Slow Decay

ELEVEN

Owen could hear sobbing even before he reached the cells.

He stopped before he rounded the corner, and she saw him. It wasn’t that he liked listening to women cry — although he’d experienced more than his fair share since he lost his virginity in a stationery cupboard at school when he was fifteen — it was more that he didn’t want to see what any girl looked like when she was crying that hard. The sobs were racking, heaving things, and sobs like that in his experience were accompanied by snot and dishevelled hair and a general loss of self-respect. He liked women who were neat and tidy; at least, outside the bedroom.

When she showed no sign of stopping crying, Owen scuffed his foot against the floor. She didn’t hear or, if she did hear, she didn’t respond, so he did it another couple of times.

Eventually the crying stopped and, after a few moments when Owen imagined her hurriedly wiping her face, a small, scared voice said, ‘Is there someone there? Hello?’

He walked nonchalantly around the corner as if nothing had happened. She was in the third cell along: a girl with blonde hair, matted now, and a face blotchy from crying and streaked with mascara. Still, at least she’d made an effort to clean herself up. She was still holding a tissue. Cardboard fragments lay scattered around her feet. Owen had a feeling that they were all that was left of the pizza boxes that had been stacked up in her cell earlier.

‘Hallo, Marianne,’ he said.

‘Everyone seems to know my name,’ she replied, ‘but I don’t know who anyone else is.’

‘I’m Owen. I’m a doctor.’

She moved closer to the transparent barrier that separated the cell from the corridor. ‘Am I ill? Is that why I’m here? I can’t remember.’

‘This is an isolation ward. We think you might have caught an infectious disease.’

She wasn’t convinced. ‘It looks more like a cell. A really old cell.’

‘Ah. This part of the hospital had been closed down. We reopened it because of the epidemic.’

‘But I thought I’d been drugged. The man who was here earlier told me someone had drugged my drink.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Owen said, thinking quickly. ‘But we think whoever drugged your drink was infected with a tropical disease.’ He racked his brain for the name of some remote illness, the kind of thing that GQ published ghastly colour photographs of under the heading ‘10 Diseases You Really Don’t Want To Catch’. ‘It’s called Tapanuli Fever. Never been seen in the UK before. We’re isolating anyone this guy came into contact with until we can get them checked over.’

‘Is that why I’m so hungry all the time? Is that one of the symptoms?’

‘Look,’ he said reassuringly, ‘the chances are you’re clean, but we need to be sure. If we’re wrong, it’ll make avian flu look like a joke.’

‘Avian flu was a joke. It never happened.’

‘Yeah, but if it had, it would have been really serious.’

He took a deep breath. She wasn’t your normal Cardiff city centre good-time girl, this one. Sparky. If he’d met her in a bar, he’d have been tempted to chat her up and take her back home. Well, back to her home. ‘Look, do you know how many people died of flu in the great pandemic of the fourteenth century?’

‘Sorry, I was crap at history,’ she said. ‘But I was really good at biology.’

‘I bet. It was twenty-five million. About a third of Europe’s population at the time. These things can spread faster than Crazy Frog ringtones if they’re not checked.’

‘And that’s what you do?’ She looked him up and down. ‘Aren’t you a bit young to be a doctor?’

‘Aren’t you a bit young to be hanging around in bars accepting drinks from strangers?’

‘Point taken.’ She sniffed. ‘So what can I do to help? Apart from just hanging around in the cold and the damp?’

‘I need to conduct an examination, but I can’t come in the… unit… with you.’

‘OK.’ She started unbuttoning her blouse. ‘You want me to take everything off?’

‘Yes. No!’ Owen took a deep breath. Tempted though he was, if Jack caught him getting a girl to strip off in the cells, he’d be out on his ear. It had been bad enough last time it happened; he’d never talk his way out of it again. ‘No, I’ve got a kind of scanner thing. If I pass it through the food slot, you can wave it all over your body. It’ll take readings which I can analyse later.’

‘And it’ll work through clothing? I don’t mind taking everything off. You’re a doctor, after all.’

God help him. ‘Yes, it’ll work through clothing. You don’t have to take anything off.’ Although, he almost said, if it’ll make you feel more comfortable…

Owen reached into his pocket and took out his Bekaran deep-tissue scanner: slim and rectangular, with a lens arrangement set along one edge. It was essentially an ultrasound generator and detector, but Toshiko had modified it, reconfiguring the device to send its readings via wireless LAN directly to Owen’s terminal. But he didn’t really care how it actually worked. As far as he, or any doctor, was concerned, it fell under the general banner heading of ‘shuftiscope’ — a device that allowed him to take a shufti into someone else’s body. Whatever a ‘shufti’ was. Something his dad used to say, as in: ‘I’ll just take a shufti at that washing machine.’ Maybe Jack would know where ‘shufti’ came from. He was good with old words.

