Something in the Water t-4

by Trevor Baxendale

  ‘Some kind of argument?’ wondered Gwen.

  ‘No, Jack’s right, it’s a fight,’ Owen said.

  He replayed the message. They heard a long, inhuman screech which overloaded the phone’s mike and then a series of frightened yells — the sound of a man in fear of his life. ‘That’s Bob Strong,’ Owen said. The sounds grew incomprehensible — except for Strong’s one, final word, which echoed loudly around the boardroom:

  ‘Saskia!’

  Then there was a heavy thud, followed by a long, wet ripping sound. Silence. Coarse breathing approaching the phone. A click and then nothing.

  Owen shot out of his seat and was already halfway to the stairs by the time the others ran out after him. ‘We’ll all go,’ Jack called after him. ‘Get the SUV.’ He turned to Ianto. ‘Stay here, keep an eye on Tosh, let me know the moment anything happens. Got it?’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Yeah — like if she finds a cure, I’m the first to know.’

  ‘Actually, she’d be the first to know, technically. And I’d be second. That would make you third, at best.’

  ‘OK, if she finds a cure, I want to be the third to know. Happy?’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Get onto the traffic police, clear a route to Bob Strong’s house.’

  Jack drove, flooring the accelerator, sending the SUV tearing along the night-time roads towards Trynsel. Owen sat in the passenger seat, coughing continuously into a handkerchief. ‘We won’t get there in time,’ he gasped. ‘He’s dead. Saskia Harden killed him, you all heard it.’

  Gwen sat in the back, checking the monitors linked to the Hub, massaging her burning throat. She immersed herself in the work, trying her best not to think about what was happening to her — to all of them. ‘We don’t know what’s happened yet, Owen. That’s just supposition. All we know is that he said her name. Doesn’t mean a thing.’

  Owen said nothing. He felt too ill to argue.

  Ianto had done his usual superb job with the police. The roads were clear, and Jack kept the SUV on or around 80 mph where he had to, pushing it up to the 100 mark on the longer roads.

  The SUV skidded to a halt outside Strong’s house. The front door was open.

  Bob Strong lay in the middle of the living-room floor, face up. He looked pale but peaceful. There was dried blood on his lips. Owen stooped over the body, a cursory examination confirming the worst. ‘He’s gone,’ he said, after failing to find a pulse.

  ‘This place stinks,’ said Gwen, covering her mouth as she gagged and coughed. ‘Urgh. Rotten cabbage or something.’

  Jack checked the kitchen. ‘Nothing in here,’ he said.

  ‘Wait,’ Gwen called suddenly. She pointed at the corpse. ‘I thought I saw a pulse.’

  ‘You can’t have,’ argued Owen. ‘He’s dead. D-E-D dead.’

  She looked at him, and he knew immediately what she was thinking.

  After only a moment’s hesitation, Owen knelt back down by Strong’s head and felt again for a pulse. After trying several times to find the carotid artery, he shook his head. ‘Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch.’ He withdrew his hand and, as he did so, froze. He was still looking at Strong’s neck. ‘Wait a sec …’

  ‘It moved, didn’t it?’ said Gwen. She was standing still, staring at the corpse, wanting to be wrong.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Jack.

  Owen pointed. A moment later, the flesh in Strong’s neck rippled as something moved beneath the surface. The movement caused the man’s head to sway grotesquely from side to side, like some kind of puppet. Then, suddenly, the corpse gave a huge spasm and started to cough and splutter like a drowning man.

  ‘Here we go again,’ said Jack.

  Owen stepped back, giving the corpse room to move. Jack had his gun out, covering the body as it jerked and convulsed. ‘Y’know, I kind of prefer it when the dead stay dead.’

  ‘Pot. Kettle. Black,’ Owen said.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Jack with a shrug. ‘The difference is, I do it with style.’

  Strong was climbing unsteadily to his knees. His eyes were still closed, his face grey and slack. After a moment his mouth opened and he said, ‘Owen Harper? Is that you …?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Owen swallowed. ‘I’d say welcome back, but …’

  ‘It’s Saskia,’ gasped Strong, straining to get the words out as his throat constricted and he doubled up in agony. ‘Saskia Harden …’

  ‘Where is she?’ demanded Jack.

