Skypoint (13 page)

Just as the thing had come for him out of the wall.

Owen!

And shook his shoulder.

‘Owen!’

Consciousness hit him like a hammer right between the eyes.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he gasped.

‘Owen, are you all right?’

This time it was a different voice. A woman’s voice. He found himself on the carpet in the SkyPoint apartment. Gwen and Jack were crouched over him.

Jack was smiling. ‘Thought we’d lost you again there, buddy,’ he said and shook Owen’s shoulder once more.

‘It’s difficult to tell with a corpse,’ said another voice.

Owen turned his head and saw Ianto over by the sound system. He really hoped Ianto hadn’t been going through the CD collection in case he had passed on for keeps this time.

‘Yeah, well I was waiting for someone to give me the kiss of life, wasn’t I?’ he said, looking at Gwen.

‘So what happened?’ Jack asked, taking in the apartment and throwing himself onto its oversized couch. ‘You missed your ten o’clock call-in. We got round here and found you on the floor.’

Gwen was helping Owen to his feet as his head caught up with him.

‘And where’s Tosh?’ she asked.

‘Lucca,’ Owen gasped. His memory falling back into place with the impact of a bomb. Quickly he brought them up to speed with what had happened up to Toshiko slamming the door on him.

‘Then it came out of the wall,’ he said.

Somehow it had seized the door so that he couldn’t escape, and then it had come for him. Emerging from the wall, a shapeless mass that was neither solid nor gas, or liquid. Like nothing he had ever seen before. But there had been lights within it, like stars. It had been like looking into a galaxy that came drifting towards him, enveloping him.

… That was all he could remember.

‘But it didn’t take you like it did the others,’ observed Ianto.

‘Maybe it prefers fresh meat,’ said Owen.

‘We don’t have time to work it out now,’ Gwen told them. ‘This creature – whatever it is – is going to have to wait. First we have to get Tosh back from Lucca.’

Jack leaped over the back of the couch. ‘That’s right. Come on.’

As one, they moved out into the passageway, but they hadn’t reached the elevator when a man came crashing through the stairwell doors. He was in his pyjamas, a dressing gown flapping around him. It was the beachball man from the Lloyds’ welcome party, his face was pale but his eyes were red with tears. All he could do was cry one word again and again…

‘Gillian! Gillian!’

Gwen caught him in her arms. ‘Calm down, love. Calm down. What is it? What’s happened?’

‘She’s gone,’ he cried. ‘She’s gone!’

Behind them, another door opened. It was Andrew and Simon, disturbed by the beachball man’s cries.

‘What on Earth’s going on?’ Andrew demanded.

But Simon saw his distressed neighbour. ‘Ryan? Whatever’s wrong?’

Ryan the Beachball’s eyes were huge, threatening to burst out of his head. ‘Something, it took her! Gillian! It came out of the wall!’

Andrew raised his eyebrows in disbelief and looked at his partner. ‘I never took him as one for the…’ And he mimed a spliff.

Owen turned towards them. ‘He isn’t. He’s not hallucinating. There’s something in the building and everyone in it is in danger. You were right before, Andrew, people haven’t been running out on their payments. People are getting killed. So do yourselves a favour, pack a bag and get out.’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ said Simon. ‘This is some sort of a wind-up.’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘It isn’t.’

Above him on the wall was the fire alarm. He pulled his Webley from its holster and used its butt to smash the glass. The building was instantly filled with the scream of an alarm.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s get everybody out of here.’

‘I thought we’d said we couldn’t evacuate the building,’ Ianto pointed out, ‘in case we lost the shapeshifter.’

‘That’s right,’ said Jack. ‘But on the other hand, look at the size of this place. We could be here months and never find it.’

‘I don’t follow,’ said Gwen shaking her head.

‘I do,’ said Owen. ‘This is its hunting ground. We reduce the food supply.’

Jack grinned. ‘Exactly. With the residents gone there’s just us.’

He looked pretty pleased with his plan; the others looked at each other. They would become the hunters and the hunted. It made sense. The only problem was that from the way Owen had described what attacked him, it didn’t sound like bullets were going to have a whole lot of impact.

But that was going to have to wait now; there were people showing up from their apartments. Owen saw Wendy and Ewan Lloyd running towards them. They had hurriedly dressed and had Alison between them in her dressing gown. She held Wendy’s hand with one hand, the other clutched the pixie doll to her chest, intent on saving her own most treasured possession.

