Author's Note: In which I severely date my story so that anyone reading it a few years from now will know exactly when I wrote it. Well, I couldn't help it….the plot demands what the plot demands….

Chapter 8

"Up here." Laila's voice sounded strangled in the little room. "My room—it's up here." She stepped towards the ladder and hesitated, the horror of what she had seen settling like a swirling darkness in her stomach, everything in her wanting to run.

There were bodies up there.

She turned back to the Doctor. "I don't know if they're alive or—not alive." Somehow she couldn't bring herself to say the word. "And I don't know—I don't know how to—how to check." She forced herself to take another step forward, but the Doctor was ahead of her, bounding up the ladder and throwing the door open before she could take a breath.

She forced herself to follow him, each step heavy. Why had she gone and brought this stranger back here? Why—

Why.

This entire day was just—why.

She stepped off the ladder and hovered in the doorway for a long moment, her hand gripping the rough wooden doorframe. The bodies—six of them—were laid out on a row of small cots, still as death, and pale as death too. And yet—she shuddered at the practicality of the thought. But if they were dead, they had to have died recently. They were whole, and, well—perfectly intact. Pale, certainly, and there was something strange about their complexion. Something unsettling. But they were—well—

She turned away, her hand over her mouth, leaning heavily on the doorframe. And to think she had dreamed of being a nurse when she was a little girl.

She heard a strange wobble sound and turned to see the Doctor standing over the first of the bodies, holding the strange device he had used earlier, the blue light from its tip casting the woman's face in an even stranger light.

This had to be a dream. It had to be. Some strange fever dream. Perhaps she was still lying unconscious on the pavement of Falling Star Lane.

And yet—it didn't feel like a dream. Dreams were different. Dreams were strange and floating and when she was in a dream, she always knew to some extent that she was dreaming. And when she woke up, she had never once questioned whether or not she was dreaming. One simply knew that they were awake.

And she was awake.

But—she couldn't be.

The Doctor turned, his face glowing strangely in the light of the device and the half-light of the attic. "Alive," he said, and his voice was low. "But not alive."

She just stared at him for a moment. "What?"

"Their bodies are technically alive—all the vital functions are there. But there's no mind—no consciousness. It's as if someone has stripped out everything that makes them, them, and left them—just a body. Just a shell." He turned back to the row of cots. "An empty shell."

Slowly, Laila took a step forward. Somehow, knowing they weren't dead made it easier—easier to approach them, easier to look at them. She stepped to the nearest bedside and looked down at a woman, her eyes closed, her face pale, and her thick brown hair falling in wisps and curls on the pillow.

She reached forward, brushing a strand of hair back.

Her skin was cold. Too cold.

She shuddered and stepped back.

This was her room, this place that was now filled with bodies. The place where she had cried into her pillow the night Rob left. The place where she had written down stories as the sunlight filtered through the dusty windows and dreamed and scratched her name beside Rob's and written Laila Blake in a hidden corner of the house-beams. Laila Blake…..she searched the wooden rafters absently. There…

She blinked. A calendar hung on the familiar wooden beam, hung over the place where she had scratched her name. For a moment she just stared at it, unable to process what she was seeing. Maybe it wasn't a calendar. Maybe it was some sort of record. Some sort of—

It was a calendar.

"Doctor." She choked out the word. "Doctor—look. It says—2018. March. 2018."