TWENTY-NINE
No one ever brought the Hoover up here, thought Ianto. How difficult could it be? The lift by the reception area had a stop on this floor, otherwise how would they get patients in and out. And OK, some of the layout in the Hub might be a bit idiosyncratic, based as it was on rebuilding existing underground vaults from Victorian times under the cover of the Tiger Bay redevelopment – if only the AMs in the Welsh Assembly knew why their Senedd building had really run so wildly over budget.
He’d have thought that everyone in Torchwood could agree that a medical suite should be spick and span, it was only hygienic. But it fell to Ianto, as usual, to lug the vacuum cleaner all the way up from the junk room in the basement and run it over the dusty carpets of the medical area. Not that any of them would thank him, mind. Nor was it likely that a single one of them would even notice. He might as well be invisible, for all the attention they gave him. Though that sometimes had its advantages.
He had just switched the vacuum cleaner off, in the middle of changing one of the attachments, when he heard a glass and metal crash from the nearest bedroom. Gwen’s voice cried out in alarm.
Ianto shoved the vacuum cleaner aside with his foot and charged through the door. It wasn’t locked, so he stumbled a couple of feet into the room before regaining his balance.
On the far side, by the basin, Owen was embracing Gwen. A broken glass and a scattered pile of toiletries lay on the floor at their feet. He had his arms wrapped around her from behind, and was trying to press his face into the back of her neck.
‘Oh,’ muttered Ianto, and started to back out. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise.’
Gwen twisted, and managed to elbow Owen in the side. He doubled over sideways, and his grip on her loosened.
‘Get him off me!’ Gwen yelled at Ianto.
The back of her neck was scraped. Owen had been attempting to bite her.
Owen straightened up, and weighed his options. He feinted to the right, and then leaped at Gwen again, pushing her head over the basin and into the mirror above it. The glass splintered.
Ianto took two steps towards them, and swung the long metal Hoover attachment in a low arc that connected with the small of Owen’s back. Owen whirled around, snarling. His eyes narrowed at Ianto. Focused on the Hoover attachment.
Ianto was considering delivering another blow, to Owen’s head perhaps, when Owen took the initiative and shoulder-charged him. Although Owen was a lot smaller than him, the movement took Ianto by surprise and he crashed over a drugs trolley, rolling onto the floor. By the time he had regained his feet, Owen had fled the room and slammed the door behind him.
Gwen had slid down the wall by the broken mirror. She sat there, winded and shocked, looking at the chaos of the room. Ianto went over to her. She had a cut just above her hairline that, as scalp injuries do, was bleeding heavily, but was less serious than it looked. The gnawed mark on her neck had just broken the skin too, and her clothes were bloodied. Ianto hunted around for sterile wipes and some pressure dressings.
The sheets and blankets were rumpled where Owen must have leaped up. Ianto stripped them back completely, and got Gwen to come over to the bed where he could position the bedside light and examine her wounds. Gwen winced as he wiped the blood away.
Ianto sat beside her, one hand on her forehead and the other gently against her neck. When Toshiko came into the bedroom, she saw them on the bed together and backed out immediately. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise,’ she said, and closed the door.
Two seconds later, Toshiko had obviously thought a bit more about it. The door opened again. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said, ‘where’s Owen?’
Jack waded downhill to the phone box. For a moment, he thought he might struggle to find the right change to make a call. Would anyone accept the charge at Torchwood if he called collect?
With no signal from any mobile, he needed a landline to make urgent contact with the Hub. He’d spotted the box as he crested the hill of the side road. The SUV was still visible, clear of the water that was swirling around this lower-lying road. The cold water eddied around his knees and soaked through his trousers.
Ianto eventually answered the call.
‘What kept ya?’ asked Jack. ‘OK, so the system wouldn’t have recognised this number. I’m using a payphone. And I’m practically up to my ass in water.’
‘Right,’ said Ianto. ‘The whole Bay area is flooding, too. The office is underwater.’
‘I tracked Megan Tegg down to the Levall-Mellon building,’ Jack explained. ‘Jeez, if any more people are gonna fall off there, we should start selling tickets. Oh, and I had a messy passenger in the car, Ianto. Do you know a good valet service?’
Ianto wasn’t responding to the banter as he usually did.
‘What’s wrong?’ Jack asked. The pips started to sound on the phone line. Jack cursed – that was never three inutes, there had to be a fault somewhere. He grabbed for the spare change that he’d lined up on top of the payphone. Half of it slipped through his fingers and into the water. He managed to insert one coin just in time.
‘Gwen and Toshiko found Owen, and brought him back. They thought he was injured, but he’s woken up and attacked Gwen. Tried to bite her in the neck. We think he’s being controlled by one of those devices inserted in his spine.’
So that’s why Megan was so placid at the end. ‘She had options,’ remembered Jack.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Sorry, Ianto. Thinking aloud. You’re right. Owen is not himself. He’s being controlled by the same thing that took Guy Wildman and Anthony Bee. Are Gwen and Tosh OK?’
