Slow Decay

EIGHTEEN

The sun was setting over towards the centre of the city, silhouetting the expensive high-rise hotels against a background of scarlet, purple and blue. From her position squashed in the back of the SUV, Gwen could see past a concrete jetty to where water roiled, thick and slow.

‘Where the hell are we?’ Owen asked as the SUV coasted to a halt under Ianto’s careful hands. He got out of the car and looked around, hands on hips. ‘Don’t think I’ve ever been around here before.’

‘You know the bit of Cardiff Docks that was redeveloped into an expensive marina where they hold dragon boat races and stuff?’ Jack asked as he too climbed out of the car.

‘Yeah.’

‘This isn’t it.’

Gwen slid out of the passenger side. ‘Somewhere over near Bute East Dock?’ she ventured, recognising the angle at which she was seeing some of the taller tower blocks. She reached back into the car and retrieved the bird-cage in which Owen and Ianto had imprisoned the flying thing. An improvised cover had been placed over it, shielding the creature from casual attention.

‘Spot on,’ said Jack. He looked around, hair ruffling in the breeze coming in off the bay. ‘Ianto — I want you here, with the engine running. We may need to get out in a hurry. Everybody else, are you tooled up?’

Last out of the SUV, Gwen checked her Glock 17. It was big and clumsy and heavy, and every time she fired it she thought she was going to fracture her wrist, but she knew she was going to need it. That was Torchwood for you. ‘Check,’ she said.

‘Check,’ Owen confirmed.

‘Check,’ softly from Toshiko.

‘And that’s a big Texas check from me too,’ Jack finished. ‘Just because I’m the boss it doesn’t mean I can get out of these things.’ He indicated a low building with a much larger extension on one end over near where the water rolled back and forth like a caged animal. ‘This whole area was part of the dock operations a hundred years or so ago. That building over there was a meat-packing factory, turning imported frozen carcasses from Argentina into stuff you can put on shelves and keep for ever. The place closed down back in the 1970s, and there were so many holding companies and front companies involved that nobody can track down who owns it now, so it’s standing right in the way of redevelopment. Toshiko and I identified it as a hunger hotspot earlier on. Apt, I suppose. I’m guessing this is where Doctor Scotus is hiding out.’

‘What’s the plan?’ Gwen asked, coming alongside Jack.

‘We go in, we get the innocent parties out, kill any worm or flying thing we can find, destroy all the diet pills, leave, have dinner and sleep the sleep of the just. Did I leave anything out?’

‘That’s a strategy,’ Gwen said. ‘What about the tactics?’

Jack stared at her. ‘We go in,’ he repeated, ‘we get the innocent parties out, kill any worm or flying thing we can find, destroy all the diet pills, leave, have dinner and sleep the sleep of the just.’

‘OK, just checking.’ Gwen raised her eyebrows. ‘I always like to know what’s expected of me.’

‘Problem is,’ Jack said, ‘we don’t know what’s going on in there. Always difficult to come up with tactics when you don’t know what you’re facing. If you try, you might end up facing a tank with a peashooter or trying to kill a mosquito with an elephant gun. Best tactic is not to have a tactic. Play it by ear.’

‘And what happens when it all goes wrong?’

‘That’s the great thing about not having tactics,’ Jack grinned. ‘Whatever happens, you can claim that’s what you intended.’

He led the way across to the building. ‘According to the plans that Toshiko called up,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘there’s a side door along here. We’ll go in that way.’

‘Tactics?’ Gwen muttered.

‘Nearest door,’ Jack replied.

The door was padlocked, but a few seconds with the Leatherman and it was open.

‘Where did you learn to do that?’ Owen asked, impressed.

‘You pick these things up when you’re in the police.’

The door opened inwards onto a corridor that ran left and right along the side of the building. Jack looked both ways, then pointed down to the right. ‘Owen, Tosh — you take that way. Gwen and I will head left. Scout the place out, don’t alert anyone to your presence, meet back here in ten minutes, try not to touch anything or set off any alarms.’

‘Tactics!’ Gwen said beneath her breath as she picked the shrouded bird-cage up from where she had left it.

