Torchwood: Slow Decay

by Andy Lane

  ‘And is that what’s going to happen to me?’ She was trying to be offhand, but he could hear the catch in her voice. ‘What’s the mortality rate? Isn’t that what you call it – “mortality rate”?’

  Almost involuntarily, his right hand reached out as if to take hers and squeeze it reassuringly, but all it encountered was smooth, cold glass. After a moment there was a small thud as something hit the glass on the other side. Her hand, seeking his.

  ‘I won’t let you die,’ he said.

  ‘You didn’t answer the question.’

  ‘We just don’t know. In the jungle—’

  Did they have jungle in South America? Or was it pampas? What the hell was pampas, anyway?

  ‘—In the jungle, half the people who catch it die. But we’ve got you under observation, and we can treat it with antibiotics and stuff. I won’t let you die.’

  ‘You’ve got me isolated. It must be very contagious.’

  ‘We have to take precautions.’

  ‘You haven’t even given me any antibiotics. You’ve just left me here, waiting.’

  ‘The tests. We’re looking at the results of the tests. Then we can treat the disease.’

  Perhaps, he wondered, he could give her an injection. Just distilled water, but he could tell her it was an antibiotic. It might help her cope.

  ‘I wish I could see my family,’ Marianne said wistfully. ‘They could just stand the other side of the glass, couldn’t they?’

  Owen knew that he shouldn’t be talking to her this way, but he couldn’t help himself. Jack would have told him to just leave her alone – do whatever tests were necessary and not engage in conversation – but he couldn’t do that. Unlike most of the people and the things that had ended up in the cells, she didn’t know what was happening to her. She needed reassurance.

  She needed a friend.

  ‘They’ve been notified,’ Owen told her, ‘but they’ve got to stay away. We’re paid to take risks, here. They’re not.’

  ‘Could I write them a letter?’

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Beneath the thin layer of chirpiness she put on, there was a deep chasm of vulnerability and fear. And he wasn’t sure whether he was making things worse or better. ‘Too risky. We’d have to spray the letter with antibiotics and stuff, to kill any bacteria, and the words’d just smudge and run off. It wouldn’t look pretty.’

  ‘Neither will I, if this goes on for much longer. I can’t wash, I can’t take a bath, and I haven’t got a change of clothes.’

  ‘Clothes we can find,’ Owen said quickly. ‘And I can probably get a bowl of hot water and some soap as well. If it’s any consolation, you still look great.’

  ‘Thanks. I bet you say that to all the dying girls in your care.’

  ‘Only the beautiful ones.’

  ‘Actually, some hot water would be nice. I must smell awful.’ She paused. ‘Talking of which, there’s a really crappy smell in this place, and it’s not me. It smells like the elephant house at the zoo. You know – that smell you get from things that eat hay all the time and then let it fester.’

  It was probably the Weevil at the other end of the block, Owen thought, but he couldn’t tell her that. ‘It’s the drains. This area of the… hospital… hasn’t been used for a while. There’s probably all kinds of stuff down there. I’ll get someone to take a look at them.’

  ‘At the very least you could get an air freshener.’

  ‘Consider it done.’

  ‘Thanks, Owen.’

  He felt a shiver run through him at the sound of his name, said in her soft Welsh lilt. There was something almost erotic in talking to her and yet not seeing her. If they’d been face to face in a bar then he would have been touching her arm by now, gazing into her eyes, smiling, looking away and then looking back. But now, like this, it was like talking on the phone, but with the added frisson that she was only a few inches away from him. Close enough that he could hear her breathe; feel the glass vibrate if she shifted position.

  ‘Owen,’ she said, ‘can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Nothing’s stopped you yet.’

  ‘Is there someone else down here with me? Someone else in isolation?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘Never answer a question with another question,’ she said, a laugh in her voice; ‘it sounds evasive. I thought I heard someone moving around. I tried talking to them, but they didn’t answer.’

  Marianne was at one end of the block of cells; the Weevil was at the other. ‘You probably heard a nurse moving around,’ he said, putting as much sincerity into his voice as he could. And Owen was the past master at faking sincerity.

