Chapter Eleven

A car had smashed into a row of cottages. The Doctor ran over, but the driver had died of suffocation long before the crash. Through the windows of every cottage the Doctor could see men and women, their dead faces lit by the flickering of their television screens. All around him he could hear the screams of men and women, the cries of children, the barking of dogs. From the direction of Pond Hill, humans were calling out for help, mourning their loved ones or simply cursing the thing that had brought death to their little village. The cloud was picking them off one by one, not even letting them finish their lament.

Adisham was almost silent.

What could he do?

The Doctor stood there, listening to a whole town die. He stared up at the sky, at the red fog and the dark shape of the Martian warship far above them. Tendrils of vapour curled around walls, licked around the ground, searching with bloodhound devotion. It was a sentient gas, programmed for one purpose.

Hunting him.

It was meant for him and wouldn't stop its killing until he was dead.

That meant that there was only one thing he could do to stop it.

'There's the Doctor,' Greyhaven announced, clearly affected by the carnage he was watching.

'Where?' Xznaal snapped hungrily.

Greyhaven pointed out one of the images.

The picture rippled, filling with an aerial view of the Doctor half-running, half-stumbling along a main street littered with human corpses. He was running towards the cloud, waving his arms.

The Red Death was getting nearer and nearer.

'It's almost as though he wants to be found,' Staines observed.