Slow Decay t-3

by Andy Lane

  ‘It’s their job to be dispassionate,’ Owen said, as reassuringly as he could. ‘They’re all working on this Tapanuli fever outbreak. They can’t afford to get emotionally involved with their patients.’

  ‘And you?’ She looked down at the ground. ‘Is it your job to get emotionally involved?’

  ‘It’s not my job,’ he said. ‘It’s just an optional extra.’

  ‘You’re really kind. I wish — I wish I’d met you before all this.’

  Owen grimaced. ‘If you’d met me before all this,’ he said, the words spilling out before he had time to think about what he was saying, ‘then you wouldn’t have liked me.’

  ‘But I do like you.’

  ‘There’s a barrier between us.’ He slapped his hand against the glass, making a sound that echoed through the brick arches. Somewhere down the end, the Weevil grunted, surprised. ‘I can’t get to you and you can’t get to me. All we can do is talk.’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ she said, with feeling.

  ‘You don’t understand.’ He closed his eyes, rested his forehead against the glass. ‘Look, if we were in a bar then I’d be all over you like a rash.’

  ‘Don’t mention rashes.’

  ‘You know what I mean. You’ve seen guys like me before. Whatever we say, whatever we do, it’s designed to get you into bed. That’s the way it works with me. The only reason I’m talking to you now is because I can’t get to you.’

  ‘You’re missing the point. You are talking to me. You could have walked away. Like the others.’

  ‘I know. But I didn’t want you to be scared of what was happening to you. That’s my medical training coming out.’

  ‘What changed?’

  Owen frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You said the reason you didn’t walk away was that you didn’t want me to be scared, not that you don’t want me to be scared. Past tense, not present. So what’s the reason that keeps you here now?’

  ‘I like you. I like talking to you.’

  ‘And if we’d been in a bar, and I’d taken you home, then we wouldn’t have talked and you’d never have got to find out that you like talking to me. What does that tell you?’

  He sighed. ‘It tells me that I need a break.’

  Gwen lay there for a few moments, listening to Lucy’s breath bubbling through her nose. The girl wasn’t dead, and Gwen wasn’t sure whether that was a result or a shame. Part of her wanted to reach out, retrieve her gun and place a couple of rounds through the back of the bitch’s head, just for the sheer cheek of trying to chat up Gwen’s boyfriend, but that was the adrenalin talking.

  Eventually, when she had got her breath back enough to talk, she pulled her mobile out of her pocket. Her finger hesitated over the 9, but reluctantly it moved on to the speed-dial button that got through to Torchwood. In principle, Gwen should notify the police straight away. In practice, what the hell would she tell them? Only four people in Cardiff — probably only four people in the world — could help her now.

  Ianto answered the phone.

  ‘Tell Jack that I’ve got one of these women who attack anything that moves,’ Gwen wheezed. ‘I’m over in Grangetown. Eighty-eight, George Avenue. I need the SUV and restraints.’

  ‘We’ll be there as soon as we can,’ Ianto said. There seemed to be alarms going off in the background.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Gwen asked. ‘It’s not fire alarm test day is it?’

  ‘Some problem in the cells,’ Ianto said. ‘Jack has gone to investigate. I’ll tell him as soon as he gets back.’

  Gwen rang off, and pulled herself to a sitting position at the end of the bed. Something intruded in her field of vision; she turned her head to be confronted with a foot belonging to the corpse of Lucy’s boyfriend. Most of the toes were missing: reduced to stumps. She winced. That might have been her.

  ‘Thank God for high heels,’ she muttered.

  She rooted around in her bag until she found two pairs of restraints: braided plastic loops with a ratcheted toggle that could reduce the size of the loops and couldn’t be slid back again. She put one of the restraints on Lucy’s hands, pulled together behind her back, and another pair on her feet. Let her eat her way out of that.

