It was inevitable.
He’d saved them. That group of survivors, insanely convinced that they could somehow survive the world with kindness and togetherness.
He’d fought the enemy. That leader, who’d led an armada of vehicles through the desert.
Oil and gunpowder, pitted against blood and sweat.
It always came down to who ran out first.
Inevitably, against the desert, he’d find himself making a mistake, or being surprised by a twist this corpse of a world threw at him. And then he’d be reduced to walking toward a horizon, with no idea of where his next drink of water would come from.
He was convinced the police box was a hallucination until he physically ran into it.
What else could it have been?
It was a big blue box, with the words “Police - Public Call Box”. It had windows that glowed.
After he’d fallen on his ass from the impact, he took a moment, shaking his head to try and clear the mirage from his head.
No good. The box was still there.
Worse, the door was opening.
He fumbled around, checking himself for a working weapon. A shotgun - a pistol - a knife - a sharp stick - something.
A man was looking down at him. He might be tempted to describe the man as oddly dressed, but who dressed normally these days? All he had were faded memories of the before time, with his wife and child, blue jeans and coffee. Weren’t those what was abnormal now?
“Hello there,” the fellow said. The voice had an accent, not quite like his own.
After a moment, the stranger resumed talking. “You seem rather at the end of your rope. Maybe you’d like to rest inside? Come in, come in.”
The stranger extended a hand, and he took it.
As he was pulled to his feet, his eyes met the stranger’s. Old eyes. Easily the oldest he’d ever seen.
“Water,” he croaked.
He didn’t quite process that the vehicle was bigger on the inside. Not at first.
The stranger had been bustling about, adjusting levers and switches, idly playing with his peculiar vehicle’s controls.
He found a glass of water pressed into his hands, and drank greedily, almost choking himself. The dust of his travel fell from his clothing with every motion, steadily coating the antiseptically clean interior of this place.
“I’m the Doctor, by the way,” the stranger said presently. “May I ask your name?”
That was a good question.
After a moment, it came back to him. “Max.”
The Doctor was clearly out of his mind. Really, who wasn’t?
He was special, though. Not the usual occupant of the wasteland, bent by fate and hammered into a new shape by circumstance. For one thing, he claimed to travel in time and space, using this “police box” as a vehicle.
Max couldn’t quite shake the delusion, though. Somehow, he couldn’t get himself to see the reality. It kept seeming like the craft was bigger on the inside.
The Doctor kept yammering at him. He was full of questions. Max was on guard, wary. At some point this person would try to rob him, or hurt him. People always did. Always.
He gave monosyllabic answers when pressed. And finally the Doctor had turned to other means to get information.
“I should say that the environment outside indicates the aftermath of a global thermonuclear conflict. Lingering radiation levels, desertification, radical climate shifts. I should need to connect an aethalometer to the console to be sure of some of the specifics.”
Max found himself the subject of a sudden inspection, with the Doctor pointing a strange rod at him. The tip glowed green, and it made a curious humming noise. It wasn’t a weapon - that much was obvious.
The Doctor drew back, and looked curiously at his instrument. What could he possibly be seeing? There were no indicators on it, nothing that Max had seen anyway. And then he found the Doctor’s eyes on him.
“You are definitely older than the conflict, though. Old enough…”
The Doctor’s eyes bored into Max’s.
He saw power. He saw wisdom. He saw the insatiable demand for - something. It was a look he’d seen in the eyes of many ambitious people, and it always terrified him. Such people would never stop until they got what they wanted.
He didn’t see malice in those eyes.
What he saw was a curiosity that could never be denied.
What did the Doctor want?
“You saw it, didn’t you. You lived through it. And that means you can help me answer a question.”
“What?” Max croaked out the word, deeply uncertain of what was to happen next.
“How did Earth destroy itself, when I know for a fact it didn’t?”