by Doctor Who
‘But the guards!’ Huntley protested. ‘Surely –’
‘They might know that I’ve been causing trouble, but not the rest of you,’ Rose told him. ‘If we can only get out of here, show people what’s happened to us, tell them how they’re being tricked.’ Huntley still looked unsure. ‘What have we got to lose? We’re full of alien eggs that could hatch any minute!’
‘There’s nothing to lose,’ Jay agreed, and Huntley reluctantly nodded.
‘Then round up the boys, boys,’ said Rose. ‘We’re busting out of here.
‘Come on!’ Mickey shouted. He glanced back at the filthy tide coming to drown them, pulled out one of the grenades. ‘Should I let this off, try and knock out the stairs?’
‘Hang on.’ Vida wiped the card on her sleeve and shoved it in again.
The rush of water seemed to gather itself like a vast cobra, ready to strike.
And finally the card-reader winked green. ‘Yes!’ yelled Mickey.
Vida flung open the door and piled through. Mickey followed her and slammed the door shut behind them. They pelted along a corridor, through some more double doors, along another corridor. . .
169
‘Where’s the way out?’ shouted Mickey.
‘Keep going!’ Vida yelled back.
But behind them came a savage splintering noise as the stairwell door was torn from its hinges by the great rush of water. Seconds later, with a stereo crash, the double doors were thrown open. The hissing, bubbling sound rushed closer and closer.
‘We can’t outrun it,’ shouted Vida as they stumbled into the main reception at last.
‘Remember Crayshaw down there?’ Mickey scrambled up on to the reception desk, pulled her up after him. ‘Old sea dog. New tricks.’
The tide of dirty water smashed through into reception, the stairwell door pitching on top of it like a massive surfboard. Mickey nodded to Vida and jumped for it –
Don’t mess up, don’t mess up, don’t mess –
He landed awkwardly, fell to his knees, dropped the grenade and swore. But at least he was on board, and Vida was clinging on behind him. She shrieked and he yelled as the miniature tsunami reared up, carrying them above the turnstiles.
And straight into the plate-glass frontage of Stanchion House.
The door hit the thick glass edge-on and shattered it.
Mickey
twisted round so his back took the impact, fell forwards on to Vida.
For a second the two clung together as jagged shards rained down around them. Then their makeshift bodyboard hit the ground and Mickey was thrown clear. He rolled over and overHe must have blacked out for a minute. Next thing he knew Vida was cradling him on the ground and there was blood on the sleeve of his T-shirt. Hers or his? He hurt everywhere except his arm, so maybe it was hers.
‘Did we make it?’ he asked, staring round, head spinning.
‘Almost,’ she told him softly.
And as his vision focussed he saw the pirate, the Victorian lady and the kid, all looming over him. Their heads looked too big for their bodies, the faces bloated and eel-white, misshapen eyes ready to plop out of their sockets as they reached down to tear at him with shrivelled, groping fingers.
170
‘Coo-ee?’ TheDoctor,allsetforadiversion,peepedthroughthehole he had made in the wall of the underground laboratories. They had been trashed and deserted. Plastic partitions lay in crumpled heaps and big cracks had opened in the floor and walls where bits of ship had toppled over. It was eerily quiet.
‘O ye whales, and all who move in the waters!’ he loudly declaimed, smiling despite himself at the richness of the echoes that bounced back at him. ‘Here, fishy fishy!’ The whiff of burning plastic in the conduit told him his trap with the electric cable had been sprung and overcome. But where were Crayshaw and company now?
Answer: right in front of him.
Water gushed out of one of the cracks in the floor, and Crayshaw formed from the foam, scarf and dark glasses back in place. ‘Why have you returned?’
‘Like the humans you’re manipulating, I couldn’t stay away. Caught up with Kelper yet?’
‘He will soon be recaptured.’
‘If not, it sets back your plans for expansion, doesn’t it? You need the ships he can arrange for you. You need –’ The Doctor broke off, 171
distracted by Crayshaw’s specs and shawl. ‘Look, why are you still bothering to hide behind those? No, don’t tell me. I suppose after all these years it’s harder not to assemble the accoutrements out of thin air like that.’
