The engine turned over sluggishly, and then died again.
‘Once more,’ Donna urged. ‘But if it doesn’t work, give up, cos they’ll know where we are by now!’
Miss Oladini tried the hotwiring again, with no luck.
Two of their pursuers appeared at the kitchen door, arms raised.
‘Run!’ Donna screamed and threw herself out and away from the car as the purple energy smashed into it and the car exploded.
Donna was lying in some bushes, Veena’s dress in tatters. ‘Oh I am so dead,’ she muttered.
There was no sign of Miss Oladini, but it was difficult to see anything with the burning car blotting out her view.
Donna looked around and saw a bicycle propped up against a far wall.
‘You have got to be kidding me,’ she muttered, then looked at her clothes. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’
Hoping the same flames that were hiding her attackers from her would keep her out of their point of view, she slipped across the lawn to the bike.
With one last look around for Miss Oladini, and a sad realisation that the car had most likely become her funeral pyre, Donna grabbed the bike and clambered onto it. She wobbled slightly, slowly getting used to riding again, and then shot off down the pathway and then onto the main road.
No way was she going to get back to Chiswick by bike, she didn’t have three days spare, but it might get her to the nearest town.
As Donna pedalled furiously, the burning car lit up the front of the Copernicus Array behind her, flames
reflecting off the mansion’s huge windows. But of people she could see no sign.
SUNDAY
When she was growing up, Donna had heard the phrase ‘the shot that was heard around the world’ used to describe the effect the assassination of US President John Kennedy had on the whole of western civilisation. People always said they could remember where they were when it happened.
As a child of the 1970s, she grew up hearing about things like the moon landing, the murders of both Kennedys and Martin Luther King, and Winston Churchill’s state funeral, but never wholly understood them. In a childhood of spacehoppers, Donny Osmond, chopper bikes and Green Shield Stamps, words like ‘Blitz’
and ‘rationing’ and ‘bubble and squeak’ just meant the old people were reminiscing about twenty years previously and probably moaning that the youth of today never knew when they had it so good.
The first time Donna had found herself saying that – to
one of the neighbourhood kids who’d scratched her late father’s car – she was appalled at herself. She had finally become exactly what she’d derided in her parents and grandparents when she was their age. Nowadays there was nothing she liked to hear more than Granddad Wilf go on about the war, his life in the parachute regiment or Nanna Eileen’s days as a Land Girl.
Today was a day like 22 November 1963 – a day when another shot would be heard around the world.
Sunday had, to be honest, started pretty badly. Donna had woken in her bed (this was a good thing), although she’d only had about two hours’ sleep (this was a bad thing).
Veena’s tattered dress was chucked on the floor (bad thing); next to it, a receipt she had got from the minicab driver (bad thing – who was she gonna claim that back from?) who had driven her from somewhere called South Woodham Ferrers back to Chiswick. The receipt was for £225 (very, very bad – her account had to be empty by now). Wilf had been awake when she got back in (very good thing) and had listened as she told him everything that had happened at the Copernicus Array. He had held her tight, promised that they’d find a way to rescue the Doctor and sent her to sleep it all off.
Donna had been furious with herself – she’d left the Doctor there, she’d abandoned him in a way he’d never do to her (bad thing). But she was also practical. He’d told her to go, and that had been right because otherwise she’d have been killed (definitely a bad thing).
Donna felt like death but needed to get help and go
back to the Array.
Perhaps she could track down Martha Jones and her mates at UNIT – she liked Martha and knew she’d drop everything to help.
As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she picked up the Yellow Pages and was already halfway to U when she realised that UNIT was unlikely to be there, filed under Military Organisations Dedicated to Wiping Out Martians (neither good nor bad, just a bit trigger-happy).
‘Well good morning, madam,’ Sylvia Noble snapped across the hallway. ‘I was worried about you last night.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Crawling back in at the crack of dawn after a night clubbing with the Doctor? At your age?
I mean, clubbing’s great when you’re 21, but when middle age is only a few birthdays away—’
‘Oi!’
