before I started travelling.’
‘There’s no war? No fighting?’
The man shook his head. ‘There’s no peril at all. I have . . . we’ve evolved out of an adrenal response. We’re an agrarian vegetarian society. I don’t . . . I mean, there’s nothing to fear on Cadmia. Nothing at all.’
‘So you don’t get scared of anything?’ She looked at him shrewdly. ‘That’s why you weren’
t scared on the train! You can’t get scared . . . Can you get angry?’
The man shook his head. ‘Well, anger is just fear. Externalised. You knew that, yes?’
Donna blinked. ‘Is it? Oh, I suppose it is. So. No, then.’
‘No,’ said the man mildly.
‘So if you needed someone to solve a problem people had with getting angry . . .’
The man nodded. ‘Oh, we’re in demand all over the galaxy.’
‘But you must be scared of dying.’
‘Why?’ said the man. ‘What’s the point? We simply go back to the land and fertilise it. We come from the land and go back to the land and everyone is nourished by the land. What’s to be scared of in that?’
Donna leaned in fascinated. ‘No war . . . Do you have love affairs? Art? Music?’
‘We have. We have sounds . . .’ said the man.
‘Sounds. That’s it? No Beatles? No David Bowie?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘So why aren’t you back on your perfect paradise, then?’
‘Drought,’ he said. ‘So, some of us . . . we take jobs away from home. We send back money, and we can make rain and so on, and we carry on.’
‘Hasn’t anyone ever invaded you?’
‘Everyone is welcome to Cadmia,’ said the man. ‘Hardly anyone stays.’
‘I’m not surprised: your nightclubs must be awful,’ agreed Donna. ‘What’s your name? Have you got one, or have you evolved out of that too?’
‘Fief.’
‘I’m not going to say pleased to meet you,’ said Donna severely, ‘because you’re an extremely bad guy.’
The man didn’t say anything for a while after that. The crocodile was continuing to circle the bottom of the tree warily, unwilling to let its supper get away.
‘The other man,’ said Fief.
‘Mmm.’
‘He’s an alien too?’
‘How’d you guess?’
‘His eyes are strange.’
Donna looked at him, and grinned, but he didn’t notice and went on.
‘What is he?’
‘Why should I tell you?’
‘No reason, I don’t mind.’
‘Well. He’s a Time Lord,’ said Donna, quite smugly.
There was a very long pause. The crocodile snapped on.
‘A Time Lord?’ The timbre of his voice didn’t change, but Donna reckoned if it could, it would have sounded impressed. ‘An ancient relic of the long-dead infamous archaic species from Gallifrey?’
‘That’s him. Give or take some hair gel.’ Donna gave him a look. ‘Good luck by the way if you’re planning to kidnap or torture him.’
The Cadmian shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. He looked out over the canopy of trees. ‘You understand. I do not have a fear response. But I recognise it in the many, many species that do. The man from Gallifrey. He provokes a fear response.’
‘Nah, he’s all right,’ said Donna.
‘He provokes fear. And anger. But not in you. How curious.’
‘Maybe I’m extremely brave,’ said Donna.
‘You must be,’ said the man. ‘Otherwise you would not spend so much time with someone who imperils you so.’
They sat for a while longer.
‘Although I do wonder what you were doing before that was so much worse than this.’
‘Temping,’ said Donna.
‘I see,’ said the man.
Donna drank a little more water and felt more herself again, the dizziness gone. ‘I have to go and find him now,’ she said.
They both looked down at the crocodile, who continued to stalk them, his tail waving lazily. With one easy movement, all the more chilling because he made it look like he was simply returning an errant tennis ball, Fief grabbed a hard-shelled unripe fruit and aimed it straight at the animal’s eye.
The beast dropped like a stone.
‘Is he going to be all right?’ said Donna, who was finding getting out of the tree a rather more graceless process than vaulting up it. ‘Ouch. Let me go first.’ She tore her pyjamas and swore. ‘Right, now you have to walk in front of me.’ She looked at the unconscious beast. ‘Seriously, though. I know he was trying to eat us and everything, but is he going to be all right?’
Fief stared at her.
‘What?’
‘I don’t . . . I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question,’ he said.
‘Is he going to recover?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fief. ‘Why would you ask that?’
‘Because I’m worried about it.’
‘But would it change your behaviour?’
Donna thought about it. ‘No. I need to find the Doctor, not open a croc hospital.’
The man nodded. ‘Well then.’ He started to lead on back to the river.
‘You’re actually quite zen for a cold-blooded killer,’ said Donna, stumbling along behind him.
