Slow Decay t-3

by Andy Lane

  ‘What happens if there’s another one?’ Gwen asked. ‘Maybe they come in twos. Or threes.’

  ‘And maybe they don’t. If there’s another one then the finest weapon that the people of the planet Rexel can manufacture will take care of it for us. But I think if there was another then it would have attacked by now.’

  Together they searched through the office, Gwen starting to the left of the door, Jack to the right, meeting at the far side where Doctor Scotus’s desk took pride of place, both of them circling around the oddly shaped chairs that sat either side of it. Apart from framed certificates on the walls and a bookcase full of medical textbooks on nutrition, digestion and, strangely, parasitology, Gwen didn’t come up with anything. Judging by the speed at which he was moving, Jack wasn’t having much more luck. When they got to the desk, Gwen took a moment to admire its solidity, and the slab of marble that formed its surface. Four marks in a rectangle on the surface indicated that something had been removed recently — probably a laptop, judging by the shape.

  The drawers were all empty of anything apart from basic supplies; staples, bits of paper, rubber bands. Gwen was probably being over-optimistic thinking that there might be something incriminating there, but life could sometimes be surprising like that.

  Jack, meanwhile, was looking though the waste-paper basket that sat by the side of the desk. ‘Surprising how often people forget about the rubbish,’ he said, pulling a crumpled piece of paper from its depths. He unfolded it, and the sound made Gwen’s skin crawl. It sounded too much like the creature that was outside in the lobby, stapled to the desk. She raised a hand to her neck, which still ached.

  Jack saw her shiver. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But I think this is important. It looks like a recent list of clients at the clinic. Lucy Sobel, Marianne Till…’ His gaze locked with hers. ‘Rhys Williams.’

  She nodded. ‘And how many others.’

  ‘They had twenty-eight clients in all. Quite a profit, this Doctor Scotus was making.’

  ‘A profit on twenty-eight clients? How much were they paying?’ Gwen grabbed the sheet of paper from Jack’s hands and glanced down the list. ‘Rhys, you arsehole! That’s our holiday fund gone for a burton!’

  ‘Recriminations later. Investigation now.’

  ‘OK, sorry. But still…’

  ‘Gwen, he’s likely to be punished enough over the next week or so. Cut him some slack. He only did it because he wanted to look good for you. And, frankly, who wouldn’t?’

  She sighed. ‘OK. Thanks.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything more we can find here. There were two other rooms leading off the lobby. Let’s give them a quick going over.’

  They headed out of the office, bypassing Ringo, which was still thumping the centre of its body frantically against the surface of the receptionist’s desk. Jack chose the middle door, Gwen the one on the left.

  Gwen’s choice was a well-appointed examination room. The walls and ceiling were a clinical white. A desk was pressed up against one wall, with one of the backless chairs in front of it. A curtained area off to one side could be used for undressing. A trolley with a black PVC surface pushed against another wall was presumably for examinations. Apart from some abstract paintings on the wall, there was nothing in the room.

  Gwen went through the desk drawers one by one, just on the off-chance, but they had been hurriedly emptied of everything apart from the normal detritus of office life: a handful of paper clips, the caps from three ball point pens, a whole load of loose staples, some bits of grey lint, three sealed pads of Post-it notes…

  And a small foil blister pack containing two pills that had been pushed to the back of the middle drawer. Gwen picked it out tentatively. It was exactly the same as the one she had found in the bathroom cabinet back in the flat, with the exception that this one contained both the ‘Start’ and the ‘Stop’ pills.

  ‘Look what I’ve found,’ she said, walking out of her room and into Jack’s.

  ‘Look what I’ve found,’ Jack retorted.

  His room was exactly the same as hers, except that there was a body on the examination trolley. It was a woman. She was spread-eagled, head lolling off one edge, legs and arms hanging off the others. There was nothing peaceful about it: she looked like an abandoned doll.

  ‘Client?’ Gwen asked.

  ‘Receptionist,’ Jack corrected. ‘She’s wearing a name tag.’

