They reached the Lloyds’ apartment, and Wendy opened the door. Everything was dark in there as she slipped in and called out for her daughter.
There was no answer. Owen knew that if she wasn’t there they only had the SkyPark to bet on. After that, this was a very big building in the dark.
‘Alison, baby? It’s Mummy.’
The apartment lay mausoleum-silent before them. Owen saw Wendy’s shoulders fall with disappointment. He followed her as she made for Alison’s bedroom and threw open the door in there. He played the flashlight across the room, lighting up posters of cartoon characters and some girl band that he didn’t know. They had long legs, though. There were stuffed toys everywhere, but no sign of Alison.
Wendy went to the air vent and checked it, thinking that perhaps Alison had been there and gone again. But the cover was shut tightly. She sat heavily on the bed and grabbed one of the cuddly toys that lay on it. He watched as she buried her face in its fur and breathed the smell of her daughter that remained on it, and cried. Owen left her to her moment of pain. They needed to be moving on, but she would only slow him down until she recovered. He looked at the soft toys that were everywhere in the room. Some of them had been in movies when he’d been a kid. He picked one up and studied it nostalgically. None of them looked as well used as the pixie doll he’d seen her with.
‘Looks like Mr Pickle is her favourite,’ he said, for no particular reason.
Wendy nodded, and started to get her emotions under control again. She wiped her eyes with the heels of her palms. ‘She takes him everywhere.’
‘He looks kind of well-used,’ he said. ‘Funny how you can buy kids all these toys and they still stick with a battered old teddy with one eye, or something.’
‘Do you have children?’ Wendy asked him.
Owen shook his head and put the soft toy down. ‘No.’
‘Well, maybe one day.’
Owen said nothing, but she saw the muscles tighten in his jaw and she knew that she had stumbled into badlands. Quickly, she said, ‘That bloody Mr Pickle, he’s probably crawling with germs.’
‘He looks like he’s been around a bit. Was he yours?’
‘Mine? God no. He turned up at the hospital after she came out of intensive care. They had a toybox or something there on the children’s ward. She must have got him out of that. When it was time to go home she wouldn’t leave him behind.
‘I suppose she thinks he helped her get better. Who knows, maybe he did?’
She got up off the bed and moved through into the lounge. Owen followed a moment later, and found her frozen to the spot, her eyes on the ceiling above her. He didn’t need to throw the torchlight on it – he could already see the strange lights glowing within its bulging, rippling mass.
Owen’s eyes measured the distance to the open apartment door, and wondered if he could tell Wendy to run for it. If she made it, why wouldn’t the thing just go after her anyway? Whatever this was, nothing impeded it – it blew straight through molecular structures like a hurricane. There was no escape.
There was only one thing he could do.
‘Wendy, get down!’
And even as he yelled, he was throwing himself at her – as the thing on the ceiling lurched downwards.
Instinctively, Wendy curled into a foetal ball, and Owen wrapped himself around her, covering her smaller body with his own, as he felt the slimy wetness of the thing that had come through the ceiling covering him.
Not only covering him, probing him. He could feel it inside him, seeping through his flesh, exploring his body, caressing his organs as if with cold, slimy fingers. He could feel it tasting him, and he felt a wave of nausea pass through him. He had felt this before, he remembered, the sensation of molecular invasion that had savaged his body and thrown him into unconsciousness.
Desperate, he fought off the darkness that threatened to sweep through his mind. He couldn’t black out now. Because this time he knew it was different – it wasn’t after him; it knew he was no good to it. It was trying to get through him, to pass through his body the way it passed through brick and steel to get to the woman beneath him. The only barrier that was stopping it was Owen’s dead flesh and maybe – just maybe – his cellular corruption would poison it before it got to her.
He cried out with disgust and with a pain he had thought he would never feel again as the thing filled him, and his brain screamed for release, pleaded for the darkness that would save his sanity.
And Owen felt it in his head, felt its tentacles wrapping around the cells of his brain, squeezing them, bursting them.
And he thought he heard its voice.
Mummy!
Then it was gone.
Owen felt it leave his body like a sudden cold shudder.
Somebody just walked over my grave.
Yeah, he thought, you wish!
It was gone.
But he lay there a moment, conscious of Wendy beneath him, still curled into a ball, still breathing, and still there.
He rolled off her, his eyes searching the gloom for those strange lights. But there were none.
‘What – what happened?’ asked Wendy, her brain struggling for the moment to accept that she was still alive.
‘Why didn’t it kill us?’
Owen got to his feet and offered her his good hand. ‘Sometimes it’s better not to ask too many questions.’
He helped Wendy to her feet and told her that they had to go, wondering how the hell he was going to do what he knew lay ahead.
They left the apartment.
Lucca saw them go.
TWENTY-SIX
One day, when he’d had time on his hands, Jack had tried to work out how many times he had died. He actually sat down in his office with a block of paper and a couple of pens and wrote a neat 1 in the margin and alongside it he wrote Dalek.
That had been how it all started. After that there had been endless bar-room brawls – they had even killed him at Torchwood back in the early days – and at one time he’d worked in a travelling show billed as The Man Who Cannot Die. OK, people had paid to kill him then, but he figured that even if it bought him a few beers at the end of the day, when you got down to it a death was a death.
Then Torchwood had discovered that they had a problem with alien sleeper agents and the whole city started going up in smoke, and Jack lost the list and never got around to starting it again. The score was somewhere around a couple of hundred, by then. But he hadn’t even started on the trenches in Flanders.
He was sure he had already forgotten some of them – unlike his lovers; he remembered all of them (every sex and species) – the one thing he never forgot, however, was how it felt to come back to life.
Like being dragged over broken glass.
It never got any better, and he never got used to it. It felt as bad as ever as he found himself lying on the concrete floor of the stairwell just outside the SkyPark.
Gwen was kneeling over him. She had seen him die so many times, but she never got used to it. A part of her never fully expected him to return to life.
This time, they had reached the twenty-fourth floor, had got through the stairway doors and had found themselves facing another door. Gwen had told him that, according to the plans on her hand-held module, this was an indoor skyrise park area.