‘Not from thin air. From the constituent atoms of the original.’
‘That’s probably very clever, but you make it sound so boring!’ He tutted sadly. ‘That’s the trouble with you hive minds. No imagination.
Dull as ditchwater.’ He frowned. ‘Sorry, I hope ditch water isn’t a close personal friend of yours.’
Suddenly the bloated corpses of two fishermen appeared, grabbed an arm each and twisted. The Doctor shouted in pain, didn’t struggle.
‘Your friends are attempting to escape,’ Crayshaw informed him.
‘You know, they’re always doing things like that.’
‘They will not succeed.’
‘Really? That’s a pity.’ He tried to shrug, though his arms were pinned behind his back. ‘Humans, eh? Aren’t they annoying? You think they’re under your control, when they suddenly shuck off your mental dominance, demonstrate free will, start hijacking your pheromonal images to get their own messages across. . . ’
‘Occasional aberrations are inevitable,’ said Crayshaw, ‘and can be corrected.’
‘Aberrations like me?’ He nodded. ‘You know I’m not human, your watery scout told you that. I imagine that’s why you’re tolerating a banal conversation like this when you’re about to become a mummy several billion times over. You’re looking at me and you’re thinking
– what’s he up to? He’s resisted us in the past. Why’s he handing himself over on a plate?’
‘Why have you returned?’ Crayshaw asked again.
‘To deal. Like I said earlier – no Kelper, no ships, no expansion.’ He half-smiled. ‘But I have an amazing ship, and powers that are frankly godlike. I’ll share these with you – if you leave the Earth and its people alone.’
Crayshaw stood impassive and blank.,
‘Come on,’ the Doctor complained, ‘this is a top offer, amazing value! I can take you to rich and distant worlds you could never 172
reach under your own steam. Through me the hive can spread not only through space, but through time.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘So –
can I deal with you?’
Suddenly the scarf around Crayshaw’s neck started to twitch. His flesh melted away like wrinkled wax to reveal the true creature controlling the old, stiff body.
‘Well, well,’ said the Doctor. ‘The hive queen is an ancient one-eyed eel the size of a Chihuahua.’ He sneered at the creature as it sat there, pulsing, watching him with its baleful eye. ‘No wonder you prefer a human body.’
‘To take these forms is unpleasant to us.’
‘But necessary to fool the locals and administer discipline now and then,’ the Doctor suggested. ‘Go on, be honest – you and your guards just like swanking around in posh bodies while the rest of the hive does its impression of soluble aspirin. . . ’
He trailed off. The queen was twitching, swelling up, her glutinous body growing bigger and fatter. Her eye bulged from behind thickly veined lids. Stubby fins and protuberances squeezed from her vile body like pus from a zit. The quivering mandibles above the gaping
‘O’ of her mouth straightened and sharpened to evil points. Soon the creature had swollen to the size of a small car.
‘I suppose you do that to intimidate your prey,’ the Doctor said softly.
‘It’s very good. Very effective.’
‘You wish to share your powers and your ship with me,’ hissed the queen. ‘I wish to take them.’
Held helpless in the grip of her guards, the Doctor could only watch as the terrifying creature slithered towards him.
Vida shut her eyes as the hands came down for them. We so nearly made it, she thought, came so close. But now it was over. The sound of sirens and shouting carried from the other side of the river, and she bellowed back, in fear and pain and anger that these things would get away with –
‘Stop!’ came a familiar voice. ‘Leave them alone or – or I get it!’
173
Vida’s heart jumped in her bruised chest. She looked up, past their gruesome pursuers, and saw Rose in the dripping grip of a bald, portly man in a stained white coat. Hadn’t she seen him somewhere before?
With a sick feeling she took in the bloody lines scored in the flesh of their cheeks and necks, the pearly tinge to the eyes. And behind them she realised a menagerie of figures in naval uniform, horribly disfigured, was shambling closer.
‘Look out, Rose!’ she yelled.
‘S’all right, they’re on our side,’ Rose told her. ‘Couldn’t have got past the guards without them. So, hear this, you water zombie things.
