Whether it was Torchwood training, or instinct, or the fact that Gwen had faced death many times before, she didn’t know. But she wasn’t dead yet and that always had to count for something.
She waited for a minute longer until she was satisfied that she was alone. It was during this period that Gwen became aware of the pain in her left ankle. As soon as she moved the pain grew worse. It must have been sprained – perhaps even broken – in the fight with the pallbearers. But she couldn’t just lie here and do nothing. She had to move. Gritting her teeth, Gwen started to crawl laboriously along the passageway.
She could hear someone breathing – long, hard, painful gasps, so loud that they must have come from someone very close. She froze. The breathing stopped. And only then did she realise that it was her own breathing she could hear.
Come on, Gwen, she told herself. Get a grip.
She clenched her fists and crawled on. The floor of the tunnel was covered in a cold sludge but she knew she had to ignore it. She had to get to the exit, get out in the open and warn Jack and Ianto. She didn’t have her mobile any more – she vaguely remembered that Ray had kept hold of it – but there was no signal this far underground, and her earpiece wouldn’t work for the same reason.
She had to get out, however difficult and painful it was.
Then she heard movement further down the passageway. There was definitely something there, a dark presence in the shadows. She stopped and glared at the gloomy shape, her eyes wide. For a split second she hoped that it was Ray, that the girl had somehow survived. But she knew in her heart that was impossible and, besides, the figure she could see was too tall.
It was a pallbearer, standing guard near the exit. It stood like the shadow of a statue, no indication that it was even alive or breathing. And there was no reason why it should be, at least by human standards. Gwen felt a little flutter of excitement in her stomach, the same world-changing thrill she always felt when in the presence of something alien to Earth. No matter what the danger, the buzz was always there.
There had been times when she had enjoyed the kick that danger brought: the sheer, unadulterated joy of facing death or injury and surviving it. That sensation could become addictive. She had never seen herself as a thrill-seeker, but she could understand the attraction. Facing down death, beating it, was better than sex. Not that she would ever tell Rhys that, but it did go some way to explain why Captain Jack Harkness was so incredibly hot.
You’re losing it, Gwen told herself angrily. Your mind’s starting to wander. The adrenalin high was giving way to delirium, and the pain in her foot was starting to add a persistent, bass-line beat to everything she thought. If she analysed the feeling properly, she knew that she would suddenly begin to appreciate just how brain-numbingly painful her ankle was. She had to take her mind off it somehow.
There was no way to get to the exit, not with the pallbearer there, that much was clear. She had to go the other way, maybe find somewhere to hide.
Very slowly, very quietly, she turned herself around. She bit her lip hard as the pain in her ankle flared with every movement, but eventually she was facing in the opposite direction and she was able to crawl away from the exit, and deeper into the shadows.
She had no idea where all the pallbearers had gone; they had simply disappeared into the passages and tunnels like rats. At last, Gwen was able to sit up and take stock of her position. She was filthy, exhausted, injured and in need of a really big vodka.
She edged further into the blackness, shivering. It was damp and unforgiving down here and she was close to panic. She had to keep calm, use her training, remember that the only way to meet a crisis was with a cool head.
A little further down the passageway she found Wynnie and Gillian.
The pallbearers had moved them. They had taken the bodies and pinned them to the walls of the passageway, opposite each other, like a pair of gargoyles. Metal spikes, slightly flared at the ends like darts, had been driven through their arms and legs to hold them to the brickwork, and two more had been driven through the eye sockets of each of them to pin back their heads. Congealed, tarry blood ran from the shattered eyes down the grey cheeks, staining the clothes like ink.
Gwen resisted the urge to vomit. She had been at road traffic accidents where the carnage had been unbelievable and kept control of her stomach; she had seen death before in many and varied forms during her time with Torchwood. And she had always kept the sick down. She refused to give in. The sight was ugly and distressing, but the physical violence didn’t affect her as much as the realisation that this abominable act had been carried out with cold deliberation by the alien beings who had come here, to her planet, uninvited.
