The men grunted at him.
‘Who the hell are you?’ said one, who had a bald head and facial tattoos.
‘Hello! I’m the Doctor! Could you do some of that taking me to your leader stuff?’ The Doctor smiled appealingly.
Another man stepped forward. His face curled in an unpleasant smile. ‘I reckon so,’ said the man. ‘I reckon he’s been waiting for you. Gully!’
There was a very, very long pause.
‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘No!’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said the man. ‘He said you’d met. Said you had lots to discuss.’
He grinned and went over and rang a little bell on the beautiful colonial house. The great wooden door slowly started to open.
Chapter
Forty-Five
Donna put the phone down. It was ringing out. He still wasn’t picking up. This wasn’t very helpful.
‘OK, TARDIS,’ she said. ‘I think we can just have another go ourselves, don’t you? Um . . . Go get the Doctor. You know! The Doctor! Fetch!’
The TARDIS stubbornly refused to do anything.
Donna started pressing some buttons at random. Fief hadn’t returned and she was starting to worry, in case he did. She couldn’t rely on him to panic and get himself in a tizzy, as so many did when confronted with the endless possibilities and formidable labyrinth of the TARDIS corridors. Knowing him, he’d logically plan a way back through or make a mental map in his head or something. She sighed. She’d only hoped to stall him for long enough for the TARDIS to make it to Brazil, and for her to leave and lock him in. Just for a bit. She didn’t want to hurt him. Also it wouldn’t do to have him cluttering up the corridors of their nice clean TARDIS; that Visigoth gang had hung around lighting fires for months.
But none of this would work if he made it back here before the TARDIS moved.
‘Come on!’ she whispered, pressing buttons cheerfully. ‘Come on!’
Nothing. She picked up the phone again. He still wasn’t answering.
‘What are you doing that’s so important?’ she hissed.
‘Gully?’ said the Doctor again as he was pushed forward to the door. ‘Maybe it’s a different one from the one I know,’ he said.
Gradually the men had come out of the dark building where they were carrying out their horrible work, and had surrounded him. The door continued to open slowly. A huge, pointed tentacle appeared around the side.
‘Maybe it’s a different octopus called Gully from the one I know,’ added the Doctor.
‘He knows you,’ said the man.
‘Maybe it’s a different octopus who knows me who is also . . .’
The Doctor gave up.
‘Hello, Gully,’ he said resignedly.
The octopus – or, more accurately, the subterranean intelligent cephalopod from the planet Calibris – was never particularly pleasant to look at at the best of times; his gelid skin, with its poisoned tentacles, and through which you could see his internal organs shifting around unpleasantly; his wide mouth full of pointed teeth; his constantly shifting, crafty little eyes, far too wide apart.
Now he was even worse; his skin was covered in scaly scars.
The Doctor knew who had caused those scars: he had.
The last time he’d seen Gully, the gangster was attempting to blast off from Calibris, the travel interchange planet, where he’d been running a drugs ring.
One drug, the Time Reaver, caused time to slow down for whoever took it. Gully had been shot with a Time Reaver gun just as his spaceship had blown up. He would have experienced the flaming ship burning up as taking place over years. The Doctor couldn’t understand how on earth he’d survived. And, as he so obviously had, how on earth he could possibly have survived with his sanity intact. It wasn’t entirely clear how much of that he’d had to begin with.
‘There you are,’ said Gully, his tentacles rolling and unrolling with delight. ‘So nice to see you again.’
‘Is it?’ said the Doctor.
‘Oh yes,’ said Gully. ‘It’s something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. Well, not a long time as these things go . . . You and I, we know something of long times, do we not?’
‘How on earth did you escape from that ship on Calibris?’ said the Doctor, genuinely surprised.
‘You see,’ said Gully. ‘When you have a very long time to think about things happening, you also have time to consider all possible courses of action.’
The Doctor thought about this. ‘That makes sense,’ he said. ‘But why . . . why on earth are you here?’
