Another Life (31 page)

Jack let Kirsty lead him to a treatment room, but didn’t allow her in with him. She returned to her desk, full of gratitude. The security guard posted on the treatment room door unlocked it and let him in.

Jack slipped in unaccompanied, and saw the body. The brutal gnawed hole in the back of the skull, exposing the spine and lower part of the brain. The casual disregard for the body, with no attempt to conceal it from discovery. The sticky mess on the smooth floor in which the corpse lay sprawled. The sprays of blood over the wall and nearby equipment. The body had been rolled over, presumably in a futile attempt to treat the victim.

In less than a minute he’d seen enough. Enough time to confirm that this was the same kind of killing as before. Enough to know it wasn’t Owen. Enough time to find the Bekaran deep-tissue scanner casually abandoned beside a stainless-steel kidney dish on an instrument tray.

Jack asked the security guard to relock the room, and he returned to the front desk. Kirsty Donald was engaged in a frustrated conversation with a guy whose sharp suit was matched by his slick patter. His green eyes flicked lasciviously over the receptionist, and he kept smoothing his thin moustache with his fingers. He looked like a salesman who, by accident or design, had washed up in A&E this evening, and he was making every effort to get Kirsty to make him an appointment with the clinical director. His pinched features and over-earnest manner reminded Jack of Owen when he was trying too hard. While the sales guy held Kirsty’s attention, Jack surreptitiously looked at the Admissions details on the desk beside her.

‘Applegate, Susan’ was near the top. Discharged an hour ago.

Jack cut straight across the sales guy’s patter, as though he wasn’t there. ‘Kirsty, is Dr Tegg available for interview at the moment?’

‘I think I was speaking, actually,’ interjected the sales guy. His sharp green eyes flared with anger behind his strained but polite tone.

‘I don’t care, actually,’ Jack told him. ‘Can’t you see these guys are real busy tonight? Why don’tcha take your briefcase and sit on it. Over there. Five hours waiting time.’

‘Thanks.’ Kirsty smiled at him with evident relief, though he was pleased to see there was a more appraising look returning to her eyes. ‘I’m afraid Dr Tegg went off duty about an hour ago. Are you together? Only she left with another doctor. Good-looking guy, too.’

Jack laughed at Kirsty’s transparent attempt to exaggerate Owen’s appeal. Or perhaps he was her type, and he should convince her that this salesman was a better prospect tonight. There he was against the wall, sitting on his briefcase and looking resentfully over at them.

Briefcase, thought Jack.

Wildman had a briefcase when he chased him through town. But he didn’t still have it when Jack caught up with him on the eighth floor of the building site. He must have concealed it somewhere in the partly constructed Levall-Mellon building. And his wasn’t full of proprietary drugs, either; it would be where Wildman had concealed the remaining nuclear fuel packs.

Jack beckoned the sales guy over to the reception desk. The thin guy jumped off his case and scurried across. ‘Mr Majunath will be free in an hour,’ Jack told him. ‘You should talk to Kirsty about setting up a meeting. And when you’ve got that sorted, she can get you to see the Clinical Director, too.’ He pointed to the wall opposite. ‘Don’t lose your briefcase.’

Jack strode confidently through the exit of A&E, oblivious to the rain that pelted down around him, heading for the SUV. He had a briefcase of his own to collect downtown.

Another couple of minutes in the sub with Toshiko might have driven Gwen insane. Toshiko was going on about algal populations, and how they changed depending on the temperature in the Bay or the amount of sunlight or some nutrient or other. Gwen was a lot less interested in how blue-green algae formed a scum on the surface than in finding the scum who’d been killing innocent people back on shore.

It was almost possible to forget all of that when they got into the alien ship.

The alien ship. Gwen had to say it to herself over and over. The alien ship.

She’d never seen anything like it, never been inside an alien ship. There’d been the meteor strike and she’d seen fragments of the transportation shell they’d dug up in the foundations of a new supermarket. This was different.

While Toshiko was making sure that the sub was safely connected to the outer hull, and that there was air inside for them to breathe, Gwen had been wondering how it would look. She’d expected it to be like a film set. After all, she’d sat yawning through enough DVD special features with Rhys to know how the effects were done. That the sets were lit specially and then the post-production effects made the places look, literally, out of this world.

