Since returning to the house, Jack had already rifled through drawers, cupboards and Gwen’s empty gun locker, the firearms confiscated by the police when she’d attacked Rhys.
He had gone down into the basement and rummaged through boxes of Christmas decorations, old Halloween costumes, discarded wedding gifts and old bikes. He’d taken apart toilet cisterns, lifted floorboards, and cut into walls. He still had not found the key fob. Jack knew he didn’t have much time to keep looking, expecting that Rhys would be home with Anwen soon after taking Mary to the hospital.
Jack scanned the papered walls in the hallway, thinking that perhaps he’d missed a safe hidden underneath one of the pictures, but he doubted it. Then he spotted a splash of colour under the bed in Gwen and Rhys’s room. Reaching underneath, Jack retrieved a book: The Day of the Triffids. Jack skimmed the back cover, reading that the book was a post-apocalyptic novel (not Jack’s favourite genre, but clearly Gwen’s or Rhys’s), where a catastrophic event has left a few surviving humans blind while giant man-eating plants with poisonous stingers walk the earth. Jack knew all about them – a nasty species.
The book was old, its faded yellow cover stained and smelling faintly of cigarettes. Jack opened it, discovering its pages hollowed out and Gwen’s dad’s watch and wedding ring inside. Jack began tossing books from the shelves next to the window. Ten minutes later he found the Torchwood SUV’s key fob hidden in a hardback copy of Brave New World. After another twenty minutes, he’d discovered the wrecked vehicle hidden in the nearby lock-up.
Clicking twice on the key, Jack opened the vehicle’s hatch and the wave of images and smells that assaulted his senses took him to his knees. Oranges and lilies and musk. He could see the team clambering into the vehicle and racing out to the Brecon Beacons, or speeding through the narrow backstreets of Cardiff. Tosh in the backseat, working on her laptop, Owen mocking her mercilessly, Gwen mocking Owen, and Ianto, dear sweet Ianto, taking care of them all. Jack leaned back on his heels and closed his eyes. Ianto touched his cheek, put his lips on Jack’s, his hands moving under Jack’s shirt.
Jack let out a sob, and opened his eyes.
A flock of starlings swooped over a nearby roof, panicking at something, darting higher up into the sky. Jack was aware of a rustling sound, close to the lock-up. He walked back out to the street, peering into the darkness.
A dark sleek puma padded across his line of vision. It stopped, turned its head and stared directly at him, its black eyes twinkling in the moonlight.
Ginger flooded Jack’s mouth. He inhaled slowly, every instinct telling him to get away, to flee, to run, but he couldn’t get his feet to move. Jack felt as if he was being held in place, as if hands were pressing down on his shoulders. His knees buckled again. The puma pounced. Jack ducked, shielding his head with his arms, a draft of cold air hitting his face.
When he looked up, the animal was gone. Nauseated, Jack leaned against a wall, calming his breathing, forcing his mind to clear. A car alarm went off in the distance. His stomach ached at the sound.
Jack slid to the ground against the wall, struggling to control his mounting anxiety, his head between his knees. He was falling through the sky. The ground rushed up to meet him, the air cutting through his skin. Jack tried desperately to tuck into a ball, but his arms and legs wouldn’t respond, he squeezed his eyes closed and felt the rough stone of the wall behind his back.
For the first time in his long life, Jack felt sheer terror beyond anything he’d experienced when confronting Daleks, or Cybermen, or – No, this kind of terror was making his bones ache, making his heart feel as if someone was squeezing and twisting it, making him doubt his sanity.
Jack crawled inside the SUV. The scent of the memory replaced with the stench of rust and mould and the stink of shit and rotting leaves.
What the hell is happening to me?
What, he wondered as he sat in the corner, his knees against his chest, what if the Doctor and all his theories about his mortality were wrong. What if this was how Captain Jack Harkness was going to end his existence. His body always able to heal itself, reanimate each cell, restructure every muscle, over and over and over again. Life always winning out within him. Perhaps the price of regaining his immortality after the Miracle had been the loss of his memories, his intelligence, his sanity?
Jack knew he could face death. He had faced death. But how could he face life on those terms?