Fief did not turn round but simply passed back the water bottle. Donna took another long draw then watched as, without apparent effort, Fief lifted up an enormous log lying on the bank and set it firmly across the perilous river crossing. He stood up lightly and walked across it.
‘Um,’ she said, edging along carefully and trying to keep both her nerve and her balance. ‘Erm . . . Can I just ask at which point in this process you’re planning to kill me?’
Fief turned back towards her. She realised with a shock he had removed his glasses once again, obviously no longer feeling the need for them. His eyes were the yellow of an owl’s. They took away all notion of humanity from him. It was very peculiar.
‘Why would I do that?’ he said. ‘You lead me to where this disease is originating. We eradicate it. Our work is done. My employer will be satisfied. It seems to me you would be more help than hindrance.’
Donna was briefly flattered by the compliment. ‘But can you stop torture or hurting other people?’ she shouted after him as he lightly reached the end of the log. She was still inching across it.
‘Like the crocodile?’ he said.
‘Um, yeah. From now on, then,’ said Donna, feeling guilty.
Fief looked at her, then turned to carry onwards. He promised nothing.
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
Deep in the beautiful colonial offices of the Ice Palace, there was movement. A reckoning.
He sat back with a satisfied grin. The casualties were mounting. But that simply meant more money, pouring in. All very satisfactory.
He looked at the news screens. Aha! It had hit the teenagers. Those noisy, gobby, angry teenagers, always on their phones. A perfect breeding ground for internalised discontent: furious, entitled, and completely impotent to change anything. Perfect.
He watched the blue shining manhole cover pulse and pulse, the billions of little Rempaths obediently sucked up through the high-speed network from the blood of the lost . . . all ready for transfer.
Then he caught some other chatter on the channels and frowned. The Korean operation was compromised, he knew . . . but when he reviewed the footage of how it had happened, he rose up in a rage.
*
Wilf was in the wrong place at the wrong time, which when you had lived as long as he had was bound to happen sooner or later.
It turned out to be the bottom deck of the number 190. Up Chiswick High road, on the way to exchange his library books. Couldn’t have been a more ordinary day. He was considering a bun. One of those twirly ones with icing and raisins. And maybe a cup of tea. Cup of tea. Bun. With his new books. This sounded like an excellent plan. He’d go to the Hot House café, where sometimes his old friend Al stopped by. That would be even nicer.
It might be a wet rainy day, but Wilf was on a warm bus with a pleasant morning ahead, as long as he remembered Sylvia’s kale she’d asked for. He didn’t know what kale was and he had the strongest suspicion she didn’t either, but she’d asked him and he’d promised and therefore he’d be strongly advised to get on it.
At f
irst it was nothing, just a quiet ‘Excuse me’. A lady was getting on the bus with a large buggy and a toddler whinging at her heels. She looked exhausted, beyond harassed. Her braids escaped her beanie hat; there was food on her jacket that might have been there for a while. The little one was whining constantly and the huge buggy was proving extremely difficult to manoeuvre in the small space.
The bus driver, a man, was unsympathetic as the woman struggled to find her oyster card. Wilf stood up to offer his seat but she shot him a fierce look and shook her head, as if he’d offered to steal one of her children. There was some tutting up the back from a noisy group of teenagers. Wilf had learned to tune out teenagers. There’d always been noisy teenagers.
In his day, the local battle-axe, Mrs MacCrorie, who had one gigantic bosom and a loud booming voice and ran the local greengrocers with an iron fist, would simply have told them to pipe down or she would tell their mothers, and they would meekly listen and quieten down, at least till she was out of sight. These days, though, nobody dared to tell teenagers anything. They were all precious little darlings, he supposed. Told they were incredibly special little flowers from the day they were born by their doting mums and dads; bought the latest of everything; gifted entitlement. Which apparently meant that nobody had to wear headphones any more and could play their favourite music in public wherever they wanted.
Wilf hadn’t minded age-related deafness at all.
The woman had inched, bright red from embarrassment, to the middle of the bus to put the buggy out of the way. The teenagers had been jumping all over the seats, taking over half of them in their puppyish ebullience, shouting obscenities at one another. The woman had to stand. The baby started to wail. Meanwhile the toddler was watching the big boys and girls with wide eyes. Every time there was a particularly nasty swear word the mother winced and the child’s mouth gaped open. Wilf sighed. He hadn’t served in a war for nothing, he thought. They hadn’t fought for this.
Now the teenagers had found an incredibly rude music video and were playing it at top volume, screaming along the words about violence and drugs. One of the boys showed the X-rated video to the little boy, to peals of nasty laughter. The bus driver moved on, refusing to turn his head.
Doctor Who: In the Blood Page 10