Skypoint t-8

by Phil Ford

  At least he had more of a choice of deaths than five minutes earlier.

  Ianto told Simon and Andrew to stay where they were. The less movement there was, the more time they might have. He crawled toward the partially exposed doors and tried to push them apart.

  They weren’t having it.

  Beneath him, he felt the elevator car groan, its weight pulling against the fraying metal threads of the cable.

  ‘Hurry up!’ he heard Andrew urging, his voice trembling.

  Ianto felt sorry for them. The closest these two had probably ever come to death was crossing the road at rush hour. Now, inside five minutes, they’d been nearly chewed up by something that came through the wall and the odds were they were going to end up smashed to pieces at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

  Get a move on!

  Ianto got his fingertips on the steel door edges and pulled, but being half-crouched on top of a lift car was far from the optimum position to really get his back into the job. He heard movement behind him and felt the elevator shift a little more. Simon and Andrew were alongside him now and without a word, all three men started to pull on the door.

  Ianto felt it start to give, and his fingers got a better purchase. Over his head, he heard the sound of another wire snapping in the cable.

  ‘Put your backs into it, boys!’ he growled, and strained against the doors.

  Beneath him he could feel the elevator car trembling against the weakening hold of the failing cable. They only had a few seconds…

  Push!

  And the doors slid apart, just a little – just enough.

  ‘Quickly, now,’ Ianto ordered, and Simon pushed Andrew through the doors. There was the sound of him tumbling to the floor in the darkness on the other side, then Simon went through.

  And that was when the cable snapped with the sound of a gunshot, and the elevator car fell from beneath Ianto’s feet. Instinctively, he threw out his hands and caught the edge of one of the doors.

  A moment later, he heard the elevator hit the bottom of the shaft with the sound of an express train hitting a mountain side. There was no explosion, but he felt a wave of oily air and dust brush past him. Then Simon and Andrew were hauling him between the doors and onto the thick pile carpet of the sixth floor.

  Ianto rolled over and the carpet felt as soft as meadow grass and the still air of the ghost-lit corridor as good as the fresh breeze of a summer’s day.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Owen had made two charges. The ingredients were tightly packed into a couple of small pickle jars that he’d found in Marion Blake’s fridge. He’d punctured their lids with a corkscrew and used some twine he’d found in another drawer as a couple of fuses. He wasn’t sure what she ordinarily used the twine for but figured that of all the SkyPoint residents that could have ignored the fire alarm, he was glad that it had been an S amp;M call girl. As he set the makeshift explosives aside on Marion’s kitchen work surface, he caught the face of his watch, and couldn’t quite believe that a part of him was actually wondering if he was still going to have time to go looking for the man-munching twins from Constantine’s coffee shop.

  Hey, what else was a guy who didn’t sleep going to do once he’d got the Lloyds and Mistress Marion to safety, then made it up to the penthouse and kicked Lucca’s arse into a twenty-five storey freefall?

  It had taken him half an hour to mix the chemicals. You had to be careful around explosives, especially the homemade variety. There was a reason so many terrorists had only one eye or used hooks for hands. Owen hadn’t wanted to blow his face off. A talking corpse was one thing – you could get away with that – but a talking skull? That was going to make people take a second look in any light.

  ‘Are you finished?’

  It was Marion. She had used the time to shed her work clothes. She hadn’t quite gone back to the Mary Whitehouse look, but they wouldn’t have thrown her out of church, either. She was curled up on the sofa at what she clearly hoped was a safe distance.

  Owen noticed that they were alone. ‘What happened to Alison and her mum?’

  Marion cocked her thumb towards her bedroom. ‘I think Wendy took Alison to lie down. It looked like you were going to be a while.’

  Just as likely, they were under the bed in there in case the madman with the busted hand blew them all to hell, he thought.

  ‘What about Ewan?’

  ‘He hasn’t come out of the loo yet.’

  Owen didn’t feel his blood chill, but he felt distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. I’m telling you, if he’s made a mess in there…’

  He had heard Wendy tell her about what was supposed to be stalking SkyPoint. If the significance of something coming through walls at people and Ewan not having shown after half an hour in the bathroom hadn’t clicked with Marion, Owen wondered if he should be checking her over for signs of something nasty as a result of her profession.

  He got up and walked towards the bathroom, dreading what he might find there. He rapped on the door, and called out Ewan’s name.

  ‘Yeah – yeah, I’m coming!’

  Owen felt the tension fall off him like a heavy coat. ‘OK, well hurry up. We need to get moving. And I need to splint up that ankle first.’

  The bathroom door opened and Ewan stood in the doorway, his injured ankle held slightly off the ground. His shirt was damp down the front. Owen guessed that he must have been sick after all. He certainly didn’t look any better, his face was pale and shone with sweat, and his eyes were red-rimmed, like he’d been crying, and wouldn’t stop moving. This was a guy that was very close to the edge.

  ‘Here, let me give you a hand,’ said Owen, and he put one arm across his shoulders and helped Ewan as best he could back through to the lounge.

