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The weather on the other side of the continent was a dreadfully dry heat. The dust that swarmed and gnashed at his eyes and whipped at his coat choked him with a nasty, intense fervor. The only available helicopter he could charter was an ancient, noisy machine so the travel was a rattling and hard-endured mess. By the time they had landed after hours in the sky the Doctor was shaking and cursing. It wasn’t any better that he had to ride passenger with the veritable corpse of the woman he most despised.

Second most despised now, the Doctor thought. That wretched bitch of a pilot flew as though she were doing her very best to discomfort him. Twice the stasis tube loosened in its straps and bruised his arm, causing him to yelp. He could have sworn he saw her crack a smile from the pilot’s seat.

Regardless, it was over. She was lowering the stasis tube onto a gurney, the helicopter’s rotors were still and the dust was settling against the hard-packed desert earth. The heat had begun to bake his skin, and he gulped with a dry throat, shifting his curses from his companion to the sandy white sun suspended in a cloudless sky.

“Move faster, woman.” The Doctor touched his arm gingerly and hobbled toward the bunker doors a dozen paces away. He heard her mutter something but paid no attention to it. The heat was quite unbearable and any further lack of inertia would turn him into a husk.

The double doors were astonishingly massive blocks of iron. Ten men abreast could march through if they were open, but at the moment they were sealed shut. The concrete exterior had been worn smooth from over a century of sandstorms. This bunker was morbidly old, most definitely older than the Doctor himself. It had been abandoned by Washington half a century ago and had become hardly a footnote in their records. The Doctor required but one small favor to have its existence purged from all electronic files as a precaution instructed by his foreign superiors, but he knew within their short stay there was not a chance they would be discovered.

A keypad was installed into the entrance, and the Doctor—much to his dismay—did not have the code.

“Foley. Foley! Get the goddamn door!” he rasped, licking his lips with a sandpaper tongue.

Cera Foley stretched her back and twisted around to glare at him. Her skin was as pale as the sun, her hair even whiter. Her face was without blemish, and had the Doctor been a hundred years younger he would have blushed from her fair appearance. She had thin pink lips that parted for a voice deeper and harsher than one would have expected. “This is hardly an easy package to handle, you gimp. You want faster, you help. Otherwise, keep silent.”

The Doctor was not amused at the insult. Nevertheless, he waited impatiently for her to lock the stasis tube onto the gurney and push it to the door, the plastic wheels sinking slightly in the sand.

She glared at him once more before punching in the numbers on the keypad. There was an audible click as the doors unlocked and a metallic squeal as they slowly swung open inward.

At first there was an absence of light, but as the Doctor stepped inside, the all too familiar intensity of fluorescent lights flickered on. The room was circular, about one hundred feet in diameter. Metal-reinforced, half rotted wooden crates were scattered about haphazardly on the rough concrete floor, coated in the same dust that was swirling about in the air after the doors opened and flooded the cool chamber in a hot gust of wind. Sand had accumulated around the walls and overall the place had an eerily antiquated, derelict atmosphere.