Risk Assessment (12 page)

Nina almost felt sorry for them. What could they really expect – two people up against a big devouring blob?

Jack flashed a weak smile. ‘It’s honestly better than it looks, folks. Our top priority now is getting you out.’

‘Oh, really,’ said Gran. ‘And how are you going to manage that? You’re surrounded.’

Jack’s smile didn’t even flicker. ‘Not completely surrounded, ma’am,’ he said.

His confidence was undermined by the rattling, roaring devastation of the rest of the building falling in and tumbling towards them like a lost game of Jenga.

‘Down!’ roared Agnes, snatching Janice and Nina to the floor.

Debris smashed in through the glass of the staff room door, spreading dust and splinters everywhere.

For a few seconds there was silence, and then the crying began. Not, noticed Nina, from the kids. Anita and Scott were both tremblingly silent. But Janice had started to sob uncontrollably. One of her staff was trying to comfort her, with the ease of someone trying to pat a live electrical cable.

Jack and Agnes stood up, dusting themselves off.

‘Not long now,’ said Gran. She’d retained her seat on the sofa, even though she was now coated with dust.

Jack looked at her. ‘There’s still time,’ he said. ‘There’s still hope.’

Gran shook her head, and smiled at him sadly. ‘No, there isn’t. And tell me, please, what happens next? After you, who will come? The army? And when that army is defeated, who will then arrive? Who then will come to die?’

Jack’s gaze hardened. But it was Agnes who spoke. ‘People will come. And they will try. And they will die, if necessary. But they will try. Because that creature is evil. It is alien. It is wrong. It must be fought. If necessary to the last man, woman and child.’

‘I see,’ said Gran, nodding. ‘That’s nice to know. Thank you.’

‘But it’s not over yet,’ vowed Jack.

‘Yes it is, dear,’ said Gran. ‘This is the feast of the Vam. Goodbye.’

And the Vam surged up and out of Gran, pouring through the air vent, the sofa, and streaming in wild tentacles through the little old lady’s ruptured body.

At precisely the same time the outer walls of the staff room gave in, pouring bricks and concrete and steel and dust down into the tiny room.

X

REAPING

THE WHIRLWIND

In which Mrs Cooper encounters the gentlemen of the press, and Miss Havisham prevails against the government of nations

As the building fell in around them a very neat, very square hole snicked open in the floor.

‘Ianto!’ cried Jack with relief, scooping up a screaming Anita, and ushering everyone down the hole. As concrete bricks thundered down around her, Agnes took one last, grim look around, before fixing on the flopping wet puppet of the old woman. And, just for a second, she looked worried. And then she jumped into the tunnel.

Outside, Ianto and Gwen were herding the survivors into ambulances.

To Jack’s eyes, the scene was startling. Squatting over the entire building was a vast black mass, as rich and sticky as toffee. It seemed to roar, but that was simply the sound of the girders rent beneath it.

It was surrounded by police cars and ambulances; there was even a fire engine, of all things, hosing it down. Several camera crews filmed the proceedings under the shifting blue lights of the sirens.

For a second, Jack just took in the absurdity of the scene – after all these days of worry, the end of the world was happening, and the Apocalypse wasn’t a sky of fire and a boiling sea with hordes of hellspawn tearing through a rain of burning coals – instead it began with the municipal authorities hosing down a giant bin liner. He smiled, and idly checked out a passing fireman.

Ianto came running up to him, and, making sure that Agnes wasn’t looking, hugged him. Jack, careless, seized his cheeks and kissed him. Ianto squirmed away uneasily. ‘Not on duty, Captain,’ he whispered.

‘Tut,’ said Jack fondly as Ianto straightened his tie. ‘Thank you.’

Ianto looked bashful. ‘I’m sorry it took so long. It was almost impossible to get a fix on you through that. . . thing. We tried digging the tunnel through it, but the cutting equipment wouldn’t touch it. It’s like the thing’s got a force field. So I had to go down.’

Jack started to say something.

