Skypoint

SIX

There had been a time in his life when Owen Harper had done everything he could to fight sleep. He had lost count of the pills he had put down his neck to help keep it at bay. As a doctor, he understood the importance of sleep; as a man he resented the chunks of life that it stole from him. Perhaps on some level he had always known that his life would be cut short and had been driven by his subconscious to make the most of what time he had. What he could never have imagined was that, at the age of twenty-six, he would have his heart reduced to mincemeat, and yet he would carry on living; nor that, in that twilight of half-life that he now endured, he would ache so much for the intermittent release of sleep.

But just as there was no rest for the wicked, as his grandmother used to tell him (God bless her mercifully departed soul) there was apparently no sleep for the undead. And when booze just filled your belly till it swelled up like an overfilled waterbed and the only way of getting rid of it was to stand on your head, open your oesophagus and wait for it to flood out across the floor around you, there wasn’t much point in filling the small hours with endless partying. And since blood no longer pumped around his body, the fuel line had run out on sex.

If Owen had believed in reincarnation – and it was odd that being dead his views on religion and the possibilities of an afterlife hadn’t really changed at all (he just didn’t buy into any of it) – but if there had been any such thing as karma then, by Christ, he must have really pissed off the gods in some past life. When he’d been a junior doctor doing his time in the genito-urinary department, he had met guys who couldn’t get it up. And that to Owen was a walking death in itself. If there was such a thing as karma and the shot that Pharm bastard Aaron Copley had fired through his heart was cosmic payback for stamping on a beetle when he was Genghis Khan or something, then there really wasn’t any need to go the whole hog. Not being able to have sex, but still aching for it was the most relentless, torturous punishment Owen could think of. Those hooded characters in the Middle Ages with their red hot pokers had nothing on this!

He had taken out a membership card at a DVD rental store and he was probably their best customer: three movies generally got him through the worst part of the night. Trouble was, he’d already gone through most of the good ones. The tag line on one of them – a lousy vampire flick with too many bare bouncing breasts that had only served to remind him of what he was missing – had purred It’s cool to be a vampire. Well, a vampire was the walking dead like him, and Owen found it pretty bloody hard to come up with anything – any damned thing at all – that was in any way cool about being dead and still walking.

But he supposed that was Hollywood for you. If you asked an American movie producer, John Wayne won the war single-handed; Robin Hood was a Yank with thinning hair and the White Cliffs of Dover were a five-minute walk from Nottingham Forest; and the crew of the Titanic passed the last few minutes of their lives shooting the passengers. Vampires probably felt pretty pissed off with the rep they got from Hollywood, too. Maybe that was why they were sometimes known as Nightwalkers because, as Owen had discovered, when you were dead but the message hadn’t got through to your body, walking was pretty much all there was left to do.

So that was how Owen Harper spent the hours when decent folk went to sleep, and the not-so-decent partied.

And as miserable an existence as it was, being undead, Owen couldn’t help smiling at the irony of the situation. He spent hours every night walking the streets of Cardiff. He had already worn through two pairs of shoes. If he were still alive, he’d have been the fittest he’d ever been. He couldn’t drink, he couldn’t eat, and he couldn’t shag – but at least he still had his sense of humour.

Always look on the bright side of death, as Eric Idle had said.

Yeah, well maybe he wasn’t quite that relaxed about it. And he didn’t think he ever would be. But at least Torchwood was still paying him, dead or alive. That would keep him in shoe leather and it looked like he was going to need it.

Come to that, now he didn’t need to eat and he couldn’t drink and heating in his flat wasn’t really much of an issue as he could feel neither cold nor heat, his wages were starting to stack up in the bank. Another of the ironies of a living death.

He did still buy the occasional coffee, however. Like now. He never drank it. It just went cold in the cup before him, but people were used to people sitting over drinks that they hardly touched in all-night cafés like this one. The staff left you alone with your demons. At 2am on a Tuesday morning, if you weren’t some sort of shift worker looking for a caffeine buzz to get you through the night and you were hunched over a coffee in a dive like Constantine’s, chances were you had demons of one sort or another.

And it was demons of a kind that had brought Owen here tonight and every night for the last three weeks.

But they weren’t his.

Except that he had kind of made them his own by deciding not to tell the rest of the team about the man he had seen ripped to pieces by two women in an alleyway at the back of the café.

They weren’t really women, of course. As the two of them had torn the poor guy apart like two halves of a butchered pig, their jaws had distended and expanded and the small pearl teeth that they had flashed at the poor sod just a few minutes before grew into razor-edged spikes. Their flesh had turned to scales. Their eyes had grown large and black, like those of a dead shark.

