by Mark Morris
Sophie looked at him, startled — and abruptly she began to giggle. Then, just as abruptly, the giggles became sobs and suddenly she was weeping, the tears running down her face.
Andy picked up a napkin from the low table in front of the settee and handed it to her with a guilty smile.
'Must admit I've never had that reaction before,' he said.
'Oh. . sorry,' Ianto said, walking into the Boardroom and instantly turning on his heel to walk out again.
Sarah laughed. 'Don't be daft, I'm only breastfeeding. I'll stop if it makes you uncomfortable.'
Ianto turned back to face her with a stiff smile. Scrupulously maintaining eye contact, he said, 'Oh no, no. Not at all. You feed away. It's. . um. . not a problem.'
She smiled. 'It's OK. Really. He's about finished anyway.' Gently she removed the baby from her breast. He grizzled for a moment, then began sucking his fingers.
'So. . how are you?' Ianto asked.
'I'm fine. Sore and tired, obviously, but apart from that. .' She frowned slightly. 'How's Trys?'
'He's sleeping,' said Ianto quickly, thinking of her husband in the cells downstairs, staring stupidly out through the transparent wall, and occasionally blundering into it, unable to work out why he couldn't get to his prey.
'Still?' Sarah said.
'Well, we gave him some pretty strong sedatives.'
She sighed. 'I'm dying for him to see our son.'
'And he will,' Ianto said, hoping desperately that he was right. 'It won't be long now.'
He looked around, rubbing his hands together self-consciously. 'I, er, just came to see if you needed anything. Jack and I have to pop out for a bit.'
'Pop out?' she repeated, alarmed. 'You're not leaving me alone again?'
'No,' said Ianto. 'Well. . not for long. We'll be back before you know it.'
'But where are you going?'
'We think we've got a lead on what's causing this. . outbreak. We're just going to check it out.'
'But what if something happens while you're away?'
'It won't,' he said firmly. He produced a mobile from his pocket and handed it to her. 'My number's on there. Call me if you have any problems. Not that you will.'
She took the phone, but still looked worried. 'I'm really not happy about this.'
'You'll be perfectly safe,' Ianto assured her. 'Nothing can get in here. It's the most secure place in Cardiff.'
Gwen put her phone back in her pocket.
'What did Jack say?' Rhys asked.
'He said he and Ianto have got a lead on what's happening. They're on their way to St Helen's Hospital.'
'Why? What's at St Helen's Hospital?'
Gwen glanced at the Samuelses. It was clear she didn't want to discuss the situation in front of them — or, more particularly, in front of Naomi Samuels, who was not the most open-minded of people.
'Long story,' she said. 'I said we'd meet them there if we could.'
Rhys raised his eyebrows. 'How we gonna do that, love? We're stuck here for the time being.'
'Who are these people you're talking about?' Keith asked.
'Colleagues of mine,' said Gwen.
'Fellow spooks, you mean?'
'We're not spooks. But. . yeah, that kind of thing.'
She lapsed into silence, thinking. From below came the sound of dozens of zombies, blundering and shuffling about.
'Not very bright, are they?' Rhys said. 'They can't even work out how to get up here.'
'That's why we're going to win,' said Gwen, reloading her gun.
'Win?' Naomi said sourly. 'And how are we going to do that then?'
In the dusty gloom of the attic, Naomi's face was a pallid mask of pinched, nervy anger. Gwen bit back on her impulse to snap the woman's head off, telling herself yet again that Naomi was just scared — and with good reason.
'We'll find a way,' she said.
'What the hell is that supposed to mean?' Naomi demanded. 'It doesn't mean anything.'
'Calm down, love,' Keith said placatingly. 'This isn't Gwen's fault.'
'She brought those things here, didn't she? Her and her boyfriend.'
'I'm her husband, actually,' said Rhys. He had wandered over to the grimy skylight in the roof, and was fiddling with his mobile.
'And we didn't bring them here,' Gwen said, trying not to get angry. 'Cardiff's overrun with them. It's chaos out there.'
'But they wouldn't have bothered us if you hadn't turned up,' Naomi retorted.
'We don't know that, love,' said Keith.
