Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [45]
Right, the Doctor’s looking towards you, and I’m looking a bit to your left, where there’s an electricals shop. I’m nudging the Doctor again, and now he’s looking there too. We start to edge a bit closer, but we can’t go too far because the Doctor has to keep the tiger away from Tommy, who’s still unconscious on the ground.
So, this shop – the window’s all full of futuristic tellies, all enormous flat screens and 3-D. That would have caught my eye anyway, but my gaze was dragged towards what the screens were showing: a news report I guess, although a few days ago I would have assumed it to be an action movie. The scene changed rapidly between horrors, some all too familiar – more sabre‐toothed tigers on the rampage with people fleeing left and right, worse still, little two‐legged dinosaurs running wild. ‘What are they?’ I said.
‘Look it up in the ISpyder guide,’ the Doctor said, and I’d actually got as far as getting out the book when I realised that it didn’t exactly matter; all that mattered was that they had very sharp teeth and claws. ‘You look,’ I said, pushing the book at the Doctor.
He took it, but something else on the screen had got his attention. His glasses came out again and he was leaning forwards, concentrating hard. He’d spotted something. I couldn’t tell what, but he nodded for me to go a bit closer, so I did – and then I saw it too.
In almost every scene, somewhere, in the background, or the foreground, or somewhere off to the side, there was a plump grey‐white bird, big of beak and perky of tail feather. A dodo. That was weird enough. But what made it even odder was that, just like the one in front of us (the one you’re standing on), they all seemed to be scrabbling at the ground. In some of the pictures, a white sphere was visible at their feet.
‘They’ve got eggs,’ I said. ‘And they’re burying them. Do you think there’s some weird plan going on to repopulate the Earth with dodos?’
‘You mean, someone’s sending sabre‐toothed tigers and dinosaurs to clear the way for our feathered friends? Bit extreme, don’t you think?’
I huffed. ‘Well, what do you think’s going on?’
‘Oh, bound to be something far more sinister.’
Now I sighed as I took the few steps backwards needed to join him again. ‘Isn’t it always? Come on, then, give us a clue.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, there’s another clue heading this way. But I’m not sure you’d want it, even for a present.’
I looked where he was pointing – down the street to your left. There was a dinosaur. Not one of the ones like on the shop’s tellies – they were only (ha, ‘only’!) about six feet long and this was at least half that again, standing upright like a Tyrannosaurus, with a huge head and, ooh, ee‐nor‐mous pointed teeth.
Amazing how calmly I’m telling you all that. Oh, here comes a dinosaur. Here comes something ready, willing and able to bite me in half in a second, and, ooh look, there’s no escape. The sonic’s not going to work on tigers and dinosaurs, is it? And like I said before, we can’t run away, not with an unconscious man at our feet.
Talking of whom, I knelt down to check his progress. He wasn’t making any. ‘I would have hoped he’d be waking up by now,’ I said to the Doctor. ‘Really, he needs to get to a hospital, be checked out properly.’
The Doctor’s answer didn’t seem to be an answer at all, at first. ‘This is obviously something to do with MOTLO,’ he said. Well, yeah, even I’d figured that one out. Thanks, Doctor.
‘So we need to find out what’s going on there. What’s with the tigers and dodos and dinosaurs.’ Couldn’t disagree there.