Peter Anghelides - Pack Animals

On the other hand, it wasn’t going anywhere, was it? The tail swished irritably, and flung Gwen’s workstation chair into the shallow pool at the base of the steel tower.

Toshiko tapped a couple of additional instructions into her computer, and heard the satisfying shunk sound of the Armoury door unlocking.

The dinosaur shuffled some more, denting the walkways, and kicking the Armoury door as it opened outwards. Toshiko tried to assess which way the creature would move. The gap between its legs widened.

This would be like running across a motorway, only the risk here was deadlier.

Toshiko threw herself forward, hardly daring to breathe. She practically fell into the Armoury. When she started to breathe again, she took in ragged lungfuls of air.

The Armoury rattled around her as the sauropod leaned heavily against the frame of the room. Toshiko stared at the racks, frantically trying to remember where the weapon was. For a dreadful moment, she wondered whether it had been removed by one of the others.

No, there it was: the Jamolean lance. She wrenched at it, catching her fingernails against the rack. The power pack had not depleted, she noted thankfully.

The Armoury clattered and shook once more. The pteranodon’s defiant shriek echoed in Toshiko’s ears. The sauropod’s flank pressed against the gap where the door had been, and the whole frame began to buckle under the pressure.

Toshiko pressed the barrel of the weapon against the tough flesh of the dinosaur’s hide, and pulled the trigger.

She could feel the heat from the energy weapon as it discharged into the creature’s side. A protesting bellow of shock and pain roared around the Hub. She pressed herself back into the Armoury, sheltering as best she could behind the racks that held the alien arsenal, praying silently that the backwash of heat from the fired weapon would not detonate any of the others. In only a few seconds, the whole room had become as hot as a dry sauna.

The exothermic reaction started by the Jamolean lance seared and burned around the Hub, until the sauropod collapsed into a smouldering heap. Toshiko stayed back for several minutes until the effect was completed. When she felt brave enough to venture out, the pteranodon was pecking at the shrivelled, charred remains. Toshiko was sure she could see a glint of Cretaceous amusement in those reptile eyes.

The whole Hub smelled of heat and charred flesh. Toshiko slumped into her workstation chair, and wiped the back of her hand across her perspiring forehead. She started to bring the CCTV back online, and smiled at the thought that her vanquishing of the creature had not been caught on camera. As she worked, she began to think what else might connect the creatures she’d seen – the bat-thing, this pseudo-diplodocus, even the Weevils… and then she had it.

It was that catalogue device they’d stored away some three months ago. After some thought, Ianto had named it the Vandrogonite Visualiser, though Jack had quibbled that just because it was found in the possession of a Vandrogon that didn’t mean the race had manufactured it.

Toshiko decided that it was time to get the Visualiser from the Vaults.

The front wheels of the chair jarred against the ambulance door for the third time, and Jack gasped in pain. ‘Sorry,’ said Owen, who was steering. ‘I’d usually ask a porter to do this.’

‘I’m honoured,’ winced Jack, who had insisted on getting into the wheelchair in the first place. He wanted to escape the ambulance before it left the zoo.

Owen warned him that the foot was ‘hanging by a thread’. Except that he used medical terms that sounded like tendons or subcutaneous exposure or something. Didn’t matter, thought Jack. Whatever it was called officially, it hurt like hell. And yet he had literally hopped into the seat of the chair, and urged them both out of the ambulance and onto the tarmac of the zoo’s main thoroughfare, in the face of Owen’s objections.

The paramedics protested, too. The dumpy one, Brenda, had waved her credentials at Owen. Barry, the quietly spoken guy with the face like a disappointed horse, hovered morosely in the background, clearly reluctant to intervene beyond a token objection. Owen mentioned the word ‘Torchwood’, but Jack thought it was probably the sight of his holstered SIG P228 semi-automatic that persuaded them to stop hassling him. Owen casually exploited their discomfort by commandeering their ambulance. He strongly implied that the dead body constituted a biohazard, but that he and Jack were at liberty to leave – Jack lost track of the clinical jargon that Owen tossed at the cowed paramedics. As a triumphant conclusion, he told them to confirm it with Control back at Cardiff General.

Bumptious Brenda and by-the-book Barry seized on this like drowning swimmers grasping a lifebelt. Which in turn gave Owen the opportunity to reroute their radio call to the Hub. Toshiko swiftly substantiated everything that Owen had said. Verbatim, in fact, because he stood behind them and fed it directly to her from his PDA.

‘What are we gonna do about getting back to the General?’ Brenda bleated at Owen, once her call had finished.

Owen waved airily, a gesture that encompassed not only the other injured zoo visitors being treated at the scene, but also a couple of other ambulances that had parked nearby. ‘Plenty of other people to assess here. After that, get a lift from another crew.’

Barry shrugged. Brenda was opening her mouth for a fresh remonstration when a shout from a paramedic took her over to another victim. There were two stretchers. On one, a grey-faced, white-haired woman was receiving oxygen. The second stretcher’s occupant was overlaid with a stitched red blanket, but the corpse’s arm had slipped from beneath it. The arm dangled free for a moment, uncovered. From the gnarled finger joints, Jack could see that Walter and his wife had finally been parted.

Owen got the collapsible chair down from the rear of the ambulance, and wheeled Jack away from prying eyes. They ended up in a secluded area to the side of the reptile house, far from the milling crowd of rubberneckers and emergency staff, and Jack was able to call back to the Hub.

‘Tosh, what have we got on Achenbrite? If you can hack into the zoo’s CCTV, you might get some visuals on them.’

‘On the whole, I’d rather not,’ said Toshiko’s voice in his ear. ‘And you know that “CC” means “closed circuit”. They’re not on an accessible network. You might as well ask me to hack the contents of one of their filing cabinets.’

Jack pondered this. ‘Those Achenbrite guys had a logo on their overalls. Crossed keys. Like the Papacy, but without the crown.’

‘I’ve set off a search now.’

Jack grinned. ‘Brilliant, as always. And Tosh – great job convincing the ambulance crew on that call they made.’

He could hear in her voice that she was smiling too. ‘Think of me as the fourth emergency service.’

‘I rely on you in a crisis, you know that.’ Jack could hear something else in her voice too. ‘Are you OK? Sounds like you’re gasping for breath.’

‘It’s been a busy morning for me.’

‘Unless,’ Jack suggested, ‘this is one of those dirty phone calls?’

‘That’s not the kind of emergency service I had in mind,’ tutted Toshiko, and Jack could picture her disapproving frown. ‘I thought I’d move some of the furniture around. You won’t recognise the place… Here you go.’

There was a computer bleep as her search results arrived. Jack shaded the display monitor on his wrist monitor with a cupped hand, and squinted at the miniature image.

In comparison with their surroundings, even on this reduced scale, the familiar grey-suited figures were brutally large. The video surveillance images showed that they were corralling a barking pack of dogs around a block of low, flat buildings. ‘You’re showing me a rerun of Animal Rescue ?’ Jack said.