Nobody Knows was heading straight towards the pram and he had a gun in his hand. Gwen observed that it was an exact replica of the one she’d confiscated earlier. She turned and ran after him. Gwen couldn’t quite believe what she was thinking – surely no one would dream of hurting an innocent baby?
But apparently, on some level, she could all too easily believe this, judging by the breathless speed with which she ran, and the force with which she tackled Nobody Knows, jumping on him from behind, slamming him to the ground. Before he could catch his breath, she was handcuffing him with the plastic ‘zap straps’ she carried. She sealed the straps around his wrists with painful tightness. She could see track-mark scars on his arms and realised he was at best an ex-user of much worse merchandise than the stuff he’d been selling.
She stood up, panting, as Nobody Knows cursed her in a ceaseless stream of inventive profanity. Gwen looked around and saw the chromed Colt revolver lying on the ground and, with a certain sense of déjà vu, picked it up, checked the hammer, and pocketed it. She turned back to look at the fracas. It seemed Jack had things under control, although he was sensibly making no effort to intervene between Pam Feerce and her three assailants. Instead he and the other, now surrendered, gang members were just watching the trio being savagely beaten by the girl.
Behind Gwen, Nobody Knows I’m a Lesbian was still swearing. She did her best to ignore the sound. And as she did so, what she heard instead was an oddly soft, sonorous voice saying, ‘Thank you.’
She turned and looked around, but there was no one nearby. Inside the supermarket there was a clump of onlookers, avid, frightened faces pressed to the windows. But they were staying well out of it. And behind her was Jack and the gang members and the fight. And at her feet was the handcuffed Nobody Knows.
But there was no one else nearby. No one except. . .
Gwen went over to the pram and stared down at the baby lying there. He smiled, drool running down his chin, and stared up at her with his bright blue eyes and said, ‘Thank you, Gwen.’
‘No, really, thank you,’ said the baby. ‘He was running over here planning to put a bullet in me. Or at least, to threaten to do so. In any case, he intended to pull me out from under my nice warm blanket and wave me around in his big smelly hand while he pressed that nasty cold gun to my head. Altogether, an unpleasant prospect.’
The baby wasn’t moving his mouth as he spoke. Instead, his words seemed to form spontaneously in Gwen’s mind, like soap bubbles swelling and bursting and vanishing in a softly echoing space just behind her eyes. She rubbed her head and stared at him.
‘But you saved me from all that,’ said the baby.
‘You’re talking to me,’ said Gwen, speaking out loud. ‘Inside my head.’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
The baby said, ‘Well it helps that you are receptive, and also that I’m not human.’
‘Not human?’
‘No indeed. I came here through what you call the Rift. Was brought here, rather. By my. . . mother.’ There was a tremulous hesitation on this word that caused Gwen’s own tear ducts to fill. It was as if the baby’s feelings were pouring into her mind along with his words.
Her own voice trembled with emotion as she spoke. ‘She brought you here – and left you?’
‘Yes. To use an image from your own memory, I was like the baby you once saw, found by your police colleagues, a baby who had been left abandoned in a carrier bag.’
Gwen was jolted by the mention of the incident. It had taken place five years earlier and had caused quite a stir at the time. The baby had been found abandoned in a churchyard. Luckily it had survived several hours of exposure and had later been successfully fostered. She remembered how there had been a pathetic bundle of five pound notes in the bag with the baby, like a bribe to the gods by some poor desperate mother asking whoever found the bag to take care of her child.
‘Yes, exactly,’ said the baby. ‘That’s why I chose that particular memory, for its aptness. Because I, too, was left with something. When my mother abandoned me and returned through the Rift to our homeworld, she left behind a “bribe”, as you call it. Though it was not money. Something far more useful.’
‘The gun?’
‘That’s right, a Torrosett 51 binary heat-cannon. And since you’re wondering, I instructed Pam to take only one of the guns and leave the other one behind. After all, who needs more than one of those things?’
Gwen shook her head, trying to absorb this information, or perhaps trying to shake this strange voice out of it. ‘You’re an alien,’ she said.
