Touch The Sky: Doctor Who/Studio C [Book 3]

Turn Left and Save Them All

Turn Left and Save Them All

(Turn Left: Part 4)

They weren't the only ones who had pulled on slippers, boots, sweatshirts, and bathrobes to stand at the front of the hotel and stare at the mushroom cloud rising on the horizon.

A cloud that had once been London.

"I was supposed to be out there selling papers," Wilf whispered. "I should have been there, we all should. We'd be dead."

"That's everyone," Sylvia murmured. "Every single person we know. The whole city."

"Can't be," Donna said thickly.

"But it is, it's gone! London's gone!"

Wilf glanced over at Matt. "If you hadn't won that... if you hadn't taken us..."

Matt didn't answer, thinking only of a woman whose name he didn't know. The woman who'd told him to do this in the first place.

He glanced back at the maid from earlier and found her looking not toward London but at him, hatred in her eyes.

~~~

Time passed.

After the disaster, it was nearly impossible to get word out of the country. Any of Matt's friends from London were dead, and any friends from America had to assume he was too. Donna's family was all he had left.

Even she couldn't begin to pull him out of the increasingly dark place his mind was becoming. Nor could Wilf, though the old man put up an incredible fight if anything in this strange new world tried to separate the four of them. Sylvia, for the most part, drew in on herself, wanting nothing to do with anyone.

Wilf's task was made marginally easier by how alphabetically close Noble, Meese, and Mott were. The pleas of an old man begging to stay with the man who had inadvertently saved his life did not often fall on deaf ears, and when push came to shove no one really wanted to split them up. Matt found himself trailing after them and wondering if he would be better off on his own.

"Leeds?" Donna said incredulously, glaring daggers at the woman sitting across the tiny, makeshift office from them. "I'm not moving to Leeds!"

"I'm afraid it's Leeds, or you can wait in the hostel for another month," the woman said tiredly, as if she'd heard this many times before.

"All I want is a washing machine," Sylvia said tiredly.

"What about Glasglow?" Donna tried. "I heard there was jobs going in Glasglow."

"You can't pick and choose!" the housing officer said. "We've got the whole of Southern England flooded with radiation. Seven million people in need of relocation, and now France has closed its borders. So it's Leeds, or nothing. Next!"

With a sense of finality, she stamped Leeds on their papers.

~~~

How did this happen?

The world wasn't supposed to be like this. He wasn't supposed to be seeing the planet through the filter of a grimy army bus window. Titanic replicas weren't supposed to fall on London and turn the entire Earth upside down.

A street of townhouses that looked like it might once have been a quaint, friendly neighborhood awaited them in Leeds. Now, though, it was filled with trash bags and soldiers, one of whom held a megaphone and called out housing assignments to the new arrivals.