steady herself. A deep vibration transmitted itself from the wall to her arm. She took her hand away, but realised that she could still just about make the vibration out, transmitted through the floor and the air.
‘Can you hear something?’ she asked Owen.
He cocked his head to listen. ‘Heartbeat?’ he asked uncertainly.
‘Generator,’ she corrected.
Owen placed his hands in the centres of the doors and pushed them open. The noise suddenly intensified, and the two of them stepped forward, through the doorway and into a large roofed space. It probably took up a good half of the entire building, Toshiko estimated. Two-thirds of the way along, the floor dropped down five feet or so. The remaining area, running up to a series of massive doors at the far end, was paved with tarmac. The inescapable conclusion was that this was some kind of shipping area, where lorries would drive up at the end and back up to the raised area, where boxes of tinned goods would be loaded in. But that wasn’t what it was being used for now.
The place was set up as an impromptu medical ward. It looked to Toshiko like something from the 1950s: between the doors and the line where the ground dropped down were four rows of tubular metal bedsteads with crisp white sheets. Their occupants, lying comatose and connected to drips and monitoring equipment, contrasted bizarrely with the darkness, the concrete floor and the skylights above through which rose-coloured light filtered in, making everything beneath look surreal and fantastic. Cables ran off to the edges of the room to where the generators probably sat.
There was nobody around. No nurses, no doctors, nothing.
Owen moved to the first bed and picked up the clipboard from the end. Toshiko walked across to join him.
‘Jodie Williams,’ he read. ‘Age twenty-five. Blood pressure and heart rate seem OK.’ He replaced the clipboard and went around to the side of the bed to check the monitor and the drip. ‘She’s being sedated. That’s more confirmation that the worm’s been removed from her body: we know that sedatives and anaesthetics don’t work well on people who are infected.’ He brushed the girl’s hair from her face. ‘Pretty,’ he said, and began to pull the sheet down to expose her naked body.
‘Owen!’ Toshiko said, shocked.
He looked up at her. ‘It’s OK,’ he said, ‘I’m a doctor. I’m allowed to do this kind of thing. I have a licence, and everything.’
Pulling the sheet down to her hips, he indicated a sterile dressing on her stomach. ‘She’s had something removed,’ he said, ‘and I think we all know what it is.’ He quickly ran professional fingers up her body. Her ribs were pronounced and her stomach, at least, what could be seen of it beneath the dressing, was concave. ‘She’s almost malnourished. OK, we can assume she’s had one of these things inside her and it’s been taken out. Where is it?’
He walked across to the next bed and pulled the sheet down. Another sterile dressing, another concave stomach. It was the same with the next girl he tried, and the next. The fourth one was a boy, a teenager.
‘It’s a production line,’ Toshiko breathed.
‘Not a production line,’ Owen replied, standing in the centre of the two rows of beds. He looked around. ‘There must be forty or fifty of them here, and they’ve all had their worms removed. It’s more like a battery farm.’
‘These must be the patients from the Scotus Clinic,’ Toshiko said. ‘Doctor Scotus must have had them all kidnapped when he realised that the worms were causing problems.’
‘But he wouldn’t have had the time or the expertise to kidnap them himself,’ Owen mused. ‘So who did it for him?’
‘That would be us,’ a voice said in a marked Welsh accent.
Toshiko whirled around. A man was standing just inside the doorway leading back into the building. He stepped forward. He was thick-set, with a close-shaven scalp on which Toshiko could see numerous white scars.
‘And who are you?’ Owen said, stepping forward, fists clenched.
‘Never mind that,’ the man said. ‘What makes you think you can just wander in here like you owned the place?’
‘And what makes you think you’ll get out alive,’ came a voice from the far side of the space. Toshiko looked over her shoulder. Another man was pulling himself up from the dropped section of floor; muscular arms pistoning his body upwards. He straightened up.
‘Don’t try to run,’ said the man in the doorway. He reached behind his back and brought out a gleaming brass knuckle-duster from a pocket, slipping it onto his right hand and raising it up so that the light from the skylights shone from the sharp points above each knuckle. ‘You’ll only make things worse for yourself.’
‘Not that it gets much worse,’ said his companion. He was holding a length of bicycle chain. It looked to Toshiko like he’d soldered nails along its length until it resembled heavy-duty barbed wire, only much more flexible and much more deadly. ‘We were told to stop anyone from interfering with this lot, but we weren’t told to do it quickly.’
Jack breezed through the door and into the room beyond.
It was where the canning had taken place. The room was filled with machinery, through which Jack could just make out a ribbon-like path, a walled conveyor belt that wound around and about the various devices that would have sterilised the cans, pumping them full of whatever kind of meat slurry the factory was producing that week, sealing them, labelling them and sending them on their way.
In the centre of the room was a cleared space and in the centre of the space a folding wooden desk had been set up with a canvas director’s chair behind it. Doctor Scotus was sitting in the chair, reading a report.
‘I love what you’ve done with the place,’ Jack said cheerily. ‘The whole retro-industrial thing is really big these days. Quite a change from that nice expensive office you used to have, with that big granite desk and those ergonomic chairs. Still, you go with what you’ve got, right? Like
‘And who the hell are you?’ Scotus replied, standing up. His long blond hair drifted around his head as he moved.
‘Health and Safety,’ Jack said, feeling rather than seeing Gwen move into the room behind him, gun held high. ‘We’ve been getting reports that you’re giving women tablets that implant alien creatures in their stomachs which drive them into hunger-fuelled frenzies which lead to murder and self-mutilation. The question is, have you filled out a proper risk assessment for this activity? Because if you haven’t, we’re going to have to take action.’
Scotus stared at Jack. His face reflected various emotions, one after the other; anger, confusion, realisation, understanding, concern and, finally, surprise. ‘Alien?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I suppose they would have to be, wouldn’t they?’
‘You didn’t know?’ Gwen asked, moving up beside Jack. She was still carrying the shrouded bird-cage, he was glad to see. He had plans for that.
‘It’s not the first explanation that comes to mind,’ Scotus said. ‘I assumed they were some newly evolved species, or something that we’d just never seen before.’
Jack moved to one side, concerned that if anything went wrong then he and Gwen were both in the line of fire. He wanted them separate, so that at least one of them would survive an attack long enough to fight back. It was a lesson he’d learned the hard way, more years ago than he cared to remember. ‘How did you come across them?’ he asked.
‘Tell me who you are first,’ Scotus said quietly, firmly. He had considerable charisma, Jack noticed.
‘Let’s just say we’re interested in anything that’s alien. Especially if it starts affecting people.’
Scotus nodded. ‘Very well. I wasn’t always a nutritionist,’ he said. ‘I used to be a vet. I owned a place just outside Cardiff, specialising in farm animals.’ He grimaced. ‘Have you seen the way that farming is going recently? It’s enough to turn your stomach. If scientists could breed square chickens, so that you could stack more of them together in one place, then farmers would beat a path to their door. It’s all about maximising the amount of profit per cubic foot, because the supermarkets will absolutely nail the farmers to the wall with the contracts they force them to sign.’
‘Fascinating though this is,’ Jack said, ‘I’m still waiting for the aliens to turn up.’
‘I was called out to a cow that had died,’ Scotus said. ‘It had apparently been acting strangely for days; eating much more than usual, attacking the other cows and taking bites out of them, getting thinner and thinner. I