‘Yes, the name of my race would be meaningless to you, as indeed would be my own name. But, associating thoughts and sounds that have similar emotional weightings for you, you could call me Czisch.’
‘Czisch?’ repeated Gwen.
‘Yes, and you are Gwen, but I will call you Mummy!’
‘Mummy?’
‘Yes, I like you better than the other one. You are for me what I believe your people would term an upgrade. Yes, I will let go of the other one and take you. I think you are a splendid choice for Czisch. And right now Czisch needs comfort!’ The voice became suddenly shrill and troubled. ‘Needs picking up! Bad man nearly hurt me! Pick me up!’
Gwen moved without thought or hesitation to the pram and scooped up the small, warm, living bundle. She held the baby to her face and breathed its intoxicating smell. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Don’t cry, poor baby. Everything’s all right.’
Pam Feerce had finished very thoroughly beating up the three dealers and now stood panting over their recumbent forms.
Jack was just trying to work out the best way of tackling her himself when all at once the girl wavered on her feet and collapsed. He couldn’t believe his luck. In fact, at first he suspected a trap. But she lay convincingly unmoving for some seconds, so he checked the handcuffs on his prisoners and left them where they were sitting, then moved forward to inspect her.
Pam stirred as he put a hand to her face and opened her eyes.
‘It let go of me,’ she said. And then her eyes filled with tears and she began to sob. She reached up for Jack, and before he could stop her she had wrapped her arms tightly around him, clinging and weeping. Pam Feerce seemed to have changed from an unstoppable fighting machine into a wilting flower, and it was a transformation which he didn’t understand, though he wholeheartedly endorsed it.
As her tears soaked the lapel of his greatcoat, he looked around, a trifle embarrassed, to see what Gwen was up to. She was standing by the pram and holding the baby. Jack grinned. Typical.
But he relaxed now, and let the girl go on crying on his chest.
Everything was under control.
At least, that was what he thought until the girl stopped crying and said, ‘Thank God. It’s let go of me at last. I couldn’t stand it. Like being a prisoner in my head.’
She stared up into Jack’s face, imploring him to understand. He nodded as if he did, while he tried to piece together what she was saying.
‘I’m never going back. Never going back.’
‘That’s all right,’ he said. Automatic soothing words, while his mind raced. ‘You won’t have to.’
‘I couldn’t. I won’t. I won’t let it get me again. I’ll kill myself. I would have killed myself before if I could. But it wouldn’t let me. I was its slave. It made me do things. It was controlling me.’
Jack felt a chill as he began to realise what she was talking about.
‘It even controlled me while it was asleep. Like a big iron fist holding my mind. I would have done anything to get away from it.’
Jack stared at her.
‘I found it,’ she said. ‘I heard it crying in the bushes behind the Red Hand. I was coming home from school. Someone had just left it there. I couldn’t believe it. I picked it up. That was the moment. I kept going back to that moment in my mind. Trying to change what happened. But I couldn’t change anything. It was too late. I pi
cked it up. And then it had me.’
She looked over Jack’s shoulder at Gwen.
‘And now it’s got your friend.’
Jack activated his earpiece and called the Hub, keeping his eyes on Gwen and the baby. She was holding the baby in one arm, with the expert air of someone who was long experienced in so doing. With her other arm she had reached into the blankets in the pram and was probing them, looking for something. There was something strange about the way she moved, about her body language. With a small feeling of sickness, Jack realised it didn’t look like Gwen at all.
‘I got free of it!’ said Pam Feerce, her voice began to quaver with renewed tears. ‘And I’m never going back. Never going back.’
He ignored the girl as he heard Ianto come onto the line.
‘Ianto,’ he said, ‘get over here.’
‘What’s up?’
Jack glanced at Pam Feerce, now kneeling sobbing on the ground. ‘We worked out who was killing the drug dealers. Though it looks like self-defence instead of vigilantes or rival gangs.’
‘And did you find the gun?’ said Ianto.
‘Yes.’
‘Where was it?’
‘In a baby’s pram.’
