Needless to say, it was unanimous.
"I warned you," said Mrs. Jewels. She put a check next to Kathy's name on the board.
Kathy pinched her nose. "Not me. I think he smells funny." Kathy thought everyone smelled funny. She leaned as far as she could from Bebe who smelled like toxic fumes from art class.
The Doctor was greeted with cheers. Someone threw a half-peeled banana at him. He caught it and chucked it backwards into the trash basket to join the dead rat. "Ohh, you're learning. Never underestimate a banana. Wot you say that'll be my next lesson, hey? The effect of the banana upon history and why it deserves its own chart on the food pyramid."
"I think we'd all be glad to have you back again, Doctor. Wouldn't we, class?"
Amiably, the Doctor shook Mrs. Jewel's hand. "A pleasure, a genuine pleasure."
"YEEEK!" yelped Paul when his hand came away covered in butterscotch.
Leslie's pigtails hung limply, soaked in pudding. Her desk collected pudding drops as she tried to wring them out. "YEEEIIIKK" she yelped when Paul gave the left one a sharp tug.
I'm glad I'm not a student thought the dead rat.
Oh good, I can go home early and take a nap thought Sharie.
We should've left it in Mrs. Zarves' class thought Allison. Oh no, I can't think about her! She hummed very loudly, to distract herself from thinking about Mrs. Zarves.
Why can't the Dalek go home on the kindergarten bus thought Terrence.
If she knew it was a Dalek, I bet she wouldn't punish us thought Mac.
"I can't imagine what got into you all today. Mr. Kitswater told me what happened on the stairs." Mrs. Jewels was waiting for them by the blackboard, looking at the collection of names that were circled and check-marked. "There won't be room for you all on the kindergarten bus."
All the students had pudding clotting their hair and pizza sauce splotching their clothes like pepperonis.
The rest of the class had already finished spelling and Mrs. Jewels looked sternly at the four delinquents snuck back into their seats.
"No nineteenth story," repeated the Doctor sagely, tucking his sonic screwdriver back inside his pocket. "I wonder where that Dalek went off to then."
Allison held her hands over her ears. She was afraid she'd be sucked back into Mrs. Zarves' class if she kept hearing about it. She'd be back copying the dictionary for all eternity.
"That's Mrs. Zarves' class," said Terrence, kicking at the blank wall. "Get a clue, Magoo. No nineteenth story, no Mrs. Zarves."
"But…that…" the Doctor scratched his head and looked back towards a door that wasn't there. "But we were on something, weren't we? We weren't on the eighteenth floor and the twentieth floor is right up there. What is it? Some inter-dimensional plane that's invisible to everyone else? What are they hiding in there?"
"There's no nineteenth story," explained Todd, like he'd said it a hundred times. "The builder forgot to build it."
Allison slammed the door after the Doctor. "It won't escape from there," she said confidently, remembering how hard it'd been to escape.
They all raced off the nineteenth floor, stumbling onto the staircase as the Dalek continued its mantra of extermination.
"Run, all of you, RUN."
"EXTEEEERMINATE"
Sharie tore her coat off and threw it at the Doctor who threw it over the Dalek.
"Sharie, the coat…now!" yelled the Doctor, giving the Dalek a burst in the eyestalk with his sonic, causing it to scream in frustration. "It's the only thing that will slow it down!"
"Thanks a lot," said the dead rat in disgust, picking itself up off the floor and walking away.
Sharie threw the dead rat before bundling herself back in her overcoat to protect against the Dalek's disintegration ray.
"Exterminate, exterminate."
"Take a hike, mike" Terrence karate-kicked the Dalek right in its single eye.
The Dalek rolled towards the scared children who were huddled by the wall and trying to make a break for the door. "You will all be exterminated. All non-Daleks must be exterminated. Exterminate. Exterminate."
The cow's last words were a heroic "MOOO."
"A cow? What on earth is a cow doing on the nineteenth floor?!" the Doctor stared at it in absolute bafflement after he'd gotten out of its way.
The Dalek looked at the cow and the cow looked at the Dalek.
"MY SOCK." Mac snatched his sock from the cow and gave it the dictionary Allison had thrown instead. "Man, I've been looking for this sock for ages!"
"MOOOO" a cow strolled over, munching on a white sock with a blue stripe.
"EXTERMINATE. EXTERMIN…"
"Get it away, get it away! She'll make me start over!" Allison hurled the dictionary to the other side of the room. "Why did I have to get stuck here again?!"
Mac shrugged, flipping to the cover. "Hey, Allison, when'd you get your own dictionary? That is you, isn't it?" he handed the book to her, watching her eyes swell to saucers when they saw "student of Mrs. Zarves" written beneath it.
"Your pleas of mercy are useless," said the Dalek. "I am more powerful than the dictionary."
"Any other word would be in the dic-tion-ary but not that one. Wish it'd help me find…"
"Well that's no surprise."