‘Yes. They’re tracking him down.’
Jack could hear a muttered conversation somewhere in the background.
‘They’ve located his mobile signal in the basement. Our internal network’s still up.’
‘OK, Ianto. Our problem now is that the thing controlling Owen knows everything he knows. So it knows its way around the Hub. It won’t need the fuel cells once it works out it can harvest the materials we’ve got down there.’
Jack thought he heard Ianto say, quietly but distinctly, ‘Oh, God.’
No time for this, thought Jack. Need to make things safe. ‘Stay with me, Ianto.’ Steel in his voice now. ‘Be careful. You got it cornered. It has nowhere else to go. No more lives left.’
A cold feeling ran right through Jack. Maybe it was the flickering intensity of the lightning that transformed the falling rain around the phone booth into strings of diamond brilliance. Maybe it was just the relentlessly increasing water around him, which had now risen up his thighs. He watched it slap against the glass insides of the phone box. From the outside of the phone booth, a passer-by might mistake this for a David Blaine trick. Would the magician escape the rising water in time?
‘Hello? Are you still there, sir?’
‘Yeah, sorry Ianto. I’m coming back in. You and Tosh, concentrate on finding Owen. Have Gwen meet me at the base of the water tower with scuba gear.’
‘Scuba gear?’
‘Yeah, coupla sets. And—’
The sound of the pips interrupted him again. Jack yelled urgently but clearly over them. ‘Find Owen. You cannot let him outta the basement. Subdue him if you can. And Ianto…?’
‘Yes?’
‘Kill him if you can’t.’
‘Sir…?’ He detected a note of incredulity in Ianto’s voice.
But the line had gone dead.
You didn’t expect to be so hungry, so badly, so soon. It clutches at your stomach, and your limbs ache. You’ve seen enough junkies sweating it out in the confines of an A&E to recognise addiction. The tremendous high. The hedonistic rush. But the brain develops a tolerance, and it demands more and more.
You thought about this when you were Megan. Now you’ve got another doctor’s perspective on the matter and, better still, you’re a doctor who has significantly more medical familiarity with alien organisms. Through Bee and Wildman, Applegate and Tegg, you’ve learned that the craving that wrenches your guts is now more than just a biochemical process in the brain, it’s a dependency.
Your undergraduate tutor called it ‘the interaction of opportunity and vulnerability’. If she asked you now, you could make her proud by describing it as a function of the cortico-mesolimbic dopaminergic system. But nothing you said to her could convey the consuming, overpowering, blinding urge to kill and devour and satiate that animalistic need. To satisfy the yearning any way you can. And to indulge, too, the dark thrill of the chase.
Behind that is the sheer excitement of being here at all. You are starting to realise where you are, what the potential is. No wonder the others feared and hated Torchwood. With what you know now about the history of the organisation, the people who work here, the contents of the vaults, there is even more to strike terror into their hearts.
Gwen and Toshiko and Ianto are searching for you. You’ve covered your tracks well. Your mobile phone is concealed in the cells, because you know that will be standard procedure for tracking you through the building. So long as you can stave off that gnawing hunger, you can rifle the inventory in Jack’s office for technology to power or repair the ship. Maybe even Bruydac technology, who knows. The others will be too busy in the cells to stop you.
Especially since you released the Weevil.
Whenever you’ve stared into that animal’s eyes before, you’ve known that its one desire is to kill. Three weeks ago, you and Toshiko visited the cells and looked at the thing, apparently asleep on its cot in the far corner of its grubby enclosure. But when you both approached the security glass that encased it in the cell, the creature scented you both through the air holes. The nostrils twitched, and the arched, deep-set eyes flickered open in anticipation. ‘This one puts the “evil” into “Weevil”,’ Toshiko told you then.
Well, when she locates your mobile down there, she’ll have a chance to find out for herself how evil that animal really is.
The walk-in safe that dominates one side of Jack’s office is sealed. Only Jack has the key. There’s nothing of use below the hatch in the floor. There’s a kind of daring to your actions. You’d never have attempted this kind of break-in before. Such a pity that all you’ve unearthed with your new-found bravery is a heap of confidential paperwork and two bowls of fresh fruit.
It’s the fruit that sets you off again. Thinking of food. Your guts ache, and the familiar appetite reasserts itself. You slam your fist against a filing cabinet, but even the pain of that doesn’t distract from the urge to feed once more.
You stagger out of the office, reeling with the longing. It’s impossible to distract yourself with a calm medical analysis. No chance to dispassionately recall how there are modified ependymal cells in the choroids plexus, when your whole self is aching to sink your teeth into Gwen’s spine and chew and grind until you’ve breached the final barrier of the meninges to drink down the salty dregs of her cerebrospinal fluid.
In the Autopsy Room, you’re almost unable to control your drooling. Even the stained tray where you conducted Wildman’s post-mortem is setting you off. On the instrument rack you find tools – a bone saw hangs beside the duralinium enterotome, the bulb-ended scissors that you use for cutting through intestines. There’s a small box of curved flat-sided Hagedorn needles. And beside that, the hooked hammer with which you pull the calvarium from the lower portion of a severed skull. Why not take some of these with you? You can use the Stryker saw to cut through the skull, and get at the spinal fluid without the usual mess and fragments of bone in your mouth.