‘Well that was original, anyway,’ said Ianto. ‘You detected it with your wrist-strap?’
‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I’m looking at it now.’
By the supermarket, Gwen had drawn the heat-gun out from under the blankets in the pram. It was an exact replica of the one back at the Hub. As Jack watched, she activated the gun so that it came to life and a searing red column of light poured out from its muzzle. Then, still holding the baby in one arm, she nonchalantly aimed it at the double-decker bus.
The red beam hit the yellow metal of the bus’s roof with a searing noise like spit on a griddle. It caused a long line across the bus’s roof to blister black, then turn molten red, then split open in a blaze of white sparks.
‘You see,’ sobbed Pam. ‘She knows how to use it. He’s showed her, just like he showed me. He made me take it home with him and he taught me how to use it, taught me all about it, all in a flash in my head.’
The double-decker fell noisily apart, sheared open at an awkward angle, like a giant slice of cake being cut. ‘Get over here as quick as you can,’ said Jack to Ianto.
‘You have no idea what it was like,’ moaned Pam tearfully, kneeling on the ground at Jack’s feet. ‘My life was gone. It stole my entire life.’
‘Right,’ said Ianto in Jack’s ear.
‘But before you leave,’ said Jack, ‘there’s one thing I need you to do.’
‘Nice, nice, nice,’ cooed the baby in her mind.
‘There,’ said Gwen. ‘Everything’s all right.’
‘Czisch needs feeding!’ shrilled the baby. ‘Hungry hungry hungry. Milk milk milk.’
‘We’ll go into the supermarket and get you something.’
‘Yes, get me something!’
Gwen settled the baby back into the pram beside the heat-gun, carefully smoothing his blanket over him, and pushed the pram towards the supermarket. Inside she saw people scatter at her approach. She ignored them. She only had eyes for him, her gurgling baby boy.
The automatic doors whispered apart as she wheeled the pram inside.
Instead of taking a shopping cart, she used the pram itself, loading items into it, careful not to disturb the little person lying inside. She selected nappies and baby wipes and food, a great deal of baby food of every description. A distant part of her mind registered how absurdly high the price of everything was in here. But she ignored that; obviously it was not important. The important thing was getting lots of food and feeding her baby.
‘Food food food,’ said the cooing voice in her head. ‘Eat eat eat.’
‘Soon baby, soon,’ crooned Gwen. She pushed the pram down the aisle, away from baby food, towards the checkouts. As she did so the doors of the supermarket opened and someone came in. Two people. Two figures that she recognised. Or thought she should recognise.
They were two men. One wore a military greatcoat. The other was smartly dressed in a business suit. They looked familiar. The one in the business suit handed the one in the greatcoat a sheet of paper. He accepted it and began to fold it.
They were looking at Gwen.
She realised that in some distant part of her mind she knew their names. But she didn’t bother trying to remember. It wasn’t important. They weren’t important.
But their importance suddenly swelled when the one folding the paper stopped folding it and threw it into the air. It was a paper plane, although Gwen couldn’t have given a name to the object as it sailed through the air. All her attention, her entire mind it seemed, was given over to watching the paper plane, following and anticipating its trajectory. It was coming towards the baby. Her baby. An object falling through the air. At her baby. Nothing must come near her baby. Not unless she knew it was safe.
She had no trouble snatching the paper plane out of the air before it landed. Her reflexes were lightning fast. Her every sense was keyed fine and sharp. She stared at the paper, crumpled in her hand. It had a photograph printed on it.
A man’s face.
Even crumpled as it was, the face was recognisable.
‘I’m hungry!’ shrilled the baby’s voice in her mind. But, for the first time, Gwen found herself able to ignore it. She smoothed the paper in her hands. The face from the photograph smiled up at her.
‘Hungry hungry hungry!’ came the voice in her head, redoubled in volume and intensity. It drove out the name that was forming in her mind, in response to the picture she held in her hand. But the face kept staring at her. And the name came inexorably back.
‘Rhys.’
