Slow Decay

FOURTEEN

The Torchwood meeting next morning didn’t get off to a good start, as far as Toshiko was concerned. Owen was bruised and surly; Gwen was bruised and moody; and Jack was irritated at one or the other or both of them. And Ianto was Ianto, fussing around the coffee machine just outside the Boardroom, trying to adjust the temperature of the steam, until Jack eventually said, ‘OK: staff treat. We all need cheering up. We’re going out for breakfast.’

They went out through Ianto’s tourist information centre, and Jack led them to a Turkish-owned café that was perched on stilts out over Cardiff Bay. The waves were slate grey and topped with spume, washing over the pebbles that made up what little beach there was. Odd fragments of wood and plastic floated on the water’s surface, eddying back and forth as if they weren’t sure where they were going. A lone swan emerged from beneath the wooden pier that separated the water from the land, aloof and unassailable. In the distance, Penarth Head was almost lost in mist, grey against grey.

‘We’ve had a hell of a few days,’ Jack said after the waiter had taken their order. ‘I know it’s all looking bleak. It happens. Whatever’s going on here is complicated, and I don’t think we have all the answers yet.’

‘Nakitsura ni hachi,’ Toshiko murmured. At Jack’s questioning look, she added: ‘It’s a Japanese saying: “The bee always stings when you’re crying”. It means that things go from bad to worse before they get better. If they get better.’

‘I couldn’t agree more. And I think that part of the problem is that some of us have pieces of information that the others aren’t privy to. If we’re going to make anything of this mess, we need to share whatever we have. Who wants to go first?’

‘We have three people showing symptoms,’ Gwen said, her voice flat, her gaze aimed at the tablecloth. ‘Lucy Sobel and Marianne Till are both in custody in the Hub. We have to assume there are more people out there with this problem, whatever it is.’

‘Owen,’ Jack said, ‘what exactly are we dealing with here?’

‘I don’t know, exactly. Tosh’s computers are still processing the scans from that hand-held thing she knocked together. All I know from close observation is that the symptoms are extreme hunger leading to psychosis and exaggerated strength. Both Marianne and Lucy seem to be trapped in a mental state where the hunger is compelling them to attack people and eat them. Then their minds are glossing over the details and persuading them that they’ve been hallucinating. I suspect that whatever they are suffering from makes them suggestible, as well as psychotic. Blood work is normal, and there’s no outward manifestation of disease. I’m picking up no bacteria or viruses in the atmospheric checks, so I can’t see it being contagious.’

‘It’s not Tapanuli fever, then?’ Jack enquired.

Owen glowered at Jack. ‘I invented Tapanuli fever. It doesn’t exist. It’s not real.’

‘You sure? I only ask because I don’t think I’m inoculated. I missed that day at school.’

‘Look, I was trying to reassure her! I wanted to keep her calm!’

‘Right,’ Jack drawled. ‘That worked out well, didn’t it?’

The waiter arrived with their orders, and they stopped talking while the plates were set down: full English breakfast, with black pudding, scrambled egg, sausage, bacon and fried bread.

‘Should we be talking about all this?’ Ianto asked. ‘I mean…’ He indicated the waiter with a nod of his head.

‘Not to worry,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve got a blanking field generator under the table. Brought it with me from Torchwood. Nobody can hear us outside a six-foot radius.’

Ianto’s eyes widened. ‘You’re joking!’

‘Absolutely,’ Jack replied. ‘Actually, the waiter only speaks ten words of English, and three of those are swearwords. He can swear like a trooper in Turkish as well. In fact, last time I checked he could swear in fifteen different languages. I think he used to be a sailor. Then again, I think I used to be a sailor. There are periods in my life that are a bit vague. That’s one of them.’ He turned to Gwen. ‘Oh, and by the way, you didn’t say who the third person is who’s affected.’

‘It’s Rhys.’ She didn’t lift her gaze from the tablecloth.

