The Undertakers Gift

by Trevor Baxendale

  ‘But those men – the gypsy men, the pallbearers, whoever they were. They’re exactly what Rachel Banks describes in her blog.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Jack admitted. He thought for a second and then clapped his hands to signal the fact that he had come to a decision. ‘OK. Gwen, Ianto, good work. Follow it up. Get yourself down to this Black House place and take a look.’

  Gwen gathered her things together. ‘On my way.’

  ‘I’ll stay in the Hub,’ Jack said. ‘I still want to work on our friend Zero, and then there’s Kerko too. Plenty to do without sticking my head above the parapet for the Hokrala hitman.’

  ‘I was going to carry on translating the writ,’ Ianto said. ‘There’s something about it that bothers me.’

  ‘No,’ Jack said. ‘You can go with Gwen.’

  Gwen said, ‘Honestly, Jack. I can manage on my own.’

  ‘No, I want both of you to go.’

  Gwen’s stare hardened. ‘We don’t need to go everywhere in twos. I’ll be fine.’

  She turned to go, ending the discussion, but Jack wasn’t finished. ‘I said I want both of you to go.’

  She stopped at the door. ‘I can manage,’ she said firmly.

  ‘It’s not up for discussion.’

  She frowned now, with a spark of fire in her big, dark eyes. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said I want you both to go. What harm is there in that?’

  ‘I don’t need my hand holding,’ Gwen insisted. ‘And neither does Ianto. At least, not by me.’

  ‘It’s not that. . .’

  ‘Then what is it, Jack? Actually? Or do you just want us both out of the way? Is that it? Are you expecting an assassin to materialise any minute and you want us both safely out of harm’s way?’

  ‘I’m not arguing about it, Gwen.’

  ‘Well I am!’ And with that she turned on her heel and strode away.

  Ianto looked questioningly at Jack.

  ‘Go with her,’ said Jack. ‘That’s an order.’

  NINETEEN

  Jack watched on the CCTV in his office as Gwen’s blue Peugeot pulled out of the underground garage. She had used her own car and not the SUV, just to make the point. Headstrong and independent and as gorgeous as hell. Jack could picture Ianto in the passenger seat, gripping the armrests tight as Gwen hurled the Peugeot along in quiet fury. Jack smiled and shook his head. ‘Gotta love the woman.’

  The Hub was empty at last, silent save for the muted click and whirr of the computers and Rift manipulator. Jack sat quietly for another minute, recalling the mud and fear of the trenches at Passchendaele, where he had fought in 1917. He could still smell the mustard gas and hear the echo of the guns, the incessant barrage of the twenty-pounders, day and night, churning the countryside into mud. So many men died that the mud became thick with corpses, and every field gun barrage would mix the flesh and bones up with the mud again. They had ended up digging trenches where the walls were lined with the severed limbs of fallen comrades. It was the stuff of nightmares, something he would never forget.

  Nightmares.

  Jack never really slept, but he did sometimes close his eyes and rest. He could zone out, empty his mind, reach a deep state of meditation that served him as well as sleep.

  Sometimes he dreamed, and sometimes the dreams were bad ones.

  If he shut his eyes now, a vivid picture formed in his mind: a cold, desolate graveyard. The ghost of an old church looming through the mist. He didn’t know where the image came from or why, but something was putting it there. He had told Ianto that it was possible to become so attuned to a place, an environment, that one could actually sense when things weren’t right. With a time rift so close, and with Jack’s history of time travel, it meant that he was sometimes almost preternaturally aware of the subtle changes in his surroundings.

  He knew something bad was coming. Real bad. He couldn’t identify what it was, or what form it would take, but he felt as though he was standing on a precipice, overlooking the destruction of the world. And it started here, with him.

  And Gwen.

  He could see her in the graveyard, walking away from him, looking back over her shoulder and smiling. She wanted him to follow her.

  He couldn’t move. He was paralysed, unable to even speak. She laughed at him then, lightly, musically, amused by his plight.