The baby started wailing stridently in her head. But Gwen ignored it and kept focusing on the photo and the name. She had a strange certainty that they were important. Vitally important.
And, as she concentrated, the baby’s voice grew fainter and the face and name became more familiar. Memory started to come back, flowing like blood into a numb limb.
And with that flow came identity, and consciousness and control. Gwen turned away from the pram, where the baby was still screaming. But now it was wailing aloud, and it was the wordless cry of all infants who have yet to acquire language.
The two young men were grinning at her as she approached. Grinning in triumph. Their names came back to her. Jack first. And then Ianto. Through the glass door of the supermarket she could see into the car park. Out there a girl was kneeling on the ground. Gwen knew she should know that young woman’s name too. But it was too soon. It was too hard for her to remember.
Or to recognise the significance of what was happening as the girl abruptly stiffened and rose from her knees, like a puppet suddenly being jerked up on invisible strings, being pulled by the controlling hand of its giant puppeteer.
Behind Gwen, the baby had stopped crying, as though it had found something to comfort it.
‘Welcome back,’ said Jack, grinning at her. ‘Nice photo, huh?’
‘Good job it did the trick,’ said Ianto.
‘I guess it really is true love.’ Jack winked at her. ‘We figured if anything would bring you back to yourself it would be Rhys. Good old Rhys.’
‘How did you know what had happened to me?’ said Gwen.
‘Pam Feerce. She told me everything.’ Jack suddenly stopped talking and all at once all three of them realised the same thing.
Pam was no longer in the car park outside. She had walked in through the automatic doors, down the baby food aisle, and was picking up the baby from its pram.
‘Oh shit,’ said Gwen.
‘That’s not good,’ said Ianto.
Even from where she was standing, Gwen could see that something was very wrong with Pam Feerce. The girl seemed to be trembling uncontrollably. As she clutched the baby in one arm, she was delving under its blankets with the other.
Jack was the first to realise what she was do
ing, and he started shouting for everybody to get out of the supermarket. After what they’d already seen, it didn’t take much to convince the staff and the few remaining shoppers to evacuate the premises. As they were hurried outside under Ianto’s supervision, Jack and Gwen remained behind for a moment.
Pam had pulled the heat-gun out from the pram and was holding it in one hand while the other clutched the baby. It was a stance identical to Gwen’s earlier. Except instead of firing the gun, Pam was staring at it, as if trying to remember something.
‘Pam,’ called Jack.
‘Go away,’ said the girl. Her voice was flat and forlorn.
‘We can help you,’ said Gwen.
‘No you can’t. Nobody can. It’s got me again. In a minute I won’t even be able to think my own thoughts.’ The girl looked at them, her face pale and desperate. ‘Get out! Now! I know what I’ve got to do.’
‘What does she mean?’ said Gwen. Her mind was still recovering from the alien grip which had recently held it so painfully tight, and it was functioning with maddening slowness.
But Jack seemed to understand. He was already dragging her out, through the automatic doors, into the car park.
‘Everybody get back!’ he yelled. ‘As far away as you can!’
He helped Gwen and Ianto disperse the crowd, and they were all moving across the street towards the Machen Estate when the explosion came, on a shockwave of hot air and flying fragments of glass. The roof of the Happy Price rose up into the air like the wing of a big black bird, an orange globe of flame rising slowly under it. There was a sound like a thunderclap that made Gwen’s ears ache.
But the noise and the conflagration seemed to clear her head. She knew what had happened. She looked at Ianto. ‘The self-destruct button,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t exactly a button,’ said Ianto.
‘Pam knew how to use the weapon, just like I did. The baby taught her about all its functions. But why. . .?’
Jack shrugged. ‘I suppose she’d had a taste of freedom and she wasn’t going back to being a slave.’
‘She’d rather be dead?’ said Gwen wonderingly. Then she remembered that iron grip on her mind. The feeling that no thought was her own, or ever would be again. To exist as a puppet always dancing to someone else’s needs and whims. A life lived in servitude. She’d experienced it for a few minutes. She thought about what it must have been like to suffer that night and day, month after month.
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