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the-torchwood-archive · 10 months ago

Text

From TWM #9, Harm's Way Part Two.

Full text is under the cut. This was a quick transcription so please let me know if you find any mistakes.

The hospital was busy. Crowded, in fact. But Rhys barely noticed. He walked up to the reception desk in A&E in a daze, although he could still feel his guts churning.

‘I’m here for Gwen Cooper,’ he said, his mouth dry as paper. ‘She’s my fiancée. I had a call…’

He left the words to die, allowing the haunted look in his eyes convince the pretty girl behind the triage desk. Without a word, the girl cast her eyes down at her VDU and began to rattle the keyboard.

‘Room seven,’ she said, without a smile. There wasn’t much to smile about in a city centre casualty department on Saturday night, ‘Through the double doors, straight on, then left. Next set of doors. You can’t miss it. Ask if you do.’

‘Thanks,’ Rhys threaded his way through the sick and injured as they milled around the waiting area coffee machine. Rhys passed a miserable looking man sitting up on a gurney in the corner, nursing a hand wrapped in a blood-stained tea towel. His wife was standing nearby, nagging him about being more careful when using a bread knife – and what was he thinking, using it to open a cereal box anyway? Judging by the look on the man’s face as he glared at the woman, he was already thinking about another good use for a bread knife.

Rhys found room seven and went in. There was a bad and a low chair and a strong antiseptic smell. In the bed was a woman, with dark hair pulled back from a face as white as the pillow. Plastic tubes ran from the woman’s nose to a series of bottles and instruments, and an intravenous drip was connected to her arm. It took him a few moments to realize that the pale, injured person in the bed was his fiancée.

Gwen’s eyes were closed, her face slack, no sign of life. Until now, Rhys had never properly thought of the word ‘deathly’ before.

‘Gwen?’ he whispered.

No response, not even a flicker of an eyelid. Oh, God.

He sat down, slowly, in the chair. It was far too low, but it brought his eyes level with her face. In profile she looked even less like the Gwen he knew. White-faced, still, lifeless.

On the far side of the bed, a machine clicked and whirred with a doleful rhythm. For a long while there was no other sound in the room, or even the hospital beyond. No other sound in the whole world, until a footstep alerted Rhys to the fact that there was someone in the doorway.

‘She’s gonna be ok,’ said Captain Jack Harkness. He came into the room, tall, athletic, healthy. He even managed to make that old RAF greatcoat look good. And in that instant, Rhys hated him more than he had ever hated any other human being in his life.

‘Ok?’ Rhys spat the letters out one by one, his face twisted into a derisive sneer, ‘What do you mean ok? Look at her!’ Rhys was on his feet now, fully intending to lash out, but then his legs seem to give way and he slumped back down into the low chair, his voice cracking, ‘Look at her, look what you’ve done to her you stupid…’

Jack put his hand on Rhys' shoulder, ‘I said she’s going to be okay. I promise.’

‘How can you know that?’ Rhys said thickly. His face was in his hands, ‘She’s in a bloody hospital bed for Christ’s sake.’

They both looked at each other then. She hadn’t moved throughout the exchange, hadn’t acknowledged their presence in any way whatsoever. The machines continued their steady hiss and beep.

Rhys looked up at Jack with red eyes, ‘What happened? Just tell me what the hell happened.’

--------------

Owen was driving at breakneck speed.

‘Have you still got a death wish or something?’ asked Ianto, clinging onto the passenger seat arm rests as Owen swung the Torchwood SUV into another wild turn. The vehicle rocked on its suspension as it scrambled over the uneven ground.

‘Life wish,’ Owen corrected him, stamping on the footbrake and spinning the wheel. The SUV skidded on its own axis and then surged forward, ‘Saving lives is what I want to do, and I can’t afford to go slow.’

Ianto closed his eyes as the SUV came to a hard stop in the middle of a building site. This was going to be a supermarket, but right now it was little more than a big expanse of dirt, foundation trenches and large plastic components for the sewers. There were a couple of pieces of heavy plant machinery here and there, but apart from that the place was dead.

Above them the early evening clouds promised rain. Lots of it.

‘You’re in the right place,’ said Toshiko, who was back in the Hub, her voice coming clear over Ianto’s communications link. He thanked her and passed the message on to Owen, who wasn’t wearing his own earpiece because half his face was covered by a huge surgical dressing. The exposed skin of his lips and cheek were raw and swollen and his left eye was barely open.

Ianto grabbed his arm before he opened the car door, ‘ Owen, you don’t have to prove anything to me.’

‘I know that,’ Owen snapped as he got out. He was hurting, but Ianto knew there was more to it than a fractured cheek bone. He had insisted on patching himself up before leaving the Hub, despite the protestations of his collogues.

Toshiko’s voice came through Ianto’s comms again, ‘You’re close to the Rift disturbance now. You should be able to locate the exact spot from there.’