Silence fell across the table. Nobody seemed willing to say anything. Eventually, Toshiko leaned across and put her hand on top of Gwen’s. ‘Then whatever this thing is,’ she said, ‘we will stop it. Owen will find a cure and Jack will make everything the way it was.’

‘And as an encore,’ Owen muttered, ‘peace in the Middle East and a resolution to the legal battle between the Americans and the Czech Republic over who brewed Budweiser beer first.’

‘Shouldn’t you be with him?’ Toshiko asked. ‘I mean, if he goes the way of the other two…’

Gwen winced. ‘What was I supposed to do — tie him to the bed? I wanted to stay with him, I wanted to protect him, but I couldn’t tell him why. He only took the pill, a day or two ago, so he’s probably not as far gone as the other two. And if there’s going to be a cure, it’s going to come from here. From us. Staying with him would just… just mean I was waiting for the inevitable. At least here I can pretend I’m helping. So — what’s the progress of this disease, if it is a disease? I have a vested interest now.’

Owen shrugged. ‘If they don’t get enough food, then they start eating themselves.’ He caught the bleak look on Gwen’s face and winced. ‘Sorry, but it’s true. Anyway, I dunno how far they could get before pain or blood loss made them pass out. Maybe both hands and both forearms. That’s just a guess. Then again, given that this thing, whatever it is, seems to affect the brain, maybe it changes the way they feel pain. If they used tourniquets to control the bleeding then there’s no reason why they couldn’t munch their way through both arms up to the shoulders and both legs up to the knees. If they were gymnastic enough, they might get halfway up the thigh. Lips would go as well, of course. They’d probably save the tongue for last, if only because tourniquets wouldn’t work and they’d choke on their own blood.’

Toshiko slid her plate towards the centre of the table. Suddenly she wasn’t feeling hungry.

Judging by Gwen’s white face, she didn’t feel well either. ‘And if they do get enough food?’

‘Then I just don’t know.’ Owen speared a piece of fried bread with his fork and bit the corner off. ‘There’s always the possibility that they just keep on going, but I think that’s unlikely.’

‘Why?’ Jack asked, succinctly.

‘Because they aren’t putting weight on.’ Owen used his fork to cut a piece of black pudding. ‘They’re plugging massive amounts of calories into their systems, and those calories are going somewhere apart from hips and thighs. In fact, not only aren’t they putting weight on, they’re actually losing it. I reckon Marianne’s lost half a stone since we caught her, and she’s been eating like pizza’s going to be reclassified as a Class A drug. If she keeps on going, she’s liable to suffer from malnutrition.’ Owen popped a piece of black pudding into his mouth. ‘She could actually starve to death,’ he said, and chewed.

‘I’ve got to ask,’ Jack said, staring at the remnants of the black pudding on Owen’s plate. ‘Although I probably don’t want to. What exactly is black pudding?’

‘It’s a kind of sausage made from a blend of onions, pork fat, oatmeal and pig’s blood,’ Ianto said.

‘OK,’ Jack said slowly. ‘Black pudding is made from blood. I get that. Nothing wrong with that. But you can get white pudding as well.’

‘Yeah,’ Owen said cautiously.

‘So what’s that then? The same thing but made with white corpuscles rather than red corpuscles?’

‘It’s just black pudding without the blood,’ Gwen said reassuringly.

‘Although earlier versions often had sheep’s brains as a binding agent,’ Ianto added. ‘Are you going to eat that black pudding?’

‘I think I’ll pass,’ Jack told him.

Rhys was woken up by a pain in his gut. It felt like stones were grinding together in there, rough surfaces grating on each other, and the membranes of his stomach were caught in the middle, torn and bleeding.

He curled up, pulling the sheets over himself and trying to force himself back to sleep, but it was no good. The pain was too intense.

Pain? It was hunger. He was starving.

