by Phil Ford
He looked around the room again, then got down on his hands and knees and saw what he was looking for. Under the bed, the cover to the air duct had been removed. The duct was small, but not too small for a six-year-old child and her rag doll pixie.
Owen felt a thrill of excitement burst through his body and he shoved the bed away from the wall and pushed his head into the duct. He couldn’t see a thing in there – it was pitch black. Fleetingly he wondered what the hell Alison found so fascinating in a claustrophobic black hole like this after where she had been. But her mother had already told him that she used SkyPoint’s ducting like her own private travelator.
He called into the ducting: ‘Alison! Alison, are you there!’
His own voice came back at him. But nothing else.
He heard someone behind him and turned to see Wendy in the doorway. Her face was tear-stained, but he recognised renewed hope there, as well.
‘I think she and Mr Pickle just went for a look around the pixie tunnels again,’ he said, getting to his feet.
As he did so, Wendy lunged towards the ventilator and called her daughter’s name as he had. There was still no reply. She tried again, this time screaming, angry and desperate; ‘Alison! Alison, come back here, now!’
Owen took her by the shoulders and eased her away from the duct. ‘It’s OK, Wendy. We can find her. She’s still alive, that’s the main thing.’
She was crying again. He felt her body shaking against his and he put his arms around her.
‘Where do you think she’ll go? Back to your apartment? Her bedroom, maybe?’
Wendy shook her head, trying to calm herself down and think straight for the sake of her little girl.
‘Maybe. Maybe,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. Or there’s the SkyPark.’
The indoor garden area where she had been reading the story of Rapunzel to Mr Pickle.
‘OK,’ Owen said. ‘Stay here with Ewan and Marion. I’m going to go and find her. Don’t worry, she’ll be safe with me.’
But as he got up, Wendy caught his hand. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have to come with you.’
Owen thought about telling her that she couldn’t; that there was something out there that came at you through walls and turned you into jelly shit. But she knew most of that already, and she was going to be no safer in the flat with Marion and Ewan than she was looking for her daughter.
‘OK, then,’ he said. ‘But do exactly as I say. And when I say it.’
She nodded and Owen took her into the lounge and let her tell Ewan and Marion what had happened, while he found a bag that he could sling over his shoulder. Into it he put the two charges, a gas kitchen lighter, and one of Marion’s big knives wrapped in a tea towel to save stabbing himself. He then slipped Ewan’s mobile into the back pocket of his jeans. Maybe a direct line to the madman on the top floor would come in useful. He also found a torch.
‘Come on,’ he told Wendy. ‘We ought to get going.’
She nodded and joined him at the door.
‘Owen.’
He saw that it was Ewan. His broken nose had stopped bleeding, but he hadn’t wiped away any of the mess.
‘Please find my daughter,’ he said.
‘Take the painkillers,’ Owen told him. ‘We’ll be back as soon as we can.’
And he led Wendy out of the apartment and towards the stairs. He tried the door first, in case it wasn’t locked. But it was. He took out the first of his charges, set it by the door and told Wendy to take cover further down the corridor before he lit the twine fuse with the kitchen lighter. The twine burned with a fast yellow flame and Owen ran.
He knew the chemistry of bomb building, but he had never had to employ it before – Torchwood tended to be a more professional and high-tech in its approach to blowing things up. Nor were a teaspoon and a set of kitchen scales any sensible replacement for the precision of lab equipment. He knew the bomb would work, he just wasn’t sure if it would take out the door – or the wall with it.
The explosion caught Owen halfway along the passageway and threw him off his feet. He rolled towards the wall at the far end. He managed to stop himself and lay there for a moment, not daring to raise his head in case his body lifted up without it.
Wendy had taken cover in a doorway, and the percussion of the blast had thrown him clear past her. He heard her crawling towards him through the dust and murk of the emergency lights.
‘Are you all right?’ she demanded, her eyes wide with fright.
‘Do I look all right?’ he asked her without moving, pleased that at least his vocal cords were working, which suggested his head was still attached to his neck. Beyond that, it was anybody’s guess.
‘Well, you’re still alive,’ she said, trying for a smile.
‘Yeah,’ said Owen, and sat up straight. He brought his hands up in front of him – one was still mangled, the other looked OK. At least they both remained attached. And he found that he could still stand. And his head was facing the right way.
‘Well, seeing as we’re still in business, let’s take a look, shall we?’
He picked up his bag of goodies and walked towards the stairway. The door was a smoking, shattered skeleton. The steps ran into darkness beyond them. Owen turned on the torch and led Wendy after him.
It didn’t take them long to reach the thirteenth floor, and Owen saw that Jack and Gwen had found their own way of getting through a locked door. It made him ache for his own gun. He doubted that 10mm shells would be much protection against the thing that he had seen come through the wall, but there was also a psychopath living on the top floor who probably had a bunch of knuckle-draggers doing his work for him. Owen had an uncomfortable feeling that they could be hanging around SkyPoint, too. If Lucca was treating Torchwood’s interest as a test of his defences then why wouldn’t he also despatch some tooled-up muscle into the arena? That was why he had taken Marion’s carving knife with him, but his modified Glock was going to be a lot handier in a fire-fight.