‘Ok,’ Ianto said, activating his PDA. As he waited for the device to decipher the readings, he asked Toshiko for news about Gwen.

‘She’s stable, that’s all the hospital would tell Jack,’ came the reply, ‘He’s there now, deflecting questions from the police.’

Ianto’s PDA chirruped as it picked up a chronon flare, ‘ Rift activity,’ he reported automatically, ‘This way Doctor Harper…’

Owen followed him across the building site, drawing his gun. Ianto glanced back at him and Owen shrugged. Guns hadn’t had much of an effect so far but he felt better with one in his hand.

They climbed over a pile of rubble and stopped short. Lying in the middle of the ground was a long, amber crust about the size and shape of a coffin. It looked exactly like what it actually was: a giant chrysalis.

‘Empty,’ grunted Owen, circling cautiously.

‘No life signs at all,’ reported Ianto, checking the PDA sensor.

‘You can say that again,’ Owen looked down at the ground. Laying at his feet was the body of a man in a hi-vis jacket caked in mug, and a hard hat split open to reveal a mass of congealed hair and brain matter.

‘Oh no,’ said Ianto.

There were other bodies laying around, half hidden in the dirt, looking like bundles of rags left out in the rain. One of them had been decapitated.

‘Builders must have found the chrysalis,’ Owen said, ‘Poor bastards never stood a chance.’

Ianto nodded and touched his earpiece, ‘Tosh? We’ve found it all right. It’s another chrysalis, identical to the first. But this one’s already open.’

--------------

‘The first one came down in a back garden in Pontcanna,’ said Jack, ‘We took it to the Hub for analysis and identified it as some sort of alien chrysalis.’

Rhys watched him carefully. Jack was leaning back against the far wall, striped by the light from the street lamps outside, sneaking in through the Venetian blinds. He wasn’t smiling and his eyes were the colour of storm clouds. The words severe weather warning leapt into Rhy’s mind.

‘It wasn’t long before it opened. What came out was…hostile.’

Rhys looked back at Gwen. She was still unconscious. He was beginning to worry that it was a coma or something. ‘It escaped…’ he heard Jack say, ‘Injuring Owen, Ianto and Gwen in the process.’

‘But not you,’ Rhys said without looking up, his voice full of ice-cold anger.

‘Believe me, if I could swap places with her, I would.’

Rhys stood up, ‘I knew this was going to happen. I bloody knew it! I said to her only this morning, I said: you’re going to get hurt, Gwen. You’re going to get hurt or killed running around after Captain Jack Harkness and Torchwood, and chasing bloody space aliens!’

He yelled he last bit, just as a nurse walked in to check on Gwen. She glanced at Jack, excused herself with a self-conscious smile, and went about her business fixing a fresh saline bag to the IV drip. The two men watched her in thunderous silence. Rhys wanted to ask her if Gwen was going to be alright, but didn’t trust himself to speak properly now. There was a great big, spiky ball of emotion swelling up inside his throat. Eventually the nurse went out, and Rhys turned on Jack again, ‘So what happens now?’

‘The doctors said she’s suffering from a concussion,’ Jack said, ‘X-rays showed a hairline fracture of the skull. There are some cracked ribs too,’ He sighed, ‘To be honest, it could have been worse.’

‘Worse?’

‘She could have been killed!’ Now, suddenly, Jack had lost his cool as well, as if his calm demeanor of a few moments ago had been little more than a thin mask covering his real emotions. His voice shook slightly as he repeated, almost hoarsely, ‘She could have been killed.’

But for Rhys that just made things worse. He glared at Jack, ‘Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t wish it was you lying there?’ He jabbed a finger at the silent, unmoving figure in the bed.

Two more nurses came in then, both looking straight at Jack. One of them was the nurse who’d just been in, and clearly she had gone to fetch a friend. The friend’s eyes roved Jack up and down in expert appraisal. Jack smiled at them both, but the nurses knew they had just walked into an argument, ‘Listen, you boys,’ said the first nurse, ‘It’s not going to do this young lady any good to hear you two arguing over her, is it?’

‘We’re not – ‘ both men began, and then stopped abruptly, neither one wanting to look as if they were doing just that.

‘I’m not in love with her,’ Jack said quietly, at exactly the same time as Rhys said, ‘She’s my fiancée.’

The nurse sighed, ‘ Why don’t you both go outside and cool off a bit?’

--------------

‘Is she going to be ok?’ Rhys asked as they were ushered into the corridor.

‘She’s hurt and she needs time to heal. She’s in the best possible place, honestly,’ the nurse smiled at him, ‘Go and get a cup of tea or something. We’ll let you know as soon as she wakes up.’

Rhys nodded dumbly, all the fight gone out of him now. Eventually he became aware of Jack taking a call on his earpiece.

