Chapter VIII:
A family of tourists was taking photos in front of the TARDIS when the Doctor emerged. "Oh, don't mind me, carry on." the Doctor said upon startling them. Several others also seemed fascinated with the TARDIS presuming it to be some kind of novelty decoration the airport had put up. None of the people going about their business in the terminal seemed surprised when the TARDIS had first materialized however. Those who had noticed it afterwards had assumed it had been there for some time. A teenage girl and her boyfriend stopped the Doctor and asked him if he would we willing to take a picture of them standing in front of the TARDIS door, a request that he was happy to oblige.
After handing the girl's phone back to her the Doctor then went to work. He flipped out his sonic screwdriver and first did a cursory scan of the surrounding area. It was clean so he then, after waiting the requisite number of minutes watching the tourists and passersby, he proceeded up and down the terminal, checking each of the waiting areas up to the boarding gates. He scanned everyone passing by as well as the surrounding environment with his sonic as he made his wade through an ever widening search area. "Nothing, nothing at all." he whispered to himself. Everything was coming up negative, that first infection was a wily one indeed. Nonetheless the Doctor was certain of the location and the approximate time so all he had to do was wait. According to the TARDIS database he had parked the TARDIS within five meters of where the first known victim of the walker plague would be made manifest. He could have been off on the time frame he supposed so he went back towards the TARDIS and decided to wait for Mr. or Mrs. Walker Zero to show his or herself.
His peculiar behavior had attracted more than just the attention of busy airline passengers however. One security guard, a hefty African American woman in her late 20s or early 30s with short hair kept in a small bun and gaudy faux gold hoop earrings saw him scanning people with his sonic screwdriver and took notice. She approached the Doctor slowly at a waddle because she was indeed quite portly to the point it impeded with locomotion and caught up with him when he stopped beside a bench and a potted plant near the TARDIS. "Excuse me sir, might I have a word with you?" she asked. "Certainly ma'am." the Doctor pleasantly replied. "Let me see your boarding pass." the woman demanded. The Doctor flipped out his psychic paper and handed it to the security officer. "Alright, there you are ma'am." he cordially replied. "It's blank." remarked the officer upon seeing nothing on the paper. That usually didn't happen, the Doctor thought, was she this dull and uncreative that nothing came to mind when she looked at the paper? That kind of stuff happens sometimes with people in overly bureaucratic organizations, everything by the book, often monotonous in thought, word and deed, makes for a dull mind and immunity to psychic paper. This however put the Doctor in a precarious situation. "I need you to wait right here. Don't try to leave now sir." the woman instructed him. The Doctor did as he was told; he had nothing to hide, nothing that the average human could discern apart from rubbish that is.
"Henry, yeah Henry, come over here." the security officer called out and waved to one of her fellow airport security personnel. The man she called left his partner alone at the screening booth he was working at and went over to see what the officer wanted him for. The screener was a tall gangly man, pale skinned with wiry balding light brown hair and probably in his late forties. He wore round glasses and overall gave off the appearance of a turtle dislodged from its shell. He was one of the specialized inspectors that did male cavity searches upon request and was being summoned apparently for that purpose. "What is it Gretchen?" asked the man. "Caught this joker wandering around acting all funny with this magic wand thingy." she replied as she snatched the Doctor's sonic screwdriver out of his hands and flashed it before the male screener that had arrived. "Thought we might want to take him in for a closer look." she suggested. "Sir, if you could come with me." the man instructed the Doctor. "Don't you try anything funny. It is pointless to resist." the woman told him as she took him by the right arm and led him along behind the man.
They took the Doctor to a small empty room and left him there, locking the door behind him on their way out. In the corner of the plain room was a camera with a microphone and in the opposite corner a bench was built into the floor. The Doctor shrugged his shoulders and sat down on the bench looking up into the camera. Hopefully this business wouldn't take long and he could get back to tracking the source of the walker epidemic.
Meanwhile in a remote viewing office the two security officers met with their immediate supervisor while the Doctor was on screen in front of them. "We picked up a suspicious fellow with a funny accent poking around gate 20 so we pulled him in for questioning." the female officer informed her supervisor. The supervisor was a stern looking woman tall and thick, like an amazon of lore. She was a good two shades darker than the female officer and had well pampered voluminous hair. Out of the three of them she was the most professional looking one in the room, with a sharp uniform and carrying herself like a person of authority, making the other two look like cheap rent-a-cops by comparison. "It's an international airport so a lot of people are going to have funny accents Gretchen." the supervisor replied. The supervisor turned to the monitor and rubbed her chin while observing the Doctor looking back at her through the camera. "Hello." the Doctor said in an uncanny coincidence just as she looked through the monitor at him. "No need to be alarmed, just saying hello." the Doctor said as the supervisor recoiled a little. "Cut the speaker." the supervisor told the screener. He flipped a switch which shut off the speakers from the doctor's cell. It made the supervisor feel less unnerved if she couldn't hear him, even though whatever weird coincidences were going on wouldn't be stopped by the act. In actuality the Doctor had managed to convert the camera into a two way communications device using a sonic button in his left breast pocket. While not as complex of a device as a sonic screwdriver it could be used to remotely actuate his sonic screwdriver to make the necessary adjustments to the camera and speakers, thus allowing him to listen in and observe what was happening behind closed doors in the airport security office.