  While she waited for the Torchwood team to sort out their emergency and get there, Gwen searched the flat. It seemed to be balanced between chaos and order, with Lucy’s boyfriend presumably leaving mess around him and Lucy trying desperately to clear it up all the time. Part of Gwen’s mind felt sorry for Lucy, trapped in a dead-end relationship in a dead-end area of Cardiff, but the rest of her remembered the way the light had gleamed off Lucy’s incisors as they parted, ready to rip her throat apart.

  The cabinets on either side of the bed were obviously his’n’hers. The boyfriend’s one she only gave cursory attention to, but Lucy’s one was more interesting. On top of the various pieces of paper and hairclips in the top drawer was a blister pack, similar to the kind of thing that paracetamol came in but containing only two transparent bubbles. One of the bubbles had a pill in it; the other was empty. Gwen turned the blister pack over. The foil on the other side said nothing about the nature of the drug it contained. Two words were printed on it: the empty bubble was labelled ‘Start’, while the bubble that still contained a pill was labelled ‘Stop’. No ambiguity there, and no need for the kind of triple-folded instruction leaflet that most pharmaceuticals came with these days.

  Gwen slipped the pack into her pocket, and kept searching. Underneath where the pills had been was an A5 hardback book covered in a pink material. It said ‘My Diary’ on the front in big, childish letters. Gwen took it out and held it for a moment. Somewhere in those pages were Lucy’s feelings about Rhys. Fantasies, perhaps, of him doing all kinds of things to Lucy that he’d occasionally hinted at doing with Gwen but never followed through on. Gwen’s fingers curled around the edge of the cover. She could read it, while Lucy was still unconscious. There might be clues in there as to what had happened to her. There might be useful information she could take back to Jack.

  There might also be descriptions of things that had happened between Lucy and Rhys for real, things that he hadn’t admitted to Gwen.

  She threw it back into the drawer. There were some questions it was probably best not to ask, not when things seemed to have improved between them.

  Beneath where the diary had been was a flyer advertising a diet clinic: presumably the one that had helped Lucy lose so much weight. Was that what the pills were for? One to start losing weight, the other to stop. Could life really be that simple? No counting of calories, no cutting back on carbohydrates, no tedious exercise? Just two simple pills?

  Gwen took another look at the flyer for the diet clinic. It was headed ‘The Scotus Clinic’, and there was a photograph underneath the heading of a thin and youngish man with a short, well-coiffured mass of blondish hair. The blurb underneath was written in short, pithy sentences, asking questions that begged particular answers, like Do you want to lose weight and be the size you deserve to be? and Tired of not getting dates and getting passed over for promotion because of your size?

  Looking at the flyer, Gwen began to wonder. Lucy went to a diet clinic, and ended up wanting to eat everything in sight. Had Marianne — the girl they had back at Torchwood — been to the diet clinic too? Was something going on there that needed to be looked at? Jack would probably disagree — if there was no alien context then he was quite prepared to walk away, no matter how many lives had been lost or might still be lost — but Gwen still thought like a policewoman. If the Scotus Clinic was preying on young girls, screwing up their metabolisms with dodgy drugs, then they needed to be called to account. And if Jack wouldn’t get involved then she would do it herself.

  The rest of the search turned up nothing of interest. By the end, Gwen was sick and tired of sharing a room with a corpse and a cannibal. Torchwood were taking their own sweet time turning up, so she went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. />
  ‘Why don’t you like getting close?’ Marianne insisted. ‘Is it because you might get hurt?’

  Owen shook his head. He still couldn’t look at her. ‘It’s because it’s never permanent. Everything dies. Everything gets destroyed. Even love. So we just make the best of it — get our pleasure where we can.’

  ‘And what brought you to that conclusion?’

  ‘Seven years of hospital, and then this place…’ He paused, remembering his medical training: the gradual knowledge that there was nothing to humanity but flesh, blood, bone and brain, and the soul-destroying realisation of how fragile they all were. How easily broken. And then discovering through Torchwood that even the little comfort he had taken from the warmth of flesh was an illusion, that humanity was a small bubble of sanity floating in an ocean of madness.

  ‘Poor Owen.’ For a moment he thought she was being sarcastic, but her tone of voice was genuine, concerned. ‘And I thought I was trapped.’

