Torchwood_Long Time Dead Read online

  The figure was pulling off its helmet when sudden activity back at the site distracted Cutler. Another two suited-up people emerged from behind the plastic, but this time they were moving with purpose. They jogged over to the largest of the trailers and ran inside. Cutler glanced back the other way, but the original figure had disappeared. Something was wrong. Had they found something in the site that had freaked one worker out and made them flee the site? That didn’t ring quite true. The person hadn’t been running. They’d just simply walked confidently away.

  He wondered why it bothered him. For all he knew, the restrictions had been lowered and it was fine to leave the site with all the gear still on. He knew nothing about the operation – no one did, even though Commander Jackson had been quite high profile amongst the press and local dignitaries, including coming to their police dinner as a guest of the Commissioner. He was everywhere, but saying nothing of significance. Cutler wondered if anyone else had noticed. But then, no one else appeared to share his fascination with this place.

  Back behind the barrier, the figures re-emerged from the cabin. Commander Jackson, in his full army uniform rather than a protective suit, was with them. If his face was anything to go by, then whatever had sent the two men scurrying to find him, wasn’t good.

  Cutler’s phone was ringing. Shit, it was 10.15.

  ‘Where are you, boss?’ Andy Davidson asked. Cutler could hear his concern. He was never late – not for a briefing.

  ‘Sorry, I’ll be there in five.’

  Jackson and the two men vanished behind the plastic sheeting.

  ‘Everything all right, is it, sir?’

  ‘Yeah. Just overslept. Forgot to set my phone.’ It was a lousy excuse and he knew it, but Davidson wouldn’t question him. His behaviour might have been a bit strange recently but not enough to warrant any probing from either his sergeant or his boss. Not yet anyway. Reluctantly, he turned away and dumped his cold coffee in a bin. It was time to get back to the daily grind. He forced himself not to peer over his shoulder for one last look. He did have some control, after all.

  ‘What the hell happened here?’ Commander Jackson crouched by the body. ‘He’s a bloody civilian.’

  ‘He signed a disclaimer. There won’t be any trouble.’

  Commander Elwood Jackson looked up. Sometimes he wondered just how depersonalised his special detail were. Where did they train them? As far as he was concerned, a little heart went a long way, even in the business of kill or be killed. It was a different Army from when he’d joined up, and when he looked at this new breed – those now siphoned off to be Department men – he felt every year of the passed time in his bones. Not for the first time since he’d arrived in Cardiff, he wondered if he was simply getting too old for all this.

  ‘A man’s dead. There already is trouble.’ The lab rat, pathetically dressed in only his underwear, was lying on his side, and Jackson carefully rolled him over.

  ‘Jesus.’ The voice behind him muttered. Maybe these men weren’t so inhuman after all. ‘What the hell happened to him, sir?’

  John Blackman’s eyes were bleeding. Commander Jackson couldn’t be sure, but it looked very much like they had exploded. A thick piece of glass was also stuck so deep into the dead man’s side only a small edge was visible. That wound, however, was clean. It was as if all the blood in his body had been sucked up to his brain and forced out through the terrible injury to his eyes. He swallowed his disgust. This wasn’t good.

  ‘He’ll have to stay here until tonight. We can get the body out then. Too much of the site is visible to risk it now.’

  ‘What did that to him, sir?’

  ‘Search this area. Look for any device he may have touched or activated by accident.’ Commander Jackson looked at poor Dr Blackman’s eye sockets again and suddenly felt naked without a suit on.

  ‘And where the hell are his clothes and his suit?’ he asked. ‘I presume he was wearing clothes under it?’

  ‘I’ll check, sir.’

  On his feet, Jackson scanned the area with his torch, professionally covering the ground with the light, careful not to pass over anything or miss a space out. Nothing. No sign of either clothes or suit. Metal gleamed in several places amidst the wreckage and he stared at one of the large objects. A large metal drawer. Looked unpleasantly like it might have served as a coffin. No wonder this basement level was filled with the stench of death and rot. He had been warned that they might come across the dead amidst the treasures the Department wanted. And here they were. One drawer nearby had broken open but he couldn’t see any glimpse of a body. He looked back down at Blackmore’s terrible corpse. Suitless. An empty drawer and a missing suit.

  ‘I need to go and call this in,’ he muttered, aware of the two men watching him impassively. He couldn’t show any hint of being in any way unsettled by this discovery. They relied on him to stay calm. ‘Find that suit. And I want to know if anyone is missing.’

  Back in the bright light of his makeshift office, Commander Elwood Jackson couldn’t shake off the chill and stink of the vault. There had been a moment’s hesitation at the other end of the phone when he’d described the scene to David Elliott, the smooth and calm Department chief he was responsible to, and it hadn’t reassured him. The idea that something had got out of one of those broken drawers, killed John Blackman and stolen his suit in order to get away should have been preposterous.

