The morning the world ended Jackie Tyler had a hangover.
The previous evening had been pub quiz night, Jackie and the girls had enjoyed a few Bacardi's and now Jackie was suffering for it, her throat was dry and her head was thumping. And some bloody idiots were digging up the road right outside the flat.
Jackie rolled out of bed and shuffled over to the window intending to give the workmen piece of her mind. Half past bloody six on a Sunday morning, what sort of time was that to go digging up the estate?
She opened the bedroom window and looked out, there were no diggers on the road. What Jackie had taken to be the rumbling of road works right outside was actually a much louder booming that had been muffled by the double glazing. Looking down she could see people running frantically through the streets, arms loaded with stuff.
"Oi! What's going on?" she called down. No one answered, her demands joined the din of people crying out for their relatives and friends.
Jackie grabbed a pair of jeans and a tracksuit top, jammed her feet into a pair of trainers and pelted out of the flat and down the stairs over the strong objections of her throbbing head.
Outside the chaos seemed worse, everybody was running in different directions, most people still in their pyjamas, a few like Jackie wearing hastily pulled on clothes. People were crying out, some were carrying television sets and piles of clothes out of flats.
"What's happening?" Jackie demanded.
"Oh, Jackie!" Cath from the laundrette stopped in her tracks, wearing a dressing gown and slippers she caught Jackie by the arms. "I'm so sorry about Rose."
"Rose? What about Rose?" Jackie demanded, shaking Cath.
"One of the nukes fell on France, didn't it."
Jackie's mind raced, confused. Okay it was sad if you happened to be French but what the hell had it got to do with Rose?
She had just remembered that the last stop in Rose's fictional travels had been France when there was another boom, louder this time and followed by the crash of shattering glass.
"Oh, God. They're getting closer." Cath pulled away from Jackie and ran helter skelter across the square, dressing gown flying behind her.
"What is? What's happening? Cath!" but the other woman had gone. Jackie looked around her, pushed this way and that by the running crowd.
"Jackie!" She turned, Mickey was running towards her. His overalls were buttoned up wrong and he was stumbling over the untied laces of his boots, he'd obviously dressed even quicker than Jackie.
"Mickey! Are you alright!?"
"Yeah, fine. I got out of my flat quickly." He grabbed Jackie's hand and pulled her away from the flats, down towards the high street.
"Hang on, I can't go running off I've left the flat unlocked and all my stuff's in there!"
"We can't," Mickey tugged insistently, "they're bombing the city centre mainly but their aim is crap. They're going to open the underground stations as shelters, now come on."
Jackie was getting ready to dig her heels in and argue when another boom caused the glass in the windows of Jackie's own block of flats to shatter and fall. There weren't many people standing underneath, most people had been fleeing the buildings. Most who were below the windows managed to dodge the falling glass shards. One or two didn't, Jackie winced and then turned and bolted for the underground station, pulling Mickey along behind her.
Still running she fumbled in her the pockets of her jeans, coming up empty and remembering that she'd left her mobile back in the flat. Along with everything else she owned.
"Mickey, have you got your phone?"
"Think it's a bit late for 999," Mickey puffed, still running.
"We need to call Rose."
Mickey produced a mobile from a pocket, he pressed call without dialling the number. Jackie briefly wondered if it was weird that Mickey still had Rose on speed dial. Mickey held the phone to his ear and mouthed the word 'answer-phone' to Jackie.
"Rose, its Mickey..." Mickey trailed off. Jackie snatched the phone from him.
"Rose, it's your mother. The world's ending or something, you need to get back here and bring that big eared northern bastard with you."
With that Jackie ended the call.
---
Mad as it sounded Jackie had gotten used to when the government said there'd been a terrorist attack they really meant 'it was aliens, but we don't want to tell you.' the idea that it really was terrorists was foreign to her. Apparently the papers had been going on about a clash of civilisations for months now, Jackie felt a bit guilty for only reading the bits about big brother and the soaps.
Mickey walked over and sat down next to Jackie with his back against the stone wall. He handed her a tin with a fork in it.
"Oh, not beans again."
"You know we can only eat stuff out of tins till we find out if it's safe."
"Yeah, but you couldn't manage tinned peaches, even peas would be better than this."
"Your wish is my command," Mickey replied sarcastically.
Jackie sighed, gave up, and took a fork full of beans. "Did you make sure Jane got some?"
Jane was a heavily pregnant girl sheltering in the same underground station. Her boyfriend had gone up to the streets the week before last saying he was going to find out what was going on. Jane was convinced he was going to come back. Jackie had stopped everyone from correcting her, no sense upsetting the poor lamb in her condition.