  She sauntered through the cemetery, running her fingertips over the gravestones.

  There were other people with her now – tall, emaciated figures in shabby funereal clothes, faces blanked by old, stained bandages.

  Gwen walked across to one of them and they embraced. Jack wanted to scream, but he couldn’t even move. He felt the tears welling in his eyes as Gwen held the pallbearer’s head, kissing him deeply. And everywhere around, Jack now realised, there were corpses. He was surrounded by them, knee deep in cold, unmoving bodies. That’s why he couldn’t move. When he looked down at the nearest body, Jack saw that it was Ianto – his face was white and stiff, his mouth open and his eyes dry beneath waxen eyelids.

  Gwen was laughing again, glancing back at Jack to check he was still looking at her. She kissed the pallbearer again, his top hat falling to the ground as they worked their tongues.

  With a gasp, Jack opened his eyes and found himself back in his office. He had allowed the dream in again. He had to concentrate, resist it, focus on what had to be done.

  Something bad was coming and he had to be ready.

  TWENTY

  Jack crossed the Hub and went straight to the armoury, letting himself in through the triple security lock with cool efficiency. Inside were racks of weaponry gathered from across the globe and various times and places.

  He picked a pair of heavy SIG Sauer 9mm pistols, Torchwood-customised to take a variety of ammunition and fitted with laser sights. He took an energy lance, a Sontaran Stenk 11 pistol and a pair of AI throwing knives. He dumped the whole lot in a canvas bag and then, almost as an afterthought, picked up a fresh box of .38 shells for his Webley.

  He hauled the bag down to the firing range, a disused underground railway tunnel that had long ago been blocked off and converted into a shooting alley. Jack often came here when he was feeling tired, or confused, or just plain angry. Firing off a few rounds always helped, and, even if it didn’t, aiming a gun was a perishable skill that had to be practised.

  If someone was going to come for him, even down here in the Hub, his base, his home. . . then he would be ready. He would stand and fight.

  He warmed up the SIGs first, stripping them, loading them and firing them with easy, familiar movements. Mostly Jack stuck with his tried and trusted Webley service revolver. But he had led a life that had familiarised him with many different weapons through the years and he was as comfortable using a state-of-the-art semi-automatic like the SIG as he was with a First World War British Army officer’s pistol.

  At the end of the tunnel were some targets – cardboard cut-outs of Weevils, Blowfish and sundry other hostile aliens. Some of the targets were human. The trick was to avoid hitting those.

  The 9mm slugs tore chunks out of several Weevils and practically decapitated a Blowfish. It was good shooting, though, and strangely satisfying. He put the SIGs down when they grew too hot to handle properly. He tried the energy lance but it incinerated not only half the targets but several human cut-outs as well. Perhaps not.

  The Sontaran gun wasn’t much better. Too powerful, too brutal, short, ugly and nasty – just like its original owners. Still, it had its uses and was more controllable and easier to use than the energy lance.

  The AI knives were more fun. They were passive-telepathic trintillium blades forged with microscopic internal nano-gyros which could alter the knife’s passage mid flight. You could throw them in almost any direction, but so long as you knew exactly where you wanted them to go they’d find the target. Ideal throwing-knife if your target was hiding around a corner. They took a bit of practice and controlling, but eventually Jack could throw on
e of them the length of the gallery and let it come back to him, flipping over and over, so that he caught it by the handle. OK, so he nicked his fingers a few times but that was one of the advantages of being immortal: the cuts healed up in minutes.

  He stowed the knives and, finally, drew the Webley from its leather holster at his waist. It felt heavy and comfortable in his hand, the wooden grips worn smoothly into the shape of his palm after so many years of use. The gun boomed satisfyingly as he fired, the huge calibre bullets punching massive holes in the targets.