‘Tosh? What gives?’

‘Owen and Ianto have found a second chrysalis.’

‘Damn.’

‘And it’s open.’

‘Damn!’

‘There are already fatalities, Jack…’

‘Damn!’ Jack took a deep breath, ‘Ok, we’ve gotta find it before it kills again. We stopped the first one so we can stop this one.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll think of something. Get them to pick me up from the hospital.’

‘Ok. How’s Gwen?’

‘Just the same. Rhys is with her now.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Yeah,’ Jack closed the call and turned back to Rhys, ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘I heard. Chasing aliens.’

‘Someone’s got to do it.’

It was said without a hint of irony, and Rhys was too tired and worried to care. But something made him ask, ‘How did you stop it, in the end? The thing that got Gwen?’

He wanted to hear how Jack and the team had made the beast pay for what it had done, but Jack simply shook his head, ‘We didn’t stop it, not really. The alien was looking for the exit when I crawled out of the autopsy room. But the Hub’s a sealed environment designed to stop hostile extraterrestrial forces from escaping into the real world. So the thing wasn’t exactly happy. It was flinging itself around, smashing into walls, wrecking the place.’

‘Sounds like some kind of wild animal,’ Rhys was almost relieved, as if Gwen’s condition could be excused as an accident of nature, rather than a deliberate attack by an intelligent force.

‘I’m not so sure,’ Jack frowned, ‘I looked into its eyes at one point. It was looking right back at me. And it knew. It knew I was gonna try to stop it.’

Rhys swallowed, feeling a bilious mix of fear and rage churning in his stomach, ‘So…?’

‘Ianto had an idea – a one shot chance at stopping it in its tracks for good. He said the creature was a predator, and naturally armoured, but there’s always a week spot. He reckoned every time it opened its mouth, there was a soft unprotected part of the palate that was exposed. A bullet through that would pass, relatively unobstructed, straight into the brain. It was a kill shot, but one requiring absolute precision in difficult circumstances. The target would be exposed for only a second as the creature roared, and then it would be right on top of you. If you hadn’t got it by then, you’d be dead meat yourself.’

Rhys reguarded Jack with genuine respect, ‘And you did it?’

Jack laughed, ‘Are you kidding? Hey, I’m good – but I’m not that good.’

‘So…?’

‘Luckily Tosh had a better idea; we lured the alien to the Rift manipulator and she hot-wired a small, highly localised time field. Slowed down a discrete pocket of time surrounding the creature. Now it’s still alive – just moving real slow. Tosh says the effect won’t last long, though. When the time-field snaps, back in line with everything else, the creature will just carry on doing exactly what it was in the middle of. Before then we have to find a way to stop it permanently.’

‘Well you’ve got another chance to find a way now, haven’t you? If there’s another one on the loose.’

‘Yeah, maybe. But how many people is it gonna kill before we find it?’ Jack’s earpiece bleeped, ‘ They’re here. I’ve gotta go.”

Rhys nodded, ‘I’ll stay here with Gwen. I want to be the first thing she sees when she wakes up,’ he held out his hand, ‘Good luck.’

Jack saluted with his fingertips and then left without another word.

--------------

‘We’ve got a fix, somewhere in Grangetown,’ said Ianto as Jack climbed into the SUV. It had clouded over and rain was in its way.

Owen tooled the car out of the hospital grounds and accelerated westbound onto Eastern Avenue.

‘It’s heading for the city,’ Ianto said, studying the flat screen in front of him. The light gave his face a soft blue pallor. The bruise on his forehead looked purple and sore.

‘Mouth shot, huh?’ said Jack.

Ianto looked at him, ‘It was only an idea.’

‘Not one of your best, Ianto,’ commented Owen.

‘At the moment it’s all we’ve got,’ Jack opened the cylinder on his old Webley revolver, checked it was fully loaded, then snapped it shut. He turned around to look at Ianto, ‘When we catch up with this guy, you can be the one to ask it to open wide for me, ok?’

Ianto raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

‘Police report on a traffic pile up near the Taff Embankment on Penarth Road,’ Owen announced. His earpiece was not jammed into his good ear and tuned to the police network.

‘So take a detour.’

‘You don’t understand. The thing that caused the pile up – cops are calling it some kind of nine-foot monster. First car hit it square on and bounced off. Then it wrecked the other vehicles and threw a lorry into the river.’

Jack’s face hardened, ‘Step on it.’

In the Hub, deep beneath Roald Dahl Plass, Toshiko took a moment to admire her handiwork. By using the Rift manipulator to bend the laws of physics, Toshiko had slowed time down in a bubble around the alien. It was a peculiar effect, the beast had paused like a snapshot suspended in mid-air. But, unlike the image on a TV screen, if you watched it carefully, you could still see the alien moving, as slowly – or as quickly – as the hour hand on a watch.

