by Andy Lane
The cold store was about the size of the Boardroom back in the Hub, but twice as tall. It was empty of carcasses, shelves or anything else apart from meathooks hanging from the ceiling and what looked at first glance like a series of sticks that had been thrown onto the floor and frozen to the walls and ceiling. At second glance, they weren’t sticks. Sticks didn’t have wings that had frozen into solid boards, but which were still beating slowly.
‘That’s where the things from those patients’ stomachs went,’ Owen breathed. ‘Scotus must have removed them surgically, and then put them in some kind of nutrient solution until they turned into these flying egg-laying things. God alone knows why he wanted to. I mean, if he’s that much of a psycho, he could just have killed the patients and let the worms feed off the nutrients in the dead bodies. They would have turned into the flying things naturally. I wonder why he went to all the trouble of taking them all out by hand?’
‘Maybe he wanted the patients for something else,’ Toshiko said. She turned to look at Owen. He looked back at her. Neither of them wanted to guess what Scotus wanted the patients alive for, but they just couldn’t help themselves.
‘If we assume he wants to make lots more eggs,’ Owen started. ‘I mean, a regular production line of eggs, then the best thing he could do would be—’
‘To turn the eggs he already had into worms,’ Toshiko continued, ‘then turn the worms into flying egg-layers and let them find secondary hosts, then each flying egg-layer would lay hundreds of new eggs.’
Owen’s face was bleak. ‘And as long as Scotus keeps some back, he can have a continuous production line! Oh, that’s just too sick to bear thinking about.’
A handful of the flying creatures were moving sluggishly towards the door, attracted perhaps by Toshiko and Owen’s body heat. They were using their wings to push themselves along the icy floor.
Toshiko pressed the button that closed the door. Cumbersome, unwieldy, it started to move.
And caught the first of the creatures as it pushed itself over the lip of the doorway, crushing it. The creature’s shell cracked, leaking yellow ichor, and the door started to open again.
‘Safety cut-out!’ Toshiko cried. ‘It thinks someone’s trapped their foot!’ She hit the button again, but the door kept swinging outwards. More of the creatures teetered on the lip of the door, then fell out. As the warm outside air hit them, their wings lost their rigidity, becoming flexible and diaphanous again. Toshiko could hear the wings buzzing as they beat faster and faster. Their little red eyes, so like jewels, seemed to glow in the light from the corridor as they tracked Owen and Toshiko’s movements.
One of them started to rise shakily into the air.
Jack gazed levelly at Doctor Scotus.
‘How can you tell he’s a host?’ he asked Gwen.
‘Look at his hair,’ she replied.
‘Yeah, OK, I grant that he’s got that whole “mad scientist with wild crazy hair” aesthetic going, but I see that a lot. It’s not proof.’
‘His hair is waving in the breeze, isn’t it?’
Jack looked at Scotus, who was staring at Gwen in disbelief. ‘Yeah, so?’
‘So there isn’t any breeze.’
Jack looked back at Scotus. Thin blond strands haloed the man’s head, but Gwen was right. Now that he was concentrating, he could see that the strands weren’t only waving in the absence of any breeze; they weren’t even moving in the same direction as each other.
‘What the hell…?’ he muttered.
‘Remember the worm thing that attacked us in Scotus’s office?’ Gwen moved to one side; the goon who had been standing behind her, guarding her, moved too, but so did some of the tendrils on Scotus’s head, shifting to track her motion. ‘That thing had a whole bunch of thin white tendrils at both ends of its body, didn’t it?’
‘I had other things to worry about at the time, like stopping it from throttling you, but let’s say I do remember that.’
‘Imagine those tendrils much longer. Six feet, maybe. Imagine them finding their way up his throat, out into the air. Imagine them finding their way in between the cells of his body, infiltrating themselves past arteries and veins, through muscles and into his brain, and then out through his scalp. Imagine—’
‘Thanks. I get the picture.’ A thought struck Jack. ‘Hang on – that worm thing had tendrils at both ends.’
