Work Text:
‘The stars are going out.’ Wilfred bent down to check his telescope for confirmation of what they’d witnessed occurring in the night sky. Stars, millions of miles away, blinking out of existence. Entire constellations switching off like Christmas lights. It was the latest in a long line of disasters, and yet a whole new level of terror.
Donna turned and saw her, standing at the edge of the allotment. Waiting. For her. Looking exactly as she did three weeks ago when she’d told Donna that she would come with her tonight.
‘I’m ready’, Donna said. The blonde woman smiled sadly, turned and walked down the hill without looking back or motioning for her to follow. Donna took a last look at her grandfather, still staring up at the sky in disbelief, muttering the names of celestial bodies that no longer existed. He could look after her mum, she convinced herself. They’d moved out of the kitchen after the Colasantos had been taken away, the comfort of more space corrupted by the nature of how they acquired it. She could just be gone for a night and then be back before she was missed, but reason told her this was unlikely. When you come with me, you’re going to die. The words echoed within as Donna turned away from the distracted Wilfred Mott, unable to tell him goodbye and tempt her to change her mind. She hesitantly made her way in the dark after the woman, who had just entered a military jeep at the foot of the hill. A tall, muscled soldier helped her into her seat, before retreating to the back of the vehicle, confirming something into his radio and giving the driver the go ahead to depart.
The journey was made in silence, Donna sat awkwardly in between the woman on her left and the driver on her right. The jeep was waved through checkpoint after checkpoint, seemingly exempt from the strict travel curfew imposed by the emergency government that was set up after the obliteration of Parliament. The then Home Secretary, now unelected Prime Minister, Brian Green had been celebrating Christmas in his constituency home up North when the Titanic hit London, and implemented new measures to prevent mass rioting. Many said this overreach was to better control and suppress the population as they passed authoritarian legislation unimpeded. The new ‘labour camps’ for the undesirable, the less socially useful, and those without British citizenship, had taken the Nobles’ co-habitants from them. ‘Sawing, digging’ Rocco had told her. In the empty, quiet weeks since she’d lost him, she’d heard whispers of disease left to spread throughout the camps, enabled by foul living conditions and a lack of medical care. A new arrival on the street billeted at the house opposite, spoke in hushed tones of radiation sickness in more southerly camps, closer to the London blast radius and manned by faceless staff in hazmat suits. Men, women, and children shipped from around the country to work and die. The people left behind could reflect on their own miserable lives, at least we’re here, and not there. Surviving, living this meagre life, ought to be preferable to being wiped out like the population of the capital, or dissolved into fat like millions of Americans-
A pothole in the uneven road jolted Donna out of her thoughts and she saw a structure on the horizon. It looked like they were heading to a lone warehouse on the outskirts of Leeds. Like whatever she was being brought to, had been assembled here for her. She glanced at the woman, whose steady gaze didn’t betray a thought as she faced forward. She couldn’t be out of her mid-twenties but carried a solemnity of someone far older.
A frenzy of activity greeted them as they pulled up and climbed out the jeep, soldiers in red berets and people in white coats scurrying about, stopping only to stare as Donna walked past them through the building’s entrance. But rather than floating past and staring at her back as she had become accustomed to from strangers over the years, their eyes focused on her face. As if they all knew who she was. And what was to come.