Scotus stared at Jack. His face reflected various emotions, one after the other; anger, confusion, realisation, understanding, concern and, finally, surprise. ‘Alien?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I suppose they would have to be, wouldn’t they?’
‘You didn’t know?’ Gwen asked, moving up beside Jack. She was still carrying the shrouded bird-cage, he was glad to see. He had plans for that.
‘It’s not the first explanation that comes to mind,’ Scotus said. ‘I assumed they were some newly evolved species, or something that we’d just never seen before.’
Jack moved to one side, concerned that if anything went wrong then he and Gwen were both in the line of fire. He wanted them separate, so that at least one of them would survive an attack long enough to fight back. It was a lesson he’d learned the hard way, more years ago than he cared to remember. ‘How did you come across them?’ he asked.
‘Tell me who you are first,’ Scotus said quietly, firmly. He had considerable charisma, Jack noticed.
‘Let’s just say we’re interested in anything that’s alien. Especially if it starts affecting people.’
Scotus nodded. ‘Very well. I wasn’t always a nutritionist,’ he said. ‘I used to be a vet. I owned a place just outside Cardiff, specialising in farm animals.’ He grimaced. ‘Have you seen the way that farming is going recently? It’s enough to turn your stomach. If scientists could breed square chickens, so that you could stack more of them together in one place, then farmers would beat a path to their door. It’s all about maximising the amount of profit per cubic foot, because the supermarkets will absolutely nail the farmers to the wall with the contracts they force them to sign.’
‘Fascinating though this is,’ Jack said, ‘I’m still waiting for the aliens to turn up.’
‘I was called out to a cow that had died,’ Scotus said. ‘It had apparently been acting strangely for days; eating much more than usual, attacking the other cows and taking bites out of them, getting thinner and thinner. I thought it was BSE, but if you report that then there’s a panic which results in every cow within fifty miles being slaughtered, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that. I conducted an autopsy, and I found this thing in its stomach. It was barely alive.’
‘Drifted through the Rift,’ Jack murmured to Gwen. She didn’t reply.
‘It looked like some kind of tapeworm,’ Scotus continued, ‘so I put it in a nutrient solution while I worked out what to do.’
‘Don’t tell me — it changed into a thing like a flying dagger and tried to impale you.’
‘I was out, on a call. I came back to find my dog dead and the creature gone.’ Scotus reached a hand up to his forehead, brushing the fine blond hairs away and placing his palm over his eyes. ‘I autopsied the dog, and found a cluster of these… egg-like things. I kept them for study — cutting some of them open, implanting others in rats and cats and other dogs until I had worked out their complete life cycle.’
‘Without bothering to inform the authorities?’
‘And what good would that have done? They wouldn’t have understood what an opportunity I had!’
‘Opportunity?’ Jack asked. ‘To do what — kill people?’
Scotus winced. ‘That was… unfortunate,’ he said. ‘It was never meant to go that way. I thought I’d invented a way of making people slim and making me rich at the same time. Obesity is such a problem these days. People would pay a lot of money for a guaranteed way of losing weight, and I developed a toxin that would just dissolve the creatures when their hosts had reached their ideal body mass without affecting the hosts. It was perfect — my patients would never realise what was inside them! I didn’t realise that the creatures could actually influence people’s actions if they weren’t getting enough nutrition!’
‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions,’ Jack said. ‘But you’re going to turn around and walk back along that road.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Scotus said.
Jack raised his pistol, but a muffled sound behind him made him turn.
Gwen’s head was twisted painfully around to one side, pointing up at the ceiling. Her eyes were wide and it looked like she might have been screaming, if the hand that was holding her head hadn’t been cutting off her breathing.
The hand belonged to a man in a leather jacket, who was holding Gwen’s automatic in his other hand.
‘Drop the gun,’ he said, ‘or I’ll snap your girlfriend’s neck.’
Somewhere in the distance, a gun fired.
Owen raised his gun and aimed it at the head of the thug with the nail-encrusted chain, which looked like something barnacled and crustacean. ‘One more step and I’ll conduct a radical transsphenoidal hemisectomy using a copper-jacketed bullet rather than a scalpel,’ he said, trying to put a firmness into his voice that he didn’t really feel.
‘You talk too much,’ the thug said. He lashed out expertly with the chain, flicking it.
The end of the chain sliced across Owen’s knuckles, sending fiery pain shooting up his arm. He dropped the gun. It hit the floor, butt-first, and fired, sending a plume of flame up towards the ceiling and deafening Owen with the blast.
‘I do everything too much,’ Owen muttered, sucking blood from his fingers.
The recoil caused the gun to skitter across the concrete floor towards the thug. He looked at it disdainfully, and kicked it away, over the edge of the concrete floor and onto the tarmac beneath. ‘Tricky safety design on the P220,’ he said. ‘The company abandoned the traditional catch for a decocking lever that lowers the hammer to a safety notch.’ He glanced up at Owen, and there was a terrible humour in his eyes. ‘But that’s by-the-by,’ he said. ‘Now it’s fairer. We’re both unarmed.’
‘You’ve got that chain thing,’ Owen pointed out.
The thug looked at the spiked chain.
‘Oops, my mistake,’ he said, and smiled.
He stepped towards Owen, bringing the chain back behind him and coiling it, ready to strike.
Owen risked a glance to one side, where Toshiko was confronting the other thug. He’d hoped she would have him on the floor with her gun in the back of his neck by now, but she seemed to be weighing up her options, deciding how to take him on. As Owen watched, Toshiko’s thug stepped forward suddenly and sliced his knuckle-dusters horizontally through the air at eye level. She brought her hands up to protect her face. The knuckle-dusters caught her palm, their brass spikes tearing the flesh and spraying blood in all directions. Toshiko staggered backwards, the gun falling from her hand and hitting the concrete floor but not, Owen noticed, firing. Perhaps he should switch to a Walther.
Something moving in the corner of his eye made him glance up. The nailed chain was flicking towards his eyes. He instinctively put his left arm up to defend himself. The chain wrapped itself around his forearm, the nails tearing through the leather of his jacket and into his flesh. The pain caused his breath to catch in his throat and his heart to go into arrhythmia with the shock. Instinctively he wanted to pull his arm closer to his body, protecting himself, but years of fighting in bars had taught him two valuable lessons.
Lesson one: you can ignore pain, if you really try.
Lesson two: do what the other guy is least expecting, even if it hurts.
Owen took two steps towards the thug. The chain sagged between them, its tension removed by Owen’s actions. The thug pulled at the chain, but instead of dragging Owen towards him, pulling him off his feet, he merely succeeded in taking some of the tension back up again. Owen took a step to one side, blood pulsing hot and wet inside his sleeve. Raising his right leg, he brought his foot down hard on the side of the thug’s knee.