Gwen flashed Jasmine a reassuring smile. The little girl was clutching her yellow rabbit and eyeing the bickering adults with trepidation.
'Keith's right,' said Rhys. 'If those things had got in while you were asleep you'd have been torn apart in your beds.'
He noticed Gwen glance meaningfully at Jasmine and give a quick shake of the head. He shrugged.
'Sorry, Gwen, but it's true. You're a lot safer up here. Come on.'
This last remark was directed at his phone, which he was now holding above his head, as though making an offering to the moon.
'What are you doing, Rhys?' said Gwen irritably.
'I'm trying to get a decent signal on this bloody thing.'
'Why?'
'Why do you think? I want to make a call.'
Frustrated, he lifted the security bar on the window and shoved it open, then thrust the hand that was holding the mobile out into the drizzly night.
'Bingo!' he exclaimed.
'Who are you wanting to call anyway?' said Gwen. 'Rentokil?'
He gave her the look a teacher might give a facetious pupil. 'I'm calling in a favour,' he said. 'It's a bit of a long shot, but you never know.'
The pod, which was sitting in an open containment case on Ianto's lap, was going crazy, pulsing brighter and more fiercely as they neared the hospital. The coloured lights flickering just beneath the surface of its opaque skin were moving so rapidly that Ianto couldn't keep track of them. The pod's rate of regeneration was increasing too; indeed, Ianto fancied he could now see the silvery orb repairing itself before his eyes. He was watching it, mesmerised, when the SUV slammed into something, jolting him out of his reverie.
'Zombie roadkill,' said Jack. 'Couldn't be helped. He stepped right out in front of me.'
Ianto glanced into the rear-view mirror, to see a dark smear on the road behind them.
'There's no need to sound so happy about it,' he said. 'I worry about you sometimes.'
Jack grinned. 'What can I say? I enjoy my work.'
They were very close to the hospital now. The drive through Cardiff had been a journey through a nightmare landscape. Even in the couple of hours they had been in the Hub, the number of zombies had increased dramatically. They were everywhere, filling the streets, aimlessly shuffling. Cardiff had become a city of the dead.
Jack had managed to avoid most of them, though some had had to be nudged aside. Ianto knew that if Jack had had his way, he would have simply ploughed through the lot of them.
'It's not like they're real,' he had told Ianto, when Ianto had asked him to slow down and be careful, 'and this baby is big enough and tough enough to cope.'
'That's not the point,' Ianto said. 'You're not the one who has to clean up the mess afterwards.'
It didn't help that the creatures seemed so interested in the pod. Whether it was the flashing lights or something more intrinsic, it certainly seemed to spark a reaction. Or maybe it's just us, thought Ianto. Maybe it's just the fact that we're the only thing apart from themselves that's moving. Certainly, wherever they went, the dead would converge on them, arms outstretched and something like. . what? eagerness? recognition? in their otherwise glazed eyes.
At last they turned a corner, and there was the hospital entrance, a hundred metres ahead of them.
'Weird,' said Jack.
'What is?'
'Look around. What d'you see?'
Ianto peered through the windscreen. It was a leafy street
in a nice part of town. Big houses on the left; the hospital grounds, flanked by high hedges, on the right.
At first he didn't see what Jack was getting at, and then he realised. 'Oh,' he said. 'No zombies.'
'A coupla streets behind us it was wall to wall, but here there's nothing,' said Jack. 'Pretty odd, wouldn't you say?'
Ianto remained silent. It was only when Jack swung the SUV through the gates leading in to the multi-level car park and they saw the brightly lit building before them that the mystery of the missing zombies was solved.
The creatures were standing in rows, several layers deep, forming a cordon around the building. There were literally hundreds of them, and they were motionless and eerily silent.
'My God,' breathed Ianto. On his lap, the pod was pulsing more fiercely than ever.
Jack looked across at Ianto and raised an eyebrow. 'No prizes for guessing what they're guarding,' he said.
It was odd in a way, but the constant state of tension, of apprehension, had become boring after a while. Tired of the crush of people in Reception, and more particularly of their endless theorising and analysing, Rianne and Nina had retreated to the empty maternity ward, and were now sitting in the semi-darkness, staring out over the car park, cradling mugs of tea.
