Another Life t-1

by Peter Anghelides

  ‘I understand the human need to survive.’

  ‘You’ve surrendered that right,’ said Jack. ‘Give me those fuel packs or I’ll shoot you where you stand.’

  Another crash of lightning. Jack saw that Megan was half-hidden by the scaffolding poles now.

  ‘Get back out here,’ he told her.

  She slid further behind the scaffolding.

  Jack lowered the muzzle of the revolver, squeezed the trigger, and shot Megan through her right foot.

  The report from the weapon was shattering, echoing off the bare concrete walls. Megan shrieked in shock and anger and pain. She half-spun around the scaffolding pole, lunging for a cross-bar as the shot twisted her around. The briefcase dropped, bounced on one corner, and fell by the far edge of the platform.

  ‘Get back out here,’ Jack repeated slowly.

  Megan had regained her balance. She shuffled reluctantly forward again, whimpering. Her right shoe was a ruined mess of leather and blood. She couldn’t put weight on it, so she slid down and sat on the wooden planks of the external platform. It was a defensive posture, but Jack knew it made her more dangerous, because she knew she was completely cornered.

  ‘I only want to refuel my ship and leave Earth,’ she pleaded. ‘Let me go.’

  ‘Can’t do that.’ Jack moved closer, raising the gun to aim at her head again. ‘Look at what’s happening already. Your ship’s causing this typhoon. Launching it would generate a tsunami that would barrel down the Bristol Channel and out into the Atlantic. On the bright side, I grant you, that would wipe out Bristol. But you know I won’t let it happen.’

  Megan stretched out a tentative hand, and tugged the briefcase towards her from where it balanced precariously at the edge of the platform. Even this small effort made her grimace in pain. She flicked the catches at the top, and lifted the lid.

  Jack stepped towards her. But as the lid lifted, his Geiger counter started to crackle and spit its radiation warning. Jack hesitated briefly, and that was enough to allow Megan time to reach into the briefcase and bring out two foil-wrapped items. If the Geiger counter on his hip hadn’t been rattling its warning sound, he could almost have believed that Megan was holding a couple of bars of chocolate.

  Megan looked up at him. ‘You’re going to help me.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘It wasn’t a question. Give me the revolver, Jack. And then you’re going to escort me back to my ship, or I’ll throw these things into the street and contaminate the whole area.’

  Jack peered down at her pityingly. He’d taken something out of his greatcoat pocket with his left hand. He held it up so that she could see it in the flashes of lightning. ‘Radiation sponge. It’s absorbing the stuff right now.’

  Megan took a deep breath. Considered her options. Slowly raised her hands above her head. It wasn’t a gesture of surrender.

  ‘Then I’ll slap these things together. The explosion will spread radioactive fragments so far across this city that you won’t be able to mop it up with a thousand of those things. Ten thousand.’

  ‘It’ll kill you too.’

  She was smiling again now. ‘I have options.’

  ‘And you’ll have no fuel.’

  ‘I’ll start again. And I’d like to tell you that I’ll see you again, Jack. Except that you won’t survive the explosion.’

  Her hands moved apart.

  Jack fired as she brought them together. They never met.

  The shot took her above the left eyebrow. Her head jerked back, and the movement threw her hands forward. The fuel packets spun from her grip, and hit the wooden walkway with a clunk.

  Megan’s upper body continued to fall back. The weight carried her over the edge. For a moment it seemed like the green netting behind her would hold her up. Until a gust of wind lifted it, and she slid off the platform and into the plastic debris chute.

  A sequence of clanks and thuds slowly faded as Megan’s body bounced and rattled down the chute. It tumbled down eight storeys and crashed into the skip at street level. Jack listened for further movement, but all he could hear was the steady drumbeat of the rain outside and the rumble of thunder.

  In the medical suite at the Hub, Gwen was startled to see movement in the bed. Owen’s eyes snapped open. He looked around wildly, struggling to rise from the pillow. His eyes widened as he took in his surroundings.