  The sharp smell of cordite filled the air once more and a lazy wreath of gun smoke floated around the room. But Jack could only ever smell perfume down here; a lingering memory of a blissful couple of hours spent with Gwen Cooper in her first few days on the job. Teaching her how to shoot, up close and personal, his arms around her as he altered her stance, his hands on hers, tutoring her in every detail of aiming slowly and carefully, squeezing, not pulling, the trigger. Then how to shoot quickly, from the hip, from the holster, from the shoulder, one gun, two guns, face-on, side-on, crouched, rolling, laughing. He smiled at the recollection; happy times and places indeed.

  It was funny, Jack thought, how time separated you from tragedy and allowed you to remember the good times rather than the bad. But what if, cumulatively, the bad times began to outweigh all the others? What if the times he had laughed at Owen Harper’s caustic sense of humour were replaced by the memory of him lying on his back with a large, bleeding hole in his chest? Or the memory of the brilliant Suzie Costello was replaced by the sight of her face down on the jetty, pumped full of bullets but still not dead? Or the whole Torchwood team, pre-millennium, slaughtered by their leader Alexander Hopkins, driven mad by the responsibility?

  There were people stretching right back through a hundred years that Jack could think of who were dead, and he could remember how each and every one of them had died. Had he become obsessed with death? The one thing he could never have, never experience, had become the driving force in everything he did.

  One of the first times they had used the alien Resurrection Glove to bring a dead man back to life for just a minute or two had been on a murder victim in a rain-lashed Cardiff back alley. And Jack had used those precious, stolen moments of life to ask the man what was it like? What was there? What was waiting in the darkness?

  The answer, of course, was: you really, really don’t want to know.

  And, gradually, Jack had come to realise that he genuinely didn’t want to know. Because whatever waited there, in that undiscovered country, should remain undiscovered. It was dark and endless and utterly unforgiving. And it scared him – because although he may never encounter it, he knew the people he loved more than anything else would. They always did.

  Ianto would die. He would slip out of Jack’s arms for ever one day – into the cold, black embrace of death, never to return.

  And Gwen. When Jack closed his eyes he could picture her lying on a mortuary slab, white as plaster. Those big, beautiful eyes would never open again, never see him, never understand him.

  Something moved in the doorway to the firing range and Jack snatched the Webley up in one smooth, reflexive motion, his finger tightening on the trigger as he stared down the hexagonal barrel at the intruder.

  ‘Hold it right there,’ said Jack, his voice steely.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Ianto slowly raised his hands. ‘Don’t shoot,’ he said. ‘I’ll come quietly. Or loudly. Whichever you prefer.’

  Very gradually, Jack relaxed his trigger finger. It took a few seconds before he could speak, and he used the time to let out his breath in a long hiss.

  ‘Ianto, you just came within a gnat’s lick of getting a bullet between the eyes.’ Jack lowered the revolver, gently easing the hammer back down with his thumb. He slipped the gun back into the holster and closed the flap. ‘Don’t ever do that again. You won’t get a second chance.’

  ‘Expecting trouble, I see,’ Ianto remarked lightly. He still looked pale but that might have been shock.

  ‘An assassin – remember?’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint.’

  Jack sighed and brushed angrily past him, heading for the exit. ‘I thought I told you – no, scratch that, I ordered you – to go with Gwen.’

  ‘Yes, I know you did. But she really, really didn’t want any company. And then my PDA picked this up.’ Ianto held up his portable scanner. The screen was flashing an urgent blue. ‘I set it to a random scan of all chronon-range wavelengths, linked to the main Hub sensors.’

  Ianto led Jack to a workstation where he punched up a program on the screen. He hit another key and one of the screens filled with a jagged oscilloscope of readings that matched those on his PDA.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Some kind of signal.’

  ‘Teleport?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Communications?’

  ‘Possibly.’ Ianto’s finger traced one of the more wiggly lines on the screen. ‘It’s on a multiple-phased wavelength on a very particular sub-ether frequency.’

  ‘Just tell me what it is, leave the rest in the dictionary.’

  ‘I’ve taken a series of measurements in the sub-ether series and the signal – if that’s what it is – is right up there. . .’ Ianto pointed at one of the peaks of the jagged line as it traced across the screen, ‘. . . in the active chronon range. Meaning there’s a time element to it.’

