Pack Animals

by Peter Anghelides

  And when she peered out from beneath her own raised arm, Gwen saw there was no dinosaur any more, either.

  She rolled across the gravel drive, desperate to see where the creature had moved, terrified that it might attack from behind. But it had utterly disappeared. Her wild look back to Rhys, further down the drive, showed that he and the others were just as baffled.

  Before she could even speak, the noise of a revving engine broke the fresh silence. It came from the dilapidated garage. More revving. The squeal of wheels on concrete. The splintering crash of the rotted wooden doors.

  A bashed-up red Ford Mondeo burst onto the driveway, knocking aside scattered gravel and chattering women. For an endless couple of seconds it seemed to be heading straight at Gwen, and she locked eyes with its determined driver. Long hair, high cheekbones.

  At the last moment, Gareth Portland wrenched the wheel hard left and swept past her down the driveway.

  Gwen ran in pursuit of the car, cutting the corner and gesticulating to Rhys that he should follow too. He pounded after her, calling a half-hearted apology to the fire crew and astonished neighbours.

  A hundred metres down the main road, Gareth Portland had been held up by a reversing rubbish van, and was only now squeezing past it.

  Gwen snatched the keys to Rhys’s car from his protesting hands, and slipped into the driving seat. He was still complaining as she threw the Vectra into gear and squealed into the roadway.

  ‘That was a dinosaur back there!’ Rhys gasped. ‘I know they’ve got a better class of pet in Rhiwbina, but that’s just taking the piss. Hey, mind my paintwork!’ He winced as Gwen shot through the narrow gap beside the rubbish truck. ‘And why are we chasing that car? It’s not like he’s stuffed Barney in the back of his Mondeo.’

  ‘I’ve no idea where that thing went,’ said Gwen. ‘But what d’you bet that Gareth Portland has something to do with it?’

  Rhys had shoved the MonstaQuest cards into his pocket when they’d left the mall earlier. He tugged the pack out now, and started to riffle through the designs.

  ‘We’ll leave Tosh to do a trace on the dinosaur.’ Gwen tapped at her comms to make the call.

  Toshiko was unable to reply, however. Right at that moment, she was distracted by an intruder, and trying not to die. Abruptly, improbably, utterly unexpectedly, a diplodocus had materialised before her eyes and was crashing around the central area of the Hub.

  TWELVE

  A first great whoop of air as he pulled fresh oxygen into his lungs. There it was again – the synaptic buzz between nerve fibres, the phasic burst of neurons. An engine kicked into life from a cold start. His whole body ignited with that astonishing feeling, every atom of him tingling, the orgasmic rush of life, the euphoria of simply being.

  Jack was back from the dead, for the thirteen-hundred-and-seventy-ninth time. Or thereabouts. He’d stopped counting properly after twelve hundred.

  He pawed away the thin red blanket that covered his face. The material snagged on a gash across his forehead, pulling the scab away from the already healing wound. Fresh blood trickled down the side of his nose, and he blinked it irritably from his eye.

  Time for the usual quick recce of his surroundings, and how he’d got here.

  Location: he was lying on a gurney in small enclosed room, like a white box. Strong smell of antiseptic not quite masking the scents of old blood and vomit. An ambulance, then. Stationary, engine off, so it had either arrived or not left yet. No way to know how long he’d been dead this time.

  Last things he remembered: the Brakkanee attack in the zoo… Ianto in its path… Jack throwing himself in the way… the jaws seizing him… savage pain in his left leg, a wild flight through the air, a final crushing pain in his neck as he struck the fence…

  He sat bolt upright, clutching at the arm that held him.

  ‘Steady, Jack.’ It was Owen’s voice. ‘You’re back again. Can’t keep a good man down.’

  It was difficult to detect what emotion Owen was feeling. Seeing Jack come back to life has hard enough, without knowing that you were condemned to a living death. Jack could suck in air and, impossibly, breathe again. For Owen, breathing was impossible.

  Jack touched Owen’s forearm as reassurance. He rolled his neck slowly, aware that he shouldn’t rush too quickly until he was sure the break had healed – otherwise, he’d just die again, and that would slow things down.