This was beyond anything Rhys could have imagined, spilling Doritos on the carpet because he was so engrossed in the film. The only thing Gwen recognised here was the smell of salt water in the air. The rest was – why was she surprised? – alien. She swallowed hard to release the pressure building in her ears.

The walkways were spongy beneath their feet as they stepped deeper into the ship. Soft green light dappled the undulating walls, rippling like a zoo’s aquarium all around them. Frothy fingers of thin material wafted from an unseen ceiling, almost beckoning them to go further. Occasionally a sharp-edged symbol would fade into view on a wall and then just as slowly fade away. Gusts of brine-tasting air swirled gently as they proceeded.

‘It’s getting darker,’ worried Toshiko. Her hand-held computer wasn’t giving her any reassurance.

Gwen noticed that when they spoke there was no echo, even in what seemed to be a cavernous space. ‘What’s worrying you, Tosh?’

‘There could be more of those starfish things you mentioned.’

Gwen brandished her torch. ‘Use your flashlight.’

‘Will that scare them off?’

‘No,’ admitted Gwen. ‘But at least you’ll see them waving their tentacles at you.’

The floor heaved beneath their feet, and a bass growl came from somewhere deep inside the ship. ‘It’s still lurching through the Rift,’ explained Toshiko. ‘It’s shaking about like a stalling car. The ship could be tearing itself apart in the process.’

‘There’s a cheering thought,’ Gwen told her. At a kind of T-junction, Toshiko took the left-hand fork, and Gwen hastened to join her.

They entered a wide expanse that contained a circle of suspended cages. They faced inwards towards a cylindrical block at the centre. Each cage had a curved back, and reminded Gwen of elongated versions of the enclosed retro chairs Rhys kept on about wanting them to buy. Probably because he’d been watching the DVDs of
The Prisoner
she’d bought for his birthday. One of the cages was enclosed at the front.

But that wasn’t what had alarmed Toshiko. She was pointing mutely at the third cage along. Owen was slumped in it. Head drooped to one side, face pallid, eyes closed.

Gwen started forward to see if she could free him, but Toshiko held her back. ‘Careful,’ she hissed. ‘On the floor in front of him…’

A short-haired blonde woman lay in an awkward heap in front of Owen’s cage. In the half-light of the room, it seemed to Gwen at first that a large vein in the woman’s neck was throbbing. Gwen stooped to take a closer look, gasped and immediately leapt away again. One of the starfish creatures was attached to the woman’s neck, arching up and down like a hand pressing up against the woman’s jaw.

Gwen reached for her gun. ‘No! You can’t fire that in here,’ snapped Toshiko. ‘The whole place is pressurised.’

‘And I can hardly shoot it while it’s on her face.’ Gwen holstered her weapon, and took out her torch. She waited until the starfish creature was on one of its upward movements, and then prised it free with the lamp end of the torch. It rolled away from the woman’s head, on its back, the four legs waggling pathetically as it struggled to regain a grip. Gwen pushed it further away with the torch, noting how the mouth section in the centre puckered in a foul parody of disappointment. The woman’s neck and lower face were a raw mass of part-digested flesh. Her lips were eaten away at one side, revealing the teeth and lower jaw.

Gwen hefted the heavy torch and brought it down in a sharp blow in the centre of the creature. It squeaked, the sound of two rubber boots being kicked together. She slammed it with another blow, and another, and another, until its centre was pulped and two arms had detached. It wasn’t twitching any more.

‘OK, stop now.’ Toshiko was holding her arm.

Gwen dropped the torch, and the light rolled around the room in a bright swirl until it came to a halt in the sticky remains.

Toshiko gave her arm a quick squeeze of reassurance and then stooped down over the blonde woman. By playing her own torch over the remaining half of the woman’s face, she could identify her: ‘Sandra Applegate.’ She carefully felt for a pulse in the remaining half of her neck. ‘Nothing we can do.’

Toshiko stood up again and examined Owen in his cage. His breathing was slow but regular. When she lifted his lids, his eyes were rolled right back into his head.

The ship heaved and shuddered more profoundly than before.

‘Let’s get him out of this thing,’ Toshiko told Gwen. ‘We need to get him back to the Hub.’

Once Toshiko had worked out how to release Owen from his confinement, his body dropped out of the contraption as a dead weight. Gwen caught him, her knees buckling under the weight. Toshiko grabbed his legs, and they half-carried, half-dragged him from the glowing circle of cages and out through the corridors towards the Torchwood sub.

