Alexander shouted in pain as he landed badly, the sound of his wrist snapping audible even over Rob's ranting.
'Get out of my house!' he was screaming. 'Give me back my wife and get out!'
'Did nobody think to bind his legs?' Alexander shouted.
'What do I do?' Joe asked.
'Oh, give her to him!' Alexander replied. 'Just get the waveform reader back or we'll never get out of here.'
'No!' Gwen shouted. 'Keep her away from him, Joe.'
Joe made a childlike whining noise. The drug programmed him to obey, but it didn't care who was giving the orders. He didn't know what to do.
'Typical,' Alexander moaned, cradling his broken wrist. 'We're about to get caught in a time-space collapse, and Torchwood Girl wants to worry about an abusive relationship. Let the apes do their thing, I say.'
Rob was moving perilously close to the edge of the drive and the waveform. 'Burst the sky and know real fears!' he shouted, fragments of his dream returning to him.
Ianto had rolled over to the SUV. Reaching into the glove compartment, he pulled out the spare handgun he knew Jack made a habit of stashing there.
'Hand the reader over,' he shouted, pointing the gun at Rob, 'and… well… stop being such a pain in the arse, frankly.'
'Oh, very good,' Alexander muttered. 'But I think we can all see he's beyond the point of negotiation.' He beckoned Hannah closer and began to whisper in her ear.
As Jack moved up the stairs, he could feel the air shifting around him. The entities must be close to entering, reality was beginning to fall apart. At the first-floor landing, Kerry Robinson held out her opened wrists to him, dripping more than bath water onto the carpet at her feet.
'It'll stop hurting soon,' he promised her as he ran past and up the next flight of stairs.
He wasn't surprised to see Alison floating high in the corner of the upstairs room, but was careful to avoid stepping too close. He didn't have time to get caught in the reeds of her little bubble of hell.
'I'll do what I can,' he said, moving carefully across the floorboards, trying to find the doorways he'd experienced before. He only hoped they were still…
He found himself in Rob and Julia's bedroom, both of them now thankfully asleep. Carefully, he backed up into the upstairs room and worked his way around the tear in space-time, waving his fingers in front of him to find its edges.
If that one was still there then that meant… his hand vanished up to the wrist in front of him.
He was briefly aware of the smell of onions before he stepped forward and vanished.
***
'Life's so unfair,' moaned Hannah, walking towards Joe.
'Stay back!' Rob shouted. 'I just want all of you out of here, go on…'
'Idiot,' Hannah said to Joe. 'Give him the woman, as long as he hands over the thing in his hands, and ignore what anyone else says.'
'Oh…' The relief on Joe's face was immense. 'Hey, mister, do swaps?'
Gwen tried to push Joe back, but Hannah punched her in the jaw.
'That hurt my bloody hand!' she shouted, walking alongside Joe towards Rob.
'There,' Rob said, throwing the PDA to Hannah. 'Now hand her over.'
Hannah put the PDA on the floor and ran at Rob screaming and crying simultaneously. 'Life's so unfair!' she screeched, jumping at Rob and knocking both of them back into the waveform.
They were caught, twisting slowly as the ripples of space-time distortion pushed and pulled them, ageing bone and peeling skin, hair growing only to become dust.
'Stay back!' Alexander shouted as Ianto ran forward to try and help. 'There's nothing to be done.'
The two of them became less distinct as they broke up into chunks, pebbles, grit, then dust, dissipating around the waveform like sugar stirred into coffee.
'You made her do that!' Gwen shouted at Alexander.
'Oh shut up and grow a pair,' Alexander muttered. 'I did what had to be done. Now pass me the reader and hope the rain's not completely…'
'He's gone!' Joe wailed. 'What am I supposed to do with her if he's gone?' He whirled around in distress and stamped on the PDA.
TWENTY-THREE
Jack stepped out into a Penylan night at the turn of the twentieth century. Taking a breath of fresh air to cleanse his palate after the oppressive, static-filled atmosphere of Jackson Leaves, he walked to the centre of the hard concrete foundations and began to set his explosive charge.
'I can't see how you think that would help,' said a voice to his right.
He looked up and, squinting in the moonlight, tried to recognise the speaker. 'Alison?' he asked, then shook his head. 'No, of course not.'
'I thought you might prefer her to old Joan.'
The creature walked over to him and squatted by his side as he pushed the timed detonator into the plastic explosive.
'Is it that you just like destroying things?' she asked, lying back on the concrete. The illusion was perfect, the cool, evening breeze erupting gooseflesh all over her body as she squirmed in the dust.
'He can't help it,' said another voice from behind him and he wasn't altogether surprised to see Miles — or a perfect copy of him at least — walking towards him. 'He's a man, and we just love to break things apart.'
'Oh,' said Alison. 'I always thought better of him than that.'
She licked her lips and, even in the low light, Jack could tell the tongue was far too long, rolling across her cheek before dipping its tip into the corner of her eyes to drink.
'No you didn't,' he replied. 'At least the real Alison didn't — she knew me much better. She was under no illusion that I was anything but trouble.'
'How right she was,' said the Miles creature. 'I wonder if that's what she was thinking as I drowned her.'
Jack shook his head and placed the explosive on the ground. 'I imagine she was wishing she had agreed to marry someone much more stable.' He began to walk away. 'I didn't kill her. That arrogant, image-obsessed and deluded lover we shared did.' He turned back to them, trying not to notice how much their fake humanity was slipping as their bodies twisted in the darkness. 'I can't take the blame for everything that happens to people I know. Miles killed her because he couldn't stand who he was. That's sad but it's hardly my fault.'
The creatures gurgled deep in their throats, a sign of anger, Jack presumed. Miles, on all fours, began to scuttle back and forth, while Alison stretched along the floor, her biceps and thighs stretching like toffee as she writhed, limbs snaking away in different directions.
'You are ceasing to be an entertainment,' she said, her voice taking on a hollow quality as it bounced around her elongated chest. 'You would do well to stop this now before you anger us further.'
'Or what?' Jack asked. 'You may be close enough to this universe to make yourselves seen, but if you're that powerful, tell you what, stop the bomb yourself. Go on, all it takes is a finger on a button.' He smiled. 'You can't, can you? You have no real physical presence here, you're just voices and cheap threats. A pair of ghosts.'
Miles reared up, pulling at his dream skin as if even the pretence of flesh was a discomfort to him. 'What do we need hands for,' he asked, the words distorting as he yanked at his mouth, pulling his cheeks out into a loose trumpet, 'when we have puppets to do our work for us?'
Jack smelled Locke before he felt him, but not soon enough to avoid the blow that sent him to the floor in a spiral of cement dust.
'You stupid idiot!' Alexander roared at Joe. 'I've a good mind to send you running into the waveform.'
'You try it, and I swear you'll follow him,' Gwen warned.
Ianto tucked the handgun into the back of his trousers. 'You thought you knew where the safe passage was,' he said to Alexander.