SkyPoint

by Phil Ford

  For a moment, Ianto and the other two men didn’t move. When they found that they could, they still couldn’t speak.

  Ianto had seen strange, strange things. But somehow this was stranger than any. His mind felt momentarily overloaded.

  It was Simon that spoke first. ‘Am I going mad?’

  Andrew wrapped his arms around him and kissed him hard. ‘I don’t care. As long as I’m alive, I don’t care.’

  Simon touched Ianto’s sleeve. ‘Do you think he did that for us? Ryan. Did he save us?’

  Ianto didn’t know if Ryan had been a hero, or had just thrown himself after his wife, but he nodded.

  ‘He saved us,’ he said. ‘For now.’

  He looked at the ceiling and let that sink in with his two companions. It didn’t take long.

  ‘It’s going to come back, isn’t it?’ said Andrew.

  Ianto was matter-of-fact. ‘Probably. It knows we’re here.’

  ‘Canned meat,’ Simon observed.

  It made Ianto smile. ‘That’s right. We have to get out. Now, one of you give me a leg up.’

  There was a hatch in the roof. From his jacket, Ianto took a small torch and, stowing the automatic in his belt, he slid his foot into the stirrup of Simon’s interlocked hands and boosted himself through the inspection cover, and into the elevator shaft.

  He got himself up onto the elevator roof and turned on the torch. He’d never been on top of an elevator before and wasn’t sure of what he’d find. He wasn’t sure if he might find the wall-walker up there chowing down on Ryan Freeman. All he did find was an unimpressive and dirty lift shaft.

  He had hoped there might have been some sort of ladder on the wall. He had presumed that someone had to make inspections sometimes, but maybe they just rode the roof of the lift, or they abseiled down from the top of the shaft. Or maybe they just didn’t bother. Anyway, there was no ladder.

  ‘What can you see?’ Simon called from below.

  ‘Nothing encouraging,’ Ianto told him.

  That wasn’t entirely true: he could see a set of doors that would lead onto the next floor up. The problem was going to be how they got to them. He was pretty sure that he’d be able to prise them open, but the prospect of standing on thin air while he did that was the disheartening part.

  Ianto looked at his watch and wondered how long it would take the creature to digest Ryan, and then come back for more.

  And then he saw something to really worry him. The elevator was suspended on a cable. It was thick and would take a lot of weight and a lot of wear. But it looked like when Ianto had fired through the roof of the cabin a couple of his bullets had shorn through the cable.

  He could see it shredding slowly.

  If he needed confirmation, a dozen metal strands suddenly gave way and the elevator car lurched.

  He heard the men inside scream, and Ianto held on for grim life.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ he heard a terrified Simon yell.

  The car had fallen half a metre at most, but that only meant that there was another thirty or more metres yet for it to fall. And the cable was stretching and straining.

  The good news was that the fall had dropped the elevator alongside a set of doors that Ianto could reach from the roof. But the guys inside were going to have to climb up here to use them – and that meant a lot of clambering about. He wasn’t sure if the damaged, straining cable was going to be able to take it. But the only alternative was a long drop.

  Ianto looked at the slowly shearing cable and moved carefully, stretching down into the cabin to reach for Andrew’s hand while he told the two men what they were up against.

  ‘Sod it,’ said Simon. ‘Sometimes you just wish you’d stayed in bed.’

  Ianto hauled Andrew up first, and listened to the sound of the stretching metal fibres in the elevator cable as Andrew helped Simon. If the whole thing went, Ianto thought, it was going to be a toss-up which happened first – the car dropped and smashed them to bits eight or nine floors below; or the flying metal cable decapitated them.

  At least he had more of a choice of deaths than five minutes earlier.

  Ianto told Simon and Andrew to stay where they were. The less movement there was, the more time they might have. He crawled toward the partially exposed doors and tried to push them apart.

  They weren’t having it.

