The Forgotten Army (15 page)

Strebbins turned her back on Yaara and walked to the black windows, staring onto the streets below. They were twenty-three storeys up, and she had a perfect view of the streets below.

Yaara appeared at her shoulder, and handed her a pair of binoculars. 'Ten units were deployed to City Hall, ma'am.

But, if you look...'

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All the way along Broadway the roads were silent. Park Row was empty of patrolling troops.

'They're committed to reporting back every thirty minutes.

I'll hear soon. You can go now, Yaara.'

Commander Strebbins was deeply concerned. Either every officer she had sent out was inside, pursuing the unknown aggressor, or they'd been taken somewhere.

She'd thought she could cope without the gear of modern policing, the mobile phones, radios and CCTV images. But now the city was being stalked by an unseen menace, and she was losing her officers.

Yaara was hovering by the door.

'What is it?' Strebbins asked.

'Ma'am, I want you to know that I'm happy to go back on the streets. If that's what you want, that is. And I won't tell the others.'

Strebbins looked at Yaara with increased respect. She was glad she was working with such brave and dedicated people.

She came to a decision. Something was keeping New Yorkers off the streets. But it wasn't her Martial Law or her curfew. It was fear. And Commander Strebbins wasn't going to let this go by unmarked.

'Yaara, call the rest of the cadets back in. We're going out together. I want to see this for myself. I'm going to pull together an armed unit so big and so strong there isn't anyone big enough to take us on.'

*

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Back in midtown New York, the Doctor and Amy were standing in the Grand Hall of the Natural History Museum.

'Why are we here?' Amy asked. 'We need to get the city back to normal.'

As soon as she had told him everything she'd discovered from the police about the unveiling of the mammoth, the Doctor had insisted they return to the Museum.

'I need to know, Amy, I can't not know. We need to find out where the mammoth really came from.'

The Doctor seemed to know his way around the Museum, and Amy followed as they took turn after turn, bowling through doors marked 'Private' and 'Staff Only'.

'I used to come here quite a bit when it first opened,' the Doctor said. 'Some of the stuff they dug up in the Gobi desert! Far too unstable to put on display. My fault. I never clean up after myself.'

Amy rolled her eyes. 'You are impossible!' she complained. 'Is there anywhere you haven't been before?'

They reached a door with a plaque labelled 'S. Horwitz', and the Doctor kicked it open, with a cheery 'Howdy!'

Inside was a small laboratory. A man and a woman looked up in surprise.

'So which of you is S. Horwitz, mammoth-maker to the masses, at least according to Amy's friends in 163

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the NYPD?' the Doctor asked.

The man put his hand up, like a guilty schoolboy. 'I'm Sam Horwitz. And this is—'

Polly Vernon.’ the woman interrupted.

'You could at least look a bit pleased to see me!' the Doctor said, grinning at them.

'Please don't arrest me.’ stammered Sam. 'It wasn't my fault.'

The Doctor shushed him and said reassuringly, 'I wouldn't do a thing like that, but no more hiding down here, Sam. I need you.'

Sam shook his head, evidently confused. I saw you ridin g the mammoth. I thought they'd locked you up... and you were knocked out.'

'We saw you too, Matador Man,' Amy said. 'And you were there with schoolchildren, weren't you?' she said to Polly.

'My class -1 teach at an elementary school.'

'Quite a place you've got here.' The Doctor looked around the room as he talked, picking up bits of Sam's work and scanning papers. 'I do love a test tube. Amy, don't press that switch.'

Amy stopped fiddling with a wall panel, amazed as ever that the Doctor could tell anything that she was doing, even when he had his back to her.

The Doctor grabbed a chair, leapt onto it and put his feet up on the table. 'So, let's talk mammoth...'

Amy cut in to ask, 'What did the scan show?'

'You don't know, do you?' the Doctor said to Sam.

