Border Princes

by Dan Abnett

  ‘I see,’ said Toshiko, slowly rising to her feet. ‘Do you have the Amok now? What’s your name?’

  ‘John Norris,’ replied the tramp, crouching down to sort through his carrier bags. ‘John Norris. I was all right once, you know.’

  ‘You’re all right now, John,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not. I’m not. I had a good job. A company car. It was a Rover. GL. I had my own parking space. They called me Mr Norris.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Workforce rationalisation. The wife moved to her sister’s place. I haven’t seen my boy in five years.’

  The tramp began to weep.

  ‘Mr Norris, we can sort this all out,’ Toshiko said, stepping towards him. Her head was throbbing. ‘Please, do you have the Amok?’

  He nodded, sniffling, and rifled around in one of his carrier bags.

  ‘It’s in here somewhere.’ He glanced up at her. ‘Big big big,’ he added. Emphasis on the middle ‘big’.

  ‘Just show it to me. The Amok.’

  ‘Oh, right, here it is,’ he said. He drew something out of the carrier bag. It was a ten-by-eight clip frame in which were pressed three photographs. A woman. A boy. A woman and a boy.

  ‘Mr Norris, that’s not the Amok, is it?’ Toshiko said gently.

  The tramp shuddered. He shook his head, shoulders hunched. ‘No,’ he whimpered. He struck the clip frame against the path and shattered it.

  ‘Mr Norris?’

  When he turned to face her, he was holding a sliver of the clip frame glass in his hand. The broken edges were so sharp, and his grip on it so tight, blood dribbled out between his dirty fingers.

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Toshiko, backing away abruptly.

  The tramp lunged.

  TWO

  Fat radials hissed as the SUV came to a halt. Jack and Owen got out into the rain. Jack tried his mobile.

  ‘No signal,’ he said to Owen.

  Jack looked around. ‘Tosh? James?’ he yelled. There was no answer.

  ‘Let’s try in there,’ said Owen, making off towards the nearby pub. It looked bright and inviting, the frosted glass oblongs of its windows warmed from within by yellow light.

  Jack followed him. Owen had gone a few steps when he paused and lowered his head.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bastard of a headache I’ve got, all of a sudden,’ Owen groaned, his hand raised to his temple.

  ‘I thought you were going to have a quiet one last night,’ Jack said sourly, pushing past Owen towards the door of the public bar.

  ‘It’s not that kind of headache,’ Owen complained, his thin mouth more of a downward curve than usual. ‘Buggering Christ, can’t you feel that?’

  ‘Your headache?’ replied Jack. ‘Funnily enough, no.’ He hesitated. ‘But I know what you mean. I can feel something.’

  He opened the pub door and went inside. Owen followed. It was as cheerfully grotty as any of Cardiff’s arse-end public houses, marinated in a smell of fags and malt. An aimless clatter-ping rang from the pinball machine and ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’ issued from the jukebox.

  ‘So where is everyone?’ Owen asked.

  The public bar was empty. So was the saloon. Empty chairs loitered around Formica-topped tables on which a few half-empty glasses and the occasional open packet of nuts waited. There was no sign of disarray, and no sign of any bar staff. The drawer of the public bar’s cash register was open.

  ‘Not a robbery,’ said Jack, going behind the bar and lifting each of the drawer’s spring clips in turn. ‘There’s a couple of hundred in here.’

  ‘This is very wrong,’ said Owen. He pointed. Two full pints of lager sat side by side on the counter’s plastic drip tray. The glasses were sheened with condensation. ‘These have just been pulled. No one walks away from a fresh pint in a pub like this.’

  ‘Not in welsh Wales they don’t,’ Jack agreed.

  They went back outside. The buildings beyond the pub and the little late shop formed an ominous silhouette against the lights of Cardiff Bay over the river.

  They both heard the cry. Distant, robbed out by the heavy rain, but distinct. Not a scream, but a cry of alarm.

  They both broke into a run.

  Toshiko sprang back to avoid the slashing glass. The tramp was mumbling and blinking.

  ‘Mr Norris,’ she warned. ‘Put that down. You’re hurting yourself, and—’

  The tramp stabbed at her again, and forced her to retreat further down the riverside path. Toshiko looked around for options. The overgrown embankment and the high chain-link fence against which Huw had died was on her right. To her left, a glistening black edge of curb-stones showed where the river wall dropped way. She could hear the river, and smell it, but it was invisible below her. It sounded a long way down.

