The Caretaker - Prologue pg. 1

As the familiar wheezing of the TARDIS came to an end, and the battered, old police box materialized in the backyard of a small, suburban town. The door to the TARDIS squeaks open, and a familiar looking 12th doctor sticks his head out through the door, looks around, and seeming satisfied with where he’s at, steps out, locking the door behind him. The Doctor, in his familiar velvet suit, walks around the side of the house and onto the street, a simple two-lane road lined with houses on each side.
Based on the position of the sun he reasons that it’s roughly 8:30 in the morning. He decides that maybe it would be easier to just check his watch and know for sure, but that really wasn’t his style. As he walks down the street, wondering why the TARDIS had brought him here, he sees a newspaper stand on the corner of the street, and figures the more he knows about where he’s at, the better chance he has of doing some good, or keeping himself alive. As walked towards the end of the street, he couldn’t help but notice that something seemed wrong. He did a quick spin to scan his surroundings, hoping something would stand out to him, but as he looked, he realized there was nothing to see but a boring, quiet suburban town, the kind that he’d ordinarily never stay in for anything longer than a pit-stop.
He then thought it strange that he was about to have to rely on a newspaper to tell him what day it was. In the last 2000 years of travel through time and space, it was a rarity to land somewhere on Earth and not recognize it. But he knew this was Earth, and he was pretty sure that this was the 21st century, though things didn’t really change much in the last couple decades. He shared a brief chuckle with himself to actually be seeing something new, for it happened so rarely.
As he finally came up on the newspaper stand, he heard some kind of truck in the distance, coming closer, and he realized what was wrong, and it stopped him dead in his tracks. He wondered how he could have missed it at all. He knew the town was quiet, he figured that it must have been just a really uneventful morning. But when he heard the truck, he finally acknowledged that this town was silent. There were no cars, no kids playing outside, no lawns being mowed, not even a dispute between neighbors. None of the key characteristics that the Doctor used to describe humanity. Nothing but one vehicle in the distance, and it was getting closer.
On impulse, he reached down to the newspaper stand, and threw the door open, grabbed the paper on top and started scanning for the date. As he found it, his eyes widened, and the color drained from his face. He let the paper fall to the ground. As he started running back to the TARDIS, it all started making sense, well, mostly.