  ‘You’re lying to me. I think there is someone there. I think they’ve got the same thing as I have, this Tapanuli fever. And I reckon they’re even further gone than I am. Is that what I can look forward to: losing the ability to talk, just shuffling around in this awful place until I die? Is that what it’s come to?’

  ‘I won’t let that happen, Marianne.’

  ‘How can you stop it?’ Her voice sounded muffled.

  ‘I don’t know yet, but I will. I promise, I will.’

  He turned to face her, twisting around on the flagstones, but Marianne still had her back to him. Her face was buried in her hands, and her shoulders were shaking with the effort of holding back the tears.

  Grangetown was the opposite of an up-and-coming area. It was down-and-going, if that meant anything. Gwen had spent a lot of time there when she was in the police – raiding houses, breaking up family feuds, making door-to-door inquiries – and the place still made her feel like someone was watching her, all the time. All the vegetation – the trees, the bushes, the flowers in the gardens – looked dry and faded. Desperation and curdled anger seemed to seep from the drains and the gutters. The place had a kind of leaden gravitational pull that made it easy to get in and much harder to get out again.

  Gwen was sure that when she’d first arrived, parking her car around the corner and walking into the road she wanted, hands in pockets and looking casual, the first person she saw reached for a mobile phone. Maybe she was imagining things, but she could almost feel the invisible web of warnings fanning out from that one person: watch out, there’s a stranger in the street. Might be the police.

  The flat that Lucy shared with her junkie boyfriend was about halfway along the street. Gwen paused by the gate and looked at the outside. The curtains were drawn. One window was cracked. The house had been converted into flats: the hall appeared to have been divided, and there were two doors, one that presumably led to the ground floor and the other giving access to the stairs up to the first floor. Paint was peeling off both doors, and weeds formed a border along the junction between the concrete of the front garden and the walls and the front step.

  She rang the bell for the right-hand door. Judging by the fact that the house to the left had its door next to this one, the stairs were on the left of the hall, meaning that the right-hand door gave access to the ground floor, where Lucy lived. She was there looking for Lucy, and if she just opened the door it would make Gwen’s job easier. Alternatively, if her boyfriend opened the door it would save Gwen the trouble of having to break in.

  Breaking and entering. How had it come to this? If there was one thing they had drummed into her in the police force it was that in order to enforce the law they had to uphold it. By committing minor infringements – illegal entry, planting evidence, forcing a suspect to confess to something they hadn’t done – all the police did was to abandon the moral high ground. It didn’t matter that they were doing it in the name of the greater good; by doing it, they subverted the greater good. They became criminals arresting criminals, which turned the whole thing into a glorified gang war.

  And yet here she was, just about to break into someone’s house, with a gun tucked into the waistband of her trousers. Prepared to do anything – even kill, if it was necessary in order to preserve her own life – and
all in the name of the greater good. All in the name of saving the human race from the dark things that hid in the darkness, waiting for their chance to get in.

  She shivered. What was it about Grangetown that made her suddenly feel dirty and old?

  She rang the bell again, but there was no answer. Slipping her hand in her pocket, she took out a Leatherman, a multi-purpose folding tool that one of her police colleagues had introduced her to. The thinking person’s Swiss Army Knife, he had called it. Quickly she folded out a flat knife blade. Making it look as if she was putting a key into the Yale lock then, blocking her hand with her body, she slipped the blade into the gap between the door and the jamb and, while she levered the blade, she used her shoulder to apply pressure to the door. Most locks only engaged for a few millimetres or so, due to clumsy fitting, and some pressure in the right place could just ease the cam of the lock away from the housing.

  And it worked. The door gave under her shoulder, and she quickly eased her fingers around the wood as it moved, trying to ensure that it didn’t suddenly fly in, banging on the wall.

  Gwen moved into the shadowed hall and closed the door behind her, partly so she didn’t alert anyone in the house to her presence, partly so she didn’t alert anyone in the street to something unusual, and partly so her eyes could adjust more quickly to the darkness.

  The first thing that struck her was the smell. Dirty washing, dirty plates, and something else. Sour metal. That very particular smell of blood.

