Pack Animals (12 page)

After a few minutes fiddling around with the Cardiff A–Z, Rhys parked around the corner from their destination.

‘You’re on a double yellow,’ Gwen noted.

Rhys laughed at her as he slammed his car door. ‘When did Torchwood worry about parking tickets?’

Gwen gave him her ‘you’ll-be-sorry’ face and said: ‘It would be abusing my position to get a ticket cancelled for Harwood’s Haulage.’ She crossed the street, and laughed at his momentary hesitation before he jogged to catch up. ‘Had you going there,’ she smiled.

Gareth’s house was set back from the road, a large Victorian redbrick building with wide bay windows. A thick twist of dark smoke spiralled out of its tall, highly decorated rubbed brick chimneys.

Gwen’s first assessment was that it would be difficult to approach the building covertly because of the noise they’d inevitably make over the gravel driveway. Once they got to the main gate, however, the need for stealth evaporated. There were tyre grooves, deep and wide in the pale gravel, where a fire engine had swung in off the road and charged towards the house. That smoke wasn’t coming from the chimneys – the upper floor of the house was alight. The roof had slumped and collapsed like melted wax on the far side, bringing down a couple of bedrooms with it. The crew rolled up the corrugated side of their fire appliance and attached thick hoses.

‘It’s a day for this kind of thing, isn’t it?’ observed Rhys.

Flakes of paper and ash were lifted from the fire into the air, and fluttered down into the driveway. Rhys showed a couple of half-burned examples to Gwen. ‘We found the right place.’ The charred fragments were still recognisable as MonstaQuest cards. ‘Just got here a bit late, eh?’

‘I wonder if he printed and packaged them in the house?’ pondered Gwen. She looked around, and spotted a dilapidated wood-framed garage that stood separate from the house against the tall pine hedge. ‘Maybe there’s more stored over there?’

A small group of nosy locals had already gathered to gawp at proceedings. Gwen approached them and listened in.

‘Hell of a row,’ said a woman in a pink dressing gown and slippers, who was holding court among her neighbours. She was clearly not the type to miss out on a local tragedy. Her bedraggled hair was half-fixed with curlers, like an impromptu crown. ‘They say that she’s still in there. She’ll be burnt to a crisp by now.’ This last observation was delivered with a mixture of horror and relish.

‘Who’s that then, Mrs Stackpole?’ asked a mousy woman in the group.

Mrs Stackpole tilted her head regally towards her inquisitor. ‘His girlfriend,’ she explained condescendingly. ‘The mother never liked her, apparently.’ Her voice dropped as though she was imparting a top secret. ‘Ideas above her station. Maybe that’s what the row was about. Heard it from my bathroom window, when I was doing my hair.’

‘Leaning out of your bathroom window, more like.’

‘It overlooks the far side of the house,’ retorted Mrs Stackpole. ‘Can I help it if there’s shrieking and banging and Lord knows what other commotion? They were shouting fit to raise the roof, I shouldn’t wonder. And blow me down, if the roof doesn’t actually fall in! I thought it was an explosion.’

‘That’d be the bolt of lightning,’ piped up a thin woman in a tartan coat.

Mrs Stackpole didn’t appreciate the interruption. ‘Lightning indeed, Mary. There’s not a cloud in the sky.’

‘I saw it myself, from across the way,’ insisted Mary.

Mrs Stackpole pouted in disbelief. ‘Well,
I
was the one who dialled 999 straight off, wasn’t I?’ Her voice trailed off as she saw Gwen earwigging on the conversation. ‘Can I help you, love?’ she asked snappishly.

Gwen favoured her with a big smile. ‘I was looking for Gareth.’

Mrs Stackpole set her mouth in a grim line of apology. ‘I’m sorry, my love. He and his girlfriend were in the house when it collapsed. Did you know him?’

‘We were… supposed to meet him here on business,’ Rhys improvised.

‘Odd man,’ continued Mrs Stackpole, her mask of concern slipping somewhat. ‘Geeky, my Robert would call him. Gareth was strange when he was at school, and didn’t change much when he was at university.’

‘Kept himself to himself,’ volunteered the mousy woman.

‘Solitary, yes,’ continued Mrs Stackpole relentlessly, unwilling to surrender the stage at this point. She nodded in the direction of the smouldering house. ‘But I don’t think there’ll be much of him for the fire brigade to find—’ She broke off. Something had caught her attention over by the house. Everyone turned to look with her.