The alien vessel bucked and warped around them. Gwen couldn’t tell how much of that was supposed to happen and how much was the ship twisting dangerously out of shape as it struggled to fully breach the Rift. She was too busy dragging the profoundly unconscious Owen to worry about it too much.

Toshiko laid Owen down carefully at the rear of the sub. It wasn’t designed as an ambulance, and he looked awkward and uncomfortable where he lay.

‘We should bring the other body,’ Gwen said.

‘And put it where?’

Gwen looked at Toshiko coldly. She remembered the dead woman’s partially digested face. ‘We can’t leave her.’

‘Yes we can.’

‘I can’t leave her, Tosh.’ Gwen stared at her until Toshiko couldn’t keep eye contact any longer.

‘Bring her if you want,’ Toshiko said, and began to check the sub’s systems. The whole vessel rocked on its axis. ‘If it looks as though the ship’s movement will compromise our departure, I will leave without you.’

Gwen didn’t ask again. She ran back through the olive-coloured corridors, determined not to be distracted by the vine-like wiring or sudden splashes of emerald light. Although the rattling shudder of the vessel was increasing, she managed to drag the corpse of Sandra Applegate back to the sub. At every step she had to force herself to look away from the woman’s ravaged face.

TWENTY-SEVEN

The SUV slewed and careened on the slick motorway. By activating the blue flashing lights at the base of the windscreen, Jack could scythe down the hard shoulder, and more quickly gain the A roads into the city centre.

The direction finder was useless, unable to get a signal in the continual downpour. The radio crackled and spat. Jack could just decipher some of the police reports and avoid the very worst of the congested roads. The emergency channel was alive with horror stories about the widespread flooding of Cardiff. The walls of one church in the centre had collapsed, and corpses were washed out through and beyond the graveyard into a tangled mess of bones and rotted clothing. At least, thought Jack, the rescuers could work out whether they’d been dead beforehand.

He tried to contact the emergency services to have them cordon off the Levall-Mellon building site. But his mobile signal fluctuated between poor and non-existent. In the brief time he did get through, it was obvious that there was no point deploying officers into an area of danger. Even looters weren’t going into the city centre now, because the place was awash with storm water.

In the haze of rain and headlights straight ahead, it looked like traffic was gridlocked. Jack yanked the wheel, and the SUV swung into a residential area parallel to the main road. Halfway down this street, a shabby figure stepped out into the carriageway with barely a glance up. Jack was unable to swerve away, and hit the figure with a solid thump. He plunged his foot down on the brake, and the SUV slid to a halt twenty metres further on.

He couldn’t just leave the poor guy there. And he couldn’t risk reversing back and maybe driving over him. So Jack killed the engine, pulled his collar up, popped open the door and jogged down the street to where the guy was splayed across the road.

He could see the body more clearly now amid the dancing splashes of the hammering rainfall. A hunched, ugly humanoid peered back at him with deep-set angry eyes, and scowled through a ragged mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. It was a Weevil, dressed in the curious half-clothing that characterised the creatures when they had only recently come through the Rift. The creature lay, shivering uncontrollably in the roadway, its arms and legs spread clumsy and wide, jerking spasmodically beneath a weak streetlight.

There was no sign of movement from the nearest houses, and no pedestrians had been foolish enough to brave the storm. Should he put it out of its misery by reversing over it like road-kill? A bullet through its head? Or could it recover and be taken into custody?

As he watched, the Weevil gave one last heaving shudder, and then expired. The rattling sound of its final breath was audible even over the continuous battering of the rain on the asphalt.

At the far end of the road, a police vehicle had paused across the junction. Jack groaned. He’d not extinguished the flashing lights in the SUV. He hared back to his vehicle, switched them off and reversed swiftly back towards the Weevil. Wouldn’t do to be caught reversing over it. Couldn’t let the cops see the creature. The police car started to reverse back so that it could turn down the roadway. Jack popped the trunk of the SUV, and cursed. The two dead policemen were still in the back, and there was no more space for a third corpse. He slammed the trunk shut and opened the rear passenger door. By hunkering down in the street, he could get his arms under the Weevil’s armpits, heft it up, and dump it in the rear passenger seat. It had a messy open wound that still leaked copiously from its forehead.