AN: I know the last couple of chapters have been kind of uneventful, but things are going to start picking up from here :)
+++++
Soon enough, we’d rejoiced with Lawrence and his small party of men. When the Doctor had seen them, he immediately handed each of the five men an electric torch, claiming that the gas lanterns they’d brought “weren’t good enough for the job.”
At the Doctor’s command, Lawrence took the lead and guided us to the entryway where construction workers had gone down into the underground tunnels to build railroads and had never resurfaced.
As the destination grew nearer, I began to worry. If something happened to any of us, how would we be able to get the word out? For all I knew, Lawrence had kept the disappearances on the down low; nobody would know that there were people trapped in the underground. The Doctor seemed to pick up on my uneasiness.
“Don’t worry about it, Annabelle. We’ll just be in and out,” he reassured, pulling an arm around my shoulders. I glance up at him, only able to give him a half-smile.
“But what if we get stuck down there?”
He frowned at this, stopping to place both of his hands on each of my shoulders. “When you’re with me, there’s a couple of things that you always have to remember. First, situations can never get any worse. Second, there is always, always hope in any situation. Third, stay close and don’t wander off. Fourth and final, messing with things usually helps.”
“Only usually?” I look past him, noticing the group has moved on without us. He notices also, releasing my shoulders from his grip, instead holding out his bent arm. I take it.
“‘Usually’ is quite a high chance,” he grins. “Now, come along, Pond. We’ve got a whole subway system to discover!”
+++++
"That's it?" I mutter, flashing the torchlight down into the 'entrance' of the unfinished subway system.
"What were you expectin'?" Lawrence piped up, standing two feet away. I stare at the manhole cover behind him, and then back down at the ladder attached to the cement walls of the tunnel. The rust that's built up over the years refused to let any metal gleam in the artificial light.
"Well, not a hole. Ever heard of stairs? Or maybe even an actual door?" I replied, retreating away from the edge where the asphalt ends and meets a thin ring of steel.
The Doctor steps up to the edge, grinning down into the darkness. "Ooh, a tunnel! It's been forever since I got a tunnel!"
“Ernest, why don’t you go down first. You know the place best--” Lawrence starts, ignoring the Doctor’s excitement, only to be cut off by the Doctor.
“Actually, Annabelle and I are going to go down first,” he interrupts, throwing an arm around my shoulders.
“And you’re setting us up to be faced with the possibly deadly unknown because…?” I ask, putting on a fake smile.
“Because you’re wearing a dress,” he replied, making me pout.
“Fine. This is the first and last time for this,” I said, gesturing at the outfit. “then. Subway monsters, what could go wrong?” I flash the torch downward one more time before carefully beginning to climb down the ladder, keeping the torch pointed towards our destination.
The Doctor climbs down next, going slowly to give me a head start. As we descend, he gets the names of the rest of the band of people Lawrence collected. Ernest, Franklin, Cecil, and Milton were the younger men who had worked underground. By the time I reach the bottom of the ladder, all six of the men are being careful with their footing, seeing as the ladder seemed to had grown slicker as we got deeper.
Scanning the torch around the area, the first thing to get caught in the beam of light was a sign, advertising DANGER: EXPLOSIVES, NO SMOKING.“Explosives...how settling,” I muttered.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t have to get explody-wody,” the Doctor said, jumping off the ladder and landing next to me, catching sight of the sign.
“Explody-wody? Are you sure you’re not the intergalactic five-year-old that the stories implied?”
“Twelve hundred and sixteen years, to you,” he defended, turning towards the wide archway that opened into the unfinished subway. Discarded scraps of metal were thrown about, along with misplaced bolts and screws. The rest of the men landed on the ground with different variations of thumps, their torchlights mixing in with the Doctor’s.
“Up ahead, about thirty feet, I can get some more light,” Lawrence said, pushing ahead of the Doctor and beginning down the tunnel. “Ernest, up front, boy. You’ve been here longer than the rest.”
As we followed behind Ernest and Lawrence, the Doctor whispered to me. “Just… be prepared for anything. Really, anything…”
“Do you have any idea what it could be?” I asked, flashing my torch at the ground, making something glint.
The Doctor turned his torch in the same direction, taking interest in whatever was shining. “I did, but it wasn’t this,” he replied, anger slowly rising in his voice. “Lawrence! Light! Now!”
“Got it!” Lawrence shouted from a distance away as a dim, caramel-coloured light flooded the place. The Doctor didn’t turn his torch off like the rest of the crew.
“No, no, no, no. No!” he mumbled at first, voice raising as he repeated the word.
“Is that…” I left my sentence unfinished, unsure of what the Doctor was about to prod with his fingers. On the ground lay what looked like a hand, besides the fact that it was made of metal, complete with movable joints for fingers and pieces of wire poking out where the wrist should be.
“This isn’t right,” the Doctor said, leaving the metal hand where it was, straightening from his bent position and walking towards Lawrence. “This isn’t right at all. They’re not supposed to be in this time, not now! And they’re just pesky, the way they keep on popping up everywhere!”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Lawrence all but demands.
The Doctor glares at him for a few moments, before stepping closer. “Well, not from this planet, I hope you’ve realized that, at least. They like to think of themselves as the superior race, but they’re just a few levels below that. They convert any living conscious they can get their hands on, turning them into emotionless… droids. ‘They’ are Cybermen, and this entire planet is in danger if any of them somehow make their way to the outside world. We have to find a way to stop them. And they like to think of themselves of unstoppable, also.”
Cybermen.
The word rings around in my head a few times, jolting old memories awake in my mind. I could remember the Cybermen from the one time they’d tried to invade, destroying everything in their way. From somewhere in the way back of my mind, a voice I can’t put a face to sounds. A Cyberman for every home…
“Annabelle?” the Doctor said, breaking me free from the little trance.
“Cybermen, then?” I said in reply, ignoring the worried look on his face. “I’m guessing it’s time for a plan, then, huh?”
The Doctor smiled, although it was obvious he was still worried, being bent down to my height. “See? You’re already getting the hang of it! So, plan! Plan… what’s that way, Lawrence? Hm, that’s getting to be a bit of a mouthful, Larry from now on alright?”
“As far as the last group of men got, Doctor,” Lawrence answers, slightly taken aback by the Doctor’s seemingly endless ranting.
“As far as they got along ‘til they got abducted, yeah?” Seeing the confused faces of the men, the Doctor continues. “This isn’t about disappearances anymore--I’m 99.999% that these are just straight up abductions.”
“To the end point it is!” I add, joining the Doctor at his side. It’s anybody’s guess that these Cybermen have been stuck underground for all this time. So, how bad can they be?