Gwen had left before dawn, leaving a cup of coffee beside the bed before heading for her precious Torchwood, and Rhys had surfaced for long enough to phone work and leave a message on the answerphone saying that he’d been in an accident, and was taking a few days off. It seemed wiser than telling them the truth. He just hoped that nobody made the connection with Lucy being off work at the same time and came to the conclusion that the two of them were having an affair or something.

Eventually, he threw the duvet off and padded out, naked, into the split living room and kitchen area, taking the now cold cup of coffee with him. He and Gwen lived on the first floor of a converted house, so nobody was going to be gazing in through the window, and they lived in Riverside, so even if anyone could gaze in through the window at him they’d be too polite to do so.

He put the cup in the microwave and blitzed it until it was warm enough to drink. Sipping it, he went to the fridge and pulled out a tub of margarine, peeled the lid off, then walked across the living room and plonked himself down on the sofa.

What the hell was happening?

Scooping out a gobbet of margarine with his fingers he popped it into his mouth and tried to work out where things had suddenly gone wrong. Why, for instance, Lucy had suddenly attacked him. It wasn’t like he’d made a move on her and she’d pushed him away and accidentally injured him; in fact, if anything, she was making a move on him before she took a chunk out of his cheek.

He excavated another gobbet of margarine and slipped it into his mouth, licking his fingers to get rid of the last traces, running his tongue along the sharp edge of his fingernails, then reached up to touch the wound dressing, pressing down lightly on the cotton wool to see how much residual pain there was. Strangely, he didn’t feel anything. Whatever cream they’d used on him the night before had worked a treat.

As he scraped more and more of the thick yellow fat from the tub, Rhys began to wonder what his cheek actually looked like. He’d not dared look at it the night before. The lasting agony of Lucy’s teeth latching onto the flesh and then tearing it away had made it feel like he’d lost the entire cheek. He’d been afraid that if he looked at himself in the mirror he would have seen his teeth and the inside of his mouth through a ragged hole. Even at the hospital he’d been wondering if they were going to operate — perhaps take some flesh from his thigh to replace the cheek, leaving him looking like a living jigsaw puzzle. Thank God Gwen had been there to calm him down. The pain had been intense, pulsing in time with his heart, sending tendrils of agony through the entire side of his face until the painkillers had kicked in. But now… now there was nothing.

Perhaps the nerve had died. Perhaps the skin was turning black around the edges. He sniffed, trying to detect some sign of gangrene, but he didn’t even know what he was trying to find, and all he could smell was the rich oiliness of the margarine. Which, he discovered, looking down at the empty tub, he appeared to have finished.

His stomach had stopped complaining now. Draining the last of his coffee, he got up and went into the bathroom. In the mirror his face looked pasty. It also looked thin. He reached up wonderingly with his hand to feel the area under his chin. It used to bulge slightly, a chubbiness that he’d never really shed since childhood, but now there was a concavity where his neck and jaw joined. And the jawline itself stood out proudly. He smiled. He hadn’t looked that good for years. If ever.

Rhys edged his fingernails beneath the transparent tape beneath his eye socket that held the dressing onto his skin, and paused for a moment. Did he really want to do this? Did he really want to see what was underneath?

Before he could talk himself out of it, he ripped the tape away from the skin. It pulled smoothly away, distorting the flesh in a wave as it went. The dressing fell away, held only by the tape on the bottom, by his jaw.

Leaving behind it an expanse of smooth, pink flesh, marred only by a set of small, crescent-shaped scars where Lucy’s teeth had sunk into the skin.

Scars that he could swear were getting smaller even as he watched.

The waiter came over to clear the plates away and then pour them coffee. Conversation stopped while he worked. Toshiko spent her time looking through the window of the restaurant at the bay outside. A small ferry was docking as she watched. Passengers were waiting on its deck to disembark.

‘OK, people — what’s the connection between Marianne, Lucy and Gwen’s boyfriend?’ Jack asked.

‘The Scotus Clinic,’ Gwen said.

‘And what’s that when it’s at home?’

