Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [40]
‘Except they weren’t the last ones,’ Martha pointed out. ‘We know what happened to the last‐ever quagga.’ She shivered, remembering. ‘They must have been the penultimate ones. No one would know about the last ever ones, because they’d just… disappear. Zapped off to the museum. Like Dorothea here.’
She reached down and rubbed the creature’s downy head.
And then they heard the first scream.
Have you ever been in a situation where things are spiralling horribly, awfully out of control, and you know it’s all your fault? I think there are really only two ways to react: be paralysed with fear and guilt, or shove the weight of responsibility to the back of your mind and treat it like you would any other hideous happening. My instinct was to do the former, but I knew I had to force myself to do the latter, because people were going to die.
The Doctor reacts so quickly, it’s like it’s programmed in. Hear scream, turn and run. Towards it, I mean, not away. As if.
And it’s becoming instinctive in me, too. I took a brief, longing look at the still‐distant TARDIS, and followed him. Then stopped, reversed, and picked up Dorothea. Then tried to run, found she was too heavy, and stumbled forwards with a kind of lurching trot instead.
There were more and more screams coming now, suddenly joined by the piercing screech of a fire alarm. We rounded a corner, and were nearly knocked over by a crowd of people running the other way, but there was no sign of a fire. In front of us was a supermarket, with screaming shoppers streaming out of the automatic doors, dropping their carrier bags in panic and sending apples and oranges and frozen ready meals sliding away in all directions. One woman was yelling ‘A bear, a bear!’, another was crying ‘A tiger!’ and a spotty teenage boy in a pastel yellow supermarket uniform was shouting about ‘A monster!’
By the time I got there, the doors were just hissing shut behind the Doctor. Seconds later, they slid open again for me. I crept in cautiously – mind you, I could have been wearing hobnailed boots for all you could hear above the alarm – but I was unable to see where he’d got to, or where the bear/tiger/monster was, for that matter. Dorothea looked around curiously as I tiptoed down the fruit and veg aisle, stretching out her neck to snag a bunch of grapes in her enormous beak.
We were creeping past the deli counter when I heard a crash. I hurried as fast as I could towards it, trying not to slip on the tins of peaches and pears that were rolling across the floor. Round the corner, I could see why the fleeing customers had been confused. The creature was the size and shape of a bear, but with the tawny coat and feline face of a big cat.
It also had the largest set of fangs I’d ever seen, like a couple of bony bananas sticking out of its mouth.
And the Doctor was standing right in front of it. I yelped. ‘Is that a sabre‐toothed tiger?’
The Doctor looked in my direction. ‘Yes. Interesting, isn’t it? Because there’s no way the last one could have crossed the Atlantic and ended up here.’
Yes, Doctor, now was definitely the time to be worrying about how it arrived thousands of years ago, rather than that it was HERE, NOW!
I edged closer nervously and saw that the Doctor was holding up the sonic screwdriver, waving it in the animal’s face. It was shaking its furry head from side to side, as if trying to dislodge a buzzing bee from inside its skull. Behind it crouched a couple of old ladies, tea‐cosy hats on their heads, obviously far too scared to attempt to pass the beast.
The Doctor used the non‐sonic‐screwdriver‐holding hand to wave me away. ‘Get out while you can,’ he said. This won’t hold it for long, I’ve just confused it for a few moments. Trying to give people time to get away. The sabre‐tooth is built for ambush, not