daughter. But he knew it was just a matter of time before she died. He knew what awaited her then. And there was nothing he could do about that, either.
A look passed between him and the old guy. He’d seen the blood now, too. The slightest motion of Owen’s head informed the other man. Daniel’s eyes started to fill with tears. ‘I’ll stay with her,’ he told Owen. ‘Until…’ He swallowed the rest of the sentence. ‘Until the ambulance men arrive,’ he said to Shona, and smoothed the hair from her eyes with a liver-spotted hand. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing.’ He turned aside to Owen and hissed: ‘What happened to the brute who started all this? Where is that scumbag?’
Owen’s face showed his bafflement.
Daniel was struggling to stay calm for Shona’s sake. He jerked his head towards the body of a large woman that was spread-eagled across two broken seats. ‘Took a knife to her and then ran off down the bus…’ The rest of Daniel’s muttered diatribe was lost on Owen, who was studying the tear marks around the fat woman’s neck. That ragged edge wasn’t like a knife wound. Could she have sustained it in the crash?
A young lad in a university scarf, green and red and white, struggled noisily with the rear emergency door. No, that red was more blood on a Cardiff scarf, wasn’t it? The door sprang open, and he started to help people over and out.
Owen gave a hand to a couple of shocked teenage boys. One of their friends was scraping around in the debris and trying to pick things up off the broken seats. ‘Leave them, Alwyn!’ called one of his mates.
‘They’re ultra-rare!’ bleated Alwyn. ‘I can’t leave my MonstaQuest cards in all this!’
Owen eased him away by the elbow. ‘Even so, it’s more important that you leave.’ He plucked a couple of the cards out of Alwyn’s fingers to make his point, and scrunched them into his own jacket pocket. The lad grumbled, but allowed himself to be hauled to safety by the other teenagers.
Owen rolled his eyes in despair, and looked at where the rest of Alwyn’s cards had dropped against the cracked window. In the middle of the scattered pile was a mobile phone, open and flashing. He stretched across and retrieved it, picking bits of glass from the silver fascia. The photo display showed a smiling young woman, labelled ‘Jenny’. He could hear a voice on the line. ‘Hello, who’s there?’ it asked.
Bloody hell, thought Owen what are the odds? ‘Tosh! Tosh, is that you?’
She sounded just as surprised. ‘Owen! Did you call this number, or did she call you?’
She? That would be Jenny. ‘Just found this phone,’ he explained.
‘Is it Jenny?’ Shona asked weakly from beside him.
‘No, it’s someone I know,’ he said gently. And then into the phone again: ‘Having a bit of a busy day here, Tosh.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m just in the middle of an RTA, outside the…’ He trailed off as the sounds of a dead line filled his ear. The call had been interrupted, and there was no connection. Time enough later to call Toshiko back.
Most of the walking wounded had evacuated. Those who remained were the trapped and the dead. A thin voice called from the length of the bus: ‘Please help me!’
A middle-aged Chinese guy was bent over a woman. Her long, light-brown hair spilled over the cheap upholstery of a ripped-out seat. Her eyes stared sightlessly. Owen held the man’s shoulders and gently pulled him away. He saw that the Chinese guy’s right foot was cocked unnaturally over to the left, with a gash through his faded jeans. A serious leg injury could be fatal, and if the femoral artery in the man’s thigh was compromised then he might bleed to death within the next ten minutes. Owen clumsily removed the guy’s belt and looped it around the injured leg. ‘God, what happened here?’
The Chinese guy grimaced as the tourniquet bit. ‘Some kid in a Halloween mask went berserk with a knife. Killed the driver. The bus ran out of control.’ He gritted his teeth, and his eyes showed his fear. ‘Is it a terrorist attack?’
‘A knife?’ Owen checked the driver, dead in his cab. The man’s arm, shoulder and throat were all torn to shreds. Again, not the clean edges from a knife, or from metal and glass laceration.
The Chinese guy lashed out awkwardly with his good leg. His foot connected with a leather-clad figure that had fallen into the seat beside him. The figure stirred and groaned.
‘Hey hey hey!’ shouted Owen. ‘Knock it off!’
‘He’s the terrorist,’ spat the Chinese guy.
That’s no terrorist, realised Owen as the figure reared up. It’s a Weevil. And it’s really badly pissed off.
The Weevil threw back its head and howled. The Chinese guy shrank back, but had nowhere to go. The Weevil’s scored face hissed and spat at him.
Owen slapped the Weevil in the face. ‘Come and have a go,’ he said, ‘if you think you’re hard enough.’
Christ, he thought as the creature snapped its head round to face him, you’d better be right about this, Harper. Since his resurrection, Owen had discovered that his very presence seemed to cow the creatures into submission. But did this one know he was King of the Weevils? Or was he about to become Snack of the Weevils?
The creature’s sunken eyes glittered at him. It growled softly, and lowered its head.
Owen blinked slowly. ‘Good boy.’
A brace of emergency vehicles screeched up outside the bus. The area was abruptly bathed in their strobing blue lights, and the bus echoed with the piercing wail of their sirens. Spooked, the Weevil leaped from cover and fled through the bus doors.
Owen struggled around to find his gun in the back of his belt. With so little feeling in his hands, he had to double-check anything that he reached for when it was out of sight. He cursed. Couldn’t feel for a pulse, couldn’t feel for a gun, what bloody good was he?
By the time he’d scrambled after the Weevil, it had already battered its way past the crowds gathered outside. He watched helplessly as it vanished into a side alley. By the time he got down, the creature would be back in its sewer home eating shitcakes.
Owen slammed the side of the bus in frustration, and got a satisfying clang with the butt of his gun. He registered the shock on the paramedics’ faces, and reholstered it. He sat heavily on the side of the overturned bus and swore again. A flapping shape in Wendleby’s window behind him caught his attention, fitfully illuminated by the flashes from the emergency vehicles. If his heart had still been beating, it would have leaped into his mouth. The shape was just the MonstaQuest display poster. But the big cartoon artwork on the poster bore an alarming resemblance to the Weevil.
Owen reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved the couple of crumpled MonstaQuest cards he’d snatched from Alwyn. From each of the oversized playing cards, stylised pictures of Weevils leered back at Owen. Just like the one who’d escaped down the alleyway. They seemed to mock him. King of the Weevils, indeed.
The orange indicator board in the dragon’s jaws seemed to have decided its status at last: ‘Out of Service’. That reminded him about his interrupted call with Toshiko. He tapped near his earlobe, and called in to speak to her.
What the hell…?
‘Achenbrite apologise for the interruption in service,’ said a calm voice.’ ‘Please stand by.’
NINE
‘Tosh? Toshiko!’
Gwen was starting to wish she’d listened more closely to the Torchwood health and safety briefing. At the time it had seemed too remote from real life, literally incredible. Police training had taught her the ABCs of basic first aid – A for Airway, B for Breathing, C for Circulation. The Torchwood equivalent seemed to go through the entire first half of the alphabet, and it started ‘A for Alien, B for Bioform’. She’d sort of switched off by the time Ianto had reached ‘I for Inseminoid’.
Here she was now, faced with an injured colleague, on the freezing rooftop of a shopping mall. Better to go with her police training. She was just about to roll her friend into the recovery position when Toshiko – thank God – seemed to revive.
‘Steady, don’t get up too fast.’