  ‘Hey, hey.’ She hurried over to the bedside to comfort him. The bedroom was calm, the silence broken only by the elevated bleeping of the monitors, and the hum of a vacuum cleaner from the corridor outside. ‘It’s OK. You probably weren’t expecting to be here when you woke up, eh?’

  ‘I’m in…’ He struggled with his words and thoughts, as though he was coming back to full consciousness. ‘I’m in the Torchwood Hub?’

  ‘Yes. Hang on, I’ll get you a fresh glass of water.’ She went over to the basin to wash and refill his glass. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said from behind her. ‘So much better than I thought was possible.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  No one ever brought the Hoover up here, thought Ianto. How difficult could it be? The lift by the reception area had a stop on this floor, otherwise how would they get patients in and out. And OK, some of the layout in the Hub might be a bit idiosyncratic, based as it was on rebuilding existing underground vaults from Victorian times under the cover of the Tiger Bay redevelopment — if only the AMs in the Welsh Assembly knew why their Senedd building had really run so wildly over budget.

  He’d have thought that everyone in Torchwood could agree that a medical suite should be spick and span, it was only hygienic. But it fell to Ianto, as usual, to lug the vacuum cleaner all the way up from the junk room in the basement and run it over the dusty carpets of the medical area. Not that any of them would thank him, mind. Nor was it likely that a single one of them would even notice. He might as well be invisible, for all the attention they gave him. Though that sometimes had its advantages.

  He had just switched the vacuum cleaner off, in the middle of changing one of the attachments, when he heard a glass and metal crash from the nearest bedroom. Gwen’s voice cried out in alarm.

  Ianto shoved the vacuum cleaner aside with his foot and charged through the door. It wasn’t locked, so he stumbled a couple of feet into the room before regaining his balance.

  On the far side, by the basin, Owen was embracing Gwen. A broken glass and a scattered pile of toiletries lay on the floor at their feet. He had his arms wrapped around her from behind, and was trying to press his face into the back of her neck.

  ‘Oh,’ muttered Ianto, and started to back out. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise.’

  Gwen twisted, and managed to elbow Owen in the side. He doubled over sideways, and his grip on her loosened.

  ‘Get him off me!’ Gwen yelled at Ianto.

  The back of her neck was scraped. Owen had been attempting to bite her.

  Owen straightened up, and weighed his options. He feinted to the right, and then leaped at Gwen again, pushing her head over the basin and into the mirror above it. The glass splintered.

  Ianto took two steps towards them, and swung the long metal Hoover attachment in a low arc that connected with the small of Owen’s back. Owen whirled around, snarling. His eyes narrowed at Ianto. Focused on the Hoover attachment.

  Ianto was considering delivering another blow, to Owen’s head perhaps, when Owen took the initiative and shoulder-charged him. Although Owen was a lot smaller than him, the movement took Ianto by surprise and he crashed over a drugs trolley, rolling onto the floor. By the time he had regained his feet, Owen had fled the room and slammed the door behind him.

  Gwen had slid down the wall by the broken mirror. She sat there, winded and shocked, looking at the chaos of the room. Ianto went over to her. She had a cut just above her hairline that, as scalp injuries do, was bleeding heavily, but was less serious than it looked. The gnawed mark on her neck had just broken the skin too, and her cloth
es were bloodied. Ianto hunted around for sterile wipes and some pressure dressings.

  The sheets and blankets were rumpled where Owen must have leaped up. Ianto stripped them back completely, and got Gwen to come over to the bed where he could position the bedside light and examine her wounds. Gwen winced as he wiped the blood away.

  Ianto sat beside her, one hand on her forehead and the other gently against her neck. When Toshiko came into the bedroom, she saw them on the bed together and backed out immediately. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise,’ she said, and closed the door.

  Two seconds later, Toshiko had obviously thought a bit more about it. The door opened again. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said, ‘where’s Owen?’

  Jack waded downhill to the phone box. For a moment, he thought he might struggle to find the right change to make a call. Would anyone accept the charge at Torchwood if he called collect?

  With no signal from any mobile, he needed a landline to make urgent contact with the Hub. He’d spotted the box as he crested the hill of the side road. The SUV was still visible, clear of the water that was swirling around this lower-lying road. The cold water eddied around his knees and soaked through his trousers.

