Skypoint t-8

by Phil Ford

  The locking mechanism to the doors was on their side, so it only took one bullet instead of a full double clip to get through.

  The sound of the shot bounced off the concrete walls of the stairwell and seemed to echo all the way up to the top of the shaft. Their ears were still ringing as they stepped into the carpeted corridor.

  ‘Hello?’ Jack called. ‘Hello? Anybody here?’

  The silence was as deafening as the gunshot had been.

  Jack started to move slowly along the corridor, the Webley held before him in both hands. Gwen followed, her eyes searching the gloomy green-cast shadows for movement. Her insides felt like they had bunched themselves up into a defensive ball, every nerve in her body felt like piano wire. She didn’t like it. She’d been in situations like this a hundred times and more, but she had never felt like this before. The gun grip felt slick in her hands and she realised that her palms were sweating.

  As they turned a corner in the corridor, Jack caught her eye. There was more light here, there was a big window that looked out over the Bay below. Most of the restaurants and bars were turning off their lights now – Jack guessed it was something like three in the morning – but there was still enough light to tell that Gwen was scared.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘If it’s any comfort, me neither.’

  He could feel sweat trickling down his back. It was a sensation he hadn’t felt in a long time. A gut-gnawing fear that started in your belly and spread out through your nervous system like a virus. The kind of fear that, if you didn’t get a hold on it, could paralyse you. That wasn’t the good kind of fear that pumped you with adrenalin and supercharged you to fight or run. It was the kind that got you killed.

  Jack didn’t understand it. Weevil hunts were almost a downtime diversion for Torchwood. The Cardiff sewers had been crawling with them for so long now that they were soon going to be more a job for the city’s sanitation department than them. If anything ever got routine for Jack’s team, it was hunting out Weevils. You didn’t get blasé about one and a half metres of muscle and teeth that just lived for tearing your throat out, but you got accustomed to them the same way an alligator wrangler could work around ninety kilos of snapping jaw and not get chewed. You developed a life-preserving respect for them, but you weren’t scared of them like this.

  ‘There!’ Gwen cried, and opened fire.

  Jack spun around with the Webley cocked, but saw nothing.

  Gwen had fired four rounds. She stopped, breathing in the cordite of spent shells. Ahead of them she had shattered one of the apartment doors, but there was no sign of a Weevil.

  Jack ran on down the corridor. Maybe she had winged it.

  Gwen heard something move in the apartment and kicked open the door, holding her gun level with her face. She could feel the heat of the automatic’s barrel gently warming her skin. She realised that she was cold. Cold, yet sweating – that was not good.

  The apartment was dimly illuminated by what was left of the lights in the Bay. It occurred to her that there might be someone in there taking refuge. She swept the apartment with her flashlight, and called out but got no answer.

  Cautiously, she moved through the apartment and checked the bedroom and the bathroom. There was no one there, not even a cat. But she’d have sworn on her mother’s life that she had heard something in there.

  She was sure she had seen a Weevil in the shadows outside the door when she opened fire. If she had just winged it and it got away in the gloom it was bloody lucky – she never missed.

  She rubbed at her eyes. Her vision was blurring a little. She was tired and stressed out.

  Christ, she could do with a drink.

  She played the flashlight across the apartment again and saw a collection of bottles standing on a small table. One vodka would steady her nerves.

  Just a small one.

  She put her gun down on the table and picked up the bottle and poured out a large measure. She picked the glass up.

  And that was when the Weevil came through the apartment door.

  Gwen caught it out of the corner of her eye and cursed herself for dropping her guard.

  Jesus, she was tired.

  It was tall for a Weevil, but was dressed in the same boiler suit they all seemed to wear. It had no ears to speak of, just holes low down at the sides of its head and its eyes were buried in hollows punched in either side of the snub nose. It was an ugly brute – all of them were – and it snarled at her with a mouth full of savage teeth.

  It leaped towards her.

  Gwen threw aside the vodka glass and lunged for her gun.