‘Whatever. Point is, it’s time to grow up, young lady.’
‘Thanks, Mum. Too old to go clubbing, not too old to live with my mother. Great.’
‘No one forces you to live here,’ Sylvia said, putting a cup of tea in Donna’s hands. ‘Not that you do much these days. Off with Daddy Longlegs for weeks on end.’ Sylvia tugged at Donna’s dressing gown, tightening the belt, straightening out the collar. ‘And where’s he today, then?
Dragged your granddad off up the allotment, no doubt.
And it’s not a warm morning, and he’s left his thermos here.’ Sylvia licked her forefinger and de-smudged a mark on Donna’s left cheek. ‘Still, I imagine they’ll both be back for lunchtime. Sunday roast and all the trimmings?
Ha! They wish. Tell you what, it’s a trip to the Jolly Lock Keeper and the all-you-can-eat for a tenner today, my girl.
Those days of my slaving over beef and Yorkshire pudding went with your dad, let me tell you.’ Sylvia eased Donna’s red hair behind her ears and flicked her fringe.
‘And there was a note left for you last night, found it when your granddad woke me up, staggering in after you’d dropped him off. I didn’t read it, but it’s from those Carnes boys the Doctor was on about.’
Donna wanted to ask how she knew who it was from if she hadn’t read it, but that way led to whole kettles of fish about notes from headmasters when Donna was twelve to letters from Martyn Hart when she was fifteen and who had opened which of those when they were addressed to the other, so she kept quiet.
Donna also had a pang for roast beef and Yorkshire pud, conjured up by her mum, covered in fantastic gravy.
Dad carving. Granddad and Nanna over for the day, blathering on about train times and the car collectors club and long walks in Windsor Great Park. Suddenly she wanted to be ten again.
And wanted to cry.
‘Mum?’
‘What?’
‘I miss Dad.’
And Sylvia Noble hugged her daughter in a way she hadn’t for quite a long time. Then pulled away, almost as if she’d remembered that Sylvia Noble’s preset was to be grouchy and uncompromising and not tactile and warm.
Especially with her wayward daughter.
But it was enough of a moment to make Donna happy.
Because it had been a real instinctive gesture.
‘Can you call your granddad, please, find out when he’s back and whether your Doctor is joining us at the pub.’
‘And Netty?’
(Ooh, very bad thing)
‘If we must.’
Eager to change the mood, Donna opened the front door to check on the weather.
‘Mum, why d’you say Granddad’s gone to the allotment?’
‘What else does he do? It’s either the veggies or Netty.
When they’re not one and the same.’
Donna shot her a look and Sylvia had the decency to apologise. ‘Sorry. Get used to being on my own so much, I forget that I shouldn’t say to other people things I say out loud to myself.’
‘We’ll worry about you and Netty later. Granddad’s taken the car. Which he doesn’t need for the allotment.’
Sylv
ia frowned. ‘He didn’t say he was taking it. Said he was going to meet the Doctor.’
‘So you assumed it was at the allotment?’
‘Like the other night, yeah.’
Donna was dialling her grandfather on her mobile, but it was switched off. The silly beggar was on his way to Copernicus, wasn’t he? And he’d left Donna behind.
At which point that ‘shot heard around the world’
moment occurred.
Donna would always remember that she was in her
dressing gown, standing at a slightly open door, a note from the Carnes boys in her hand (unread, by her at least), staring at a space where a car should have been, her mum just behind her. There was a fresh mug of tea by the Yellow Pages. Over the road, old Mister Lyttle was walking his dog. A small black thing of indeterminate breed that always smelled of wet fur. To the left, a real peripheral vision type thing, a blue van was parked.
And dominating the blue sky was a massive, ferociously awful pillar of pure bright light, the very edges suffused with a faint purple glimmer.
Donna heard her mum say, ‘Oh my God, not again, not the sky on fire again.’
But it wasn’t entirely on fire. Just this one column, accompanied by a sound like a gas flame on the cooker, but ramped up by ten thousand decibels.
