Doctor Who: The Dying Days by Lance Parkin

Author:Lance Parkin
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction:Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780426205043
Publisher: Virgin
Published: 1997-05-15T10:00:00+00:00

This morning something was different, and it took a moment to work out what it was. It's like breathing: you do it all the time, of course, but every so often you're sitting down, relaxing, reading perhaps, and you become conscious of it. You feel every inhalation rushing through the hair in your nostrils, you feel it easing down your throat and inflating your lungs. You breathe out, acutely aware of your diaphragm contracting. For a while you forget how to breathe without thinking about it. In moments like that, you visualise all the other things your body does without telling you. The blood pumping around your brain, the skin cells you're shedding, the food that's slowly being turned into shit in your stomach, and then you think about the chemicals flashing and winking in your brain that make you what you are. You sit there, wondering if you'l ever be able to concentrate on anything else again, or whether the steady rhythms of your body that have been there al your life will keep you in a hypnotic trance forever. Two minutes later, you've forgotten all about it again, and turned back to your book or television.

The difference was the traffic. The sound of cars was normal y there in the background. Not the noise of individual engines revving or vehicles whooshing past with car radios blaring, but the flatter, more even sound of tyres against tarmac, a dull sound like rushing wind that's always there in every town centre. The invisible cars that are forever somewhere in the distance. The sound that is somehow the same volume whatever the time of the day or night.

In London, more than any other city in Britain, it is ever-present. It pervades every shop, every house, every office.

There isn't a window that doesn't pulse, or a pavement that doesn't hum with the vibration. Even on the platform of a Tube station, deep underground, it's there. No-one ever notices unless they are by themselves, sitting in a park or waiting for a train that never comes.

But when it's not there, it's as though the city is holding its breath, or its heart has stopped beating.

There were sounds - burglar alarms that were still ringing, car alarms that hadn't yet run down. Every so often a police siren would wail past. Loudest of al was the birdsong.

A helicopter passed overhead.

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