Owen knelt, and slid the device through the slot at the bottom of the door where pizzas had obviously been passed through to her. ‘Here. It’s switched on already. Just move it carefully along the outside of your clothes, as close to the skin as you can get. Try and make sure you cover everything.’

‘OK.’ She hesitated. ‘Look, I don’t want to seem critical, but if this is an isolation ward, and if I might be infected with something horrible, then why is that food slot left open? And why are there ventilation holes in this glass screen?’

Jesus. He was really having to work for this. ‘Positive pressure in the corridor,’ he said with as much confidence as he could muster. ‘The airflow goes into the… unit… not out. So I’m safe.’

‘Here goes,’ she said with trepidation. Holding the device above her stomach, she began to move it up her body.

Sour metal.

That was the first thing Gwen smelled as she pushed open the door of the flat. Sour, hot metal, like a garage where car parts were being welded together.

It was a smell she knew. Almost an old, familiar friend by now. The first time it had pricked her nostrils had been at three in the morning in a house in Butetown, where an elderly man had patiently used a hacksaw to cut through his left wrist, all the way to the bone and beyond. Gwen hadn’t seen the body — she’d been too junior for that, so she was just standing at the door, stopping anyone apart from the police and the coroner from going inside, but she remembered that smell, creeping down the stairs, and every time she smelled it now it put her back there, standing at the bottom of those uncarpeted stairs, listening to her colleagues trying to unstick the old man’s body from the bath. The next time had been in a squat in Ely, when a doped-up kid had whacked her in the nose with the heel of his hand as he tried to fight his way past her. The bleeding had stopped within ten minutes, leaving her lips and chin crimson and sticky, but she still had that flat, metallic taste in her mouth the next day. The times after that — too numerous to mention. The places were all different, the cause was always the same.

Gwen knew blood when she smelled it.

‘Rhys?’ she shouted, slamming the door into the wall and rushing into the hall. ‘What’s happened?’

Not even listening for an answer, she kept moving towards the living room. Rhys wasn’t there, but Lucy was crumpled on the floor, back against the sofa. Her alabaster forehead was marred by a massive bruise. By her feet, a spatter of blood marred the carpet.

‘Gwen?’ Rhys emerged from the bathroom, holding a tea towel to his cheek. The front of his T-shirt was bright red, the same colour as his neck, the same colour as the tea towel was turning where it touched him. ‘Thank Christ you’re back.’

She rushed to him and took his weight, feeling him lurch into her, supporting himself on her shoulders. ‘You need to sit down. Come on, let’s get you into the living room.’

Like competitors in some crazy three-legged race, they staggered together out of the hall. Carefully, Gwen let Rhys slip from her grasp, transferring his weight from her to the armchair, still keeping the tea towel clamped to his cheek. She stood over him, feeling like she’d come to a dead end, a junction where she wasn’t sure which way to turn.

‘I wasn’t expecting you back,’ Rhys murmured. His eyes were closed, his head resting on the back of the armchair.

‘Obviously,’ Gwen said. Her gaze clamped on Lucy, slumped on the floor a few feet away. She bent down to check the girl. Her pulse was strong in a throat that was so thin Gwen could see the throbbing of the blood in her arteries and the taut lines of the tendons distending the skin. She was unconscious, but breathing normally.

And there was blood on her lips: wet and smeared across her cheek. Gwen cautiously pulled Lucy’s lower lip downwards. Her teeth were bloodied as well, the blood outlining the gaps between them.

‘Rhys, what the hell has been going on here?’

‘We went out shopping for food, and Lucy started acting strange.’ Rhys kept his eyes closed as he spoke in a quiet, strained voice. ‘We came back, and she started coming on to me. I thought she was going to kiss me, and I tried to tell her not to, but she suddenly launched herself at me and bit my cheek. I pushed her away, but she just threw herself at me again. I pushed her away again, and she stumbled back and went arse-over-tit over the coffee table, hitting her head on the arm of the sofa as she went. I think she’s out cold. She’s still breathing, at least. I checked that before I went to sort my face out. I was just about to ring you.’

‘Let me look.’ Gwen reached out to take the tea towel. It was cold and wet. For a moment she thought that Rhys had been rinsing it under the tap in the bathroom when she arrived, but as she took it in her hand she realised it was too bulky, too cold. There was something inside: a packet of frozen peas.