The bodies were a warning: Come any further and the same thing will happen to you.
But Gwen Cooper didn’t back down to bullies. Never had, never would. This kind of thing didn’t frighten her, it just made her more determined than ever to put a stop to it, to do her bit to protect the human race from this kind of hostile action.
Because what Gwen saw here was nothing short of a declaration of war. Whoever, or whatever, the pallbearers were – wherever they came from and whatever they wanted – they had just bought themselves a whole load of trouble.
With a choking sob, Gwen lowered her eyes, ground her fists into the grime beneath her, and crawled onwards, further into the darkness.
THIRTY-FIVE
Ray sat on the remains of a low stone wall at the edge of the Black House.
Shock had set in after she had disconnected the call to Torchwood. The American man had sounded nice – warm, confident, in control. But it felt like a dream now. The moment she had closed the call and the mobile’s backlight had faded, the whole conversation had felt like a ridiculous flight of fantasy.
Torchwood? Captain Jack Whatever. . .?
It was ridiculous, and she would have felt ashamed if it hadn’t been for the calamitous avalanche of shock and despair that had descended on her since escaping from the crypt with her life.
With her life.
Wynnie was dead. She couldn’t comprehend that simple, incontrovertible fact. She knew it was the truth, but she just couldn’t comprehend it. Couldn’t feel it. All she knew was that a huge, boiling rock of fear and grief had landed on her chest. And it was suffocating her.
Ray had no idea how long she sat like that; time no longer had any meaning at all. A river of bad thoughts swirled through her mind, slow and murky with guilt.
She had survived. Her friends were dead. And she had absolutely no idea what to do now.
Then she heard the car engine. A big, black 4x4 slewed to a halt directly in front of her, the tyres scrunching heavily across the cracked paving.
Two men got out of the car. The first wore a serious expression and a three-piece suit. The second man was older, good-looking and wearing an RAF greatcoat. He strode purposefully towards Ray and she saw that he had a pair of the most wonderful blue eyes she had ever seen. As he approached Ray she automatically got to her feet, and a slow smile softened the man’s otherwise diamond-hard glare.
‘Ray?’
‘Yes.’
He held out his hand. ‘Captain Jack Harkness.’
His hand was as warm and dry as his voice. Ray found herself shaking the hand automatically, and a curious sense of calm seemed to rise up her arm and spread through her entire body. Just being near him was like being wrapped in warm towels. She staggered slightly, her legs almost giving way as the accumulated emotional turmoil suddenly dissipated.
‘Easy now,’ said Jack, keeping hold of her hand, supporting her. The briefest flash of a smile sent a wave of renewed strength and energy flooding through her.
‘This is Ianto Jones,’ Jack told her, nodding at the man in the suit. ‘We’re Torchwood.’
Ray looked back at the SUV. ‘Just the two of you?’
They didn’t reply. The man called Ianto had some sort of handheld device which he was using to scan the area.
&nbs
p; ‘What happened to Gwen?’ Jack asked.
‘She went down there with Wynnie and me,’ Ray said. ‘We were looking for my friend Gillian. She said she was going to meet us here.’ Ray quickly recounted the facts about finding Gillian’s mobile, the underground passages, the pallbearers. She spoke in a flat, dull voice, unwilling to let her emotions surface now. She barely wanted to think about it at all, but she knew this was a job that had to be done. Her voice gave up on her, however, when she started to recount the details of Wynnie’s death.
‘What happened to Gwen?’ Jack repeated.
He was making an effort to be patient, Ray could sense it. There was a small muscle in his jaw that she could see was twitching. She took a deep breath and tried to explain, but all that came out was a jumble of senseless words.
‘OK,’ he said, holding up a hand for her to fall quiet. ‘Let me ask you this question: did you see Gwen Cooper die?’