They hadn't talked much in the last half-hour or so. In fact, Nina had spent much of the time dozing. A nurse had cleaned and re-bandaged her leg for her; despite what Nina's friends had thought, she hadn't needed stitches.
'I wonder what happened to the Thomases,' Rianne said.
'Huh?' Once again, Nina's eyes had been drooping closed. Rianne reached out and gently took the half-empty mug out of her hands.
'Sarah Thomas. She's one of my ladies. She phoned earlier this evening to say she'd gone into labour. I hope she's all right.'
Before Nina could rouse herself to answer, the faint screech of brakes from outside drew Rianne to the window. At the top end of the car park was a big shiny-black vehicle, all lit up like a Christmas tree. In fact, it was pulsing with light, as if it contained some kind of mobile disco.
Rianne tensed. Clearly the occupants of the vehicle had seen the creatures massed around the hospital. Turn back, she urged them silently, turn back.
The big black vehicle began to rumble forward.
'No!' Rianne said, loud enough to snap Nina fully awake.
'Wassamatter?' Nina muttered.
Rianne gestured at the approaching vehicle in dismay. 'Another lamb to the slaughter.'
Nina hauled herself out of her chair and hobbled across to stand beside Rianne. They watched the big black car edging towards the hospital, rippling and strobing with inner light, almost as if it wanted to draw attention to itself.
The creatures encircling the hospital had been still and silent for some time, but now twenty or more of them jerked into motion and peeled away from the main throng, shuffling towards the newcomers.
'Get away from here. Get away,' Rianne urged, her fists clenched in dreadful anticipation.
Nina's voice was as bleak as her words. 'Whoever they are, they don't stand a chance.'
In his hospital bed, Oscar Phillips thrashed and writhed. His lips curled back over clenched teeth gleaming with spittle, and his eyes rolled madly behind their closed lids.
FOURTEEN
'This isn't good,' Ianto said nervously as zombies swarmed over the SUV.
Jack, however, seemed unperturbed. 'Relax, Ianto,' he said. 'This thing's tougher than a tank. There's no way in hell they can get in.'
'Yes, but there's no way we can get out either,' Ianto replied. 'In fact, there's so many of them I doubt we could even drive through.'
Jack acknowledged the observation with a shrug. 'There is that, I guess.'
He nodded at the orb, pulsing madly in the box on Ianto's lap.
'Maybe buddy boy there will protect us.'
'Or maybe they'll tear us apart to get to it,' Ianto said. 'It certainly seems to have agitated them.'
It was true. In the presence of the pod, the zombies seemed more animated, more ferocious than usual. They were crawling all over the SUV, pounding and scrabbling at the windows, leaving greasy smears of themselves behind. Their rotting faces glared in at Jack and Ianto, the pod's light flashing silver in their lifeless eyes.
Jack unholstered his Webley. 'Only one way to find out,' he said.
Ianto blanched. 'You're not going out there?'
As ever, Jack seemed to relish the prospect of extreme danger. 'It's either that or sit here till doomsday.'
'But you'll be killed,' Ianto said.
Jack shrugged. 'So what's new?'
'This is different, Jack, and you know it. They'll tear you apart. They'll eat you.'
Jack was unmoved. 'Well, you know what they say about life — the best way to enjoy it is to fill it with new experiences.' He held out his hand. 'Give me the pod, Ianto.'
'This is madness, Jack,' Ianto protested.
Jack's face was set, determined. 'Give me the pod,' he repeated.
Ianto sighed, momentarily undecided, and then unhappily he handed the box over to Jack. Jack lifted out the pulsing pod and slipped it into an inside pocket of his greatcoat. He tossed the box onto the back seat, then leaned forward, pulled Ianto towards him and kissed him on the forehead.
'You wait for me here. If I don't manage to find Oscar and stop all this. . well, just do what you can. Drive. Get back to the Hub.'
But Ianto shook his head, suddenly decisive. 'No. If you're going, I'm coming with you.'
'No way,' Jack said. 'My own stupidity I can live with. I'm not having you risking your life.'
