Torchwood_Exodus Code

by Carole E. Barrowman

  ‘Did she ingest anything?’ the female medic asked Gwen while her partner tried to untangle the jacket from the woman’s head. She slapped away his hands, struggling against his ministrations.

  ‘I don’t know who she is,’ said Gwen, tightening her hold on Anwen, aware of the manager waving his arms while one of the constables stared at her and the other unclipped his radio from his lapel, requesting back-up. This day was not going to end well.

  ‘She was already really agitated when I spotted her,’ Gwen told the medic. ‘I think she came into the shop that way.’

  The medic was cutting the jacket from around the woman’s head, her long hair matted to the fabric with her own blood.

  Gwen shivered, her anger becoming a dull ache in her limbs, the nausea dissipating. Oh God, if they could track the madwoman’s movements through the store then they could track hers and she did not need to give Rhys one more reason to be disappointed in her ability to lead a normal life. She was already on thin ice in that area. No, make that cracking ice.

  Finally, the medics had the madwoman restrained enough to peel the jacket off her. Her hair was plastered to her scalp. Sweat soaked the woman’s face. And blood. Lots of it. The woman squinted, confusion and pain masking her face. She held something up to the medic.

  ‘It’s all quiet now,’ she said.

  The medic fell back on his heels, frantically fumbling in his kit bag for an ice pack.

  ‘Call it in,’ he screamed to his partner, who couldn’t stop staring at the side of the woman’s head, at the pink pulpy flesh above her neck and the bloody ear gripped in her soaked fist.

  The medic looked up to tell Gwen she’d better give the police her statement, but Gwen and Anwen were gone.

  20

  CRADLING A MUG of hot cocoa in her hands, Gwen stared out of the nursery window at the full moon. Behind her, Anwen was asleep, finally, and Rhys, finally, had headed to the local, for ‘some sanity’, he’d yelled.

  Gwen had edited her role in the events of the day considerably, saying only what supported the brief mention of ‘The Madwoman in the Supermarket’ on the local news. Rhys claimed he was sick of her self-deprecating taunts about her domestic capabilities – had she really told him she thought she was a bad wife? Her complaints were exhausting him, he claimed. He refused to be dragged into another fight with her over why she was so unhappy, why she felt so useless and why she’d had this terrible taste in her mouth ever since she’d come home from the shops. She had told him it tasted like hopelessness, which, he hollered, was as ridiculous as she was becoming. Slamming the kitchen door, he stomped off down the road.

  Gwen closed her eyes, trying desperately to let the silence calm her. How did she get to this place? To this point in her life where she had no idea who she was or what she was meant to do next? For a while, she had been someone – a member of a team, a formidable force, protecting the world from so many of the terrible things she hoped her daughter would never have to witness, and, oh she loved her daughter more than life itself. Why then was she so miserable, why was she so angry all the time and so, so terribly sad?

  She sipped her cocoa, wiping the tears from her face. Hopelessness, that’s what it tasted like.

  Maybe she just needed some company. Gwen watched the thin clouds cut across the face of the moon.

  ‘“The tide is full,”’ she whispered. ‘“The moon lies fair upon the straits”… and I’m going right off my rocker,’ she said aloud to herself, ‘reciting a bloody poem I memorised at school.’

  Behind her, Anwen rolled onto her side, kicking off her blankets, snuffling the way toddlers do, until she slipped back into sleep again. Gwen knew what her mum thought was wrong – the baby blues, post-partum depression. But Gwen knew that wasn’t it.

  PTD, more like. Post-Torchwood Depression.

  Maybe she should talk to someone about what was happening to her? After today’s outburst in the supermarket, she was sure that she needed some professional help, needed to find someone she could trust to help her make sense of her mixed-up feelings, to help her figure out the next steps in her life.

  She set her mug on the wide sill of the bay window and curled her legs under her.

  Where are you, Jack? I really need you. Something terrible is happening to me.

  21

  GWEN WASN’T SURE how long she sat at the window, watching the rising moon, but it was long enough for her self-pity to begin to piss her off too. She needed to take control of the situation. She stood up, knocking her mug to the floor, a decision made.