Donna just knew that something awful was happening where that column of light hit the ground, somewhere to the west of Chiswick. Although she didn’t know it then, all around the world, no matter what time zone, similar columns of heat energy were doing the same.
And in the sky, that leering face of stars was still up there, the hideous grin seemingly wider and broader than ever before.
‘Mum, inside, now. Lock the doors, let no one in except me. Or Granddad. Or the Doctor. Especially the Doctor.’
‘And why is he so special?’
‘Oh, just say you’ll do it, will you.’
‘All right,’ Sylvia muttered. Then: ‘And where are you
going?’
‘I need to try and find him. Both of them actually.’
‘Aren’t they together?’
‘That’s what I’m worried about.’
‘Well, you can’t go out like that.’
Donna realised she still wasn’t dressed and ran upstairs, throwing off her dressing gown when she was barely through the door of her room.
‘Don’t leave that lying on the floor,’ Sylvia called.
Donna picked it up, hung it on the door hook and sighed.
‘Priorities, Mum,’ she muttered.
Dressed in a T-shirt and an old tracksuit she couldn’t believe she ever wore but knew would be warm, Donna headed back downstairs, grabbing a heavy coat.
Out in the street, she could hear people and cars revving up. Everyone had seen the pillar of light and now they were seeing that awful face in the sky.
Give it half an hour and it’d be panic on the streets, rioting, looting and police everywhere. She had to get out of London fast.
‘No car,’ she cursed to herself.
She opened the front door – that blue van.
So wrong. So wrong, Donna Noble. So wrong.
Then she was at the driver’s window, looking at the seat. The dashboard. The lack of keys. The locked door.
Poor Miss Oladini had made it look so easy when she’d hotwired that car, but Donna didn’t have a clue where to begin.
Great.
She tried the door just in case.
It was open.
She glanced up the street but no one in the mêlée of people was yelling at her or claiming the van as theirs.
She hauled herself into the driver’s seat and put her hand under the seat to adjust it. God knew why – she wasn’t going anywhere, because no one in this day and age was stupid enough to put their keys under the seat of an unlocked van.
She brought up her hands, a bunch of car keys in them.
‘And I want a tricycle and a pony and a lifetime’s supply of milk chocolate,’ she said aloud, putting her hand back under the seat just in case her Christmas wishes from when she was eight came true too.
No ponies, no bikes, not even a melted chocolate bar.
But the keys – that was good.
She ramped the van into reverse, and seconds later she was on her way back down towards Chiswick High Road, planning her second journey out towards Essex in twelve hours.
She threw a last look in the wing mirror at her house as she swung the van around and then shot off, hoping that her mum hadn’t seen her do this. Cos then there’d be hell to pay. And quite right too!
Before she had even got to the main road, the crowds were in the street, staring and pointing, and she could hear sirens from ambulances, police and fire engines all around her, all heading down towards the west, towards the M4.
Towards where the pillar of light had struck the ground.
She was heading towards London and that side of the street was relatively empty, even for a Sunday.
Donna’s attention was drawn by the number of people outside the various electrical shops that dotted both sides of the street. Chiswick High Road had mostly been cafés and show shops when she was growing up, but this invasion of gadget shops was weird. She remembered the Doctor saying he’d met the Carnes boys in one.
All this went through her mind in a brief second, probably because there on the streets in front of her were Lukas and Joe Carnes.
Like they’d been waiting for her.
Literally.
Standing in the street. One minute, the road had been empty. The next, two lads were right in front of her.
Donna hit the brakes, and just avoided skidding to a halt, actually making quite a graceful stop, although a man behind her hit his horn.
‘Yeah? What else didja get for Christmas, sunshine?’
she screamed back at him. ‘Shove it up yer—’
The passenger door opened, and Joe and Lukas clambered in.
‘Joe says we need to be somewhere called Copernicus,’
Lukas said quietly. ‘He also knew you’d be here. At this time.’
