Peter Anghelides - Another Life

Megan looked up at him. ‘You’re going to help me.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘It wasn’t a question. Give me the revolver, Jack. And then you’re going to escort me back to my ship, or I’ll throw these things into the street and contaminate the whole area.’

Jack peered down at her pityingly. He’d taken something out of his greatcoat pocket with his left hand. He held it up so that she could see it in the flashes of lightning. ‘Radiation sponge. It’s absorbing the stuff right now.’

Megan took a deep breath. Considered her options. Slowly raised her hands above her head. It wasn’t a gesture of surrender.

‘Then I’ll slap these things together. The explosion will spread radioactive fragments so far across this city that you won’t be able to mop it up with a thousand of those things. Ten thousand.’

‘It’ll kill you too.’

She was smiling again now. ‘I have options.’

‘And you’ll have no fuel.’

‘I’ll start again. And I’d like to tell you that I’ll see you again, Jack. Except that you won’t survive the explosion.’

Her hands moved apart.

Jack fired as she brought them together. They never met.

The shot took her above the left eyebrow. Her head jerked back, and the movement threw her hands forward. The fuel packets spun from her grip, and hit the wooden walkway with a clunk.

Megan’s upper body continued to fall back. The weight carried her over the edge. For a moment it seemed like the green netting behind her would hold her up. Until a gust of wind lifted it, and she slid off the platform and into the plastic debris chute.

A sequence of clanks and thuds slowly faded as Megan’s body bounced and rattled down the chute. It tumbled down eight storeys and crashed into the skip at street level. Jack listened for further movement, but all he could hear was the steady drumbeat of the rain outside and the rumble of thunder.

In the medical suite at the Hub, Gwen was startled to see movement in the bed. Owen’s eyes snapped open. He looked around wildly, struggling to rise from the pillow. His eyes widened as he took in his surroundings.

‘Hey, hey.’ She hurried over to the bedside to comfort him. The bedroom was calm, the silence broken only by the elevated bleeping of the monitors, and the hum of a vacuum cleaner from the corridor outside. ‘It’s OK. You probably weren’t expecting to be here when you woke up, eh?’

‘I’m in…’ He struggled with his words and thoughts, as though he was coming back to full consciousness. ‘I’m in the Torchwood Hub?’

‘Yes. Hang on, I’ll get you a fresh glass of water.’ She went over to the basin to wash and refill his glass. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Fine,’ he said from behind her. ‘So much better than I thought was possible.’

No one ever brought the Hoover up here, thought Ianto. How difficult could it be? The lift by the reception area had a stop on this floor, otherwise how would they get patients in and out. And OK, some of the layout in the Hub might be a bit idiosyncratic, based as it was on rebuilding existing underground vaults from Victorian times under the cover of the Tiger Bay redevelopment — if only the AMs in the Welsh Assembly knew why their Senedd building had really run so wildly over budget.

He’d have thought that everyone in Torchwood could agree that a medical suite should be spick and span, it was only hygienic. But it fell to Ianto, as usual, to lug the vacuum cleaner all the way up from the junk room in the basement and run it over the dusty carpets of the medical area. Not that any of them would thank him, mind. Nor was it likely that a single one of them would even notice. He might as well be invisible, for all the attention they gave him. Though that sometimes had its advantages.

He had just switched the vacuum cleaner off, in the middle of changing one of the attachments, when he heard a glass and metal crash from the nearest bedroom. Gwen’s voice cried out in alarm.

Ianto shoved the vacuum cleaner aside with his foot and charged through the door. It wasn’t locked, so he stumbled a couple of feet into the room before regaining his balance.

On the far side, by the basin, Owen was embracing Gwen. A broken glass and a scattered pile of toiletries lay on the floor at their feet. He had his arms wrapped around her from behind, and was trying to press his face into the back of her neck.

‘Oh,’ muttered Ianto, and started to back out. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise.’

Gwen twisted, and managed to elbow Owen in the side. He doubled over sideways, and his grip on her loosened.

‘Get him off me!’ Gwen yelled at Ianto.

The back of her neck was scraped. Owen had been attempting to bite her.

Owen straightened up, and weighed his options. He feinted to the right, and then leaped at Gwen again, pushing her head over the basin and into the mirror above it. The glass splintered.

Ianto took two steps towards them, and swung the long metal Hoover attachment in a low arc that connected with the small of Owen’s back. Owen whirled around, snarling. His eyes narrowed at Ianto. Focused on the Hoover attachment.

Ianto was considering delivering another blow, to Owen’s head perhaps, when Owen took the initiative and shoulder-charged him. Although Owen was a lot smaller than him, the movement took Ianto by surprise and he crashed over a drugs trolley, rolling onto the floor. By the time he had regained his feet, Owen had fled the room and slammed the door behind him.

Gwen had slid down the wall by the broken mirror. She sat there, winded and shocked, looking at the chaos of the room. Ianto went over to her. She had a cut just above her hairline that, as scalp injuries do, was bleeding heavily, but was less serious than it looked. The gnawed mark on her neck had just broken the skin too, and her clothes were bloodied. Ianto hunted around for sterile wipes and some pressure dressings.

The sheets and blankets were rumpled where Owen must have leaped up. Ianto stripped them back completely, and got Gwen to come over to the bed where he could position the bedside light and examine her wounds. Gwen winced as he wiped the blood away.

Ianto sat beside her, one hand on her forehead and the other gently against her neck. When Toshiko came into the bedroom, she saw them on the bed together and backed out immediately. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise,’ she said, and closed the door.

Two seconds later, Toshiko had obviously thought a bit more about it. The door opened again. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said, ‘where’s Owen?’

Jack waded downhill to the phone box. For a moment, he thought he might struggle to find the right change to make a call. Would anyone accept the charge at Torchwood if he called collect?

With no signal from any mobile, he needed a landline to make urgent contact with the Hub. He’d spotted the box as he crested the hill of the side road. The SUV was still visible, clear of the water that was swirling around this lower-lying road. The cold water eddied around his knees and soaked through his trousers.

Ianto eventually answered the call.

‘What kept ya?’ asked Jack. ‘OK, so the system wouldn’t have recognised this number. I’m using a payphone. And I’m practically up to my ass in water.’

‘Right,’ said Ianto. ‘The whole Bay area is flooding, too. The office is underwater.’

‘I tracked Megan Tegg down to the Levall-Mellon building,’ Jack explained. ‘Jeez, if any more people are gonna fall off there, we should start selling tickets. Oh, and I had a messy passenger in the car, Ianto. Do you know a good valet service?’

Ianto wasn’t responding to the banter as he usually did.

‘What’s wrong?’ Jack asked. The pips started to sound on the phone line. Jack cursed — that was never three inutes, there had to be a fault somewhere. He grabbed for the spare change that he’d lined up on top of the payphone. Half of it slipped through his fingers and into the water. He managed to insert one coin just in time.