  Beneath him, he felt the elevator car groan, its weight pulling against the fraying metal threads of the cable.

  ‘Hurry up!’ he heard Andrew urging, his voice trembling.

  Ianto felt sorry for them. The closest these two had probably ever come to death was crossing the road at rush hour. Now, inside five minutes, they’d been nearly chewed up by something that came through the wall and the odds were they were going to end up smashed to pieces at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

  Get a move on!

  Ianto got his fingertips on the steel door edges and pulled, but being half-crouched on top of a lift car was far from the optimum position to really get his back into the job. He heard movement behind him and felt the elevator shift a little more. Simon and Andrew were alongside him now and without a word, all three men started to pull on the door.

  Ianto felt it start to give, and his fingers got a better purchase. Over his head, he heard the sound of another wire snapping in the cable.

  ‘Put your backs into it, boys!’ he growled, and strained against the doors.

  Beneath him he could feel the elevator car trembling against the weakening hold of the failing cable. They only had a few seconds…

  Push!

  And the doors slid apart, just a little – just enough.

  ‘Quickly, now,’ Ianto ordered, and Simon pushed Andrew through the doors. There was the sound of him tumbling to the floor in the darkness on the other side, then Simon went through.

  And that was when the cable snapped with the sound of a gunshot, and the elevator car fell from beneath Ianto’s feet. Instinctively, he threw out his hands and caught the edge of one of the doors.

  A moment later, he heard the elevator hit the bottom of the shaft with the sound of an express train hitting a mountain side. There was no explosion, but he felt a wave of oily air and dust brush past him. Then Simon and Andrew were hauling him between the doors and onto the thick pile carpet of the sixth floor.

  Ianto rolled over and the carpet felt as soft as meadow grass and the still air of the ghost-lit corridor as good as the fresh breeze of a summer’s day.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Owen had made two charges. The ingredients were tightly packed into a couple of small pickle jars that he’d found in Marion Blake’s fridge. He’d punctured their lids with a corkscrew and used some twine he’d found in another drawer as a couple of fuses. He wasn’t sure what she ordinarily used the twine for but figured that of all the SkyPoint residents that could have ignored the fire alarm, he was glad that it had been an S&M call girl. As he set the makeshift explosives aside on Marion’s kitchen work surface, he caught the face of his watch, and couldn’t quite believe that a part of him was actually wondering if he was still going to have time to go looking for the man-munching twins from Constantine’s coffee shop.

  Hey, what else was a guy who didn’t sleep going to do once he’d got the Lloyds and Mistress Marion to safety, then made it up to the penthouse and kicked Lucca’s arse into a twenty-five storey freefall?

  It had taken him half an hour to mix the chemicals. You had to be careful around explosives, especially the homemade variety. There was a reason so many terrorists had only one eye or used hooks for hands. Owen hadn’t wanted to blow his face off. A talking corpse was one thing – you could get away with that – but a talking skull? That was going to make people take a second look in any light.

  ‘Are you finished?’

  It was Marion. She had used the time to shed her work clothes. She hadn’t quite gone back to the Mary Whitehouse look, but they wouldn’t have thrown her out of church, either. She was curled up on the sofa
at what she clearly hoped was a safe distance.

  Owen noticed that they were alone. ‘What happened to Alison and her mum?’

  Marion cocked her thumb towards her bedroom. ‘I think Wendy took Alison to lie down. It looked like you were going to be a while.’

  Just as likely, they were under the bed in there in case the madman with the busted hand blew them all to hell, he thought.

  ‘What about Ewan?’

  ‘He hasn’t come out of the loo yet.’

  Owen didn’t feel his blood chill, but he felt distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. I’m telling you, if he’s made a mess in there…’

  He had heard Wendy tell her about what was supposed to be stalking SkyPoint. If the significance of something coming through walls at people and Ewan not having shown after half an hour in the bathroom hadn’t clicked with Marion, Owen wondered if he should be checking her over for signs of something nasty as a result of her profession.