‘It’s a diet clinic based here in Cardiff. Lucy definitely went there, and Rhys went there too. He told me about it last night. He wanted to lose weight because he thought I was falling out of love with him, the idiot.’

‘And how does it work?’ Toshiko asked.

‘They get two pills: one to start the weight loss and one to stop it. I think if we investigate we’ll find out that Marianne went there too.’

‘She did,’ Owen said.

Jack gazed at him with interest. ‘OK, Sherlock — how did you know that?’

‘Cos she had a leaflet in her handbag.’

‘And what were you doing looking through her handbag?’

Owen looked affronted. ‘I was looking for clues, and stuff.’

‘And what were you really doing looking through her handbag?’

He ducked his head. ‘I wanted to see whether she has a boyfriend or not.’

‘And has she?’

‘Dunno. You can’t find anything in a woman’s handbag. It’s not organised along logical lines. I only found the leaflet by accident.’ He looked around. ‘That’s why women don’t make good surgeons, you know? Blokes, they put down their scalpels and retractors and stuff all in the right order so they can just reach out again and pick it up without even looking. Women, they just throw it all down higgledy-piggledy on the tray, and then wonder why they pick up a clamp when they want the forceps.’

Gwen looked over at Toshiko. ‘Do you want to tear him a new arsehole?’ she asked, ‘or shall I?’

‘He doesn’t really mean it,’ said Toshiko, but she avoided Gwen’s gaze.

‘How is Marianne?’ Jack asked. ‘Her fingers looked pretty raw from what little I saw.’

‘Yeah, and her face wasn’t looking too hot after you finished rearranging it with the fire extinguisher.’ There was an undertone of dark anger in Owen’s voice, but Toshiko couldn’t tell whether it was directed at Jack or at himself. Or perhaps at both.

‘If I hadn’t, she’d have been treating your face like people treat kebabs on a Friday night.’

‘Yeah, well…’ Owen paused, gazing out of the window at the distant headland. ‘I had to amputate her fingers,’ he said finally, casually, as if he was talking about the weather, or last night’s TV. ‘The damage was too great. She’d stripped all the skin and bone off. I can’t keep her unconscious — there’s not that much sedative in the whole of Cardiff — so I’ve had to chain her up in the cell. Actually chain her to the wall so she can’t eat any more of herself, with what remains of her hands bandaged up. Last I saw she was trying to reach the bandages with her mouth, she was that hungry.’ It seemed to Toshiko that his gaze was fixed on something much further away than Penarth Head. There was something hard about his face. ‘I remember taking an oath once to “Do no harm”. I’m not sure with Marianne what “doing no harm” means. Whatever happens, she suffers.’

This time it was Gwen who reached out a hand to touch Owen’s, an almost unconscious gesture of sympathy and understanding. Toshiko had been just about to reach out herself. When she saw Gwen’s hand move, she pulled hers back, reaching instead to pick up her napkin, fold it, put it down again.

‘What about Lucy?’ Gwen asked. ‘You didn’t put her in the same cell, did you?’

This time it was Ianto who answered. Toshiko had almost forgotten that he was with them at the table. ‘No, we managed to get her into the cell next to Marianne before she woke up.’

‘And her boyfriend?’

‘I went back and cleaned the place up. There’s no sign that anything happened. I actually brought his body back to the Hub so that Owen could do an autopsy, if he wanted.’

‘The fun never ends,’ Owen muttered. ‘Corpses, stacking up, every day. Bodily fluids and rotting flesh. I’d smell better if I worked in a fish and chip shop. And the hours would be better.’

‘That looked like a nasty gash on her head when I picked her up,’ Ianto continued, having paused politely while Owen talked, ‘but it was healing fast by the time we got her into the cell. I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever is affecting these women is helping them heal faster.’

‘They’re not alien,’ Owen scoffed. ‘They’re ordinary Welsh girls. Whatever’s happened to them hasn’t given them magical powers. It just makes them hungry and psychotic.’