  ‘Situation report then, Doctor Harper. This ambulance reached the hospital yet?’

  ‘Still at the zoo,’ said Owen.

  Jack threw back the blanket, and swung his legs to put his feet on the floor.

  ‘Whoa there, Captain,’ Owen said, and held him back gently. ‘One fatal wound to the forehead, and I think you’ll find…’

  Oh, all right then, decided Jack – he wasn’t putting his feet on the floor. His right foot, at best. Because the left was dangling by a thread of flesh and gristle. The Brakkanee had chewed practically right through the leg. Pain blossomed in the stump of the limb as blood began to circulate. A few fresh red spots dripped off the end and onto the ambulance floor.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ muttered Owen, ‘you’ll live. Of course.’

  The back doors of the ambulance opened, and a grumpy-looking paramedic stuck her plump face in through the crack. ‘We all set yet?’ She caught sight of Jack’s irreparably mashed leg, and blanched. ‘Christ almighty! Barry told me he was dead!’

  ‘That was the other guy,’ Owen told her, and jerked his head in the direction of the second gurney.

  For the first time, Jack saw the other body. A stitched red ambulance blanket covered it, from the tip of the head right down to the upturned toes at the end of the stretcher. A broad figure, utterly still. ‘Ianto?’ he breathed.

  ‘No,’ said Owen firmly.

  ‘Well, look at this man’s foot,’ the paramedic insisted. She indicated Jack’s injury. ‘We can’t hang on here.’

  Jack wiggled his stump, and the foot swung gruesomely on its gristly connection. ‘Hang on, very good,’ he said.

  ‘No offence, mate,’ said the paramedic. ‘But we need to get you to Cardiff General.’

  She was all set to come in, but Owen stood up to block her. ‘I told you, leave it. Torchwood will make the arrangements. Don’t argue,’ he continued relentlessly over her renewed protests. ‘Just get out and I’ll get on with it.’

  ‘Sure he was dead.’ The woman looked daggers at Owen. He could tell from her eye line that she was also considering Jack’s head wound. ‘I’m a paramedic, you know, not a porter.’

  ‘And I’m a doctor,’ Owen told her. ‘D’you wanna take it up with Mr Majunath at A&E?’

  The paramedic backed down.

  Owen nodded. ‘Well, piss off out of it, then.’

  The doors emphatically slammed shut. Jack winced, and clutched his ruined limb as another spasm of pain lanced right up it.

  ‘That had stopped bleeding out when they found you. Hasn’t started again since you came back, even though your heart’s pumping again. You sure it’ll… y’know…’ He waved his fingers like a magician.

  Jack looked at Owen’s splinted fingers, knowing that they would never repair like he could. ‘It’ll take a while. And it’ll hurt like hell.’

  ‘What’s the worst you’ve ever had?’

  Jack considered for a moment. ‘You don’t wanna know.’

  ‘Burned to a crisp in a fire?’

  ‘You’re a sick man, you know that?’

  ‘Says the man with the detachable foot.’ Owen narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. ‘Could you survive going through a meat grinder?’

  ‘Never been tempted,’ replied Jack. ‘God, that would really sting, wouldn’t it? Still what doesn’t kill ya just makes ya stronger.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ muttered Owen. He examined Jack’s dangling foot. ‘Could have been worse. Bite from a Brakkanee, you could have contracted Alien Lifeform Injected Cerebral Encephalopathy.’

  ‘A.L.I.C.
E.’ Jack pondered this. ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘Nasty,’ Owen told him. ‘Christopher Robin went down with it.’

  ‘I swear to God, Owen, sometimes I don’t know what to believe with you.’ Jack considered the body on the other gurney. ‘If that’s not Ianto, then where is he?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Owen. ‘Tosh sent me straight here. SUV was still in the car park. Rest of the place is evacuated, so it was easy to find you. I just followed the ambulances. Hell of a day for them, there’s a shopping centre on fire on the other side of town and a major RTA in the centre of Cardiff. No sign of Ianto,’ he concluded. ‘It’s like he’s just vanished.’

  ‘So who’s the stiff?’

  Owen tugged back the blanket. Jack knew the face at once. It was the ginger guy, one of the Achenbrite team. His neck lolled awkwardly on the thin pillow, a wide gash right across his pallid, freckled forehead.