  She eased the Glock 17 from her waistband and held it high, pointed at the ceiling, safety clicked to off. Ready for anything.

  Gwen entered the front room first, easing herself around the half-open door, alert for movement. There was nothing. The room was empty; bare floorboards, a sofa that had seen better days, DVD cases and discs scattered around the floor, and a surprisingly large HDTV set with full audio-visual set-up. Including speakers by the TV itself and on either side of the sofa. Her police training told her that it had probably been nicked; her knowledge of Lucy told her that the girl probably bought expensive toys for her boyfriend with her wages, which he eventually got around to selling to fund his drug habit. Cruel, but she’d seen it so often before.

  After checking behind the door, she moved back into the hall. The kitchen was straight ahead, and she could see its length from where she stood. Piles of plates, crockery, cutlery, pans, all waiting to be washed. Several tinfoil takeaway containers with sauces of various kinds dried into them. No people.

  The cupboard doors stood open, and there were packets of rice and biscuits on their sides, sticking out into the kitchen. Someone had been ransacking the place, looking for something. Looking for food, perhaps.

  The door to the back room was closed, and she pushed it open with her gun.

  The smell of blood – dryness, rust and sourness – intensified.

  The body of Lucy’s boyfriend was slumped across the bed in the back room. He was naked. His throat had been ripped out: blood had fountained across the ceiling, the bedspread and the wall behind the head of the bed. Chunks of flesh had been torn from his shoulders, his chest and his arms. His head was turned away but, judging by the blood that stained his cheeks, his eyes had been pulled out of his head.

  Or sucked out.

  Sucked out and eaten.

  Gwen moved into the room, still alert for any movement but aware that she was probably too late. It looked as if Lucy had already had her snack.

  The duvet had twisted about his lower half, probably as he fought to get away from his attacker, but there was a pool of glutinous blood congealing in its folds. Gwen had no desire to check, but she was pretty sure that his genitalia had been ripped away and swallowed whole. She only hoped he’d been dead when it happened. Junkie or not, nobody deserved that kind of death. Especially at the hands of their girlfriends.

  Bile rose in Gwen’s throat, bitter and acid, at the thought that this might have been Rhys. She might have returned from Torchwood to find him like this. On their bed. Twisted up in their duvet. Half-eaten.

  ‘He tasted strange.’

  The voice came from behind her. Gwen cursed, even as she turned and brought the gun up.

  Lucy was standing behind the door. She stepped forward, the door starting to close as her body pushed past it. It was difficult to tell where the blood stopped and her clothes began. Her mouth and chin was smeared with it. Under other circumstances, Gwen might have thought she was vomiting the stuff, but she knew different. The blood wasn’t Lucy’s.

  ‘It must have been the drugs,’ Lucy went on. ‘The heroin. It made him taste strange. Bitter, and a bit tingly.’ She paused, and seemed to take in Gwen, and the gun, for the first time. ‘How’s Rhys?’ she asked brightly. ‘I hope he’s OK.’

  THIRTEEN

  Gwen stared at Lucy.

  The girl’s eyes were wide, pupils surrounded by whites on all sides. She was licking her lips convulsively.

  ‘I was looking for you,’ Gwen said cautiously.

  ‘That’s good,’ Lucy said. ‘I was hoping someone would come. I thought it might be Rhys, but I was hoping it was you.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve already tasted Rhys. He’s kind of spicy. Must be the amount of Indian food he eats. But I haven’t tried you yet. I wonder what you taste of.’

  Gwen brought her gun up in both hands, arms bent at the elbow, knees slightly bent as well, ready to absorb the recoil if she had to fire the gun. Classic shooter’s pose, as taught to her not by the Cardiff police force, who had never armed her in eight years of duty, but by Jack, who had within three days.

  ‘Cordite,’ she said. ‘I taste of cordite. Want to try some?’

  ‘I’ll skip the starter,’ Lucy said, ‘and go straight for the throat.’

