Andy Lane - Slow Decay

‘Oh hell,’ he said. ‘I need a bog, and I need it fast!’

As Owen edged into the Autopsy Room, the creature stirred, flexing its body and raising both ends up from the table. Owen could hear a sound coming from it, a rustling sound, like someone wading through dry grass.

‘Nice Paul,’ he said. ‘I really liked “Magneto and Titanium Man”. Classic track, in my opinion.’

He eased himself into the room. The creature moved to track him with its tiny eyes. Owen assumed it was tracking his body heat, seeing him in the infra-red.

Owen moved to the right, leaving enough space for Ianto to slip into the room and move to the left. They separated, each one moving in a different direction around the gallery that encircled the walls. The creature wasn’t sure which one of them to go for, moving its ‘head’ uncertainly from one to the other and back again.

‘“Band on the Run” was great as well,’ Owen went on, trying to distract the creature with sound as well as movement. He didn’t know whether it could hear him or not — maybe it could track vibrations as well as heat. Worth a go, at any rate. ‘Although I never understood that line about the rain exploding with a mighty crash as they fell into the sun. What’s that all about then?’

He and Ianto were about ninety degrees apart now, and the creature was still uncertain which of them to concentrate on. Perfect. From behind his back Owen pulled out the alien device that Toshiko had found in the Archive, the one that looked like a pumped-up clover leaf with a stalk hanging down, the one she said projected small electrical shocks along an ionised path, like a low-power ray gun. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘get ready to-’

With a sickening lurch in the pit of his stomach, Owen suddenly realised that he and Ianto had kept on moving past the ninety-degree point and were now almost in a straight line with the autopsy table in the middle. That would have been fine if the creature had had just the one head and had to still keep looking at both of them, but Paul effectively had two heads, one at each end. And with both Owen and Ianto now safely under observation, it attacked, flinging itself off the table and propelling itself through the air at fantastic speed using its insectile wings.

At Ianto.

‘Get down!’ Owen yelled. Ianto dropped out of sight behind the railing on the gallery. The creature hit the brick wall, embedding itself an inch into the mortar, then flexing its body back and forth and using its wings to pull itself out. It hovered in mid-air for a moment, looking around for sources of heat. And it found Owen. One moment it was there, the next it was a blur, heading for his chest.

Owen brought the alien device up and pulled what Toshiko had confidently told him was the trigger. It shuddered in his grip, and the air between him and the living missile was filled with light. The creature bucked, losing its aerodynamic form and suddenly becoming something more like a boomerang. It spun crazily through the air before bouncing off the wall next to Owen’s head and falling to the gallery, stunned. Or dead. Owen didn’t much care which.

‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to just gas it?’ Ianto asked.

Owen gestured towards the doorway. ‘No door,’ he said, breathless. ‘Whoever designed this place didn’t count on anything in the Autopsy Room wanting to get out again, which just goes to show how little they knew about Torchwood.’

Jack and Toshiko came breezing into the Hub at the same time as Gwen. Well, actually, as far as Gwen could see, Jack was breezing and Toshiko was more like a slight waft of air.

‘Tosh — are you OK?’ she asked.

Toshiko offered up a wan smile. ‘I’ve been better,’ she said.

Jack took the spiral metal stairs up to the Boardroom three at a time. ‘Everyone get together,’ he said. ‘We’re going to go for the big finale.’

Gwen and Toshiko exchanged glances before following him up the stairs and past the large portholes — former pipes that had been sealed off — that looked out into the murky waters of the bay. Small fish were playing around in the crevices in the brickwork.

Owen and Ianto arrived from the medical area, having presumably heard the commotion. Owen was carrying something under a blanket.

‘Coffee?’ Ianto asked as they all congregated in the Boardroom and sat down around the conference table.

‘You’re going to need it,’ Jack said. ‘We’ve got a packed programme ahead of us.’ As Ianto fiddled with the machine outside the door, Jack took up a position in front of the wide window that looked down into the Hub, legs apart and hands on hips. ‘Right, let’s clear up some loose ends. Gwen — what’s the story with Rhys and George Harrison?’

‘Rhys has taken the second pill, and he’s flushed the disintegrating remnants of George down the toilet in the noisiest and most unpleasant way possible. But he’s clear. Thanks.’

‘No problem. Ianto, where are we with young Lucy and John Lennon?’

Ianto glanced in from the platform outside. ‘Miss Sobel is still confined in the cells. Having learned our lesson from the unfortunate Miss Till, we’ve made sure her arms and legs are firmly pinioned and she has a metal gag in her mouth — a scold’s bridle, I think it’s called. And we’re pumping a vaporised form of anaesthetic into the cell to keep her sedated.’

‘Yeah, and who’s idea was that?’ Owen snapped. ‘I thought I was the doctor around here?’

‘You went AWOL,’ Jack said calmly, ‘so we had to improvise.’ He turned back to Ianto. ‘I think we’re safe to feed her the second pill now. Put it in her food or something. Owen can clear the cell out when she’s finished clearing John Lennon out of her system.’

‘Thanks a bunch,’ Owen muttered.

‘Hey, don’t complain. You left us in a mess, so I’m leaving you with a mess. What goes around, comes around.’ Jack glanced around the faces at the table. ‘OK. George and Ringo are dead, John is on the way out and Stuart never got a look in. So where’s Paul?’

Owen pulled the blanket from the object that he’d brought up with him. It was an old-fashioned bird-cage made of metal rods, flat on the bottom and curved on the top, but the thing inside wasn’t a canary. In fact, Gwen wasn’t sure what it was. It’s body was long and thin and winged, but it looked cowed.

‘This,’ Owen announced, ‘is Paul. He’s gone solo and reinvented himself.’

‘Seriously,’ Jack said. ‘What is that thing?’

‘Seriously, it’s the next stage in the life cycle of the worms.’

‘It’s a flying egg-layer with extreme prejudice,’ Ianto added helpfully, bringing in a tray full of coffees.

‘The worm lurks in the gut, absorbing nutrients, until the host dies,’ Owen explained. ‘The worm then turns into this thing, which flies around until it can bury itself in something living — probably some kind of grazing animal, but I’m sure anything would do. We’ll call that the secondary host. This thing lays eggs, and dies. The eggs are then eaten by whatever eats the secondary host, and the cycle starts all over again.’

‘And I’m sure that on its home planet it works out perfectly,’ Jack said, ‘but here on Earth it’s trying to impose itself on a different set of hosts, and I’m not going to let that happen. And I also want to know where Doctor Scotus fits into all this, which brings us on to what Toshiko and I did this afternoon. Using that alien tech which amplifies distant emotions, we triangulated on a place on the outskirts of Cardiff where there’s a large concentration of very hungry people. Either there’s a Weight Watchers convention going on, or Doctor Scotus’s clinic is up and running somewhere else.’