‘Really?’
‘Oh, yeah. There will be noise. There will be bright lights. There will be woe. There will be weeping and consternation. The streets of Cardiff will resound with the lamentation of estate agents.’
‘This is Torchwood going to war, then?’ asked Toshiko.
‘No, this is Torchwood trying to prevent one,’ said Jack.
‘You people have never seen a real war,’ said Davey.
‘Sir?’ Jack asked, looking at the old man.
‘I said you’ve never known a real war. Not a real one. It never leaves you, war doesn’t. Everything you saw or did, it all clings like a smell you can’t ever wash off. Sixty years, sixty damn years, it hasn’t ever washed off.’
Davey had stopped by an iron gate. It stood open on its bolts, as if it had been pushed aside.
Beyond the gate lay the allotments: portioned-out strips of ground, a patchwork of rectangular plots, some with sheds, some with rainwater tanks or tool chests, some neglected and overgrown. A hazy mist drifted over the winter beets and rhubarb leaves. The rain began to fall harder, pattering off the vegetation.
Jack walked into the allotments, and looked around.
‘I could come to like a place like this,’ he said. ‘When I retire. Not so much with the rain, obviously.’
He looked at Davey. ‘Your shed?’
‘Up along there, Captain,’ Davey said, with a gesture. Raindrops dripped from his raised sleeve.
‘Tosh tells me you’ve spoken to this thing?’
‘Tosh?’
‘The nice Japanese girl there.’
‘Oh, right. Yeah, we’ve spoken a little. I dug it up, after all. Kept it safe. We chatted. Reminisced, really, one old boy to another. War stories. Memories of life during wartime.’
Jack wiped rain off his face and looked at Davey. The old man’s eyes were very sharp, very knowing.
‘So, was it good to talk?’ Jack asked him.
‘Good?’ replied Davey.
‘I have no idea, no frame of reference, so I’m asking you. Was it good to talk?’
‘I suppose,’ said Davey. ‘It was refreshing to meet someone who got it. To be truthful, Captain, I’ve never had anyone I could talk to about… about the service. Not Glynis. Not really. She never got it. God knows, I never wanted her to get it. It understood, though. I could tell it things. We shared things. Memories. It was nice for me.’
‘Yeah?’
Davey nodded. Drops of rain ran off the end of his nose. ‘Nice to be respected. To be acknowledged. Only a soldier understands what another soldier has been through. In the end, we’re a lonely breed in that regard.’
‘I guess you would be.’
‘I just-’
‘What?’ Jack asked.
Davey shook his head. ‘I just wished we could have kept it to that. It kept having these dreams, see? At night, its dreams leaked into mine. I tried, but I couldn’t bear them. The things it had done. Laughed about. Awful things. I have my own bad dreams, Captain Harkness, and I’ll carry them to my grave, where God can judge me, if he likes. I couldn’t carry its dreams too. I wanted to. I tried. One old soldier to another.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Jack.
‘You’re going to have to kill it, aren’t you?’ asked Davey.
‘I think we are. I wish to hell I knew how,’ said Jack. ‘Davey, let’s see this shed of yours.’
The rain beat down relentlessly. The shed was a silent, damp box. Its windows were broken and its door was half-open. Jack and James gazed at the decaying remains of the bodies spread and staked out in front of it. Toshiko looked away, swallowing hard.
‘What do we do?’ James asked Jack.
‘I guess we… find out if it’s inside,’ said Jack. He took a step forward.
The shed juddered violently. It stopped shaking for a moment, and then juddered again.
‘Get down,’ said Jack.
The shed blew apart. It came to pieces in a flash of yellow light. The panelled walls burst out in all directions in a flurry of splintered boards. The pitch-treated roof ascended, in one burning piece, and crashed over into a plot two allotments away.
Swathed in flames, the Serial G turned and looked at them. It was standing on a scorched rectangle of ground that had been the floor of the shed. The downpour sizzled as it fell around it.
‘Keep your heads down!’ Jack yelled, on his belly in the soaking grass. James was face down with his arms over his head. Toshiko was trying to get the old man into the cover of a compost bunker.
‘Tosh! Get him out of here!’
Toshiko replied something inaudible. Jack was well aware how impractical his last instruction to her had been.
The Serial G took a step forward off the burning patch of shed floor. Its long, thin legs extended slightly, taking it up to over ten feet tall. The huge steel hooks that formed its hand opened and closed with a noise like a luxury liner’s anchor chain running out. It turned its head to the left, then to the right, and took another step. It hummed. Rain streamed off it.
It was coming towards them. With a curse, Jack got up and ran, head down, through the rain, between rows of cold frames and bean poles.
‘Jack!’ James yelled.
The Serial G turned its head to follow Jack’s movement. There was a yellow pulse.
Jack had thrown himself headlong into a bed of wet brambles and elephant ear rhubarb leaves. He felt the scorch of the heat cone as it shaved the air above him. The blast exploded up a patch of ground in a great, muddy divot, and crushed a galvanised water tank with a kettle-drum bang. The water inside evaporated instantly in a screaming belch of steam.
The Serial G began to trudge towards the spot where it had seen Jack drop down. Jack heard its steps pulping vegetables and snapping canes. He heard the drum of raindrops. He couldn’t get up. That would be suicide. He rolled instead, scrambling through the soaking undergrowth, twigs and nettles scratching his face.
The Serial G fired again, but its blast fell short, violently excavating a cabbage patch and turning a large cold frame into a blizzard of glass and wood chips.
Jack winced and tried not to cry out. One flying chunk of glass had stabbed into his upper left arm, and another had cut his cheek on the way past.
The Serial G took another two steps.
Jack sprang up, wincing at the tight pain from his upper arm, and started to run for better cover.
The Serial G turned immediately, its torso rotating. It raised its left arm to shoot it out and snatch Jack off his feet.
‘Oi! Buggerlugs!’ James yelled. He came up from behind a composter and emptied the clip of his side-arm at the metal figure.
His distraction worked. Too well.
The Serial G ignored Jack and turned to face him instead.
TWENTY-TWO
It all happened very fast.
James ducked back down behind the composter. The rain was hammering down. The Serial G pulsed its dull yellow glow and the brick composter pulverised. Toshiko glimpsed James’s body cartwheeling backwards in the storm of flying brick fragments and flaming hanks of compost mulch.
She yelled his name. He was dead. He was so surely dead-
She saw him get up, unsteady, dazed, his hair matted and his shirt torn. He looked around, as if trying to remember who he was, where he was.