"Never heard of that one." Mac snatched a dictionary off the closest table. "Lookin' up a word in the dic-tion-ary. Gonna find that word in the dic-tion-ary. Socks and smocks and all-i-ga-tors. Fox and lox before fridg-er-a-tor" Mac hummed to himself, flipping through the book. "Nope, sorry, Doctor, "dalek" isn't in here."
"A Dalek. It's a race bent on destroying the rest of the universe. I thought I destroyed them all."
Terence looked around for something to kick at it.
The Dalek drew closer, mechanical whining as it raised its egg-beater hand.
"Looks like it belongs in the kitchen with Mrs. Mush," muttered Terence.
"So is it the detestable cook or the janitor from the black lagoon?" Mac looked from the egg-beater arm extension to the plunger.
Mrs. Zarves and the rest of her class were oddly elusive. Allison hoped the weird alien had done something with them.
"You're the only one here?" the Doctor glanced behind her, concerned. "I thought everyone would be back in class by now."
"OH THANK THE GODS!" Allison upended the table she'd been hiding under and ran to join her classmates. "It was even worse the second time around! I was only an eighth through the A's!"
"Allison?"
The boys backed away from the alien, looking up in surprise when they saw a student huddled under the table.
If Daleks could laugh, this one would have. "And so, Doctor… are you."
"If I have to face one more Dalek after you, it will be too soon." The Doctor brandished his screwdriver. "I've destroyed all the Daleks in the cosmos three times over! You're an impossibility!"
"Now the Time War will end once I have ex-terminated you, Time Lord!"
Unfortunately the door to the nineteenth-story classroom was no match for a determined Dalek.
"Yeah right!" called Mac. "Not by the blue-striped socks on my feet! Er- uh, sock." He'd only been able to find one of the socks that morning.
"I am not Miss-es Gort" said the Dalek. "You will open this door so I can ex-terminate you."
"Scarier than that weird thing." Sharie shivered, pulling her coat around her more tightly.
"Mrs. Gort?" the Doctor said, confused.
"I knew it wasn't the ghost of Mrs. Gort!" Terrence punched the air.
Even the dead rat that happened to be in the corner stared at him.
They all stared at the Doctor.
"Yes, yes, it's an alien bent on killing you all and I'm the Doctor here to stop it."
"That weird robot—"
"But—"
The Doctor aimed his sonic screwdriver at the door. "All of you inside now! Now!"
Sharie tugged at the doorknob. "It won't open!"
Sadly it did little more than to offer the Dalek a new color scheme.
"GET LOST, JACK FROST!" Terrance ducked the beam, and ripped the cover off a pudding cup with his teeth like it was a grenade and threw it at the alien.
"EXTERMINATE." The Dalek fired its laser.
Three students were holding down the final stand against the Dalek.
The Doctor followed the food until he came to the floor just above the eighteenth, but below the twentieth.
Chocolate icing, sliced turkey, and what could only be truthfully called "mushroom surprise" (due to the mushrooms being the only recognizable part of it) painted the walls.
They must really be enjoying lunch, thought Louis.
Food was flying down the stairs amid student screaming and the odd mechanical yells of "Exterminate! Exterminate!"
"Get it! Knock it off the stairs!"
"EXTERMINATE. I will EXTERMINATE all you pests."
The Doctor had to duck a large gob of applesauce.
"Mrs. Gort isn't here anymore!" Louis called after him.
The Doctor finished his thirty-second tirade and offered Louis a jaunty salute before dashing over to the thirty-flights of stairs.
"You can call me the Doctor, everyone does and I do believe for the safety of the entire school you might want to evacuate them all in about eight minutes and thirty four seconds, well, give or take those…between you and me there's something dangerous around here and I mean to find out what. But there's no need to worry of course, I do this all the time, well, it's not that I wouldn't enjoy a break here and then but doesn't it just seem like the universe has a mind of its own—when some aliens pop round here to conquer and subject all humanity to their bidding, though in this case, it might be a little under its league seeing as there's a whole school and only one Dalek…" the Doctor glanced down at a gadget in his hand, that Louis only noticed then. "…I wouldn't be too worried if I were you, but all the same..."
Louis sneezed.
"Substitute" said the man as though it had only just occurred to him. "Substitute…oh of course!" He reached back into the blue box and pulled out a duster to slip on. The duster lived up to its name.
"Are you the substitute?"
"An honor to meet you, an honor. There's nothing like meeting an individual so dedicated to upholding the sacred tradition of recess." He pumped Louis' a few more times before pulling away.
From the blue box popped a wild-haired man, spectacles slipping down his nose as he came over to shake Louis' hand up and down.
Louis the yard teacher frowned, wondering where such a cumbersome object could have come from. Craning his neck back, he tried to see whether it was something that might've come from the window of Mrs. Jewels' room.
One day, a blue police public call box appeared in the middle of the schoolyard.