Shard was screaming; she screamed as she fell, she screamed as the world around her erupted in rock and fire, screamed as everything went white and the planet ate her with gnashing teeth of white fire.
She was still screaming when someone gently tapped her on her shoulder.
The man was short, in a lovely white cream, yet battered, suit standing before a large twinkling white and gray control console that held what appeared to be the finest of blown glass, hovering and sighing in the center. She was standing beside him.
The man smiled, his furry eyebrows wriggling all the while, caterpillars wired on crack.
Shard stopped screaming.
"Excellent." The little man turned back to the console and started flicking switches and nudging levers. "I'm the Doctor, by the way."
"Okay." Shard managed, with some difficulty, to find the word; it seemed oddly huge and difficult to pronounce, alien; her throat was dry, her mind blown.
There was a long silence as switches were flicked, humming was hummed and strange electronic noises went about their bubbling and clicking business.
Shard watched in silence, wondering, somewhat remotely, if she'd peed on herself while plummeting to her death. Her body was so soaked with sweat it was hard to tell. It seemed rude to ask, somehow. She just hoped she didn't smell.
There was a polite bonging sound and the oscillating cylinder of blown glass crested gently to rest within the console.
"Ah, there we are." The man fluttered some fingers at her as he plucked his hat off a coat rack. He flicked a larger lever and headed through a pair of large doors.
Shard found herself alone in the humming white chamber, her knees quivering, her body cold and shivering, staring around, hugging herself, before deciding, at long last, to follow the strange little man through the doors.
Shard stepped out from inside a wooden box- she didn't bother to think about that bit, it seemed strangely normal after the past few hours- onto a concrete floor where the strange little man was speaking to a peculiar couple: a beautiful, confident woman with long black hair and mocha skin and a young latino man, his face lined, his muscles taut yet strained, the laugh lines hard and tight. Shard knew that look from the back streets of Chicago: too many drugs.
The woman was speaking, staring oddly at the Doctor. "I'm Dr. Shaw, Sahara Rain Shaw."
"Sahara Rain…" The Doctor pondered slowly, rolling the r's theatrically. "Doesn't that make you an oxymoron?"
Sahara raised a tired eyebrow. "Coming from an alien with a Scottish accent," she bounced back, eyeing his rumpled figure up and down. "What does that make you?"
The Doctor smiled. "Just highly unlikely." He wondered over to the far wall and activated a viewing screen. "How is your mother?"
Sahara followed him, watching as he dialed up a satellite image. "She's fine; in demand, apparently, she said she was prepping for an archaological expedition to the moon. I was assuming she was being flippant but I'm not so sure just now." She stood next to the little man, staring almost a foot and a half down to stare at the dandruff dusted shoulders. "I've waited my whole life to meet you..." her words sounded almost solem, tinged with disbelief.
The Doctor grinned up at her. "I know: you expected someone taller. How do you think I feel?" He turned back to the monitor as the RGB false color image rezzed into focus. "I expect I will be next time… we'll do lunch. Sorry about your father."
Shard saw the tall woman flinch, as if she'd been struck and pulled away from the little man. Shard pressed closer to see the screen: it was a huge cloud, covering nearly a quarter of the U.S., the edges of the cloud were torn and twisting as the winds seemed to lick it into little wisps, dwarfed by the gray black mass. She gaped.
"Impressive, isn't it?" The Doctor said, noticing her expression. "It's quite a show this time. Beautiful, in its own way."
"What is it?" the man asked, speaking for the first time.
The Doctor gestured expansively. "Mighty Yellowstone, hear her roar… or something. I'm not very poetic, I'm afraid. Given up on quotations lately…" his voice trailed off before gathering impetus once more. "That is the eruption of a massive caldera complex, all perfectly natural, if totallydevastating." He stared at the image again, seeming lost in his own thoughts before turning back round to face Sahara. "Now then, why did you activate the beacon?"
Sahara pulled out a memory stick and slotted it into the GSB port beside the viewer. "These are specs of a life form we recovered from a private genetics laboratory," Sahara began as specs and proposal documents flashed across the screen.
The Doctor read each image in an instant. "That's it? You called me back for that? The recall system is only for emergencies, I'd have thought Liz would have mentioned that to you. I'm not a policeman. Talk to your government agencies…"
Sahara stood her ground. "This is an emergency, Doctor. This infection has killed-"
"It isn't alien," the Doctor cut her off. "It's a terran based life form. It's been around for millions of years and will be around for another million years. Just because you haven't seen something before doesn't make it alien."
Sahara stared at him.
With a sigh, the Doctor turned back to the viewer and pulled up an electron microscope image, the gray and white peaks of the round husk seemed like that of a comet or alien mountainscape. "They lie dormant within the Earth and when an eruption of significant magnitude, heat and pressure occurs, they are released up into the upper stratosphere and spread round the world before returning to settle in the seas and in the soil once more. They infest lifeforms, reproduce and lie dormant once more until the next eruption. All perfectly natural. I can help it if some company has piggy backed a neurotoxin to it. You don't need me."
Shard asked quietly. "Infest?"
The Doctor flicked through some more documents, pausing on a satellite image. "Yes, they infest native hosts, using the nutrients and proteins of the host bodybefore releasing the spores spread via methane gas, usually. Generally they accompany volcanic eruptions during mass extinction events. Plenty of bodies, but they can breed in the living too." He sounded causal, dismissive.
Shard felt emptiness crawl slowly into her stomach, leaden, acidic- eating her from within.
"How many will die?" Sahara pressed.
"Thousands… Millions… Billions." The Doctor said calmly. "People, whales, penguins, salmon… most of the species will survive, but more than a third of your populations will die."
Sahara looked outraged, a look of child-like anger appeared strange on someone so confident, so mature. "That's it? You're just going to let it happen? Let everyone die?"
"What do you expect me to do?" The Doctor seemed angry, his patience obviously wearing thin. Shard was distracted though, staring at the image of another cloud, a smaller mashed potato smear of a cloud, this one in what looked like a wheat field.
"How about saving them?" Sahara asked, trying to both challenge and appease the little man with her soothing voice. "Isn't that what you do?"
"This isn't some sort of alien invasion or incursion; this is a natural part of earth's life cycle. I can no more stop this than I can control the nutrients in the ocean currents or pollen in the air!" He obviously realized that his voice was raised and melodramatic. "How you humans deal with your environment is not my concern." He stomped off to the blue box.
There were other images of varying resolutions and different times, before and after, all from Imogene's satellite imagery, of the missile, of the cloud after the impact, and before the impact Shard could discern what looked like human bodies, draped over each other in a heap, some pale and naked, some in hospital blue, in a clarity Shard would have thought was impossible.
"So that's it?" Sahara called after him. "Do nothing. You're just going to let everyone, everything die?"
Shard waited, waited for the little man to answer, to say something, to say anything, for in her mind, in her memory she was back in the field with Bryce, standing at the edge of the crater in the wheat field, staring at the blackened stumps of limps and signed flesh that hugged the crater edge, like a scab on a fresh wound. Before the men had come after them... they were coming after them, Shard realized, because they'd been exposed, they'd become infected, infested, she was infested, she was infested and she was going to die and the only person who could save her was standing before her... he hadn't answered Sahara's question but the somber expression on his face was terrible to behold.
Shard knew in that moment that he was going to let everyone die.
Including her.