"Tommy's sharing some of his with her."
Jackie gave up on the beans. End of days or not, there's only so many cold beans a person can be expected to eat. Mickey pulled out his mobile and looked disappointedly at the screen.
"No messages?" Jackie asked, it was a rhetorical question.
"Wouldn't know even if there was, no signal. You don't think Rose-"
"No!" Jackie didn't let him finish. Rose was alright, she had to be. Living in a crowded tube station, eating baked beans, no one to talk to but Mickey; the only thing that kept Jackie going was the knowledge that Rose was alive out there somewhere.
---
"You know all this is my fault," Mickey said one day as Jackie was flicking through the stations of the small radio they'd found in one of the kiosks. Two hundred stations and nothing but static, that was digital for you.
"Did you break the radio, or something?"
"All this, us living like this, it's my fault. That missile I sent into Downing Street, that was the start of it, everyone says."
Jackie gently took Mickey's hand. "You saved me, that night with the Slitheen, and now too."
"Yeah, rescued you to a life of baked beans and possible radiation sickness. Dead heroic, that."
"That missile was the Doctor's idea. Supposed to be a time traveller, didn't see this coming, did he? Bloody idiot."
"Still be good to see him."
Jackie grunted a sort of agreement, she thought if she ever saw him again she'd smack him right across his big gob.
---
Jackie was trying to sleep on the pile of clothes and old newspapers that passed for luxury these days. She heard what sounded a bit like an asthmatic hippo trying to pass wind, she'd been dreaming about that sound for weeks.
Something prodded her in the ribs. "Mum, wake up, mum..."
God, these dreams were getting a bit repetitive.
The prodding got more insistent. "Go away, Mickey," Jackie mumbled.
"Mum, seriously, get up..."
Jackie blinked, squinted, and then jumped to her feet engulfing her daughter in a hug. "Oh, Rose, thank God you're safe, thank God. You have to get away, just go, you don't know what's happening here..."
"Rose, have you found...Oh, there she is," that was when Jackie finally became convinced she wasn't dreaming. She might dream about Rose, but there was no chance of her subconscious conjuring up that alien git.
The Doctor was clambering up off the tracks, his box was parked right on them. It would serve him right if a train came along and flattened it. Fat chance, there hadn't been a train since the day the first bomb had fallen.
He was still grumbling at Jackie, "We've been through half the London Undergorund looking for you."
Rose was apologising, "...I didn't get your message right away, and then when I did we arrived a year too late, and then when we got the time right but didn't know where you were going to be and we went to the flat, and then...did you say Mickey was here?"
"Yeah, he's over there somewhere..." Jackie waved vaguely to her right, not wanting to let Rose out of her sight.
"I'll go find him," Rose pulled away.
"I said one, Rose," the Doctor complained in a long suffering tone of voice.
"It's just Mickey," Rose shot back, "what harm can it do."
The Doctor shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and smiled awkwardly at Jackie. "Hello. Sorry we took so long, but we've been a bit busy, end of the world and all that."
Jackie looked sceptically at the blue police box sitting innocently on the tracks, "How are you planning on getting everybody in there, then?"
"I'm not," the Doctor said, looking at point just to the left of Jackie's ear.
"But all these people..." The people in the station, the people who wandered up the tracks, any survivors up on the surface. Bloody Hell, even if there weren't any more in London there had to be people in other parts of the world.
"Dead. In a year, all dead. Rose and I were there."
Jackie was stunned. Jane and her baby, Cath from the laundrette, what made Jackie any different from them?
Nothing except Rose.
Rose came back into view, dragging a stunned looking Mickey by the hand.
"Rickey the idiot," the Doctor said, taking Mickey by the shoulders and turning him around, "do you promise that if I take you away from here, saving your life in the process that you'll try not to muck up the timeline?"
"I, uh-"
"Good enough," said the Doctor, giving Mickey a little shove. He tumbled off the platform disappearing inside the blue box.
The Doctor and Rose scrambled down onto the tracks, both held their hands out to help Jackie down. She felt she should refuse, offer to stay here and help, or at the very least die with her planet, but instead she took Rose's hand, jumped down onto the tracks and walked into the blue box.
Bigger on the inside, well Jackie supposed it would have to be, there was no way Rose would get away with the amount of washing she brought home for Jackie to do if it was only as big as it looked.
"If the four of us have to repopulate the planet I want Mickey, there's no way I'm having big eared alien babies."