‘I don’t know.’ Gwen was worrying her lower lip with her teeth. ‘Remember what happened with the Weevils. For a start, they’ve obviously developed a far greater strength than normal. Lucy was close to breaking my neck, and Marianne — if it was Marianne — was able to take down a fully grown Weevil. Something’s changing them physically, as well as mentally.’

‘And remember the reactions of the other Weevils,’ Toshiko added. ‘The ones by the wharf, and the one in the cells in Torchwood. They were wary. They were frightened. I don’t think that was just the fact that this girl had killed one of them.’

‘No, that usually just makes them mad,’ Jack said, with feeling.

Toshiko looked around at her colleagues. ‘I know biology is Owen’s area rather than mine, but I am wondering if these girls are giving off some kind of chemical scent which Weevils find disturbing.’

‘I’ve just remembered something.’ Gwen thumped the table with her fist. ‘There’s been so much going on that it just went out of my head, but Rhys told me that someone tried to kidnap Lucy a few days ago. I’d assumed that it was connected to her boyfriend — some kind of unpaid drug debt or something — but now I’m wondering if it’s connected to whatever they’re infected with. But who could it be?’

‘Someone at the Scotus Clinic, perhaps?’ Jack drummed his fingers on the table. ‘I’ve got to say, I don’t know whether there’s anything here for Torchwood or not. It still sounds more like a shared delusion, or some tropical disease to me, pheromones and super-strength or not. We’re set up to look for signs of alien activity in the area and stop it. I just don’t see the evidence here.’

Toshiko looked over at Gwen. Her boyfriend was infected. If anyone was going to push Jack into investigating this, it had to be her.

Owen and Ianto gazed at Gwen as well, waiting for her to react.

‘It might be alien influence,’ she said, as if it were only her and Jack at the table, ‘or it might be something more mundane. Either way, we need to find out. I think we should investigate the Scotus Clinic, and then make a decision based on what we find there.’

‘Does Rhys remember enough about the clinic that he can draw us a map? Always useful to know where you’re going.’

‘I’ll ask,’ she said.

By the time Jack and Gwen had made their preparations, looked at blueprints and plans, checked out their weapons, argued over who was going to drive the SUV and then made their way, still bickering, through the Cardiff traffic to the office block that housed the Scotus Clinic, it was lunchtime. The lobby was crowded with men and women in smart office-wear, either heading out for coffee and sandwiches or back to their offices. People in green coveralls were watering the various plants and vines that were placed strategically around. The air was filled with the incessant ping of lifts arriving.

Jack looked around. There was something about lobbies that never changed. He’d been in hotels and office blocks from the nineteenth century all the way through to the forty-ninth, on a panoply of planets between Earth and the Horsehead Nebula, and it was always the same. People rushing around trying to look important, grabbing food on the move. Nobody taking time to sit down and relax, sip a cocktail, close their eyes and daydream for a while. Everyone had somewhere better to be, and they never seemed to get there.

The lifts were separated from the rest of the lobby by a glass wall. Booths embedded in the glass allowed people in and out via rotating glass doors, but only if they placed some kind of identity card in a slot. Gwen was standing in front of the glass, trying to make out the company listing on a big board by the lifts.

‘Tolladay Holdings,’ she read. ‘Sutherland amp; Rhodes International, McGilvray R amp;D, Rouse and Patrick Financial… ah! The Scotus Clinic. Floor Twelve. Looks like it occupies the entire floor.’ She glanced at the booths, then at Jack. ‘How the hell are we going to get in? Have you got some alien device that will override the security on these doors?’

‘Even better,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve got money.’

He strode across to the rose marble desk that sat in the centre of the lobby. A man in security guard’s uniform sat behind the desk. His name tag read ‘Martin’. He watched Jack approach with professional distrust.