  ‘Got caught in an explosion. Whacked his head into a brick wall, smacked right through the skull, frontal and right sphenoid. But that’s not the best bit.’ Owen slid the blanket the rest of the way off the body.

  The top half of the corpse was still in the grey Achenbrite uniform, somewhat bloodied from the brutal head injury.

  The lower half, below the waist, was gone. Owen flicked the red cover back over, and the contours of the legs reappeared, like a magic trick. He removed the blanket once more, and the legs were gone again.

  ‘Not amputated,’ said Owen, ‘just absent. What do you think about that?’

  The tang of blood caught in Ianto’s mouth. He turned his head, and suffered a brief moment of panic as water covered his nostrils. He coughed, and now the taste of brackish water choked him. He struggled and floundered until he somehow managed to drag himself into a shallow part of… wherever this was. Even as he spluttered, he could barely hear himself. He wanted to shout, but didn’t know where he was.

  Why was it so dark?

  A profound darkness. He’d been down a mine shaft once, and his guide had extinguished all the torches and helmet lights. That kind of darkness. The utter absence of light.

  Was this death? He’d half-joked with Owen about what there was after life. Owen had sneeringly told him he wouldn’t understand, but Ianto had seen in his eyes that Owen really didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe Ianto was discovering it for himself. Finding out what was there.

  What waited in the dark.

  He called out hopefully. His own voice was a dull hum in his head. His throat felt ragged. Was he whispering or screaming?

  He opened his eyes wide. Nothing. But there was the buzz in his ears, and the taste of stale water in his mouth, and the scratchy sensation of angled concrete beneath him and water around his legs. When he ran his hands over his face, his shoulders, down across his outstretched legs, he could make out the contours of his own body and where the water lapped against him. There was a tenderness to his right side, and the clothes seemed torn. But he could definitely feel.

  He choked back a sob of gratitude. And now he could hear that. The buzz in his ears began to resolve itself into meaningful sounds. Human voices in the middle distance.

  ‘D’you hear that?’ A young man’s voice, Swansea accent.

  A girl replying: ‘If it’s those bloody students, I will bloody ’ave them. Bloody rag week, it goes on for ever. The lazy bunch of pampered work-shy English bastards.’

  The demotic sound of real Cardiff. Definitely not dead then.

  ‘If they think we’re paying a ransom for them to return that wall…’ began the woman.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Anna. How could they possibly have stolen a brick-and-concrete wall?’

  ‘I’ve seen Derren Brown,’ grumbled Anna. ‘It’s not my fault you can’t get Channel 4.’

  The voices faded as the two moved further away. Ianto knew his hearing wasn’t fading again, because now he could hear the sound of wind in the branches of a tree, the ripple of water around him. The throaty growl of a large animal close by.

  Ianto’s breath caught in his chest. He blinked furiously, hardly daring to move any further. He levered himself onto all fours in the water, some kind of shallow pool. Unless he could see, there was no way of knowing for sure what the animal was, where it lurked, or the extent of the danger.

  He could guess, though.

  The alien device had gone off in his hands. A defence mechanism, that’s what the big bloke had been shouting about, wasn’t it. Somehow, the blast had taken out the wall of the enclosure and hurled him into the display area. If he hadn’t landed in the pool, the fall would have killed him. As it was, the device had somehow accelerated him away from what it perceived as an attacker, and… what, blinded him? How did that make sense.

  The darkness was dissipating. If Ianto concentrated hard, he could start to discern shapes in front of him. He was initially suspicious that it was an optical illusion, his brain struggling to cope with his loss of sight and inventing stuff for him to see. But no, there were definitely the contours of the tiger enclosure… the scratched sandy surface… the tree in the centre…

  And, oh yes, the tiger.

  Ianto took a terrified, shuddering inhalation through his nose. The tiger’s head darted in his direction. But it did not move towards him. It lifted its shaggy striped head and sniffed the air suspiciously. Maybe being chased by a two-headed alien monster had taken its toll on the big cat’s confidence, but Ianto was too scared to be convinced of that.

