It leaped towards her.
Gwen threw aside the vodka glass and lunged for her gun.
It was the vodka that saved Jack.
If Gwen hadn’t put the Glock down, she would have shot the Weevil through the head, and that would have put Jack on the floor and ruined the apartment’s expensive white carpet with his brains. His brains would have grown back together pretty quickly, of course, the shattered skull would have rebuilt itself and he would have been good as new in a few minutes, but a bullet through the brain always scrambled him up a bit for a while and right now he needed to be thinking straight.
Because something was messing with their heads.
Jack threw himself to the floor before Gwen could fire and screamed out, ‘Gwen, it’s me! It’s Jack!’
The Weevil had disappeared, but Gwen held the gun steady, ready for it to come at her again.
‘Jack, there’s a Weevil!’
He was crouched behind the couch now. He knew it would be no defence against the automatic clip she was likely to fire if she got it into her head that the Weevil was also down there, but he figured it was just safer if she didn’t see him right now.
‘No, Gwen. There is no Weevil!’
‘What are you talking about?’ she snapped, and swung from side to side, just in case the Weevil was trying to work its way around her.
‘Remember Lucca said he had this place well fortified. I think he’s got some sort of psychotropic gas on this floor. When he initiated his defences, the gas would have been released. It’s winding us up, making us see things.’
‘No, Jack. You’re talking crap.’
‘Listen to yourself, Gwen. It’s affecting your reason. Ask yourself, why the hell would there be Weevils on the twentieth floor of this place? How would they even get in here? It’s built like Fort Knox.’
‘I saw a Weevil, Jack! What the hell’s got into you? What have they done to you?’
Jack could feel any hold on Gwen slipping away from him. If he was right – and he knew that he was – he hadn’t felt as scared as this since that last god-awful day on the Boeshane Peninsular. Whatever Lucca had in the air here was eating into their minds, and it was not only making Gwen hallucinate, but also turning her paranoid.
‘Who are they, Gwen?’
‘You know. Don’t pretend, Jack!’
‘Gwen, listen to me, please. Concentrate on what I say, Lucca has released some sort of hallucinogen into the air. It’s part of his defences. To turn us on each other. You’ve got to fight it, Gwen, and we have to get off this floor. Now!’
Jack stayed behind the couch and waited for his words to get through to her. He counted the seconds, and fought the fear and dread that still surged through his own body.
When he had run after the phantom Weevil he had seen that there was nowhere for it to go, and had forced himself to be logical. He wasn’t always the most logical man – sometimes defying logic could save your life; could save a planet – but sometimes logic was a piece of lifesaving driftwood when reality was getting wrecked around you.
Like now.
There had been nowhere for the Weevil to run and he knew that Weevils didn’t walk through walls. And when he’d forced his own haunted anxiety aside he realised there was no way that there had been any Weevil there when Gwen had fired. Apart from anything else, Gwen didn’t miss.
And, when you got down to it, Jack Harkness does not get frightened by shadows.
But Gwen hadn’t answered him yet, hadn’t realised that he was her friend, the man she trusted with her life beyond anyone else in the world – maybe even more than her husband.
‘Gwen?’ he said, his worries building to new levels.
She answered him with a burst of fire from the automatic on machine setting that shredded the couch to splintered wood and torn foam.
But Jack had moved by then. He’d heard the click as Gwen had put the gun into machine pistol mode and had dived across the apartment and rolled to his feet as she ejected the spent magazine from the gun and reached for a new one.
She was wild-eyed and trembling with psychotic adrenalin.
And Jack knew this was his only chance. He aimed the Webley and fired six times.
Gwen ducked as the apartment’s window shattered behind her, and Jack lunged for her, kicked the automatic out of her hand and put his arm around her waist, dragging her to the devastated window as the wind caught their hair.
She struggled, but Jack got his arms around Gwen, pinning her hands against her body as he threw them both against the wall next to the window.
‘Breathe, Gwen,’ he said. ‘Breathe it in. Deep breaths.’
And as he filled his own lungs with the cool fresh air that blew in over the Bay he could already feel the tension in his body starting to ease.
He could feel her holding her breath, refusing to give in to him, still somehow believing that he was an enemy, but he held her tight, pinned her to the wall and knew that any moment she was going to start to breathe, and then they were going to get through it.
‘Hey,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘I said big breaths. I want big breaths. I really love big breaths.’
And the pure air must have already started working on her, because she laughed. And then she was breathing deeply, filling her lungs with the air that smelled salty and of the sea, and of freedom.
‘I’m OK,’ she said at last.
Jack continued to hold her tight.
‘I said I’m all right, Jack.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But you know me – any excuse.’
‘I’m a married woman now, Captain Harkness,’ she said playfully, and escaped his arms.
He looked at her as the wind did things with her hair, and she looked beautiful. In all his years and travels, there hadn’t been many women that compared to Gwen Cooper.
She saw him looking and felt uncomfortable in his gaze. He saw it, and stooped down to get her gun. He handed it back to her.
‘We should go,’ he said, quickly. ‘Just try not to breathe too deeply till we hit the next floor.’
‘Jack,’ she said.
He was already halfway across the apartment. He turned back. ‘What?’
She hesitated, and he could see that something was on her mind, maybe something about the way she had seen him look at her. Then she gave him a hard look. ‘That kick really hurt, you know.’
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Alison’s gone! She’s gone!’
Wendy was crying and screaming as she rushed out of the bedroom. Owen still stood over her bloody, shaking husband. Marion appeared from the bathroom with painkillers in one hand and a spliff in the other. Owen no longer felt like easing Ewan’s pain, especially since he had just increased it by the increment of a broken nose.
‘What’s happened? What’s going on?’ Marion demanded.
‘It’s taken Alison,’ Wendy screamed.
Owen looked from her to Ewan and saw the fat man that had just tried to kill him come apart at the seams. For an instant he wished he hadn’t broken the bastard’s nose – he had only been trying to save his little girl. And now she had been taken from him.
‘Wendy,’ Ewan croaked, his voice distorted by his smashed nose.
She went to him and they held each other and shook with shared grief. Owen doubted that she had even noticed the blood.
Owen grabbed an ornament from a shelf – he didn’t see what it was, he didn’t care – and threw it against the wall with all the force he could find. It detonated. Whatever it had been was shattered beyond recognition. His foot lashed out and kicked over Marion Blake’s coffee table. He looked for something else to destroy and saw Marion’s pale frightened face.