  Ianto eventually answered the call.

  ‘What kept ya?’ asked Jack. ‘OK, so the system wouldn’t have recognised this number. I’m using a payphone. And I’m practically up to my ass in water.’

  ‘Right,’ said Ianto. ‘The whole Bay area is flooding, too. The office is underwater.’

  ‘I tracked Megan Tegg down to the Levall-Mellon building,’ Jack explained. ‘Jeez, if any more people are gonna fall off there, we should start selling tickets. Oh, and I had a messy passenger in the car, Ianto. Do you know a good valet service?’

  Ianto wasn’t responding to the banter as he usually did.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Jack asked. The pips started to sound on the phone line. Jack cursed — that was never three inutes, there had to be a fault somewhere. He grabbed for the spare change that he’d lined up on top of the payphone. Half of it slipped through his fingers and into the water. He managed to insert one coin just in time.

  ‘Gwen and Toshiko found Owen, and brought him back. They thought he was injured, but he’s woken up and attacked Gwen. Tried to bite her in the neck. We think he’s being controlled by one of those devices inserted in his spine.’

  So that’s why Megan was so placid at the end. ‘She had options,’ remembered Jack.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Sorry, Ianto. Thinking aloud. You’re right. Owen is not himself. He’s being controlled by the same thing that took Guy Wildman and Anthony Bee. Are Gwen and Tosh OK?’

  ‘Yes. They’re tracking him down.’

  Jack could hear a muttered conversation somewhere in the background.

  ‘They’ve located his mobile signal in the basement. Our internal network’s still up.’

  ‘OK, Ianto. Our problem now is that the thing controlling Owen knows everything he knows. So it knows its way around the Hub. It won’t need the fuel cells once it works out it can harvest the materials we’ve got down there.’

  Jack thought he heard Ianto say, quietly but distinctly, ‘Oh, God.’

  No time for this, thought Jack. Need to make things safe. ‘Stay with me, Ianto.’ Steel in his voice now. ‘Be careful. You got it cornered. It has nowhere else to go. No more lives left.’

  A cold feeling ran right through Jack. Maybe it was the flickering intensity of the lightning that transformed the falling rain around the phone booth into strings of diamond brilliance. Maybe it was just the relentlessly increasing water around him, which had now risen up his thighs. He watched it slap against the glass insides of the phone box. From the outside of the phone booth, a passer-by might mistake this for a David Blaine trick. Would the magician escape the rising water in time?

  ‘Hello? Are you still there, sir?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry Ianto. I’m coming back in. You and Tosh, concentrate on finding Owen. Have Gwen meet me at the base of the water tower with scuba gear.’

  ‘Scuba gear?’

  ‘Yeah, coupla sets. And-’

  The sound of the pips interrupted him again. Jack yelled urgently but clearly over them. ‘Find Owen. You cannot let him outta the basement. Subdue him if you can. And Ianto…?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Kill him if you can’t.’

  ‘Sir…?’ He detected a note of incredulity in Ianto’s voice.

  But the line had gone dead.

  You didn’t expect to be so hungry, so badly, so soon. It clutches at your stomach, and your limbs ache. You’ve seen enough junkies sweating it out in the confines of an A amp;E to recognise addiction. The tremendous high. The hedonistic rush. But the brain develops a tolerance, and it demands more and more.

  You thought about this when you were Megan. Now you’ve got another doctor’s perspective on the matter and, better still, you’re a doctor who has significantly more medical familiarity with alien organisms. Through Bee and Wildman, Applegate and Tegg, you’ve learned that the craving that wrenches your guts is now more than just a biochemical process in the brain, it’s a dependency.

  Your undergraduate tutor called it ‘the interaction of opportunity and vulnerability’. If she asked you now, you could make her proud by describing it as a function of the cortico-mesolimbic dopaminergic system. But nothing you said to her could convey the consuming, overpowering, blinding urge to kill and devour and satiate that animalistic need. To satisfy the yearning any way you can. And to indulge, too, the dark thrill of the chase.

