‘Phone problems,’ said Donna shortly. ‘Anyway, look. I . . . I’ve been infected. I’m coming in. You’re the only one I trust with a needle. I’m coming in . . . I don’t know when, but soon. It’ll be soon. Won’t it? Won’t it?’ She glanced at the Doctor, who was already kneeling on the floor, starting to open the manhole bolts with his screwdriver.
There was a long pause at the other end of the line.
‘No,’ said Asha. ‘No, look. Donna. I’m so, so sorry. I’m not sure what happened with your grandfather. But the other people who came in infected, the other people who were presenting the same way . . . we gave them all blood transfusions, too.’ Her voice sounded defeated and exhausted. ‘Donna, I’m so sorry. They didn’t work. They didn’t work at all.’
Donna felt a horrible grip of fear. And the icy hand. She felt a flicker of fingers across her heart. Dancing on her. Waiting for her. Waiting to grip.
‘What do you mean? What happened to them?’
There was a very long silence.
‘Donna, I’m sorry,’ Asha said again.
‘What do you mean? I showed you! Gramps is fine now!’
‘He is,’ said Asha. ‘But we couldn’t replicate it. We gave all our patients blood transfusions.’
There was a terrible dead humming silence on the long-distance line.
‘They all . . . They’re all exactly the same. The ones we still have. Otherwise the disease took its natural course . . . They . . .’
Donna lifted her eyes to the Doctor who was still working on the cover, as if he didn’t want to meet her eyes. Then he forced himself to do so. The expression on his face was so terribly sad.
‘It makes me so angry,’ said Asha. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Donna swallowed hard. The icy finger touched her. She felt it, the whorls and cold loops of its imprint on the caverns of her heart.
‘Don’t be angry,’ she said, her voice scraping as she got the words out past her constricted throat. ‘You did your best. And I mean it. Don’t get angry.’
Slowly, she replaced the receiver.
‘You knew,’ she spat.
‘If it were that simple, Donna, they wouldn’t be the problem that they are.’
‘But why did it work with my grandpa?’
The Doctor stuck his hand up through his hair. ‘I dunno. Maybe his fundamental nature overcame it? I really dunno.’
Donna’s face was distraught. ‘But . . . But I’m not like him! I get cross at stuff! I get irritated at people all the time! You drive me mad when you take your glasses off and put them back on again every five minutes. Either put your glasses on or take them off! Why is that a difficult problem? Just choose a place for your glasses to be and stick to it!’
‘Yeah, all right, calm down.’ The Doctor was looking at her carefully, his brain ticking over.
She turned and looked at him. ‘See! I won’t be able to hold it, Doctor. I can feel it. That cold hand . . . It’s coming for me.’ She could feel a tear forming in the corner of her eye and blinked it away. ‘Oh well,’ she said, attempting a smile. ‘If I’m looking on the bright side of everything . . . at least I won’t have to get another needle in me.’
The Doctor looked at her curiously suddenly, and stood up. ‘Ohhh,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Ohhhh . . .’
‘Stop doing that, it is so annoying. And if you annoy me, I’m going to turn into a Rage Monster, then try and kill you, then die.’
‘Ohhh, Donna Noble I think you might have just . . . No. Yes! No.’
‘When I say you’re killing me, Doctor, can I just remind youm, you are actually killing me.’
The Doctor stuck on his glasses.
‘And there you go again!’ Donna gripped the chair, her knuckles turning white.
‘So,’ the Doctor said, pacing round Gully and back again. ‘When you had that blood transfusion . . . you hated the needles, right?’
Donna shivered. ‘Can’t stand the bloody things. Always have. Fainted. Out cold.
‘You didn’t tell me that.’
‘Well, I didn’t want you to think I was a coward.’
‘You actually fainted?’
‘Big bump on my head and everything.’
