Doctor Who

by Russell T Davies

  And Caroline, at last, believed. She looked at her husband for one last time and said, ‘I love you.’ Then she took hold of the boys’ hands, and ran.

  Clive faced the dummies. Their leader, in a bright orange waterproof, an incongruous bobble hat on top of its globe-head, walked towards him. Eyeless and yet aware.

  To protect his wife and children, Clive simply opened up his arms. He would greet the dummy in friendship, or stop it with his body, whatever it took. And he found himself smiling, even as he started to cry. Because here it was at last. Adventure.

  The dummy straightened its arm, pointing at Clive, and the plastic hand morphed into a long, thin barrel.

  Like a gun.

  But Clive Finch stood his ground. Anything to buy his family a few more seconds. He held his breath and puffed out his chest and closed his eyes. Somewhere in the back of his head, he thought: Like father, like son.

  Then the back of his head was gone.

  Far away, beneath the city, Rose looked up. She thought she could hear the terror on the streets. Screams. Sirens. Gunshots.

  Her mother was out there somewhere. Her mother and everyone she knew, with an Auton army on the march.

  But then the Nestene bellowed, forming another two syllables with its red plastic maw.

  It said, ‘Doc.’

  And then ‘Tor.’

  On the ledge below, the Auton holding the phial stood back and its twin began to push the Doctor forwards. Towards the edge. The Doctor struggled, gasped, dug his heels in, but the Auton was remorseless. The Nestene below widened its awful mouth in anticipation. Its rage battered Rose’s mind, hammering ideas into her thoughts. It said feast. It said sacrifice. It said revenge. And one more word, what was it …?

  Absorb.

  It would absorb the Doctor.

  And with him, it would gain everything he knew about time and space. The TARDIS would come under Nestene control. The massacre spreading across London would roll on forever and outwards into the stars.

  Rose sank down, helpless, to hug poor, sobbing Mickey. There was nothing she could do. She’d never felt so small; one stupid girl in the middle of a war, trapped underneath a burning city with entire galaxies pivoting around this moment, and she was tiny, infinitesimal, useless.

  The Auton pushed.

  The Doctor was forced closer to the edge.

  17

  Rose Says No

  Jackie ran through hell.

  A black cab careered past her, a dummy kneeling on the bonnet, hacking at the windscreen with axe-hands. The taxi mounted the pavement, crashed through a window and rammed its way inside a shop. Seconds later, it exploded, a bright fireball funnelling out of the wreckage.

  And the dummies marched on. Some of them on fire. Not caring. Burning, walking, killing.

  A red double-decker bus braked and slewed across Oxford Street to stop sideways-on. Its passengers stared out in horror at the carnage. A line of dummies marched towards the bus and kept marching, arms held out to push. The bus creaked, tilted, then slammed onto its side with an almighty wham!

  Then the dummies clambered up, mounting the bus. They hacked at the horizontal windows, then dropped down into the interior. Screams and yells and begging came from inside.

  This is insane, thought Jackie, still running, this is impossible, and she blamed Jacinta for giving her that milk. Hallucinations caused by ergot, she’d read about that, although, hold on, was there ergot in milk? What is ergot anyway?

  But even as she ran, she knew the terror around her was genuine. The fear and adrenalin pumping in her heart and guts had to be real. And she knew, damn it, she’d survive, yes she would, even if she had to run forever, because now she knew why Rose had sounded so scared on the phone. Her daughter was out there somewhere, and Jackie would find her, she’d save her, she’d bring her home.

  The Bad Wolf band ran down Frith Street. Gunshots! They ducked, terrified, as bullets spat and ricocheted. Behind them, the plastic threesome had now morphed their hands into guns, swinging to and fro, firing wildly. All around them, bodies in the street.

  Patrice, Sally and Mook clung to a doorway. Then Sally yelled, ‘Get out of the way! Go back!’ She was shouting at five children walking down the street towards the gunfire.

  But then the children stepped into a cone of streetlight. Not children at all. Dummies of children, in bright red duffle coats. Faces painted with huge cartoon eyes and goofy smiles.

