Slow Decay

by Andy Lane

  ‘Jack, perhaps you ought to take a break.’

  He sighed, and continued as if she hadn’t said anything. ‘So much variety. That’s what I like about this planet. Thousands of varieties of apples, for no good reason. Same with pears. Problem is, they’re dying out. People don’t want grey apples, or small apples, or lumpy apples. They want their apples all the same size and all the same shade of green. Doesn’t matter what they taste like. Give it another few years, and you’ll only be able to buy Cox’s Orange Pippins and Golden Delicious, and you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference between them.’

  ‘I think—’

  ‘It’s like the Weevils. They’re not human. The question is: why aren’t they human? They eat like us, they wear clothes like us, and at night, with the streetlights behind them, they could be taken for human. In fact, I’ve seen people wandering the streets of Cardiff who look less human than the Weevils. So how is it we can make a distinction? And this girl downstairs – Marianne. She’s human, but she eats like a Weevil. Which side of the line does she go?’

  ‘Jack…’

  He looked up, and there was something almost tragic about his face. ‘Don’t worry about me, Tosh. The apples are just a symptom of what’s to come. I’ve seen the future, and it all looks and tastes the same.’ The shadow passed, and he was the same old Jack that she had known ever since he tracked her down in London and asked her to join Torchwood. ‘Sorry. Just me being stupid. Let me know if Owen turns up.’ It was a dismissal, of sorts, and Toshiko turned to go. As she did so, Jack reached out, picked up the first apple in the line and took a bite out of it with a crisp crunch. ‘Lemony,’ he said.

  Toshiko returned to her work station. She sat down just as Jack bit into another apple. ‘Sweet, juicy, touch of mango.’

  Filtering out the sounds of crunching from the office, Toshiko turned back to the screens. The first was showing the progress of the various viruses and worms she’d let loose on the Internet to create an electronic trail for Marianne Till, showing that she’d headed out for Ibiza when she was actually in the cells within Torchwood. It was basic work, and Toshiko didn’t have to pay much attention to it after she’d started it off.

  The second screen was just an array of flickering numbers. It was the raw processing of the ultrasound scans that Owen had completed on Marianne; data being filtered, filleted, massaged and stitched together into a coherent whole. It was taking time, but it looked like it was going to produce a useful set of pictures.

  The third screen was the one that was taking most of her attention. It had nothing to do with Marianne Till, nothing to do with dead Weevils and nothing to do with sudden and spontaneous attacks of hunger. It was the interior of one of the almost biological alien devices that Toshiko had discovered, with Ianto’s help, in the Torchwood Archive; sibling to the one that the Torchwood team had found at the scene of the deaths in the Cardiff nightclub.

  The device was sitting quietly on the desk, focus of a number of sensors. It looked something like an over-inflated clover leaf: three rounded lobes about the size of an orange, but flattened, joined together, with a stalk hanging beneath the point where the lobes met. The stalk looked to Toshiko like a handle of some kind, giving her some more clues as to the size and shape of the hands that might have held it. Assuming it was a handle, and assuming that it fitted her hand in roughly the same way as it would the alien user, then one of the lobes would either project or receive energy of some kind, while the others might contain processing hardware, or energy cells, or something else.

  Based on a cursory examination of the device, Toshiko had a theory that it projected an electrical charge at short-to-medium range. The device contained something like a low-power laser which, she suspected, was designed to ionise the air along a straight line. An electrical charge would then be projected along the ionised air, shocking anything at the far end. Perhaps it was a weapon, perhaps it was a sex toy; Toshiko wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure she cared, either. What intrigued her at the moment was the suspicion that the device contained another hidden picture.