  Behind that is the sheer excitement of being here at all. You are starting to realise where you are, what the potential is. No wonder the others feared and hated Torchwood. With what you know now about the history of the organisation, the people who work here, the contents of the vaults, there is even more to strike terror into their hearts.

  Gwen and Toshiko and Ianto are searching for you. You’ve covered your tracks well. Your mobile phone is concealed in the cells, because you know that will be standard procedure for tracking you through the building. So long as you can stave off that gnawing hunger, you can rifle the inventory in Jack’s office for technology to power or repair the ship. Maybe even Bruydac technology, who knows. The others will be too busy in the cells to stop you.

  Especially since you released the Weevil.

  Whenever you’ve stared into that animal’s eyes before, you’ve known that its one desire is to kill. Three weeks ago, you and Toshiko visited the cells and looked at the thing, apparently asleep on its cot in the far corner of its grubby enclosure. But when you both approached the security glass that encased it in the cell, the creature scented you both through the air holes. The nostrils twitched, and the arched, deep-set eyes flickered open in anticipation. ‘This one puts the “evil” into “Weevil”,’ Toshiko told you then.

  Well, when she locates your mobile down there, she’ll have a chance to find out for herself how evil that animal really is.

  The walk-in safe that dominates one side of Jack’s office is sealed. Only Jack has the key. There’s nothing of use below the hatch in the floor. There’s a kind of daring to your actions. You’d never have attempted this kind of break-in before. Such a pity that all you’ve unearthed with your new-found bravery is a heap of confidential paperwork and two bowls of fresh fruit.

  It’s the fruit that sets you off again. Thinking of food. Your guts ache, and the familiar appetite reasserts itself. You slam your fist against a filing cabinet, but even the pain of that doesn’t distract from the urge to feed once more.

  You stagger out of the office, reeling with the longing. It’s impossible to distract yourself with a calm medical analysis. No chance to dispassionately recall how there are modified ependymal cells in the choroids plexus, when your whole self is aching to sink your teeth into Gwen’s spine and chew and grind until you’ve breached the final barrier of the meninges to drink down the salty dregs of her cerebrospinal fluid.
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br />   In the Autopsy Room, you’re almost unable to control your drooling. Even the stained tray where you conducted Wildman’s post-mortem is setting you off. On the instrument rack you find tools — a bone saw hangs beside the duralinium enterotome, the bulb-ended scissors that you use for cutting through intestines. There’s a small box of curved flat-sided Hagedorn needles. And beside that, the hooked hammer with which you pull the calvarium from the lower portion of a severed skull. Why not take some of these with you? You can use the Stryker saw to cut through the skull, and get at the spinal fluid without the usual mess and fragments of bone in your mouth.

  Convenience food. You could strike Gwen down, and then open her up like a packed lunch.

  Suitably equipped, you set off for the lower levels.

  Gwen didn’t like sitting alone in the Hub, not at the best of times. This was worse, sitting by a computer terminal in the Hub while Ianto and Toshiko tracked Owen through the basement. At least she could guide them while she waited for Jack to return. She watched their identification icons slide silently across the computer schematic that showed the labyrinth of interconnecting tunnels that criss-crossed the Torchwood basement.

  At first, the sound of their voices over an open channel made her feel less alone. Then she decided that Owen would also be able to hear them describing their progress. When Gwen brought this up, Toshiko considered restricting the broadcast to a point-to-point message between them and the headset at the terminal where Gwen sat, but on further reflection decided that Owen was just about smart enough to hack into that if he wanted.

  ‘Doesn’t that apply to these icons too?’ Gwen asked. ‘If I can track you on the schematic…’

  There was a further silence from Toshiko. ‘You’re right,’ she said eventually. ‘He’s a sneaky sod. Did I mention that he breached our firewall with that virtual reality game?’

  ‘Only seven times.’

  ‘I am so going to slap him when I find him. OK, Gwen, we’ll reconnect if we need to. Ianto, you need to switch off your mobile. Now.’ Toshiko’s line cut out. The two identification icons on the schematic faded away into nothing.