Doctor Who_ The Forgotten Army - Brian Minchin [22]
In the cage next to them, an elephant started to trumpet in panic, bashing the bars of his cage, eager to get away.
'Just listen!' Amy implored. There it was again. Stomp.
Stomp. Stomp. Still quiet, but definitely getting closer.
'What could be making that noise?'
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she asked. 'Did you say anything about a Trojan horse?'
'No, that would be impossible. There's barely room in there for...' The Doctor looked at the size of mammoth. 'Well, maybe one or two people.'
They both started to back away.
The noise came again. STOMP. STOMP. STOMP.
'But that sounds like hundreds of feet marching.’ Amy insisted.
The Doctor nodded grimly. 'Like an army. Could be some kind of TARDIS technology... A different dimension, but I'd have noticed. Maybe it's a temporal gateway, but the readings are wrong.
Amy looked at the Doctor. 'Doctor, what if they wanted the fur to be wrong? What if they wanted to make it rare so it'd be brought here? What if they wanted to be caught?'
Ever nearer, and even louder - STOMP! STOMP! STOMP!
Then the noise stopped.
It was so quiet Amy was sure she could hear her own heartbeat.
Very, very quietly, the Doctor and Amy moved their heads to listen to the mammoth. There was a sound like a key being turned in a lock.
FATOOM! The entire belly of the mammoth hit the floor.
The Doctor and Amy gazed in wonder. The mammoth had been split neatly in half and now
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looked like a dismantled toy - normal on top, but all of its lower half descended to the floor. Bright lights blazed out from within the mammoth and, finally, its innards were revealed. The inside of the mammoth looked like a gleaming alien spaceship. The muscle and skin had been no more than a thin shell around a metal body, packed with fantastic-looking alien technology.
'Whoa. What is that?' Amy looked at the Doctor as, with a loud creak, the head of the mammoth turned to face them. 'I thought you said it was turned off.'
The Doctor shrugged. 'Looks like I was wrong.'
'Will it shoot?' Amy asked.
'Don't be ridiculous,' the Doctor replied. 'It's a mammoth, it doesn't have laser guns. It will gore us with those tusks...'
Amy failed to feel reassured.
With a loud hiss, the mammoth's belly was swathed in smoke, and from within the haze came the sound of boots marching, many times louder than before. STOMP! STOMP!
STOMP! Hundreds of boots, stamping hard as they marched along the metal insides of the beast.
Above this barbarian sound, they could hear a high-pitched
'Left, right, left, right, left, right'.
As the stomp got louder, the animals of the Zoo were getting restless, uniting in fear, as a mood of chaos spread in the chilly air. The unholy cacophony
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of bellows, yowls and panicked growls echoed around the enclosures.
Amy instinctively took a step back, freaked by the massed cries of the Zoo animals.
The Doctor took a step forward. 'Now that is interesting.'
He peered into the hazy light. 'Someone has put an entire army in there. There's something coming out, Amy, down here, look!'
He dived onto his belly, and Amy joined him on the floor.
They were now at eye level with the metallic lower half of the beast. As the smoke cleared, they could see that on top of the living muscle was what looked like the deck of an aircraft carrier. It was marked up with arrows, tiny lettering labelled Muster Points and Lift Zones. With a whirring noise, tiny gun turrets rose out of the deck and swivelled to point at the Doctor and Amy.
Everything stopped.
Amy looked to the Doctor. 'Should we, er, be so close to it?'
'Probably not...' the Doctor agreed.
They started to get to their feet, but it was too late.
The mammoth let out a massive blast from its trunk, and the entire Zoo fell silent. It sounded like no animal Amy had ever heard, as if someone had combined the hunting cry of a hungry wolf howl, with the deathly rattle of a cat screech and the murderous growl of a grizzly