  It was the vodka that saved Jack.

  If Gwen hadn’t put the Glock down, she would have shot the Weevil through the head, and that would have put Jack on the floor and ruined the apartment’s expensive white carpet with his brains. His brains would have grown back together pretty quickly, of course, the shattered skull would have rebuilt itself and he would have been good as new in a few minutes, but a bullet through the brain always scrambled him up a bit for a while and right now he needed to be thinking straight.

  Because something was messing with their heads.

  Jack threw himself to the floor before Gwen could fire and screamed out, ‘Gwen, it’s me! It’s Jack!’

  The Weevil had disappeared, but Gwen held the gun steady, ready for it to come at her again.

  ‘Jack, there’s a Weevil!’

  He was crouched behind the couch now. He knew it would be no defence against the automatic clip she was likely to fire if she got it into her head that the Weevil was also down there, but he figured it was just safer if she didn’t see him right now.

  ‘No, Gwen. There is no Weevil!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she snapped, and swung from side to side, just in case the Weevil was trying to work its way around her.

  ‘Remember Lucca said he had this place well fortified. I think he’s got some sort of psychotropic gas on this floor. When he initiated his defences, the gas would have been released. It’s winding us up, making us see things.’

  ‘No, Jack. You’re talking crap.’

  ‘Listen to yourself, Gwen. It’s affecting your reason. Ask yourself, why the hell would there be Weevils on the twentieth floor of this place? How would they even get in here? It’s built like Fort Knox.’

  ‘I saw a Weevil, Jack! What the hell’s got into you? What have they done to you?’

  Jack could feel any hold on Gwen slipping away from him. If he was right – and he knew that he was – he hadn’t felt as scared as this since that last god-awful day on the Boeshane Peninsular. Whatever Lucca had in the air here was eating into their minds, and it was not only making Gwen hallucinate, but also turning her paranoid.

  ‘Who are they, Gwen?’

  ‘You know. Don’t pretend, Jack!’

  ‘Gwen, listen to me, please. Concentrate on what I say, Lucca has released some sort of hallucinogen into the air. It’s part of his defences. To turn us on each other. You’ve got to fight it, Gwen, and we have to get off this floor. Now!’

  Jack stayed behind the couch and waited for his words to get through to her. He counted the seconds, and fought the fear and dread that still surged through his own body.

  When he had run after the phantom Weevil he had seen that there was nowhere for it to go, and had forced himself to be logical. He wasn’t always the most logical man – sometimes defying logic could save your life; could save a planet – but sometimes logic was a piece of lifesaving driftwood when reality was getting wrecked around you.

  Like now.

  There had been nowhere for the Weevil to run and he knew that Weevils didn’t walk through walls. And when he’d forced his own haunted anxiety aside he realised there was no way that there had been any Weevil there when Gwen had fired. Apart from anything else, Gwen didn’t miss.

  And, when you got down to it, Jack Harkness does not get frightened by shadows
.

  But Gwen hadn’t answered him yet, hadn’t realised that he was her friend, the man she trusted with her life beyond anyone else in the world – maybe even more than her husband.

  ‘Gwen?’ he said, his worries building to new levels.

  She answered him with a burst of fire from the automatic on machine setting that shredded the couch to splintered wood and torn foam.

  But Jack had moved by then. He’d heard the click as Gwen had put the gun into machine pistol mode and had dived across the apartment and rolled to his feet as she ejected the spent magazine from the gun and reached for a new one.

  She was wild-eyed and trembling with psychotic adrenalin.

  And Jack knew this was his only chance. He aimed the Webley and fired six times.

  Gwen ducked as the apartment’s window shattered behind her, and Jack lunged for her, kicked the automatic out of her hand and put his arm around her waist, dragging her to the devastated window as the wind caught their hair.

  She struggled, but Jack got his arms around Gwen, pinning her hands against her body as he threw them both against the wall next to the window.