  ‘I guess she was killed by Ringo out there.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘No marks on her neck, and look at her mouth.’

  Gwen leaned closer. The receptionist’s mouth was wide open, locked in an endless scream, and there was blood around her lips. Some of it had trickled down her cheeks, leaving crimson stripes behind.

  ‘Oh good God. Don’t tell me-’

  ‘That Ringo climbed out through her throat, probably rupturing something along the way? Owen can confirm it in an autopsy, but that’s my reading of the situation.’

  ‘What the hell are we dealing with?’ Gwen asked.

  Jack turned towards the door leading out into the lobby.

  From out of the shadows, something black launched itself at his face, its skin torn where it had wrenched itself free of the staples that had been holding it to the desk.

  Jack’s hand came round holding his Webley revolver. His finger moved a fraction of an inch, and the creature blew apart as the gun made a sound barely louder than the power stapler. Shreds of flesh and droplets of liquid splattered against the walls.

  ‘Something that just doesn’t know when to quit,’ said Jack.

  The device Toshiko was looking at now — the third of the similar alien devices she had found the time to examine — was the one found in the wreckage of an alien escape pod near Mynach Hengoed in the 1950s. That was before she was even born, she reflected. It was flatter than the rest, lenticular, with sharp projections all the way around the edge, some of which had been knocked off over the years as it was moved from crate to crate. It was an orange colour, and had a hole right through the centre. Holding it in her hand, Toshiko thought it was slightly heavier on one side than the other, but she had no more idea about its function than about the rest of the devices in the series.

  The series. That was how she was thinking of them. They were all different shapes, sizes and colours, but they were obviously related to one another. Made by the same hands, she was sure. Well, perhaps not hands. Made by the same claws, or tentacles, or mandibles. It didn’t matter. She was convinced there was a consistent style running through them.

  And perhaps more than just a consistent style.

  Voices were echoing through the Hub from the Autopsy Room — Owen’s personal domain — distracting Toshiko’s attention from the device she held. It sounded like Jack, Owen and Gwen were arguing. Jack and Gwen had come rushing back from the Scotus Clinic looking like something had happened, but they’d headed straight into the medical section without saying anything to her. She’d tried to tell them about the image of the creature inside the girl, but Jack had snapped something about it being ‘old news’ and kept on walking.

  Ianto had followed on a few minutes afterwards, wheeling a body in on a gurney. He too went past Toshiko without acknowledging her existence. Part of her had wanted to follow on to see what all the fuss was about, but she felt awkward. They would tell her when they needed to. When she could help.

  Toshiko wondered if there was something technical she could be doing now, but she couldn’t think of anything and neither Jack nor any of the others had made any suggestions. Having processed Marianne’s medical scans, Toshiko had found herself at something of a loose end, which is why she had returned to looking at the alien devices matching the one that had been found in the nightclub where the young men had died.

  Toshiko sometimes wondered whether the others truly felt she was part of the team. They valued her technical knowledge — she knew that — but there were times she felt as if she wasn’t part of the decision-making proces
s. Excluded from the action. Marginalised.

  Perhaps she just wasn’t outgoing enough. She certainly didn’t join in the banter as much as the others did. She sometimes felt awkward at the informality of the Torchwood team — she was used to working in a more formalised environment. It was her fault that she didn’t integrate with the team. She wished she knew how to do something about it, but she didn’t.

  Sighing, Toshiko slid the device beneath the scanner head that she had rigged up. It contained sensors that would examine the device in various spectra — microwave, infra-red, ultra-violet and others — and integrate the results together into one picture. Having already done this twice before on two of the other devices, she felt that she had it down to a fine art. And the changes she had made to the software would speed the process up.

  As her computer laboured to integrate the various pictures it was receiving, Toshiko tried to hear what the argument was about, but she couldn’t make any of the words out. Gwen appeared to be pleading with Jack about something, while Jack was being firm and Owen was throwing in the occasional jibe. Tension was seeping out of the medical area, and Toshiko could feel her shoulders and neck becoming tighter in sympathy. She hated conflict, especially in the Hub where things should have been calm and contemplative.