Jack sat in the shell of the Torchwood SUV and sobbed, letting hopelessness burrow deeper into his psyche, letting emotions he’d never experienced in years course through his veins, letting the enemy inside.
Outside the SUV, the puma stalked the perimeter, its head lifted towards Jack. Then it paused, scratched at the ground around the SUV before fading into the darkness, leaving the smell of eucalyptus lingering in its wake.
Jack felt the tremor in his hands, an uncontrollable itch on each tip of his fingers. He clawed his hands across the carpet of the SUV, trying for relief. The itch spread to his elbows like a million mosquitoes biting him at once. He scrambled out of the vehicle, rubbing his arms against the wall, scraping and tearing the skin. Then he felt the ground roll beneath him. The garage walls surrounding the SUV began to shake, the corrugated iron door buckling as dust and dirt rained down on him.
In the distance he heard a chorus of car alarms start as a tremor ran up the street, ripping up the pavement like paper and scattering trees. One toppled towards the garage, and Jack threw himself out of its way, his momentum carrying him on into the road. Except there was no road any more – the tarmac was fracturing beneath him.
Jack scrabbled to find his footing, but the ground shook around him, ancient pipes and cable snaking and jumping as the earth buckled. Above him, the little row of lock-ups was collapsing, their walls bulging and splitting as the water mains burst through them. Jack fought his way onto a patch of road, and clung to it, a tiny island in a gushing torrent of water. He looked up, trying to see a way to get to the SUV before it was too late, but all he could see was the ground yawning further open, a vast, muddy canyon gulping down cars, wheelie bins and benches, bobbing around in a mundane flotilla. He could hear the cries of other people, could see them running as the crevice zigzagged further up the street.
Then, with a sudden rollercoaster jolt, Jack’s little island slipped forward, tipping him into the churning morass, the blocks of concrete landing on his back, pinning him to the bottom.
Blood pounding in his ears, he tried pushing the blocks off him, but the weight was too much. Choking and flailing, Jack began to drown.
Then a great boom travelled through the water, and the surging pool around Jack became a sudden rushing current, dragging and tugging at his clothes. The ground had split still further, pulling the plug out of the basin and sucking the water, cars, stonework and flotsam down deep into the ground.
Jack was suddenly grateful for the masonry holding him in place. It was the only thing keeping him from being carried away. As the last of the water vanished, the blocks on top of him started to shift, and Jack pulled himself coughing to his feet. All around him was mud, sobbing and devastation. Jack was standing on the lip of a great chasm. Echoing up from it was the gurgle of water and the absurd echo of dozens of car alarms.
He tried to get his bearings and groaned. The street was a ruin. Houses crumpled like they were made of Lego. The lock-ups had gone. And there was no sign of the car.
The SUV had gone, taking with it whatever Gwen had wanted him to find.
37
MARY COOPER WAS putting on a brave show, handing out strong tea and coffee in plastic cups, pretending that helping serve refreshments to those cleaning up the streets was distracting her from worrying about Gwen locked up in that horrible psychiatric ward.
Her husband’s fate had left Mary wary of the authorities and the hospitals. She was simultaneously terrified of having her daughter in a hospital and anxious that she wasn’t getting the care she needed. The ward was no
isy and sterile, cold and unwelcoming. All Gwen really needed was rest, a chance to recover from everything that she’d been through, flying back and forth across the Atlantic, trying to save her dad and anyone else that she could, and all so soon after the birth of a baby. It wasn’t surprising that Gwen’s mind had cracked; any normal woman’s would have, and way before now.
‘Thanks for doing all this, Mary,’ said one of the area’s local councillors. ‘No matter what anyone thinks, there’s still nothing like a good strong cuppa to make the job go smoothly.’
Especially, thought Mary, when all you’ve done all morning is parade up and down the streets giving orders, you useless twit.
‘Biscuit?’ she said to him.
‘Don’t mind if I do.’
*
The havoc was not confined to the streets. Out in the middle of the channel, a vast black geyser was shooting steam into the air, creating a grey mist around it that was keeping the coastguard at a careful distance. When the tremor had struck last night, the geyser had burst through the water’s surface. Now the sky above was filled with helicopters and the surrounding beaches and cliffs lined with tourists watching the towering fountain.
