1
The Doctor opened the TARDIS door and stepped out into the warm desert night. A gentle breeze stirred the dusty ground at his feet. The only sound was the cheep-cheep-cheep of nearby cicadas.
That and the distant crackle of walkie-talkies, and the rumble and stutter of diesel engines idling.
‘This looks familiar,’ he muttered softly. The Nevada Desert, United States of America. He’d visited here before, not so far away and not so very long ago. 1947, wasn’t it? Place called Roswell if memory served him. He grinned in the dark.
Now that was fun.
He wondered if he ought to have another go at fixing the TARDIS’s chameleon circuit some time. Sitting out in the middle of the desert, it was going to look somewhat incongruous. Mind you, it was night and he’d put down several hundred metres from the highway. Probably no one was going to spot it out here. In the dark it would look like the stunted hump of yet another Joshua tree.
The Doctor closed and locked the door behind him and then strode out across the dry packed earth towards the army trucks parked half a kilometre away, gathered on the gravel shoulder of the dust-and-grit highway.
Closer now, he could hear the unsteady voices of frightened men, muffled by the thick rubber seals of oxygen masks. The night was dense with the crackles and beeps, and the garbled voices and sentence fragments of to-and-fro radio traffic. Floodlights picked out a weatherworn roadside billboard and, nearby, an abandoned gas station, the windows boarded up, the forecourt tufted with weeds. A sign beside the entrance read:
Tired? Why Not Take a Break in Fort Casey?
The Friendliest Welcome Outside of Home!
The Doctor nodded. Fort Casey. This was where the probe he’d been tracking must have touched down.
He had almost reached the cluster of army vehicles before someone actually spotted him emerging from the dark.
‘Hey!’ A muffled voice barked out at him. ‘YOU THERE! STOP!’
The dazzling beam of a torch settled on his face. The Doctor squinted and shaded his eyes.
‘Stop right there!’ The muffled voice sounded young. Very young. And very frightened. ‘Raise your hands!’
‘Tsk, tsk,’ chided the Doctor. ‘Raise your hands … please!’
‘Shut up and show me your hands!’
The Doctor raised them. ‘Charming.’
The soldier spoke into his radio. ‘Major Platt? Got a civilian here … Just came out of the dark, sir … Infected? Don’t think so, sir.’
The Doctor could discern the outline of the young soldier against the glare of his torch: cloaked in a biohazard suit, an oxygen cylinder on his back, an assault rifle wavering uncertainly in his gloved hands. Another man joined him a moment later.
‘You!’ A deeper, more commanding voice this time. ‘Where’ve you come from?’
The Doctor smiled. ‘I’m not from round here.’
‘Have you come from the town, sir?’
‘Fort Casey, I presume?’
‘Yes. Have you been in direct contact with anyone from Fort Casey?’
‘No. I’ve only just come down.’
A pause. ‘From Atlanta? You one of the team from the CDC?’
The Doctor found himself nodding. The major did seem to want that to be the case rather badly so he decided to give the man what he wanted to hear. ‘Actually, yes … yes, I am.’
‘About time! We’d better get you suited up and briefed.’
‘Suited up?’ The Doctor clucked his tongue. ‘Really? Is that entirely necessary?’
Major Platt didn’t seem to be in the mood for flippancy. ‘Follow me to the command tent, I’ll give you the sit-rep.’
‘The last logged communication from the town was seventeen hours ago: a 911 call for an ambulance. The caller only managed to say …’ The major flipped through a pad of paper on his desk. He was all buzz-cut silver hair and lean, tanned face like chiselled sandstone. Marines all the way. Booyah. He read what was scribbled down on the page in front of him. ‘They’re all dead … everyone’s dead, flesh turned to liquid. It moves … There are things! Moving things! They’re alive …’ Major Platt looked up at the Doctor. ‘The caller became incoherent after that and disconnected shortly after.’
The Doctor drummed his fingers thoughtfully against the top of the aluminium folding-table between them. ‘Hmm … That really doesn’t sound very good.’
The command tent was an airtight bubble of thick plastic, lit from within by several halogen stand lamps. The major had removed his mask and biohazard suit and now stared at the Doctor curiously. His Edwardian morning jacket, waistcoat and cravat seemed particularly to be drawing the major’s gaze.
‘I was at the opera,’ the Doctor explained, ‘when my phone went off.’
The major waved that aside. ‘It appears the pathogen isn’t airborne, but we can’t be a hundred per cent sure of that. We have all entry/exit routes from the town locked down. It appears this thing, whatever it is, infects and kills very quickly.’
‘Which is probably a rather good thing.’
Platt’s grey brow furrowed.
‘Quick to kill, Major, means we don’t have to worry about an infected carrier straying too far away from the town.’ The Doctor nodded thoughtfully. ‘You said you sent some of your troops in?’
He nodded. ‘Four hours ago. We’ve not heard from them in over three.’
‘What was the last thing you did hear?’
The major shook his head. ‘Garbled transmission. Made no sense to me.’
‘Do tell.’
‘Something about webs everywhere. Webs all over the town.’ The major squinted his grey eyes. ‘Webs? Everyone turned to liquid! You got any idea what on earth we’re dealing with?’
The Doctor had a pretty good idea. But it was just that: an idea. A suspicion. He needed to know for sure. ‘You’re right. It’s not an airborne infection, Major. At least, not yet.’
‘You telling me you know what this is?’
The Doctor nodded slowly. ‘I’ve come across it before, yes.’
‘You got a name for it?’
‘A nightmare.’ The Doctor thumbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘If it’s the pathogen I think it is, it will spread quickly. There are no species barriers. It can be carried and transmitted by any creature – anything organic, in fact.’
‘That’s impossible! No pathogen can do that!’
‘Within seventy hours of touchdown, this thing will become uncontainable. Within a month …’ The Doctor shook his head slowly. No words needed there.
The major’s eyes narrowed. ‘You sure you’re from the Atlanta Centers of Disease Control? Because you sure ain’t like the usual pencil-neck swab-heads down there.’
‘Ahh … you have me, Major,’ the Doctor said with a smile. ‘I lied.’
Major Platt bristled. ‘Then you’d better tell me right now who sent you.’
‘I’m sure you’ve heard of the organisation, Major. Its name gets whispered every now and then in dark government corners.’
‘Who are you with?’
‘UNIT.’
The major’s face paled. ‘UNIT?’
The Unified Intelligence Taskforce; it operated off the radar and off the balance sheet for a number of the world’s governments. The Doctor had worked with UNIT before. While the average man in the street might not have heard of it, Major Platt most certainly would have, unless he had kept his head stuck firmly in the sand for all of his military career.
‘Good. It seems you are acquainted with it.’ The Doctor pushed himself back from the table. ‘That’s excellent. It will save us wasting valuable time, me explaining the situation to you.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t need much … just that you need to let me go in.’
‘Impossible! Class five containment protocol – nobody else goes in, nobody comes out!’
‘UNIT has the final say here, I believe. Not the army. And since I’m their man-on-the-spot … I think that makes me the one in charge here.’
Major Platt’s eyes narrowed. ‘I received no notification that my authority –’
‘Major, every second we spend here, sitting in your lovely shiny tent, is a second we simply can’t afford to waste. This pathogen will become airborne very soon.’ The Doctor smiled sadly. ‘Then all your roadblocks, all your men in their amusing rubber suits, will simply be … an irrelevance.’