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Poor Miss Oladini had made it look so easy when she’d hotwired that car, but Do
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, pla
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.
Do
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.
Do
‘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,’ Do
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?’ Do
‘It told him where you’d be,’ Lukas continued. ‘It talks to him.’
That sort of answered her question, Do
Lukas shrugged. ‘Du
That made sense to Do
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 Do
It was empty. Really empty. This was a big six-lane roadway 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. Do
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…’ Do
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 Do
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.
‘Oi, you, excuse me?’ she yelled out to a young guy who was trying to get under the red and white tape. ‘Sir?
You can’t come through…’
The man ignored her. Sergeant Pearce grabbed her radio and called a couple of colleagues over as she stepped under the line herself and hurried over to him.
‘Welcome back,’ he said to… well, to nothing. Just to
the fine white ash that had once been trees and goodness knows what else.
‘Sir, I must ask you to get back behind the line. This is a crime scene.’
The man continued to ignore her, and Pearce noticed that five other people had done the same thing all around the perimeter. ‘Guys,’ she said into her radio, ‘what’s going on?’