Peter Anghelides - Pack Animals

‘Can you do that?’ she persisted.

Maddock nodded dumbly. He fiddled with his mobile phone.

‘Don’t make any calls,’ Toshiko told him. She deliberated on another plausible lie. Didn’t want him calling in the police, or his mates, before she’d swiftly recce-ed the whole area. ‘Need to keep those lines clear for the emergency services.’

Maddock complied meekly. He plunged his shaking hands in his expensive jacket pockets and gazed with expectant, frightened eyes down the escalator and into the depths of the mall.

Toshiko slipped into the emergency stairwell and cautiously followed the trail of blood.

She found the body on the next landing down. From what was left, Toshiko worked out it was a woman in her twenties. The body was twisted, limbs thrown out awkwardly amid crumpled plastic shopping bags. The upper torso was a shredded mess of ripped clothing and torn flesh. A savage slash across the neck had severed her carotid artery, and the wound had spurted lines of dark red blood up against the chipped grey concrete of the wall. The body was cooling. Toshiko closed the corpse’s appalled, staring eyes.

A scratchy electronic noise came from a lower stair. Toshiko found the open clamshell of a silver mobile phone. She picked it up and listened to a chaotic chatter. ‘Hello, who’s there?’ she asked.

‘Tosh! Tosh, is that you?’ the phone said.

She could hardly believe it. ‘Owen! Did you call this number, or did she call you?’

‘Just found this phone,’ Owen’s voice continued. He seemed to be talking to someone else nearby as well. ‘Having a bit of a busy day here, Tosh.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m just in-’ The line abruptly clicked off.

‘OK,’ Toshiko said to dead air. She was about to click the phone shut when the speaker crackled and a mechanical voice said: ‘Achenbrite apologise for the interruption in service. Please stand by.’ The message repeated. Toshiko pocketed the mobile, and tapped the connector point by her right ear that activated her Torchwood comms. The same message was repeating: ‘Achenbrite apologise…’ She tapped it off again.

That couldn’t happen. The Torchwood system was a dedicated network. The screen of her PDA flickered with interference patterns, too. Maybe she could check with Ianto, he might have some idea what-

She realised she’d instinctively tapped her earpiece again. Easy to get into that habit. Easy to get over-reliant on the technology, she of all people should know that.

Back up by the library, she found Maddock frowning at his mobile phone. She could hear the same message playing out of it. ‘Thought I told you not to use that thing,’ she rebuked him, and made for the U-shaped stairway. ‘I’m going to make that CCTV check now. You said it was Mr Belden in charge?’ He hadn’t; her PDA had told her that earlier, but the question helped focus the frightened general manager.

The U-shaped stairs up to the security suite revealed further clues. Close up, the handrail wasn’t just scratched, it was raked along most of its length. Toshiko considered the angle of the freshly gouged grooves and the spatter-pattern of blood on the wall. So the creature had come down this way, leaned against the library window on the lower level, and found an exit in the emergency stairwell. Some unfortunate shopper had bumped into it there and got torn to pieces. The creature had made its way across the upper floor, and then back up these stairs. Toshiko gripped the butt of her handgun, and guardedly negotiated the remaining stairs to the top-most floor.

The door of the security room had been wrenched out of place. A chunk of plaster beside the hinges was missing. The cracked door lay on the floor. A severed human arm, still incongruously clad in the pale blue sleeve of a mall uniform, stretched across it at an angle, its stiff fingers never to reach the handle.

The PDA screen continued to fizz unhelpfully. No way of telling if there was recent Rift activity up here. No way of tracing the creature.

The door would have opened inwards, but the lintel had splintered out into the corridor, shards of wood spiking in Toshiko’s direction as she approached. Whatever had smashed down the door had done so from within the security room.

And inside was a slaughterhouse.

Toshiko had attended murder scenes, and been in abattoirs, yet this made her stomach heave. She knew from the records that the place was designed for two people; it was still hard at first glance to count the bodies. Shreds of pinkish flesh and pale blue cloth were strewn over the floor, chairs, and equipment. A deep slick of blood pooled on the carpet tiles, so much that a raised patch had congealed. What equipment had not been smashed flickered and clicked, unobserved by the butchered guards.

Toshiko tried to concentrate on something else, to stay calm. She studied the multiplexor that showed quad images – a trade-off between getting greater coverage versus the complexity of post-editing. That looked like a matrix switcher. The images on this monitor here were lo-def colour, but those were black and white. Better for low light. An IR camera covered the loading dock, where she and Gwen had encountered the Weevils earlier. It used a motion detector, so that it could record frames of video only when there was movement and thus reduce the subsequent need to review large chunks of nothing.

But her eyes were inevitably drawn to the ravaged bodies of the dead men in the room. One of them lay half-covered by some odd foliage that was growing in the corner. Variegated leaves with a serrated edge. Not a good place to keep plants, she thought. Anything that needs watering shouldn’t be that close to expensive electrical equipment.

A rattle made her spin abruptly. Her heart hammered, and her breath caught in her throat. Her handgun was level and ready, aimed at the doorframe.

‘There’s someone up on the roof,’ said Maddock. He broke off as he saw her gun. And then he saw the carnage in the room. ‘Oh God,’ he managed before his eyes rolled back in his head and he tumbled back into the corridor.

Toshiko stepped carefully over to him. Maddock was unconscious, but apparently unharmed. She put him in the recovery position. At least she wouldn’t have to explain to him why Head Office staff were armed these days.

A scratching noise came from the flight of nearby stairs that led up to the roof. Fresh blood trailed up the concrete steps.

Her PDA was still out of action. No way of telling what was up there. It could be the creature that had butchered the security guards, or it could be one of its would-be victims who’d escaped. She needed to find out.

Toshiko angled her gun up the short stairwell and kept close to the outer wall. The handrail and the concrete paint were smeared red where something had hurried up ahead of her, but this was no time to be fastidious about getting in on her clothes. She remembered Jack warning her about this during basic training: ‘Better red than dead,’ he’d joked. Except that staying alive wasn’t a joke. Her dry cleaner had seen worse than this and not asked any questions. But then again, her dry cleaner was Ianto.

She pushed at the crash bar and the fire door swung open with a squeal of unoiled hinges. She moved swiftly through the frame and out, and pressed her back against the adjacent wall. She narrowed her eyes until they adjusted to the sudden brightness.

The roof was laid out as a series of metal walkways. The blockish square shapes of air conditioning vents and lift mechanisms stood out starkly against the clear morning sky. A light wind carried the sounds of traffic and industry up to her. Cardiff sparkled off into the distance on three sides of the roof.

And a dark silhouette stared down over the edge.