  She tiptoed out of Anwen’s room and into her bedroom, lifting the baby monitor from Rhys’s bedside table and turning the volume to high. Anwen’s breathing was steady and clear. Downstairs, she grabbed her phone from the table in the hallway where she’d set it on top of today’s post, and a torch from under the sink. Grabbing her coat from behind the kitchen door, she dropped her phone into her pocket, keeping the baby monitor in her hand. When she got to the front door, she held the monitor to her ear to be sure she could still hear Anwen. She could.

  Gwen hurried along the street, putting the monitor to her ear every few steps just to be sure. At the end of the road, she took a right turn, heading for a row of lock-ups and opening one of the garage doors. Satisfied that Anwen was still asleep and that she could still hear her, Gwen took a set of car keys from her pocket and clicked the fob. Directly in front of her in the darkness, something beeped and flashed twice. Gwen lifted up the bottom of a camouflage tarp and popped up the rear doors of a large black vehicle.

  Leaving the rear doors open, the tarp draped over them, Gwen climbed inside the burned-out shell of the only surviving Torchwood vehicle. The back of the SUV was empty. The seats destroyed long ago, the smell of charred rubber, gunpowder and pizza of all things lingering inside. For a brief moment, Gwen was sitting in the back as the SUV sped through the streets of Cardiff, Jack driving, laughing, his hand resting lightly on Ianto’s knee. Ianto serious as ever. Tosh and Owen taunting him from the back seats.

  Anwen’s soft cries from the monitor brought her back to the SUV and the shell it really was. Gwen waited to be sure Anwen settled back to sleep. When she did, Gwen crawled to the front of the vehicle, pulling up a thick plastic liner, swinging it all the way to the rear doors.

  She pressed the key fob in a series of three beeps, a pause, and then another two, watching as a compartment opened in the middle of the SUV’s floor, a computer screen and keyboard emerging.

  Gwen set the baby monitor next to her, its soft static comforting her. She powered up the system. On the roof of the SUV, an antennae the size of a knitting needle revealed itself from the folds of the cracked skylight.

  She logged in to the system, smiling as the familiar Torchwood logo appeared on the screen. After they’d been so easily discovered by the CIA a few months ago, and assuming that they might still be being watched, Gwen had agreed with Rhys that they’d keep computers and the internet out of their home. Every week, Gwen scanned the house and their car for bugs. So far they’d been left alone. If Rhys discovered this set-up, Gwen was sure, given everything that she’d put him through, that this would be the proverbial last straw.

  ‘So we’ll keep this our little secret,’ she said, setting the baby monitor off to the side.

  Gwen googled ‘supermarket madwoman’ and found six versions already uploaded to YouTube. After she’d played three of them and watched herself attack the shop manager from a variety of angles, she was embarrassed, but, she had to admit, she also felt a bit chuffed that she could still defend herself, that she could still kick someone’s arse.

  No, Rhys was right, she thought. She really did need an anger management class. By no stretch of the imagination had she been defending herself or Anwen. But still, she couldn’t stop herself from grinning as she replayed, rewound and replayed again, the moment when she shoved the manager into the breakfast cereals and the look of terror in his eyes.

  Pausing the video, Gwen
leaned back against what was left of the SUV’s dashboard, her heart racing. She’d snuck out here intending to use Torchwood software to delete all record of the incident, but before she did she decided to play the last of the four versions of the incident. This one had recorded from the other side of the aisle so it had captured Gwen, Anwen clutched to her chest, ducking out the emergency exit to make her escape. The person recording had darted back to the woman and the paramedic after Gwen had left. The local news had not shown any of this and when Gwen finished watching it she could see why. As the medic slipped the jacket off the woman’s head, she gasped at the violence the woman had inflicted on herself.

  Strange. Gwen’s curiosity trumped anything else she had been feeling. She opened another program on the computer and sent the same message she’d been sending for the past three days, since she’d felt her life caving in on her.