  Jack seized the implication straightaway. ‘Has it detected a temporal fusion device?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So where’s the signal coming from?’

  ‘Somewhere in the Hub.’

  Jack just looked at him. Ianto swivelled and pointed at another monitor, showing CCTV footage from the cell block downstairs. ‘Cell One, in fact. Our mystery guest, Mr Zero.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Gwen drove angrily but carefully. Now wasn’t the time to have to explain herself to some over-eager traffic cop in a bad mood. It was easy with the SUV; the police knew what it was on the whole and left it alone. But her own car was different. It was ordinary. If anything could be ordinary in her life any more. Things were getting weirder and weirder, and, bizarrely, the strange and the exotic and the dangerous had now become the staple ingredients of Gwen’s life.

  Sometimes she had to really concentrate, just to work through the ordinary, boring, domestic routines. It was easy for Jack and Ianto, they lived for Torchwood. But Gwen had a life, a real life. A home and a partner and, possibly, plans for the future.

  She didn’t intend to die any time soon, that was for sure. Jack seemed intent on protecting her and Ianto, but she didn’t need it. She’d faced some tough situations in the last couple of years but she was still here, still standing, and ready for more.

  Gwen Cooper loved Torchwood.

  She loved the excitement, the danger, the never-knowing-what’s-coming-next. She loved the alien technology, the firepower, the friends she’d made and, above all, the knowledge that she had helped to make a difference. She’d saved lives – not just one or two but hundreds, if not thousands. She’d met people from space and people from the future and aliens and monsters and all kinds of shit – and she’d still done it with a home to run and a husband to care for.

  And so sometimes she really had to concentrate, just to get the normal things done: shopping, meals, laundry, birthdays. Rhys was good but he had a job of his own and, at the end of a day, he was just a man. And men were useless at the routine, day-to-day domestic stuff. Unless they were Ianto.

  Inevitably, her thoughts would always turn back to Torchwood matters. She was worried about Jack. Jack was taking too much on his shoulders. He wanted to protect everybody and the responsibility was overwhelming him.

  She was worried about Ianto as well. He looked drawn and ill. Usually he was the very picture of health, but ever since the Hokrala situation had blown up he seemed drained and pale. But the workload had been intense in the last few months – the
re was too much for just the three of them to do, and Ianto worked so hard ‘behind the scenes’, as Jack liked to put it, to keep the Hub and Torchwood running as smoothly as possible.

  Gwen pulled the Peugeot over to the kerb and parked near some railings. She was in the vicinity of the Black House. She zipped her jacket up as she got out of the car. The sky was cold and grey and it looked like more rain was on its way. The clouds hung over the city like a threat.

  It was a strangely quiet and deserted area. There was an atmosphere: oppressive, dismal, unsettling. Gwen shivered. It was lonely here. There was an absence in the air that was almost tangible, as if Gwen could reach out and grab a handful of nothing, and feel its cold, unforgiving emptiness.

  Wrapping her arms around herself, she headed towards the Black House.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Ianto pointed the handheld PDA scanner at Zero and checked the reading.

  ‘Still nothing.’

  Jack bared his teeth in frustration. He was leaning against the cell door, arms folded. ‘I just don’t get it.’

  ‘The signal’s definitely coming from here,’ Ianto insisted. ‘From him.’

  The amorphous orange creature sat impassively on the bench, where it had remained ever since its arrival. It seemed to glow with a faint, inner luminescence, casting a strange marmalade light around the interior of the cell. Bubbles oozed lazily through the jelly as Ianto tried another scan and Jack glared at it.

  Ianto shook his head in confusion, his face bathed in the vibrant blue light of the scanner. ‘I’m relaying the readings from the Rift monitors through the PDA. They definitely register activity in the chronon range. There’s some kind of time displacement – or at least distortion – around the creature. It’s tiny, minute even, but it’s absolutely there. And it’s regular, sequential. . . definitely a signal. It’s got a rhythm.’