killing her boyfriend? Isn’t it right that we keep the creature in her alive and save Marianne and Rhys?’
‘Punishment isn’t the same as justice,’ Gwen said slowly, shaking her head. ‘Jack’s right — we don’t have the right to choose.’
Owen’s fists clenched in frustration. ‘I do. I’m going to give Marianne the “Stop” pill,’ he said. ‘She’s suffered enough.’ Before Jack or Gwen could stop him he grabbed one of the blister packs off the instrument tray and dashed for the door.
He could hear the sound of their pounding footsteps echoing off the Victorian brickwork as he sprinted through the tunnels of Torchwood. Gwen was shouting his name; Jack was silent but Owen could sense his steely determination.
His own breath rasped in his ears and burned in his chest. He could feel his blood pulsing through the arteries in his throat and in his temples. He couldn’t tell how close they were; any second he expected a hand to close on his shoulder, pulling him back, but it never did.
Skidding round a corner, he reached the cells. The Weevil in the closest one was pressed up against the glass, sniffing at the air and exposing its teeth, but he paid no attention to it. He kept going, past the cell where Lucy was incarcerated and on to the end cell, where Marianne waited for him.
‘I’ve got it!’ he called. ‘The cure. Just one tablet and you’ll be fine! I promise!’
Marianne didn’t answer. She was slumped in her cell, her bandaged hands with their damaged fingers still chained to the wall so she couldn’t chew on them again.
Instead, she had found a different way to feed on herself. She had twisted her body around so that she could reach her upper right arm with her teeth. She must have dislocated her shoulder to manage it. Owen knew that she had dislocated her shoulder because she had chewed all the way through her arm, regardless of the pain, until there wasn’t enough flesh left to keep it attached. With no joint there to hold the arm in, the weight of her body had pulled her shoulder and her arm apart, tearing through what few muscles and tendons remained. Her body had flopped forward onto the stone flooring, while her arm dangled separately from the restraint above.
The stone floor of the cell was a lake of glutinous blood.
Marianne’s head had dropped forward on her chest, and her hair, her gorgeous blonde hair, hung over her eyes.
Owen slumped to his knees. The blister pack dropped from his fingers. He felt as if a yawning chasm had opened up within him, an abyss into which his heart was dropping.
‘Owen,’ came Jack’s voice from beside him. Strong fingers took his head and turned it until he was looking straight into Jack’s eyes. Jack was kneeling beside him, and Gwen was kneeling beside them both. ‘Owen, I will ask many hard things of you. This is not the hardest, not even close, but it will seem that way. It will seem like the hardest thing in the world. Owen, I need you to cut Marianne’s body open as quickly as you can and get that thing out of her. It might be still alive, and we need to find out all we can about it. I won’t ask you if you can do that for me, because you
Owen nodded bleakly. Of course he would do it. What else was left? He used to be a doctor. He used to cure people. Now… now he couldn’t even cure himself, let alone anyone else.
While Gwen went back for a trolley, Jack opened up the door to the cell. He had his Webley ready, just in case the creature — what had Jack christened it? Paul? — made some attempt to escape the cage of dead flesh that was holding it.
Owen just watched, still kneeling on the ground, as the two of them released Marianne’s left arm from the restraints, placed her body on the trolley, then released her right arm from the restraints and placed that beside her. His heart had dropped away into that unfathomable abyss within him. He couldn’t feel anything. There was nothing left to feel.
With Marianne on the metal surface of the autopsy table, and with Gwen and Jack watching silently from the gallery, Owen carefully cut the clothes off her body. Part of him remembered how desperately he had wanted to see her naked, but the sight of her body did nothing for him now. Marianne wasn’t there any more. What was her was the way she had held herself, the way she had tilted her head, the way her eyes had seemed to come alive when she got talking about her favourite things — that had been Marianne. And that had gone.