  ‘That’s enough about me,’ he said. ‘I have my cross to bear. I’m more interested in you at the moment. You’re not showing any obvious symptoms. You’re still lucid, I can see that, but what about how you’re feeling? Any aches and pains? Any unusual tiredness? Mood changes?’

  ‘No more than usual,’ she said morosely.

  ‘I can prescribe some stuff that might help. Paracetamol if you’re feeling feverish.’

  Marianne shook her head. ‘I hate taking tablets. I’ll just ride it out, I guess.’ She paused, and wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Strange thing is that I’m hungry, all the time. My stomach seems to be churning, although that might just be the stress of being locked up here.’

  Owen looked at the pizza boxes and foil containers from the nearby Chinese takeaway that were stacked in the corner of the cell.

  ‘Seems to me,’ he said carefully, ‘that you’re doing pretty well when it comes to food.’

  Marianne followed his gaze to the boxes and containers, and frowned as if she’d never seen them before. ‘I didn’t eat all those, did I?’ she asked. ‘I couldn’t have. Not if I’ve only been here a day.’ She glanced at Owen imploringly. ‘Owen, tell me the truth — how long have I really been here?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Honestly — about thirty-six hours.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But I must have eaten ten pizzas and a shed-load of Shanghai noodles in that time. And I keep forgetting how much I’ve eaten, and I keep wanting more.’ She was breathless, almost screaming now. ‘What’s happening to me?’ She turned and threw herself against the far wall, hands pulled close to her chest, forehead pressed against the brick.

  ‘Calm down,’ Owen said reassuringly. ‘It might be something to do with the Tapanuli fever. Your metabolism might have speeded up, raising your temperature to try and kill the virus off. Speeded-up metabolism means hunger. I’ll check your temperature again. If it’s normal then I could try prescribing some beta-blockers to suppress your appetite.’

  ‘I get the strangest dreams,’ she said quietly. Her voice was muffled, as though her hands were pressed up against her mouth. ‘I dreamed I was chasing something through the city centre, and if I caught it I was going to eat it. And I dreamed I attacked a man in a bar. I was biting his face, and I couldn’t stop myself. And I think there was a pigeon as well. I tore its head off with my teeth and swallowed it. I pulled its wings off and ate those as well. God, Owen, I can’t stand these dreams. The hunger just rages through me, and I’d do anything to satisfy it. Can you give me something to stop the dreams? Please?’

  ‘I could try Dosulepin,’ he said, thinking. ‘It’s a tri-cyclic antidepressant, but it also acts as a sedative. It might take a few days to kick in, but it’s worth a go.’

  ‘Anything,’ she said. He could hardly make out the words: her voice was so muffled. It sounded like she had something in her mouth, although she’d eaten her last lot of pizza an hour ago. ‘I can’t stand it much longer. I hate it here.’

  Owen pressed his hands against the armoured glass. ‘Just hold on,’ he said urgently. ‘We’re working to find a cure. Just keep holding on.’

  ‘I don’t think I can,’ she said, voice almost incomprehensible. ‘The hunger… oh God, Owen, I’m so hungry.’

  ‘Do you want me to get more food?’ he asked. ‘Pizza suit you? Or do you want to go for an Indian this time?’

  Marianne turned around from the far wall. Her hands were held up in front of her face, and for a moment Owen couldn’t work out what was wrong with them. Her fingers were streaked red and white, and they were thinner than they should have been. And the joints were exaggerated, arthritic.

  It was the gore and the shreds of flesh that were clotting on her chin that made him realise.

  While he was talking to her, while she was talking to him, Marianne had nibbled her fingers down to the bone.

  Without thinking, he banged his hand on the control set into the inside of the brick arch. The armoured glass pivoted back into the cell with a grinding sound. Somewhere behind him, alarms went off in the Hub.

  ‘Marianne, it’s OK. Stay calm. I can help, OK?’