Two firemen were rushing away from the collapsed building, hampered from running as fast as they evidently wanted to by the gravel drive and their bulky reflective uniforms. ‘Get back!’ yelled one of them as he rounded the fire engine. His helmet fell off the back of his head, but he did not stop to retrieve it.

‘Oh my good God,’ said Mrs Stackpole as she saw something that finally made her shut up.

Gwen shrugged off the fleeing fireman who tried to stop her, and slipped from Rhys’s anxious grasp too. She moved closer to the extraordinary sight that was destroying the arched porch of the house.

It looked like an angry little diplodocus, about the size of a cow, thrashing its long neck from side to side. Ash and fragments of MonstaQuest cards continued to dribble down from above. That’s when Gwen remembered where she’d seen this thing before. It was exactly like one of the MonstaQuest toys from the shop. That horn she’d noticed in the model was actually a third eye in the centre of its forehead.

She flicked on her PDA, and angled it towards the house. Her comms clicked online as she tapped her ear. ‘Tosh? Are you back at the Hub yet?’

Toshiko’s voice crackled. ‘Yes I am.’

Gwen focused the PDA’s viewfinder. ‘Are you getting this?’

‘I take it you’re not in Jurassic Park?’

‘No. Nearer to Heath Park.’ Gwen could hear Rhys calling her away now. The diplodocus swung its long neck in her direction and its mouth yawned wide. She backed off, but stumbled, twisted awkwardly and fell onto the path.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Toshiko in her ear.

The little diplodocus took a couple of stomping footsteps towards her. Gravel squirted from under its feet like gunshots. Gwen threw up her arm to defend her face. Just as it was upon her, the huge creature was enveloped in a bright flash. Gwen instantly recalled what that woman, Mary, had said: a lightning strike. But there was no noise.

And when she peered out from beneath her own raised arm, Gwen saw there was no dinosaur any more, either.

She rolled across the gravel drive, desperate to see where the creature had moved, terrified that it might attack from behind. But it had utterly disappeared. Her wild look back to Rhys, further down the drive, showed that he and the others were just as baffled.

Before she could even speak, the noise of a revving engine broke the fresh silence. It came from the dilapidated garage. More revving. The squeal of wheels on concrete. The splintering crash of the rotted wooden doors.

A bashed-up red Ford Mondeo burst onto the driveway, knocking aside scattered gravel and chattering women. For an endless couple of seconds it seemed to be heading straight at Gwen, and she locked eyes with its determined driver. Long hair, high cheekbones.

At the last moment, Gareth Portland wrenched the wheel hard left and swept past her down the driveway.

Gwen ran in pursuit of the car, cutting the corner and gesticulating to Rhys that he should follow too. He pounded after her, calling a half-hearted apology to the fire crew and astonished neighbours.

A hundred metres down the main road, Gareth Portland had been held up by a reversing rubbish van, and was only now squeezing past it.

Gwen snatched the keys to Rhys’s car from his protesting hands, and slipped into the driving seat. He was still complaining as she threw the Vectra into gear and squealed into the roadway.

‘That was a dinosaur back there!’ Rhys gasped. ‘I know they’ve got a better class of pet in Rhiwbina, but that’s just taking the piss. Hey, mind my paintwork!’ He winced as Gwen shot through the narrow gap beside the rubbish truck. ‘And why are we chasing that car? It’s not like he’s stuffed Barney in the back of his Mondeo.’

‘I’ve no idea where that thing went,’ said Gwen. ‘But what d’you bet that Gareth Portland has something to do with it?’

Rhys had shoved the MonstaQuest cards into his pocket when they’d left the mall earlier. He tugged the pack out now, and started to riffle through the designs.

‘We’ll leave Tosh to do a trace on the dinosaur.’ Gwen tapped at her comms to make the call.

Toshiko was unable to reply, however. Right at that moment, she was distracted by an intruder, and trying not to die. Abruptly, improbably, utterly unexpectedly, a diplodocus had materialised before her eyes and was crashing around the central area of the Hub.

TWELVE

A first great whoop of air as he pulled fresh oxygen into his lungs. There it was again – the synaptic buzz between nerve fibres, the phasic burst of neurons. An engine kicked into life from a cold start. His whole body ignited with that astonishing feeling, every atom of him tingling, the orgasmic rush of life, the euphoria of simply being.

Jack was back from the dead, for the thirteen-hundred-and-seventy-ninth time. Or thereabouts. He’d stopped counting properly after twelve hundred.

He pawed away the thin red blanket that covered his face. The material snagged on a gash across his forehead, pulling the scab away from the already healing wound. Fresh blood trickled down the side of his nose, and he blinked it irritably from his eye.

