Slow Decay

‘Yeah, sorry.’ He thought for a moment, and his face crumpled into a worried grimace. ‘The thing is, they worked! I’ve lost a good stone and a half since I took the first tablet.’

‘And you look great,’ she said, reassuringly. And it was true. Rhys hadn’t looked as slim for as long as she had known him. His stomach was flat, his arms and thighs were taut and his arse… that was just fantastic. Part of Gwen wished she could get that effect as quickly, but she wouldn’t pay the price that Lucy or Marianne had. No, it was back to running through darkened hospital corridors and alleyways for her.

‘And you reckon this is why Lucy had such a bad reaction?’

‘Psychotic episode brought on by whatever complex biochemical stuff was in the pill. Apparently they’ve had complaints from all over South Wales.’

‘Hasn’t hit the news,’ he said, puzzled.

‘BBC Wales have been doing an undercover investigation. Apparently they’re going to blow the lid off it in a new documentary in a month or so.’

‘Oh.’ He seemed strangely impressed at the mention of BBC Wales, as though it lent the story some extra credibility. ‘OK, I understand about the pills, and I understand about Lucy. What I don’t understand is, if the pills are potentially so dangerous, why do you want me to take the second one?’

*

Owen stared at the squat, black shape and goggled.

The tentacular arms seemed to have melded together, forming a long, thin body, and then the whole thing had grown two pairs of diaphanous wings, each one a third of the way along the body, that looked like they were beating at several hundred beats per second. The thing was both radially and bilaterally symmetrical, with the body knobbly in the middle but coming to a sharp point front and back. From what he could see, there were clusters of deep-set eyes, like jewels, at both ends. With those wings it was likely to be fast, and if it could go in both directions then it was likely to be highly manoeuvrable.

It was like a flying knife.

Ianto looked over his shoulder. ‘What happened to it?’ he asked.

‘I think we’re dealing with a multi-stage life cycle,’ Owen replied. ‘There’s the egg, of course, and there’s the creature that sits in the gut, absorbing nutrients. And then there’s this. Probably the egg-laying stage.’

‘What does it do — cut its way out of the host and fly off?’

‘Don’t be melodramatic. That’s more like Alien than it is real life.’ He thought fast, trying to connect what he knew of biology with what he’d observed of this thing in its various stages. ‘I’m working on the assumption that something this evolved isn’t a parasite at all. It’s not in its best interests to kill the host, cos it wouldn’t last long without a source of food. And I don’t think the worm form is built for hiking long distances in search of one. No, it wants to keep the host alive so it keeps getting fed, but what if the host dies? Then it’s faced with a mass of flesh which it can metabolise quickly, triggering a new stage of development.’ His voice was getting faster as he worked through the implications of what he was saying and saw the conclusion that he was coming to. ‘So when the host dies, it grows wings and turns itself into a flying dart.’

‘But why?’ Ianto pressed.

‘So it can aim itself at some animal moving along the ground, fly at it really fast and embed itself in the animal’s body, either killing it or causing severe wounds. It lays its eggs and it dies. Then scavengers come along and eat the remains of the dead animal, unwittingly snaffling up a whole load of eggs at the same time. And the cycle starts again.’

‘That is like Alien,’ Ianto pointed out, ‘with some modifications so it makes more sense.’

‘Shut up,’ Owen said, absently. He tried to imagine what life was like on this creature’s world. Nasty, brutish and short, he thought, which for some reason also reminded him of a girl he’d shagged a few months back.

‘OK,’ Ianto said. ‘Now that you’ve cleverly worked out that it’s a flying, egg-laying dealer of death, I have another question.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Which one of us is going to go in there and get it?’

The corrosive paranoia dripped away from her, and Toshiko was suddenly confronted with the fact that she had badly underestimated this device. The emotions she was receiving were too strong. She wasn’t able to cope. She threw the automatic away from her, onto the seat that Owen usually occupied, horrified at the terrible mistake she had almost made.

Toshiko’s position as technical expert to Torchwood was based on a couple of lucky guesses she’d made early on, but ever since then she had failed at whatever task she had been set. Jack only kept her on out of pity. The best thing she could do was to pack her bags and return to London. A despairing wail escaped her lips. There was no escape!

‘Tosh, stay focused.’

‘I’m trying. I’m really trying,’ she wept.

The device’s field of view passed across a man dressed in a tattered and stained overcoat and ragged trousers. His shoes were tied to his feet with string, and he was pushing a shopping trolley ahead of him. It appeared to be filled with old magazines. Toshiko cringed, expecting madness to wrap itself around her mind, infiltrating black tendrils into every aspect of her thoughts, but instead all the colours in the sky and the road and the cars seemed to intensify, as if a rainbow had descended from the sky and coated everything with light. She wanted to lean out of the window and let the wind ruffle her hair while she called out to passers-by, telling them how wonderful the world could be if only you opened your heart to it.

The car drove on leaving the vagrant behind, trailing his cloud of joy, and Toshiko felt like crying at what she had lost. For a moment there she’d had the secret of existence in her hand, and it had been snatched away.

Hunger squirmed inside her, and her mouth suddenly filled with saliva. She could smell meat on the breeze, and it was almost driving her mad. She was just about to tell Jack that she thought she had something when she noticed that the device was pointing across a dual carriageway at a Mexican restaurant. She must have been picking up on the hunger of the diners inside. She adjusted her aim away from the restaurant to take in another section of the city.

It was as if she had driven off the edge of a cliff and was falling into a chasm of starvation. Her stomach knotted tight and her hands began to shake. She couldn’t think straight: every sight, every sound, every smell reminded her that she desperately needed to eat.

She nudged the device sideways, perspiration beading her forehead, and the feeling was gone, melting away to leave nothing behind. If what she had felt before, passing the restaurant, was hunger, then this had been famine, multiplied many times over.

Quickly she worked out the bearing that the feeling had come from and drew a line across the map, starting at the rough position of the car and extending across the city. She turned to Jack and said: ‘I think I have something. It’s coming from the east.’

‘Strong?’

‘Almost overpowering.’

‘OK.’ He swung the SUV into a tight turn. ‘Sorry to do this to you, Tosh, but we need to triangulate that signal. Keep scanning until you get it again. Let’s hope it’s what we’re looking for.’

Oh bollocks, Gwen thought. ‘The second pill isn’t made from the same plant extracts,’ she said carefully. ‘It’s more of a standard drug, like paracetamol, but it flushes the body of… of impurities. It sensitises the liver to the stuff that was in the first pill and helps your body eliminate it. The Department of Health have given it a clean bill of health. As it were.’

‘Right. OK.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll take the second pill when I get home, then, if that’s what you want.’

Gwen fished in her pocket and brought out the blister pack that she’d removed from their bathroom cabinet. ‘Here — take it now.’

‘God, you’re keen.’

‘I worry about you.’

He smiled. ‘Really? Cos I like it when you worry.’

‘Take the pill, Rhys.’