Winner Takes All (10 page)

And then the phone said, ‘The person you are calling has not responded. Please try again,' and there was a click and then the dial tone.

Slowly, reluctantly, Rose clicked off the handset.

NINE

A
ll Rose could think of doing was, somehow, finding out where her mum had gone. Maybe she could win a holiday too, and follow her. She still had forty-two untouched scratchcards, after all. Perhaps one of them was a ‘lucky' one.

Rose scrabbled in her pocket, dragged out the wodge of cards, began frantically scratching off the silvery covering. No. No. No. No. She began to despair of the Quevvils. Surely they wanted people to win? Surely they wanted an endless supply of players for their deadly games? So why couldn't they have stuck in a few more winning scratchcards?

Sixteen cards in, and she got a result: not a holiday but another games console. Which was no good, not what she wanted, but something. Twenty-one cards more, nearly at the end of the pile, and she got another one. Try to look on the bright side: at least that was two winning cards not in the hands of people who might use them, claim their consoles, kill some friends.

Not a single holiday in the whole lot. And Rose still didn't have a plan.

Maybe Jackie hadn't left the planet yet, maybe Rose could find out where the ‘winners' were taken and go there. She'd think of a plan, she knew she would. For now, she decided, she had to get into town, as quickly as possible, and hope that by the time she got there she'd know what to do.

Rose left the flat, locking the door behind her, and hurried down to the road. She stuck out her arm as a bus approached, and it pulled into the kerb. She jumped on it, and waved her pass as she moved in the direction of a seat.

‘Oi,' called the driver. ‘Oi, you.'

After a second, Rose realised he was addressing her. She backtracked, and looked at him expectantly. ‘Yes?'

‘Let's see your pass again.'

Her heart sinking, she held it up, smiling, as if she knew that there wasn't really a problem.

‘That's over a year out of date!'

She looked at it, so surprised. ‘I'm really sorry. I must have picked up the wrong one by mistake. I won't do it again.'

But he wasn't to be swayed by a charming smile and an apologetic manner. ‘That's £1.20, then.'

‘I don't have any cash on me,' she said. Didn't say, I've got out of the habit; I haven't needed money for months.

‘Can't let you on the bus then,' he said. By now the other passengers were starting to grumble. Holding everyone up. Young people these days. Thoughtless kids. Selfish cow.

‘But it's really important,' she said. ‘I've got to get to town. Please?'

‘Not my problem,' said the driver, and she could tell that he was enjoying this, that it was the highlight of his day. ‘I'm not moving this bus until you've got off it.'

‘It's a matter of life or death!' she tried.

But the bus driver was implacable, and the noise from the other passengers was beginning to get ugly, and precious seconds were ticking away, so in the end she had to get off. What did they care that her mum could be on her way to an alien planet right now, could be on her way to her death? Even if she told them that, even if they believed her, they wouldn't care. The difference between life and death: one pound and twenty pee.

Hating them, hating humanity, Rose started half walking, half jogging her way into town.

After a bit of running around, a few shouts and threats and so on, the Doctor was leaning back in his chair, a gentleman of leisure. Eventually, faced with not many options, he'd voluntarily taken his old seat in the games room, hoping that the Quevvils would thus register him as being a prisoner again without remembering that prisoners are usually tied up. So far, it seemed to have worked. He was holding the control pad in his hands, but hadn't started playing the game again. If he had his way, that would never happen. He'd been trying to keep a conversation going instead, and had managed it for quite a while now, without, however, finding out anything of use.

‘Bit of a waste,' he said to the Quevvil guarding him. ‘Blowing up your pawns if they leave the game. Just means you've got to get more of 'em.'

‘We cannot risk the carriers returning to our base,' said the Quevvil. ‘If the primed disruptors were then activated . . . That is, in the game –'

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. ‘Exactly how thick do you think I am? It's not a game, I have worked that out.'

The Quevvil seemed flustered. ‘Humans do not have the intelligence . . .'

