Andy Lane - Slow Decay

Eventually, of course, he went back. Where else was there to go?

The Hub, unusually, was empty. Owen kept walking, towards the Autopsy Room.

Ianto was standing outside. He was peering nervously around the edge of the doorway.

‘Where is everyone?’ Owen asked.

‘Gwen has gone to be with her boyfriend,’ Ianto replied. ‘Jack has said that if she can persuade him to take the “Stop” pill then he’s happy to let it go. Jack and Tosh are out looking for Doctor Scotus, and I’ve been spending my time either here or the cells.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Watching the creature Jack calls Paul develop and looking after Lucy Sobel. The things you should have been doing.’

Owen felt like hitting Ianto square in the face. ‘What’s up?’ he asked instead. ‘Why are you skulking out here?’

‘Ah — we had a slight problem with Paul,’ Ianto said, edgily. ‘I think I may have had the nutrient solution pumping in too fast. It seems to have absorbed too much too fast.’

Owen pushed him out of the way and glanced into the room.

The Autopsy Room was much as he had left it, except that the glass jar that he had put Paul in was lying on its side, smashed into large fragments.

Paul was on the autopsy table. It wasn’t a worm any more. It was about the size of a rat, but consisted of a long black body, sharpening to a vicious point at both ends, striped with electric blue. Two gauzy, gossamer fans which had emerged from the central body were thrumming the air.

‘Fuck me,’ Owen said. ‘It’s Paul McCartney, with wings!’

The SUV drifted like a polished black ghost through the streets of Cardiff, reflecting the cars and buildings that it passed. Every now and then, Jack would take it past the half-silvered glass of an office block, and Toshiko would look out of the window to see a corridor of multiplied images extending to infinity, mirrors reflecting mirrors.

What with that, Jack’s driving and the device she was holding, Toshiko was beginning to wish she hadn’t come up with her Big Idea.

‘How are you feeling?’ Jack yelled back.

‘Irritated,’ she called over the engine hum. ‘And tired. And exhilarated. And bored.’

‘But not hungry?’

‘No more than usual.’

She shifted the map from her lap and raised the alien device slightly to aim it more squarely out of the window. It was the one they had found in the nightclub. It seemed like weeks ago that she had turned over Craig Sutherland’s body to see it lying there, but it was actually only four or five days. Things had moved so fast.

A pang of suppressed sexual longing ran through her, making her feel as if her heart was about to burst, then it was gone, leaving her shuddering and empty. She moaned.

‘OK?’

‘It’s… difficult. So many emotions.’

‘I know. We have to keep going, Tosh.’

‘Yes. We do.’

Toshiko had set the device up as best she could to amplify distant traces of emotion and reflect them back to her. The problem was, driving round the city left her at the mercy of a thousand different feelings. Emotions were what differentiated humans from animals, that’s what they said, but Toshiko was finding herself swamped by an animalistic mass of basic drives and fears. For a person who valued logic and order above all things, it was terrifying. Or was she just picking up on someone else’s terror, somewhere close by?

The car drove past another anonymous office block, and she felt a wave of crashing tedium sweep over her. Why was she even doing this? It was as boring as chewing sand.

She was just about to throw the device out of the window and curl into a ball on her seat when Jack took a corner, and the boredom was replaced with edginess. She glanced at the back of Jack’s head, sure that he had turned to check her out while she wasn’t looking. He hated the fact that she was technologically cleverer than he was. He only kept his position as leader by destroying those who could replace him. He’d done it to Suzie, and he was going to do it to her if she didn’t kill him first.

Her hand curled around the butt of the automatic pistol that she kept beside her. One quick shot to the back of the neck and she could take control of Torchwood.

She raised the pistol and took aim at Jack.

Gwen looked across at Rhys. They were standing on the edge of Cardiff Bay, on a small beach of grey and black pebbles, looking out across the water. Gulls bobbed nearby, hoping for a crust of bread or a fragment from a burger bun. She knew she should be at Torchwood, helping to track Doctor Scotus down, but she needed to make sure that Rhys was safe.

What was the point in saving the world if you weren’t allowed to save the ones you loved?

There was almost no sign that Rhys’s cheek had been almost torn off, just days before. The skin was pinker, less weathered than the rest of his face, but it wasn’t like he was the kind of guy who spent his life halfway up the Amazon or halfway across the Gobi, and consequently had a face weathered to buggery. A couple of days of sun and wind and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between one side and the other.

‘Look, I’m having trouble grasping this,’ he said. ‘That tablet — you’re saying it was contaminated ?’

‘I checked with the Department of Health,’ she said smoothly. ‘They’re worried that the tablets might be adulterated with something. It’s a bit like that scare a few years back about the Chinese herbal remedies, when they discovered that in high doses they could cause liver failure, but because they are classified as a herbal supplement rather than a drug people are still allowed to sell them. Same story here.’

‘Why is it,’ Rhys asked, ‘that we have a Department of Health but a Department for Transport, a Ministry of Defence and a Home Office . There’s no consistency there at all.’

‘Rhys — focus!’

‘Yeah, sorry.’ He thought for a moment, and his face crumpled into a worried grimace. ‘The thing is, they worked! I’ve lost a good stone and a half since I took the first tablet.’

‘And you look great,’ she said, reassuringly. And it was true. Rhys hadn’t looked as slim for as long as she had known him. His stomach was flat, his arms and thighs were taut and his arse… that was just fantastic. Part of Gwen wished she could get that effect as quickly, but she wouldn’t pay the price that Lucy or Marianne had. No, it was back to running through darkened hospital corridors and alleyways for her.

‘And you reckon this is why Lucy had such a bad reaction?’

‘Psychotic episode brought on by whatever complex biochemical stuff was in the pill. Apparently they’ve had complaints from all over South Wales.’

‘Hasn’t hit the news,’ he said, puzzled.

‘BBC Wales have been doing an undercover investigation. Apparently they’re going to blow the lid off it in a new documentary in a month or so.’

‘Oh.’ He seemed strangely impressed at the mention of BBC Wales, as though it lent the story some extra credibility. ‘OK, I understand about the pills, and I understand about Lucy. What I don’t understand is, if the pills are potentially so dangerous, why do you want me to take the second one?’

Owen stared at the squat, black shape and goggled.

The tentacular arms seemed to have melded together, forming a long, thin body, and then the whole thing had grown two pairs of diaphanous wings, each one a third of the way along the body, that looked like they were beating at several hundred beats per second. The thing was both radially and bilaterally symmetrical, with the body knobbly in the middle but coming to a sharp point front and back. From what he could see, there were clusters of deep-set eyes, like jewels, at both ends. With those wings it was likely to be fast, and if it could go in both directions then it was likely to be highly manoeuvrable.