Slow Decay

Jack let the Webley fall from his hand onto the tiled floor.

‘OK, big boy,’ he said to the goon who was holding Gwen’s neck, ‘you can let go now.’

The goon twisted Gwen’s head around a little further. Jack could see her tendons standing out. Her cheeks and forehead were suffused with blood and her eyes were almost popping out of their sockets. One more turn and her neck would break.

‘If anything happens to my friend,’ he said calmly, ‘I will take my pistol and shove it so far up your ass that you’ll gag on it. And then I’ll reach down your throat and pull the trigger.’

The goon kept smiling at Jack, and shook his head in mock-chastisement, but he relaxed his grip a fraction. Gwen sucked in great whooping gulps of air, her face gradually returning to its normal colour. She was still holding the bird-cage in her hand, and she shakily set it on the floor without disturbing the shroud.

‘Not sure where this guy fits into the scheme of things,’ Jack said, turning to Doctor Scotus. ‘Are you branching out into fitness? Hiring personal trainers?’ He eyed the goon up and down. The man obviously lifted weights every day. No need for diet pills there. ‘Cos I could do with a workout, if you know what I mean.’

‘I’ve… made a deal with some of the Cardiff criminal fraternity,’ Scotus said. ‘They protect me, and carry out some small tasks, and in return I give them a cut of the profits.’

‘Small tasks like kidnapping your customers off the street because you can’t afford to have them running around going psychotic?’ Jack gazed at the goon, who was getting edgy at the attention he was getting. ‘I wouldn’t start counting on those profits if I were you,’ he said. ‘The bottom’s dropped out of the diet-pill market, what with all the problems with murder and cannibalism and stuff.’

‘Issues, just issues,’ Scotus said, rubbing his hand across his eyes. ‘The creatures are growing too fast, requiring too much nutrition. I’ve developed a hormone that will delay their growth, slow it down. It will require my patients to take another tablet every day, of course, but I will tell them that it’s just a part of the treatment. One tablet to start the treatment, a tablet every day to keep it going, and a tablet to stop. It’s simple, and effective.’

‘How long did it take to develop this hormone?’ Jack asked. ‘And how many people died along the way? Was your receptionist one of them?’

Scotus grimaced. ‘Poor girl,’ he said. ‘She missed taking a tablet. Just forgot. The creature inside her reacted… badly. It escaped, and hid somewhere in the air-conditioning system, or under the floor. I had to move out of the office suite in a hurry, before it attacked anyone else.’ He shook his head. ‘It should be a fairly simple process to adjust the dosage to ensure that my customers can miss one or two tablets in a row without the creature becoming agitated.’

‘But you need the eggs,’ Gwen rasped, rubbing her throat. ‘You need lots of eggs if you’re going to develop an efficient business model.’ She spotted Jack’s sceptical glance, and shrugged. ‘Rhys bought a book called Fifteen Ways to be an Effective Manager,’ she said. ‘I had a flick through, one night, when I was bored.’ Turning back to Scotus, she said, ‘So where do all these eggs come from? As I understand it, a host needs to be implanted by one of those flying things, and I doubt you got more than a few dozen eggs from that dog of yours. You’re going to need thousands, even tens of thousands, if this thing takes off. What’s the secret? Where are the eggs going to come from?’

Scotus looked away, discomfited. ‘There are… possibilities,’ he said. ‘I have identified a new source of supply.’

‘No.’ Jack felt a rage building within him, burning through his heart and brain. ‘This stops, here, now.’

Scotus shook his head. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘The potential impact of my diet pills is immense. They could literally change the world. They are the only diet pills guaranteed to make you lose weight. Not “help”. Not “assist”. Not “only in conjunction with a calorie-controlled diet”. No, if people stick to the regime, then the pills actually make them lose weight. Overnight, there’s no more obesity epidemic in the western world. The National Health Service can turn its resources away from treating heart disease and diabetes, and all the other things that obesity causes, and start working on the things that matter, like curing cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. The government can redirect its resources to fighting global warming. Just one simple thing, like making people slim, and the effects are incredible. Is it so much to ask that a few people sacrifice their lives in the early stages of testing?’

‘Yes,’ Jack said. He could feel the rage darkening his voice. ‘It is.’

Scotus was almost pleading now. ‘But there are always risks in drug tests. Do you think that antibiotics came for free? Do you think that drugs for controlling blood pressure didn’t cause any problems during testing? Even when new drugs go into a few years of double-blind tests to check their efficacy, the people given the placebos have to suffer a continuation of their symptoms when the other people on the trial are being given a cure. Is that fair? All medical research is built on pain and death. We accept it, when we think about it at all, because the potential benefits are so great!’

‘There is a difference,’ Jack said, ‘between research that may have an unfortunate side effect and research that’s guaranteed to kill your test subjects.’

‘It’s no good,’ Gwen said. She was staring at Scotus. ‘You won’t convince him. He will keep on going, producing his pills, whatever arguments you make.’

‘She recognises the truth in what I’m saying,’ Scotus proclaimed. ‘She recognises the passion behind my words.’

‘No,’ Gwen said. ‘I recognise the fact that you’ve been infected yourself. There’s one of these creatures inside you, and it’s controlling your thoughts.’

Halfway along the corridor, past the door they had come in by, Toshiko stopped by the first of the massive riveted metal slabs.

‘What’s this?’ she asked Owen.

He rushed past her. ‘Cold store,’ he said. ‘It’s where they would have kept the frozen carcasses they offloaded from the ships, before canning them and taking them away to the shops. Transport area’s back that way,’ he gestured over his shoulder, ‘so the canning area is probably up ahead.’

‘The power is on,’ Toshiko said simply.

Owen stopped. ‘It can’t be. This place has been deserted since the 1970s.’

‘There’s a generator,’ Toshiko pointed out.

‘But that was set up to keep the medical monitoring equipment running, and provide lighting.’ Owen was getting irritated; Toshiko could tell from his tone of voice. He didn’t like people disagreeing with him. ‘There’s no point cooling the cold store down to some ludicrous temperature. That’s just a waste of energy,’

‘It would be,’ Toshiko said, ‘if there wasn’t anything in here.’ She pressed her face against the thick glass. ‘But I think there is.’

She turned her attention to the control box by the side of the door. It had a thermostat on it, plus a couple of buttons that turned the cooling on or off. The thermostat was set at just above freezing. There was also a button that opened the door, although there was a massive handle on the door itself which would do the same in case of power failure. She guessed there was a similar handle on the inside just in case anyone became trapped.

Owen moved alongside her. She edged to one side, careful not to brush against his arm. She had poured antiseptic over it, back in the large area where they had fought and vanquished their opponents, and then placed dressings over the area where the nails had ripped his skin and bound the whole thing up with bandages. He had then done the same with the back of her hand. Owen had left their opponents tied to two empty beds at the end of one of the rows. He had wanted to use the nail-studded chain to tie them down with, but Toshiko had vetoed the idea.

‘Let’s take a look inside,’ she said. She pressed the button on the box that she thought would operate the mechanism. Somewhere inside the door, something went clunk. A hydraulic system wheezed into life, pulling the door slowly open. Toshiko and Owen both stepped backwards as the door swung ponderously towards them and a cloud of freezing vapour puffed into their faces.

As the vapour cleared, Toshiko stepped forward. She had retrieved her Walther from the floor of the medical area, and now she held it in front of her in both hands, ready to fire.

‘Oh hell,’ Owen said. His breath turned to white vapour as it left his mouth, condensed into water droplets by the cold that rolled towards them from the opening door. ‘Are those what I think they are?’