Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [99]
Her pupils rolled back into place. Two blurry green eyes focused on the Doctor. He smiled encouragingly.
For a moment, Sam didn’t respond. Then: ‘I dreamt something,’ she said.
Ah. Now, thought the Doctor, is this going to be an insignificant meaningless delusional dream, or a portentous prophetic dream with serious ramifications on the cosmic scale?
‘I was a heroin addict,’ Sam went on. Then she shook her head, a bit groggily. ‘No I wasn’t. I’d taken heroin, but I wasn’t an addict. Is that possible?’
The Doctor felt faintly embarrassed. ‘I don’t know. I’m hardly an expert.’
‘Everything was different. I remember getting drunk a lot. I never get drunk, do I? Oh, God. There were other things. This boy. I was fourteen. No, fifteen.’ Sam was shaking, the Doctor noticed. ‘It was another life. A whole other life. I mean, I was me, but I was someone else. I never met you. You know the first time I saw you, I was running away from those dealers at Totters Yard? I remember, it was different. They were my friends. No, they weren’t my friends, but I used to... oh God. Oh God, I don’t believe this.’
The Doctor rested his hand on her cheek. Lying to her might be the best idea, he decided. ‘It was only a dream, Sam. Dreams only mean what we want them to mean.’
‘But it didn’t feel wrong. You know? It felt like it was the way things were supposed to be. And when I woke up, and you were there, I... it didn’t feel right any more. It felt like I wasn’t supposed to be here. Like I was supposed to be back in London. King’s Cross. I’ve hardly ever been to King’s Cross. Why should I dream about it like that when I’ve hardly ever been there?’
The Doctor wondered what he should say. To an extent, she was probably right. By taking Sam off in the TARDIS, he’d changed her timeline, and by association, the timeline of her whole species. But he’d taken risks like that a billion times before, nothing bad had happened so far. Well, nothing very bad. What was different this time?
‘Who am I?’ Sam asked, between breaths, and the Doctor suddenly realised she was crying. Sort of. Shallow, half-hearted sobs, as if she knew she ought to be upset, but wasn’t sure how to go about showing it. ‘Who am I supposed to be?’
The Doctor put his arm around her. He didn’t have an answer.
Before Sam could say anything else, there was a muted gurgling sound from somewhere nearby. Sam stopped crying in a second. The Doctor felt her limbs go stiff in his arms. Slowly, he disentangled himself from her, and stood.
A few feet away, a second figure lay among the kidney plants. It was curled up like a foetus, and the similarity didn’t end there. Its eyes were wide open, but then, the Doctor doubted it had any eyelids. It was the creature he’d seen on the pixscreen in the security centre. The antibody’s umbilical cord had withered away, and without the City’s systems to support it, it had fallen to the ground, ready to die.
‘What is it?’ asked Sam. Her voice wasn’t much more than a squeak. Mercifully, she couldn’t see the thing from where she was sitting.
‘Nothing,’ the Doctor told her, not taking his eyes off the antibody. ‘Nothing at all.’
The antibody turned its soft, swollen head. Two huge black eyes stared up at the Doctor from the undergrowth.
It gurgled again. Three syllables. The Doctor wouldn’t have identified the sounds as words, if he hadn’t been able to see the antibody’s lips moving.
‘It’s-not-fair.’
Without a word, the Doctor raised his sonic screwdriver. The antibody followed the movement of his arm. It stopped thrashing its little stunted limbs.
‘It’s-not-fair.’
The Doctor pressed the trigger.
The cells of the antibody had already started to collapse in on themselves. The screwdriver accelerated the process. The creature’s skin wrinkled, then turned black, shrinking and hardening across its bloated body. Tumours blossomed across its cranium. The eyes sank into the underdeveloped skull.
Eventually, there was nothing left of the antibody but a husk. The Doctor lowered the