  ‘Breathe, Gwen,’ he said. ‘Breathe it in. Deep breaths.’

  And as he filled his own lungs with the cool fresh air that blew in over the Bay he could already feel the tension in his body starting to ease.

  He could feel her holding her breath, refusing to give in to him, still somehow believing that he was an enemy, but he held her tight, pinned her to the wall and knew that any moment she was going to start to breathe, and then they were going to get through it.

  ‘Hey,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘I said big breaths. I want big breaths. I really love big breaths.’

  And the pure air must have already started working on her, because she laughed. And then she was breathing deeply, filling her lungs with the air that smelled salty and of the sea, and of freedom.

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said at last.

  Jack continued to hold her tight.

  ‘I said I’m all right, Jack.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But you know me – any excuse.’

  ‘I’m a married woman now, Captain Harkness,’ she said playfully, and escaped his arms.

  He looked at her as the wind did things with her hair, and she looked beautiful. In all his years and travels, there hadn’t been many women that compared to Gwen Cooper.

  She saw him looking and felt uncomfortable in his gaze. He saw it, and stooped down to get her gun. He handed it back to her.

  ‘We should go,’ he said, quickly. ‘Just try not to breathe too deeply till we hit the next floor.’

  ‘Jack,’ she said.

  He was already halfway across the apartment. He turned back. ‘What?’

  She hesitated, and he could see that something was on her mind, maybe something about the way she had seen him look at her. Then she gave him a hard look. ‘That kick really hurt, you know.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Alison’s gone! She’s gone!’

  Wendy was crying and screaming as she rushed out of the bedroom. Owen still stood over her bloody, shaking husband. Marion appeared from the bathroom with painkillers in one hand and a spliff in the other. Owen no longer felt like easing Ewan’s pain, especially since he had just increased it by the increment of a broken nose.

  ‘What’s happened? What’s going on?’ Marion demanded.

  ‘It’s taken Alison,’ Wendy screamed.

  Owen looked from her to Ewan and saw the fat man that had just tried to kill him come apart at the seams. For an instant he wished he hadn’t broken the bastard’s nose – he had only been trying to save his little girl. And now she had been taken from him.

  ‘Wendy,’ Ewan croaked, his voice distorted by his smashed nose.

  She went to him and they held each other and shook with shared grief. Owen doubted that she had even noticed the blood.

  Owen grabbed an ornament from a shelf – he didn’t see what it was, he didn’t care – and threw it against the wall with all the force he could find. It detonated. Whatever it had been was shattered beyond recognition. His foot lashed out and kicked over Marion Blake’s coffee table. He looked for something else to destroy and saw Marion’s pale frightened face.

  He shook his head, suddenly impotent and weak. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He fell heavily into a chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

  Owen had told them he would get them to safety. He had promised himself that Alison wouldn’t go back into the darkness – not for years, if he could help it. Not until the darkness took her as naturally as it took anyone.

  He looked at Wendy and Ewan. Their hearts were breaking. Not just because they had lost their little girl but because they knew to where she had gone. This time for good.

  Thank God at least they didn’t know how her remains would look when Torchwood found them. If Torchwood survived.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked eventually.

  It took a while before Wendy could find her voice through the sobs. ‘I took her to lie down. It looked like you were going to be a while, and I didn’t want her around while you were making explosives. We lay down on the bed together and – oh, God forgive me – I fell asleep. Only a few minutes – it could only have been a few minutes. But she’d gone!’

  Owen got up and walked into the bedroom where they’d been sleeping. The bed was made, but he could see the impressions left by two bodies that had recently lain there. One was smaller than the other.

  He stood in the doorway and ran his eyes over the room. Nothing had been disturbed. There were no signs of the thing that had come through the wall. But then, there never was any sign.

  Alison Lloyd had been taken without trace.

  And that made him think.

  Mr Pickle, the pixie doll, had gone, too. He remembered that she’d had it when he’d seen her on the thirteenth floor. He remembered she was hanging on to it the same way that Wendy hung on to her, like she would never let her go.

