Peter Anghelides - Pack Animals

The demotic sound of real Cardiff. Definitely not dead then.

‘If they think we’re paying a ransom for them to return that wall…’ began the woman.

‘Don’t be stupid, Anna. How could they possibly have stolen a brick-and-concrete wall?’

‘I’ve seen Derren Brown,’ grumbled Anna. ‘It’s not my fault you can’t get Channel 4.’

The voices faded as the two moved further away. Ianto knew his hearing wasn’t fading again, because now he could hear the sound of wind in the branches of a tree, the ripple of water around him. The throaty growl of a large animal close by.

Ianto’s breath caught in his chest. He blinked furiously, hardly daring to move any further. He levered himself onto all fours in the water, some kind of shallow pool. Unless he could see, there was no way of knowing for sure what the animal was, where it lurked, or the extent of the danger.

He could guess, though.

The alien device had gone off in his hands. A defence mechanism, that’s what the big bloke had been shouting about, wasn’t it. Somehow, the blast had taken out the wall of the enclosure and hurled him into the display area. If he hadn’t landed in the pool, the fall would have killed him. As it was, the device had somehow accelerated him away from what it perceived as an attacker, and… what, blinded him? How did that make sense.

The darkness was dissipating. If Ianto concentrated hard, he could start to discern shapes in front of him. He was initially suspicious that it was an optical illusion, his brain struggling to cope with his loss of sight and inventing stuff for him to see. But no, there were definitely the contours of the tiger enclosure… the scratched sandy surface… the tree in the centre…

And, oh yes, the tiger.

Ianto took a terrified, shuddering inhalation through his nose. The tiger’s head darted in his direction. But it did not move towards him. It lifted its shaggy striped head and sniffed the air suspiciously. Maybe being chased by a two-headed alien monster had taken its toll on the big cat’s confidence, but Ianto was too scared to be convinced of that.

His earlier desperate scramble had brought him to the shallow side of the tiger’s pool. Ianto shuffled backwards out of the water, painfully aware of the splashing, keeping his eyes fixed on the striped animal. The tiger stared balefully at the ripples in the water, as if they were the most fascinating things in the enclosure.

Ianto continued to retreat, never once looking away from the creature, alert for any sign that it was going to plunge into the water, or start a skirting run around the pool. He could smell dung as he reversed, and winced as he worked out that he had shuffled into a pile of tiger shit. Instinct made him look at where he’d placed his hands. He could see a brightly coloured photograph that had dropped, half-folded, into the pile. On closer examination, he saw it was an oversized playing card from something called MonstaQuest. On the card was an image so arresting that Ianto almost forgot about the tiger: it was a stylised illustration of the Brakkanee.

A quick glance up revealed that the tiger had settled back down, apparently losing any interest in the earlier movement. Ianto tentatively reached out to pick the card out of the dung.

He couldn’t see his hand.

It should have been obvious immediately. But the return of his eyesight and the distraction of the big cat made his realisation all the more shocking.

He couldn’t see any of his body, any of his clothes. Not even when he waved his hands in front of his face. Or rather, in front of where his face should be. He could still feel his limbs and torso and head, as a quick exploration with his hands now proved.

Ianto uttered a laugh of incredulity, or maybe it was hysteria. The laughing hurt his ribs.

The noise made the tiger raise its head curiously, but it did not move. No wonder it couldn’t locate him. Ianto Jones was invisible.

Toshiko sheltered in the lee of her own workstation as glass cascaded around her. She tried not to cry out, in case the dinosaur heard her.

She’d fled here as soon as the creature had materialised in the Hub. This was insane, she thought. There was no way it could have walked in. It was some kind of small sauropod, maybe a diplodocus, though the third eye suggested it was extraterrestrial. It certainly couldn’t be a fully grown Earth dinosaur, otherwise it would have filled pretty much the entire space. It was still as big as a bull, and possibly as dangerous.

But it wasn’t a carnivore. So did hiding make it more or less likely that she’d be killed? Would it notice if she made a noise? And even if it did, would it care?

The thing was stretching its long neck towards the upper-floor Hothouse. The room had been converted from the old Boardroom when they had conducted extensive repairs to the Hub, and was filled with potted plants, most of them alien in origin. Toshiko had been up there only a few minutes earlier, conducting research on the double-headed plant sample she had picked up at the mall. The room’s bright illumination must have attracted the hungry creature to the tempting greenery within, and that’s why it was straining to reach up to it.

An angry shriek echoed around the cavernous room, echoing off the tiled walls. Torchwood’s own resident dinosaur was a pteranodon. Jack and Ianto had captured it some years previously, and allowed it free access to the Hub. Toshiko always worried that the pteranodon might be territorial, and had speculated on the risks of having their workstations covered in dinosaur droppings. Jack seemed unusually well informed about the territorial habits of a creature that hadn’t existed on Earth for over seventy million years, but the pteranodon was house-trained, had never yet attacked a Torchwood employee, and didn’t bring home any of the local sheep that it occasionally ate on night hunting trips. Nevertheless, the pteranodon was clearly very annoyed to find a rival in the Hub. It perched on the walkway outside the Hothouse, pecking at the top of the other dinosaur’s head and screeching with rage.

The sauropod flicked its tail casually and cleared Gwen’s desk. A flat-screen monitor cracked and split as it tumbled to the floor. Toshiko felt her own desk shiver with the impact. She let out a little yelp as its contents scattered onto her head – pens, her plush toy tiger, a mouse dangling on its cord, a couple of bon-bons from the jar that Gwen had bought her. She caught the photo of her parents, before it smashed on the metal walkway, and placed it safe and flat on the floor.

The sauropod shuffled sideways to fend off the pteranodon’s enraged attack. Around its feet, sprouting through the metal grille of the floor, was a fresh growth of alien flowers. Half a dozen of them, yellow double-headed blooms. Toshiko had brought only one sample back, and that was now in a Torchwood evidence bag on her battered desk. There were no other samples like it in the Hothouse – she’d checked that earlier.

These new blooms had arrived with the dinosaur. But how had the dinosaur arrived, just materialising out of thin air?

The pteranodon screeched again. Toshiko craned her neck to look up, and saw it stretch its wings wide. She shivered. It reminded her of the monstrous thing that had attacked her at the mall.

Ah, the monstrous thing that had disappeared into thin air in front of Gwen. It had reappeared in the security room – where she’d found the double-headed alien buds.

Could the bat-creature have been transmitted through the CCTV signal? And could this dinosaur have been sent to the Hub through Gwen’s PDA?

Toshiko levered herself up from behind her workstation, and clattered her fingers across the keys of her terminal, oblivious to the noise, no longer caring whether the sauropod heard her. With a few further deft keystrokes, she had closed down all the CCTV monitoring in the Hub. The dinosaur wasn’t going to get transmitted accidentally to one of her unsuspecting colleagues.