Get away from those two people or I’m history – and so are the eggs I’m carrying. Professor Huntley here will kill me!’ She gestured behind her, ‘And this lot will kill each other too, just watch them!’
Huntley – yes, that was it, one of the secret scientists from down-stairs. Vida saw that he had picked up a large chunk of broken glass and was holding it to the girl’s neck.
‘Get your hands off her,’ said Mickey hoarsely. He tried weakly to stand, but Vida shushed him.
‘Don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Look, they’re doing as she says!’ To her astonishment, the three guards were backing uneasily away.
‘It’s working, they’re confused!’ Huntley seemed to be having diffi-culty catching his breath as he called over to them. ‘Their instinct is to protect their eggs, as it is in any hive!’
Rose widened her eyes at Mickey and Vida. ‘Get over here, then!’
Vida helped Mickey get back up, and they limped warily over to join this bizarre cavalry. ‘Where’d you spring from?’ she asked.
‘Big dark hole in the ground, flooded with water.’ But Rose was looking at Mickey as she spoke, her eyes glistening. ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?
I look disgusting, don’t I?’
Mickey shook his head. ‘You don’t. You could never.’
She almost smiled. ‘Don’t lie!’
‘I’m not!’ he protested, dabbing at a cut above one eye. ‘Anyway, the Doctor will fix you up.’
‘Where is he?’
Mickey hesitated.
174
‘Mickey, where is he?’
He looked as if he wanted to hug her, but Huntley waggled the blade of glass with a meaningful nod at the fancy-dress monsters. Or rather, monster. Vida saw that the pirate and the kid had disappeared, leaving only the Victorian lady giving them the evil pearl eye.
‘They’ve gone to ask Mum what they should do,’ Vida surmised. ‘We can’t have long.’
Now Rose was targeting her. ‘Where’s the Doctor, Vida?’
‘He went to distract Crayshaw, the leader of the hive. To buy us time so we can get the tracers.’
‘What, those chemical things you chuck in the ocean?’
‘As summaries of my life’s work go, that’s not bad,’ said Vida wryly.
‘The Doctor needs us to get those chemical things you chuck in the ocean, but. . . ’ She pointed to the cargo dump left behind when they’d taken the tug. ‘They should be somewhere in the store lockers. The place you were brought to acclimatise after they. . . did that to you.
Do you remember?’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Rose, shivering in the sunlight. ‘So basically, if we can get past the walking drowned and the sea monsters, we’re laughing. What do these tracers look like?’
‘Big metal flasks racked in a kind of posh crate,’ rasped one of the sailors, a dark-skinned boy. ‘There were 100 aboard.’
Vida stared. ‘How did you –’
‘I worked in the stores,’ he told her, wheezing for breath. ‘I don’t know how many survived the wreck. . . Maybe none at all. But I’ll see what I can find.’
‘We’ll need the whole crate,’ Vida said. ‘It’s part of the release assembly. It’ll take two to shift it, minimum.’
‘I’ll go with you, Jay,’ Rose told him.
‘Can’t you just stay here?’ Mickey urged her.
‘What, here where it’s safe you mean?’ She tapped Huntley on the arm, angled her head back to look at him. ‘That’s really good threatening, professor, but could you try it on one of the others?’ He eased off, and Rose pulled free. ‘Say you’ll kill a sailor or two,’ she told 175
Mickey, squeezing his arm. ‘It might keep those things back for a bit longer.’
He nodded bleakly and watched her run with Jay over to the cargo dump.
‘Fingers crossed,’ murmured Vida, and went to find herself a mutated sailor to threaten.
The store in the cargo dump was just as cold, wet and dark as Rose remembered. Dozens of freshly drowned people staggered round in the confined space, lost in a nightmare world of their own, wheezing for air. The rustle of the thick tarp overhead sounded like some great, scurrying animal was close by, and sent shivers through her.
She and Jay had scrambled on board the overland way. Were they expected? She didn’t know. The water-things couldn’t be too psychic, or they would have stopped them escaping. Maybe it was to do with the pheromone things – when the creatures used your head to send the apparitions, they could see inside your mind at the same time.
