Peter Anghelides - Another Life

‘Gwen and Toshiko found Owen, and brought him back. They thought he was injured, but he’s woken up and attacked Gwen. Tried to bite her in the neck. We think he’s being controlled by one of those devices inserted in his spine.’

So that’s why Megan was so placid at the end. ‘She had options,’ remembered Jack.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Sorry, Ianto. Thinking aloud. You’re right. Owen is not himself. He’s being controlled by the same thing that took Guy Wildman and Anthony Bee. Are Gwen and Tosh OK?’

‘Yes. They’re tracking him down.’

Jack could hear a muttered conversation somewhere in the background.

‘They’ve located his mobile signal in the basement. Our internal network’s still up.’

‘OK, Ianto. Our problem now is that the thing controlling Owen knows everything he knows. So it knows its way around the Hub. It won’t need the fuel cells once it works out it can harvest the materials we’ve got down there.’

Jack thought he heard Ianto say, quietly but distinctly, ‘Oh, God.’

No time for this, thought Jack. Need to make things safe. ‘Stay with me, Ianto.’ Steel in his voice now. ‘Be careful. You got it cornered. It has nowhere else to go. No more lives left.’

A cold feeling ran right through Jack. Maybe it was the flickering intensity of the lightning that transformed the falling rain around the phone booth into strings of diamond brilliance. Maybe it was just the relentlessly increasing water around him, which had now risen up his thighs. He watched it slap against the glass insides of the phone box. From the outside of the phone booth, a passer-by might mistake this for a David Blaine trick. Would the magician escape the rising water in time?

‘Hello? Are you still there, sir?’

‘Yeah, sorry Ianto. I’m coming back in. You and Tosh, concentrate on finding Owen. Have Gwen meet me at the base of the water tower with scuba gear.’

‘Scuba gear?’

‘Yeah, coupla sets. And-’

The sound of the pips interrupted him again. Jack yelled urgently but clearly over them. ‘Find Owen. You cannot let him outta the basement. Subdue him if you can. And Ianto…?’

‘Yes?’

‘Kill him if you can’t.’

‘Sir…?’ He detected a note of incredulity in Ianto’s voice.

But the line had gone dead.

You didn’t expect to be so hungry, so badly, so soon. It clutches at your stomach, and your limbs ache. You’ve seen enough junkies sweating it out in the confines of an A amp;E to recognise addiction. The tremendous high. The hedonistic rush. But the brain develops a tolerance, and it demands more and more.

You thought about this when you were Megan. Now you’ve got another doctor’s perspective on the matter and, better still, you’re a doctor who has significantly more medical familiarity with alien organisms. Through Bee and Wildman, Applegate and Tegg, you’ve learned that the craving that wrenches your guts is now more than just a biochemical process in the brain, it’s a dependency.

Your undergraduate tutor called it ‘the interaction of opportunity and vulnerability’. If she asked you now, you could make her proud by describing it as a function of the cortico-mesolimbic dopaminergic system. But nothing you said to her could convey the consuming, overpowering, blinding urge to kill and devour and satiate that animalistic need. To satisfy the yearning any way you can. And to indulge, too, the dark thrill of the chase.

Behind that is the sheer excitement of being here at all. You are starting to realise where you are, what the potential is. No wonder the others feared and hated Torchwood. With what you know now about the history of the organisation, the people who work here, the contents of the vaults, there is even more to strike terror into their hearts.

Gwen and Toshiko and Ianto are searching for you. You’ve covered your tracks well. Your mobile phone is concealed in the cells, because you know that will be standard procedure for tracking you through the building. So long as you can stave off that gnawing hunger, you can rifle the inventory in Jack’s office for technology to power or repair the ship. Maybe even Bruydac technology, who knows. The others will be too busy in the cells to stop you.

Especially since you released the Weevil.

Whenever you’ve stared into that animal’s eyes before, you’ve known that its one desire is to kill. Three weeks ago, you and Toshiko visited the cells and looked at the thing, apparently asleep on its cot in the far corner of its grubby enclosure. But when you both approached the security glass that encased it in the cell, the creature scented you both through the air holes. The nostrils twitched, and the arched, deep-set eyes flickered open in anticipation. ‘This one puts the “evil” into “Weevil”,’ Toshiko told you then.

Well, when she locates your mobile down there, she’ll have a chance to find out for herself how evil that animal really is.

The walk-in safe that dominates one side of Jack’s office is sealed. Only Jack has the key. There’s nothing of use below the hatch in the floor. There’s a kind of daring to your actions. You’d never have attempted this kind of break-in before. Such a pity that all you’ve unearthed with your new-found bravery is a heap of confidential paperwork and two bowls of fresh fruit.

It’s the fruit that sets you off again. Thinking of food. Your guts ache, and the familiar appetite reasserts itself. You slam your fist against a filing cabinet, but even the pain of that doesn’t distract from the urge to feed once more.

You stagger out of the office, reeling with the longing. It’s impossible to distract yourself with a calm medical analysis. No chance to dispassionately recall how there are modified ependymal cells in the choroids plexus, when your whole self is aching to sink your teeth into Gwen’s spine and chew and grind until you’ve breached the final barrier of the meninges to drink down the salty dregs of her cerebrospinal fluid.

In the Autopsy Room, you’re almost unable to control your drooling. Even the stained tray where you conducted Wildman’s post-mortem is setting you off. On the instrument rack you find tools — a bone saw hangs beside the duralinium enterotome, the bulb-ended scissors that you use for cutting through intestines. There’s a small box of curved flat-sided Hagedorn needles. And beside that, the hooked hammer with which you pull the calvarium from the lower portion of a severed skull. Why not take some of these with you? You can use the Stryker saw to cut through the skull, and get at the spinal fluid without the usual mess and fragments of bone in your mouth.

Convenience food. You could strike Gwen down, and then open her up like a packed lunch.

Suitably equipped, you set off for the lower levels.

Gwen didn’t like sitting alone in the Hub, not at the best of times. This was worse, sitting by a computer terminal in the Hub while Ianto and Toshiko tracked Owen through the basement. At least she could guide them while she waited for Jack to return. She watched their identification icons slide silently across the computer schematic that showed the labyrinth of interconnecting tunnels that criss-crossed the Torchwood basement.

At first, the sound of their voices over an open channel made her feel less alone. Then she decided that Owen would also be able to hear them describing their progress. When Gwen brought this up, Toshiko considered restricting the broadcast to a point-to-point message between them and the headset at the terminal where Gwen sat, but on further reflection decided that Owen was just about smart enough to hack into that if he wanted.

‘Doesn’t that apply to these icons too?’ Gwen asked. ‘If I can track you on the schematic…’