Time for the usual quick recce of his surroundings, and how he’d got here.

Location: he was lying on a gurney in small enclosed room, like a white box. Strong smell of antiseptic not quite masking the scents of old blood and vomit. An ambulance, then. Stationary, engine off, so it had either arrived or not left yet. No way to know how long he’d been dead this time.

Last things he remembered: the Brakkanee attack in the zoo… Ianto in its path… Jack throwing himself in the way… the jaws seizing him… savage pain in his left leg, a wild flight through the air, a final crushing pain in his neck as he struck the fence…

He sat bolt upright, clutching at the arm that held him.

‘Steady, Jack.’ It was Owen’s voice. ‘You’re back again. Can’t keep a good man down.’

It was difficult to detect what emotion Owen was feeling. Seeing Jack come back to life has hard enough, without knowing that you were condemned to a living death. Jack could suck in air and, impossibly, breathe again. For Owen, breathing was impossible.

Jack touched Owen’s forearm as reassurance. He rolled his neck slowly, aware that he shouldn’t rush too quickly until he was sure the break had healed – otherwise, he’d just die again, and that would slow things down.

‘Situation report then, Doctor Harper. This ambulance reached the hospital yet?’

‘Still at the zoo,’ said Owen.

Jack threw back the blanket, and swung his legs to put his feet on the floor.

‘Whoa there, Captain,’ Owen said, and held him back gently. ‘One fatal wound to the forehead, and I think you’ll find…’

Oh, all right then, decided Jack – he
wasn’t
putting his feet on the floor. His right foot, at best. Because the left was dangling by a thread of flesh and gristle. The Brakkanee had chewed practically right through the leg. Pain blossomed in the stump of the limb as blood began to circulate. A few fresh red spots dripped off the end and onto the ambulance floor.

‘Don’t worry,’ muttered Owen, ‘you’ll live. Of course.’

The back doors of the ambulance opened, and a grumpy-looking paramedic stuck her plump face in through the crack. ‘We all set yet?’ She caught sight of Jack’s irreparably mashed leg, and blanched. ‘Christ almighty! Barry told me he was dead!’

‘That was the other guy,’ Owen told her, and jerked his head in the direction of the second gurney.

For the first time, Jack saw the other body. A stitched red ambulance blanket covered it, from the tip of the head right down to the upturned toes at the end of the stretcher. A broad figure, utterly still. ‘Ianto?’ he breathed.

‘No,’ said Owen firmly.

‘Well, look at this man’s foot,’ the paramedic insisted. She indicated Jack’s injury. ‘We can’t hang on here.’

Jack wiggled his stump, and the foot swung gruesomely on its gristly connection. ‘Hang on, very good,’ he said.

‘No offence, mate,’ said the paramedic. ‘But we need to get you to Cardiff General.’

She was all set to come in, but Owen stood up to block her. ‘I told you, leave it. Torchwood will make the arrangements. Don’t argue,’ he continued relentlessly over her renewed protests. ‘Just get out and I’ll get on with it.’

‘Sure he was dead.’ The woman looked daggers at Owen. He could tell from her eye line that she was also considering Jack’s head wound. ‘I’m a paramedic, you know, not a porter.’

‘And I’m a doctor,’ Owen told her. ‘D’you wanna take it up with Mr Majunath at A&E?’

The paramedic backed down.

Owen nodded. ‘Well, piss off out of it, then.’

The doors emphatically slammed shut. Jack winced, and clutched his ruined limb as another spasm of pain lanced right up it.

‘That had stopped bleeding out when they found you. Hasn’t started again since you came back, even though your heart’s pumping again. You sure it’ll… y’know…’ He waved his fingers like a magician.

Jack looked at Owen’s splinted fingers, knowing that they would never repair like he could. ‘It’ll take a while. And it’ll hurt like hell.’

‘What’s the worst you’ve ever had?’

Jack considered for a moment. ‘You don’t wanna know.’

‘Burned to a crisp in a fire?’

‘You’re a sick man, you know that?’

‘Says the man with the detachable foot.’ Owen narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. ‘Could you survive going through a meat grinder?’

‘Never been tempted,’ replied Jack. ‘God, that would really sting, wouldn’t it? Still what doesn’t kill ya just makes ya stronger.’

‘Tell me about it,’ muttered Owen. He examined Jack’s dangling foot. ‘Could have been worse. Bite from a Brakkanee, you could have contracted Alien Lifeform Injected Cerebral Encephalopathy.’