  Strong turned, twisting violently from side to side, unable to speak or even draw breath. Then he gave an almighty cough; a loud, barking hack that sounded like the beginning of projectile vomiting but produced nothing. For a moment he continued to dry retch on his knees, head back, mouth open. Then, without warning, a sudden gush of blood ran down his chin, followed by a long, choking cry that only stopped when something rose up in his throat and filled his mouth like a plug. His jaws widened, cracked, the lips stretched back in a taut rictus around his teeth as something began to force its way out of his mouth.

  It emerged with sickening speed, like a newborn baby slipping free of the womb in a stream of fluid. Then Bob’s throat burst open with a spray of blood across the floor and the homunculus climbed free. The glistening green figure landed in a pool of gore, slipping and sliding but quickly righting itself as Bob’s corpse finally toppled backwards. The body simply fell back to the floor like a dropped glove.

  Owen, suddenly galvanised into action after watching the process with horrified fascination, drew his gun.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ yelled Jack, holding a hand out to warn him off. ‘Don’t shoot. I want it alive.’

  But the homunculus had other ideas. With a hiss it scampered across the floor, leaving a trail of red slime as it disappeared through the door.

  ‘Damn!’ Even if Jack wanted it alive, he didn’t want it to escape, so he followed the thing with his gun, firing as it went. The shots tore up long splinters of wood laminate but not one hit the creature.

  The homunculus moved preternaturally fast; by the time Gwen had followed it outside and reached the pavement, it had vanished into the night. She swore and turned back.

  Owen was examining Bob Strong’s remains where he had fallen on the living-room floor. There was blood everywhere, and the lower half of his face had been completely torn away, exposing the raw meat of his throat.

  Jack stood over the body, fist to his mouth as he began to cough. ‘Same as the Greendown man?’

  Owen nodded, indicating the gaping fissure in the man’s neck. ‘It was growing in there all the time.’

  Jack swallowed hard. ‘You said you saw something moving in his throat when you examined him earlier today. The homunculus?’

  They all stared at Bob Strong’s shattered jaws and ravaged neck. Then they all looked at each other.

  Gwen was pale and sweating. She massaged her throat and gagged. ‘It starts with a sore throat,’ she whispered. ‘Oh my God, no …’

  ‘We’ve all got it,’ Owen realised, his own hand on his neck. ‘One of those things — growing inside us …’

  ‘Not just us,’ Jack said. ‘All the people from Strong’s surgery. All the people they may have infected. All of them carrying one of those things. Incubating it. Waiting for it to …’

  ‘To what?’ Gwen asked loudly, fear making her angry. ‘To climb out?’

  ‘To be born.’

  Gwen had never felt so sick. She staggered over to the window, leaning on the sill. Dimly, she could hear Jack contacting Ianto, asking him for a situation report between coughs. On the other side of the room, Owen leaned against a wall, pale and shaking as he hacked into his hand. It came away speckled with blood.

  Then, bizarrely, the telephone rang. It was a cordless handset on the coffee table. They all stared at it as it rang again. Then Jack picked it up. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello? Is that you, Bob?’

  Jack cleared his throat. ‘No. I’m afraid Bob’s not available. Who’s ca
lling?’

  ‘Well — it’s his mother,’ said the voice cautiously. ‘I was just calling to see how he is …’

  Jack looked down at the dead man on the floor.

  ‘Mrs Strong?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m Captain Jack Harkness. We need to talk, but I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you.’

  Ten minutes later, Gwen was staring out of the window. Jack had finished speaking to Mrs Strong. Gwen had hardly dared to listen; she had been the bearer of bad news to unsuspecting relatives too many times already. It was never a good experience.

  She stood in a kind of trance, hearing Jack’s words but not listening to them. People were walking past, going about their everyday business, oblivious to the abject horror being played out in this ordinary suburban living room. Cars swished by, drivers intent on the road.

