I kinda forgot I was posting these. Well, after an unintentional delay, here's chapter two!
Sergei followed the Doctor down the abandoned streets of London, careful to stay close to the buildings. Weeds and sprouting trees grew out of cracks in the pavement. Vehicles clustered around intersections, like enormous burnt insect husks.
Mercifully, there were no human corpses… although there were hundreds of scorch marks of roughly human shape and size.
The street’s once bright commercial signage was now faded and tarnished. Store fronts still displayed the remnants of unimaginable wealth: rotting dresses and purses, rusting electronics, jewelry and more.
Only grocery stores had been thoroughly looted.
London’s pre-invasion prosperity was as alien as Daleks to Sergei. Post-war Russia had shaped his formative years, and much of his home city of Leningrad had been flattened by Hitlerite artillery. More than a million people had starved. His brother and older sister starved, and his father and uncle perished at the front.
Sergei shuddered, childhood memories flooding back unbidden. Flashes of gaunt figures huddled in frigid subway station, dust falling with every shuddering shell hit; mobs butchering horses in the street. The blood curdling shriek of German dive bombers. His father messing his hair before departing for the front, for the last time.
A flutter of wings and a burst of motion ahead shook him out of reverie: The Doctor had startled a cluster of pigeons.
Sergei chided himself: stay in the moment!
“Come on, Sergei! Keep up!” The Doctor urged, waving him forward before peering around the corner.
Sergei trotted up beside him and leaned past the Doctor to get a view. It was Trafalgar square! He’d seen pictures. The monument to Nelson still stood in the square centre, beside a fountain, now bone dry and stained black. A string of military vehicles wound its way along the road to the South: blackened hulks, their upside down turrets scattered about randomly.
What really caught his eye was the gleaming metal obelisk, lined with domes along its length, that stood before the National Gallery, crowned by a glowing white dodecahedron that thrummed with power. He could feel a low level vibration emanating from it in his bones.
“Tovarish,” he hissed, “What is that?”
The Doctor shrugged. “Not quite sure. Could be a BLEN. Lined with sensor domes. We’d best go around. Back that way.”
“It was not here last time?”
“No,” replied the Doctor. “That’s what worries me.”
“Tovarish, what’s a BLEN?”
“A Blinovitch Limitation Effect Negator. It’ll register any time eddies in the area… like our arrival. Among other things…”
Sergie’s brow furrowed as stepped over a fallen telephone pole. “What we felt earlier? The stuttering?”
“Yes,” nodded the Doctor. “It’d register across realities. Provide an event anchor, of sorts. Come on, let’s cut through this alley.” They clambered over a makeshift barricade of barrels, bikes and planks, passing into the comforting darkness beyond.
Shadows offered the illusion of safety.
One never felt so exposed as on the Russian steppes. Sergei remembered being the tallest thing in view, surrounded by an endless sea of wheat, with nowhere to hide.
Sergei gasped for breath. It was challenging to keep up with this nimble, genius time domovoy. Sergei had been in space for a week, and the sudden shift back to a terrestrial environment was taxing his leg muscles and stamina. “So… the Daleks know you are here.”
“Worse. You alright?”
Sergei nodded and slumped down on a crate. “Let me catch breath. How much farther?”
“Oh, another 45 minutes, I imagine. Little longer, if we stay off the main roads. Sooner we get to Wood Lane the better. We’ll need allies. Hopefully the resistance can provide clues. Ready?”
Sergei grunted, slapped his thighs and stood up. “Poyekhali!”
An hour later they finally reached Wood Lane and entered the dilapidated ruins of a tube station. Old newspapers, leaves, and twigs littered the concrete floor inside.
“How we reach these rebels?” asked Sergei, taking the opportunity to sit down again, this time on a worn wooden bench.
“I’m trying to remember,” replied the Doctor, examining the room carefully. “Never been myself. Susan said the entrance was revealed by pressing… ah!” The Doctor stopped before a sign.