‘Common sense,’ Jack said.

As Owen and Toshiko went off to the right, Jack set off along the corridor to the left. The floor was dusty along the edges, but clear in the centre, Gwen could make out wheel tracks in the dust. ‘There’s been some traffic along here,’ she said, nodding towards it. ‘And recently.’

‘I’d feel more comfortable,’ Jack admitted, ‘if we actually knew what this Scotus guy is up to. That way we could just burst in and stop him. Trouble is, we need to find out what he’s doing first, and then stop him, which complicates things.’

They passed a series of square metal doors with thick glass windows set at eye level and little control boxes beside them, which Gwen assumed controlled some kind of refrigeration. She glanced in through one of two of the windows, but it was dark inside and she couldn’t see anything apart from a flutter that may have been a reflection of something behind her, a moth or a fly or something. Placing her hand on one of the doors, she thought she could detect a slight tremor, but she wasn’t sure.

She looked off to her right. Toshiko and Owen had vanished around a bend. They were on their own.

Jack had reached the end of the corridor, where a fire extinguisher was attached to the wall, heavily coated in fluffy dust.

A door was set into the wall. ‘Shall we see what’s inside?’ Jack asked.

‘Tactics?’ she smiled.

‘Foolhardiness,’ he grinned, and threw the door open.

Owen and Toshiko walked cautiously along their half of the corridor. The floor was tiled in black Formica, and the walls were patchily painted. Rectangular neon lights hung from chains on the ceiling. A pair of double doors terminated the corridor: they had plastic sheets attached along their bottom edges and, judging by the curved marks they had left, would scrape along the ground when the doors were opened. Toshiko assumed that their job was to keep moisture out, which indicated that whatever was on the other side was open to the elements, at least some of the time,

Toshiko’s foot caught on a raised floor tile, and she staggered to the wall, placing her hand against it to steady herself. A deep vibration transmitted itself from the wall to her arm. She took her hand away, but realised that she could still just about make the vibration out, transmitted through the floor and the air.

‘Can you hear something?’ she asked Owen.

He cocked his head to listen. ‘Heartbeat?’ he asked uncertainly.

‘Generator,’ she corrected.

Owen placed his hands in the centres of the doors and pushed them open. The noise suddenly intensified, and the two of them stepped forward, through the doorway and into a large roofed space. It probably took up a good half of the entire building, Toshiko estimated. Two-thirds of the way along, the floor dropped down five feet or so. The remaining area, running up to a series of massive doors at the far end, was paved with tarmac. The inescapable conclusion was that this was some kind of shipping area, where lorries would drive up at the end and back up to the raised area, where boxes of tinned goods would be loaded in. But that wasn’t what it was being used for now.

The place was set up as an impromptu medical ward. It looked to Toshiko like something from the 1950s: between the doors and the line where the ground dropped down were four rows of tubular metal bedsteads with crisp white sheets. Their occupants, lying comatose and connected to drips and monitoring equipment, contrasted bizarrely with the darkness, the concrete floor and the skylights above through which rose-coloured light filtered in, making everything beneath look surreal and fantastic. Cables ran off to the edges of the room to where the generators probably sat.

There was nobody around. No nurses, no doctors, nothing.

Owen moved to the first bed and picked up the clipboard from the end. Toshiko walked across to join him.

‘Jodie Williams,’ he read. ‘Age twenty-five. Blood pressure and heart rate seem OK.’ He replaced the clipboard and went around to the side of the bed to check the monitor and the drip. ‘She’s being sedated. That’s more confirmation that the worm’s been removed from her body: we know that sedatives and anaesthetics don’t work well on people who are infected.’ He brushed the girl’s hair from her face. ‘Pretty,’ he said, and began to pull the sheet down to expose her naked body.

‘Owen!’ Toshiko said, shocked.

He looked up at her. ‘It’s OK,’ he said, ‘I’m a doctor. I’m allowed to do this kind of thing. I have a licence, and everything.’

