Something in the Water

TEN

‘So what the hell happened there?’ demanded Jack. He was circling the desk in his office, arms folded. ‘I thought you said you were bringing a dead body in for examination. Didn’t you think to check he actually was dead first?’

Gwen knew he was being sarcastic, but the tone still stung.

‘Be fair, Jack,’ said Owen from the doorway. ‘Y’know, the guy had done a lot to make himself look dead: lain in a bog for forty years, decayed himself, let the worms in, shrivelled up a bit, stopped breathing, no circulation, all major organs dried up and inactive. Could’ve fooled anyone.’

‘Thanks, Owen,’ said Gwen acidly.

‘OK, so he was dead,’ Jack admitted, stalking past Owen. He looked down into the Autopsy Room. The corpse, now returned to the examination table, had been strapped down. ‘It raises the question, though: why didn’t he stay dead?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Gwen said. ‘We know the corpse shows traces of Rift energy. It has a connection with the weak spot in time here.’ She looked up and met Jack’s gaze. ‘Could it have anything to do with you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Being this close to the actual Rift.’ Gwen flicked her gaze at the chromium pillar running through the centre of the Hub. ‘Being this close to you — someone who cannot die.’

Jack held her gaze. ‘Not buying it.’

‘Why not? It only came back to life when it was here with you and the Rift! It showed nothing of that beforehand — not when we found it, not when we put it in the boot of my car, not when it was brought down here.’

Jack frowned. ‘So why isn’t it still alive now? Same Rift, same me.’

‘Could be something to do with you blowing what was left of its brains all over the walls,’ suggested Owen, and then he held up a hand. ‘No, wait, sorry — that would still only be a clinical definition of something that had to be dead. It may not agree.’

‘So what are we looking at here?’ Jack wanted to know. ‘A zombie?’

‘Or a vampire?’ Gwen said.

Owen sighed and dragged a hand down his face. He needed a shave. ‘We can’t rule anything out at this stage. Tosh is running some tests right now. Maybe she can come up with something.’

Jack turned back to look at the corpse on the table as Gwen joined him. ‘It hasn’t moved again,’ she said. ‘It looks exactly like what it is — a body that’s lain dead in a bog for forty years.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jack with a cold smile, ‘which is exactly what it looked like an hour ago, before it decided to make a bigger comeback than Frank Sinatra.’ He watched Ianto moving around the Autopsy Room, carefully and methodically cleaning the place up, but making sure he kept well out of the corpse’s reach.

‘You’d better come and see this.’ Toshiko was sitting at her workstation, her smooth features lit by the glare from the bank of computer screens mounted above the desk. Her fingers were already rattling across a number of keyboards, and various images flickered over the monitors in response.

‘What you got for us, Tosh?’ Jack leant over her desk and studied the screens. A couple of them showed images relayed from the Autopsy Room: the corpse strapped to the table, and an X-ray of the body. Others showed spectrographic analyses of various factors, and another was showing a digital recording of the moment when the corpse first moved.

On the screen, Owen leant over the body to make the first incision, and then suddenly reeled back as the corpse jerked into life.

‘What’s this then,’ asked Owen, peering at the images, ‘Dawn of the Dead re-run?’

‘Keep watching,’ said Tosh.

They all watched the recording as the corpse climbed off the table, dragged Gwen down, and then took the first bullet from Jack’s gun.

Gwen flinched as she watched, remembering the cold wetness speckling her face as the corpse lurched away from her.

On the screen, the dead body continued to struggle, knocking over the trolley and finally getting a sizeable part of the remains of its head removed by Jack’s second shot. It sank to its knees and collapsed, dead, again.

‘I’ve seen this before,’ Jack said.

‘Didn’t like it much the first time,’ said Gwen.

‘Me neither,’ Owen agreed. ‘I hate repeats.’

‘Wait,’ said Toshiko, touching a control so that the image reversed rapidly to the moment when the corpse started moving. ‘Listen carefully.’

‘If you’re saying someone farted,’ said Owen, ‘then I’m afraid it was me. Understandable, I think, in the circumstances.’

‘No, listen,’ said Toshiko, in no mood for jokes. ‘You can only just hear it …’

She replayed the scene again, tweaking the volume. This time they could clearly hear the scrape of the corpse’s movement, the startled yelp from Gwen as it grabbed her ankle and pulled. They watched as it drew her closer, Gwen recoiling, heard the sharp hiss of breath.

‘It’s saying something,’ Jack realised.

‘Probably couldn’t speak very clearly anyway,’ said Owen. ‘No lips, jaws all stiff, tongue and larynx shrivelled up like leaves. Even if it was trying to say something, it wouldn’t be able to articulate the words properly.’

‘Something about rags?’ suggested Gwen.

‘Maybe we should ask him,’ said Owen. ‘Excuse me, but would you mind coming back to life again just one more time, we didn’t quite catch what you said before.’

‘Play it again,’ said Jack.

They listened.

‘Definitely “rags” or “rag”,’ said Gwen. ‘I’m sure of it.’

‘The “s” sound may not be correct,’ Toshiko advised them. ‘There are no lips or tongue to control the speech. It’s trying to say something, but it hasn’t got the means to do it properly.’

‘Might as well be “gottle o’ gear”,’ said Owen.

‘Wait — the computer’s found a match,’ said Toshiko. She touched a control and the sound was replayed again, cleaned and stripped of all extraneous white noise. ‘What if we play that back alongside the visual image?’ She grabbed a keyboard and started typing. Within a few seconds, she had the original video image running again, this time with the enhanced audio.

The corpse slid off the autopsy table, grabbed Gwen, pulled her close. It looked at her, or tried to, and said, ‘Water hag! Water hag!’

And then there was a series of distorted, muffled noises as Owen and Jack spoke on the tape and Jack’s revolver had the last word.