  Gwen heard Anwen cough, paused, listened for a beat, then she opened a number of windows and scrolled through screens, until she had access to the local CCTV cameras outside the hospital in Swansea. When she recognised the medics unloading the gurney with the madwoman strapped to it, Gwen zoomed in on the image. They must have sedated her, Gwen thought. The woman was unnaturally still, her eyes wide open, and a bandaged taped to the right side of her face.

  Gwen noted the time stamp on the recording, closed out all but one of her screens and in a few minutes had hacked into the patient admission records.

  Before she could investigate further, she heard a car door slam through the monitor. Shit. Rhys was home. He’d kill her if he discovered she had hidden all of this equipment, never mind that she’d left Anwen.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ she said, scrolling through screens until she found the admission files for the day’s patients.

  From the baby monitor, she could hear Rhys’s footsteps on the stairs, and, of course, Anwen decided at that moment to stir. Gwen listened as her whimpers began.

  She found the database. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, her adrenalin spiking. God, she missed this rush.

  Anwen burst into full-scale crying.

  From the monitor, Gwen heard the bedroom door creak open. Anwen’s crib rattled, her screams increasing. Gwen heard the footsteps on the floor. She heard Anwen’s blankets rustle.

  Gwen stopped typing, her hands frozen in mid-air. What if it wasn’t Rhys?

  22

  ‘WHERE’S YOUR MUM then, luv?’

  Gwen exhaled, not knowing what she would have done if the voice in the monitor hadn’t belonged to Rhys.

  Three patients’ records popped on the screen one after another, two women and one man. She clicked on the man and scanned the A & E admission notes. Drunk and disorderly, he’d cracked his head open outside a pub.

  Anwen’s cries settled back to whimpers. Gwen could hear Rhys picking her up from her crib. ‘Is your mum asleep, pet?’

  She heard the nursery door open and footsteps going down the hall.

  Gwen clicked on the other two admission charts, scanned their notes too. ‘What are the chances of that?’ said Gwen. Frantically, she emailed the charts to her phone.

  ‘Gwen Cooper!’

  Gwen jumped. ‘Shit.’ The static on the baby monitor crackled loudly, the anger in Rhys’s voice palpable. ‘Get back here. How could you leave Anwen by her bloody self?’

  Gwen grabbed the monitor and was about to answer that she was in contact every second, but then remembered it wasn’t a radio, a realisation that reinforced how much she missed her old life. How much she missed Torchwood.

  She listened to Rhys’s footsteps as he bounded down the stairs. She could not have him come outside and find her here. He’d take away the only things she had left that made her feel needed. Although, really, what could he do? He could lock her up in the attic like some wayward wife. He could take away her daughter. He wouldn’t dare. Gwen’s anger knotted in her gut.

  ‘Gwen! Where are you?’

  She was about to shut off the computer, when the screen filled with static. What the hell? Staring at the static, she ran her fingertips across the tracking pad, but the static remained. She tried to shut down the computer. The static remained. And then as if she’d stepped inside the noise, Gwen could see nothing but grey noise and static around her.

  Yet a part of her knew she was staring at a computer screen inside a shell of an SUV in Wales. It was as if she was watching herself watching herself.

  She shivered.

  Somewhere ahead of her, Gwen could hear a low hum. Wait. Not a hum, a growl.

  Gwen tore her eyes away from the static on the screen. She felt sick. She could hear the growling getting louder. What was it? Leaving the static screaming on the screen, Gwen crawled to the side of the SUV and stared out at the darkness. The windows in the SUV had been broken out ages ago.

  This time she heard the low growl behind her.

  Inside the SUV.

  She whipped round, ready to attack, and found herself facing the most beautiful animal she’d ever seen. Its skin was crushed velvet, its eyes like polished stones – so black they shimmered blue. The puma went down on its front paws, holding Gwen’s gaze.

  Gwen could see herself in the puma’s eyes, then it was no longer her face but the computer screen displaying a faint outline of an image, a geometric design of some sort. She stretched her hand out towards the puma; the air around its head felt dry and hot. It opened its mouth wide and took Gwen’s hand inside.