The Doctor didn't point out that he wasn't human. ‘Yeah, you're right, teleport a couple of humans into your secret underground base, shoot ray guns at them, force them to play – they'll never work it out.'

The Quevvil snarled. ‘Your mind cannot comprehend the truth.' It raised its gun. ‘But you will play the game.'

‘Don't think I will, thanks all the same,' said the Doctor. ‘I'm a bit anti setting off to kill these Mantodeans who've done nothing to me. And I'm not that keen on risking the life of some poor kidnapped human, either.'

The Quevvil started to wave its gun – and then lowered it. It had a cunning look in its eyes that the Doctor didn't like.

‘So far, you are the human who has progressed furthest into the Mantodean stronghold. But it is only a matter of time before others penetrate into the heart of it. We have waited for years; we can wait longer. We came to this planet and started in this small area to see if the idea had merit, if the humans were intelligent enough, if our technology was sufficient on Toop –' the Doctor grimaced in frustration; they kept merrily mentioning the name of their planet but it meant nothing to him, he'd never heard of it; why couldn't they drop its galactic coordinates into the conversation? – ‘if it could cope with a small number of carriers and controllers. We hardly expected to find a controller who would succeed immediately – indeed, with hundreds of games out there, only a very few controllers have passed our training level, a mere handful showing themselves worthy of our dedicating our full resources to them. So we are already prepared to extend the plan. We will take it to more towns, across this country, and then to other countries. We will increase the number of winning cards. Humans are greedy: order them to aid us and they would protest, but make it seem like a prize, like something for only a select few . . . ha! They will snatch at any chance of getting something for nothing! The more humans who play the game, the more competent controllers we will find, and the more carriers we will need . . . If you played the game for us now and did as we wanted, got to the centre of the Mantodean stronghold, no more humans would have to die. But until someone succeeds, the game will continue to be played.'

‘Stop calling it a game!' yelled the Doctor in fury. ‘People are dying!'

‘Our research suggested that death was a common pastime on Earth,' said the Quevvil. ‘Humans spend much of their time killing. There is hardly a species on Earth that humans do not kill, including other humans. That, with your greed and cunning, was why you were considered ideal subjects for this task.'

‘Yeah, we humans are a bit rubbish,' said the Doctor. ‘A lot of us aren't very nice at all. I can't defend all that killing we do, all that greed and cunning. So I'm hardly going to sit here and commit genocide just to save a few of us, am I? What have these Mantodeans ever done to me?' He threw down the control pad, and slapped his forehead. ‘Oh, hark at me, completely forgetting to mention I'm not human. You won't get a human to solve this “game” for you. Yeah, they're cunning and all that, they're pretty determined, and a few of them might even be geniuses like me. But not all that many. It's going to defeat them all in the end. You should sack your market researcher.'

The Quevvil didn't seem to know what to say to that. So it raised its gun again, and pointed it straight at the Doctor.

Rose arrived in town, but she still didn't have a plan. Get into the Quevvils' base, find the Doctor, hope he'd know what to do, how to save her mum? She hurried to the newsagent's shop. It was closed. She glanced at her watch: 5.40. The whole day had gone by without her noticing. She started to examine the lock, hastily pretending to be tying up her shoelace as a couple of uniformed policemen walked past, hoping they didn't notice that her shoes didn't have laces. But it was no good, she didn't have the faintest idea how to pick the lock, and the shop had a prominent alarm system. She'd be arrested before she got halfway to the cellar.

She turned her attention to the Quevvils' prize booth, a few metres away. Still didn't have a proper plan, but she couldn't just do nothing. Let's hope they're the sort of aliens who think all humans look alike. They barely saw me, she thought, trying to convince herself; just if they looked out when I was trying to get in with the Doctor, and there was only one of them when I was scattering salt all over the place, and they would have seen me only for a split second before we teleported away . . .

She'd have to risk it. She knew this wasn't the right plan, wasn't the one that would work, didn't have a hope, but it was all she could think of just now, and she'd have to risk them recognising her.