Sergei noted that he could understand it, despite his poor grasp of written english. It advocated boiling rainwater. Curious! Before Sergei could ask, the Doctor pressed the letter ‘o’. A low grinding sound followed, whereupon a section of wall slid back, revealing a flight of stairs descending into inky black. The Doctor smiled, produced a flashlight from his seemingly bottomless coat pocket, and aimed it into the depths. He turned to Sergei and nodded towards the stairs. “Shall we?”
“No time like present,” replied Sergei.
They descended two full flights into the earth. At the bottom of the stairs was a platform. If it had once been an active station, it’d been mothballed long ago, and sections bricked up. At the far end was a reinforced metal door. The Doctor ran a hand over the smooth surface, then tapped it lightly with the flashlight. Shave and a haircut, twice.
They heard bolts being snapped back, and the door swung inward. The smell of grease, welding fumes and pungent charcoal flooded over them.
A disheveled fellow in a tattered suit stood beside the steel door. He motioned them forward with an automatic weapon he clutched tightly in gnarled fingers. His face was grim and unwashed.
The room beyond was lit by work lights strung from the ceiling. They hung low over workbenches littered with weapons, explosives, tools and a radio. Two dozen workers, clad in drab clothing, looked up at them expectantly. Sergei noted that one, an older fellow with unruly hair and feverish eyes, was in a wheelchair.
For a moment, no one moved.
“ATTENTION! ATTENTION SURVIVORS OF LONDON!” blared the radio. “THE DALEKS ARE THE MASTERS OF EARTH! SURRENDER NOW AND YOU WILL LIVE—”
The stocky man in the wheelchair switched it off, rolled back, and expertly manoeuvred towards them. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he snapped, waving a hand at the door. “Get inside!”
The Doctor stepped theatrically into the bunker. Sergei followed.
“Well, hello!” said the Doctor cheerily. “You must be Dortmun, yes? I’ve heard so much about you. How’s that bomb coming along? Won’t work, you know. Complete dud, but I can fix that. Is David about?”
Dortmun’s craggy face cycled through surprise, indignance, and bewilderment. Finally he managed to splutter, “Who are you?”
“Yes, exactly,” beamed the Doctor, more than a little smugly. “But you can just call me The Doctor. We have a lot to talk about. Swimming in the Thames, latest cricket scores, end of the world, what have the Daleks been about, all that.”
The seated man ignored The Doctor. “You,” said Dortmun, pointing at Sergei’s arm. “That’s Cyrillic on your flight suit. Are you Russian? How did you get here? Do you still have active air bases? Where?”
Sergei shrugged. “It long story.” He grinned broadly. “You have vodka? I tell you tale, you tell me tale.”
“We do,” grunted Dortmun. He hunched forward in his chair and fiddled his fingers. “But there won’t be time for it.” He nodded at the guard by the door.
The man grunted and flung the steel door shut with a reverberating clang. He then stepped before it, revealing the gleaming metal hull of a Dalek in an alcove that had been concealed behind.
The alien floated forward silently; as it did so, it emitted a sharp, acrid ozone smell that stung Sergei’s nostrils.
A half-dozen more Daleks flooded into the bunker from adjoining tunnels, accompanied by a swarm of gaunt humans. Sergei’s eyes widened: the poor souls were clad in rags, in stark contrast to gleaming metal helmets atop to their heads. The devices were elaborate affairs; each had a transmitter on the side. The men carried stubby automatic weapons and walked stiffly, like zombies. Their eyes were blank. Soulless.
Robot men!
It got even more eerie: the seated humans had frozen in place, unblinking, as if they’d been turned off.
“DOC-TOR! DOC-TOR!,” grated the Daleks in triumph, energy compensators flashing in unison.
Something about them struck Sergei as odd. These daleks looked… less sophisticated, somehow simpler, than the one Sergei had met in orbit. Most were gleaming silver with light blue domes running along their faceted skirts. Their base was larger, thicker.
One with a bright red and gold casing glided to a halt in front of the Doctor. “WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU!” It’s metallic voice seethed with hatred. “NOW WE CAN BEGIN!”
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