  ‘Mr Norris...’

  ‘You can’t have it!’ he cried. ‘It’s not your go! It’s my go!’

  He came at her for the third time, moving with alarming speed for such a dishevelled, unhealthy soul. The makeshift blade glittered as he swung it, and the motion whipped out a fan of blood from his lacerated fingers.

  This time, despite the pain in her head, Toshiko managed to do more than evade. She side-stepped, pirouetted on one foot, and planted a heavy side-kick into the tramp’s sternum.

  He woofed and jerked backwards, but the multiple layers of clothing he was wearing insulated against the bite of the kick. He surged back at her with a strangled cry, and drove the tip of the glass blade at her throat.

  Toshiko ducked it, turned, and grabbed the extending forearm with both of her leather-gloved hands as it came over her. Hauling on his arm, she slammed her shoulder up into his armpit, and threw him right over her onto his back.

  He landed with winding force, and lay twitching, face up in the rain, his mouth moving slackly behind his beard.

  She kicked the shard of broken glass away.

  ‘Right then,’ she said.

  Something that felt as big and heavy as a speeding bus slammed into her from behind without any warning at all.

  ‘Down here!’ James yelled. Gwen made a scrambling descent of the embankment after him towards the murky riverside. Wet cow-grass and rhododendrons slapped at her face. They came out on a cinder path along the dirty flood wall. A little way along, the body of a young man lay twisted against the fence.

  ‘James!’ she cried.

  ‘Never mind him!’ he shouted back, still running. ‘Fighter Command!’

  Fighter Command. Thank you so much, Captain bloody Analogy, she thought, struggling through the headache to form any kind of coherent thought at all. Fighter Command meant ‘Scramble and drop everything’. Spitfire pilots sprinting in their flying jackets and Mae Wests the moment the field telephone started to jangle, cups of tea and faithful dogs and card schools left behind. The urgent call to action.

  ‘Sodding well wait up!’ Gwen yelled, and then shut up.

  Twenty yards ahead of them, two figures were struggling violently on the path. One was Toshiko. The other was a big man in jeans and a lumberjack shirt. He had Toshiko by the throat, and was shaking her to and fro as if he wanted to work her head off. Toshiko was flailing helplessly. Nearby, an old, filthy tramp was crawling around on the ground, mewling to himself pitifully. Gwen could hear the horrible barks of pain being forced out of Toshiko.

  James flew past the tramp and threw himself at the big man. Gwen was right behind him.

  ‘Oi! Bloody leave her be!’ she yelled.

  The big man in the lumberjack shirt obliged, tossing Toshiko aside. But only, it turned out, so he could jerk around to get James off his broad back. The big man was six six, his neck as thick as his shaved head. He smelled of a beer-sweat that was showing no mercy to industrial-strength applications of Lynx. He roared something, and rotated so wildly that James’s feet left the ground altogether. A beefy, jabbing elbow did the rest. James yelped and fell off him onto the path, clutching his face.

  Grinning, the big man was
about to place-kick James in the ribs when Gwen tackled him like a full-back.

  He went down on his face, felled like a tree, and cracked his teeth on the ground, biting the tip off his tongue into the bargain. Gwen struggled onto his back, and bent one of his meaty arms up behind his shoulder-blades.

  ‘That’s enough!’ she ordered. ‘Stop fighting me, or I’ll break your bloody arm off, so help me!’

  The man beneath her hollered something through broken teeth.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before!’ Gwen snapped. She cinched the twisted limb up beyond ‘pinned’ to ‘painful’ to make him shut up.

  Running footsteps approached from the opposite direction. Jack and Owen appeared out of the rain, racing down the riverside path. Jack’s greatcoat was flying out behind him like wings.

  He skidded to a halt, looking at Toshiko and James writhing on the ground, and Gwen straddling a blood-spitting thug.

  ‘Going well, I see,’ he remarked.

  ‘As bloody usual,’ snapped Gwen. ‘Give me a hand with this one, for Christ’s sake!’

  More than a hand was needed. The big man bucked and unseated Gwen. She flew off him and landed on her backside. The big man got up on his feet, blinking and looking around, spoiling for more. He found himself face to face with Jack Harkness’s perfect white smile.