The wave the geyser had created had hit the corner of the southern coast of Wales like a freight train, water slamming into the cliffs with enough force to crumble a hefty chunk of coastline, littering the shore with debris and stabbing the sand with trees hurled from the cliffs during the quakes.
The Marina was swarming with men and women dressed in yellow emergency vests, gripping black bin bags in gloved hands like an army of giant bees. A squad of local firefighters was tagging the bigger pieces of debris that were safe to have local lads on three wheelers haul to a central dumping site and from there on to the city waste yard.
Local schools had been closed for the rest of the week. There had been injuries, but no deaths, and most of the community was embracing the hard work ahead of them with a sense of humour and grace.
Most of them, that is, except Andy Davidson, who was trying to weave his police car in and out of the tides of people flowing up and down the ravaged Swansea streets. When Andy eventually pulled up outside the Coopers’ house, he was jittery and on edge and not looking forward to sharing his news.
‘Hey,’ he called to Jack and Rhys. The two of them were busy doing makeshift repairs to the fence. Jack was holding a plank in place while Rhys hammered it with his good arm. They glanced up as Andy approached. Jack noticed the blanched look on Andy’s face, and made a quick attempt to get Mary out of the way.
‘I could use a cup of that coffee, Mary,’ he said.
Gwen’s mother remained immune to his charm. ‘Well, Mister Captain Jack Harkness, you know where the pot is, because if this is about Gwen I’m hearing it same as you both.’ She folded her arms, pursed her lips and waited.
Andy looked from Jack to Rhys and then to Mary. He could hear Bonnie in his head: ‘Look them in the eye and serve them the news. How they take it isn’t up to you to control.’
‘Gwen’s gone,’ Andy blurted out.
‘What?’ said Rhys.
‘Gone where?’ said Mary, not quite grasping what she was hearing.
‘What happened?’ said Jack, grabbing the hammer from Rhys before he put it through a window or Andy.
‘It’s standard procedure when the emergency alert system goes off that all restrained patients have their restraints loosened – you know, in case they need to escape to a safe environment.’
‘So they just let her walk out of the bloody ward?’ asked Rhys.
‘Let him finish, Rhys,’ said Jack.
‘All the women in that ward were sedated when their restraints were removed. The doctor checked. The guards were changing shifts. They assumed because the women were asleep that they didn’t have to watch them so carefully. They claim they turned away for only a few minutes, when they checked the ward, the nurse was knocked out and Gwen was gone. The guard says it looked like she had pulled out her IV and must have been faking that she was getting her sedation.’
‘Did you check the CCTV footage?’ asked Jack.
‘We tracked her to the car park, and then nothing. She must have left during the tremors,’ said Andy. ‘I’ve got everyone on the lookout. We’ll find her.’
Jack and Rhys knew Gwen better than anyone in the world. In unison they said, ‘I doubt it.’
Mary whirled round to face Jack. ‘I wish she’d never bloody met you!’ she yelled.
She dashed inside the house, leaving Jack staring down at Anwen bumping his leg with her plastic trike.
38
THE MEDIA CLAMOUR had been growing for almost a week. By the time Dr Trimba Ormond of King’s College, London called an official WHO press conference about the increasingly frequent cases of female ‘insanity’, it was already too late.
A few physicians and a smattering of politicians and diplomats representing various global health institutes and NGOs gathered at the WHO’s London headquarters. They were talking anxiously among themselves, and generally avoiding any acknowledgement that they might once again be facing a global crisis. A few journalists were there, too, but most had decamped to South Wales in search of super geysers.
Two floors above the lecture hall, Dr Ormond sat in her bright but cramped office behind an overflowing desk, touching up her make-up while she finished a call.
‘I suppose the good thing is that there has been a learning curve of sorts,’ she said, powdering her thin nose. ‘We are certainly much better equipped to share resources and information among each other than we were a year ago.’