Cautiously, Gwen peeled the cold tea towel from Rhys’s face. He hissed in pain, eyes clenched tight together. Strings of glutinous, clotting blood joined the towel to his face, but the damage wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. The cheek was more or less intact, but Lucy’s tooth-marks were clearly visible in Rhys’s flesh. It looked like she’d relaxed her grip when he pushed her back, rather than tearing his cheek off. He would live.

‘But why would she try and bite you?’ Gwen asked. ‘Apart from the obvious.’

‘I don’t think the obvious had anything to do with it. She was in a frenzy. The way her lips were drawn back, it was like a starving dog seeing a raw steak. I swear, Gwen, if she’d got a better grip she would have torn my cheek off and swallowed it whole, then come back for more. She would have eaten my entire face off if I hadn’t stopped her.’

With a sickening lurch, Gwen realised that if things had gone slightly differently, if Rhys’s reactions hadn’t been quite so fast or if Lucy had come at him while he wasn’t looking, Gwen might have come home to find him like that Weevil they’d discovered in the alleyway, his face all raw tissue and bloody bone.

What the hell was going on? What with that girl — Marianne — in the Hub, and now Lucy, it was beginning to look like some kind of bizarre epidemic was affecting Cardiff.

And affecting Gwen’s personal life, as well. No matter how much she tried to keep the two of them apart, Torchwood and home were blurring together.

‘We need to get you seen to,’ she said.

‘You make it sound like you’re taking me to the vet’s.’

‘I wish! I was thinking more in the realm of tetanus shots. Antibiotics. Maybe stitches.’

‘What about Lucy?’ Rhys’s eyes flickered open. ‘We can’t leave her here. She might be injured.’

‘More to the point, she might wake up and start on the main course. Don’t worry about her.’ She reached for her mobile.

‘Who are you calling? The police?’

She gazed at him, at his bloody face, at the sweat on his forehead. Her Rhys. The man she loved. The man she had almost lost because of her job. Because of the Rift, and the things that came through it.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m calling Torchwood.’

‘Bloody brilliant,’ he sighed.

As the phone rang at the other end, Gwen walked into their bedroom. Rhys would be OK for a few moments, and she might need to say something she didn’t want him to hear.

It was Jack who answered. ‘Gwen? What’s up?’

‘Rhys has been attacked.’

‘Transportation can be a cut-throat business, I hear.’

‘This is serious. The girl who attacked him tried to eat his face off.’

There was a pause at the other end of the line. Gwen didn’t know where Jack was, but she imagined him standing on a rooftop somewhere — perhaps on top of the Millennium Centre itself — gazing down at Cardiff Bay, watching the reds and blues and yellows of the city’s lights reflected from the waves. Of course, he might just have been in his office in Torchwood, sitting with his feet up on the desk.

‘I get you,’ he said finally. ‘The key words there being “face”, “eat” and “girl”. What do you want us to do?’

‘The girl’s name is Lucy. She’s a friend of Rhys’s. I’ve got to get Rhys to hospital. I need someone to come and take her away.’

‘What kind of state is she in?’

‘Unconscious.’

‘Great — I’ll send Owen. Stay where you are until he arrives.’

Jack cut the connection.

Gwen stared at the phone for a few moments, as if the mere sound of Jack’s voice had charged it with some strange energy, then she put it away and went back into the living room.

Rhys was still sat in the armchair, clutching the freezing tea towel to his cheek.

Lucy wasn’t there.

‘Where the hell did she go?’ Gwen exclaimed.

Rhys opened his eyes, puzzled, and looked at the patch of carpet by the sofa where Lucy had been crumpled. ‘I dunno,’ he said muzzily. ‘I heard someone moving around. I thought it was you.’ He looked sheepish. ‘Sorry — I kind of zoned out there for a bit. I’m not used to this kind of thing.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to be,’ Gwen said, heading into the hall. She’d left the door wide open when she came in and smelled the blood, but now it was pulled to. Lucy must have come to and made her escape. Gwen cursed herself. She should never have left Rhys in the room with Lucy, even if she thought the girl was unconscious! Either Lucy had been faking, or she’d come to while Gwen was on the phone to Jack, but either way she might have just leaped on Rhys and picked up where she’d left off, sucking his eyes from their sockets, or tearing his ears off. What the hell had she been thinking?

What she’d been thinking about, of course, was Rhys, and how hurt he was. Her normal police instincts had deserted her, faced with injury to a loved one.