‘Oh, they had my measure on Calibris after that,’ said Gully, crossly. ‘But I hung around a few taverns. There’s always jobs for smugglers, Doctor. And I am a tremendously good one.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘I’ll give you that, Gully. If you have absolutely no morals or qualms it’s almost a perfect world for you.’
‘Quite.’
Gully motioned to the other men to part. ‘Come into my office, Doctor.’
The Doctor couldn’t deny that inside the house was also a thing of beauty. The computing power necessary to transport the Rempaths – and the reason it needed to be kept so cold – must all be in the other building. This house, though, was a 1920s thing of loveliness.
They both looked at the glowing manhole in the middle of the floor.
‘Who wants all these Rempaths?’ said the Doctor. ‘Who wants so many?’
‘Everyone,’ said Gully. ‘They’re the most tremendous weapon. Wanna know why it’s so lucrative?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said the Doctor.
‘Because you sell it to both sides,’ said Gully, his horrible mouth extending into what passed for a smile.
‘What do you mean?’ said the Doctor, realising even as he said this that of course he knew.
‘You spread it amongst your opponent’s civilian populace, lose them all to a hideous dark age of howling pain . . .’ said Gully, rubbing two tentacle tips together. ‘But . . .’
‘You give it to your own frontline,’ realised the Doctor. ‘Send them all in to war furious with their feeding virus; utterly desperate for blood.’
‘Guaranteed carnage,’ said Gully. ‘Guaranteed annihilation. No prisoners. Nobody comes home.’
The Doctor sighed.
‘And the money is so, so good . . . I have a lot of plastic surgery to pay for.’
‘You are scum, Gully.’
Gully ignored this cheerfully. ‘I’m looking forward to being done here,’ he said. ‘Bit lonely out here. I miss the city.’
‘There’ll be no cities left the way you’re carrying on.’
‘Oh, Calibris will never change. Especially when I get back with enough money to buy her. Now. You.’
‘Me?’
‘I have a plan for you. I worked out how much time passed for me when I was on the ship.’
‘You know it wasn’t me who shot you?’
Gully didn’t know, or didn’t care. ‘It was four months. Four months of burning up in an explosion Doctor. Can you imagine what it feels like to be on fire for four months, but to never die? Can you? To feel every single cell in your body crisp up? Slowly? To feel every single tiny impact. To take every breath, over an hour, to feel yourself, painfully slowly, pull the black poisonous smoke into your lungs, knowing full well all that time you have absolutely no way to prevent it, absolutely nothing to do to stop yourself dying, inch by tiny inch?’
Gully sighed.
‘So for YOU.’
He pointed directly at the Doctor.
‘Ooh yes. It’s going to take a while. But that’s fine. Our time frame to total human extinction was six months . . . although I have to say it’s going much quicker than I expected. It’s speeding up all the time. They don’t really need much encouragement, these little pets of yours, do they? They so love kicking off.’
He moved forward, lifting his tentacles. The line of men stood behind the Doctor, blocking his escape.
‘Still. However
many months we have. You’re going to be here, with me. And you’re going to be in pain. Not enough to kill you. No. Not quite. Not when you beg. Not when you cry. I might even bring you with me. I trade anything you know.’
He came closer so his side eye was staring straight at the Doctor’s.
‘You might fetch quite a price. Bit of a one-off, aren’t you? Unique. Always a selling point. I’ll try not to damage you too much. Can’t promise.’
He fingered his own scars with a tentacle.
‘No. Can’t promise.’
The Doctor stood in front of him. Where was Donna? She should be here by now. He felt casually for the phone just to check – and then he closed his eyes in frustration.
It wasn’t in his pocket. It must have fallen out somewhere. In fact, now, even as he felt for it he thought he could hear it – somewhere, far away, ringing. His hearing was unnervingly acute. How could he have missed it before? It was with the chattering birds, high up in the trees.