Maybe.
Whatever, she guessed they would know she was there soon enough.
‘The flasks were kept over here,’ said Jay, ducking through the dripping crowd to explore the shelved walls of the store. Rose could see better in the dark with these heightened, pearly eyes; there was a moonlit glow to everything she saw. ‘Quite close to the edge of the split, but the crate was strapped down. So maybe. . . ’
That word again. Rose was getting sick of possibilities. She wanted a good, hard, firm fact.
‘Yes!’ Jay hissed, crouching over something. ‘Some must have fallen out, but the crate itself is sound. Give me a hand undoing these straps, then we can drag it out.’
‘Come on, then.’ But as Rose splashed across the floor to join him, the silent drowned stopped their dead march. ‘Something I said?’ she murmured, ducking between their heaving bodies until she reached the crate. The thick plastic straps bit into her prune-like skin as she scrabbled at them. God, what I wouldn’t do for some moisturiser.
176
Then she heard a sucking noise behind her. Whirled around.
The ranks of the drowned had parted, to reveal three things. Glutinous and white, they were slithering over the wet floor towards her.
Rose’s stomach turned. They looked to be part slug, part fish. Two long, needle-like tusks stuck out dangerously from the white jelly flesh of their faces.
‘Jay,’ she said shakily, backing away, ‘we’ve been rumbled.’
He swore, tugged at the top of one of the flasks. ‘Can we use these on them?’
‘I don’t know how they work,’ Rose told him. ‘What are we meant to do with them, anyway?’
‘I dun no, I can’t get it out of the crate!’ Jay smashed his fist against the metal. ‘Useless!’
‘Uh-oh, here come more of them!’ The pallid creatures were uncoiling from the dank darkness beneath the shelving, pushing out their heads like giant snails.
‘These ones don’t have a human body,’ he reasoned, ‘so they’re slow.’
‘They don’t have to be fast,’ Rose reminded him. ‘They can control the water.’
‘But they can’t hurt us, can they? Not with what’s inside us!’
‘They won’t have to! Just wash us back into the river, along with the latest recruits. Drag us back dow
n into the pit.’ She stared round helplessly. ‘Back to square one.’
‘Then we’ll have to leg it while we can,’ said Jay. He readied himself to jump the encroaching creatures. Then he stopped. ‘Oh, no.’
A towering grey-brown wedge of solid Thames was paring away from the surface, ready to come crashing down on the cargo trailer.
The police, the soldiers, they couldn’t cope any more. There were too many people crowding the street, pushing against the barriers.
Keisha watched, grinding her teeth and feeling horribly helpless as the disaster waiting to happen finally lost all patience.
‘Maybe we could turn this thing and block the street,’ said Jackie.
But there were cars packed solid all around the tanker now, the blare of horns adding to the shouting and the sirens. ‘We can’t just sit here.’
177
‘Maybe. . . ’ Keisha closed her eyes. ‘Maybe Rose was wrong.’
‘You want to join that lot out there after what she said?’
‘I don’t know what to think any more.’
‘Then I’ll tell you.’ She opened the door of the cab, let in more of the din and clamour. ‘We’ve got to do something to try and stop this.’
‘There’s nothing we can do!’ Keisha yelled. ‘Don’t go, Jackie, please.
Everyone goes and leaves me. Jay, Mum –’
‘Your mum could be out there now in that lot!’
‘– and I can’t. . . I can’t do this. . . ’ Tears prickled behind her eyes.
‘Please don’t go.’
She reached out to be held. Just as Jackie was pulled from out of the cab by someone in the mob outside.
‘No!’ Keisha screamed. ‘Get off her!’ Before she even knew what she was doing she had scrambled over the seat and jumped down into the milling crowd. She shook the tears from her eyes, but Jackie was already lost from sight. And now two more men had seized control of the tanker. One of them slid into the driver’s seat. A soldier’s gun went off close by. The engine bit into life as if in reply. The tanker lurched forwards, shunting the sea of people on, starting a fresh panic. Keisha glimpsed Jackie now, caught up in the crush of bodies.