‘You were right,’ Rhys murmured, breaking the self-destructive spiral her thoughts were descending into.

‘Right about what?’

‘Right about Lucy. About letting her stay here. Definitely a bad idea.’

Gwen laughed — more a hiccup than a proper laugh, but she felt the darkness recede from her mind. ‘I wasn’t anticipating anything like this, I must say.’

‘What were you expecting, then?’

‘I was-’ She stopped, embarrassed. ‘Look, I’d better sort that door out. We don’t want her coming back.’ She walked down the hall and pushed the door closed until it clicked.

‘Come on — what were you expecting?’

‘If you really want to know, I thought she was trying to get you into bed!’

‘She was.’ Rhys’s voice was calm, flat, although it was the calmness of encroaching shock. ‘I guess I was flattered. I guess I was even interested. But nothing happened, and nothing was ever going to happen.’

Gwen felt as if someone had poured cold water down her back. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I love you, and because I want to stay with you.’

‘Despite… despite the fact that things aren’t the way they were when we started seeing each other?’

‘Or maybe because of that.’ He shifted position slightly and winced. ‘It can’t always be like the first few days. Relationships change. People change. And so long as they change together, it’s OK. I’ll be honest, there’s a part of me that wants things to be as exciting as they used to be. But there’s another part of me that likes the snuggling up and watching telly together.’

‘She’s prettier than me. And she’s a bloody sight slimmer than me too.’

She wanted Rhys to say that she was prettier than Lucy, that she was slimmer than Lucy, but she knew that he would have been lying, and if there was one thing she wanted at that moment it was the truth about what was happening to them.

‘I have a feeling you’re working with guys who are handsomer and slimmer than I am,’ he said eventually. ‘But nobody can keep trading up for better and better partners. Not if they want anyone to ever trust them.’

‘Oh Rhys…’

‘Oh bugger.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m just wondering how the hell I’m going to shave around this for the next few weeks.’

‘Where’s Owen?’

Toshiko looked up from the screens that were currently displaying the output from the three work stations that she was running in parallel. ‘I believe he is feeding the prisoner,’ she said.

Jack was sitting in his office, separated from the rest of the Hub by a dusty glass screen. ‘Is it my imagination, or is he spending a lot of time with that girl? It can’t be healthy.’

Toshiko had been wondering the same thing, but she wasn’t going to betray Owen. Assuming there was anything to betray. ‘She is very hungry,’ Toshiko responded. ‘Owen has been diligent in supplying her with food. I think he’s even been getting different takeaways so Jubilee don’t get suspicious about the amount of food we’re ordering.’

Jack was just a shadow through the glass. ‘Tell him to come in here when he’s back. I need him to go to Gwen’s place.’

Toshiko got up and walked over to the doorway, concerned. ‘Is everything all right with Gwen?’

Jack looked up from where he sat. His feet were up on the desk. A row of apples sat before him, lined up along the far edge. Some were green, some red, some a dusty grey. Some were large and some were small. They were all, however, recognisably apples.

‘Her boyfriend’s apparently been attacked by one of these women on the verge of a bulimic episode,’ he said. ‘They’ve got the girl there, unconscious. I want Owen to go across and bring her back. While he’s at it, I want him to assess how much the boyfriend knows. We may need to do something about him.’

‘Can I ask a question?’

‘Just as long as it’s not trigonometry. I’m shit at trigonometry.’

‘Why have you got all those apples on your desk?’

Jack stared at Toshiko, then at the row of fruit.

‘It’s an experiment,’ he said.

‘What kind of experiment?’

‘All of these things are apples, right?’

Toshiko shrugged. ‘They would appear to be apples, yes.’

‘Different varieties, yes?’

‘Yes.’

Jack pointed at them, one after the other. ‘St Edmunds Pippin, Mère de Ménage, Catshead, Ribston Pippin, Ashmead’s Kernel, Mannington’s Pearman, Lodgemore Nonpareil, Devonshire Quarrenden.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘So what makes them apples? Why aren’t they something else?’

Toshiko shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘All these apples taste different from one another. They look different. They feel different when you bite into them. But they’re all apples, and we know they’re all apples. You know, there are pears that look more like some of these apples than the other apples do, but they’re not apples: they’re pears. But how can we tell the difference?’

‘Jack, perhaps you ought to take a break.’

He sighed, and continued as if she hadn’t said anything. ‘So much variety. That’s what I like about this planet. Thousands of varieties of apples, for no good reason. Same with pears. Problem is, they’re dying out. People don’t want grey apples, or small apples, or lumpy apples. They want their apples all the same size and all the same shade of green. Doesn’t matter what they taste like. Give it another few years, and you’ll only be able to buy Cox’s Orange Pippins and Golden Delicious, and you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference between them.’

