Peter Anghelides - Another Life

‘Wait and see,’ Owen admonished her.

He ran through the images on the display. Many of the pictures showed Wildman’s corpse with its arms spread, skin flayed back, the chest exposed and the abdomen open. The traditional Y-shaped incision had been made from shoulders to mid-chest and on down to the pubic region. Wildman’s head had struck the bus, and then he had landed on his front. His face was smashed into an unrecognisable pulp, even after it had been cleaned up. Owen explained that he’d considered removing the brain through the big hole in the front of the skull, rather than the more conventional second incision across the head just below and behind the ears. ‘He’s not gonna end up in an open casket, that’s for damned sure,’ agreed Jack.

There were more pictures. Owen had cut the cartilages to separate the ribs from the breastbone. ‘They were smashed up on landing,’ he explained, ‘and when I entered the abdominal cavity you could see that the large intestine had been lacerated by a penetrating injury sustained on impact. So freeing up the intestine took some time. Nothing of great interest for most of the organs. No bacteria in the blood. No interesting results from the bile and urine analysis. Non-smoker, slightly enlarged liver suggests he enjoyed a drink. No indication of drug use, prescription medicines or poisons.’

Jack drummed on the table. ‘You’re saving up the best bits for last, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ said Owen with relish. He put up some new images. ‘Examination of the oesophagus, stomach, pancreas, duodenum, and spleen. Non-human elements there…’

‘That creature that he threw up at Jack,’ interrupted Gwen.

‘Genius,’ said Owen laconically, and continued as if nothing had been said. ‘There’s also an alien device inserted in his spine. Attached to the spinal column, actually, quite near the top. And here it is.’

He produced the thing with a flourish. It was spherical, about the size of a large marble, but with a dull chrome finish. There were three short spiked attachments to one side of it, which Gwen assumed were how it had been fixed in place. Toshiko took it from Owen, and placed it into a small black container about the size of a box of matches. She that to her laptop, and started to scan its contents. ‘Is that round thing what killed Wildman, then?’

Owen rolled his eyes. ‘He died of concrete poisoning. What do you think killed him?’ To make his point, he flashed back to a SOC picture that showed the mangled remains of Wildman, sprawled in the street. ‘Technically, you know, we’d call that a depressed skull fracture and cerebral bleeding.’

‘What about that stuff you were saying yesterday about the spinal fluid?’

Owen flicked back to his notes. ‘Confirmed what you thought, Jack. The blood and skull fragments and brain fluid were from three different DNA sources, including that smelly bag of shit we found yesterday.’

Gwen stiffened in her chair, and felt her face flush with anger again. ‘That bag of shit was a person.’

‘Not any more,’ Owen replied.

‘All right,’ interrupted Jack. ‘Good work on the autopsies, Owen. Tosh, what have you got?’

Toshiko smiled. ‘Search results are coming through.’ She touched her keyboard and her screen replaced Owen’s on the huge plasma display on the wall.

Owen sat down and stared at the screen with envious eyes. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘She gets the jobs that take her a couple of minutes and then this whizz-bang technology does the grunt work for her while she sits back and does her nails. Why do I get all the jobs that mean spending two hours up to me elbows in someone else’s cold dead guts?’

Toshiko patted his arm on the table to make him shut up. ‘It’ll take a while, because it has to do a content search on multimedia databases around the UK. Oh, and Jack, I had no luck with that search you asked about yesterday. No UK hospital examinations or autopsies contain info about binary vascular system. Negative for overseas hospitals too. I did the last three years, like you suggested. Shall I extend to five?’

Jack shook his head. ‘Never mind. Stay focused on the current problem.’ But Gwen could see Jack was trying to hide his disappointment. That wasn’t like him, he preferred to encourage and support his team. ‘What else have you got?’

‘I checked out the security reports from the place Wildman worked, the Blaidd Drwg nuclear facility. Do you think it’s too much of a coincidence that a number of their new, experimental nuclear power packs have gone missing?’

Jack’s eyes widened. ‘Didn’t see that on the evening news.’

‘Well, it’s not something they’ve made public, obviously,’ admitted Toshiko. ‘I wonder what…’

Her voiced trailed off as an extraordinary figure entered the room. The inflated white suit and cumbersome cylindrical helmet made it difficult for him to get through the doorframe. When he managed this small feat, he waddled across the meeting room towards them. Gwen could hear his breath hissing through a speaker to one side of the helmet. It took her a moment to see through the visor that it was Ianto.

‘It’s the Michelin Man!’ laughed Owen.

Jack seemed unsurprised by the new arrival. ‘The cut of that suit does nothing for you. It doesn’t even look comfortable.’

‘It’s comfortably protecting my testicles,’ responded Ianto’s voice from the speaker.

Jack considered this unexpected news. ‘I could talk to you about your testicles all day, Ianto,’ he said. ‘But I imagine you have something even more important to tell us.’

The helmet speaker coughed apologetically. Ianto brandished a Geiger counter at them. It was already clicking alarmingly. Gwen wondered fleetingly about where she could go to escape the radiation. But what was the source?

‘I took the liberty of scanning the corpses in the mortuary,’ Ianto began. ‘And I regret to say that one of them is highly radioactive.’

‘OK,’ said Jack calmly. ‘Not too much of a coincidence after all, Tosh.’

Ianto was quickly scanning them each in turn. The ratcheting sound of the Geiger counter didn’t increase when it ran over Jack or Toshiko. It stayed the same when Ianto motioned it against Gwen, too, and she released a rush of air from her lungs that she hadn’t consciously been holding. She stepped out of the way to let Ianto waddle further into the room alongside the table.

The Geiger counter crackled and spat violently when Ianto placed it against Owen. From the look on his face, Owen wasn’t entirely surprised. ‘Up to me elbows in the corpse,’ he shrugged. ‘For two hours. What did you expect?’

‘The rest of you are within safe limits,’ Ianto confirmed.

Gwen was faintly ashamed to discover that she’d unconsciously positioned herself at the end of the table, as far away from Owen as possible. Toshiko bumped up close to her, she noticed. Owen glared at them accusingly from the other side of the room. But where had Jack gone?

Ianto was still explaining. ‘I’m afraid that Owen’s close proximity to the irradiated cadaver means that he will need decontaminating.’

Jack reappeared through the door. He carried a wooden box, teak with brass hinges and an elaborate clasp. He placed it on the table, unfastened the clasp, and from the velvet-lined interior of the box withdrew what looked like a squat loofah.

Owen eyed this novel new item. ‘If you think I’m going to scrub it all off with that…’

Jack held out the loofah, and waggled it at Owen until he took it from him. ‘This will soak up six types of radiation.’

‘Six?’ Owen looked impressed. ‘I can only remember three types.’

‘Well, I got a deal on that thing,’ Jack explained.