‘Course he did,’ Donna replied, driving forward as the irate driver overtook her, one hand off the wheel and gesturing at her. Shrugging, Donna continued driving towards Hammersmith. ‘Morning, Joe,’ she called to the boy, who was now in the back.
Joe didn’t reply but got something out of his pocket.
‘What’s that then? New MP3 thingy?’
‘It’s an M-TEK,’ Lukas replied on Joe’s behalf.
‘You what?’ Donna tried to sound interested, but wasn’t. She was more focused on how they’d known she would be there.
‘It told him where you’d be,’ Lukas continued. ‘It talks to him.’
That sort of answered her question, Donna decided, but annoyingly threw up a couple of dozen other ones. ‘Is that how he knew the Doctor’s name the other day, then?’
Lukas shrugged. ‘Dunno. Man in the shop gave it to him. Said it was a demo version. Gave out about ten of ’em. Said Joe was the right person to have one. He didn’t tell me till we’d got home and I found him downloading music onto it.’
That made sense to Donna, although it didn’t really make any sense at all. When you travelled with the Doctor, you began to accept that things that didn’t make sense really did make sense in a not-making-sense-to-normal-people kind of way.
So this M-TEK thing made Joe Carnes know things. Or it told him things. Things to attract the Doctor’s attention.
‘Didn’t your dad ever tell you boys about accepting gifts from strange men?’
‘My dad did,’ Lukas said, glancing at Joe. ‘Joe’s dad didn’t stick around long enough.’
Well, thought Donna, that’s a conversation killer. She made a sudden turn into the Hammersmith roundabout that caused someone to toot their horn. Maybe it was the same driver as before, but she didn’t know or care. She turned onto the Talgarth Road.
It was empty. Really empty. This was a big six-lane roadw
ay towards Central London, via Earls Court then Knightsbridge, then Hyde Park and eventually into Piccadilly. It should’ve taken twenty minutes, maybe thirty to get to Piccadilly on a Sunday lunchtime, and that was without any road works. Donna did it in ten and she wasn’t exactly speeding.
It was as if all the people in London were going away… no, going towards something. That light. They were all heading towards that.
Rubberneckers, eager to take photos on their mobiles and say ‘oh look, we saw the carnage!’ or something more sinister? In which case why wasn’t she affected?
‘Scuse me, boys, more law-breaking…’ Donna got out her mobile as she drove and called her mum. No reply.
That wasn’t good news.
So here she was, in a stolen transit van, driving through a deserted London, off to darkest Essex to rescue her granddad and her friend from killers, unable to contact home, complete with the Children of the Damned at her side.
‘Cheers, Doctor,’ she said to no one in particular.
Some twenty miles away from Donna and the boys, there was a massive police and ambulance presence around the Ruislip Woods area, with even more emergency services arriving from nearby RAF Hillingdon.
The massive bolt of white energy had struck the woodlands – one of Britain’s first protected woods –although there wasn’t too much to protect right now. It had created a massive bowl-shaped crater about a quarter of a mile wide, decimating the trees, grasses and shrubbery. A small waft of smoke drifted on the morning air and crowds of startled onlookers huddled close by, partly out of amazement, partly out of shock, but mostly out of fear.
Was it a plane crash? An al-Qaeda bomb? Something from the RAF base gone wrong? Casualties? Oh my God, my kids were playing here? Has anyone seen my dog, a lab cross? Excuse me, have you seen my husband, he was out jogging? Have you seen that awful face in the sky? Is it a movie stunt? I never trusted that IRA ceasefire…
Police Sergeant Alison Pearce was trying to control the crowds and her own officers and get the emergency crews through. The Sunday morning shift had seemed such a good idea. Three kids meant that doing night shifts was out, but her mum could babysit on a Sunday while she did her shift. Normally, she’d be home by ten, see them asleep and get them off to school in the morning. She’d already called home and warned her beloved mother that grandparental care might be the order of the next couple of days. The paperwork alone on this would keep her busy. And that’s assuming she ever actually got away from the site.
Dr. Who - BBC New Series 28 Page 11