Now it was Ianto's turn to look determined. Drawing his gun, he said, 'It's my decision, Jack. I chose to do this job. I know what the risks are.'
Jack looked as though he wanted to argue, but couldn't find a firm basis from which to do so. In the end he simply flapped a hand at Ianto and said, 'OK. If that's what you want, let's both go out in a blaze of glory. You ready?'
'Ready,' Ianto said grimly.
'Now!' Jack shouted.
They shoved their doors open simultaneously, causing zombies to tumble back like skittles. Instantly more of the creatures surged forward to fill the gap, teeth bared and eyes staring, hands reaching out.
Ianto pointed his gun and started shooting. And horrible as it was to see fleshless skulls shattering into fragments and heads disintegrating into bloody meat before his eyes, he continued shooting, trying to console himself with the knowledge that the creatures weren't real, that they felt no pain, that this was, in effect, nothing but a three-dimensional — albeit potentially lethal — computer game.
He was still shooting as he swung his legs from the SUV and stood up. And behind him he was aware that Jack was shooting too, the sharper crack of his Webley revolver underpinning the deafening boom of Ianto's semi-automatic.
Zombies fell in swathes before him, but they kept coming out of the darkness, kept pushing him back. One grabbed at him from the roof of the SUV; he turned and shot it from point-blank range.
Another swiped at his face, raking jagged fingernails down his cheek, before he was able to swivel and shoot it in the throat.
Yet another, a goth girl with black lipstick, panda eyes, and entrails leaking from a festering wound in her stomach, latched on to his left arm and sunk her teeth into his shoulder. He dislodged her by slamming her into the side of the SUV before she could break the skin, and then shooting her through her spiky forest of black hair while she was scrabbling on the ground.
At last the inevitable happened. While Ianto was pointing his gun, a flailing arm knocked the weapon from his hand. Ianto watched in despair as it flew through the air and clattered to the ground, among the shuffling feet of the walking dead.
Oh God, this is it, he thought as they surged towards him. He turned, grabbed the still-open door of the SUV and used it to haul himself up towards the roof of the vehicle, in the final desperate hope that he might be able to defend himself bett
er from up there.
Just as he reached the roof, kicking out at hands that were snatching at his legs, he became aware of three things simultaneously: an incredibly bright light, a loud, clattering whirr, and a raging wind that swooped down on him from nowhere. The light dazzled him, and the wind knocked the breath from his body and threatened to wrench him from his precarious perch. Clinging on for dear life, Ianto dropped to all fours and managed, with extreme difficulty, to turn his head.
For a second or two the light was so blinding that he couldn't work out what he was looking at. Hovering in the air above the SUV was what appeared to be an illuminated metal wall painted in white and orange stripes. Then Ianto saw landing wheels and the whickering blur of rotor blades, and suddenly realised he was staring at the underside of a helicopter. It had a bright red nose and tail, and a white body. The words 'COASTGUARD RESCUE' were printed in bold black capitals on the fuselage side of the aircraft.
Ianto sensed scrabbling movement beside him and twisted his head again, thinking that one of the zombies had climbed up after him. But it was Jack, bathed in the glare from above, and with rainbow light from the pod pulsing through his thick coat, still firing his Webley into the throng below. He turned briefly and grinned, hair flapping wildly around his head. He shouted something about 'cavalry', but the roar of the helicopter was too loud for Ianto to make out his words properly.
Then Ianto saw a line descending from the side door of the helicopter, and attached to the line was Gwen, black hair flying and leather jacket gleaming, haloed by the helicopter spotlight. Gwen was pointing her gun and taking potshots at the zombies below. Despite the fierce wind, Jack stood up on the roof of the SUV, waving and laughing.
Gwen was grinning too when she alighted on the roof of the SUV.
'Hello, boys,' she shouted. 'Having fun?'
'We are now,' Jack laughed, and hugged her tightly. Then in the same movement he swivelled and shot a zombie, which had poked its head over the edge of the roof. It fell back without a sound.
'Right,' Gwen yelled. 'Who's first?'
'Ianto,' Jack said decisively.
When Ianto looked about to protest, Jack shouted, 'You're mortal and you don't have a weapon.'