  The image on the screen was similar to the one that Toshiko had generated from the interior of the other device: a patchwork of various images in different colours, all overlaid on top of one another. A line moved slowly down the screen, marking the point where her software was progressively refining the resolution of the picture by processing scans lasting many minutes. So far it was just a clash of colours with some indications of an underlying structure, a bit like an overhead photograph of a field where the shape of an old settlement could still be seen in the contours of the land, even though the stones themselves had long been buried. The circuits were there, but she would have to puzzle them out, tease out their edges, their connections, their mountings. But, like the previous device, she got tantalising hints of a picture behind the picture, an image that wasn’t the circuit but was built from parts of the circuit.

  And now, if she half-closed her eyes and let the pictures from the screen refract in rainbow shards from her long eyelashes, she could just about make it out. She could feel the strain in the muscles of her eyes, and her head began to ache as if a spike was being driven into her temples, but it was there.

  A face, wider than it was high, with what might have been bulbous eyes at each end and a vertical slit of a mouth in the centre. But the image was slightly different. The head seemed to droop down at the ends, leaving the eyes hanging, and there were folds around the mouth.

  It was older, but it was still the same alien face she had seen before.

  Which meant that the devices were something more than just devices. They had a meaning over and above what they actually did.

  But what the hell was it?

  TWELVE

  The Outpatients department of Cardiff Royal Infirmary was full of people. They sat there, arms folded, looking like they wished they had brought something to read with them. Magazines were scattered around, but they were all months out of date. Half of them were car magazines, the other half dishing the dirt on celebrity lifestyles. People would pick them up, glance at a page or two, then put them down again with a sigh.

  Gwen wished she’d thought to bring her John Updike book with her. It was sitting beside the bed, cracked open to the page where she’d finished a chapter. She’d been trying to get back to it for a couple of months now – long enough that she couldn’t quite remember how it had started or who some of the characters were – but life and Torchwood kept getting in the way. She could have scooped it up as she and Rhys left the flat, but she had bigger things on her mind. Like the trail of blood that Rhys was leaving behind him all the way to the car.

  Rhys was reading a Dean Koontz novel. He’d read all of Dean Koontz’s novels, and still kept them in the flat, even though he wasn’t likely to read them again. Gwen had tried to read one, once, just to please Rhys, but she couldn’t get past the first paragraph. At the time she’d thought the horror-based plots in which innocent people were menaced by dark forces beyond their comprehension too outlandish for words.

  Now she thought them too tame. Funny thing, life.

  She’d texted Jack with an update on the situation, and she hoped that they’d be out scouring Cardiff for Lucy. Looking around, she couldn’t help but notice that most of the people in Outpatients didn’t look as if they were injured. Rhys was definitely the person there with the most blood on him. A few were sneezing, and one woman had a rash of small red spots across her arms and face. There was one guy with his arm in a makeshift sling, and another with a bloody cut above his eye. No small children with their heads stuck in saucepans, which was a shame. Considering it was such a cliché, Gwen didn’t think she’d ever seen it. Carry On films had a lot to answer for.

  No drunks, either. It was still too early in the evening for that. Come midnight and the place would reek of beer and sweat. People would be slumped against walls and lying on the stained carpet tiles.

  Beside her, Rhys was leaning back in his seat,
eyes closed, tea towel still held to his cheek. It was maroon all over now, and sopping wet with the condensation from the pack of frozen peas.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked for the hundredth time. She wished she could think of something more original, something sensitive and caring, but that was all that came to mind.

  ‘Like a bit of an idiot, actually,’ Rhys replied. His eyes were still closed. ‘I’m going to have to make up some kind of story for work. I can’t possibly admit that Lucy bit me. The jokes will never end.’

  ‘You can’t say that I bit you either. Nobody gives a love bite that big. And not on the cheek.’

  He frowned. ‘I read somewhere that there are more bacteria in the mouth than anywhere else in the human body. Is that true? Could I get infected just by being bitten?’

  ‘If we ever get to see a doctor, we can ask him. But seriously, I think they’ll give you an antibiotic shot. When I used to have to break-up fights and stuff in the police, there’d be lots of guys whose teeth had cut the inside of their cheeks when they’d been punched. The paramedics would always give them antibiotics in case the bacteria inside their mouths got into the wounds and started up an infection.’