Owen watched it all from the cover of a dumpster that stank of rotting food, and the odour of a drunk’s toilet. The man had been dead before Owen got there – the girls were pragmatic butchers: they had taken off their victim’s head first, effectively stemming any cries for help and killing him at once. By the time Owen had reached the cover of the dumpster, the guy had been nothing but dead meat and bone – and the two creatures had devoured it all, ripped dripping red flesh from living bone then ground the broken skeleton between their massive, powerful extended jaws. The sound of the dead man’s bones being pulverised and devoured was loud and industrial, like machinery rendering waste.

Thirty minutes earlier, Owen had watched the girls walk into Constantine’s coffee shop. They had smiled at him as they came through the door. They had looked at him in the same beat and both had curved and parted their lips a moment later and shown him small, perfectly white teeth as if on cue. Each smile was an exact copy of the other. And the girls almost were.

Twins, Owen had thought, and he felt that hopelessly familiar ache for the things he would have done before that bastard’s bullet put an end to more than just his life. As fantasies went, twins were right up there. And Owen had fulfilled most of his fantasies generally more than once with a succession of women. But he had never made it with twins. And he was never going to. That was why he looked away from the girls as they smiled his way, and that was probably why they moved on.

All the same, Owen was curious and he watched them in the night-time mirror-glass of the big coffee shop window as the twins bought cappuccinos from the bag-eyed student who did the Constantine’s nightshift three days a week.

They couldn’t have been much past eighteen; they were tall – maybe five-eight (and most of that was leg) with the lean, toned bodies of athletes – and they dressed in duplicate red outfits that displayed a lot of chest and lot of thigh. Each wore white boots.

Clubbers, Owen guessed. The only difference between them was their hair. Both wore it long, but one was black, the other was the colour of bleached silver. If they pulled (and why the hell wouldn’t they?) it was the only way their guys would tell them apart. And they were probably wigs that the girls switched in the toilets to have fun with their unsuspecting dates. They looked like a couple of girls who liked to have fun.

Boy, he thought later, didn’t he get that right.

But dressed like that at this time in this part of town was asking for trouble. There were five other guys in the coffee shop apart from Owen and the student barista. Owen wouldn’t have trusted any of them with his dog, never mind his daughter. All of them watched the girls as they waited for the coffees, and the girls spent the time leaning their slender backs against the counter watching the men. Occasionally one would whisper to the other, and the other would snigger, flashing a glance at one of the men who would know beyond doubt that they were discussing him. Owen knew how that would feel and these girls were playing with fire. Either they had just escaped from a convent school, or they knew exactly what they were doing.

Owen’s worries for the safety of the girls began to subside. He started to worry about the men.

The student behind the bar put the girls’ coffees on the stained and scarred stainless-steel counter and Owen watched as they turned and reached for drinks in perfect unison.

Unnatural unison.

And together, without discussion, they took a table next to a man in his middle thirties. His hair was long, tied back in a ponytail. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days but his clothes were clean and no shabbier than your regular Cardiff student. Like the rest of the men in there, he hadn’t failed to notice the twins, but he’d shared his interest in them with the book he was reading. Or, more likely, had the discretion to hide it behind the book. Owen couldn’t see what the book was, but it looked like some sort of paperback academia. The guy was probably a mature student, or maybe a lecturer. As the girls sat down, they both flashed the ponytailed guy those white smiles, and in them Owen recognised just the right proportions of shyness, interest and promise. Like they had used a formula to work it out.

Only the guy with the ponytail and the highbrow paperback would never see that.

Didn’t matter how bright a man was, when a sexy woman smiled at you – that was all you saw. When you were looking at twin smiles that glowed like that, it was like being hit by closing car headlights and suddenly you were no better than a dumb rabbit.

When the man smiled back, Owen knew the guy was dead. Whatever the twins really were inside the flesh that they wore so well as they worked the men in the coffee shop, they were predators. And Owen watched, fascinated, as they stalked their prey across the half-dried puddles of cold coffee on the old scratched table. All it really needed was David Attenborough whispering a commentary in his ear.

He wasn’t close enough to hear what the women said to the ponytailed student/lecturer, all he could do was read the body language, but it wasn’t a long dialogue. Just a few minutes later all three were pushing back their chairs and moving towards the coffee-shop door and the darkness that waited outside. Owen watched them in the window, and started to work out what he was going to do. Fascination with these hunting creatures was one thing, they had provided a distraction from his nocturnal boredom, but he couldn’t let this go the whole way …

As they passed him and opened the door onto the street Owen could feel the heat of excitement coming off the ponytailed guy. If he’d looked, Owen was sure he’d have seen it building up in the guy’s crotch. Owen let them slip through the door, and the girls were laughing at something the guy had just said. Their laughter made Owen think of Disney fairies; it was delicate and musical and unreal. As the door closed behind them it cut the sound off. Owen watched them turn left, one twin either side of the student/ lecturer as he slipped an arm around each girl’s waist. Then Owen slid off his chair and headed after them. He checked for the automatic tucked into the back of his belt; his hand was still busted from that bad night with Toshiko a few weeks back (it would always be busted since his body no longer had the ability to heal), but he knew he could still handle the gun OK. He didn’t really want to use it on the two pretty girls, but Torchwood had given him a pretty reliable sense about things around Cardiff, especially at this time of night, when things that looked a little odd were, in reality, probably right off the scale. He didn’t want to shoot the two girls, but he knew that was not what they were.