‘Yes!’ he shouted. ‘Donna, that’s brilliant.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It wasn’t the blood transfusion! It was the sacrifice! The self-sacrifice. They can’t just take blood from a blood bank. That doesn’t mean anything to the people who donated it, except a mild sense of smugness and a custard cream. But yours. Yours hurt. It cost you to do what you did. And you did it anyway. Empathy isn’t enough to overcome those little viruses. But altruism . . . hurting yourself for another person. There isn’t a force in the universe strong enough to overcome that. Well, possibly magnetism, but let’s not get into that right now. Yes. Yes.’ His face darkened just a little. ‘That’s why getting Wilf to give you your blood back wouldn’t work. Is he scared of needles?’
‘He’s not scared of anything.’
‘That’s right. He’d be delighted. Wouldn’t mean anything to him. Wouldn’t work for you. Aha. Aha.’
He paced up and down as Donna watched him, trying to damp down the brief glimmer of hope.
‘But we don’t have time.’
He grabbed the screwdriver. ‘We have to stop this spreading any further . . .’
‘I don’t think,’ said Donna, with a lump in her throat, ‘I don’t think that will be much consolation to the rest of us.’
The Doctor paused. And looked up. A shadow passed, very briefly, across his face.
Fief suddenly turned his huge head. ‘You would save just one, over everyone, Doctor?’
The Doctor looked pained.
Fief went on, in that same calm tone. ‘Time is running out. Why would you even think to take the one over the multitude?’
‘Because you understand nothing, Fief,’ the Doctor said tightly.
‘No,’ said Donna, forcing herself to overcome the fury rising within her, the need to shout out ‘This isn’t fair!’ To howl the place down. To placate the beast within. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s right. He is right. You have to carry on. For everyone else. You do.’
She shook her hand out in front of her. She was deathly pale. The Doctor looked at her for a fraction of a second. Fief and Donna were both staring at him.
Then he straightened up.
‘No!’ he shouted, his voice echoing around the room, the geniality gone; the Time Lord fully present; a fire burning in his eyes. ‘I say No.’
He whisked around, his coat following him, to head into the TARDIS. As he opened the door, he turned his head and said fiercely, ‘Stay here. All of you. Don’t move.’
Chapter
Fifty-Five
‘What is that, a shower head?’
Telling Donna not to move was, naturally, a complete waste of time.
The Doctor bent over the metal device he’d pulled down from the ceiling onto the console top, examining it closely. He glanced behind at her. ‘What did I just say? Stay outside!’
‘No chance,’ said Donna.
She was scared . . . so scared, and she didn’t know what it would make her do. Something within her wanted to lash out, to scream; to hurt someone. She needed to be in the TARDIS, where she felt safe. Safer.
‘Can’t you just take me back in time? Break my phone?’
‘You’d still be sick,’ said the Doctor, who had started working on some other dials. He glanced up. Then he pressed a combination of buttons. ‘But we can spare a little . . .’
The screen showed Fief and Gully outside the TARDIS, both stock still. But something else was apparent: the leaves weren’t blowing in the breeze; the fan had stopped.
Donna squinted at it. ‘Have you just paused time?’
The Doctor shot her an incredulous glance. ‘Have I just paused time for the entire universe? How would I do that, then?’
‘Well, I dunno, do I? You do all sorts of st
uff. What about that bee parade?’
‘Well, no, obviously not. Slightly simpler. The TARDIS has sped it up – relatively speaking – in here for us. So we have a little time to fix this before things get worse on Earth.’
Donna felt at her face in dismay. ‘Am I going to get wrinkles?’
‘Not if you let me get a move on.’
Donna shook her head. ‘What if it goes wrong?’
‘It won’t go wrong!’ protested the Doctor. ‘Except with that sleepy princess. Which was one time. You should go outside. Far as you’re concerned, I’ll be done in the blink of an eye.’ He looked at her and his voice softened. ‘It’ll be safer that way.’
Donna shook her head vehemently. ‘I’m staying right where you are.’
The Doctor raised one eyebrow. ‘Better get to work, then.’
He quickly found her an easy chair, a copy of the Beano and a cup of hot chocolate, which were the most calming things that occurred to him under the circumstances, and wrapped her up in a blanket for good measure. She kept complaining about the cold.