‘Bullet time,’ Ianto had said. He’s still been clutching the big Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifle, ‘Why don’t we shoot it now?’

‘Because as soon as the bullet enters the protracted tachyon field it’ll slow right down as well,’ Tosh had told him, ‘And besides, it’s mouth is closed.’

The sound of police sirens filled the Hub, relayed via the comms link in the SUV as it sped towards the city centre. Soon Jack’s voice had also crackled through the air, and Tosh heard him loud and clear as he made his way into the growing chaos, ‘Get these people out of the way! This is Torchwood! We’re dealing with the situation now.’

Toshiko shook her head. Were they? As usual they seemed to be reacting to events rather than controlling them. She had just realized a whole branch of theoretical physics at a moments notice, and there wasn’t even time to appreciate it. But Torchwood never paused, not even for thought. Everything they did was fast, reactive, and above all secret. This was the 21st Century. Everything was changing and they had to be ready.

‘Tosh, are you getting me?’ Jack’s voice snapped Toshiko out of her reverie. ‘I hear you Jack. Go ahead.’

‘We’re closing in on the second alien. It’s having some kinda tantrum in the city centre. We’ll stay online and keep you informed. See if you can come up with anything that can help.

‘Like a bloody big gun,’ suggested Owen, crackling over the speakers.

Tosh touched her earpiece, ‘Jack, I don’t know if it’s any use, but –‘

‘There it is!’ She heard Jack’s voice cutting across her. The speakers made his voice crackle and distort, ‘Hang a left. Whoa! It’s on top of that bus! Hey, it’s grown. Man, that’s one big guy…’

Toshiko almost screamed in frustration. She couldn’t see a thing. With one hand she was trying to punch up CCTV images from the city centre on her monitors, but it was murderously slow business.

‘How could it get that big?’ asked Ianto.

‘Will it ever stop growing?’ Owen pitched in, ‘I mean, are we talking a Godzilla scenario, or what?’

Tosh began to feel the cold dread building up inside her. She felt totally cut off from the events, helpless as she listened to them. What could she do? The slo-mo monster in the time bubble wasn’t going to wait forever. And neither was its twin, the thing that was already carving a bloody path through central Cardiff.

‘It’s tearing cars in half with its bare hands,’ she heard Ianto’s voice, ‘There are armed police, but they can’t do any good.’

‘I’m gonna find their commanding officer,’ Jack said, ‘We’ve got the pull them back, right out of harm’s way.’

--------------

Toshiko heard a crash, like a car accident, and them more shouting. Shots were fired. There were screams. Impatiently she rapped at her earpiece with her fingers, ‘Jack?’

‘Busy now, Tosh,’ came the reply. A pause, then the sound of more shots. Men shouting. Jack’s voice snapping out orders, presumably to the police. It sounded like he was reporting from a war zone. Suddenly there was silence. Then: ‘Ok, Toshiko. What have you got for me? Make it good.’

‘I’ve been looking at the chrysalis, Jack. I’ve compared the markings we found on the first one with the images of the second.’

‘Tosh, we’ve got a hostile alien tearing lumps out of Central Square. People are dying. What’s the bottom line?’

Before Toshiko could say another word, she heard a terrific crash over the speakers and yet more screaming. Machine gun fire rattled out into the night. She swiveled in her seat as CCTV images from the centre of town finally rolled into life on her screens. Those that were working showed the swirling blue lights of emergency vehicles, silhouettes running, some of them armed. There was no sign of the SUV.

One of the cameras caught a glimpse of the alien: brutish, part-simian and part-scorpion, trampling vehicles underfoot. Heavy rain and the low resolution image made it difficult to see any details, and the creature disappeared in a flash down a side street.

‘Jack? Can you hear me? Owen? Ianto? Is anyone receiving me?’

Nothing but static. The connection was dead. Everything was slipping out of her control. What could she do?

She switched one of the screens onto the BBC News channel. A local correspondent was reporting from Cardiff city centre, huddled in a raincoat, police cars behind them, ‘…something loose in the city centre, extremely hostile. A police spokesman refused to be drawn on the exact nature of the emergency, but we do know that the EVAC Cardiff response team is currently holding an emergency meeting in City Hall. The city centre has been sealed off and the police are flooding the area with armed response units. Residents are advised to stay…’

His final words were drowned out by the roar of a huge explosion, an orange fireball erupting in the background. Pieces of debris sped towards the screen in a blue and then, abruptly, the image disappeared as the camera went offline.

Toshiko sat back, stunned. No Jack. Nothing from Ianto or Owen. Gwen unconscious in hospital. A hostile alien causing chaos in the city, and another one right behind her, poised to rip her to shreds the moment time began to flow freely once again.

What could she do all by herself?

#torchwood #jack harkness #ianto jones #gwen cooper #owen harper #toshiko sato #short story #harms way

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