‘Hi,’ Jack said. ‘Look, I could spin you some kind of story about a snap health and safety inspection, or something equally implausible, but we’re both busy men and we haven’t got time to dance around. Let’s cut to the chase. How much money will it take for you to let us through to the lifts?’

The man’s face folded up into a scowl. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

‘That entirely depends on whether you find the concept of hard cash inherently funny.’

Martin shook his head. ‘You ain’t getting in there.’

‘Five hundred of your quaint British pounds.’

‘No way.’

‘Six hundred.’

‘It’s more than my job’s worth, mate.’

‘Sitting in a lobby being ignored by everyone who walks past isn’t a job, it’s just a way of watching your life slip away. Did you grow up wanting to be a security guard in an office block? Did you lie awake at night dreaming about handing visitor’s passes out to stressed people turning up late for meetings? Seven hundred.’

‘Look — who the hell do you think you are?’

‘Come on, I’m on a tight budget here. Seven hundred and fifty pounds, and that’s my final offer. Take an evening class. Follow your dream.’

Martin looked around. Nobody else was paying any attention to them. Catching Jack’s eye, he glanced meaningfully down at something just below the level of the desk, then back again. ‘I ain’t got time for this,’ he said loudly, and turned away. Jack leaned over and felt around with his fingers. There was a box down there, on a shelf hidden by the desk’s surface, and there were four or five things like credit cards in the box. He scooped two of the cards out, replacing them with a thick envelope he’d taken from a pocket in his coat. ‘Nice doing business with you,’ he said. ‘Hope the rest of your life works out OK. Drop me a line, OK?’

Gwen watched him return with an expression of disbelief on her face. ‘Firstly, that was bribery. Secondly, did that envelope really have seven hundred and fifty pounds in it? Thirdly, if it did then how did you know that’s how much it would take?’

‘Funny thing,’ Jack said; ‘it always ends up at seven hundred and fifty pounds with security guards, no matter where we start off. Must be a union thing.’

He tossed a card to Gwen. Choosing a moment when the lift area was momentarily unoccupied, they went through their booths together.

The lift doors opened on the twelfth floor to reveal a hall area with a deep carpet in neutral brown, hessian weave wallpaper and some unthreatening abstract paintings. A door to the left identified the Scotus Clinic in large sans serif letters.

Gwen pushed the door open.

The lobby of the clinic was empty, apart from several comfy chairs in a waiting area, three doors, the right-hand one labelled ‘Doctor Scotus’, and a vacant receptionist’s desk. Jack knew straight away that the place was deserted. There was a feeling, or rather, a lack of feeling to places that weren’t being used. They were missing something: an energy, a vibration, a background hum. It was like the difference between a sleeping person and a corpse; they looked the same, at first glance, but you could always tell them apart.

Sleeping corpses were a problem, of course, but Jack had worked out different methods of identifying them. And they didn’t turn up that often.

‘I think we were expected,’ he said, looking around. ‘This place has been abandoned. And pretty recently.’

Gwen moved across to the right-hand door. ‘Rhys said he talked to Doctor Scotus himself. We ought to start in there.’ She knocked twice on the door. ‘Just in case,’ she murmured.

‘Politeness costs nothing,’ Jack agreed. ‘Unlike security passes, which are quite pricey. I need to start cutting back on the bribes. I’ve almost blown this month’s budget.’

‘No answer,’ Gwen said. She pushed the door. It swung open, revealing a shadowy office. If there were windows in there then they were covered by curtains or blinds. She stepped inside, quickly being swallowed up by the darkness.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Jack said, still looking around the lobby.

‘Mmmm?’

‘Why is it there’s a Scottish pound note, but there’s no Welsh pound note?’

‘Mmmm!’

Gwen came staggering back through the door into the lobby, hands clawing at her neck. Something was wrapped around her throat, something about as thick as Jack’s thumb but with a wildly thrashing tail. Something coloured black, with vivid blue stripes encircling its body.

And it was throttling the life out of Gwen.