  If the wall-walker had taken Alison while she was sleeping, why would it also take a rag doll? Whatever the wall-walker was, it was clear that it needed human cellular matter – presumably as some sort of food. Non-human matter, like the estate agent’s clown cufflinks got left as waste. He supposed that Alison might have been hanging on to the doll in her sleep, but then why hadn’t the thing taken Wendy, as well?

  He looked around the room again, then got down on his hands and knees and saw what he was looking for. Under the bed, the cover to the air duct had been removed. The duct was small, but not too small for a six-year-old child and her rag doll pixie.

  Owen felt a thrill of excitement burst through his body and he shoved the bed away from the wall and pushed his head into the duct. He couldn’t see a thing in there – it was pitch black. Fleetingly he wondered what the hell Alison found so fascinating in a claustrophobic black hole like this after where she had been. But her mother had already told him that she used SkyPoint’s ducting like her own private travelator.

  He called into the ducting: ‘Alison! Alison, are you there!’

  His own voice came back at him. But nothing else.

  He heard someone behind him and turned to see Wendy in the doorway. Her face was tear-stained, but he recognised renewed hope there, as well.

  ‘I think she and Mr Pickle just went for a look around the pixie tunnels again,’ he said, getting to his feet.

  As he did so, Wendy lunged towards the ventilator and called her daughter’s name as he had. There was still no reply. She tried again, this time screaming, angry and desperate; ‘Alison! Alison, come back here, now!’

  Owen took her by the shoulders and eased her away from the duct. ‘It’s OK, Wendy. We can find her. She’s still alive, that’s the main thing.’

  She was crying again. He felt her body shaking against his and he put his arms around her.

  ‘Where do you think she’ll go? Back to your apartment? Her bedroom, maybe?’

  Wendy shoo
k her head, trying to calm herself down and think straight for the sake of her little girl.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. Or there’s the SkyPark.’

  The indoor garden area where she had been reading the story of Rapunzel to Mr Pickle.

  ‘OK,’ Owen said. ‘Stay here with Ewan and Marion. I’m going to go and find her. Don’t worry, she’ll be safe with me.’

  But as he got up, Wendy caught his hand. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have to come with you.’

  Owen thought about telling her that she couldn’t; that there was something out there that came at you through walls and turned you into jelly shit. But she knew most of that already, and she was going to be no safer in the flat with Marion and Ewan than she was looking for her daughter.

  ‘OK, then,’ he said. ‘But do exactly as I say. And when I say it.’

  She nodded and Owen took her into the lounge and let her tell Ewan and Marion what had happened, while he found a bag that he could sling over his shoulder. Into it he put the two charges, a gas kitchen lighter, and one of Marion’s big knives wrapped in a tea towel to save stabbing himself. He then slipped Ewan’s mobile into the back pocket of his jeans. Maybe a direct line to the madman on the top floor would come in useful. He also found a torch.

  ‘Come on,’ he told Wendy. ‘We ought to get going.’

  She nodded and joined him at the door.

  ‘Owen.’

  He saw that it was Ewan. His broken nose had stopped bleeding, but he hadn’t wiped away any of the mess.

  ‘Please find my daughter,’ he said.

  ‘Take the painkillers,’ Owen told him. ‘We’ll be back as soon as we can.’

  And he led Wendy out of the apartment and towards the stairs. He tried the door first, in case it wasn’t locked. But it was. He took out the first of his charges, set it by the door and told Wendy to take cover further down the corridor before he lit the twine fuse with the kitchen lighter. The twine burned with a fast yellow flame and Owen ran.

  He knew the chemistry of bomb building, but he had never had to employ it before – Torchwood tended to be a more professional and high-tech in its approach to blowing things up. Nor were a teaspoon and a set of kitchen scales any sensible replacement for the precision of lab equipment. He knew the bomb would work, he just wasn’t sure if it would take out the door – or the wall with it.