  The children lifted up their arms. Pointed them. Their hands narrowed into guns. Patrice, Sally and Mook cringed, helpless, sobbing, and Patrice took hold of Mook’s hand.

  The children fired.

  Peashooters.

  Little pellets of plastic went ping, ping, ping!

  The children’s dummies had children’s weapons.

  ‘Ouch!’ said Patrice, with a wild, scared laugh.

  But the little dummies kept firing, faster, harder, and the pellets began to sting. Patrice, Sally and Mook flinched and hopped and wailed.

  ‘Down here!’ Sally yelled, and they broke cover to run down a long, narrow alleyway.

  As they ran, Patrice kept hold of Mook’s hand. And for all his terror, Mook held on to Patrice with a thrilling lurch of his heart.

  Caroline raced down the middle of the road, holding on to Ben and Michael, pulling them along, chaos all around them. She was crying, but anger filled her, like ice, like fire. Nothing would stop her getting these boys to safety, nothing in this world.

  And then nothing of this world bounded out in front of her. A big, clumsy, impossible plastic dog blundered into the street.

  ‘No way,’ said Michael, coming to a halt.

  It was a representation of a sheepdog, six big blocks painted in brown and white. It jerked its head at them, as though barking. But as they watched, the head-square peeled apart into a mouth. And grew teeth. Long, sharp teeth.

  ‘Sod that,’ said Caroline and launched herself forward. She gave the dog an almighty kick. It flew apart into separate blocks!

  ‘Yes!’ said the boys and high-fived their mum.

  But then Caroline looked back. Dozens of dummies, perhaps hundreds, were forming a battalion in the street. An elite corps in High Street fashion. Their hands shifting from swords to axes to guns. And they began to march.

  Caroline, Michael and Ben ran in terror.

  Outside the ruins of Henrik’s department store, a limousine pulled up.

  Inside sat Rudi Henrik, 27 years old, gleaming and Botoxed, his forehead as smooth as a shop-window dummy’s. Though he risked a wrinkle now, as he smiled. He’d had good news. The lawyers said that if the dead caretaker, Bernard Wilson, could be blamed for the bomb, then they had a little legal wriggle-room over the word ‘staff’; the insurance contracts made no difference between staff singular and staff plural, so if staff singular had destroyed the shop, then staff plural could be blamed. Which meant, no compensation. No payoffs. No wages. Indeed, one clever soul in Berlin said it might be possible for the Henriks to sue the survivors for loss of earnings.

  So Rudi was delighted as he stepped out of the limousine to shake hands and commiserate with the plebs. Beside him, his wife Valentina slid out of the car, and on the far side, Oskar, his boyfriend, disembarked. All three assumed smiles to greet the grimy masses.

  They saw, walking towards them, some sort of tribute. Charming, thought Rudi and he said aloud, ‘How sweet.’ Some of the workers had evidently dressed as mannequins, wearing Henrik’s finest, to greet their master.

  Rudi was still smiling as one dummy’s arm swung round, and its axe-for-a-hand decapitated his wife.

  Behind him, a dummy’s arm turned into a drill, which whirred through Oskar’s stomach.

  Rudi gibbered and wailed and jumped back into his car. But too late. A tall, muscular dummy stopped the door from closing, and clambered inside after him.

  The limousine shook and jolted and juddered, and the gold-sputtered windows became a darker gold.

  Somewhere
in Catford a lanky, rangy, stubbly man was making a quick escape.

  He’d been living for three months with a Ghanaian woman called Abena. In truth, he couldn’t stand her. But she had money to spare. Her father was the CEO of a petrochemicals firm back in Ghana, and she’d come to London to study Politics and Philosophy at the LSE. Her student life was supported by an open cheque book from dad. Nice flat, nice car, nice meals.

  And that, thought Jimmy Stone, was very nice indeed.

  So he’d romanced her, and moved in, and helped her to spend the money. And then he’d got bored. It was all very well, having cash to flash, but he couldn’t bear her smile, her positivity, her relentless dedication to doing good in the world. Give it a rest, love!

