Pack Animals

by Peter Anghelides

  She pushed through the barrier that had been placed inside the store to prevent customers leaving by the exits nearest to the accident. The late-afternoon shopping crowds had not diminished, and Jennifer used the nausea device to part the crowds and make her way to the escalators unimpeded.

  As she negotiated the top of the second-floor escalator, an old man in a pork pie hat became wildly disoriented by the nausea device, and staggered into her. The device jolted out of her hand, bounced once on the rubber handrail, and dropped into the down escalator. Jennifer dithered for a moment at the top of the up escalator, undecided about whether to try and retrieve the device.

  The crowd behind her began to recover their composure, a continuous stream of people pushing past as they continued onto the floor. No time, decided Jennifer. She had to press on, and reach the fourth floor. Reach Gareth before Torchwood did.

  David Brigstocke hated the crush of Saturday shopping. But today, he decided, he hated Eleri Francis even more.

  This was a trivial news assignment, and he believed Eleri must have known that. He was supposed to be covering the aftermath of the bus crash in the street outside, but his editor had sent him into the store and up to the toy department instead. One of the Wendleby’s staff had phoned the radio news office with a tip-off that Martina Baldachi had been spotted buying gifts. More likely one of Martina’s PRs had tipped them off. ‘Send Ieuan Walters,’ countered Brigstocke. ‘Isn’t that why we have an Entertainment Correspondent?’ This was the same old office bullshit. It had been like this since he’d overheard them talking about him in the canteen, in Welsh, stupidly assuming that he couldn’t understand. They’d understood him, all right, after Brigstocke confronted them and explained what he thought of them. In Welsh.

  ‘Ieuan’s at the Mid-Wales Beer Festival in Llanwrtyd Wells,’ Eleri had replied. ‘You’ll find the toy department on the fourth floor.’

  Brigstocke had managed to have a bit of fun at Martina Baldachi’s expense during the interview. That wouldn’t go down well with Eleri, he supposed, but with a live feed it was too late for her to do anything about that. Now he was on a down escalator, evaluating whether he still had time to get to the crash site, when he spotted a familiar figure hobbling into the store.

  Captain Jack Harkness.

  Brigstocke caught up with him by the service lift.

  ‘It won’t come any faster if you keep pressing the button like that.’

  Brigstocke was pleased to see Harkness’s exasperated reaction.

  ‘Kinda busy.’

  ‘As always,’ replied Brigstocke. ‘You’re looking good for someone whose foot was almost severed at the zoo.’ He watched Harkness involuntarily look at his own left foot. ‘I spoke to the paramedics, Jack. You can’t fool medical professionals about that kind of thing.’

  Harkness gave up on the service lift, and limped across to the escalator instead. He paused before stepping on. At first, Brigstocke thought he was being cautious about his injured foot. Until he realised that Harkness wasn’t entirely sure where he was going.

  ‘You want to help?’ Harkness had narrowed his eyes, looking for a reaction. He leaned in close to speak into Brigstocke’s ear. ‘That kid you were interviewing earlier? He’s a terrorist suspect, and we need to track him down. No, put the digital recorder down.’

  ‘It’s a phone,’ said Brigstocke. ‘I’m calling the police.’

  Harkness closed his hands over the phone, folding the casing shut in Brigstocke’s palm. ‘We are the police.’

  ‘No you’re not. I’ve talked to the police about Torchwood.’

  ‘Do you want to help or not?’

  Brigstocke licked his lips as he pondered this. Across the aisle from them a customer lift dinged as it arrived at their floor. Brigstocke put his phone back in his jacket pocket. ‘Toy department. Fourth floor.’

  Brigstocke jumped into the lift and held the door, gesturing for Harkness to join him. As well as helping, it kept him close to his quarry.

  Harkness limped over. Before he got in, he tapped at his ear and said: ‘Ianto? Hold off for a couple of minutes.’

  Gareth Portland hated everyone. They bustled past him where he sat at his stand on the fourth floor, unconcerned whether he was alive or dead.

  But he was so alive. More than he had ever been in his whole life.

  The Visualiser purred in his hand. It spoke to him. Reassured him. Knew him. Loved him.