It wasn’t the least bit cold.
The strange metal device had three points, and a small rivet at the back that the Doctor was now welding something to.
‘What is it?’
‘The less you talk, the faster I get this done.’
‘Yeah, but what is it, though?’
‘It’s . . . It’s called a chameleon arch.’
‘What’s it do?’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said the Doctor. He glanced around. ‘But what it can do . . . what I think it can do . . . If I fix it properly, I can give some blood to you.’
‘I don’t want your blood!’ said Donna. ‘Ugh. Weird alien blood. What if I go all strange like you? What if I start talking gibberish and getting interested in . . . geometry . . .’
The Doctor blinked. ‘Would that really be so bad?’
‘What, all of you gabbling on in my head all day? Yeah!’
The Doctor smiled. ‘OK, OK. No. I’m not remotely compatible with you.’
‘Innit.’
‘But this little device here . . . If I modify it . . .it can make my blood human. Human enough.’
‘You can turn bits of you human?’
‘I can, yes . . . Is that your spew face? Stop making your spew face!’
Donna didn’t want to ask the next question, but she knew she had to. In a small voice she said, ‘Will it hurt you?’
The Doctor shrugged and waved a hand. ‘Oh . . . you know . . .’
Donna knew that meant yes. She looked him straight in the eye. ‘And will it work?’
‘Hope so.’ He looked straight back at her. ‘I’ve seen you in one of your moods before.’
‘Oi!’
The job couldn’t be rushed, however much it needed to be. Donna finished the hot chocolate. She felt restless, like a caged animal. She stood up and started pacing up and down. He warned her to stop; to hunker down and breathe; but she point-blank refused, and he had to work on, occasionally fussing under his breath.
‘I’m not just waiting,’ she said, in a tone he had never heard before. ‘Otherwise . . . otherwise . . . I don’t . . . I mean, I spend my life just waiting around and waiting around, that was my entire life before I met you, waiting for some stupid bloke or some useless job or some other way of totally wasting time just to get through the day just to get one with whatever my stupid pointless life was meant to be about . . . all that time! Doing my nails and waiting in queues and waiting for the stupid lottery numbers to come up and messing about on the internet. That was what my life was!
‘And now that’s it, all that hanging around waiting for stuff to get better and now it’s going to end out here in the jungle! They won’t even know where I am! Nobody will even care! Gramps will miss me for a bit, but they won’t even . . . I mean, they’ll probably bring cakes in to work for like two days, boo hoo, well, never mind there’s always another temp . . .
‘And I won’t leave anything behind, and nothing will have mattered and . . .’
Bang.
Donna found in dull surprise that she had punched one of the roundels on the console room wall. She couldn’t even feel it in her fist.
The Doctor glanced up, his face full of compassion, and tried his best to work faster.
‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll have a thing or two to say,’ Donna went on. ‘A thing or two about how I was bound to come to a bad end, Nerys and Hettie and all of that lot, I’m sure they’ll have plenty to say. Plenty. About how I was getting on a bit, never really made the best of myself, such a shame, ha ha ha. Well, I’ll show them. I’ll show them.’
‘Donna, please, please just sit down.’
She punched the wall again. She found the angrier she got, the more the heat of the fury rose in her the more it was attempting to melt; to heat the angry cold hand she could feel now; not a touch, but a fist; a cold fist was holding her heart in its hand. She went bright red, although the tips of her fingers were an icy white.
‘And you’re meant to help! You’re meant to help me! But I’m not that useful. Nobody even cares when we’ve all died. Nobody has missed us. I’m not useful. Not like some flight attendant! Not like some stewardess or some medical doctor, or Rose.
‘No. I’m just Donna! Just the temp! Just baggage. Mum was right all along.’
The Doctor tried to keep things calm, but he knew as soon as Donna’s mother came into things, his best intentions would all be for naught. Instead, he worked on the last adjustments, as precisely as he could, as the storm raged on around him.
‘Right, you. Come on. Over here,’ he said finally.