  She moved forward, and before Gwen could even think about pulling the trigger Lucy’s left hand was knocking the gun away while her right hand gripped Gwen’s jaw and wrenched it viciously to one side. Gwen’s fingers tightened convulsively; the gun fired into the ceiling with a deafening blast. Plaster and fragments of wood fell around them. Lucy’s forefinger and thumb were pressing deep into her flesh, bruising the bone, while the rest of her fingers were embedded deep in Gwen’s windpipe. Somewhere in there, the carotid artery was faltering and spluttering, and Gwen’s vision grew darker, as if something had parked in front of the window, cutting out the light from the street.

  With her last shreds of strength, she brought the gun down on Lucy’s head once, twice, and felt the girl’s grip falter. She brought both arms down to her waist, thrust them up between Lucy’s hands and then used what leverage she had to push Lucy’s arms outwards. The girl’s fingers reluctantly released their grip and Gwen sucked air noisily into her lungs as she backed away.

  ‘Don’t fight,’ Lucy whispered, crouching. Blood was trickling down her face from the wound on her scalp. ‘Fighting makes the muscles go all tense and bloody, but they taste better when they’re relaxed.’ Her gaze flickered sideways, to the remains of her boyfriend on the bed. ‘He was so blissed out, he didn’t even realise I was eating him. His muscles were like nothing I’ve ever tasted before. And his eyes… so, so sweet.’

  ‘Lucy, look at me. Look at me. Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Hungry,’ Lucy wheedled. ‘So hungry, all the time. Stomach feels like there’s something twisting around and around in there, and it’s never satisfied. Never ever satisfied. I have to eat all the time now, just to keep going.’

  ‘But not me.’

  ‘You’re the only fresh meat here,’ Lucy said, and launched herself at Gwen. She crashed into Gwen’s chest, carrying her backwards. Gwen’s feet caught in a piece of loose carpet and she toppled, Lucy’s weight carrying her down. The room twisted around her as she fell, then it fragmented into shards of light as the back of her head hit the floor beside the bed. Lucy’s weight fell directly on her stomach, driving the hard-won air from her lungs again. The girl’s knees slid to either side of Gwen’s chest, pinioning her. Hands held her wrists t
o the floor. The gun skittered away from nerveless fingers.

  Pain scoured every nerve in her body, burning as it went. Gwen’s breath hissed in her swollen throat. She wriggled, but Lucy’s legs and hands were holding her body firm. She couldn’t move.

  Lucy leaned forward. Her breath smelled rank. Shreds of bloody skin were caught between her teeth. ‘How romantic,’ she hissed. ‘Your flesh and Rhys’s, reunited inside me. The ultimate threesome.’

  ‘Why Rhys?’ Gwen panted. ‘I thought you fancied him?’

  ‘I do. But you don’t understand the hunger. Nothing is important compared to the hunger. It has to be satisfied.’

  ‘Even when it means your boyfriend has to die? Even when it means that Rhys has to die?’

  Lucy winced, eyes blinking closed and then looking away. ‘It’s like breathing,’ she whispered. ‘Even if I try to stop, I can’t. I find myself just throwing food into my mouth to keep from screaming. Rice and bread don’t do it. I need fresh meat.’

  ‘But not mine,’ Gwen shouted, twisting her legs so that one of her feet caught beneath the edge of the bed. She bucked, almost knocking Lucy off her chest. Lucy let go of one of Gwen’s hands, grasping at the bedspread to keep herself from falling back. Gwen flailed around with her hand, looking for her gun but finding only something smooth and covered with fabric. Desperately she brought it up and hit out at Lucy’s face with it, realising only as it passed in front of her eyes that it was a woman’s shoe, black, probably a Manolo Blahnik knock-off, with four-inch heels.

  The heel struck Lucy on her left temple, leaving a bloody gash behind it. She shot backwards, screaming, arms windmilling wildly. The back of her head thudded against the edge of the door, which had been left half-open when Lucy had pushed it earlier. It sounded resonant but liquid. Lucy bounced forward again, eyes wider than before but pupils rolled up so far they were staring at the insides of her sockets. Her head left a smear of blood and hair behind on the door. She fell towards Gwen, but Gwen rolled out of the way. Lucy’s face impacted on the carpeted floor, and she didn’t move.