As he opened the door, a drunk the size of a grizzly bear lurched through it off the street and waded blindly into Owen on rubber legs. Something unintelligible slipped out of the drunk’s mouth as his eyes scrambled for focus and gave up. Owen thought it might have been an apology, and told the drunk that it was OK, then tried to get around him and out of the door, but the drunk clapped a meaty shovel of a hand against Owen’s shoulder and said something else, his eyes still swirling in his head like a couple of goldfish in twin bowls.

V gt nmney. Lsst’t. Cnn yuu …

Owen told the drunk that he didn’t have time for this, but the drunk wasn’t listening. He put his other hand on Owen’s other shoulder, and Owen wasn’t sure if the guy was trying to fix him with a look or just trying to stand up.

Y’lk lk nss kndablk …

And the guy with the ponytail and the two sexy girls that were something else entirely were getting further and further away …

Owen really didn’t have time for this.

He kicked the drunk hard just under the kneecap and the guy went down like a detonated apartment block. Owen was out on the street a moment later, and turned left but there was no sign of the ponytailed guy or the two women.

Shit.

Owen ran. He knew they couldn’t have gone far, but around here it was a maze of backstreets and alleyways. Each one was a black hole that could hide anything. Owen took the first one he came to. Logic suggested that was what they would have done. He pulled the gun from where it nestled in the small of his back and moved into the darkness of the alleyway, creeping quickly but silently. One thing about being dead, you never ran out of breath.

That was when Owen had seen that he was too late to save the man with the ponytail, and he had taken cover behind the dumpster, overcome by sick fascination as he watched the two women-things devour him, bones and all.

It was over in no more than five minutes – the girls killed and ate with a bloody choreography that was both practised and obscenely natural – but the worst part came at the end.

As they finished their feast, the girls’ alien transformation went into reverse as if it had been a reaction to their hungry bloodlust and now, sated, the spikes, scales and crunching jaws were shrinking away, the monsters metamorphosing back into the slight, vulnerable young women Owen had seen walk into the coffee shop. Only now they were on their knees in the filth of the back alley, licking up the blood and last remains of their victim from the dirt-encrusted paving and from his shredded clothing that was now all that remained of the man that had been drinking a two-shot white Americano in Constantine’s just a few minutes earlier. But that wasn’t the worst part.

Owen watched in fascinated horror as the slighter of the girls held a ragged strip of shirt linen in both hands and licked the blood off it the way people lick a yoghurt lid clean. Then, together, they gathered the dead man’s clothes and moved towards the dumpster with them.

Owen sank back further into the shadows. For a moment he forgot he was dead and tried to hold his breath.

They threw the savaged bundle of rags into the bin, and then came the worst part of all. The really bad bit – that was worse than any amount of flesh-tearing, bone crunching and blood-licking. The part that made Owen grateful that he no longer slept, that he would never have dreams that could be haunted by what he heard as the two women held hands and walked off into the darkness.

Their laughter. Musical and ethereal. And enough to chill a dead man’s bones.

Owen didn’t move from the darkness from behind the dumpster for maybe a full minute. And when he did, he looked down into his hand and saw that he still held the automatic, fully loaded, not a shot fired.

Why didn’t you use the gun?

And he didn’t know what scared him the most.

That was why he had kept what he had seen to himself. When morning came, he had gone to the Hub, seen Jack, Ianto and Toshiko and he hadn’t said a word. But that night he had returned to Constantine’s and he had waited for the twins to show up. They hadn’t, but Owen knew that they would. Some time. They were hunters and hunters always returned to the site of a good kill. Lions hunted at waterholes, these things stalked bars and coffee shops.

A couple of days later, the Hub’s computer system picked up a missing persons report on the Cardiff police system. Owen recognised the guy with the ponytail. Jean-Claude Gabin, a French philosophy student. He had been reported missing by his flatmate. The police had so far failed to find any trace of him. Owen doubted that they would. But people went missing all the time, and most of them turned up again safe and sound – even in Cardiff. Jean-Claude Gabin wouldn’t show up on the Torchwood radar unless parts of him showed up in the gutter, and the twins had been too fastidious for that.

So that night Owen had walked the streets of Cardiff once more until daybreak. And he had spent hours bent over a cooling, and cold, mug of coffee in Constantine’s. But the twins hadn’t shown up again.

And tonight he was here again.

For all he knew – or cared – the kid behind the bar could be just putting the same cold Americano in front of him that Owen had been bent over for the last week as he waited.

All that mattered was that he was there when the twins returned.