‘I think-’

‘It’s like the Weevils. They’re not human. The question is: why aren’t they human? They eat like us, they wear clothes like us, and at night, with the streetlights behind them, they could be taken for human. In fact, I’ve seen people wandering the streets of Cardiff who look less human than the Weevils. So how is it we can make a distinction? And this girl downstairs — Marianne. She’s human, but she eats like a Weevil. Which side of the line does she go?’

‘Jack…’

He looked up, and there was something almost tragic about his face. ‘Don’t worry about me, Tosh. The apples are just a symptom of what’s to come. I’ve seen the future, and it all looks and tastes the same.’ The shadow passed, and he was the same old Jack that she had known ever since he tracked her down in London and asked her to join Torchwood. ‘Sorry. Just me being stupid. Let me know if Owen turns up.’ It was a dismissal, of sorts, and Toshiko turned to go. As she did so, Jack reached out, picked up the first apple in the line and took a bite out of it with a crisp crunch. ‘Lemony,’ he said.

Toshiko returned to her work station. She sat down just as Jack bit into another apple. ‘Sweet, juicy, touch of mango.’

Filtering out the sounds of crunching from the office, Toshiko turned back to the screens. The first was showing the progress of the various viruses and worms she’d let loose on the Internet to create an electronic trail for Marianne Till, showing that she’d headed out for Ibiza when she was actually in the cells within Torchwood. It was basic work, and Toshiko didn’t have to pay much attention to it after she’d started it off.

The second screen was just an array of flickering numbers. It was the raw processing of the ultrasound scans that Owen had completed on Marianne; data being filtered, filleted, massaged and stitched together into a coherent whole. It was taking time, but it looked like it was going to produce a useful set of pictures.

The third screen was the one that was taking most of her attention. It had nothing to do with Marianne Till, nothing to do with dead Weevils and nothing to do with sudden and spontaneous attacks of hunger. It was the interior of one of the almost biological alien devices that Toshiko had discovered, with Ianto’s help, in the Torchwood Archive; sibling to the one that the Torchwood team had found at the scene of the deaths in the Cardiff nightclub.

The device was sitting quietly on the desk, focus of a number of sensors. It looked something like an over-inflated clover leaf: three rounded lobes about the size of an orange, but flattened, joined together, with a stalk hanging beneath the point where the lobes met. The stalk looked to Toshiko like a handle of some kind, giving her some more clues as to the size and shape of the hands that might have held it. Assuming it was a handle, and assuming that it fitted her hand in roughly the same way as it would the alien user, then one of the lobes would either project or receive energy of some kind, while the others might contain processing hardware, or energy cells, or something else.

Based on a cursory examination of the device, Toshiko had a theory that it projected an electrical charge at short-to-medium range. The device contained something like a low-power laser which, she suspected, was designed to ionise the air along a straight line. An electrical charge would then be projected along the ionised air, shocking anything at the far end. Perhaps it was a weapon, perhaps it was a sex toy; Toshiko wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure she cared, either. What intrigued her at the moment was the suspicion that the device contained another hidden picture.

The image on the screen was similar to the one that Toshiko had generated from the interior of the other device: a patchwork of various images in different colours, all overlaid on top of one another. A line moved slowly down the screen, marking the point where her software was progressively refining the resolution of the picture by processing scans lasting many minutes. So far it was just a clash of colours with some indications of an underlying structure, a bit like an overhead photograph of a field where the shape of an old settlement could still be seen in the contours of the land, even though the stones themselves had long been buried. The circuits were there, but she would have to puzzle them out, tease out their edges, their connections, their mountings. But, like the previous device, she got tantalising hints of a picture behind the picture, an image that wasn’t the circuit but was built from parts of the circuit.

And now, if she half-closed her eyes and let the pictures from the screen refract in rainbow shards from her long eyelashes, she could just about make it out. She could feel the strain in the muscles of her eyes, and her head began to ache as if a spike was being driven into her temples, but it was there.

A face, wider than it was high, with what might have been bulbous eyes at each end and a vertical slit of a mouth in the centre. But the image was slightly different. The head seemed to droop down at the ends, leaving the eyes hanging, and there were folds around the mouth.

It was older, but it was still the same alien face she had seen before.

Which meant that the devices were something more than just devices. They had a meaning over and above what they actually did.

But what the hell was it?