They both glanced down to Scotus’s groin. Was it Jack’s imagination, or was there something stirring down there as well?
Jack looked up at Scotus’s face. ‘What happened?’ he asked simply.
‘I tried one of the pills,’ he said. ‘I had to. Who would buy diet pills from a fat nutritionist? I got the same cravings as the others, the same desire to eat anything, no matter what it was. I suppressed it, with powdered protein supplements at first, then using drugs. Eventually, I discovered that by taking sedatives I could cause the creature’s appetite to reduce. Its weight is stable now, but the tendrils you mention – the way it perceives the world – continued to grow. They permeate me. They have infiltrated me.’
‘Then why not take the second pill?’ Gwen asked. ‘Why not flush the thing from your system?’
‘Because the tendrils are too entwined with my brain and my nervous system,’ Scotus said simply. ‘Killing the creature would most likely kill me. That’s one reason. The other is simpler. It won’t let me.’
‘It won’t let you?’ Jack stepped forward.
The goon behind Gwen tracked Jack with her gun, but let him go. The man was too engrossed in what was going on. It was obvious from the expression on his face that he thought he’d fallen into a pit of madmen. ‘You mean, it’s controlling you?’
‘Nothing that obvious. It’s not intelligent; not as we measure intelligence, anyway. But it does have instincts, which it communicates to me. The instinct to survive is very strong.’
‘I think I’ve heard enough,’ Jack said. ‘Have you heard enough?’
‘More than enough.’
Jack reached into a pocket of his greatcoat. His hand closed around the alien device that they had found at that Cardiff nightclub what seemed like years ago now. Toshiko had already set it up so that it would pick up local emotional reactions and amplify them further away. All he had to do was to press a couple of buttons to activate it. His fingers found them quickly.
He nodded to Gwen. She bent and quickly pulled the shroud off the bird-cage before the goon could stop her.
The winged alien creature in the cage shifted, confused by the sudden flood of infra-red signals.
‘Jesus!’ the goon said, and stepped backwards, raising the gun and aiming it at the cage.
One of the other alien devices that Toshiko had determined was part of a matching set was wired to the cage, shoved in through the little flap through which the creature had originally been shoved. It transmitted electrical charges along a plasma path generated by a low-power laser beam. It was aimed directly at the creature, which didn’t have any room to squeeze out of the way.
Before the goon could stop her, Gwen pressed the button that activated it.
A lambent orange glow filled the cage, and the creature suddenly bucked as a charge of electricity went through its body for the second time that day.
The pain it felt was picked up by the original alien device and amplified all around. Scotus doubled over in agony, throwing up on his desk; Gwen collapsed, eyes rolling up in her head; and the goon just keeled over. Gwen’s gun fell from his fingers.
Jack fought against it. Pain and he were old friends. He could keep going through agony that would fry the nerves of any other human.
While the effect lasted, Jack walked slowly through the pain like a man walking underwater, collecting all the weapons and dumping the goon’s body next to that of Doctor Scotus, fastening both of them to the canning machinery with some flexible metal restraints that he’d brought with him from the Hub. Then he turned both alien devices off.
Gwen recovered fi
rst. He’d expected that. She had more force of will than almost anyone he’d ever known.
Owen pulled Toshiko to her feet.
‘What was that?’ she asked.
‘That was Jack’s plan working,’ Owen said grimly.
‘It was as if someone was drilling out all my teeth at the same time.’
‘Let’s hope it bought Jack the time he wanted.’ Owen looked around at the winged creatures that had spilled out of the cold store. The pain felt by their brother had obviously hit them hard, but they were beginning to recover. ‘Quick, let’s get out of here.’
He half-dragged Toshiko through the door and into the room beyond, pulling the door shut behind him. He didn’t have much time to take in the sight of all the canning machinery, and the two men fastened to it. Jack was standing in the centre of the room, propping Gwen up. He smiled at Owen and Toshiko as they arrived.
‘Are we having fun yet?’ he asked.
‘There’s something you should know—’ Owen started.
‘There’s many things I should know, including how to mix the perfect hyper-vodka and how to recover from its effects. What’s this one?’