  The world moved past Gareth Portland, uncaring. So it was time for the world to change.

  TWENTY-ONE

  When Jennifer Portland saw her son sitting alone in the toy department, she thought her heart would finally break.

  All around this area of the sales floor, eager children squealed with delight as their parents guided them through the toy displays. But there was no clamour about the MonstaQuest sales stand. Gareth sat to one side of it in a bucket seat. Stacked piles of unsold card packs teetered beside him. His head was bowed, and he was studying his hands. It brought back sharp and painful memories of seeing her teenage son at home, after another awful day at his savage Secondary, slumped in an uncommunicative heap at the dinner table.

  The MonstaQuest stand was flanked by two cardboard monsters. They were exaggerated caricatures from the pack, blown up to life size, standing guard, designed to attract customers. Jennifer recognised them as a Weevil and a Hoix.

  She approached quietly. Gareth was studying the VIP tickets he’d been given for the international match. A couple of students strolled up to pester him.

  ‘I’m on a break,’ Gareth told them without looking up. Jennifer suddenly realised how long it was since she’d heard his voice.

  The students wanted to buy the tickets from him. Gareth responded not by looking at the students but by clutching the tickets to his chest. It was a protective gesture that Jennifer recognised from his childhood, that she’d seen him do with a favourite toy.

  ‘They’re not for sale,’ Gareth said.

  ‘Come on, Harry,’ one of the students said to his mate, tugging his arm. ‘We’ll have to try the touts instead.’ He kicked the leg of Gareth’s chair. ‘Don’t want your lousy tickets, mate.’

  ‘Or your stupid card game,’ added Harry. He prodded one of the stacked piles of MonstaQuest cards, and it toppled over against the foot of the Hoix.

  Gareth stood up angrily, but the students had already strolled off. Jennifer saw a murderous look in her son’s eyes. She’d seen that in the Achenbrite CCTV cameras earlier. It was a cold, unspoken fury that warned of coming violence the way that dark clouds threatened rain.

  The Visualiser device was in Gareth’s hands. It was only when he looked up again that he saw his mother watching.

  Jennifer walked over to him. ‘Come on, Gareth,’ she said soothingly. ‘Time to stop all this.’

  Gareth stared at her like she was a stranger.

  Gwen was still giggling at Owen in the cargo lift.

  Owen didn’t find it funny. ‘Well, it looked real enough to me.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Owen. It’s definitely dead now.’

  A cardboard Weevil lay crumpled in the corner, the remains of a MonstaQuest display item. Owen had taken one look at it as they were about to board the lift and put a bullet through its forehead. Gwen’s first reaction was to duck from the ricochet. Her second was to burst out laughing.

  ‘It was coming towards me,’ persisted Owen.

  ‘It was falling over,’ Gwen corrected him. ‘It’s funny, but when you’re embarrassed you don’t blush any more.’ She looked more closely at his cheek where Martina Baldachi had whacked him. ‘Did that hurt?’

  ‘Didn’t feel a thing,’ Owen said. ‘Hope it doesn’t bruise, though. Don’t want to spend the rest of my death with fingerprints across my face.’

  The lift bell pinged.

  ‘Fourth floor,’ said Owen. ‘Kitchenware, furniture, children’s toys, and alien technology.’

  Before the doors slid open, there was a mighty thum
p against the other side, accompanied by angry shouting.

  ‘Keep your hair on!’ called Owen. ‘They won’t open any faster if…’

  His voice trailed off as the doors parted. Beyond the lift, two huge gorillas were hurling furniture across the sales floor. Gorillas in alien uniforms. Terrified shoppers and Wendleby’s staff were scrambling to get through or over the displays and away to safety.

  Gwen unholstered her handgun. Owen was ahead of her, already out of the lift and stepping over the remains of the coffee table that had been hurled against the outer doors.

  One of the creatures broke off from its bombardment, and swung onto a tall, freestanding unit. Racks of cutlery tumbled off and clattered to the floor. A young sales assistant stood below it, petrified. One of her friends seized a skillet from a display of pans and lashed out wildly. The gorilla casually reached out one long arm and simply batted him away into a rack of electrical goods.

