Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [82]
The owners of the little hotel at the top of the hill had been delighted to get her business, although they’d insisted on cash – more than happy to take dollars.
‘America’s not had it so bad, has it?’ the receptionist asked her.
Trix had told her about Fitz, but the woman hadn’t seemed to hear. Everyone here had a strange mix of pragmatism and optimism. They thought the second moon could well disappear as quickly as it had appeared, and felt life would get back to normal. If the world was going to end, it was going to end. Their role, as they saw it, was to negotiate some sort of acceptable life between these two extremes. We are where we are.
Trix had been worn out, and hadn’t wanted to outstay her welcome at the airfield. The car had been waiting there, as arranged. A nice powerful BMW, one anonymous enough to avoid police attention. She’d driven through the 170
dark, surprised at how few cars there were on the road and how normal everything else looked.
Now she was already booting up her laptop and fiddling around with phone leads. The landlines were down here, but her mobile still had a signal.
The main cloud of Vore had swept right round the world, and was somewhere on the Russian steppes at the moment. The global death toll was being put at 9,970,000. That made Trix think of shops pricing items at £9.99, to make it look as though they weren’t charging a tenner. A trick that worked, of course. Ten million people had died yesterday, and the sheer scale of this was incomprehensible to her.
Trix sat back and absorbed the news. She’d spent a day coming up with worst-case scenarios. You could talk about ‘millions’ or even ‘billions’ of people, but it meant nothing. Then she thought about what a planet was, related it to what she knew about. She’d just spent fourteen hours in the air, going both ways over the Atlantic. She and Fitz had travelled across a tiny segment of the Earth to get from London to New York. It was a big planet. The planet was still here, though: all the buildings, the museums, the libraries, the statues, the graves. The plants and animals, the seas and continents. Even thinking like that, without putting faces to it, it was too much to take in at once. As with everyone else on the planet, Trix’s brain hadn’t caught up with everything that had happened.
She turned the TV on. Endless pictures of people mourning. No piles of dead bodies, but it was breakfast television. There were church services. The new pope hadn’t made a public appearance yet, but the Vatican was insisting he was well and hadn’t been taken when the swarm hit St Peter’s Square.
Great swathes of the world had been completely unaffected. For some parts that had been it was just the latest in a line of natural disasters, and life had barely changed. When the famine in Darfur and rebuilding after the Asian tsunami were presented as ‘life goes on as normal’, you knew the world was in trouble. Cut against this were snatched images of Vore just walking down streets. Some of them had been seen munching on plants or killing livestock.
They didn’t seem to eat people, but they did occasionally grab them and carry them off into the air and none of those people had been seen again. The United Nations had declared the very first global emergency. GM-TV was listing the celebrities believed to have been killed. EastEnders had lost more than Coronation Street. Dec was fine, but there was no sign of Ant. The latest thing was a spate of unexplained injuries – people finding bruises they couldn’t account for. Trix checked, and was surprised to find a livid purple mark on her arm.
The pundits were still only 90 per cent certain that the Vore came from the second moon. There were good photos of it now. It was the colour of sand-171
stone, with the occasional straight groove carved in its surface, and features like stacks and mounds that looked artificial. There were no visible cities or roadways. The Americans and the Russians were considering a nuclear response, but Trix could immediately see a problem – even if there