‘You did well, Mr Jones,’ said Agnes. She’d materialised behind them almost silently and stood there, actually smiling as she picked dirt from her gloves. ‘A most timely rescue.’ She grinned at him and patted him on the shoulder.

Ianto grew visibly.

She then turned to survey the mayhem around them. ‘Goodness me,’ she sighed. ‘What a mess.’

‘All my fault?’ asked Jack.

‘Oh yes,’ said Agnes with the tone of an eternally patient, eternally disappointed teacher. ‘But we shall have to see what we can do. Mrs Cooper!’

Gwen broke away from complicated discussions with three policemen, a fire sergeant and a traffic warden and came running over. She looked stressed, but thoroughly in charge.

Agnes looked around her and drew herself up. ‘We shall have to have a quick field conference everyone. Now, we’ve fallen at the first gate and clearly the anticipated alien threat has not been prevented. Secondly, we have been unable to contain the situation without the help of civil authorities. Thirdly, those oiks over there savour of Her Majesty’s Press, so we can assume that public knowledge of this alien menace will hit the streets within days. And, fourthly and finally, I rather fear we shall be spared public disgrace, as, given that creature’s exponential rate of growth, I predict that it will have spread all the way to Bedfordshire by next week and the continent in a fortnight. The fate of the world, is, very literally, in our hands.’ Agnes beamed and then cocked an eyebrow at Jack. ‘And I believe you said, only a short while ago, “Crisis? What crisis?” Shame on you, Harkness.’

‘So what do we do?’ said Gwen, sensing Jack’s rigid frame.

Agnes placed her hands on her hips and waved away an approaching camera crew. ‘Mrs Cooper, please continue the excellent civil liaison work that you’ve been undertaking. The rest of us have a sample of that creature which we shall examine in the Hub. We’ll be back as soon as we can.’

Back at the Hub, Agnes, Jack and Ianto stared at the open cash box. Inside, the fragment of the Vam had expanded to fill the tin, which was starting to rattle slightly. Already the sides of the tin were melting. They’d rapidly transferred it to a containment field.

Jack set up a chemical analysis while Agnes demanded an inventory of weapons from Ianto. She was hoping there was something somewhere in their armoury. She scanned down the clipboard Ianto had presented her with. ‘It’s a shame we don’t have a giant containment-field generator,’ she tutted, running a finger down the list.

‘Don’t look at me,’ Jack shouted over. ‘There’s not much call these days to contain something the size of a small village.’

As she flung herself through the gap, the air behind her lit up a bright, crackling blue and a wave of heat rushed past her. She landed awkwardly on the ground.

A hand reached down to help her up, but she ignored it.

‘I should have expected to find you here,’ she said.

Jack grinned. ‘We’ve contained it.’ He gestured to the troops behind him operating the field barriers. ‘A little something I brought back from Torchwood India about ten years ago. Seems to be doing the trick.’

Agnes carefully smoothed down her hopelessly creased skirts.

‘An appearance at the last minute, I see, Harkness. If you had been earlier, we might very well have saved some of the facility.’

Jack demurred. ‘We’ve contained the threat. And, bonus, we got you out alive. Another second and you’d have been sealed on the other side of that force wall for ever.’ He sighed.

Agnes glared at him. ‘Not for ever, Harkness. I believe those shields will only hold back the threat for five thousand years. A postponement, not a defeat.’

Jack grinned. ‘Well then, after our time, I hope.’

Agnes paused before replying. ‘Sadly unlikely, Harkness. When those walls come down, I shall be waiting. And so, I fear, shall you.’

Jack smiled, ‘Like a bad penny, ma’am,’ he said.

And this time, when he offered her his hand, she took it.

Agnes looked up. ‘Ah yes,’ she said crisply, ‘I remember. You only just got out of there alive, didn’t you, Harkness? I trust that the barriers around that place are still working? We could dismantle them, I suppose, but then that would just unleash. . . no.’