  Owen waved away some shoppers who had raced from the next department to see what all the noise was. One woman was struggling with her many bags of shopping, while her husband yanked the sleeve of her coat and told her to leave them. The short argument was abruptly ended when the nearest gorilla landed right in front of them with a thump, opened its huge mouth and bellowed a savage roar straight into their faces. The woman shrieked, flung her shopping aside, and fled. The gorilla began to pick curiously at the abandoned Wendleby’s bags.

  Two other shoppers were angling their mobile phone cameras at the creature. ‘Are you insane?’ Owen yelled. Before he could reach them, there was a swirl of brilliant white light from over by the sofa beds, and one of the gorillas melted away into nothing.

  Owen rushed up to the nearest shopper, a bristle-headed lad in a bomber jacket who bore an uncanny resemblance to the gorillas. He smacked the camera phone from the lad’s hand. ‘That could have been the last picture you ever took.’

  ‘It will be if you smashed my camera, you jerk!’ He was bunching his fists, squaring up to Owen.

  Owen held up his compact double-action 9mm pistol so that the lad could see it clearly. ‘Talk to the gun, ’cause the face ain’t listening.’ He was pleased to see the bloke was shocked into silence. ‘Get out of here before you’re killed. Could be that thing that does it, could be me.’ Owen switched on his earcomms. ‘Ianto, you there, mate?’

  ‘Receiving.’

  ‘Take out the mobile phone network.’

  ‘Doing it now.’ Ianto’s voice crackled in his ear. ‘Got some activity up there?’

  Gwen was in on the conversation now. ‘We might need back-up. Are those Achenbrite boys on standby with their capture equipment? These things look like the biggest gorillas you ever saw.’

  ‘Gorillas?’ said Ianto. ‘You don’t see many of those in Wendleby’s.’

  ‘They’re not picking out fabrics,’ said Gwen. ‘They’re in combat gear.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ianto. ‘So they’d be guerrilla gorillas, then?’

  ‘Just send Achenbrite up here, Ianto.’

  The remaining gorilla bellowed from its position atop the display unit. It swung its hairy, drooling face around, and its scrunched expression suggested that it couldn’t work out where its monstrous mate had gone.

  ‘I used to love a bit of a shop, me,’ sighed Gwen as she took aim. Her bullet struck the monster right between the eyes. It fell backwards off the display and clattered down into a display of coffee makers and kettles.

  Owen hurried over to where it had fallen. A small crowd of frightened people edged nearer to it. The gorilla heaved one last great gust of rank air, and its final breath sprayed the crowd with snot from its huge nostrils. The crowd cowered. A handful stared at their mobile phones as though they could will them into action, but the handsets had died as abruptly as the creature. Owen could hear the three-note apology from the nearest ones, and the calm Achenbrite statement.

  ‘What’s going on?’ demanded the lad in the bomber jacket. Owen held up his gun as a fresh warning, and the bloke looked shocked again. Except this time, it was at something behind Owen.

  He whirled to face a new threat. A spindly creature with a tiny central body and etiolated limbs staggered across the furniture department. It trailed its dangling hands almost lazily over a nearby sofa bed. The cover split open and spewed stuffing and springs, as if it had been eviscerated. The creature flicked its head from side to side quizzically, reached out one long arm, and plucked at a ceiling-mounted CCTV camera.

  ‘Shit!’ spat Owen. ‘Ianto, you have to kill the CCTV!’

  He loosed off a couple of shots. The creature picked up a two-seater sofa and flipped it across the room. It could have been made of feathers for all the effort it seemed to require. But it felt heavy enough when it glanced off Owen and knocked the gun from his hand. Gwen took a harder blow, and fell beneath the sofa.

  The creature stalked closer. A sales assistant got in the way, so it picked him up and flexed its fingers. The man’s body was severed, and the two halves of his corpse were discarded like litter. Blood sprayed over the nearby furnishings.

  The creature moved towards Owen. He scrabbled backwards, desperate to get away from the knife-edged talons.

  It brought its insectoid head closer to him, so close that he could see his face reflected in its compound eyes. Was it looking at him? Scenting him? About to devour him?

  He didn’t have time to speculate any more, because the head split open in an explosion of dark liquid.

