Skypoint

TWENTY-SIX

One day, when he’d had time on his hands, Jack had tried to work out how many times he had died. He actually sat down in his office with a block of paper and a couple of pens and wrote a neat 1 in the margin and alongside it he wrote Dalek.

That had been how it all started. After that there had been endless bar-room brawls – they had even killed him at Torchwood back in the early days – and at one time he’d worked in a travelling show billed as The Man Who Cannot Die. OK, people had paid to kill him then, but he figured that even if it bought him a few beers at the end of the day, when you got down to it a death was a death.

Then Torchwood had discovered that they had a problem with alien sleeper agents and the whole city started going up in smoke, and Jack lost the list and never got around to starting it again. The score was somewhere around a couple of hundred, by then. But he hadn’t even started on the trenches in Flanders.

He was sure he had already forgotten some of them – unlike his lovers; he remembered all of them (every sex and species) – the one thing he never forgot, however, was how it felt to come back to life.

Like being dragged over broken glass.

It never got any better, and he never got used to it. It felt as bad as ever as he found himself lying on the concrete floor of the stairwell just outside the SkyPark.

Gwen was kneeling over him. She had seen him die so many times, but she never got used to it. A part of her never fully expected him to return to life.

This time, they had reached the twenty-fourth floor, had got through the stairway doors and had found themselves facing another door. Gwen had told him that, according to the plans on her hand-held module, this was an indoor skyrise park area.

Jack had smiled. ‘What a lovely day for a walk in the park.’

He had gone to push the door open and as soon as he had touched it, he’d been hit by enough volts to light up Cardiff Arms Park.

‘I thought there was supposed to be a power cut around here,’ he said as the feeling returned to his extremities and Gwen helped him up again.

‘The door’s electrified,’ she said.

‘No kidding?’

Jack was waving his hands in the air; his fingers still tingled from their contact with the door.

‘Another of Lucca’s defences.’

‘Looks like.’

‘So what do we do? With the lifts not working, there’s no other way in.’

Jack was flexing his muscles, limbering up like a runner.

‘We don’t need another way in,’ he said.

Gwen couldn’t believe what he was suggesting. ‘Jack that’s madness.’

‘Hey, immortality is all about getting a buzz out of life.’

‘Jack-’

‘Just get though fast and don’t touch me. OK? Oh, and don’t look. I might turn a bit… crispy. And you might try and hold your breath.’

Before Gwen could waste any more time arguing, Jack lunged at the door, throwing it open with the weight and momentum of his body even as the electricity hit him and surged through him.

Gwen leaped through the open doorway and then turned back, watching in horror as Jack – already dead – clung to the door, his flesh starting to cook, his eyes boiling in his head.

It didn’t matter that she knew he was going to be all right…

She turned away, biting down on her hand. It was the only way to stop the scream that was clawing at her throat.

Behind her, she heard his body fall to the floor and the door swing to behind him. She found that she couldn’t turn around. She couldn’t bear to look at him like that.

She had seen him die so many times… but never like that.

She lost track of how long she stood there, her back to his body, waiting for him to stir.

When he touched her shoulder, she jumped.

‘I told you not to look,’ he said with a smile, and that old twinkle in his eyes.

His eyes. Thank God, he had eyes.

He saw her staring, wordless, and Jack felt a coldness close around his heart.

He ran a finger down the side of his face. ‘Hey, everything is all right, isn’t it?’

Gwen nodded smiling. ‘Oh, yes. Perfect.’

All the same, Jack took his torch and checked his reflection carefully in one of the big SkyPark windows.

‘Don’t do that to me,’ he said.

Together, they moved across the park as Gwen consulted the schematics on her small computer screen. They were looking at the outside of SkyPoint again, and Jack was running his eyes over the windows. He didn’t want to choose the wrong one.

‘Jack, are you sure this is going to work?’

He pointed at the electrified door. ‘There’s only one other way out of here, Gwen, and I am done cooking for today.’

There was a lightning conductor that ran down from the bottom end of Besnik Lucca’s roof garden. Jack’s plan was to climb it into the garden and launch a one-man assault on the penthouse from there. That in itself, at over sixty metres in the air, was a risky plan. Additionally, to get to the conductor, Jack would have to go out through one of the windows on the twenty-fourth floor and traverse half the SkyPoint building to reach it using a ledge only fifteen centimetres wide.

He was fairly confident that, however unassailable Lucca considered his sanctuary, he wouldn’t see an attack coming from the bottom of his garden.

‘Don’t worry,’ he told Gwen. ‘I’m good with heights.’

Then he drew the Webley, took careful aim and put out the window with four shots. The glass shattered and fell into the night. Jack hoped no one was standing down there tonight – that was the second window that he’d put out.

The wind whipped at his coat as he took a look out through the window and reloaded the gun. Gwen watched him fill the cylinder. Six shells. Then he pushed the Webley back into its holster and slipped the air force greatcoat off and handed it to Gwen.

‘Keep this for me, will you? Batman looks great with that flapping cloak of his, but I don’t think he ever gets this close to the edge.’

He stepped up onto the ledge and got ready to head along it.

‘Which way is it, again?’ he joked.

It was the final straw for Gwen, who threw the coat down on the floor and got up alongside him at the window.

‘And where do you think you’re going?’ he asked.

‘If you think you can take out Lucca and his men with just six bullets, you’re crazy, Jack Harkness,’ she said, and looked out at the drop below. ‘Crazier than you think you are!’

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘You’re crazy if you think you’re coming out here with me.’

‘I’ve been on ledges before. I talked a suicide down once, I did.’

‘Oh, really? What storey?’

She hesitated. ‘It’s the principle of the thing that’s important. Now let’s move, I’m freezing my bloody knickers off here.’