  ‘Is that one of the objects from tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six, shelf eight, box thirteen?’

  She jumped at the sound of the voice behind her. Twisting on her seat, she realised that Ianto was standing in the shadows.

  ‘I signed it out,’ she said defensively.

  ‘I didn’t mean to question you.’ He stepped forward. ‘I’m just glad that someone is taking an interest in the Archive. All too often we find these things, give them a cursory examination, then put them in a box and forget about them. It’s nice that someone cares enough to pull them out every now and then and see if we can’t find out something new.’

  Toshiko opened her mouth to say something, although she wasn’t entirely sure what, but her computer chimed softly. The integration routines had finished their work. She turned to view the screen. Ianto moved up to stand at her shoulder.

  ‘What, if you don’t mind me asking, is that?’ he asked.

  Based on what she had seen in the other two devices, Toshiko was pretty sure she knew exactly what it was. An image. A portrait of an alien creature, looking straight out of the screen at her, formed of components within the device: alien analogues of wires and capacitors, transistors and resistors, integrated circuits and power sources.

  This picture was subtly different from the other two. The head was flatter than would be normal for a human, with a vertical slit for a mouth and eyes set at either end of a rugby ball-shaped head, but the head looked plumper than in the images from the other two devices; drooping less at either end and not as wrinkled. The mouth — if that was what it was — seemed more pronounced. If anything, the whole picture looked younger.

  ‘I think,’ she said carefully, ‘it’s someone’s life story.’

  SIXTEEN

  ‘This is like performing brain surgery on a fucking Smartie,’ Owen muttered as he bent over his autopsy table. He rested a scalpel on top of the yellow pill in the table’s centre and pressed down gently. The pill slipped away and skittered to one side, bouncing off the table’s metal lip.

  Reaching out to a table on one side, where he kept his surgical tools on a metal tray, he retrieved a pair of forceps. With these in his left hand he could hold the pill steady while he gently drew the scalpel across the top of the pill. It left a fine incision behind. Something oily welled up through the incision.

  ‘Interesting,’ he murmured. ‘I thought this was a dissolvable sugar coating, like you get on some headache pills, but it’s more like a harder version of gelatin. It’s flexible. With a bit of luck, I might just…’ His voice tailed off as he moved the forceps around, getting a better grip on the tablet. Manipulating the scalpel carefully, he extended the incision to the sides of the pill, then slipped the blade beneath the coating and prised it away from the interior. Oil spilled slowly out. In less than a minute, he had removed the coating entirely, stripping it away from the thing that had been hidden inside.

  ‘I hate soft centres,’ he said.

  ‘What have you got?’ Jack asked from the balcony.

  ‘Well, it’s not Turkish Delight, that’s for sure.’ Reaching out to the tray again, he picked up a pen-like device with a lens and a light at one end. He pointed it at the thing on the autopsy table and pressed a button on the side of the device. The plasma screen above his head faded within a few seconds into a high-definition close-up of the thing. The tip of Owen’s scalpel was just visible at the edge of the screen, the size and shape of a garden trowel.

  ‘Oh hell,’ said Gwen. She put a hand to her mouth. ‘You know what we’re looking at, don’t you?’

  The thing was no more than a centimetre long, and curled into a comma. It was charcoal in colour, with irregular blue stripes, and looked like three very small worms, all joined together at one end. A tiny fuzzy cloud that might have been thousands of minute, translucent, fibres surrounded the free ends. The small teardrop of oily liquid that had surrounded and protected it was spreading out across the metal topography of the table.

  Jack nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’

  ‘It’s an egg,’ Owen said. He used the scalpel to unfold the foetal creature. ‘It’s not a pill at all; it’s an egg. A fucking egg. And this is the embryo inside.’

  ‘But…’ Gwen seemed to run out of words. ‘But why?’ she finished eventually. ‘Why would anyone knowingly swallow an egg, especially if it turns into something like that?’