  When he’d taken command of this operation it had been made very clear that they were not looking for survivors. Broken down to basics this was an equipment salvage operation. It was simply that the equipment might be highly sophisticated and like nothing Jackson and his men had seen before. That hadn’t concerned him at the time. He was used to simply managing operations and following orders from above. That the orders were coming from the Department rather than military command was really neither here nor there. The outcome was the same, and it wasn’t as if they were in the field. The building collapsing aside, there should have been no real reason for anyone to be injured or lose their lives. All the men on site knew that whatever they pulled out of the rubble had to go to Blackman and his ilk for further studying. Soldiers, in the main, weren’t a curious bunch. That’s what made them such good soldiers. No one who ever questioned too much would go and die for someone else’s policies. Commander Elwood Jackson had always been a good soldier. He didn’t ask questions. He blinked and behind his own eyes he saw Blackman’s wrecked ones. A radio buzzed on his desk.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘No sign of his suit, sir. We’ll keep looking.’

  ‘Any personnel unaccounted for?’

  ‘No, all present and correct, sir.’

  He turned the radio off and leaned back in his chair. Unease settled like grease in the pit of his gut. He’d learned long ago to trust that feeling. Something wasn’t right here. He thought of Blackman’s dead body. The missing suit. But most of all he thought about that tiny moment of hesitation before David Elliott had spoken.

  Chapter Two

  Suzie Costello had dumped the helmet in a passing bin and then stripped the suit off as soon as she found a suitable empty side street. She shoved it behind some overfilled bins and then headed towards the burger bar on the main road. The man’s clothes were slightly baggy, but he’d been a skinny little thing and had at least been wearing a belt, which now held his trousers on her hips. The tang of sweat coming from the shirt was unpleasant, but she had no choice but to put up with it – at least for now.

  Some people had stared at her as she’d strode away from the Torchwood Hub’s wrecked site, but she didn’t need to worry about them ever giving a description of her. It was the suit they’d been looking at, not the person inside it.

  Inside the fast-food restaurant she took the stairs two at a time and went into the toilets. It was only just gone 10 a.m., and the place was empty. She filled the sink with warm water and began splashing her face with it, washing away the dust and grime that coated her skin. When she was done, s
he straightened up. The water felt good. Refreshing. It made her feel alive. She was alive. She giggled aloud at that, the sound echoing eerily in the small confines.

  When she’d first woken up on the floor, she’d simply wanted to get away. She hadn’t even known who or what she was until she’d been striding away. She had been operating on instinct. Hers and something else’s. The more she’d recovered her own memories, the more she’d realised that perhaps she wasn’t quite alone in her body. She’d killed the man in the vault – and yes, that had been fun as well as necessary – but it hadn’t been entirely her.

  Still, she thought, smiling at herself in the mirror. Figuring that out could wait. Torchwood was gone, and she was alive. Now there was a turn-up for the books. They could shove that in their smug pipes and smoke it. Their faces rose up behind her eyes, memories she couldn’t suppress: Ianto the puppy, Toshiko the repressed, Owen the playboy, Gwen who was everyone’s favourite new girl, and then of course, Jack. Her smile twisted into an ugly grimace. They hadn’t done so well without her, had they? Maybe if they hadn’t been so high and mighty, they’d still be eating pizza and drinking coffee in the Hub. As it was, she wondered if they were even alive?

  Anger surged inside her, rage and hurt at those she’d once worked with, and she swallowed it down. She was back. She didn’t need them. They could go to hell as far as she was concerned, if they weren’t already there. She thought of the nothing she’d been lost in and shivered slightly, despite the warmth. In the mirror, her reflection stared back and her confidence wavered slightly as she raised one hand to touch the back of her head. There was no blood. No exploded skull. She checked once again under the shirt for reassurance. No bullet wounds there either. Not even a single scar to show where Jack Harkness had emptied his gun into her. Why the hell wasn’t she in pain? Still damaged? She had been brought back from the dead once before, but it hadn’t been like this. This time she was healed, as well as breathing. She looked back into the mirror. This time she really had been reborn, not just brought back to life. This was a whole new Suzie.

  She needed to do something about her hair. Lighten it, perhaps. Cut it, definitely. It wouldn’t take much to change her appearance enough to put anyone off her trail should they come for her. Not that she thought they would. After all, she was dead, right? Twice over? The only people who might think to look for her were Torchwood and, judging by the state of the Hub, if they weren’t dead themselves they had to be in too much trouble to be thinking of her. She was a ghost. She giggled again and had to put her hand over her mouth to stop it developing into a full-blown laugh. She had things to do. This was no time for fun. The smile fell away.

  Only when she pulled the door open did she see the small sign on the back. This toilet was cleaned at 8.30 a.m. The time had been filled in with a wipe-clean marker pen, and next to it were initials and then a date. It was the last two digits that stopped her for a moment. That long? She’d been dead for three years? Her teeth gritted and her anger cooled into something else as the memory gripped her. Emptiness filled her vision. The final instant of terrible fear that came with a last breath. Death. She hated it. She wouldn’t go back to it. She drew in a long, defiant breath. She would become it.

  ‘Box 321, please.’

  ‘Certainly, madam.’ The prim, middle-aged woman behind the counter smiled up at her. ‘If you could just sign in.’