  He got up and walked towards the bathroom, dreading what he might find there. He rapped on the door, and called out Ewan’s name.

  ‘Yeah – yeah, I’m coming!’

  Owen felt the tension fall off him like a heavy coat. ‘OK, well hurry up. We need to get moving. And I need to splint up that ankle first.’

  The bathroom door opened and Ewan stood in the doorway, his injured ankle held slightly off the ground. His shirt was damp down the front. Owen guessed that he must have been sick after all. He certainly didn’t look any better, his face was pale and shone with sweat, and his eyes were red-rimmed, like he’d been crying, and wouldn’t stop moving. This was a guy that was very close to the edge.

  ‘Here, let me give you a hand,’ said Owen, and he put one arm across his shoulders and helped Ewan as best he could back through to the lounge.

  As they went, Owen spoke to him gently. It was the kind of voice he had used a lifetime ago sitting next to nervous patients in ward beds. ‘Take it easy, Ewan. Everything’s going to be all right, I promise. I’m going to get you and your family out of here. Believe me, we do this sort of thing all the time.’

  They reached the couch, and Owen let him down gently. Ewan didn’t look all that comforted.

  Owen glanced up at Marion. ‘Have you got any painkillers around? Paracetamol? Hash? I think he could use something.’

  ‘I think I can find something,’ she said hesitantly and left the lounge to go get it.

  Owen gave Ewan a playful wink. ‘Let’s hope she finds the good stuff.’

  Then he picked up the two whips, moved back across to the kitchen and selected a knife from the rack she had fitted there. He could have performed surgery with them. All he needed to do was separate the whips from their handles. The knife he chose did the job easily. He took the handles and the whips back to Ewan and started to bind the handles into place with the first of the whips.

  ‘This is going to hurt a bit,’ he warned.

  Ewan said nothing.

  The next thing Owen knew was that Ewan had the other whip around his throat and was pulling it tight. Very tight.

  The immediate thought that shot through Owen’s mind was that generally since he had been reanimated as a walking, talking corpse the advantages of his condition were comprehensively outnumbered on a day-to-day basis by the ball-crushing downsides. Right now, though, a real bonus was the fact that he no longer needed to breathe – which meant that any attempt to strangle him was going to be pretty futile.

  Briefly, he thought about just waiting it out – it wouldn’t take too long before Ewan got bored or, in his condition, exhausted. Then Owen thought about his neck and how – whether Ewan meant it or not – snapping it would be all too easy. And if Owen had to be a living corpse, he’d rather be part of the walking-dead rather a quadriplegic cadaver for the rest of his unnatural life.

  So he fought back hard, and broke Ewan’s nose with his head.

  Noses are pretty easy to break, and there wasn’t much in Ewan’s that was going to do Owen any harm. A broken nose also hurt like hell and, as Owen expected, Ewan gave up on throttling him pretty fast.

  Owen just wished he’d had a gun to push into Ewan’s bloody face when he turned on him and demanded to know what the hell was going on.

  The blood from Ewan’s smashed nose was mixed with tears as he shuddered with grief and shame, and tried to protect himself with hands that shook like fragile leaves.

  ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ he wailed.

  Owen grabbed the other man’s shirt front, and would have made a fist to threaten him with – only he remembered that hand was busted and bandaged.

  ‘You’re sorry?’

  ‘He told me he would get Wendy and Alison out if I killed you!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lucca! Besnik Lucca! I work for him, God help me! I’m an accountant, not a killer! I couldn’t – I couldn’t have done it! But he said—’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him? When?’

  Ewan pulled the mobile phone from his trouser pocket. ‘In the bathroom.’

  Owen grabbed the phone and saw Lucca’s number. His mind raced. There had to be a way he could use this.

  Then Wendy burst into the lounge and screamed.