  ‘Rough night?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Fwuk yoh!’ the big man spat, his words mangled by his cracked front teeth and swollen tongue. ‘Iss mihhn! Mhhy ttuhhn!’

  ‘Your turn?’ asked Jack. ‘OK, fellah.’

  Jack threw a perfect, Marquis of Queensbury right hook that slapped the big man’s head to the right. Drops of blood sprayed out, like Raging Bull.

  ‘’ahstard!’ the big man snorted, and swung a punch back that was so telegraphed, it might as well have been announced by a butler. ‘Big big big!’ he yelled, his slurred emphasis resting on the middle ‘big’.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ Jack replied, ‘but you know what they say...’ A jab to the gut folded the big man over. An upper cut finished the job.

  The big man curled up on his side on the ground, groaning and dazed. Jack stepped back, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand, and smiled again.

  ‘And the winner is,’ Owen remarked snidely, helping Toshiko up. She was bruised around the throat and having trouble breathing.

  ‘All right?’ James asked Gwen. She nodded and held out her hand to let him pull her to her feet.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ she said, pointing.

  ‘Just a split lip,’ he replied.

  ‘Tea, cakes and Band-Aids later,’ said Jack. ‘Were we all just brawling for fun, or—?’

  ‘Those bags,’ coughed Toshiko, pointing down the path to the two, forlorn Sainsbury’s carriers. ‘It’s called the Amok.’

  ‘Is it, indeed?’ asked Jack, cocking his head in curiosity and stepping forwards.

  ‘It’s mine!’ the old tramp moaned. He was cowering by the fence. ‘It’s mine! It’s my go!’

  ‘Not any more, I’m afraid,’ Jack told him. ‘Stay there.’

  Jack approached the bags. The rain pattered off the bulging plastic. He could smell the contents, and the experience wasn’t pleasant. He crouched down. Gwen and James appeared on either side of him.

  Jack glanced at them with a rueful grin. ‘Lucky dip,’ he said. He put his hand into one of the bags.

  Behind them, the tramp wailed out a deep, anguished howl. It almost obscured Toshiko’s call of ‘Be careful!’

  Jack pulled out a few objects that made him, Gwen and James grimace. ‘Oh, joy,’ Jack said. ‘This is why I love the job so.’

  ‘Just tip them out, I would,’ suggested Gwen.

  ‘And if it’s something volatile?’ asked James. ‘Something delicate or sensitive or, you know, explosive?’

  ‘Just tip them out anyway,’ said Gwen. ‘That’s got to be better than having to stick your hand in shit.’

  Jack turned both carrier bags out onto the path and began to sift. The rain rinsed the exposed contents: pieces of clothing, matted with black dirt; a crushed Marlboro packet filled with a collection of stubbed-out cigarette butts; part of a Rubik’s cube; the fashion cover for a mobile phone; something furry and mauve that had once been a motorway services sandwich; the tail of a kite; a toothless comb; more bits of torn, stinking clothing; a single, scuffed Adidas trainer in a child’s size; eight disposable plastic forks and spoons held together by a red Post Office elastic band; a Happy Meal toy; part of an electric toothbrush; another clip frame, smaller than the first, holding a photo of a mother and father proudly displaying a small baby on a windy beach somewhere; a safety pin; an out-of-date copy of Exchange & Mart with several pages torn out; a Bic pen with no innards...

  ‘There!’ James said, excitedly. ‘What’s that by the phone cover? Is that it?’

  Jack held the object up. ‘It’s a Pikachu-head Pez dispenser,’ he said solemnly. He checked. ‘It’s OK, though. It’s not loaded.’

  ‘Oh,’ said James. ‘It looked like—’

  ‘Like what?’ Jack inquired.

  ‘A Pikachu-head Pez dispenser, now I see it, obviously,’ scowled James.

  ‘My head really hurts,’ said Gwen, ‘otherwise I’d be laughing and taking the piss right now.’

  ‘All right!’ James snapped. ‘It looked like...’

  ‘What?’

  James muttered something.

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘A piece of exotic technology,’ James said slightly louder and reluctantly.

  Gwen pursed her lips. ‘Even though my head does hurt, that’s fantastically funny. Should I alert the rest of the team James just made a tit of himself?’

