Peter Anghelides - Another Life

‘Jack!’ Owen adopted a tone of breezy familiarity. Better to try and blag it at this stage. ‘How are you getting on?’

‘I’m wiping you off the scoreboard buddy,’ Jack replied. ‘All those high scores you had? Not any more!’ He hefted a plastic gun, designed like an old-style revolver and attached by a stout cable to the base of the arcade game. On the display screen, a phalanx of the slavering undead menaced a cowering crowd of hospital patients and nurses. ‘Tosh told me about her 3D game technology. But you know, I’m kinda traditional about these things. Prefer the classic look. Retro.’

You’re telling me, thought Owen as he studied Jack’s collarless shirt and braces.

‘I thought I’d try it left-handed today,’ continued Jack nonchalantly, ‘to give you a chance.’ He loosed off a brisk string of shots. The machine pinged in approval as the zombies exploded into dusty pixels on the screen. Jack gave another great whoop of celebration. ‘Oh yeah! See that?’ He pulled Owen closer to the machine and tapped the screen with his finger. ‘That means I get an extra life. But…’ He affected to look forlorn. ‘… I can’t stay here all day. OK, you take it from here.’ He tossed the gun in a short arc through the air so that Owen could catch it. Owen decided he wasn’t going to be fazed by this challenge, and took up position in front of Zombie Death .

Jack stopped at the door on his way out, and considered Owen’s posture. ‘Have you done something to your tits?’

Owen couldn’t stop himself touching his chest self-consciously. ‘No. I switched the game off.’

‘Well, you gotta start working harder on those pecs, buddy. I can recommend a good gym. Is the Wildman autopsy done?’

Owen tried not to let his ‘Oh, shit!’ feeling show on his face. He still had to complete that, because he’d got sidetracked by Second Reality . ‘Sure, I’ll finish up shortly,’ he lied. While Owen was looking at Jack, in the Zombie Death game his character was dragged to the ground by the attacking monsters and devoured.

Jack laughed. ‘Bring the results to the Boardroom in an hour.’ He turned his back on Owen as he left the area. ‘Or sooner if you run out of lives.’

The walk in from Riverside normally took less than half an hour. But today, there were repeated delays. The night-time thunderstorm had not eased off so, after kissing Rhys goodbye over his cornflakes, Gwen grabbed a taxi outside their flat in the hope of staying dry. A two-mile walk turned into a five-mile drive, but she was held up as even the normally light Sunday morning traffic ground to a halt along the drenched Penarth Road. Finally, she stood for a few moments on the paving stone by the stainless-steel water tower, waiting to descend into the Hub. Through the rain, she studied the armadillo shape of the Millennium Centre. ‘ Creu Gwir fel gwydr offwrnais awen ,’ the text read. ‘Creating truth like glass from the furnace of inspiration.’ It always amused her to read these words while she was concealed in the deceptive invisibility of the paving stone that led into the even more secret underground facility of the Torchwood Hub.

Jack waved away her apologies for lateness as she entered the Boardroom, and then indicated her seat. Toshiko returned to studying her laptop, where she was making notes in one window, studying some calculations in another, and displaying live video feeds in two more.

Owen stared at Gwen from where he stood at the plasma screen, bristling with ill-concealed irritation at having his presentation interrupted.

‘Death rejoices,’ Jack said. ‘Why was he so happy about it?’

‘I don’t understand,’ Gwen said.

‘It’s what you see in some mortuaries,’ Owen told her. ‘ Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae .’ The Latin words sounded strange in his London accent. ‘It means “This is the place where death rejoices to teach those who live.” You know, to cheer them up that they’re cutting into dead people.’

‘Only this guy…’ Jack’s casual gesture encompassed several images of the dead Wildman before them. ‘… he didn’t look worried about dying at all, last I saw of him.’

‘He changed his mind about that, after the first fifty feet,’ observed Owen.

Gwen frowned at this. ‘Well, who really wants to die, eh? Like that programme about smoking last night on Channel 4, eh Tosh?’

Toshiko didn’t look up from her laptop computer. ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t watch TV.’

‘No TV at night?’ Gwen affected astonishment. ‘God, I don’t know what me and Rhys would do without watching telly.’

‘Talk to each other, maybe,’ suggested Toshiko.

Owen coughed. ‘Shall I start this all over again, then?’ He was asking Gwen, rather than Jack. Jack was just smiling, amused by Owen’s reaction.

‘I’ll catch up,’ Gwen reassured him. Owen was looking pretty rough this morning. She’d seen him roll into the Hub before, looking like he’d slept in his clothes, lost his razor, and come straight in without changing. But this morning the circles under his eyes were almost as dark as the stubble on his chin. At least he looked a bit better than Wildman’s corpse in the autopsy pictures.

It was only a few months now since Gwen had seen her first autopsy. She’d never had reason to attend one as a police officer, and she’d always dreaded the day that she’d have to. She’d heard the stories of strapping lads from her station who’d collapsed onto the scrubbed mortuary floor on first witnessing the clinical dissection of a dead body. Lads like Jimmy Mitchell, throwing up their canteen lunch. So her first autopsy had been here at the Hub, when she’d watched Owen dissect a woman of sixty-five who’d managed to get on the wrong side of a Weevil.

Owen had delighted in making Gwen help him, testing the new girl, trying to make her collapse or weep or throw up or just run from the mortuary. She’d determinedly refused to give him that pleasure. She’d approached the whole thing with the detachment she brought to bear when examining a scene of crime. Observing the hanging scale for weighing removed organs, with a round clock-face marked off in kilos and a stainless-steel pan underneath — that was like the one she weighed her fruit in at Tesco. A Bunsen burner on a counter was the same as she’d used at school. The severed grey remains of brain, heart, bowels in jars around the room were harder to dismiss. OK, they were like the specimens in GCSE Biology. She had survived the ordeal and been pleased by her own calmness and by Owen’s obvious disappointment.

That night, back home, when the normality of the sofa and the chicken chow mein and EastEnders on the telly had calmed her, she’d suddenly remembered the old woman’s pale grey eyes, revealed when Owen had casually peeled back the lids. And to Rhys’s surprise, Gwen had rushed to their bathroom and vomited so hard and so long that she’d ended up dry-retching, nothing left to spew into the toilet bowl.

That was then. Now, she was hardened to it. Or was she simply harder?

‘I used that Bekaran deep-tissue scanner for some of these,’ Owen was explaining, ‘so I could get some initial snaps without any invasive procedures.’ The images were displayed on the wall screen, bright red and cream images of flesh and blood and bone. ‘Amazing, innit? It’s like it peels away the outer layers, or makes them invisible, or something.’

Toshiko looked up idly from her laptop screen. ‘So why bother with the autopsy, then? Even without that, you’ve got MRI scans, ultrasound, nuclear medicine, molecular testing… It’s not hard to work out how he died, is it? His head hit the pavement at thirty miles an hour. Case closed.’