  She was out tonight, at some posh wedding in Henley. Jimmy had wrangled his way out of the invitation by pretending to have food poisoning. Left alone, he went around the flat, helping himself. Six pairs of gold earrings, one gold bracelet, one platinum bracelet, and bingo, her Duomètre Chronographe watch, worth about £25,000, all shoved into his pockets and off he went, down the stairs, thanks, Abena, bye-bye.

  He reached the street and inhaled a shock of cold air. He’d done it! He wasn’t a thief by nature—a born liar, perhaps, and unfaithful, okay, that was only natural—but Abena deserved it. In fact, he was doing her a service. He could teach her more about politics and philosophy than the LSE with one simple phrase: always look after Number One.

  ‘You’ll come to no good one day,’ said a memory in his head. The voice of that gorgeous, stupid Rose Tyler. Ranting at him as he drove off with her rubbish second-hand computer stashed in the back of his car. Hah, he’d proved her wrong!

  So Jimmy Stone, swaggering in tight jeans, turned the corner onto Catford Broadway, his pockets bulging with so much expensive jewellery that technically he died a very rich man, as a crowd of Autons fell upon him and chopped him into bits.

  As the citizens of London ran, screamed and fought for their lives, someone was fast asleep.

  In a house in Chiswick, a woman hugged her pillow a little tighter, annoyed by vague alarms from far-off. She’d had hell of a time last night, a bit too much vino collapso because Rufus from Accounts was leaving, to go to Northampton, and she fancied him like rotten, except she drank a bit too much and told him, and he’d laughed in her face, so that went well, and it was still only 9.30 p.m., and God knows what had happened after that, except she’d arrived home at 3 a.m. without one shoe. Or, to put a positive spin on things, with one shoe.

  She’d then wandered through Saturday, dazed and glum. She made a truly disgraceful ham in parsley sauce for her mother’s birthday tea, then gave up.

  ‘You go to sleep, sweetheart,’ said her granddad.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Donna Noble.

  And she slept through the whole thing.

  Jackie ran to a halt, shielding her face from a blizzard of glass fragments as a window shattered to her left. A bridal shop. Three dummies of brides in veils and white dresses stepped forward, late for the wedding.

  She looked ahead. The street was filling up with crash-test dummies. Behind her, a four-metre-tall clown built out of little plastic bricks, freed from a toyshop, was lurching down the street, creaking and swinging its huge white-gloved hands to club people so hard, they flew through the air.

  She was trapped. Crash-tests ahead. A giant clown behind. And now the brides.

  She retreated backwards, against the underside of an overturned black cab as the eyeless faces of the brides seemed to see her.

  Jackie stared in horror.

  The brides extruded their hands into blades and advanced.

  Bad Wolf’s alleyway had reached a dead end. Sally hammered on one door, then another, yelling for help, but everyone had locked themselves inside.

  They saw the five child dummies approaching, peashooter-hands outstretched.

  But then Mook said, ‘Oh my God.’

  The shiny-white muscled dummies appeared behind the children. Soldiers in harnesses and leather and speedos. Lifting their arms.

  ‘Over here!’ yelled Patrice and they ran behind three tall, steel, industrial bins. They cowered in the muck and rubbish on the floor as the dummies opened fire and the bins pinged with pellets and bullets.

  Patrice was crying as he put one arm around Mook, then the other around Sally. The band hugged each other. The bins rang with ricochets as the dummies and their children marched closer and closer.

  Caroline and her sons ran from the army behind them, but then the smoke from a burning car in the road ahead cleared, revealing …

  A second army.

  A hundred dummies marched from both directions.

  The family was trapped in the middle.

  Caroline sank down to the tarmac, and pulled Michael and Ben to her. She wept and kissed them, and they hugged their mum. On both sides, the impassive battalions advanced.

  On every street, people cowered and wept. Above the Thames, in Pod 27, the posh little boy, his mum and dad and 20 Chinese students stared out at the city. Flames blossoming from the dark streets. Cars swerving as people ran and dummies marched. And below them, on the Embankment, a golden monk with samurai swords for arms sliced his way through the panic.

  They could not see, beneath the river, the Nestene signal travelling as fast as thought, shooting along cables, away from London, across the channel, over to Europe and out to the west, beneath the Atlantic, thick coaxial cables of plastic on the ocean bed fizzing and sizzling as the signal raced along.