"Ok, so we got this peculiar fellow here. What can you tell me about him?" the supervisor asked the pair of screeners. "When I checked him he got no boarding pass and I for one don't recall seeing him go through security in the first place." Gretchen told her supervisor. "See if you can pull something up on the video about him. Find out when and where he first arrived." the supervisor instructed Henry. After what seemed like hours of sifting through video footage and watching the Doctor sit there smugly in his cell the security guards were ready to give up. "Anything?" asked the supervisor. "Nothing. I don't see him at any of the entrances or exits. First time he appears is here when he's taking a photo with these kids by that goofy box in the corridor." Henry reported. The TARDIS' chameleon circuit did its job and none of the security officers seemed to think it's presence was out of place, despite it being a big blue box displaced in time and space in the middle of a modern airport. He doesn't seem to act like a man hiding something, doesn't look worried in the least." the supervisor commented after observing the Doctor all the while. "Patient fella that's for sure. Either he's just that good, or we've been wasting our time." remarked Gretchen. "Well, might as well give him the cavity search and if he's clean send him on his way." the supervisor got up and said. "You keep digging through that video footage and see if you can pinpoint anything unusual." she instructed Henry who remained behind while she and Gretchen went to go pay a visit to the Doctor.
The Doctor got up as soon as the two of them entered into the room. "You can remain seated sir." the supervisor told him. "Now we've been looking over your activities here today and they seem a little suspicious. If you wouldn't mind telling us what you are doing here today sir?" the supervisor asked. "You see I'm looking to catch a flight to London and I seem to have misplaced my boarding pass so I was searching for it when your associate here stopped me." the Doctor told them in such a way that they had to believe his every word was truthful. "Mmmmhmmm, you don't mind if she does a little cavity search on you?" the supervisor asked. "Search away. Though you might want to watch out, I did have cheese curds and jammie dodgers earlier today and the combination can be quite nasty coming out the other end." the Doctor consented. Gretchen put on her gloves and started to pat the doctor down. Having already removed the Doctor's sonic from his person earlier they found nothing of interest, a crumpled up tissue, a photo of the loch ness monster, the real one before it went extinct, not the cloned version placed back into the loch in AD 5412, some string, an eraser and a couple of ornamental handcrafted chess pieces, a white pawn and black queen to be exact that had somehow gotten into his pocket from a game of chess he had with Napoleon a few months back. As Gretchen instructed the Doctor to lower his trousers a foul smell like that of pure sulfur that could burn the nose hairs off any mere mortal squeaked out. "Daaaaaamn that's rancid!" complained the screener as she got up and backed away. "I warned you. I really should stop mixing things with Jammie Dodgers, really." the Doctor lightheartedly remarked. "Now if you'd rather make a go at the easy way around this I believe you will find my credentials in by left coat pocket." the Doctor told the airport screener. The supervisor looked at Gretchen, reeling in disgust and then took the psychic paper out of the Doctor's pocket as he had suggested and looked at it. "DHS, Office of the Inspector General. This is a test?" she asked. Gretchen took the psychic paper in its familiar binding and looked at it. What kind of trick was he trying to play? This time what had been blank before were now legit credentials from high up in the DHS. Dumbfounded, she handed the paper back to the Doctor. Must've been some fancy spy gadget there, disappearing ink, those national security types always thinking up new and clever ways to test them she assumed. "Bingo, and you passed with flying colors. Fine detective work there, right right." the Doctor applauded them both. "What was with this then?" the supervisor asked him while taking out the Doctor's sonic screwdriver and brandishing it in front of his face. "A harmless toy, it just lights up and makes noise that's all." The Doctor told them. "Hmmm, looks like we were a little too jumpy today." the supervisor commented. The Doctor tightened his trousers and patted the supervisor on the back. "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. Good work." he applauded her. She handed the Doctor back his sonic screwdriver and let him go before heading back to the office to tell Henry, who still had no new news to report, to abandon the search and return to his duty station.
After being released from his duty station the Doctor returned to the area around the TARDIS. This time his scans frightened him, at first they all came back negative but then there was a positive reading for the zombification disease. It was not just one positive, but several, all in the vicinity of the TARDIS. He scanned out over longer distances in the airport and quickly moved up and down the terminal to each of the gates. There he found several people infected with the disease. More chilling was the fact that each of these people were those he had seen earlier during his scans. The young couple, the family posing by the TARDIS, and several others, now all registered as carrying the deadly organism. He briskly walked past the TARDIS towards the airport security checkpoint. He was in no particularly hurry except to confirm his own nagging curiosity; the epidemic that had begun was a silent one, the walkers themselves would not be made manifest to the world for nearly another year, by that time nearly all corners of the globe would have been exposed to the pathogen. He stopped at a distance in front of Gretchen and Henry while they checked in other passengers and scanned them. The results confirmed his fears, they were both infected. He walked intently back to the TARDIS cursing himself for being so foolish. How in his arrogance had he been so blind, so reckless, how could he have let something so obvious pass over him without as much as a thought? It was the end of the Time War all over again; he had single-handedly brought about the end of the species he had come to love and protect. For all the evidence seemed to point to the fact that the passive form of the infectious agent must have mutated during his stint in Rick's time and found a way to cheat both the TARDIS scanners and decontamination screens. This single celled nemesis had proven itself to be quite intelligent in its own right, clever enough to fool the Doctor, who was very, very clever to begin with. As he approached the Tardis door and turned the handle to open it he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he had located Walker Zero. He was Walker Zero.
Author's Note: This is the conclusion of "Walker Zero" but it is not the end of the story so to speak. There are two planned sequels "Flesh and Steel" from Rose's perspective, and the direct sequel tentatively titled "Walker Zero - Part II" which will pick up with the Doctor and Rick right where this one leaves off and will explore more of the Doctor Who side of things leading up to the true origin of the outbreak now encapsulated in a time loop. I'm doing it this way because I like this chapter as an ending (particularly the last paragraph) and didn't want it to get lost in the middle of the tale. To all of my readers thank you for your continued interest and support. Cheers.