  As they went, Owen spoke to him gently. It was the kind of voice he had used a lifetime ago sitting next to nervous patients in ward beds. ‘Take it easy, Ewan. Everything’s going to be all right, I promise. I’m going to get you and your family out of here. Believe me, we do this sort of thing all the time.’

  They reached the couch, and Owen let him down gently. Ewan didn’t look all that comforted.

  Owen glanced up at Marion. ‘Have you got any painkillers around? Paracetamol? Hash? I think he could use something.’

  ‘I think I can find something,’ she said hesitantly and left the lounge to go get it.

  Owen gave Ewan a playful wink. ‘Let’s hope she finds the good stuff.’

  Then he picked up the two whips, moved back across to the kitchen and selected a knife from the rack she had fitted there. He could have performed surgery with them. All he needed to do was separate the whips from their handles. The knife he chose did the job easily. He took the handles and the whips back to Ewan and started to bind the handles into place with the first of the whips.

  ‘This is going to hurt a bit,’ he warned.

  Ewan said nothing.

  The next thing Owen knew was that Ewan had the other whip around his throat and was pulling it tight. Very tight.

  The immediate thought that shot through Owen’s mind was that generally since he had been reanimated as a walking, talking corpse the advantages of his condition were comprehensively outnumbered on a day-to-day basis by the ball-crushing downsides. Right now, though, a real bonus was the fact that he no longer needed to breathe – which meant that any attempt to strangle him was going to be pretty futile.

  Briefly, he thought about just waiting it out – it wouldn’t take too long before Ewan got bored or, in his condition, exhausted. Then Owen thought about his neck and how – whether Ewan meant it or not – snapping it would be all too easy. And if Owen had to be a living corpse, he’d rather be part of the walking-dead rather a quadriplegic cadaver for the rest of his unnatural life.

  So he fought back hard, and broke Ewan’s nose with his head.

  Noses are pretty easy to break, and there wasn’t much in Ewan’s that was going to do Owen any harm.
A broken nose also hurt like hell and, as Owen expected, Ewan gave up on throttling him pretty fast.

  Owen just wished he’d had a gun to push into Ewan’s bloody face when he turned on him and demanded to know what the hell was going on.

  The blood from Ewan’s smashed nose was mixed with tears as he shuddered with grief and shame, and tried to protect himself with hands that shook like fragile leaves.

  ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ he wailed.

  Owen grabbed the other man’s shirt front, and would have made a fist to threaten him with – only he remembered that hand was busted and bandaged.

  ‘You’re sorry?’

  ‘He told me he would get Wendy and Alison out if I killed you!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lucca! Besnik Lucca! I work for him, God help me! I’m an accountant, not a killer! I couldn’t – I couldn’t have done it! But he said ’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him? When?’

  Ewan pulled the mobile phone from his trouser pocket. ‘In the bathroom.’

  Owen grabbed the phone and saw Lucca’s number. His mind raced. There had to be a way he could use this.

  Then Wendy burst into the lounge and screamed.

  Alison had gone.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The darkest time in Toshiko Sato’s life had been the months she had spent in the UNIT cell. There had been no real bed, the toilet had been little more than a hole in the ground, and the food had been some tasteless gruel that had been nutritionally designed to do no more than keep her alive. But the worst part was that she had no hope. No one knew she was there and no one there was interested in her account of why she had stolen the plans for the sonic modulator. She had believed that she would die there.

  But Jack had rescued her then and, as she sat bound to the chair in Besnik Lucca’s sumptuous penthouse, she knew that he and the others would do everything they could to do so again. The difference was that back then Jack had been in control. He had had the influence to walk into that UNIT incarceration facility and spring her to work for him. At SkyPoint, Lucca was the man in charge. That meant Jack might need some help.

  Lucca’s men had secured her to the chair with plastic cable-ties. They were the same things that the military used to detain prisoners. Thin strips of tough plastic that were less bulky to carry than handcuffs, and did the job better. Once they were tightened up, the only way they could be released was with a knife, and if you struggled against them they cut into your flesh. Lucca’s men were used to this sort of thing – they had secured each of her arms to the chair at her wrist and with another cable-tie over her forearm. Her ankles had also been cable-tied to the chair legs. Like this, she wasn’t going anywhere; wasn’t going to be any help to the others at all.

  The one thing that they couldn’t tie up, however, was her mind. And that was all she needed to try and get free.

  Lucca and his goons seemed to have lost all interest in her lately – which had been a relief. Lucca had become absorbed in watching the progress of his game on the floors below him. He had brought the images up on the huge television set in the lounge and now lay sprawled on the couch with a remote control flicking between the hidden cameras. But for the glass of champagne in his other hand and the opulent surroundings, he would have looked like just about any other late-night channel grazer looking for something on TV to get them through their insomnia.

  He had howled with delight when he saw Gwen demolish the door to the stairs with a hail of bullets, and he had hissed with pantomime fury when Ianto had survived the crashing elevator. But he was completely relaxed, Toshiko noted, utterly confident of his invulnerability – both from the Torchwood team and whatever was also out there stalking the building’s occupants.

