‘They look like…’ Toshiko started, and then trailed off as her thoughts caught up with her words. ‘Oh fuck,’ she said primly.
The cold store was about the size of the Boardroom back in the Hub, but twice as tall. It was empty of carcasses, shelves or anything else apart from meathooks hanging from the ceiling and what looked at first glance like a series of sticks that had been thrown onto the floor and frozen to the walls and ceiling. At second glance, they weren’t sticks. Sticks didn’t have wings that had frozen into solid boards, but which were still beating slowly.
‘That’s where the things from those patients’ stomachs went,’ Owen breathed. ‘Scotus must have removed them surgically, and then put them in some kind of nutrient solution until they turned into these flying egg-laying things. God alone knows why he wanted to. I mean, if he’s that much of a psycho, he could just have killed the patients and let the worms feed off the nutrients in the dead bodies. They would have turned into the flying things naturally. I wonder why he went to all the trouble of taking them all out by hand?’
‘Maybe he wanted the patients for something else,’ Toshiko said. She turned to look at Owen. He looked back at her. Neither of them wanted to guess what Scotus wanted the patients alive for, but they just couldn’t help themselves.
‘If we assume he wants to make lots more eggs,’ Owen started. ‘I mean, a regular production line of eggs, then the best thing he could do would be-’
‘To turn the eggs he already had into worms,’ Toshiko continued, ‘then turn the worms into flying egg-layers and let them find secondary hosts, then each flying egg-layer would lay hundreds of new eggs.’
Owen’s face was bleak. ‘And as long as Scotus keeps some back, he can have a continuous production line! Oh, that’s just too sick to bear thinking about.’
A handful of the flying creatures were moving sluggishly towards the door, attracted perhaps by Toshiko and Owen’s body heat. They were using their wings to push themselves along the icy floor.
Toshiko pressed the button that closed the door. Cumbersome, unwieldy, it started to move.
And caught the first of the creatures as it pushed itself over the lip of the doorway, crushing it. The creature’s shell cracked, leaking yellow ichor, and the door started to open again.
‘Safety cut-out!’ Toshiko cried. ‘It thinks someone’s trapped their foot!’ She hit the button again, but the door kept swinging outwards. More of the creatures teetered on the lip of the door, then fell out. As the warm outside air hit them, their wings lost their rigidity, becoming flexible and diaphanous again. Toshiko could hear the wings buzzing as they beat faster and faster. Their little red eyes, so like jewels, seemed to glow in the light from the corridor as they tracked Owen and Toshiko’s movements.
One of them started to rise shakily into the air.
Jack gazed levelly at Doctor Scotus.
‘How can you tell he’s a host?’ he asked Gwen.
‘Look at his hair,’ she replied.
‘Yeah, OK, I grant that he’s got that whole “mad scientist with wild crazy hair” aesthetic going, but I see that a lot. It’s not proof.’
‘His hair is waving in the breeze, isn’t it?’
Jack looked at Scotus, who was staring at Gwen in disbelief. ‘Yeah, so?’
‘So there isn’t any breeze.’
Jack looked back at Scotus. Thin blond strands haloed the man’s head, but Gwen was right. Now that he was concentrating, he could see that the strands weren’t only waving in the absence of any breeze; they weren’t even moving in the same direction as each other.
‘What the hell…?’ he muttered.
‘Remember the worm thing that attacked us in Scotus’s office?’ Gwen moved to one side; the goon who had been standing behind her, guarding her, moved too, but so did some of the tendrils on Scotus’s head, shifting to track her motion. ‘That thing had a whole bunch of thin white tendrils at both ends of its body, didn’t it?’
‘I had other things to worry about at the time, like stopping it from throttling you, but let’s say I do remember that.’
‘Imagine those tendrils much longer. Six feet, maybe. Imagine them finding their way up his throat, out into the air. Imagine them finding their way in between the cells of his body, infiltrating themselves past arteries and veins, through muscles and into his brain, and then out through his scalp. Imagine-’
‘Thanks. I get the picture.’ A thought struck Jack. ‘Hang on — that worm thing had tendrils at both ends.’
They both glanced down to Scotus’s groin. Was it Jack’s imagination, or was there something stirring down there as well?
Jack looked up at Scotus’s face. ‘What happened?’ he asked simply.
‘I tried one of the pills,’ he said. ‘I had to. Who would buy diet pills from a fat nutritionist? I got the same cravings as the others, the same desire to eat anything, no matter what it was. I suppressed it, with powdered protein supplements at first, then using drugs. Eventually, I discovered that by taking sedatives I could cause the creature’s appetite to reduce. Its weight is stable now, but the tendrils you mention — the way it perceives the world — continued to grow. They permeate me. They have infiltrated me.’
‘Then why not take the second pill?’ Gwen asked. ‘Why not flush the thing from your system?’
‘Because the tendrils are too entwined with my brain and my nervous system,’ Scotus said simply. ‘Killing the creature would most likely kill me. That’s one reason. The other is simpler. It won’t let me.’
‘It won’t let you?’ Jack stepped forward.
The goon behind Gwen tracked Jack with her gun, but let him go. The man was too engrossed in what was going on. It was obvious from the expression on his face that he thought he’d fallen into a pit of madmen. ‘You mean, it’s controlling you?’
‘Nothing that obvious. It’s not intelligent; not as we measure intelligence, anyway. But it does have instincts, which it communicates to me. The instinct to survive is
‘I think I’ve heard enough,’ Jack said. ‘Have you heard enough?’
‘More than enough.’
Jack reached into a pocket of his greatcoat. His hand closed around the alien device that they had found at that Cardiff nightclub what seemed like years ago now. Toshiko had already set it up so that it would pick up local emotional reactions and amplify them further away. All he had to do was to press a couple of buttons to activate it. His fingers found them quickly.
He nodded to Gwen. She bent and quickly pulled the shroud off the bird-cage before the goon could stop her.
The winged alien creature in the cage shifted, confused by the sudden flood of infra-red signals.
‘Jesus!’ the goon said, and stepped backwards, raising the gun and aiming it at the cage.
One of the other alien devices that Toshiko had determined was part of a matching set was wired to the cage, shoved in through the little flap through which the creature had originally been shoved. It transmitted electrical charges along a plasma path generated by a low-power laser beam. It was aimed directly at the creature, which didn’t have any room to squeeze out of the way.
Before the goon could stop her, Gwen pressed the button that activated it.
A lambent orange glow filled the cage, and the creature suddenly bucked as a charge of electricity went through its body for the second time that day.
The pain it felt was picked up by the original alien device and amplified all around. Scotus doubled over in agony, throwing up on his desk; Gwen collapsed, eyes rolling up in her head; and the goon just keeled over. Gwen’s gun fell from his fingers.
Jack fought against it. Pain and he were old friends. He could keep going through agony that would fry the nerves of any other human.
While the effect lasted, Jack walked slowly through the pain like a man walking underwater, collecting all the weapons and dumping the goon’s body next to that of Doctor Scotus, fastening both of them to the canning machinery with some flexible metal restraints that he’d brought with him from the Hub. Then he turned both alien devices off.
Gwen recovered first. He’d expected that. She had more force of will than almost anyone he’d ever known.
Owen pulled Toshiko to her feet.