Mechanically, Owen made a deep lateral incision from shoulder to ruined shoulder, dipping down to touch Marianne’s xiphoid process as he crossed the sternum, then a second incision from the xiphoid process down to the groin, cutting through muscle and yellow body fat. Blood welled thickly from the incisions. Using his hands, he pulled the incisions apart, revealing the internal organs. Normally he would cut through the ribs and cartilage next, exposing the heart, lungs and trachea, but he wasn’t conducting an autopsy — he was looking for one very particular thing.
Looking up at the gallery, where a grim-faced Toshiko and Ianto had now joined Jack and Gwen, he nodded at Toshiko. She pressed a button on a remote control she was holding, and the image of Marianne’s torso, taken by Toshiko’s ultrasound scanner, flashed up on the high-definition screen that hung above the table. The colour-coding showed where the creature was — or where it had been. Palpating Marianne’s duodenum, Owen quickly located the right stretch of intestine. He could feel something in there more solid than pre-digested food. It seemed to shift slightly under his questing fingers. Reaching out to the instrument tray, he retrieved a couple of clamps and used them to secure either end of the organ, above and below the creature. A few strokes with a scalpel and he had isolated that entire section — about a metre’s worth of wet, pink flesh. He lifted it clear and placed it in a metal bowl, then placed the bowl on the table beside Marianne’s abused body.
Ianto, unbidden, had retrieved a large glass jar from storage. It had a lid that could be fastened securely on top, and nozzles top and bottom so that liquid or gas could be introduced or extracted. It was about the size of Marianne’s head. Owen had sometimes used it for chemical experiments, but it suited his purpose now. From his chemical store, he obtained some hydrochloric acid and poured it into the jar, along with some distilled water and various other chemicals. By this time, guessing what he was doing, Gwen had scoured the Hub for whatever scraps of food she could find — old pizza crusts, sandwiches, bags of sweets, stuff from the refrigerator, anything that could be used to replicate the internal environment of a digestive system. Owen tipped them into the jar. Within moments the mixture had turned cloudy and curdled, and the sharp smell of the acid had been replaced by something nastier and more faecal.
Owen retrieved the section of Marianne’s intestine from the metal bowl and held it up above the jar. This was going to be the tricky bit. Somewhere in the background, he could sense Jack bringing his revolver out of his coat, holding it ready in case the creature tried to escape, as it had from the receptionist at the Scotus Clinic.
Owen held the scalpel in steady hands, preparing to make the final cut. He held the length of intestine by one end, just above the clamp, and sliced vertically downwards. The cut gaped open, pressed by something heavy within. For a moment, Owen was worried that the creature wouldn’t relinquish its grip, but it must have sensed a change in the health of its host. Whatever means it used to maintain hold on the inside of the gut, whatever hooks or suckers it was using, had been released. As Owen watched, a slimy black and blue mass slid out of Marianne’s intestine and fell into the jar, splashing the liquid up the sides where it stuck in globs, which then slid down again to rejoin the mass.
Ripples spread across the surface of the liquid, but Owen thought he could see the creature moving, digging itself deeper into the biological muck.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Paul,’ he said, the first words he had spoken since he had found Marianne’s body. ‘Paul is formerly the occupant of Miss Marianne Till. Paul will be staying with us for a while. Please make him feel welcome.’ He gazed up at Toshiko. ‘Tosh, you’re the most technical one here, so I’m going to tell you what to do next. The hydrochloric acid and the scraps of food will resemble the contents of a gut, which will make Paul here feel at home. I don’t fancy keeping it like this, however — too messy and it’s going to stink to high heaven. What I want you to do is drain the jar in about four hours, and while you’re draining it, flush it through with nutrient solution. You’ll find bags of it labelled up in the fridge. Set up a drip so the nutrient solution gets introduced into the jar at the same rate as it’s removed. Set it up so that a bag lasts about two hours. That may be overdoing it, but I don’t think these things can be overfed, somehow. All clear?’
Toshiko nodded.
Gwen tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look at her. ‘Owen,’ she said: ‘what happens now? You’re talking like you’re not going to be around.’
‘I’m not, for a while,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go and find a dark corner somewhere, and I’m going to get as