  ‘They don’t do it knowingly.’ Jack clenched his hands on the rail of the balcony, hard enough that Owen heard the metal creak. ‘And I think they do it so they can lose weight. Tell her, Owen.’

  ‘I’m guessing that the life cycle of this thing, whatever it is, is similar to that of our own, our very own, tapeworm,’ Owen said. He leaned closer, fascinated by the thing on the table in front of him. ‘It’s probably activated by the acidic contents of the stomach, hatches, then makes its way to the intestine and latches on. It sucks up nutrients, drawn from whatever the host has been eating. There’s so sign of a mouth, so I’m guessing it absorbs the partially digested food through its skin.’

  ‘Chyme,’ Jack suddenly said.

  Gwen looked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘Chyme — semi-liquid, partly digested food leaving the stomach and entering the duodenum. Another candidate for my list of words that need to be saved from extinction and used in conversation as often as possible.’

  ‘All eyes on me, please,’ Owen said firmly. ‘Unless you want to be sent to the naughty corner. Now, unlike a tapeworm, I suspect this thing is voracious. That’s why the hosts are hungry all the time, and why they lose weight so fast. They’re almost starving, because the thing in their gut is taking all the food away from them before they get a chance to absorb it themselves. It’s like a cuckoo: relying on the host to do the hard work then taking advantage of the results.’

  ‘I hope for your sake it’s dead,’ Jack said.

  ‘Not dead as such, but it’s certainly inert. It will only come to life if I swallow it. Which I have no intention of doing. Not even on a bet.’

  ‘What about the other pill?’ Jack asked. ‘The one labelled “Stop”?’

  Owen glanced over at the instrument tray, where three blister packs sat: the one Gwen had found in her own medicine cupboard, the one she had found at Lucy’s flat and the one Gwen and Jack had found at the Scotus Clinic. All three packs were now missing their ‘Start’ pills. Two of them still had the ‘Stop’ pills remaining. The third was empty. ‘I tested one earlier,’ he said. ‘Basic plant sterol — more or less harmless to humans, but I’m guessing it’s deadly to the worm-things. It probably allows the host to digest the remains, so there’s nothing left to give the game away.’

  ‘Perfect.’ There was something
dark in Jack’s voice. ‘One pill to start the weight loss and another to stop it. Absolutely perfect. Symmetrical, in fact.’

  Owen reached out and took a pair of tweezers from the tray. ‘Perfect apart from all the side effects,’ he said, picking the creature gently up from the autopsy table and holding it close to his face, turning it around so he could examine it from all aspects. ‘That raging hunger isn’t everything — there’s psychotic behaviour as well. We don’t know what causes that yet. And from what you said, the mature form of this thing leaped out of the receptionist’s throat, rupturing a major blood vessel in the process before it attacked you. That’s not the kind of behaviour that I’ve ever seen a tapeworm exhibit. It almost indicates awareness, perhaps even consciousness.’

  ‘Is it intelligent?’ Gwen asked. ‘Could we communicate with it?’

  ‘I don’t think the brain’s big enough to hold much intelligence. I think it’s going on instinct, and some basic processing of sensory inputs. What surprises me is the way you say it attacked you. Tapeworms are just inert assemblages of self-replicating segments. This thing — whatever it is — has the ability to sense where things are, decide they are threats and move to do something about that threat. Wherever their natural habitat is, they probably stalk their prey in some way before either laying eggs inside it or colonising it in the adult form.’

  The colour had drained away from Gwen’s face. Her throat was working as if she was trying to stop herself throwing up.

  ‘We’ll call it George,’ Jack said suddenly.

  ‘Call what George?’

  ‘The parasite that’s inside your boyfriend. Makes it easier if we label them differently. Stops us getting confused. The one that attacked us in the Scotus Clinic was Ringo, the one inside Rhys is George, the one inside Marianne Till is Paul and that leaves the one inside Lucy Sobel as John.’