  ‘Not friendly bacteria, then,’ Rhys said.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any such thing as friendly bacteria. Some of them might be relatively indifferent, but I don’t think they could reasonably be described as friendly.’

  Like alien life forms that end up on Earth, she thought bitterly. Despite the best hopes of mankind, the universe seemed to her to be a pretty unpleasant place.

  ‘Rhys Williams?’ The nurse standing by the desk was looking around.

  Rhys’s hand shot up. ‘Here.’

  ‘This way, please.’

  Gwen went with him to a small, curtained alcove where Rhys sat on a bed while a doctor examined him. She was younger than both Rhys and Gwen, and looked like she hadn’t slept in a week.

  ‘How did this happen, then?’ she asked as Rhys pulled the tea towel away from his face. She looked over at Gwen. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’

  ‘Rugby practice,’ Rhys said firmly.

  Gwen raised her eyebrows at the doctor, expecting her to take a look at Rhys’s flabby physique and say something sarcastic, but she just looked him up and down and nodded. Surprised, Gwen glanced over at Rhys’s stomach. It might have been her imagination, but it was looking flatter than she remembered. Maybe it was just the way the material of his T-shirt was plastered against the skin by the drying blood, but she could almost see some muscle definition. Was he going to a gym or something?

  ‘I thought you rugby players wore gum shields,’ the doctor said as she cleaned the wound with a pad of cotton wool. She kept dabbing the cotton wool in a kidney dish filled with something antiseptic. Thin strings of bloody liquid began to swirl around in the dish, forming shapes that came together and apart.

  ‘They fall out.’ Rhys winced as she patted the wound. The tooth-marks were livid against white skin now. ‘By the time the training ends the ground is littered with gum shields. We have to send a boy out to collect them up at the end of the session. We pay him ten pence a set.’

  ‘Right. I’m going to give you an anti-tetanus shot,’ the doctor said, as if she hadn’t been listening. ‘And then put a dressing on the wound. I’ll also prescribe a course of antibiotics, just in case. It’s a pretty clean wound, and it should heal within a couple of weeks.’

  ‘What about stitches?’ Rhys asked.

  ‘Not necessary. Go see your doctor in a week, just to check that everything’s OK. If there’s any swelling, or if the area gets tender to the touch, go and see them sooner.’

  When they got outside, it was dark. A handful of people were hanging around near where the ambulances stopped. Rhys and Gwen paused for a moment, letting the fresh air wipe the tang of the antiseptic from their nostrils.

  ‘I’d suggest going and getting a meal somewhere,’ Rhys said. He indicated his bloody T-shirt. ‘But they’d probably throw me straight out again.’

  ‘We could get a takeaway,’ Gwen said.

  Rhys shook his head. He looked away, awkwardly. ‘I don’t really want to go back to the flat. Not now. Not straight away.’

  ‘There’s got to be somewhere still open where I can get you a shirt.’ Gwen thought for a moment. ‘Department stores will be closed. Asda will still be open.’

  ‘Asda.’ Rhys winced. ‘Hardly my style.’

  ‘Hey, you want dinner or not?’

  He shrugged. ‘All right. But you’re going to have to go in and buy the stuff. I’ll loiter outside, scaring small children.’

  ‘OK. Extra-large?’

  ‘Actually…’ He paused. ‘I think just Large will do.’

  ‘Rhys, this is the kind of thing you should be saying to me but never do, but, are you losing weight?’

  He shrugged, embarrassed. ‘A little.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Cutting out carbohydrates. Cutting down on the drinking. More walking.’

  ‘Rugby practice, obviously.’

  ‘Did you like that? I thought it was quite inventive.’ A pause. ‘And Lucy recommended some tablets she’d been taking,’ he said, offhandedly. ‘They worked on her.’

  ‘Yes, we should obviously let Lucy be our role model on things involving food.’