‘What’s going on?’ Ewan demanded, looking flushed with barely controlled panic.

He was looking at Owen, but Jack answered. ‘There’s an emergency. You have to get out now.’

‘Is it a fire?’ Alison gasped, her eyes large with excitement.

Owen bent down to her. ‘No. It’s not a fire, but you have to get out of the building as quickly as you can. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe.’

‘If it’s not a fire, what’s happening?’ demanded Wendy. ‘And who are you people?’

‘Everything is going to be fine,’ Gwen told her. ‘Just get into the lift and leave the building.’

As she spoke, she was easing the family towards the elevator.

‘No,’ Ewan said, suddenly defiant. ‘Not the lift. Not if there might be a fire. It’s dangerous. We’ll take the stairs. Come on, Wendy.’

‘There isn’t a fire, Ewan,’ Owen said quickly. ‘The lift’s quicker.’

‘We’re not using the lift!’ he snapped.

The elevator doors opened, and Andrew and Simon went for it without a second thought, taking the whimpering beachball man with them.

‘Well, we are,’ said Andrew. He lashed an accusing look at Simon. ‘I always told you there was something wrong with this place, but you wouldn’t listen, would you?’

Ewan was drawing his family towards the stairs. ‘Come on, Wendy, Alison. This way.’

Owen strode after them. ‘OK, if you want to take the stairs, I’m coming with you.’

Ewan glared at him. No way did he want Owen with them, but right now he didn’t seem to have any choice. Owen didn’t stop to think about it. If Ewan wanted to be an arse, that was up to him.

As they went through the doors to the stairwell, Owen turned back. ‘Make sure you get Tosh, Jack.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Gwen told him.

And Owen was gone.

Jack turned to Ianto and told him to take the elevator down to the ground floor with Andrew, Simon and the beachball man. ‘Pull up the records on the desk computer in the reception hall – there’s got to be a list of everyone who lives here. Check them off as people reach the ground. I want to know that everybody is clear.’

Ianto nodded and jumped into the elevator cabin. Andrew glanced at him appreciatively, then caught Simon’s look. Ianto just hoped it was a very fast ride to the ground.

He saw Jack wink at him as the door closed on the elevator cabin and it began to descend.

At the same time Jack checked the cylinder of the Webley .38. All six chambers were loaded.

‘OK,’ he said to Gwen. ‘Item One – let’s get Tosh back.’

Gwen pulled her own automatic out.

And then the fire alarm stopped. And the lights went out.

EIGHTEEN

The sudden silence was deafening; the darkness, blinding.

Jack and Gwen threw themselves against the walls. It was an instinctive reaction. Made them a harder target. It was only a half-second later that they both realised that this time, in this building, the walls might not be such a good place to go for cover. They looked at each other from opposite sides of the dark passageway as their eyes grew accustomed to the night light that fell through a window further along.

‘Maybe not,’ said Jack.

Together they stepped away from the walls and went back-to-back, their eyes searching the darkness.

‘What happened?’ Gwen whispered.

‘At a guess, we just lost power.’

As he spoke, emergency strip-lights at the bottom of the walls started to flicker into life, giving the passageway a muted green illumination.

‘Yeuch,’ said Jack. It sounded like he’d just stepped in something.

‘What?’ Gwen hissed.

‘I do not look good in green.’

‘Jack?’ It was Ianto’s voice in his ear. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Where are you, Ianto?’

In the elevator cabin, Ianto ran his eyes down the string of floor numbers.

When the power had gone the lift had lurched to a stop and for a few seconds they had been plunged into total darkness. Andrew had squealed with fright, and Simon told him to grow up. Then a small emergency light had come to life on the ceiling, so Ianto could make out the numbers.

‘I think we’re between the sixth and seventh floors,’ he said at length. ‘That’s just a guess.’

‘Everybody OK?’ asked Jack.

Ianto looked at his cabin mates. Andrew’s eyes behind his red frames looked like they’d been drawn by Chuck Jones, but he was OK. Simon had an arm around the silently heaving shoulders of the fat man that he occasionally called Ryan. The fat man was the only one Ianto worried about: he was already stressed, having seen his wife get pulled through the wall, now he was trapped in a lift between floors. He could have a heart attack. Or he could turn crazy.