Chapter
Forty-Six
‘Doctor!’ screamed Donna, several thousand miles away. ‘Answer your phone! And stop telling me that I’m getting worked up. I know I am. For a good reason.’
She slammed down the phone, then, breathing heavily, tried to calm herself down. She glanced at her phone. Checked all the news sites. They were still talking about outbursts of aggression. Nowhere was it mentioning her cure or the amazing steps forward that had happened at the Moverden hospital.
She typed angrily on her social media page.
‘EVERYONE LISTEN! YOU NEED TO GIVE BLOOD! IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO STOP THIS SPREADING! TO STOP THIS DISEASE HAPPENING! EVERYONE! GIVE BLOOD NOW!!’
And she pressed ‘send’.
Almost as soon as she’d finished typing, people started making suggestions. She watched in mounting horror.
‘Stop these conspiracy theories!’
‘That’s what people said about vaccination.’
This spun on to a different thread, of lots of people arguing about vaccination, utterly furiously.
‘No,’ said Donna. ‘No, this isn’t what I mean, at all.’
More replies were coming now, thick and fast; sarcastic; mansplaining things to her about how heart disease and mental illness weren’t catching actually and that she was a) very, very stupid and b) ignorant and spreading misinformation.
And then, as her post got shared further and further throughout the web – she could see the counter going up in her screen even as she typed – then everyone piled in. The abusers. The people who made big personal threats about what they wanted to do to her.
‘The Nazis did medickl expriments too you know’ came one. ‘Are you a nazi?’
‘I’m not a Nazi!!!!’ said Donna.
‘Neh, she’s not pretty enough’ came the next remark.
A huge boiling sense of impotent fury came over her. She started to type rebuttals into her social media, but every time she did so, something else came up and made it even worse than before. Before she knew it people were making remarks about the way she looked, about her hair . . . It was a total character assassination, and completely devastating.
Donna found herself utterly hunched over the little phone, completely traumatised, brain racing; full of fury and rage, deciding what she was going to type next to show them all a thing or two, to make them listen to her, listen to her about this incredibly important discovery she’d made and none of them were listening, she’d make them listen . . . She typed back, more furious than ever, desperately pointing out to them where they were totally wrong and what right did they have to interfere with something when she was only trying to make things better and . . .
The world slowed down. She staggered backwards.
She felt it.
She felt a sudden, icy cold finger. Just touching. Touching her heart, almost curiously. If she hadn’t known what it was, if she hadn’t heard about it from the Doctor, she would have ignored it, brushed it off as a curiosity, or a small thing.
Her heart was pounding, in rage, yes, but also now, something new: in terror.
Was that it? Was she infected now? Did she have no choice?
In shock, she dropped the phone. It fell onto the hard floor of the TARDIS and shattered, the screen becoming completely unreadable, the pixels below smashing and discolouring beneath her. She stared at it. Then, furiously she crushed it beneath her heel.
She held a hand to her heart. It was racing. She leant over the console, both hands flat on it, trying to control her breathing. Slowly. In and out. In and out. She had to calm herself down. Had to. She tried not to think about whether she was infectious now. Whether she would keel over and die in front of a screen – or worse, like Kenneth, go rogue, try and take some of her fellow human beings out with her. She needed a blood transfusion. But if she didn’t find the Doctor, it wouldn’t make any difference now, would it?
She stared at the broken handset in agony.
Chapter
Forty-Seven
The Doctor was trussed up and hanging upside down. Apparently this let the blood go to the brain and increased all the nerve centres there. Gully had done his research. He was advancing slowly. The mouth full of teeth – so hideous on a cephalopod; so obviously wrong – were bared in a wide mirthless grin. The men had gone back to their posts, locking the door behind them.
‘Do you know what it felt like?’ said Gully to the Doctor. ‘After your little protégé harpooned me? In the ship that was burning? What it felt like,’ he said, drool dripping from his lips in anticipation. ‘How long it took. How long can we make it take?’