‘Don’t you touch me!’ screamed Donna. She was now completely out of control and far beyond reason. Her colour was terrifying; her time, the Doctor could see, was running very short.
Suddenly she turned. A great white fist grabbed at her heart. She screamed, then came charging towards the Doctor, claws out.
‘I’ll show you!’ she screamed. ‘I’ll show you! Arrrrrrgh!’
Chapter
Fifty-Six
Everything was very hazy. Lights and colours swung in and out. She felt hot and cold all at once.
‘You tripped,’ the Doctor was saying urgently. ‘Don’t you remember? You were . . . jogging. You were taking some mild exercise. OK, you were strolling. OK, well, you’d just gone to get more hot chocolate. And you tripped. Remember?’ His voice sounded strained. ‘You do remember, don’t you? That it was exactly like that?’
Donna looked up groggily. She couldn’t quite focus. There was a tube coming out of her arm that disappeared from her body and snaked its way over to his, but he had his back to her. She blinked. She felt sick . . . and hot, and odd.
His face was turned away. He wasn’t looking at her.
Donna closed her eyes, not entirely sure she wasn’t about to pass out again. She realised, though, that there was something inside; as if her tensed heart was unfolding, like an opening fist.
She also realised that she’d been holding her breath, and slowly, gently, exhaled as soon as she knew she wasn’t going to throw up after all.
‘Doctor?’ she said.
Her vision wobbled, and she was briefly seeing double.
The tube coming out of her arm . . . It led to his sleeve, she could see that. But beyond that, he still had his back to her. She didn’t understand why. She didn’t understand anything.
‘Doctor . . .’
Still he didn’t turn round.
‘How are you feeling?’ he said. His voice was low and tight.
Donna examined herself. It was . . . The icy finger inside her. It had gone. She could feel that it was gone; that a huge weight of fear and pain was lifted.
‘I . . . I think I’m all right.’ Tears were slowly rolling down her face, although she barely noticed them. ‘I’m . . . Oh my. I think. I think . . . I’m all right . . .’
She tried to cast her mind back. It was a blur. She felt, though, a s
trange sense of guilt, and shame.
‘Did I say anything . . .uh, did I do anything . . .?’
There was a long exhalation of breath beside her.
‘I mean, are you giving me the cold shoulder or what?’
His back still facing her was worrying her. She didn’t like it a bit. She gently lifted up her own arm to touch his shoulder, but he jerked away.
‘No,’ said the voice roughly.
Then there was a pause, and then, finally, he twitched and reached over, and his hand gently withdrew the needle from her arm – she barely felt it as he pulled it out – and still, he would not turn around, but she saw his entire body curl up as, with some force, he threw the tube on the floor.
‘You all right?’ she said gently, as his entire body sagged with relief.
There was a long pause.
‘Yeah,’ came the voice. ‘Give me a minute, Donna.’
There was another long pause. Then he tried to get up, staggered, fell down. And she wanted nothing more than to pull him up, gently, and put his head in her lap, and hold him still until he was soothed, and bathe his wounds and whisper urgently over and over again that everything would be all right.
But that . . . that was not the kind of thing they did.
She stretched a hand out towards him. Then, slowly, she let it fall.
He jumped up, shaking himself down.
‘You all right, you daft prannet?’ she made herself say.
‘Yup! Yup! Totally! Right. Let’s go. Come on, not a moment to lose, you’ll get a grey hair.’
And he beamed at her cheerily to show her how fine he was, and she smiled back, although she didn’t believe a word of it.
But of course he already knew that.
Chapter
Fifty-Seven
There was no change in Fief and Gully, outside; they had only been away for a split second. But there was no gas left in the canister, and the octopus had started melting more rapidly, his limbs twitching as he came back to life.
The Doctor ignored both of them and ran to unscrew the heavy metal plate on the floor. ‘So what’s inside here,’ he said, ‘is a pipe that leads to the other side of the world.’
‘That is amazing,’ said Donna. ‘Right through the centre of the Earth? Where it’s all, like hot and stuff?’
Doctor Who: In the Blood Page 18