  When Owen opened his eyes, Jack Harkness was grinning down at him. One hand held his .38 Webley revolver, which was still smoking. The other was held out to help Owen get to his feet.

  ‘I can’t believe all of this, Jack.’ The stranger beside Jack sported a tweed jacket and a Welsh accent.

  ‘Who’s your mate?’ Owen asked Jack.

  Jack clapped the stranger on the shoulder. ‘David Brigstocke, from BBC Radio Wales. Gimme a hand, David, I think one of my officers is trapped over here. She looks good in leather, but not when it’s on a sofa.’

  Owen assisted them in freeing Gwen from beneath the tumbled heap of furniture. ‘He’s your journalist?’

  ‘He wanted to do a “day in the life” piece, I said he could tag along.’ Jack was staring at the ceiling-mounted cameras. ‘Why are these cameras still operational?’

  Ianto’s voice said in their ears: ‘I’m having a bit of trouble isolating the feeds.’

  ‘Take out the power to the whole place!’ shouted Jack.

  The journalist, Brigstocke, looked alarmed. ‘Shouldn’t we evacuate the store first?’

  ‘We?’ smiled Jack. He indicated the shrinking crowds around them. ‘Besides, I think they’ve got the message. OK, David. Until the power goes out, let’s make sure they’re keeping clear of this area. Go and hit the reverses on the up escalators. Then call all the lifts to this floor and jam their doors open. Prevents anyone getting trapped inside them.’

  Owen saw that Brigstocke was hesitating by the torn remains of the store clerk.

  ‘Hey!’ Jack snapped at Brigstocke. ‘You wanted to be a part of this… Go!’

  The toy department was deserted now. Most of the shoppers had been parents, accompanying their bright-eyed children to plan Christmas. Thinking about birthday presents. The occasional weekend dad making up for his workday absence with the bribe of a gift. Mothers and fathers whose parental instinct was to protect their children first of all.

  So when a whirlwind of savage animals had sprung from the MonstaQuest display, it had rapidly become obvious that this wasn’t a store event. That much was clear from the genuine terror in the staff, who had abandoned their desks and tills and fled the scene screaming like everyone else. Two huge gorillas had lumbered off, dragging their feet and knuckles, whooping and chattering at the new sights. A whirlwind group of huge, savage insects hovered and chittered in the deserted toy department, plucking at the soft toys as though considering how edible they were.

  Parents, children, staff ha
d fled. Now there was only one mother left. And it was her instinct to stay with her child.

  Jennifer Portland faced Gareth at the heart of the storm, trying to ignore the wafts from the dreadful creatures that fluttered over her head, the slashing sounds of their razor-sharp mandibles.

  ‘What have you done, Gareth?’ She pleaded with him to look at her, to acknowledge her. But he simply stared out with a cold and dispassionate look at the devastation he had wrought.

  As her son had grown up, Jennifer had been able to tell when Gareth was distressed. Even when he wouldn’t tell her, she could recognise the set of his mouth, or the particular way he slouched when he tried to explain something, or the sparkle of unshed tears in his frustrated eyes. Now as she looked at him, she didn’t recognise anything at all. It was like the shell of her beloved son. All that was of him had been emptied out and replaced with something else.

  ‘What have you done?’ she asked again. That was when all the store lights went out.

  The noise from the monstrous insects all around them dipped momentarily, before resuming with a new, angry intensity.

  There was still a sharp source of light across the sales floor. It spilled out from within the MonstaQuest display behind Gareth, throwing his outline into sharp silhouette. He was staring at the Visualiser device. He turned it to the light so he could read the display, but what Jennifer could read was the fury in her son’s face.

  ‘Not enough people!’ snarled Gareth. ‘Insufficient power!’

  ‘Gareth, come back to me!’ pleaded Jennifer. She shuffled closer. Desperate to hold him. To forgive him.

  ‘There is no Gareth,’ said the thing that had been her son. Its black eyes bored into her. ‘And besides, you were already dead to him.’

  Gareth strode past his mother, shrugging off her attempt to grab him, to hug him. She turned to follow him as he left. But the insect creatures had gathered in front of her. Gareth was already out of the room when the insects fell upon Jennifer.