He shot out a tentacle. The poisoned needle at its tip stung deeply into the Doctor’s face as he drew it across.
‘One,’ he said lasciviously. ‘I wonder if we could manage a few thousand a day?’
*
It really does say a lot about how exhausted Donna was, and how double loaded with jet lag and emotion that it took her as long as it did.
After searching a few rooms – there was still no sign of Fief. Donna was sure the Doctor would find him, as soon as she’d found him – and if she didn’t, did it matter?
With no joy she went back to the console, trying to breathe the way she’d been taught in the one yoga class she and Hettie had taken together. Unfortunately she had absolutely hated the yoga class, the teacher had been a golden-tanned, honed goddess who had looked on all of them pityingly because they couldn’t get their feet on top of their heads, but she couldn’t think about that just now. Could she get Hettie’s phone? She glanced outside. The streets were totally empty. Everyone was in. Hiding from the violence in the streets. They didn’t know they’d carried it inside with them.
‘Please, TARDIS! Please! Where is there a phone?’
Donna was imprecating the TARDIS. She couldn’t get it to move. Not an inch. Surely if she could find a phone she could call him.
07700 900461. That was it, the only number she’d ever managed to remember off by heart in about ten years. She could call him. Wherever he was.
‘TARDIS! Please help me. I’m calm. I’m staying calm. I am calm. If only there was a . . .’
She bit her lip.
‘Oh. OK.’
She turned towards the outside of the door, feeling even as she did so on the streets of Chiswick, the streets she’d known and walked all her life, the odd new sense. Something malevolent. Shadows passing behind windows. Who was it typing about you? Who was saying things about you online? Who could you trust?
People cowering in their houses. The corner shop was closed. Somebody had pulled down the shutters, even though it was the middle of the day. As if they were scared. Of looting. Of violence. It was as if a curfew had come down, even without there being a state of emergency.
Yet. Of course. Yet.
She tentatively opened the little box on the front of the TARDIS. The black telephone hung there, outdated. She didn’t even know if it worked. It certainly never rang. She picked up the receive
r.
Chapter
Forty-Eight
‘What would you call it . . . plantation chic?’ said the Doctor, looking around the room. A zebra rug lay on the floor. The desk was broad, made of rare polished wood. A fan spun lazily in the ceiling.
The octopus stung him again. It hurt. A lot.
‘I rather look forward to when you stop talking,’ said Gully. ‘Probably past the next layer of epidermis.’
He shocked the same area of skin again. And again. The Doctor wheezed in pain. It wasn’t really the decor that had caught his attention.
‘Did you buy it? Did you get interior designers in?’
Gully snorted. He shocked the Doctor again. ‘The owners were informed they needed to leave,’ he said. He lifted up his suckers. ‘Now, you’re getting used to that,’ he said. ‘But this, however . . .’
Slowly, a sticky liquid emerged from the end of his tentacle.
‘There’s nothing stickier than this,’ he said. ‘On your raw skin. Oh, and it’s acidic. It will stay there. Pretty much until it burns through. Although it works pretty slowly, I should warn you.’
He laughed a horrible laugh. The Doctor wasn’t listening. Amongst the old papers, in front of the ancient filing cabinet. He was looking at the large, black, old-fashioned dial telephone. Could she?
‘Come on, Donna,’ he said. The liquid had actually hit the side of his neck. He could feel it, gradually, starting to sear through his skin. There was a burning smell. He closed his eyes.
‘Only another four months of this to go,’ said Gully. ‘Or until the refining process speeds up. Then it will just be the death you’re begging for.’
Chapter
Forty-Nine
Gully had his tentacle pressed hard against the Doctor’s shoulder blade when the phone rang.
His head shot up. He blinked and looked at the phone, obviously completely bamboozled as to what it actually was. The Doctor twisted his head. They both stared at it.
‘It’s a phone,’ said the Doctor eventually, rasping through the pain. ‘A comms device.’
Doctor Who: In the Blood Page 16