They reached the Lloyds’ apartment, and Wendy opened the door. Everything was dark in there as she slipped in and called out for her daughter.
There was no answer. Owen knew that if she wasn’t there they only had the SkyPark to bet on. After that, this was a very big building in the dark.
‘Alison, baby? It’s Mummy.’
The apartment lay mausoleum-silent before them. Owen saw Wendy’s shoulders fall with disappointment. He followed her as she made for Alison’s bedroom and threw open the door in there. He played the flashlight across the room, lighting up posters of cartoon characters and some girl band that he didn’t know. They had long legs, though. There were stuffed toys everywhere, but no sign of Alison.
Wendy went to the air vent and checked it, thinking that perhaps Alison had been there and gone again. But the cover was shut tightly. She sat heavily on the bed and grabbed one of the cuddly toys that lay on it. He watched as she buried her face in its fur and breathed the smell of her daughter that remained on it, and cried. Owen left her to her moment of pain. They needed to be moving on, but she would only slow him down until she recovered. He looked at the soft toys that were everywhere in the room. Some of them had been in movies when he’d been a kid. He picked one up and studied it nostalgically. None of them looked as well used as the pixie doll he’d seen her with.
‘Looks like Mr Pickle is her favourite,’ he said, for no particular reason.
Wendy nodded, and started to get her emotions under control again. She wiped her eyes with the heels of her palms. ‘She takes him everywhere.’
‘He looks kind of well-used,’ he said. ‘Funny how you can buy kids all these toys and they still stick with a battered old teddy with one eye, or something.’
‘Do you have children?’ Wendy asked him.
Owen shook his head and put the soft toy down. ‘No.’
‘Well, maybe one day.’
Owen said nothing, but she saw the muscles tighten in his jaw and she knew that she had stumbled into
badlands. Quickly, she said, ‘That bloody Mr Pickle, he’s probably crawling with germs.’
‘He looks like he’s been around a bit. Was he yours?’
‘Mine? God no. He turned up at the hospital after she came out of intensive care. They had a toybox or something there on the children’s ward. She must have got him out of that. When it was time to go home she wouldn’t leave him behind.
‘I suppose she thinks he helped her get better. Who knows, maybe he did?’
She got up off the bed and moved through into the lounge. Owen followed a moment later, and found her frozen to the spot, her eyes on the ceiling above her. He didn’t need to throw the torchlight on it – he could already see the strange lights glowing within its bulging, rippling mass.
Owen’s eyes measured the distance to the open apartment door, and wondered if he could tell Wendy to run for it. If she made it, why wouldn’t the thing just go after her anyway? Whatever this was, nothing impeded it – it blew straight through molecular structures like a hurricane. There was no escape.
There was only one thing he could do.
‘Wendy, get down!’
And even as he yelled, he was throwing himself at her – as the thing on the ceiling lurched downwards.
Instinctively, Wendy curled into a foetal ball, and Owen wrapped himself around her, covering her smaller body with his own, as he felt the slimy wetness of the thing that had come through the ceiling covering him.
Not only covering him, probing him. He could feel it inside him, seeping through his flesh, exploring his body, caressing his organs as if with cold, slimy fingers. He could feel it tasting him, and he felt a wave of nausea pass through him. He had felt this before, he remembered, the sensation of molecular invasion that had savaged his body and thrown him into unconsciousness.
Desperate, he fought off the darkness that threatened to sweep through his mind. He couldn’t black out now. Because this time he knew it was different – it wasn’t after him; it knew he was no good to it. It was trying to get through him, to pass through his body the way it passed through brick and steel to get to the woman beneath him. The only barrier that was stopping it was Owen’s dead flesh and maybe – just maybe – his cellular corruption would poison it before it got to her.
He cried out with disgust and with a pain he had thought he would never feel again as the thing filled him, and his brain screamed for release, pleaded for the darkness that would save his sanity.
And Owen felt it in his head, felt its tentacles wrapping around the cells of his brain, squeezing them, bursting them.
And he thought he heard its voice.
Mummy!
Then it was gone.
Owen felt it leave his body like a sudden cold shudder.
Somebody just walked over my grave.
Yeah, he thought, you wish!
It was gone.
But he lay there a moment, conscious of Wendy beneath him, still curled into a ball, still breathing, and still there.
He rolled off her, his eyes searching the gloom for those strange lights. But there were none.
‘What – what happened?’ asked Wendy, her brain struggling for the moment to accept that she was still alive.
‘Why didn’t it kill us?’
Owen got to his feet and offered her his good hand. ‘Sometimes it’s better not to ask too many questions.’
He helped Wendy to her feet and told her that they had to go, wondering how the hell he was going to do what he knew lay ahead.
They left the apartment.
Lucca saw them go.
TWENTY-SIX
One day, when he’d had time on his hands, Jack had tried to work out how many times he had died. He actually sat down in his office with a block of paper and a couple of pens and wrote a neat 1 in the margin and alongside it he wrote Dalek.