  ‘Ouch. Point taken.’ He shook his head. ‘This still feels like a dream to me. It’s all moving too fast. I can’t take it in.’

  ‘Part of that’s the shock. It’ll pass. Tell you what – let’s get a hotel room for tonight. A treat for the both of us. We can go back to the flat tomorrow. It’s Sunday, so that still gives us a day to recover before you go back to work – assuming you’re fit.’

  ‘That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.’

  It would also, Gwen thought, give the rest of the Torchwood team time to investigate. There might be some clues back at the flat they needed to look for, something that might say where Lucy had gone. And, of course, the last thing she wanted was for her and Rhys to go back to the flat, fall asleep, and then wake up with Lucy bending over them, madness in her eyes, poised to rip their throats out.

  Threesomes like that really didn’t interest Gwen.

  ‘What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?’

  Owen laughed. The flagstones were cold beneath his crossed legs, and his vertebrae were grinding against the armoured glass behind him, yet he felt strangely comfortable. ‘I sometimes ask myself the same question. I thought I’d be well on my way to being a surgeon by now.’

  Marianne was sitting with her back against the glass in her cell, mirror image to his position. Their heads were separated by just a few inches of space. He could almost feel the heat from her body through the glass. Almost.

  ‘Was that the big life plan?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, I thought so. Seven years of training and I still had it in my sights. Spent a year as a junior houseman at Cardiff Royal Infirmary. Then I blinked, and when I looked again it was gone.’

  ‘And you ended up here.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He looked around, at the crumbling bricks and the lichen. At the rusted metal and the trickling water. ‘I ended up here.’

  ‘So you were at the Infirmary, but you’re not Welsh, are you?’

  He laughed. ‘You can tell?’

  ‘The accent.’

  He paused. Thinking. ‘Yeah, I’m from the East End. Plaistow. Terraced houses and council estates and old pubs. You could hear the Hammers playing at home from the back bedroom. Big cheer whenever they scored. Big groan when the goal went against them. I used to lie there and listen, Saturday afternoons. Used to make up my own commentary, as well.’

  ‘So why did you go to medical school?’

  Good question, and one he tried not to think about too often. ‘Most of my friends ended up as car mechanics or estate agents. I could see all that ahead of me, and I couldn’t face it. I wanted to do something that meant something. And then…’<
br />
  ‘Go on,’ she said softly.

  ‘And then my dad died. Just upped and died. We found him in the bedroom one morning, slumped against the wall. He was wearing his shirt and his boxers and he had one sock off and one still in his hand. He looked… he looked like someone had said something to him that he couldn’t quite hear, and he was trying to work out what it was. One of the arteries in his chest had just given way. Aortic aneurysm, it’s called. I’ve done all the lectures, and I’ve seen photos in textbooks, and I’ve conducted autopsies of people who’ve died that way, but for me an aortic aneurysm will always be my dad, sitting there, one bare foot, and frowning.’

  His face was wet. Tears were slipping from his eyes and spreading out across his cheeks leaving coldness behind. He hadn’t even realised he was crying. The grief was something separate from him that his body could get on with while he was talking.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marianne said.

  ‘And that’s why I became a doctor.’

  ‘So you could save people like your father?’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘So I could stop the same thing happening to me.’

  Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Then: ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Tell me about Tapanuli fever.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Tapanuli fever. This thing I’ve got.’

  For a moment the flagstones seemed to tilt under Owen’s backside. He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Then he remembered. Tapanuli fever. He’d told her she’d been infected with a tropical disease and she was in an isolation ward.

  ‘Oh, yeah, Tapanuli fever. Used to be known as the Black Formosa Corruption, back in Victorian days. Endemic to a few small regions of… er… South America. Argentina. I’m guessing that someone in Cardiff’s just got back from doin’ missionary work out there or something.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  Not surprising, considering he’d made it up. ‘It’s very rare. Like Ebola. Nobody’d heard of that until there was a sudden spate of deaths.’