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'That's odd, that's very curious.' His eyes flickered over every detail of the paper he was looking at. 'Because this is a real lab, and you're a real scientist, been to all the great academic institutions, I see -Harvard, Yale, Aberystwyth...'

While he was talking, Polly got her mobile out, trying to make a call.

The Doctor raised a finger to stop her. 'Ah, ah, ah, never mind that, not that it works anyway. But I'm the Doctor, I'm here to stop what was hidden inside that mammoth. So I need to know. If you're a real scientist, Sam, then why couldn't you tell that it wasn't a real mammoth?' As an aside he said to Amy, 'And he seems to be human, no aliens inside his belly.

Or hers for that matter.'

Sam was spluttering with indignation. 'I don't know who you are, or what kind of doctor you are, and I don't know what you're suggesting. I am not part of any kind of hoax.'

The Doctor turned on his heels and made for the door.

'Thank you! That's all I needed to know.'

Sam stood up, confused. 'What do you mean?'

At the door, the Doctor turned to him. 'I scanned you, you're definitely human, all the right things in all the right places. Fear of being a failure, belief in the true nature of the mammoth, and a totally enormous crush on young Polly here.'

Amy grinned. 'You totally have to get together, you look so sweet!'

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Sam blushed and shuffled slightly nervously.

Amy looked at the Doctor impishly. 'Can I?'

The Doctor nodded, and Amy ran up to Sam and knocked gently on his belly. 'No secret hatches here! And nice work on the abs may I say, you've got a keeper here, Polly.'

Amy winked at Polly, who exclaimed: 'You are both quite mad.'

The Doctor swept back into the room. 'Thank you Amy, we'll be off now, have a nice evening. I'd stay in, if I were you.

But Sam, stop me if I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but I couldn't help noticing that secret map of the Dinosaur Oasis...

You didn't find anything else there, did you?'

Sam shook his head.

'And it wasn't buried that far down, really, was it?'

Again, Sam shook his head. 'I knew it looked wrong, but every other detail was perfect. I thought maybe we'd made a mistake in dating the age of the ice sheet.'

'Someone put the mammoth there to be found, Sam, and now I know it wasn't you. We need your help. Next stage of the investigation into the incident is going to be pretty tricky.'

Sam seemed to brighten at this. 'What, like me using m y skills as a palaeontologist to analyse the beast and work out what's happened - like they do in CSIT

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'CSZ: Prehistory.’ said Amy drily. 'The spin-off that's just been waiting to happen since 65 million BC.'

There's something else at work here.’ the Doctor continued, 'and you are going to be absolutely integral to our success.'

Sam nodded, biting his lower lip nervously. 'Of course, anything I can do to help. Polly, you better go straight home, this could get dangerous.'

The Doctor looked disappointed. 'What? It's Polly that we really need. Right now, Polly is the most important part of the whole plan.'

Polly was stunned. 'Why me?'

The Doctor moved in close to her. 'You've got the one thing that's going to help us stop whatever's doing this.

Children!'

The Doctor led them to the roof of the Museum. Sam and Polly both gasped as they saw that New York had been plunged into absolute darkness. The streets below them were deserted.

'I've never seen the city so quiet.’ Polly said.

The Doctor pointed to the skies. I bet you've never seen anything like that, either.'

Without the light from the buildings, the New York sky was filled with hundreds of twinkling lights. The skyscrapers seemed small in comparison to the vast size of the universe above them.

Polly shook her head in disbelief. 'I've grown so 167

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used to seeing the night sky as an orange glow, I'd forgotten how beautiful the stars are.'

'There's the Saucepan.’ Amy pointed out helpfully.

'I think it's called the Plough.’ the Doctor corrected her.

'Looks more like a saucepan to me.’ insisted Amy. 'Or an axe. Do aliens live there as well?'

'They're almost entirely made of water, and so obsessed with the weather. Very dull species. But that's not the point!

There are so many worlds and solar systems, out there, Polly and Sam, things you wouldn't believe. And something very bad and very frightening has come out of that mammoth.'