That had been how it all started. After that there had been endless bar-room brawls – they had even killed him at Torchwood back in the early days – and at one time he’d worked in a travelling show billed as The Man Who Cannot Die. OK, people had paid to kill him then, but he figured that even if it bought him a few beers at the end of the day, when you got down to it a death was a death.
Then Torchwood had discovered that they had a problem with alien sleeper agents and the whole city started going up in smoke, and Jack lost the list and never got around to starting it again. The score was somewhere around a couple of hundred, by then. But he hadn’t even started on the trenches in Flanders.
He was sure he had already forgotten some of them – unlike his lovers; he remembered all of them (every sex and species) – the one thing he never forgot, however, was how it felt to come back to life.
Like being dragged over broken glass.
It never got any better, and he never got used to it. It felt as bad as ever as he found himself lying on the concrete floor of the stairwell just outside the SkyPark.
Gwen was kneeling over him. She had seen him die so many times, but she never got used to it. A part of her never fully expected him to return to life.
This time, they had reached the twenty-fourth floor, had got through the stairway doors and had found themselves facing another door. Gwen had told him that, according to the plans on her hand-held module, this was an indoor skyrise park area.
Jack had smiled. ‘What a lovely day for a walk in the park.’
He had gone to push the door open and as soon as he had touched it, he’d been hit by enough volts to light up Cardiff Arms Park.
‘I thought there was supposed to be a power cut around here,’ he said as the feeling returned to his extremities and Gwen helped him up again.
‘The door’s electrified,’ she said.
‘No kidding?’
Jack was waving his hands in the air; his fingers still tingled from their contact with the door.
‘Another of Lucca’s defences.’
‘Looks like.’
‘So what do we do? With the lifts not working, there’s no other way in.’
Jack was flexing his muscles, limbering up like a runner.
‘We don’t need another way in,’ he said.
Gwen couldn’t believe what he was suggesting. ‘Jack that’s madness.’
‘Hey, immortality is all about getting a buzz out of life.’
‘Jack—’
‘Just get though fast and don’t touch me. OK? Oh, and don’t look. I might turn a bit… crispy. And you might try and hold your breath.’
Before Gwen could waste any more time arguing, Jack lunged at the door, throwing it open with the weight and momentum of his body even as the electricity hit him and surged through him.
Gwen leaped through the open doorway and then turned back, watching in horror as Jack – already dead – clung to the door, his flesh starting to cook, his eyes boiling in his head.
It didn’t matter that she knew he was going to be all right…
She turned away, biting down on her hand. It was the only way to stop the scream that was clawing at her throat.
Behind her, she heard his body fall to the floor and the door swing to behind him. She found that she couldn’t turn around. She couldn’t bear to look at him like that.
She had seen him die so many times… but never like that.
She lost track of how long she stood there, her back to his body, waiting for him to stir.
When he touched her shoulder, she jumped.
‘I told you not to look,’ he said with a smile, and that old twinkle in his eyes.
His eyes. Thank God, he had eyes.
He saw her staring, wordless, and Jack felt a coldness close around his heart.
He ran a finger down the side of his face. ‘Hey, everything is all right, isn’t it?’
Gwen nodded smiling. ‘Oh, yes. Perfect.’
All the same, Jack took his torch and checked his reflection carefully in one of the big SkyPark windows.
‘Don’t do that to me,’ he said.
Together, they mo
ved across the park as Gwen consulted the schematics on her small computer screen. They were looking at the outside of SkyPoint again, and Jack was running his eyes over the windows. He didn’t want to choose the wrong one.
‘Jack, are you sure this is going to work?’
He pointed at the electrified door. ‘There’s only one other way out of here, Gwen, and I am done cooking for today.’
There was a lightning conductor that ran down from the bottom end of Besnik Lucca’s roof garden. Jack’s plan was to climb it into the garden and launch a one-man assault on the penthouse from there. That in itself, at over sixty metres in the air, was a risky plan. Additionally, to get to the conductor, Jack would have to go out through one of the windows on the twenty-fourth floor and traverse half the SkyPoint building to reach it using a ledge only fifteen centimetres wide.
He was fairly confident that, however unassailable Lucca considered his sanctuary, he wouldn’t see an attack coming from the bottom of his garden.
‘Don’t worry,’ he told Gwen. ‘I’m good with heights.’
Then he drew the Webley, took careful aim and put out the window with four shots. The glass shattered and fell into the night. Jack hoped no one was standing down there tonight – that was the second window that he’d put out.
The wind whipped at his coat as he took a look out through the window and reloaded the gun. Gwen watched him fill the cylinder. Six shells. Then he pushed the Webley back into its holster and slipped the air force greatcoat off and handed it to Gwen.
‘Keep this for me, will you? Batman looks great with that flapping cloak of his, but I don’t think he ever gets this close to the edge.’
He stepped up onto the ledge and got ready to head along it.
‘Which way is it, again?’ he joked.