‘So far, so good,’ he told Jack.

‘Sing a few campfire songs. We’ll get to you soon as we can.’

Jack turned to Gwen, she had taken a hand-held module from her jacket pocket and was running quickly through screens.

‘What have you got?’ he asked.

‘The SkyPoint blueprints. Besnik Lucca has the whole of the twenty-fifth floor, penthouse suite, roof garden…’

‘Has he got a jacuzzi? I bet he’s got a jacuzzi. Maybe if we get this sorted in double-time…’

‘Doesn’t say anything about a jacuzzi. What it does say is there’s no way up there other than the lifts.’

Jack wiped his mouth with the back of his gun hand, feeling the humour drain out of him. ‘So we can’t reach Tosh while the power’s down and, you know, that gives me a really bad feeling about what’s going on here.’

Jack spoke into his comms again. ‘Owen. Are you there?’

Owen and Toshiko had decided not to wear their comms while they’d been playing Mr and Mrs in case someone had noticed them, but he had taken the earpiece from his pocket when the lights went out. He was there when Jack called him.

‘Here, Jack.’

He was two floors below with the Lloyds. And Ewan had a broken ankle. When the power went they had been hurtling down the concrete steps, in the sudden darkness Ewan had lost his footing and gone down heavily. The emergency lighting on the stairs wasn’t up to a glow-worm’s arse, and together they had managed to help Ewan into the passageway on the eleventh floor, where Owen had quickly examined the injury. There was no way Ewan was going to make it down another twenty turns of the staircase down to the ground.

He told Jack all of this quickly, uncomfortably conscious that Ewan was sitting on the passageway floor with his back against the wall, and that Wendy and Alison were crouched around him. Owen’s eyes flickered from one wall to another. The spacious hallway of the eleventh floor had become strangely and insidiously claustrophobic.

He missed the comforting weight of the automatic in his hand. He wasn’t sure how much good it would be against something that could slip through the atomic structure of a brick wall, but it would have felt good anyway.

‘Listen, Owen, I think Lucca has cut the power. It puts the elevators out of commission and that makes him unreachable.’

‘And traps us with whatever that thing is,’ said Owen.

‘Maybe he’s hoping it will do his work for him,’ Gwen suggested.

‘In the old days in Eastern Europe there were noblemen who gave their enemies a sporting start, then set their hunting dogs on them. But this is the twenty-first century, and I have something that comes through the walls.’

Jack, Gwen, Owen and Ianto all froze. Besnik Lucca had whispered into their ears.

Above them, on the twenty-fifth floor, he stood in the monitor room that showed him the Torchwood team on three different screens, and spoke into the communications device he had found in Toshiko’s purse.

Jack hated the sound of the man in his ear, he felt contaminated by it. Biting down on his anger because he didn’t want to give Lucca the satisfaction of knowing he had got to him, he said, ‘What have you done with our friend?’

Lucca moved unhurriedly away from the monitors and into the lounge. He had Toshiko gagged there, tied to the arms of an armchair, but unhurt.

‘She’s a little tied up right now, but otherwise well,’ Lucca said.

‘What do you want, you bastard?’ Owen demanded.

Toshiko’s eyes followed Lucca around the room as he ambled through it, taking in the treasures of his art collection. Unlike the rest of SkyPoint, the penthouse remained drenched in light – it was clearly fed by a separate power supply.

‘I have a proposal for you, Torchwood. I have no real idea who you are, or who you represent, but I have had the fortune to study some of your equipment and your methods. You are clearly well resourced and also resourceful.’

‘Thanks for the compliments, Lucca,’ Jack scowled, ‘but I’d rather you got to the point.’

‘An Englishman’s home is his castle, don’t they say, Jack? I presume the dictum still stands in Wales. Perhaps not, as the English built their castles here to subjugate the natives.

‘Well, SkyPoint is my castle, my fortress. As perhaps you can imagine, a man in my position has many enemies – those from my homeland that are still looking for me – people here that would take from me what I have worked for.’

‘Don’t you mean stolen and killed for?’ said Gwen.

Lucca ignored her. ‘My castle has many fortifications but they are, as yet, untested. I have every reason to believe that they cannot be breached, but only the determination of a skilled and motivated force can prove that.’