  ‘No need,’ said Owen. He and Toshiko had joined them. He looked at James. ‘End of the World, huh?’ he asked. ‘If it hadn’t been for us pesky kids?’

  ‘Shut up!’ Toshiko growled. She was still rubbing her throat and the colour had not yet returned to her rain-streaked face. ‘This is still serious. Something’s affecting these people. And us, or am I the only one whose head feels like it’s about to pop?’

  ‘What do you know, Tosh?’ Jack asked.

  Toshiko coughed, tryng to clear her voice. ‘Whatever Torchwood has been tracking this last week is here, in this vicinity. It’s aggressive and it’s spiking. It’s driving people in range out of their minds. Background cerebral flooding. We’re all feeling it. It’s killed one boy already. His name was Huw.’

  She gestured back up the path at the pale, tangled heap of limbs.

  ‘Huw,’ said Gwen, with a glance at James. He was dabbing at his split lip.

  ‘The victim was talking about abstract numbers before he died,’ said Toshiko. She pulled a compact digital recorder from the pocket of her coat and sourced the right playback with expert flicks of her gloved thumb. ‘Here...’

  ‘There are... there are numbers, and there are two blue lights and they move, and they move about, like this,’ a tinny voice said through a background rustling of rain and pocket lining. ‘They move. They move. They move about. They’re big lights. Big big big.’

  ‘Lights? And numbers?’ Toshiko’s voice asked.

  ‘Big big big. Flashing and moving. Blue. Oh, sometimes red. Red is dead. Blue is true. Big big big.’

  ‘Big big big,’ echoed Jack, mimicking the emphasis.

  ‘That’s what his girlfriend said too,’ said Gwen.

  ‘Along with a load of old bollocks,’ James added.

  ‘Then the tramp there arrived,’ said Toshiko, ‘and said—’

  She thumbed the playback again. ‘Huw had the Amok, but he lost,’ the ragged voice recording declared. ‘Donny had it before him, and he lost too. Before Donny, Terry. Before Terry, Malcolm. Before Malcolm, Bob. Before Bob, Ash’ahvath.’

  ‘Before Bob who?’ they heard Toshiko ask.

  ‘Ash’ahvath.’

  ‘As in the Middlesex Ash’ahvath’s?’

  There was a spluttery, sniggery sound o
n the playback ‘You’re funny. I don’t know no Ash’ahvath. It was just the last name on the list.’

  Toshiko clicked the device off.

  ‘Huw had the Amok, but he lost,’ repeated Jack, deep in thought. ‘Donny had it before him, and he lost too. Strange.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Owen. He frowned. ‘Uh, how?’

  ‘He said “lost”, not “lost it”,’ said Jack. ‘If it was an object, they’d have lost “it”. But they just “lost”, as if—’

  ‘As if it was a game,’ said Gwen.

  ‘Exactly as if it was a game,’ Jack agreed.

  Toshiko held the recorder out again and clicked it on. They all heard the tramp’s voice crying ‘You can’t have it! It’s not your go! It’s my go!’ She clicked it silent.

  ‘The lumberjack told me it was his turn,’ Jack said. ‘I didn’t really understand what he meant at the time.’

  ‘So...?’ asked Owen.

  Toshiko turned away from them and stared at the tramp. He was still cowering in the overhang of the slack chain link.

  ‘Where is the Amok, Mr Norris?’ she asked.

  ‘Shooo! Shoo!’ he cackled back, spitting and warding them off.

  ‘Well, he’s no sodding use,’ said Owen.

  Toshiko aimed her index finger at the pile of garbage they were huddled around. ‘Shoe,’ she said.

  Jack picked up the child’s trainer, sensing at once the weight of it. He tipped it up, and something rolled out of it.

  It was a geometric solid about five centimetres wide that looked as if it had been stamped or cast out of copper. It had the look, colour and patina of the twopence pieces that had been in circulation since Decimalisation. It clinked as it rolled across the path on its geometric corners. Staring at it, they all felt a sudden revulsion.

  Though it was perfectly symmetrical in every aspect, none of them could sufficiently explain its geometry.

  Or even bear to look at it.

  ‘Is that a...’ James began. ‘What is that? A dodecahedron? No, a... a...’

  ‘I can’t describe it,’ Toshiko began.

  ‘I’m gonna be sick,’ said Owen.