Exodus Code (10 page)

‘The police are on their way.’ The manager pushed passed Gwen and reached for the cowering woman’s arm.

And that was al it took. Gwen grabbed his wrist and twisted his arm up behind him, flipping him to his knees and banging his head against the shelves.

‘I know they’re on the way. I frickin’ cal ed them!’ Gwen was swimming in red.

‘And this mess isn’t mine, you bloody idiot. It’s hers.’

Gwen’s sudden violent reaction, stunned the security guard who froze in place for a beat, then came to his senses enough to wrestle his boss from Gwen’s grip, pushing Gwen closer to the woman, who was rocking and mumbling more aggressively on the floor.

The guard had completed his training only two days before, and he had learned that you do not touch a customer unless you absolutely have to. Did this count as one of those times? He stared at Gwen. This woman looked real y pissed off. He looked to his manager for some guidance, but his boss had backed up against the shelves, trying to regain some of his dignity, and holding his mobile in front of him like a weapon.

‘I’m filming you,’ he yel ed at Gwen, ‘so… so you’d better back away.’

Gwen ripped the phone from his hands and dropkicked it into the dairy section. Then she pivoted and faced the guard, who instinctively raised his hands in surrender, taking two steps back.

Behind the guard, Gwen could see customers’ arms stretched in the air and mobiles flashing pictures. Beyond the crowd outside in the parking lot she could see the lights of an ambulance and a panda car, but worst of al she could see a look of sheer terror on Anwen’s face. God, what am I doing?

Gwen inhaled and exhaled and the red at the edges of her vision began to fade, the crunch of the cereal at her feet softened, the lights above her seemed to flicker and dim.

Holding her hand out to the manager, she said, ‘I am so, so sorry. I… I felt… I thought you were going to hurt her. This woman needs help.’

The manager slapped Gwen’s hand away.

‘And so do you, missus.’

Anwen started to cry again.

‘Sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me,’ Gwen said, lowering her voice and her hand. ‘I was just protecting the woman. She’s obviously having some kind of seizure and you just didn’t seem to care.’

Gwen could feel the anger churning in her stomach. She felt sick.

Ennobled by the sight of the police entering the shop, the manager puffed out his chest and poked Gwen’s shoulder. ‘I want you arrested.’

‘Mummee!’ screamed Anwen. ‘Uppie!’ Then Anwen threw the box of puffs at the guard’s head, who turned and took a step towards her.

‘Don’t you bloody dare,’ shouted Gwen, her blood boiling again. She slammed her chest into the guard, who fel against the trol ey, causing Anwen to scream even more.

‘I want you out of my shop this minute,’ hissed the manager, pushing the guard towards the entrance. ‘Go get the police!’

‘Fine… that’s fine,’ said Gwen, catching her breath and unclipping Anwen from the trol ey. ‘Please, let’s at least take care of this woman first. She real y is in bad shape.’

The security guard turned and glared at Gwen while negotiating his way through the crowd of shoppers to the front doors.

While keeping an eye on Gwen standing behind him with Anwen in her arms, the manager crouched a safe distance in front of the madwoman, who was now howling in anguish and trembling violently, her head wrapped and hidden under her jacket.

‘I think she’s having some kind of epileptic fit,’ said the manager.

‘No shit, Sherlock,’ snapped Gwen.

‘Listen, you… bitch,’ said the manager, final y losing it. He stood up, pointing at Gwen. ‘You’re a bloody menace and for al I know you did something to this woman and that’s why she’s in such a state.’

A bal of white, like the after-burn of a camera flash, burst in front of Gwen’s eyes. She was about to charge the manager again, but Anwen squirmed in her arms. Gwen blinked hard and the anger settled back in her chest.

The madwoman’s howls had shifted to screams of terror, jolting the manager and Gwen from their face-off.

‘Is that blood?’ asked the manager, noticing a smal puddle forming under the madwoman.

Two paramedics wheeled a gurney piled with bags of equipment down the cereal aisle, forcing the manager and Gwen to step aside. The manager took the opportunity to get clear of this insane mother. He marched down the aisle to greet the two constables who’d arrived with the ambulance.

‘Don’t you dare move!’ he yel ed back at Gwen. ‘You’re not leaving here until I say so.’

‘Piss off,’ muttered Gwen, sliding Anwen onto her hip, watching with concern as the paramedics tried to get a blood pressure cuff on the madwoman who was now prostrate on the floor, breathing heavily, her body stiff as a board, blood pooling under her head, which along with her hands was stil wrapped in her jacket.

‘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 wel .

‘She was already real y 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 dul 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.

Final y, 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 al quiet now,’ she said.

The medic fel back on his heels, frantical y fumbling in his kit bag for an ice pack.

‘Cal 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 tel Gwen she’d better give the police her statement, but Gwen and Anwen were gone.

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

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 real y 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 hol ered, 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 al 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 ful ,”’ 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 rol ed 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 sil of the bay window and curled her legs under her.

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

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 hal way 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 stil 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 stil asleep and that she could stil 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 shel of the only surviving Torchwood vehicle. The back of the SUV was empty. The seats destroyed long ago, the smel of charred rubber, gunpowder and pizza of al 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 shel it real y was. Gwen waited to be sure Anwen settled back to sleep.

When she did, Gwen crawled to the front of the vehicle, pul ing up a thick plastic liner, swinging it al 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 stil 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’l 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 stil defend herself, that she could stil kick someone’s arse.

No, Rhys was right, she thought. She real y did need an anger management class. By no stretch of the imagination had she been defending herself or Anwen. But stil , 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 al 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.