Polly stared at him. 'You're both mad. Whatever has done this, the army or someone will stop them. I'm cold, it's late, and I'm going inside.'

'Not this time, Polly.’ the Doctor told her gently. 'This time, it's going to be us. The army didn't last five minutes against them. Look down below, do you see anyone on the streets? Anyone at all?'

Down on the streets below, not a single soul was moving.

'They've closed down the city.’ Sam said. 'It's best to wait indoors.'

'Just look at New York.’ the Doctor said. 'Look. It's been driven to despair by a force that no one can see and, instead of fighting it, we're hiding. Last time I was in New York, I met men who'd been

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beaten down and abandoned and ruined, but they were some of the best and the bravest I've met. They had nothing left, but they were prepared to give it all. They were brilliant. Anyone who thinks they can win just because they're bigger and richer is doomed to fail. We only have one thing left. But it's a thing that will drive us on through the darkest of days to defeat the deadliest enemies the galaxy can throw at us. We are right.'

Polly and Sam were both listening attentively.

'People are disappearing from the streets,' the Doctor went on. 'You can see it with your own eyes. You don't have to trust me, but trust yourselves. You know the police should be on the streets, but they've gone too. And that means it's something very scary indeed. And what's worse, it's so hidden, we won't even know what they're planning until it happens.'

'And if we help you?' Polly asked. 'What do you want?'

'The mammoth coming back to life wasn't a miracle. This is an alien invasion, a very clever alien invasion. They're rounding up the biggest and toughest New Yorkers that they can find. So I need a team of people that can become invisible to them. I need your class, Miss Vernon. Everyone gets a chance to be a hero!'

169

Joe Hudson rubbed his
eyes to check he wasn't dreaming. Four people were standing on the fire escape outside his bedroom, high up a New York Brownstone. His teacher, Miss Vernon, the Mammoth-Man from the Museum, a girl with bright red hair, and a man with a cheeky sparkle in his eyes and floppy hair and a funny old jacket.

The man with the hair told him to open the window, and Joe slid the pane up cautiously.

'Joe, I'm the Doctor. How do you fancy saving New York?'

Joe looked at the group appraisingly. 'Are you like Iron Man?' He was 10 years old, and knew a fair bit about superheroes.

'I'm exactly like Iron Man,' the floppy-haired 171

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man called the Doctor agreed. 'Only without the Iron. And I have two hearts. So, actually nothing at all like him, now you mention it, but that's not a problem, I'm better than him.'

'You don't even have a cape,' said Joe scornfully. He looked at the red-haired girl. 'What's your special power?'

The Doctor smiled at him. 'That's Amy. And you really don't want to know.'

Joe looked the Doctor up and down, eyeing him up for telltale signs of a hidden superpower. 'So what have you ever done, then? You're not like the Fantastic Four, are you?'

The Doctor smiled. 'Do you remember when all the clocks went to zero?'

Joe looked interested. 'They said it was a computer fault.'

'No such thing. I was there, Joe. There were aliens on Earth, and they were seconds away from destroying the planet.'

Joe was wide-eyed with astonishment.

'I didn't do it alone,' the Doctor told him. I needed the best people on the planet. That time it was Amy. This time it's you.'

Part of Joe wasn't surprised. With all the things that had happened over the last few years, he'd grown to believe there was something else out there. His dad still talked of the time he froze and started chanting, and nobody felt safe at Christmas now.

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The Doctor put his face very near to Joe's and told him.

'There is far more out there than you could ever imagine. And everything that's happened in New York today is because of aliens. Will you help me?'

'Hell, yes!' said Joe, earning himself a disapproving look from Miss Vernon.

That's my boy!' the Doctor grinned. Then, catching sight of Amy's expression, he decided: 'I'm not saying that again.

Right, Joe, I've travelled through time and space, but right now, the only thing that's going to stop this city falling apart is you. I need someone so brave and so clever they can get around the city without anyone noticing. Do you think you can do that?'