  From deep below to far above; satellites in orbit above the Earth clicked and jiggled, plastic circuits rewriting themselves, to send the signal from on high.

  Below, above, and across the curve of the world, the signal sang its song, and in the windows of a thousand cities, in Beijing and Barcelona, Reykjavik and Rio, Sydney and San Francisco, ordinary plastic dummies began to twitch, and jerk, and swivel, and think.

  Every form of plastic felt an urge to move, tugging at a cellular level. An instinct to rise up and kill. Wires and panels and joints and plugs in kitchens and cars and computers and offices began a little dance. Cables yearned to strangle. Dolls grinned in anticipation of murder. Bags imagined suffocation. Nylon ropes knew their time had come. Laminated sheets of paper felt their edges sharpen into razors and prepared to spin. On deserted Pacific islands, reefs of plastic bottles tumbled together to form giant, lurching, man-shaped idols, rearing up over the surf with no one to witness their birth.

  And still, the call of the Nestene went deeper. Reaching inside the bodies of men and women to find the tiny particles of plastic ingested by the human race, microbeads assimilated into their guts and brains and hearts. The Nestene heaved at the plastic; people tried to run but found their legs slowing down, they tried to fight but found their arms becoming heavy.

  In a Soho alleyway, three dummies threw the bins aside. Patrice, Sally and Mook sat in the dirt, weak, powerless, unable to run.

  The dummies lifted their guns.

  In the middle of the West End, Caroline Finch and her sons felt their strength drain away as two armies converged upon them.

  The dummies raised their axes.

  In the shadow of an overturned black cab, Jackie Tyler felt her legs buckle and she sank to the floor as the brides advanced.

  The dummies raised their stilettos.

  Jackie sobbed, and thought of Rose, and thought of Pete, and she closed her eyes.

  And then Rose Tyler said no.

  She stood up.

  She said it aloud.

  She said, ‘No.’

  She’d had enough.

  She’d had enough of standing back and doing nothing. Of being told to sit still and behave and go to work and wear this and say that, of being told what to do by men, and boys, and her mother, and teachers, and bosses, and boyfriends, by the Doctor and the Nestene and everyone in between.

  Above her, the world was ending. In front of her, the Doctor was dying. At her feet, Mickey was b
lubbing.

  Well, to hell with that.

  She ran across, jumped down to a lower gantry and yanked a metal chain from its railing. She wrapped it around her wrist. Looked down. If she were a physicist, or a soldier, or an architect, she might be able to calculate the angle and distance and velocity, but sod it. In a life without many qualifications, Rose had one badge of merit: in the Jericho Street Junior School Under-7s Gymnastics Tournament, she’d won the bronze.

  So she held on tight to the chain.

  She took a deep breath.

  She jumped off the gantry and swung across the chasm.

  She sailed towards the Doctor.

  He saw her coming.

  And in that second, he gained new strength—with a grin, he doubled over, to throw the dummy holding him over his shoulder and down into the pit, so easily that Rose had a second to think: What, was he waiting for me?

  But she swung over the Doctor’s head.

  She wasn’t aiming for him.

  She was aiming for the second Auton. The one standing back, forgotten.

  The Auton still holding the Doctor’s phial of anti-plastic.

  Wham!

  She hit the Auton.

  As Rose continued her arc, she looked back to see the dummy totter and fall, its outstretched hand letting go of the phial.

  The phial glittered, dark and blue, as it fell down, down, down towards the Nestene’s roaring maw.

  Rose’s arc completed and she began to swing back.

  The phial fell into the Nestene and disappeared into its molten skin. The glass went crack!

  As Rose sailed back towards the wall, there he was, the Doctor, with that huge, silly smile, arms wide open to intercept her, a whoomph of air from his lungs as he caught her and held on tight.

  The two of them laughed with joy, and looked over the edge.

  Below them, the cauldron of red plastic seethed and bubbled, but now lines of dark blue streaked and skittered across its surface, branching out like winter trees.

  The Nestene screamed!

  18

  Death Throes

  The dummies stopped.

  Jackie looked up.