  ‘Bloody hell, Gwen. Where are you?’

  Gwen’s eyes flew open. She was alone in the SUV. When was the last time I ate or slept, she wondered. She looked down at her hand. It was wet and sticky and there were tiny tears of blood on her knuckles.

  Behind her an image throbbed against the static on the computer screen. She tried not to stare at it again. In a panic, she sent a screen shot to her phone.

  The rock in Gwen’s gut shifted, pressing down on her chest. Her lips felt cracked and dry. Licking them, Gwen tasted peaches. She hated peaches. Soft and slithery in her mouth. Rhys loved peaches. Gwen hated Rhys.

  She slammed the computer closed, hid it underneath the compartment in the floor again, brought down the antennae, and crawled from the SUV. Pulling the camouflage tarp back over it, Gwen slammed the garage door and sprinted down the street.

  23

  THE ONLY PERSON making any noise at Gwen and Rhys’s breakfast table the next morning was Anwen, who was enjoying the chance to practice her latest farmyard noises. Her squeals of delight were bouncing off the walls as well as the stiff cold shoulders of her parents.

  ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, Gwen,’ said Rhys, spooning oatmeal into Anwen’s mouth whenever she paused long enough from her babbling to take a breath. ‘It’s not like you to leave Anwen alone.’

  He handed the spoon to Anwen, reminding her how to hold it, laughing as she plunged it into the oatmeal, scooping an upside-down spoonful to her mouth, leaving most of it on her bib.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rhys. I’m really sorry,’ said Gwen, buttering a slice of toast. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. ‘I just had to get out. I’ve been feeling so cooped up here lately.’ She paused and offered the buttered toast to Rhys, who arched his eyebrows but accepted it. ‘Friends?’

  He tore the toast in half, handing the other half back to her. ‘Friends. But don’t ever bloody well do that again.’

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ Gwen said, ‘I had the monitor with me and I could hear her the whole time. If anything had happened, I would have been back here in a flash.’

  ‘All gone!’ exclaimed Anwen with her hands in the air.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Rhys, taking the tray off the high chair and lifting Anwen out. ‘You heard me come into the house, but I could’ve been anyone. Could’ve taken her before you even knew she was gone.’

  ‘I know. I know. You’re right,’ Gwen said, taking Anwen from Rhys’s arms and setting her on the floor next to a pile of colourful plastic blocks. She refilled
her mug from the coffee pot.

  Rhys was right. Of course, he was right. But did he have to keep reminding her? She had said she was sorry. Many times. She had apologised last night when she had come rushing inside, her head thumping. She’d lied about where she’d been, blurting that she’d taken a walk to clear a headache, and this morning she had apologised at least ten more times before they’d even come downstairs for breakfast.

  How many times did it take for him to get it into his thick skull? Really. How many?

  Gwen noticed her hands were shaking. Too much caffeine. She emptied her coffee mug and put it in the sink. The clang sounded loud, like the noise her dad’s welding gun made when he was in his workshop. Her dad. She missed him so much. He’d never had a chance to spend much time with his only granddaughter.

  Anwen had waddled her way across the floor to the pots and pans cupboard and was in the process of emptying it.

  ‘From now on, if you feel like getting away again, you need to tell me,’ said Rhys, handing Anwen a wooden spoon from the drawer next to the cooker. Anwen banged the spoon against the pots, squealing with delight at the racket.

  ‘God knows I would’ve stayed home if you’d told me,’ added Rhys, shouting above Anwen’s squeals and the radio news. ‘And if you need a break during the day from being home with Anwen, just say so. You know your mum will help when she gets back, and mine would be round here in a flash.’

  Gwen whirled round. ‘Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you, Rhys Williams! You’d like it if my mum or your mum had to take over because I’m doing such a bad job as far as you’re all concerned.’

  ‘No!’ said Rhys, pushing away from the table. ‘That’s not what I meant at all.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t it? And I suppose I’m too stupid now to know what you mean? Poor Gwen, all cooped up in her own little world and making everyone so unhappy!’