  Besnik Lucca was, without doubt, a psychopath. He was a man without conscience, whose only drive was personal gratification without any care for the cost to others. A man whose narcissism was such that he believed he was better than anyone, more beautiful, more powerful and – quite definitely – unassailable by anything, even a creature that could walk through walls and reduce you to a pile of cellular crap.

  To put it another way, he was mad.

  Maybe that could work for her.

  The two henchmen had disappeared from the apartment – maybe they were out in the roof garden, smoking. As long as they weren’t in Lucca’s small control room.

  That was where he had gone when he turned the power off to the rest of the building. That was where she was going to have to get to, to turn it back on.

  They would come after her, of course. But as long as they didn’t get to her for just a couple of minutes… that was all it would take for Jack to realise that the power was back on and to take an elevator to the penthouse floor. Lucca wouldn’t open the doors – as he hadn’t for her until she surrendered her gun – but that wouldn’t be a problem for Jack. He had a gadget that would pop the lock on the elevator as easily as cracking a bottle of beer.

  A couple of minutes, maybe less.

  Toshiko started to rock the chair. It was big and heavy, an industrial steel frame with a leather seat and back. Stylish, but also somehow a bit like something from a torture chamber. She was only small – it took her a while to work up the momentum to get the chair moving.

  Lucca looked away from the TV as she crashed heavily to the floor. He stood up, frowning, and moved slowly towards her. Toshiko watched him come closer, one side of her body hurting with the impact.

  Lucca started to shake his head, pitifully. ‘Whatever are you trying to do, Toshiko?’

  Toshiko grunted something behind the gag in her mouth, and struggled against the cable-ties. It was just for effect, but it hurt like hell, all the same.

  Lucca took the chair and set it straight. He did it easily. He was a strong man.

  Toshiko looked into his eyes and said something else behind the gag. Lucca slipped his hands behind her head and released the gag.

  ‘Now,’ he said patiently, as if talking to a child, ‘what is it you want to say?’

  ‘Save my friends, please.’

  Lucca’s mouth curled. ‘What?’

  ‘I know what’s out there. The thing that comes through the walls. And they can’t stop it with bullets.’

  ‘Oh, I know.’ Lucca smiled. He had seen what happened when the tall one dressed like a tailor’s dummy had fired at the creature in the elevator.

  ‘It will kill them.’

  ‘That’s the general idea,’ he said.

  ‘But you could save them,’ she said, anxiously. ‘We could save them. I can save you.’

  That intrigued him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m a scientist. I know what that creature is, and I know how we could make your penthouse invulnerable to it.’

  ‘It is invulnerable. If it hadn’t been it would have come for me before now.’

  ‘Why would it? There were plenty of people on the lower floors before. But most of them have gone. Yes, it might pick off those that are left and my friends first, but then it’s going to come here, Lucca. And you won’t be able to keep it out without me.’

  He looked at her suspiciously. ‘What makes you so clever?’

  Toshiko pursed her lips, impatient. ‘Do I have to go through my CV? Would you even understand it?’ she asked.

  Lucca regarded her for a full ten seconds without a word then drew something from his pocket. Without taking his eyes off her, he brushed it with his thumb and a long steel blade sprang into his hand. Toshiko couldn’t help but look at the switchblade. The steel was dark and old and its edge was nicked and worn. It looked like it might have come with Lucca when he first escaped his homeland, and she didn’t want to think what it had probably been used for. Lucca watched her and read every thought that went through her mind. He had seen the same reaction – and worse – a thousand times.

  ‘You are very beautiful, Toshiko,’ he said gently. ‘You shouldn’t try my patience.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I don
’t want to die, either. That’s why I want to help you.’

  Lucca crouched before her, and ran the knife’s edge gently over her arm. She felt the blade pass lightly over her bare skin, the sensation was electric, like a kiss.

  ‘Suppose I said you could save yourself – and me – but not your friends?’

  Her eyes had been following the knife as it caressed her arm; now it paused at the cable-tie over her forearm. She looked at him.

  ‘I want to live,’ she said.

  Lucca looked at her, then kissed her on the lips. It was gentle. Like a lover’s parting. Then he folded the knife away.

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Toshiko,’ he said. ‘But you’re not going to.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  They were on the twentieth floor when Gwen saw the shadow of the Weevil.

  ‘What was that?’

  She and Jack had been taking the concrete steps two at a time, lighting their way with their flashlights, and their guns held aloft. They didn’t know what they might run into on those shadowy stairs, but Gwen hadn’t expected to catch sight of a Weevil.

  ‘Where?’ Jack asked, spinning around in the stairwell, sweeping the dull concrete walls with light. All he saw was the number 20 on the door to the floor and more stairs.

  ‘Out there,’ she said, and edged towards the door, and looked out through its porthole window. Beyond the glass the floor was lit eerily green by the emergency lights, and nothing seemed to be moving. ‘I thought I saw a Weevil.’

  Jack looked from Gwen to the stillness beyond. He saw nothing.

  ‘It was just a shadow,’ she said, starting to doubt herself now. ‘Maybe I imagined it.’

  Then Jack saw something move out there. Again, just a shadow. But there was something. Maybe someone hadn’t got out when the alarm went off; maybe they had been trapped when Lucca locked off the doors.

  Maybe they should take a look.