Rose went up to the booth, acting casual, nothing to indicate she knew these were aliens, nothing to say
you might have killed my mother.

She got one of the winning cards out of her pocket, stuck it in the reader, waited to be allowed through the door. There was a Quevvil behind the counter. So much for her hope that the Quevvils couldn't tell humans apart – pot calling kettle, she had no idea if this was the one she'd encountered before or not.

The Quevvil produced a boxed games console and tried to hand it to her.

‘I've already got one of those,' Rose said. ‘I just wanted to ask a question. My mum's won one of your holidays and I need to get in touch with her urgently. Could you tell me if she's left yet?'

‘I am sorry, that is not possible,' said the Quevvil, pushing forward the box.

‘Is there a depot or something?' said Rose, her eyes darting all around the booth, hoping to discover some sort of clue.

‘I am afraid I cannot give out that information,' said the Quevvil, still being insistent with the boxed game.

Rose lost it. ‘Tell me what you've done with my mother!' she screamed. She grabbed the box, and threw it across the counter. It hit a pile of games, which collapsed with an almighty crash. The Quevvil's quills began to stand on end, and it suddenly hit Rose that this was an alien, an alien who didn't mind killing humans – it wasn't going to give her any information on Jackie, this was totally the wrong plan, and the door had closed behind her . . .

The Quevvil was holding the gun on the Doctor when a great noise came from above, as if something heavy had been dropped to the floor. The Quevvil glanced upwards, and the Doctor pounced. Pouncing on something covered in pointed quills possibly wasn't the most sensible move in the world, but the Quevvil was distracted as the Doctor managed to wrench its gun away, and in an instant he was out through the door. A barrage of spines soared through the air after him as he sprinted down the corridor, past the three Quevvils by the ladder to the trapdoor, presumably going to investigate the noise. He reached the far end of the corridor, and slammed the door behind him. A drumming noise told him that more quills were thudding into the heavy wood of the door. The key was on this side, and he turned it. It might keep them out for a while. He took a deep breath.

Rose had forgotten that the doors opened from the inside. She hit the control and dived out of the booth, praying that the Quevvil wouldn't follow her. It wouldn't, would it? Wouldn't want to make a fuss, make people think there was something odd going on, that they weren't what they said they were . . .

She stood by the booth, not knowing what to do next, panic threatening to overwhelm her. She wanted to throw more things.

Then a voice somewhere nearby said, ‘Rose? Rose, sweetheart? Is everything all right?'

Of course everything wasn't all right, and it took Rose a few moments to calm down and pay attention to the tremulous voice. She finally turned round, to see an elderly lady wearing a pink plastic mac, a flowered headscarf tied over her white permed curls. It didn't register initially. And then she realised, hardly daring to let herself hope. ‘Dilys?' she said. ‘But . . . but I thought you were going on this holiday with my mum . . .'

Dilys looked worried. ‘I couldn't go on my own, Rose, love. Since my Harold died, you know I don't like going places on my own, not even the bingo.' She held out a hand in which was a familiar piece of cardboard. ‘I just came here to see if there was anything they could do about it, about your mum's. Shame she has to miss out.' She pushed the scratchcard towards Rose. ‘Look, would you take this, Rose, dear? I feel so bad about what happened. I couldn't go now. Maybe your mum'll still want to, though, later. She can have this one, I know they said we had to go today, but you never know . . .'

Rose took the card, not really understanding what Dilys was saying, but the hope was growing, blossoming inside her. ‘You mean my mum didn't go on the holiday either!'

But Dilys was still looking worried. ‘You mean you don't know? They said they'd phone you, promised they'd let you know.'

The hope was being replaced by an ache, a heaviness in her stomach, and she blurted out, ‘Tell me what, Dilys? Who was supposed to tell me what? Please, tell me!'

And poor Dilys, nervous and stuttering, began to tell her. ‘I'm so sorry, Rose, love. I've got bad news . . .'