Pulling the sheet down to her hips, he indicated a sterile dressing on her stomach. ‘She’s had something removed,’ he said, ‘and I think we all know what it is.’ He quickly ran professional fingers up her body. Her ribs were pronounced and her stomach, at least, what could be seen of it beneath the dressing, was concave. ‘She’s almost malnourished. OK, we can assume she’s had one of these things inside her and it’s been taken out. Where is it?’

He walked across to the next bed and pulled the sheet down. Another sterile dressing, another concave stomach. It was the same with the next girl he tried, and the next. The fourth one was a boy, a teenager.

‘It’s a production line,’ Toshiko breathed.

‘Not a production line,’ Owen replied, standing in the centre of the two rows of beds. He looked around. ‘There must be forty or fifty of them here, and they’ve all had their worms removed. It’s more like a battery farm.’

‘These must be the patients from the Scotus Clinic,’ Toshiko said. ‘Doctor Scotus must have had them all kidnapped when he realised that the worms were causing problems.’

‘But he wouldn’t have had the time or the expertise to kidnap them himself,’ Owen mused. ‘So who did it for him?’

‘That would be us,’ a voice said in a marked Welsh accent.

Toshiko whirled around. A man was standing just inside the doorway leading back into the building. He stepped forward. He was thick-set, with a close-shaven scalp on which Toshiko could see numerous white scars.

‘And who are you?’ Owen said, stepping forward, fists clenched.

‘Never mind that,’ the man said. ‘What makes you think you can just wander in here like you owned the place?’

‘And what makes you think you’ll get out alive,’ came a voice from the far side of the space. Toshiko looked over her shoulder. Another man was pulling himself up from the dropped section of floor; muscular arms pistoning his body upwards. He straightened up.

‘Don’t try to run,’ said the man in the doorway. He reached behind his back and brought out a gleaming brass knuckle-duster from a pocket, slipping it onto his right hand and raising it up so that the light from the skylights shone from the sharp points above each knuckle. ‘You’ll only make things worse for yourself.’

‘Not that it gets much worse,’ said his companion. He was holding a length of bicycle chain. It looked to Toshiko like he’d soldered nails along its length until it resembled heavy-duty barbed wire, only much more flexible and much more deadly. ‘We were told to stop anyone from interfering with this lot, but we weren’t told to do it quickly.’

Jack breezed through the door and into the room beyond.

It was where the canning had taken place. The room was filled with machinery, through which Jack could just make out a ribbon-like path, a walled conveyor belt that wound around and about the various devices that would have sterilised the cans, pumping them full of whatever kind of meat slurry the factory was producing that week, sealing them, labelling them and sending them on their way.

In the centre of the room was a cleared space and in the centre of the space a folding wooden desk had been set up with a canvas director’s chair behind it. Doctor Scotus was sitting in the chair, reading a report.

‘I love what you’ve done with the place,’ Jack said cheerily. ‘The whole retro-industrial thing is really big these days. Quite a change from that nice expensive office you used to have, with that big granite desk and those ergonomic chairs. Still, you go with what you’ve got, right? Like Changing Rooms.’

‘And who the hell are you?’ Scotus replied, standing up. His long blond hair drifted around his head as he moved.

‘Health and Safety,’ Jack said, feeling rather than seeing Gwen move into the room behind him, gun held high. ‘We’ve been getting reports that you’re giving women tablets that implant alien creatures in their stomachs which drive them into hunger-fuelled frenzies which lead to murder and self-mutilation. The question is, have you filled out a proper risk assessment for this activity? Because if you haven’t, we’re going to have to take action.’

Scotus stared at Jack. His face reflected various emotions, one after the other; anger, confusion, realisation, understanding, concern and, finally, surprise. ‘Alien?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I suppose they would have to be, wouldn’t they?’

‘You didn’t know?’ Gwen asked, moving up beside Jack. She was still carrying the shrouded bird-cage, he was glad to see. He had plans for that.

‘It’s not the first explanation that comes to mind,’ Scotus said. ‘I assumed they were some newly evolved species, or something that we’d just never seen before.’

Jack moved to one side, concerned that if anything went wrong then he and Gwen were both in the line of fire. He wanted them separate, so that at least one of them would survive an attack long enough to fight back. It was a lesson he’d learned the hard way, more years ago than he cared to remember. ‘How did you come across them?’ he asked.

