Peter Anghelides - Pack Animals

Last things he remembered: the Brakkanee attack in the zoo… Ianto in its path… Jack throwing himself in the way… the jaws seizing him… savage pain in his left leg, a wild flight through the air, a final crushing pain in his neck as he struck the fence…

He sat bolt upright, clutching at the arm that held him.

‘Steady, Jack.’ It was Owen’s voice. ‘You’re back again. Can’t keep a good man down.’

It was difficult to detect what emotion Owen was feeling. Seeing Jack come back to life has hard enough, without knowing that you were condemned to a living death. Jack could suck in air and, impossibly, breathe again. For Owen, breathing was impossible.

Jack touched Owen’s forearm as reassurance. He rolled his neck slowly, aware that he shouldn’t rush too quickly until he was sure the break had healed – otherwise, he’d just die again, and that would slow things down.

‘Situation report then, Doctor Harper. This ambulance reached the hospital yet?’

‘Still at the zoo,’ said Owen.

Jack threw back the blanket, and swung his legs to put his feet on the floor.

‘Whoa there, Captain,’ Owen said, and held him back gently. ‘One fatal wound to the forehead, and I think you’ll find…’

Oh, all right then, decided Jack – he wasn’t putting his feet on the floor. His right foot, at best. Because the left was dangling by a thread of flesh and gristle. The Brakkanee had chewed practically right through the leg. Pain blossomed in the stump of the limb as blood began to circulate. A few fresh red spots dripped off the end and onto the ambulance floor.

‘Don’t worry,’ muttered Owen, ‘you’ll live. Of course.’

The back doors of the ambulance opened, and a grumpy-looking paramedic stuck her plump face in through the crack. ‘We all set yet?’ She caught sight of Jack’s irreparably mashed leg, and blanched. ‘Christ almighty! Barry told me he was dead!’

‘That was the other guy,’ Owen told her, and jerked his head in the direction of the second gurney.

For the first time, Jack saw the other body. A stitched red ambulance blanket covered it, from the tip of the head right down to the upturned toes at the end of the stretcher. A broad figure, utterly still. ‘Ianto?’ he breathed.

‘No,’ said Owen firmly.

‘Well, look at this man’s foot,’ the paramedic insisted. She indicated Jack’s injury. ‘We can’t hang on here.’

Jack wiggled his stump, and the foot swung gruesomely on its gristly connection. ‘Hang on, very good,’ he said.

‘No offence, mate,’ said the paramedic. ‘But we need to get you to Cardiff General.’

She was all set to come in, but Owen stood up to block her. ‘I told you, leave it. Torchwood will make the arrangements. Don’t argue,’ he continued relentlessly over her renewed protests. ‘Just get out and I’ll get on with it.’

‘Sure he was dead.’ The woman looked daggers at Owen. He could tell from her eye line that she was also considering Jack’s head wound. ‘I’m a paramedic, you know, not a porter.’

‘And I’m a doctor,’ Owen told her. ‘D’you wanna take it up with Mr Majunath at A amp;E?’

The paramedic backed down.

Owen nodded. ‘Well, piss off out of it, then.’

The doors emphatically slammed shut. Jack winced, and clutched his ruined limb as another spasm of pain lanced right up it.

‘That had stopped bleeding out when they found you. Hasn’t started again since you came back, even though your heart’s pumping again. You sure it’ll… y’know…’ He waved his fingers like a magician.

Jack looked at Owen’s splinted fingers, knowing that they would never repair like he could. ‘It’ll take a while. And it’ll hurt like hell.’

‘What’s the worst you’ve ever had?’

Jack considered for a moment. ‘You don’t wanna know.’

‘Burned to a crisp in a fire?’

‘You’re a sick man, you know that?’

‘Says the man with the detachable foot.’ Owen narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. ‘Could you survive going through a meat grinder?’

‘Never been tempted,’ replied Jack. ‘God, that would really sting, wouldn’t it? Still what doesn’t kill ya just makes ya stronger.’

‘Tell me about it,’ muttered Owen. He examined Jack’s dangling foot. ‘Could have been worse. Bite from a Brakkanee, you could have contracted Alien Lifeform Injected Cerebral Encephalopathy.’

‘A.L.I.C.E.’ Jack pondered this. ‘Is that bad?’

‘Nasty,’ Owen told him. ‘Christopher Robin went down with it.’

‘I swear to God, Owen, sometimes I don’t know what to believe with you.’ Jack considered the body on the other gurney. ‘If that’s not Ianto, then where is he?’

‘Dunno,’ said Owen. ‘Tosh sent me straight here. SUV was still in the car park. Rest of the place is evacuated, so it was easy to find you. I just followed the ambulances. Hell of a day for them, there’s a shopping centre on fire on the other side of town and a major RTA in the centre of Cardiff. No sign of Ianto,’ he concluded. ‘It’s like he’s just vanished.’

‘So who’s the stiff?’

Owen tugged back the blanket. Jack knew the face at once. It was the ginger guy, one of the Achenbrite team. His neck lolled awkwardly on the thin pillow, a wide gash right across his pallid, freckled forehead.

‘Got caught in an explosion. Whacked his head into a brick wall, smacked right through the skull, frontal and right sphenoid. But that’s not the best bit.’ Owen slid the blanket the rest of the way off the body.

The top half of the corpse was still in the grey Achenbrite uniform, somewhat bloodied from the brutal head injury.

The lower half, below the waist, was gone. Owen flicked the red cover back over, and the contours of the legs reappeared, like a magic trick. He removed the blanket once more, and the legs were gone again.

‘Not amputated,’ said Owen, ‘just absent. What do you think about that?’

The tang of blood caught in Ianto’s mouth. He turned his head, and suffered a brief moment of panic as water covered his nostrils. He coughed, and now the taste of brackish water choked him. He struggled and floundered until he somehow managed to drag himself into a shallow part of… wherever this was. Even as he spluttered, he could barely hear himself. He wanted to shout, but didn’t know where he was.

Why was it so dark?

A profound darkness. He’d been down a mine shaft once, and his guide had extinguished all the torches and helmet lights. That kind of darkness. The utter absence of light.

Was this death? He’d half-joked with Owen about what there was after life. Owen had sneeringly told him he wouldn’t understand, but Ianto had seen in his eyes that Owen really didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe Ianto was discovering it for himself. Finding out what was there.

What waited in the dark.

He called out hopefully. His own voice was a dull hum in his head. His throat felt ragged. Was he whispering or screaming?

He opened his eyes wide. Nothing. But there was the buzz in his ears, and the taste of stale water in his mouth, and the scratchy sensation of angled concrete beneath him and water around his legs. When he ran his hands over his face, his shoulders, down across his outstretched legs, he could make out the contours of his own body and where the water lapped against him. There was a tenderness to his right side, and the clothes seemed torn. But he could definitely feel .

He choked back a sob of gratitude. And now he could hear that. The buzz in his ears began to resolve itself into meaningful sounds. Human voices in the middle distance.

‘D’you hear that?’ A young man’s voice, Swansea accent.

A girl replying: ‘If it’s those bloody students, I will bloody ’ave them. Bloody rag week, it goes on for ever. The lazy bunch of pampered work-shy English bastards.’