  The formalities done, the assistant retrieved the keys and unlocked the gate to the racks of safety deposit boxes in the narrow room beyond. She moved with precise efficiency to the right one, unlocked the housing and took out the metal box from within. She smiled again, and led Suzie to one of the small rooms at the side.

  ‘You’ll have privacy there, Mrs Bunting. Let me know when you’re done.’

  Her key for the box had been taped under a pew in an old church not far from the centre of town. If it had been missing, she wouldn’t have panicked – there was always a way into something if you really wanted it – but it turned out that whichever old ladies were responsible for keeping the wooden benches of St Mark’s clean, didn’t stretch to cleaning underneath them, just as she’d suspected. She smiled, pleased with herself. There was nothing like forward planning.

  She emptied the box, shoving its contents into her pockets. A passport in the name of Sue Costa; bank and credit cards in the same name; flat and car keys. A whole new life was waiting for her. The last item in the box made her smile. A knife. Just in case she got here and needed a weapon. Perhaps she should have left a gun in there instead, but a knife was quieter when you needed to get away fast. She turned it this way and that, letting the steel shine. There was something about a knife that she found reassuring. You had to get in close to use a knife. You had to look right into their eyes as that moment of terror struck. You delivered death personally with a knife.

  She held the weapon up, like a band across her eyes and staring into their own brown pools of anger, distorted slightly by the metal, she felt the first wave of something strange inside her. She gasped slightly as something looked out through her eyes and she, in turn, looked back into something. Something terrible. It was beyond the black nothing of death. It was something totally other. Something cold and awful – a space between dimensions. And it wasn’t empty. Her ears throbbed with the echo of distant sobbing and she knew – although she didn’t know how she could possibly know – that it was the man she’d killed in the vault that she could hear. The darkness – this living darkness – tugged at her and she gasped again, lowering the knife. Where the hell had that come from? What was it? And how was it connected to her?

  She took a moment to regain her breath, letting heat and life flood back to her cheeks. The answers could come later, when she had time to think. There would be an explanation. There always was.

  Slowly, she cooled down. It’s hungry. It wants me to feed it. The thoughts came from nowhere, but slowly Suzie smiled again. For now, it was all she needed to know. It was hungry, and she was angry. She’d felt the terror of the moment of death twice too many times. It was time she shared it. Maybe if she shared it enough, it would leave her alone. One thing the reborn Suzie Costello was sure of – she had no intention of dying again. She tucked the knife into the back of her trousers.

  ‘All done?’ the assistant was sitting back behind her desk when Suzie emerged, but was straight up on her feet. She was in good shape for her age, Suzie thought, as she approached. She looked like a runner. Sleek limbs. Toned skin. Put her in some different clothes and she’d probably pass for 40. Not that that would be happening any time soon. Any time at all, in fact.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ Suzie smiled as she handed over the box. When the woman had taken it, and her hands were full, Suzie gripped her arm. Something shifted inside her. The empty universe so far removed from this one yawned greedily behind her eyes. Her smile widened as the assistant’s fell.

  ‘I have something to show you,’ she whispered. The woman’s alarmed gaze met her own unnatural one, and she slumped in her grip. The moment was nearly here. Suzie smiled and pulled the knife from the back of her trousers.

  She was still smiling as she lay in the bath two hours later. She’d forgotten how good killing felt. Perhaps she’d just never admitted it to herself before. But that had all been before the darkness. Before she had become Death itself. Now she was just doing what was in her nature. The water was hot, and it was good to be warm. She pushed the bubbles around and then sat suddenly upright as something beneath the surface caught her eye.

  The red light flashed under the skin of her stomach. Her mouth fell open. So that was it. Suddenly it all made sense.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Where did you say you found it?’

  ‘It was on the beach. My trousers are ruined.’

  ‘You wanted to try some fieldwork, Ianto,’ Suzie smiled. ‘Maybe buy some cheaper trousers if you want me to send you out again.’

  ‘It was hardly fieldwork. Picking up a piece of recovered tech.�
�� Ianto sipped his coffee.

  ‘True. But you’re not the only one in expensive trousers, and the signal was coming from the beach, and I’m the boss.’ She smiled again, and then focused on the item on the table.

  ‘Any clues yet, Tosh?’

  The item was the size of a credit card but made of some kind of metal with three clear stones of some variety embedded in it.

  ‘No. I can’t see how to activate it, at all.’ The Japanese woman peered through her thick glasses and then lifted the item again. ‘It’s heavier than it looks.’

  ‘Yes, I don’t need you to state the obvious. Maybe when Jack and Owen get back, they’ll have an idea what it does.’

  ‘I couldn’t find any match on the database,’ Ianto said. ‘Nothing even close.’

  Toshiko pulled her glasses off and turned them around thoughtfully. She held up the strange little device. ‘These could be magnifying glasses of some kind.’ She looked through one. ‘That’s strange. I can’t see anything but darkness.’ She put it down again. ‘Look. The glass appears clear here. Pale yellow just like the light around it. But if you look through it –’ she handed it to Ianto – ‘there’s nothing but darkness.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Ianto said, peering through it. ‘Strange.’