Convenience food. You could strike Gwen down, and then open her up like a packed lunch.
Suitably equipped, you set off for the lower levels.
Gwen didn’t like sitting alone in the Hub, not at the best of times. This was worse, sitting by a computer terminal in the Hub while Ianto and Toshiko tracked Owen through the basement. At least she could guide them while she waited for Jack to return. She watched their identification icons slide silently across the computer schematic that showed the labyrinth of interconnecting tunnels that criss-crossed the Torchwood basement.
At first, the sound of their voices over an open channel made her feel less alone. Then she decided that Owen would also be able to hear them describing their progress. When Gwen brought this up, Toshiko considered restricting the broadcast to a point-to-point message between them and the headset at the terminal where Gwen sat, but on further reflection decided that Owen was just about smart enough to hack into that if he wanted.
‘Doesn’t that apply to these icons too?’ Gwen asked. ‘If I can track you on the schematic…’
There was a further silence from Toshiko. ‘You’re right,’ she said eventually. ‘He’s a sneaky sod. Did I mention that he breached our firewall with that virtual reality game?’
‘Only seven times.’
‘I am so going to slap him when I find him. OK, Gwen, we’ll reconnect if we need to. Ianto, you need to switch off your mobile. Now.’ Toshiko’s line cut out. The two identification icons on the schematic faded away into nothing.
Gwen listened to the hum of the computers, the drip of water, and the occasional rustle from the pterodactyl up in the rafters above the second floor.
The ping of an alarm drew her attention to a second display. It showed a high view of the surrounding area, seen from the top of the silver water tower. Only the humped outline of the Millennium Centre’s entrance made the image recognisable. The evening light had faded dramatically under the leaden skies, and sheets of rain swept over an expanse of murky water. The Bay water flooded right up as far as the tower and completely obscured the paving stones.
The alarm detected changes in heat signals from the immediate area. At the top of the image, there was the imposing outline of Jack Harkness, making his way knee-deep through the water. He had his head down against the prevailing wind, and his greatcoat trailed in a wake through the storm water behind him. He splashed his way to the paving slab by the water tower, and activated the lift.
The relative calm of the Hub was disrupted at once. A square column of dirty water began to cascade from the ceiling as the paving slab began its descent.
Within seconds, Jack was visible above it, like a drenched statue on a tall, liquid plinth. ‘Close it! Close it!’ he spluttered down to her.
Gwen fumbled with an override control, and a replacement paving slab slotted into place and shut off the flow of water as abruptly as it had begun. She made her way over to the lift’s hydraulic pole. The basin in the centre of the Hub was overflowing with water now, so she negotiated her way across by clinging to a higher walkway. A fish briefly broke the surface of the pool as Gwen shuffled tentatively across.
The slab reached floor level. Jack was soaked from head to toe. She helped him as he shrugged off his drenched coat. Gwen ruffled his hair, which was plastered flat to his forehead. He slicked it back with his hand, and she saw the watch on his wrist. ‘It really is waterproof, isn’t it?’
‘Better believe it,’ Jack told her. ‘American craftsmanship.’
His soaked coat was heavy with rainwater. Gwen laid it over a railing.
‘Take your brolly next time, eh?’
‘Must be in the car,’ he smiled. ‘I left the SUV a coupla streets back, uphill. Thought I could drive all the way back, but wasn’t sure where to drop anchor.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Gwen. ‘No traffic wardens out in that storm. It’s not going to be towed away.’
‘Hope not,’ agreed Jack. ‘Three dead bodies in it.’
‘That’s got to be worth at least twelve points on your licence.’
‘If I had one. Never needed to.’ Jack had sauntered over to the basin. He was sopping wet, so he didn’t seem to care about wading across through the flood water. ‘You got the scuba gear I asked for?’
Gwen indicated a pile of equipment on the other side of the basin.
‘Suit up,’ said Jack.
‘Aren’t we going to help Ianto and Tosh find Owen?’
Jack was already stripping off his outer clothes. ‘No time. That ship you found, it’s still coming through the Rift. You and me can best help Owen by getting back there.’
‘Getting back there how?’
Jack pointed at the flooded basin that separated them across the Hub. ‘This is a tidal pool. There are some valves and safeguards to negotiate on the way, but it’s the fastest route. The ship will have come much further through the Rift now, because it’s displaced a huge amount of water in the Bay. C’mon, get your gear on.’
Gwen considered the precarious railing to the side of the basin, and the flooded walkway. She was going to get wet anyway. She shrugged, and waded across the basin to join Jack.
‘Did you bring a harpoon gun?’ Jack asked her as she started to strip.
She paused and looked at him. ‘You are joking, right?’
‘Not at all,’ he said as he adjusted the straps on his diving mask. ‘You do remember the size of that starfish thing, don’tcha?’