‘Tell me who you are first,’ Scotus said quietly, firmly. He had considerable charisma, Jack noticed.

‘Let’s just say we’re interested in anything that’s alien. Especially if it starts affecting people.’

Scotus nodded. ‘Very well. I wasn’t always a nutritionist,’ he said. ‘I used to be a vet. I owned a place just outside Cardiff, specialising in farm animals.’ He grimaced. ‘Have you seen the way that farming is going recently? It’s enough to turn your stomach. If scientists could breed square chickens, so that you could stack more of them together in one place, then farmers would beat a path to their door. It’s all about maximising the amount of profit per cubic foot, because the supermarkets will absolutely nail the farmers to the wall with the contracts they force them to sign.’

‘Fascinating though this is,’ Jack said, ‘I’m still waiting for the aliens to turn up.’

‘I was called out to a cow that had died,’ Scotus said. ‘It had apparently been acting strangely for days; eating much more than usual, attacking the other cows and taking bites out of them, getting thinner and thinner. I thought it was BSE, but if you report that then there’s a panic which results in every cow within fifty miles being slaughtered, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that. I conducted an autopsy, and I found this thing in its stomach. It was barely alive.’

‘Drifted through the Rift,’ Jack murmured to Gwen. She didn’t reply.

‘It looked like some kind of tapeworm,’ Scotus continued, ‘so I put it in a nutrient solution while I worked out what to do.’

‘Don’t tell me — it changed into a thing like a flying dagger and tried to impale you.’

‘I was out, on a call. I came back to find my dog dead and the creature gone.’ Scotus reached a hand up to his forehead, brushing the fine blond hairs away and placing his palm over his eyes. ‘I autopsied the dog, and found a cluster of these… egg-like things. I kept them for study — cutting some of them open, implanting others in rats and cats and other dogs until I had worked out their complete life cycle.’

‘Without bothering to inform the authorities?’

‘And what good would that have done? They wouldn’t have understood what an opportunity I had!’

‘Opportunity?’ Jack asked. ‘To do what — kill people?’

Scotus winced. ‘That was… unfortunate,’ he said. ‘It was never meant to go that way. I thought I’d invented a way of making people slim and making me rich at the same time. Obesity is such a problem these days. People would pay a lot of money for a guaranteed way of losing weight, and I developed a toxin that would just dissolve the creatures when their hosts had reached their ideal body mass without affecting the hosts. It was perfect — my patients would never realise what was inside them! I didn’t realise that the creatures could actually influence people’s actions if they weren’t getting enough nutrition!’

‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions,’ Jack said. ‘But you’re going to turn around and walk back along that road.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Scotus said.

Jack raised his pistol, but a muffled sound behind him made him turn.

Gwen’s head was twisted painfully around to one side, pointing up at the ceiling. Her eyes were wide and it looked like she might have been screaming, if the hand that was holding her head hadn’t been cutting off her breathing.

The hand belonged to a man in a leather jacket, who was holding Gwen’s automatic in his other hand.

‘Drop the gun,’ he said, ‘or I’ll snap your girlfriend’s neck.’

Somewhere in the distance, a gun fired.

Owen raised his gun and aimed it at the head of the thug with the nail-encrusted chain, which looked like something barnacled and crustacean. ‘One more step and I’ll conduct a radical transsphenoidal hemisectomy using a copper-jacketed bullet rather than a scalpel,’ he said, trying to put a firmness into his voice that he didn’t really feel.

‘You talk too much,’ the thug said. He lashed out expertly with the chain, flicking it.

The end of the chain sliced across Owen’s knuckles, sending fiery pain shooting up his arm. He dropped the gun. It hit the floor, butt-first, and fired, sending a plume of flame up towards the ceiling and deafening Owen with the blast.

‘I do everything too much,’ Owen muttered, sucking blood from his fingers.