‘There’s about thirty of those winged things loose outside, and a hospital ward with about the same number of sedated patients,’ Owen said rapidly. ‘The winged things are going to head right for them, plunge themselves right in and lay their eggs. The eggs we can deal with – I recommend a flamethrower and then some acid on the ashes – but that leaves us with thirty-odd dead people, and I’m not comfortable with that.’
Jack raised his eyebrows. ‘I can’t leave you alone for a moment, can I?’
‘I reckon we have about three minutes before it’s too late.’
Jack’s gaze flicked left and right as he considered his options. ‘Bullet’s will take out those flying things, won’t they?’
‘Yeah, but there’s a swarm of them. You’d never get them all before they get you. Remember, they’re attracted by body heat.’
‘Yeah, I remember.’ A grin burst across Jack’s face. ‘Did I see a fire extinguisher out in the corridor?’
Owen shrugged.
‘Yes, you did,’ Toshiko answered.
‘Carbon dioxide or foam?’
Toshiko thought for a moment. ‘Judging by the colour coding, carbon dioxide.’
‘Perfect. Can someone get it for me without getting hit by one of those things?’
Gwen, Owen and Toshiko exchanged dubious glances. Eventually, Toshiko opened the door, Gwen grabbed the fire extinguisher from the wall and Owen held his automatic at the ready in case any of the creatures flew at them.
He needn’t have worried. They were all crawling or flying unsteadily along the corridor, gaining strength by the moment, towards the medical unit. Towards their new hosts.
Jack had taken his coat and shirt off, and was standing bare-chested, arms extended. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Do it.’
‘But—’
‘Do it.’
Owen raised the fire extinguisher. He looked uncertainly at Gwen and then at Toshiko. They just stared back.
He pulled the safety pin out and pressed the handle firmly down.
Carbon dioxide gushed from the fire extinguisher’s nozzle, enveloping Jack in a pall of white fog. The gas, expanding as it emerged from its pressurised state, sucked heat from the air. Jack’s hands were just visible, emerging from the cloud, white with frost, the fingertips glistening. He was turning slowly, letting the vapour hit him from all sides.
Owen released the handle and let the fire extinguisher drop.
Jack stood there like a marble statue, every muscle on his stomach and his arms standing proud and firm.
He opened his eyes and winked at Owen. Then he scooped up the guns – his and Gwen’s – from the table. Gwen held out a spare magazine she had taken from her pocket. Jack took it, then walked stiffly out of the room and down the corridor.
There was silence for a few moments, then Owen heard the sound of gunfire – six rapid shots from Jack’s Webley, then a series of deeper roars from Gwen’s Glock. Owen imagined the creatures whirring around the cavernous room with the hospital beds in the centre, and Jack, standing there, picking them off like a man firing at clay pigeons. The firing started up again, higher and flatter than the Glock. He must have reloaded his Webley. Another pause, and then the firing started again, deeper this time: the Glock again.
Owen had lost count of the number of shots he’d heard, when suddenly everything went silent. Had Jack killed all the creatures, or had one of them plunged itself into his chest, filling him full of eggs? Still, no sound. No footsteps. Nothing.
Fingers appeared around the edge of the doorway. White, cold fingers.
Jack walked slowly back into the room.
‘That was fun,’ he said. ‘Forget about diet pills: I think we’ve just discovered the logical successor to paintballing.’
TWENTY
The sky was bright and clear, a wash of purest azure from horizon to horizon. Penarth Head stood out crisply against the sky, almost as if the whole scene were a collage and the headland had been cut out of a picture in a magazine and stuck onto blue card. Even the water of the bay seemed purer than usual, sparkling in the sunshine.
Standing at the quay that led down to the ferry, Jack and Gwen were comfortably silent. They had shared life and death together, and although they had plenty they wanted to say to one another, for the moment they were content.
‘What happened to the patients in Scotus’s medical facility?’ Gwen asked eventually.