  Alison had gone.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The darkest time in Toshiko Sato’s life had been the months she had spent in the UNIT cell. There had been no real bed, the toilet had been little more than a hole in the ground, and the food had been some tasteless gruel that had been nutritionally designed to do no more than keep her alive. But the worst part was that she had no hope. No one knew she was there and no one there was interested in her account of why she had stolen the plans for the sonic modulator. She had believed that she would die there.

  But Jack had rescued her then and, as she sat bound to the chair in Besnik Lucca’s sumptuous penthouse, she knew that he and the others would do everything they could to do so again. The difference was that back then Jack had been in control. He had had the influence to walk into that UNIT incarceration facility and spring her to work for him. At SkyPoint, Lucca was the man in charge. That meant Jack might need some help.

  Lucca’s men had secured her to the chair with plastic cable-ties. They were the same things that the military used to detain prisoners. Thin strips of tough plastic that were less bulky to carry than handcuffs, and did the job better. Once they were tightened up, the only way they could be released was with a knife, and if you struggled against them they cut into your flesh. Lucca’s men were used to this sort of thing – they had secured each of her arms to the chair at her wrist and with another cable-tie over her forearm. Her ankles had also been cable-tied to the chair legs. Like this, she wasn’t going anywhere; wasn’t going to be any help to the others at all.

  The one thing that they couldn’t tie up, however, was her mind. And that was all she needed to try and get free.

  Lucca and his goons seemed to have lost all interest in her lately – which had been a relief. Lucca had become absorbed in watching the progress of his game on the floors below him. He had brought the images up on the huge television set in the lounge and now lay sprawled on the couch with a remote control flicking between the hidden cameras. But for the glass of champagne in his other hand and the opulent surroundings, he would have looked like just about any other late-night channel grazer looking for something on TV to get them through their insomnia.

  He had howled with delight when he saw Gwen demolish the door to the stairs with a hail of bullets, and he had hissed with pantomime fury when Ianto had survived the crashing elevator. But he was completely relaxed, Toshiko noted, utterly confident of his invulnerability – both from the Torchwood team and whatever was also out there stalking the building’s occupants.

  Besnik Lucca was, without doubt, a psychopath. He was a man without conscience, whose only drive was personal gratification without any care for the cost to others. A man whose narcissism was such that he believed he was bett
er than anyone, more beautiful, more powerful and – quite definitely – unassailable by anything, even a creature that could walk through walls and reduce you to a pile of cellular crap.

  To put it another way, he was mad.

  Maybe that could work for her.

  The two henchmen had disappeared from the apartment – maybe they were out in the roof garden, smoking. As long as they weren’t in Lucca’s small control room.

  That was where he had gone when he turned the power off to the rest of the building. That was where she was going to have to get to, to turn it back on.

  They would come after her, of course. But as long as they didn’t get to her for just a couple of minutes… that was all it would take for Jack to realise that the power was back on and to take an elevator to the penthouse floor. Lucca wouldn’t open the doors – as he hadn’t for her until she surrendered her gun – but that wouldn’t be a problem for Jack. He had a gadget that would pop the lock on the elevator as easily as cracking a bottle of beer.

  A couple of minutes, maybe less.

  Toshiko started to rock the chair. It was big and heavy, an industrial steel frame with a leather seat and back. Stylish, but also somehow a bit like something from a torture chamber. She was only small – it took her a while to work up the momentum to get the chair moving.

  Lucca looked away from the TV as she crashed heavily to the floor. He stood up, frowning, and moved slowly towards her. Toshiko watched him come closer, one side of her body hurting with the impact.

  Lucca started to shake his head, pitifully. ‘Whatever are you trying to do, Toshiko?’

  Toshiko grunted something behind the gag in her mouth, and struggled against the cable-ties. It was just for effect, but it hurt like hell, all the same.

  Lucca took the chair and set it straight. He did it easily. He was a strong man.