  His earlier desperate scramble had brought him to the shallow side of the tiger’s pool. Ianto shuffled backwards out of the water, painfully aware of the splashing, keeping his eyes fixed on the striped animal. The tiger stared balefully at the ripples in the water, as if they were the most fascinating things in the enclosure.

  Ianto continued to retreat, never once looking away from the creature, alert for any sign that it was going to plunge into the water, or start a skirting run around the pool. He could smell dung as he reversed, and winced as he worked out that he had shuffled into a pile of tiger shit. Instinct made him look at where he’d placed his hands. He could see a brightly coloured photograph that had dropped, half-folded, into the pile. On closer examination, he saw it was an oversized playing card from something called MonstaQuest. On the card was an image so arresting that Ianto almost forgot about the tiger: it was a stylised illustration of the Brakkanee.

  A quick glance up revealed that the tiger had settled back down, apparently losing any interest in the earlier movement. Ianto tentatively reached out to pick the card out of the dung.

  He couldn’t see his hand.

  It should have been obvious immediately. But the return of his eyesight and the distraction of the big cat made his realisation all the more shocking.

  He couldn’t see any of his body, any of his clothes. Not even when he waved his hands in front of his face. Or rather, in front of where his face should be. He could still feel his limbs and torso and head, as a quick exploration with his hands now proved.

  Ianto uttered a laugh of incredulity, or maybe it was hysteria. The laughing hurt his ribs.

  The noise made the tiger raise its head curiously, but it did not move. No wonder it couldn’t locate him. Ianto Jones was invisible.

  THIRTEEN

  Toshiko sheltered in the lee of her own workstation as glass cascaded around her. She tried not to cry out, in case the dinosaur heard her.

  She’d fled here as soon as the creature had materialised in the Hub. This was insane, she thought. There was no way it could have walked in. It was some kind of small sauropod, maybe a diplodocus, though the third eye suggested it was extraterrestrial. It certainly couldn’t be a fully grown Earth dinosaur, otherwise it would have filled pretty much the entire space. It was still as big as a bull, and possibly as dangerous.

  But it wasn’t a carnivore. So did hiding make it more or less likely that she’d be killed? Would it notice if she made a noise? And even if it did, would it care?

  The thing was stretching its lo
ng neck towards the upper-floor Hothouse. The room had been converted from the old Boardroom when they had conducted extensive repairs to the Hub, and was filled with potted plants, most of them alien in origin. Toshiko had been up there only a few minutes earlier, conducting research on the double-headed plant sample she had picked up at the mall. The room’s bright illumination must have attracted the hungry creature to the tempting greenery within, and that’s why it was straining to reach up to it.

  An angry shriek echoed around the cavernous room, echoing off the tiled walls. Torchwood’s own resident dinosaur was a pteranodon. Jack and Ianto had captured it some years previously, and allowed it free access to the Hub. Toshiko always worried that the pteranodon might be territorial, and had speculated on the risks of having their workstations covered in dinosaur droppings. Jack seemed unusually well informed about the territorial habits of a creature that hadn’t existed on Earth for over seventy million years, but the pteranodon was house-trained, had never yet attacked a Torchwood employee, and didn’t bring home any of the local sheep that it occasionally ate on night hunting trips. Nevertheless, the pteranodon was clearly very annoyed to find a rival in the Hub. It perched on the walkway outside the Hothouse, pecking at the top of the other dinosaur’s head and screeching with rage.

  The sauropod flicked its tail casually and cleared Gwen’s desk. A flat-screen monitor cracked and split as it tumbled to the floor. Toshiko felt her own desk shiver with the impact. She let out a little yelp as its contents scattered onto her head – pens, her plush toy tiger, a mouse dangling on its cord, a couple of bon-bons from the jar that Gwen had bought her. She caught the photo of her parents, before it smashed on the metal walkway, and placed it safe and flat on the floor.

  The sauropod shuffled sideways to fend off the pteranodon’s enraged attack. Around its feet, sprouting through the metal grille of the floor, was a fresh growth of alien flowers. Half a dozen of them, yellow double-headed blooms. Toshiko had brought only one sample back, and that was now in a Torchwood evidence bag on her battered desk. There were no other samples like it in the Hothouse – she’d checked that earlier.