  On the pavement opposite, a severe-looking blonde woman stared back at Gwen. She was wearing a raincoat and cradling a baby in her arms. At least, Gwen thought it was a baby at first, but actually it was more like a toddler, a child perhaps only three or four years old. The child turned to look at Gwen as well, and an abrupt coldness filled her like ice water.

  It was the homunculus. The face, a parody of a human’s features, was still covered in blood and mucus. The sharp little eyes, yellow and calculating, watched Gwen from either side of a sharp, blade-like nose and a vicious little slit of a mouth. The slit opened in a smile, showing black, needle-like teeth.

  ‘Owen,’ Gwen croaked.

  He joined her at the window and saw the woman carrying the homunculus.

  ‘It’s her,’ he said. ‘Saskia Harden. And that’s her new baby.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  They ran outside, but the woman and the homunculus had already gone.

  ‘That can’t have been it,’ Owen said, shaking his head. ‘It was way too big. Two or three times the size of what we saw. That wasn’t what Bob Strong just coughed up.’

  ‘I tell you it was,’ Gwen insisted. ‘I know it was. It’s grown, even in that short a time. I could tell by the way it looked at me. By the way she looked at me.’

  ‘Saskia Harden,’ Owen spat the name out like a lump of phlegm. ‘I’ve never even met her and I’m getting to really hate that bitch.’ He coughed heavily, turning his head politely away from Gwen as he did so. When he looked back at her his face was grey and his eyes were red and watering. ‘Come on,’ he said huskily. ‘Let’s move. We need to get this place sealed off first, though.’

  Owen collected some hazard tape from the SUV and stretched it across the front door of Strong’s house as a makeshift barrier, while Gwen called in a police SOC team to cordon the area off. She wasn’t in any mood for the questions they asked and cut them off abruptly by pulling rank. The power Torchwood gave her was usually a secret thrill, but right now it just made her feel nauseous.

  What made it worse was when the young policewoman on the other end of the phone line started to cough, apologising immediately afterwards. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Must be that flu thing. I think we’re all coming down with it … They say it’s nothing to be alarmed about, but they don’t tell us anything really. I’ve seen the TV pictures, just like everyone. Of course we’re alarmed, what do they expect?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Gwen dully, as the WPC started coughing again. ‘Thanks, anyway.’

  Jack drove them back to the Hub. He had been very quiet following his conversation with Mrs Strong, listening silently to a report from Ianto.

  ‘Tosh has made some progress. She’s isolated the alien cells from her own body and matched them with those she found in the Greendown Moss corpse.’

  ‘Quelle surprise,’ muttered Owen. His head was resting against the passenger window and he had his eyes shut. His face was grey and shiny with sweat, reflecting the flashing blue lights which ran up the sides of the SUV windscreen.

  Toshiko was struggling to focus. Not the ideal thing for carrying out delicate experiments in a controlled environment. Not that any of this was very controlled. Her vision kept blurring and her hands were shaking as she adjusted the controls on the microscope. It took every ounce of her self-control to keep her mind on the job, to ignore the sound of her heart thudding in her chest, the pounding of the blood in her head. She knew she was close to finding what she was looking for, she just had to keep concentrating.

  She had to keep stopping to cough as well. She had hoped that the warm, humid atmosphere of the Hothouse would help — in theory, it should have kept the respiratory passages clear and open. It was a common and simple remedy for croup, after all. But now it felt like there was something at the back of her throat, swelling all the time, threatening to choke her, and she just couldn’t dislodge it. On a number of occasions she found herself on her knees, or lying on the floor, utterly spent with the effort of coughing.

  Then, when she finally found the strength to pick herself up and carry on, she would grab a tissue, wipe her chin, lean against the workbench and tell herself not to give up. Just carry on. Don’t think of anything else but the work.

  There was a knock on the glass door behind her. She turned around and saw Ianto; a large pot plant partially obscured his face, but she could see that he wasn’t well either. His face was pale and drawn and there was a thin rime of blood on his lips.

  ‘Why don’t you come out?’ he said through the intercom. His voice sound hoarse. ‘You need a break.’

  ‘No. Got to keep working.’

  ‘There’s no point remaining in quarantine,’ Ianto pointed out. ‘We’re all infected.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ She managed a faint smile. ‘I work better alone like this. The isolation helps concentrate the mind.’