‘Owen brought them out of sedation, one by one, and spun them some story that they’d been drugged in a bar. He’s very fond of that story. I think it has some kind of resonance for him.’
‘How did he explain the dressings and the scars?’
‘Told them they were missing a kidney, which was probably on its way to the Middle East to be transplanted into a billionaire oil tycoon. Hey, if it means they’re more careful about what they eat and drink in future then it’s a plus as far as I’m concerned.’
‘And they bought it?’
Jack smiled. ‘Owen can be very convincing, when he wants to be. I think he’s taken four of them out for dinner so far, and he’s working on the rest.’
Far out across the bay a small boat was bobbing around. Normally, Gwen wouldn’t have been able to see even half that distance, but the air was so clear she felt she could see all the way across to Weston-super-Mare if she tried.
‘What about Doctor Scotus?’ she asked.
‘Owen and I talked about that. In the end, it wasn’t our job to punish him. We suggested he try one of the “Stop” pills, under medical supervision, to see whether it would get rid of the thing that was inside him, infiltrating its way through his flesh. He couldn’t take it himself, of course – the thing wouldn’t let itself be harmed – so Owen dissolved it in solution and injected it.’
‘OK. And..?’
‘And Scotus was right. The creature had wound itself too tightly around him. He didn’t survive the process.’
‘Oh.’ A moment’s pause. ‘And Lucy?’
‘Returned to full physical health.’
Gwen thought for a moment. ‘She killed her boyfriend, you know. She ate her boyfriend. There’s got to be some kind of payback for that.’
‘I said full physical health. She’s under psychiatric supervision. I doubt she’ll ever come to terms with what she did.’
‘Hmm.’ She didn’t sound convinced. ‘I know Toshiko will survive,’ she said eventually, ‘but what about Owen? He took that thing with Marianne pretty hard.’
‘He always does. He’ll get over it.’ Jack looked sideways at Gwen. ‘And what about you? We haven’t seen you around for a while?’
‘You haven’t texted me.’
Jack grinned. ‘I mislaid the number. Everything OK at home?’
Gwen nodded. ‘Everything’s fine. Well, as fine as it’ll ever be. After I got the police to raid th
at factory and arrest the gang members, we went away for a few days. Rhys wanted to go to Portmeirion, but I held out for Shrewsbury.’
‘Very nice.’ He paused, weighing up whether to continue. ‘You know,’ he said eventually, ‘those diet pills weren’t the answer. They just address the symptom, not the cause. Changing your body isn’t the point. You have to change the behaviour that’s changing your body.’
‘Very wise,’ she said. ‘You should go on TV. Maybe write a book. Change Your Tack With Captain Jack. You’d sell a million.’
‘Too much like setting up a religion, and I’m not going that route again.’ He noticed Gwen shiver. ‘Cold?’
‘Getting that way. Shall we go back?’
‘Let’s.’ On a whim, Jack slipped his greatcoat off and placed it around Gwen’s shoulders.
‘What’s that for?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Because you earned it,’ he said.
All of the alien tech was safely in storage back in the Hub, sitting in boxes in the Archive, but Toshiko couldn’t stop thinking about them. Not about the devices per se, but about the information they contained. The images. The story.
Sitting cross-legged on the futon in her flat, candles burning on shelves and tables, Toshiko laid out the nine photographs in a line on the tatami mat in front of her, moving them around until they were in the order she wanted.
The image on the left showed the alien – the designer, as she thought of it – at what she guessed was its youngest age. The skin, from what she could make out, was unlined, the eyes bright and firm. As she looked from left to right, the alien got older. Its skin became more wrinkled, more pachydermous, and the hammerhead-like extrusions which housed its eyes began to droop. In the last but one image, it looked sad and old.
Hidden within the devices it had made, had been the story of its life; of how it had grown, developed and aged. Perhaps it had happened a few decades ago, perhaps a few million years, but the story was as real as if it had happened yesterday.
The last image of all was different. It had come from one of the pieces of tech found at the scene of an alien spaceship crash near Mynach Hengoed. It had also, coincidentally, been the last one Toshiko had examined.