Ray was about to start nodding, because she was certain that she had seen Gwen die at the hands of the pallbearers – but then, in a sudden moment of terrible clarity, she realised that all she had seen was. . . nothing. She hadn’t stopped to check. She had turned and fled. And as she had run helter-skelter along the darkened passages, Ray had thought Gwen had been running right behind her. But she hadn’t followed Ray out of the Black House so she must have been mistaken. Gwen must have been killed along with Wynnie and Gillian.
That was the only possible explanation. But she hadn’t actually seen it happen, and she said so. ‘No. No, I didn’t.’
Jack Harkness nodded to himself with just a hint of relief and satisfaction, and then turned to Ianto Jones. ‘Anything?’
‘Low-level Rift activity,’ Ianto reported, still checking the PDA. ‘Faint signs of antilositic energy traces. Nothing conclusive.’
‘Shielded?’
Ianto shook his head. ‘No sign of anything like that.’
Jack turned slowly on his heel, letting his gaze take in their surroundings: the scrubby weeds, broken walls and leafless trees. The empty shell of the church. He shivered, visibly, as he returned his attention to Ray. ‘Can you feel it?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘The weight of the future,’ Jack replied. ‘Pressing down on us.’ He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. ‘You can feel it in the air. Like the universe is holding its breath.’
‘Do you really know what’s going on here?’ Ray’s voice sounded small, lost.
‘Not really. But I’ve lived in these parts for long enough to sense when something is wrong, and round here. . . it’s really wrong. Badly wrong.’
‘Can you put it right?’
‘We can try.’ Jack turned to Ianto. ‘We need to go down and take a look.’
Ianto nodded in curt agreement, switched off the PDA and turned back towards the SUV.
Ray watched him go and then turned back to Jack. ‘Are you mad? You can’t go down there. I told you – it’s full of those pallbearer people. They’ll kill you.’
‘No chance,’ Jack replied.
‘But there’s only the two of you.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Jack said. ‘We’ve brought some friends with us to help out.’
Ianto returned with a heavy canvas hold-all, a bit like a cricket bag. It looked heavy, and when he dumped it on the ground it made a harsh, metallic clank. Ianto unzipped the bag and Jack picked out a short, brutal-looking sub-machine gun.
Ray stepped back, amazed and somewhat aghast.
‘Meet my old pal the Sten gun,’ Jack said. He snapped a long magazine into the side of the stock and cocked the weapon with a loud, aggressive action.
‘This is insane,’ said Ray.
‘This is Torchwood,’ Jack replied.
THIRTY-SIX
Gwen couldn’t work out how deep she was under the Black House now, or how far she had come. The twisting maze of dark passages was now just a confusing, nightmare memory. She had crawled until she couldn’t stand the pain in her ankle any longer, and now sat against a cold, wet wall. Her jeans were soaked through, her jacket was torn and filthy, and she was starting to shake.
She felt in her jacket pocket and found a spare magazine for her gun. But she had dropped the automatic somewhere in the initial fight so the ammo was next to useless. In her other pocket she found her pencil torch. She took it out and, after a few seconds work with her trembling fingers, managed to switch it on. She kept one hand cupped over the end so that the small but powerful LED didn’t suddenly illuminate the whole area and give away her position.
Very carefully, she allowed a small, thin ray of light to seep out between her fingers. It stabbed through the darkness, caught the mud-streaked toe of her left boot. Her foot was throbbing now, sending bolts of pain right up her leg and deep into her chest.
She angled the torch beam so that it cut across the passageway, finding the opposite wall in a coin-sized spot of light. It was green, wet, shrouded by old cobwebs. She roved the light across the uneven brickwork until it disappeared into a black abyss.
A doorway, right opposite her.
Cautiously, she probed the floor with the torch. It looked like quite a wide door. Tracing the edge of it upwards, she discovered a low, arched stone ceiling stained with wide, irregular patches of moist lichen. It looked like the map of an alien world, scrawled in decay across a dark, forgotten heaven.
The old church crypt.
Wonderful.