  ‘The others are on their way back to base,’ Ianto told her. ‘They’ll be here soon.’

  ‘That’s good. Any news from the outside world?’

  ‘Nothing good. The flu story isn’t being accepted. Perhaps people aren’t as gullible as the Government hoped. They’ve changed their minds now and they’re saying it’s an isolated outbreak of a tropical disease. Nothing to worry about, no serious risk to the public, no need to panic, but they’re sending in specialist army medical teams to various locations across South Wales and England to help relieve the pressure on local doctors and hospitals.’

  ‘They’ve no idea what they’re dealing with,’ said Toshiko.

  ‘Do we?’

  In the SUV, Ianto’s voice came through, husky and pained: ‘Jack, I have a call for you. It’s the PM.’

  ‘Now?’ Jack snapped. ‘All right, put him through.’ Jack took a hand off the wheel and tried to clear his throat, which turned into a full-on coughing session before he could resume speaking. ‘Hello, Prime Minister,’ he croaked. He listened for a moment and then said, ‘No, sir, the situation is not under control. Yes, I know it’s fast becoming an emergency. And yes, Torchwood is doing everything it can to resolve the situation.’

  He listened for a minute longer, his face grim in the light of the dashboard. ‘With respect, sir, we don’t operate on those lines. If you want to flood the area with troops in NBC gear then that’s your call. It won’t affect what we’re doing. But no, I don’t think it’s a good idea. For one thing it won’t do a damn bit of good and it’ll probably start a panic … No, I should think the Home Secretary is probably safe. There is no need for him and the rest of the Cabinet to go into the secure facility … Oh, you already are. OK, well you sit tight, sir, and don’t worry. And tell the Home Secretary it’s probably just a cold. We’ll handle things from here.’

  Jack broke the connection and bared his teeth in feral anger. ‘Dumbass. He thinks we’re responsible.’

  ‘Us?’ queried Gwen incredulously.

  ‘The disease is concentrated around the Cardiff area and South Wales. Of course, it’s started to affect some areas in England, so now Westminster’s worried. The finger is being pointed at Torchwood.’

  ‘It must be something to do with the Rift,’ Owen pointed
out. ‘It’s connected somehow.’

  They had to cross through the Trynsel area, and Owen realised that they were passing near the medical centre. But the first thing they saw was a lot of police cars, blue lights flashing, then a fleet of ambulances. Paramedics and cops were walking around, heads down.

  ‘What’s going on?’ wondered Gwen.

  ‘We’re near the medical centre where Bob Strong worked.’

  ‘Where he first met Saskia Harden,’ Jack added.

  A policeman in a florescent hi-vis vest waved them down. Jack pulled up and opened the driver’s window. As the SUV slowed, the cop saw the word TORCHWOOD stencilled on the wing and immediately stiffened, practically coming to attention. ‘Sorry, sir, didn’t realise it was you,’ he said. He covered his mouth and coughed painfully. ‘We’re trying to cordon off the area,’ he continued. ‘So we’re redirecting traffic. Just waiting for the diversion signs, see.’

  Beyond the last police car, they could see a pair of army medical trucks, large red crosses on the khaki sides. Soldiers were pulling on white one-piece overalls and transparent plastic helmets.

  The policeman noted Jack’s look and said, ‘It’s just a precaution — leastways, that’s what they’re telling us. I don’t believe anything they say any more. Do you lot know what’s happening, sir? Only I’m from around here, and I know a lot of people who’ve got the blood cough, see.’ He reached into his pocket and produced a handkerchief smeared with red. ‘Myself included. My sergeant says I can’t go off duty, though. All leave’s been cancelled. Half the boys are sick and my missus, well, she’s very worried. We’ve got two kids, you know …’

  Jack looked up at him. The cop was no more than twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. Behind him the troops were getting their Nuclear-Biological-Chemical suits sorted. ‘Don’t worry,’ Jack told him. He smiled. ‘We’re on it.’

  The policeman waved the SUV through, and Jack accelerated towards the city centre, calling in to Ianto as he went.