‘I don’t think a force field would work anyway,’ sighed Jack. The light blue field around the blob had started to spark and crackle alarmingly. ‘That creature is drawing energy off of it. Very efficiently. Our sample could very well become another of those things.’

Agnes glanced sharply at the shuddering mass. ‘I do so hate something I can’t shoot. What does the analysis suggest?’

Jack tapped a screen. ‘Oh,’ he said.

At exactly the same time, the mass quivered, shook and died.

‘A chemical spill?’ asked the man from BBC News.

‘Oh yes,’ said Gwen.

‘It’s the size of a football pitch.’

‘It’s a big chemical spill.’

‘And appears to be moving.’

‘Spilling. It’s what spills do.’

He looked at her, boiling with frustration, and then turned on his heel and stormed off to shout at his camera crew. Gwen stood her ground, checking that the broadcast damper in the SUV was still working. Good. Something the size of that thing would only cause a national panic.

She was so sodding tired and not a little drunk. It had been quite a day, and looked like getting a whole lot worse. Despite what Agnes had said, they’d worked so hard to stop something like this happening. As soon as those coffins had turned up, Jack had said they were trouble. But this was getting off the scale – rapidly and horribly.

Her phone chirruped again. She sighed and answered it. It was, no doubt, someone else’s boss’s boss’s boss angrily demanding an explanation he could give his boss. She breathed in, said to herself very quietly, ‘This is not my fault.’ Then she took the call.

Trying to coordinate a civil response was proving tricky. The police had been easy – keeping people away, stopping traffic – all fairly easy, and no worse than sealing off St Mary Street from the innocent on a Saturday night. Getting those shop people off to hospital had got rid of a few ambulance crews, but more kept turning up, as though waiting hopefully for casualties. The firemen had, eventually, been persuaded to stop spraying the blob with water – all that was doing was making the ground slippery.

The firemen had sent a special chemical spills team out, who strode around wearing white protective suits, but at least they backed up her cover story.

Someone had set up floodlights, which gave passers-by a jolly lovely view. It wasn’t going to be long before a camera crew set themselves up outside Gwen’s damping field and the whole thing went global.

Perfect, she thought.

She was now tentatively explaining to a nice man from the Assembly that, no, Cardiff didn’t need evacuating, and no, reports he’d heard of a nuclear weapon or terrorist strike were rashly ill-informed. ‘It’s just a big black blob. It’s eating things. We just need to keep everyone out of its way while we work out what to do with it,’ she explained, endlessly patient. ‘We’re Torchwood. This is why we’re here. This is what we do,’ she said calmly and with total authority.

Sod it. She called Rhys. ‘You watching the news?’

‘No!’ he laughed back. ‘Why would I? There’s a
Two Pints
marathon on BBC Three. What is it, love?’ A slightly forced tone. ‘World finally ending, is it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Gwen.

‘Want to talk about it?’

‘Not really.’

‘Fine.’ In the background, Gwen could just hear him turning down the pre-recorded laughter of a studio audience and a little bit of applause. She imagined him, spread out in the flat, taking up both his and her halves of the sofa, bottle of beer resting on the floor. He’d probably made lasagne. Yeah, that’d be nice.

‘Lasagne’s in the oven,’ he said. ‘You gonna be long?’

‘Dunno,’ she sighed. ‘Like I said, world ending.’

‘Well, just try and pop in before it’s all over.’

‘I love you,’ she said, and got back to being patronised by someone from the Welsh Natural Disasters Prevention Agency who had a) got her number from somewhere, and b) not realised that this wasn’t a natural disaster or that the horse had already bolted and that yelling about a nice new stable door wasn’t going to do much good. Lovely, she thought – this is let’s bollock Gwen Cooper day. If I’d wanted that, I’d have gone and been a traffic warden. The nice thing about Torchwood was that you could always be sure that you could ring round and get all the authorities on your side. The disadvantage was that this meant they all had your phone number, and had a nasty habit of ringing you up at the first sign of trouble. Sometimes, she just wished they’d all sod off.