Gwen slowly pulled herself around and crawled on her hands and knees through the doorway. Every now and again she had heard the distant sound of the pallbearers moving around in the passageways and she guessed they were still searching for her. She hoped that they were too arrogant to realise that the corpses of Wynnie and Gillian hadn’t been enough to scare her off.
She raised the pencil torch and directed it into the darkest shadow. The light fell on a smooth wall of glass, smeared with greasy marks and streaks of algae. It was some kind of tank, or container, long and low.
Like a funeral casket.
The light found its way through a clear section of the glass. At first, there was nothing to be seen but the darkness beyond. The casket appeared empty.
But then something moved inside it. Slowly, calmly, with a soft, dry rustle. An indistinct shape moved into the light of Gwen’s torch and she saw then what it was.
She didn’t scream. She couldn’t. The noise simply died in her throat, strangled by fear.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The Sten gun was clutched tightly in Jack’s hand as he reached the bottom the first flight of steps leading down into the Black House crypts. His eyes peered sharply into the darkness, but the place was deserted.
‘Quiet as the grave,’ remarked Ianto, joining him. The cold evening light seeped down the stairs after him, casting a wan grey light across his features. It didn’t make him look any better.
‘How are you bearing up?’ Jack asked him softly.
‘I’ve felt better,’ Ianto admitted. He was carrying a Heckler & Koch MP5 SMG and it looked heavy in his hands. The strap bit into the bone of his shoulder and the flesh of his neck was as white as his shirt collar.
‘I can’t do this alone,’ Jack told him quietly. ‘Just hang in there and cover my back, OK?’
‘OK.’
Jack moved forward and was swallowed up by the shadows in an instant. Sweating profusely, Ianto started after him.
When they couldn’t see any more, they switched on their torches. Ianto’s was clipped to the barrel of his MP5. Jack carried his in one hand, the Sten gun in the other.
‘Are we expecting a lot of these characters then?’ Ianto wondered.
Jack kept his reply to a whisper. ‘I don’t know. But you remember what Harold said. The Already Dead are suicide soldiers. They won’t spare us and we can’t spare them. They’re hard to kill but not impossible – we’ll just have to hit them with everything we’ve got.’
They continued along the narrow passageway and descended the next flight o
f steps. Jack’s boots squelched through the mud that lined the tunnel floor, his torchlight searching for the next level. Then, for a fleeting moment, the light struck a piece of ragged cloth that suddenly vanished, its owner recoiling from the glare with a sharp hiss.
Jack paused, crouching, shining his torch along the passage. Suddenly something grey lurched out of the darkness, a humanoid in a long, ragged cloak. The Sten gun let out a deafening rattle and the figure crashed backwards with an angry snarl.
Jack leapt down the rest of the stairs as the creature rolled to its feet. In the light of Ianto’s own torch, he could see the front of the alien’s chest, swaddled in bandages, filthy with blood. The creature’s head snapped up, the black mouth yawning open between the layers of bandages.
And then the nightmarish face caved in under a deafening fusillade of bullets from Ianto’s H&K. One moment there were the bandages, with tiny yellow eyes glittering with hatred, and the next there was just a sticky black mess, and the figure collapsed backwards.
There was another directly behind it, stepping into the light with a hiss. Jack, already on one knee, opened up again with the Sten. Tar-like blood jetted from the ragged holes in the creature’s chest and neck and it, too, fell. The creature writhed on the floor, its ragged hands clutching at the brickwork on either side of the passageway. Jack stepped over the kicking heels, put the Sten to his shoulder and aimed another burst directly into the head. The body gave a final jerk and then lay still.
The clattering echo of the automatic gunfire was still reverberating down the passageway.
‘Well, they know we’re here now,’ Ianto said, breathing hard.
‘Damn right,’ said Jack. His face was grim as he knelt down to examine the corpse. Carefully, he hooked a finger under some of the bandages which covered the face and pulled them free, shining his torch on what was revealed beneath. He winced at the sight, and quickly turned the light away. ‘The Already Dead,’ he said. ‘Worse than I thought.’
The Undertakers Gift Page 12