The Time of Change

"Him?"

Up on the church porch, a lady with long blond hair and bright brown eyes helps the elderly Tony with a few of the machinery items. A boy around thirteen years old stands beside her, looking on with curiosity. "Where's Mo?" inquires the woman, alluding to the man Tony mentioned before. The young boy raises his eyebrows as if to punctuate the question. "Is he with you?"

Tony kicks the church door irritably, a rivet clanging to the wooden slats under his feet. "This flaming door. Always sticking. I thought you were having it fixed," he accuses his daughter. She exclaims, now afraid, "Dad!" He meets her eye with sorrow in his own.

"Something's happened to him, hasn't it?" the woman's son says lowly. Tony says nothing as he leads his family into the church. Nasreen follows a moment later, a worried Hunter on her heels.

The Doctor is the last to join the crowd after taking some time to watch the shield above. When he enters, walking past stacked boxes of who-knows-what cluttering the now-unused church, he hears a woman speaking with disbelief in her voice. "So we can't get out, we can't contact anyone, and something—the something that took my husband—is coming up through the Earth."

"Yes," says the Doctor, appearing quite unexpectedly from behind a great tower of cardboard boxes. The woman who spoke whips around to face him. "If we move quickly enough," he tells her, "we can be ready."

"No, stop. This has gone far enough," she declares, holding up a hand. "What is this?"

Tony puts his hand on her shoulder from behind. "He's telling the truth, love."

"Come on. It's not the first time we've had no mobile phone signals. Reception's always rubbish."

"Look, Ambrose," Nasreen says, standing from where she had been sitting on the edge of the altar. "We saw the Doctor's friend get taken, okay? You saw the lightning in the sky. I have seen the impossible today, and the only one who has made any sense of it for me is the Doctor."

Ambrose points. "Him?"

"Me," says the Doctor.

A beat passes in which everyone looks at one another, apprehensive. "Can you get my dad back?" the little boy in the corner asks shyly.

The Doctor gives him a soft, encouraging smile. "I promise," he says, "but I need you to trust me and do exactly what I say from this second onward because we're running out of time."

"So tell us what to do," Ambrose concedes.

"Thank you," replies the Doctor. He meets the eye of every person in the room in turn, from Nasreen on the far left to Hunter leaning against the wall on the farthest right. "We have eight minutes to set up a line of defense. Bring me every phone, every camera, every piece of recording or transmitting equipment you've got."

They do so, pulling the items out of pockets and bags. The Doctor collects them calmly and uses the sonic screwdriver to amplify the microphone and recording lens on each. After he completes this, he hands back the objects and calls for everyone to follow him outside. They scramble around the graveyard just outside the church as he gives out instructions. "Every burglar alarm, every movement sensor, every security light. I want the whole place covered with sensors." While they set up the equipment, Tony remains inside the church, watching as the dots on the radar screen continue to move upward toward the surface.