  Marianne stared at him, eyes bright and wide with sadness and with agony. Blood dripped from her chin and onto the white T-shirt he’d bought her only hours before.

  ‘Owen, I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

  And launched herself, skeletal hands outstretched, at his throat.

  By the time Gwen got back to the flat it was dark, and she was so tired she just wanted to fall into bed and sleep for a week.

  Ianto had eventually picked her up in Grangetown. He was alone in the SUV. When Gwen let him into the flat and noticed he was alone, she asked him where everyone else was. ‘I believe Owen was attacked by the young lady we have prisoner,’ he answered. ‘He triggered the alarm, and Jack and Tosh had to subdue her whilst he escaped.’

  ‘Subdue her?’ Gwen said, thinking back to her epic battle with Lucy, ‘How!’

  ‘Jack used a fire extinguisher.’

  ‘OK.’ She nodded. ‘That makes sense. I guess they distracted her with the freezing carbon dioxide.’

  ‘No, they beat her back with the flat end. Caused quite a mess.’

  Gwen winced. ‘Is Owen all right?’

  ‘He has some bruising.’ Ianto glanced at Gwen’s neck. ‘Looks like you’ve suffered much the same thing.’

  ‘Different attacker, but same intention, I guess. Talking of which…’

  Together they had manoeuvred Lucy’s tightly bound and still unconscious body into the back of the SUV. Ianto offered her a lift back, but she still had the car parked round the corner. Reluctantly she watched him drive off and then took a deep breath before braving the Cardiff traffic.

  She hadn’t eaten since before she set out to Grangetown, but the fight with Lucy had made her feel nauseous. The last thing she wanted was food. Now, pushing open the front door, she would quite happily have curled up on the hall carpet and slept if there was even a half-closed door between her and her bed.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Rhys appeared from the living room. The dressing on his cheek made him look like a lopsided hamster. ‘Gwen — what happened?’

  ‘What happened where?’ she said muzzily.

  ‘Your neck!’

  ‘Oh, that. I got in a fight. With Lucy.’

  He reached out to take her in his arms. She fell forwards, letting him take her weight.

  ‘Are you all right? Did you win?’

  ‘There’s no video,’ she said, eyes closed, pressed into his chest and smelling the mixture of aftershave and antiperspirant that she knew so well she could tell Rhys apart from a dozen other men in a darkened room. ‘And we weren’t fighting in mud, so you can stop getting excited.’

  ‘I’m not getting excited,’ he said. ‘I’m just worried about you.’

  ‘That’s nice. I’m OK. I’ll be even better when I get to bed.’

  ‘You need to put some antibiotic cream on those scratches. Funnily enough, I actually hav
e some you can use. It’s in the bathroom cabinet.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You’re not moving.’ His arms went around her. ‘What happened with Lucy?’

  ‘She’s in custody. In a secure unit.’

  ‘Will I have to make a statement?’

  Gwen shook her head against his chest. ‘I don’t think so. There’s obviously something wrong with her.’ She brought her hands up and pushed herself away from Rhys. ‘Get yourself to bed. I need something warm to cuddle into.’

  Rhys headed for the bedroom, pulling his shirt off as he went, and Gwen went into the bathroom. She reached for the door to the bathroom cabinet and pulled it open. Paracetamol, cotton buds, athlete’s foot cream, tampons… where the hell was the antiseptic cream?

  OK, there it was, sitting on the bottom shelf.

  Right in front of the blister pack that only had two plastic blisters on it, one of which was empty.

  And Gwen knew with a sickening lurch in her stomach that if she turned it around, the foil on the back would have two words printed on it.

  ‘Start’ and ‘Stop’.

  FOURTEEN

  The Torchwood meeting next morning didn’t get off to a good start, as far as Toshiko was concerned. Owen was bruised and surly; Gwen was bruised and moody; and Jack was irritated at one or the other or both of them. And Ianto was Ianto, fussing around the coffee machine just outside the Boardroom, trying to adjust the temperature of the steam, until Jack eventually said, ‘OK: staff treat. We all need cheering up. We’re going out for breakfast.’