The recoil caused the gun to skitter across the concrete floor towards the thug. He looked at it disdainfully, and kicked it away, over the edge of the concrete floor and onto the tarmac beneath. ‘Tricky safety design on the P220,’ he said. ‘The company abandoned the traditional catch for a decocking lever that lowers the hammer to a safety notch.’ He glanced up at Owen, and there was a terrible humour in his eyes. ‘But that’s by-the-by,’ he said. ‘Now it’s fairer. We’re both unarmed.’

‘You’ve got that chain thing,’ Owen pointed out.

The thug looked at the spiked chain.

‘Oops, my mistake,’ he said, and smiled.

He stepped towards Owen, bringing the chain back behind him and coiling it, ready to strike.

Owen risked a glance to one side, where Toshiko was confronting the other thug. He’d hoped she would have him on the floor with her gun in the back of his neck by now, but she seemed to be weighing up her options, deciding how to take him on. As Owen watched, Toshiko’s thug stepped forward suddenly and sliced his knuckle-dusters horizontally through the air at eye level. She brought her hands up to protect her face. The knuckle-dusters caught her palm, their brass spikes tearing the flesh and spraying blood in all directions. Toshiko staggered backwards, the gun falling from her hand and hitting the concrete floor but not, Owen noticed, firing. Perhaps he should switch to a Walther.

Something moving in the corner of his eye made him glance up. The nailed chain was flicking towards his eyes. He instinctively put his left arm up to defend himself. The chain wrapped itself around his forearm, the nails tearing through the leather of his jacket and into his flesh. The pain caused his breath to catch in his throat and his heart to go into arrhythmia with the shock. Instinctively he wanted to pull his arm closer to his body, protecting himself, but years of fighting in bars had taught him two valuable lessons.

Lesson one: you can ignore pain, if you really try.

Lesson two: do what the other guy is least expecting, even if it hurts.

Owen took two steps towards the thug. The chain sagged between them, its tension removed by Owen’s actions. The thug pulled at the chain, but instead of dragging Owen towards him, pulling him off his feet, he merely succeeded in taking some of the tension back up again. Owen took a step to one side, blood pulsing hot and wet inside his sleeve. Raising his right leg, he brought his foot down hard on the side of the thug’s knee.

Owen felt, rather than heard, a wet snapping sound. The thug’s leg crumpled in a direction it wasn’t supposed to go. He screamed, shrill and loud.

‘And that’s what seven years of medical school did for me,’ Owen gasped, tugging the chain from the thug’s suddenly nerveless hand and unwrapping it carefully from his arm. ‘I know every vulnerable point on the human body, and several inside it as well.’ Stepping forward, he brought his heel down squarely on the thug’s temple. The screaming stopped.

The inside of his sleeve was hot and wet and throbbing, but he didn’t think the damage was anything more than superficial. He turned to where Toshiko was fighting her own corner. She was backing away fast, blood dripping from her injured hand. Owen looked around for her gun. If he could retrieve that, he could even the odds somewhat.

Before he could do anything, Toshiko reached down with her uninjured hand and pulled her leather belt out from her jeans. Still backing away, she doubled it over and moved her grasp from the metal buckle to the pointed and pierced end.

‘What’s this — the fashion police?’ her thug taunted.

Toshiko flicked the belt at him the same way Owen’s thug had flicked the nailed chain at him. The square belt buckle caught him on the bridge of his nose. Blood gushed as he stumbled backwards. His heel caught on Toshiko’s Walther and he missed a step. Toshiko flicked her belt again. The buckle hit him right between the eyes. He crumpled to the floor.

Owen looked at Toshiko with astonishment. ‘That was awesome,’ he said.

‘That was Fendi,’ Toshiko replied smugly. She looked at his arm, and winced. ‘We need to get that seen to,’ she said.

Owen indicated her ripped hand. ‘And that,’ he said.

Toshiko looked at it as if she hadn’t noticed it before. ‘Should we get to a hospital?’ she asked hesitantly, ‘or call Ianto?’

Owen indicated the beds lined up behind them, each with its comatose occupant. ‘They’ve all got sterile dressings on,’ he pointed out. ‘There has to be a cupboard full of medical supplies around here somewhere. And when we’ve got ourselves sorted out, we’ll go and see what’s up with Jack and Gwen. They’re probably having a really boring time, compared to us.’