‘That may be the case,’ said the Health Secretary on the other end of the line. ‘These women might simply be experiencing a reaction to something they’ve come into contact with, or even some medication they’ve all shared. And, to be perfectly clear, I’m not dismissing the notion that this is simply mass hysteria among like-minded women. Let’s be honest, Dr Ormond, we’re not talking about a real health crisis, are we?’
Dr Ormond smarted at the minister’s remark and angrily snapped her powder case closed. As far as she was concerned, too many of her colleagues had been slow to respond to this crisis because it was happening only to women, and, worse, it was happening inside women’s heads. A far too scary place to inhabit if you listened to some of these men.
‘As you are well aware from my report, sir,’ she said, ‘we’ve so far found nothing in common among these females except that there’s never only one woman affected. Almost every cluster has at least five or six women in it. We have yet to trace only one woman in an area suffering from this mental illness alone.’
‘So perhaps that might suggest each cluster has something in common.’
Dr Ormond looked up at her assistant who had entered the office and was tapping his watch face. Three minutes until the press conference.
‘As you will also note in our report,’ said Dr Ormond impatiently, gathering the notes for her speech from her desk and sliding them into her leather portfolio, ‘each woman in each cluster that we’ve been able to identify has been thoroughly investigated and we have found no correlation in their symptoms and nothing at all in common in their backgrounds. We’ve tested their ground water and their major food supply, their oxygen levels and their blood types. We have nothing.’
‘But you will continue to investigate?’
‘Of course! But—’
Before she could finish her sentence, before she could present him with her plan to continue the investigation, the Health Secretary interrupted her and excused himself. From the speaker, Dr Ormond could hear a mumbled conversation, raised voices and then she heard chairs scraping. A new deeper, softer male voice came on the line. ‘Trimba, this is Alan Pride. May we speak frankly?’
She looked up at her assistant, who shrugged and rolled his eyes. Alan Pride was the PM’s right-hand man, his amanuensis, his conscience (such as it was) and, when necessary, his fall guy. Alan Pride was in his fifties, and a
man of one or two intriguing contradictions. Born to a coalmining family in the north of England, Pride had earned a scholarship to the London School of Economics, where he and the PM had become close friends. A Harvard MBA had been followed by rapid progress to the board of an international bank. When the market crashed, Pride stepped down. Admitting his own bank had been complicit in making bad loans, he testified in front of Parliament and the US Congress against many of his fellow bankers who, he believed, had shamed themselves and their profession. Selling his mansion in Connecticut, his pied-a-terre in Paris and his house in Kensington, he disappeared from the public eye for a few months. His appointment in Downing Street had caused a minor uproar in predictable sections of the press but, as usual, that hadn’t been enough to outweigh the support of the Party.
Was Pride a changed man or simply a man who’d changed his approach to power? Trimba Ormond hadn’t made up her mind. ‘What is it you’d like to ask, Mr Pride?’
‘Do you have a plan for what our local hospitals should do with these women who are… suffering? Because you know as well as I do that our mental health facilities are already stretched to capacity. Before you take any of this report to the public, I’d like to talk to you about some ideas I have on the matter.’
Dr Ormond sat back down at her desk. ‘With all due respect, Mr Pride, I have a press conference about to start. I think we need to share what we’ve discovered right now. Before things get worse.’
‘That’s not your call to make, Trimba. I’ll see you in my office tomorrow at 9 a.m.’
Dr Ormond slammed her portfolio onto the speaker, disconnecting the call. She instructed her assistant to cancel the press conference, but gave no indication if she was going to reschedule. The press would not be happy, and neither would her colleagues. She made a few edits on the press release, then handed it to her assistant.
‘How does that sound?’ she asked.
Her assistant read the release aloud. ‘While we, in collaboration with other national and regional organisations, have not yet uncovered the cause of this widespread outbreak of mental illness in women, we have determined that the number of cases has not increased dramatically. We must, however, remind all care-givers of suffering women that, although it seems not to be contagious, it can be life-threatening to its sufferers and to their loved ones. Therefore, until we can find a way to eliminate, or at the very least reduce the symptoms for these afflicted women, we and our health partners across the world are recommending that health professionals keep their patients sedated and under close supervision.’
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