Doctor Who_ Winner Takes All - Jacqueline Rayner [16]
She was aghast. ‘That’s the brilliant plan?’
He held out his hands. ‘It’ll work! Those thick necks they’ve got, they won’t be able to look down properly. You’ll be way out of their field of vision.’
She wasn’t convinced, but knew she probably couldn’t come up with a better plan in time. ‘Couldn’t you be the one hiding?’ she asked as a last resort.
‘I’m over six foot!’ he said. ‘Catch me fitting behind this.’ He patted the chair. ‘And the shame of it! Hiding behind a chair from a monster? Me?’
Rose raised her eyebrows at him, but got up anyway, and crawled into the gap between the seat and the wall. The Doctor arranged a throw so it was more or less covering her. ‘Oh, gross!’ she called out. ‘No one’s hoovered back here since the Dark Ages.’ A second later: ‘I’ve just found a biscuit.’ A second later: ‘I’ve just found a pound coin.’ A second later, worriedly: ‘I don’t know what I’ve just found, but I’ve put my elbow right in it…’
And a second later, she could smell something. A tang in the air, as if she’d just been spritzed with lemon juice. Her tongue and nostrils were fizzing.
‘This is it,’ said the Doctor, perching on the arm of the chair above her. ‘Hold tight.’
She grabbed hold of his bony ankle, reflecting in a distracted way how odd it was that a 900‐year‐old alien from outer space wore diamond‐print socks, just like they’d used to sell at the shop where she’d worked, £8.99 for three pairs, breathable cotton weave.
There was a crash; they’d smashed open the front door again. And then the Doctor was standing up, and saying really unconvincingly, ‘Oh no! Why are you pointing a gun at me? I’ll come quietly.’
And she just had time to see, from under the draped throw, a pair of clawed legs obscuring her view of the screen, which was showing a load of angry Mantodeans swarming around, clacking their jaws together.
‘Game over,’ Rose thought, and then everything disappeared.
* * *
SIX
Rose was disorientated for a few seconds, and because of that she almost died. She felt sick and dizzy, and her skin tingled as if she’d just had a bath of Alka‐Seltzer. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to move again, or even know quite how bits of her body attached to other bits of her body ever again. But as her head began to clear she suddenly became aware that her arms were moving. She certainly hadn’t consciously decided to move them, and she observed the strange phenomenon with detached interest for a few moments. Then the mental mists parted still further, and she realised that her arms were moving because she was clutching something with a death grip, and it was trying to shake her off. A moment later and she recognised it as an ankle, as the Doctor’s ankle, and everything came flooding back. The Doctor was talking loudly, trying to distract attention from her. ‘Where am I? What’s all this about then?’
She unclenched her fingers, let go of the ankle. There were other ankles in her line of vision, squat ankles covered in coarse black hair, leading to ugly clawed feet. A Quevvil’s feet. Trying not to make a sound, not to move, she took in her surroundings. She was on a concrete floor, utterly exposed. But to one side was a litter of things: filing cabinets, chairs, a cracked computer monitor. She wriggled over to the pile as quickly and quietly as possible, began to slither behind it. Her legs were still sticking out when a door opened right next to her and she heard the tink tink of more claws on concrete. Lots more claws. Had she taken a fraction of a second longer to recover…
Not that she had recovered fully – she still felt nauseous and she found herself mentally checking herself, trying to work out if she’d been reassembled in exactly the right way. Had her fingers always been that long? Had her feet always been so small? She finally concluded that they had.
She wondered where they were. Still on Earth, she reckoned, thank goodness – she couldn’t believe that any alien planet populated by giant porcupines