EIGHT

The Withington Hotel was not infested with alien bedbugs. Which wasn’t to say that it didn’t have unpleasant biting insect life in its five-star bedrooms, reflected Owen Harper.

Jack had asked him to pursue this investigation. ‘A safe pair of hands,’ Jack had called him. Yeah, right. What Jack meant was that it would be a safe assignment for him in his condition. Nothing would get broken, particularly Owen.

Dead Man Walking. What was the point in coming back to life if Torchwood wouldn’t find him any death-defying assignments?

One of Toshiko’s monitoring software programs had identified an unexpected peak in GP records about urticaria, with a statistically significant increase in patients with red, itchy weals on their skin. Cross-checking credit card details suggested a further statistically significant link to the Withington Hotel, a Rift hotspot some three months previously.

At least Jack now allowed Owen to carry his handgun again. ‘Not that it’ll be much good for picking off alien insects,’ Ianto had explained when he’d delivered the weapon from the Armoury that morning. ‘You’re not that good a shot.’

‘Well, how could I defend myself again alien bedbugs?’ pondered Owen.

‘Tuck your trousers into your socks,’ Ianto had suggested, with no indication that he was joking.

Owen arrived at the Withington shortly before 10 a.m. and spent less than an hour masquerading as a hotel inspector. Enough time to send the hotel management into a minor panic, and also sufficient for Owen to access all necessary areas. He swiftly identified the reason for so many bitten guests as cimex lectularis – the common bedbug. Even the honeymoon suite had evidence of eggs, faecal spots, and a lively collection of first-instar nymphs.

So, the outbreak had not come through the Rift. However, Owen had identified a missing Vredosian who was working as a chambermaid on the fifth floor. The plaid polyester of the staff uniform anonymised the staff of most large hotels, and yet Owen found it hard to understand how she’d gone unrecognised with her triangular teeth and pale grey skin. Hedgehog spines poked through her mop cap, like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. He studied his captive as they both waited for the lift to arrive. ‘How did no one notice you?’

The Vredosian wriggled uncomfortably beside him, her thumbs cuffed together. ‘The staff captain thought I was from Eastern Europe,’ she rasped. ‘Sometimes the obvious stares him in the face.’

Owen laughed. ‘I’ve got a Captain like that.’

The lift pinged. He was about to give the Vredosian an encouraging push into the lift when he remembered that she was the source of the bedbug outbreak. He wasn’t sure he wanted to get that close to her in the lift, but what was the alternative? He needed to get her back to the Hub. And then what – a bowl of bread and milk? He supposed Jack would know. ‘So, you’ve travelled millions of miles to find the job of your dreams,’ he said, and indicated she should board the lift. ‘Working for the minimum wage in a South Wales Hotel. Doesn’t get better than that, eh?’

The Vredosian lowered her spiny eyelashes and ignored him. She wasn’t dangerous; just another bloody nuisance in a city that already had enough of them to worry about without a flea-carrying extraterrestrial working illegally in the Welsh service industry. God, just imagine the Daily Mail headline.

Owen studied his own reflection in the mirrored wall of the lift. Is this what he’d become – a nursemaid to vagrant aliens? He put his left hand up to his face experimentally, aware again that he could feel nothing. The glove covered his permanently broken left finger. It also enclosed the tatty crepe bandage that held the splint in place, in turn concealing the scalpel cut across his palm that would never heal and that required re-stitching each week. He stroked one finger down a sideburn. The first day home after his return from the dead, he’d had a careful shave – his final shave, as it happened. He’d never have five o’clock shadow again. The beard would never grow back. On the bright side, he’d never get hair in his ears like his dad. And he’d had to decide, right then in front of the bathroom mirror in his apartment, whether he wanted to lose those sideburns for the rest of his life. No, not life – his existence.

Owen was still contemplating this when the lift pinged for the ground floor, the mirrored doors slid open, and his reflection disappeared.

The pair stepped into the lobby area. Bright morning sunshine spilled through the revolving doors and sparkled on the brass fittings. Orange pumpkin decorations glowed as though they had internal illumination. A couple of kids bounced on the leather couches while their parents waited in the check-out line.

Should have taken the service lift to the basement, thought Owen. He had to get the Vredosian across town to the Hub. What was he gonna do, order a taxi? He hadn’t brought his car, but he was damned if he was going to call Ianto to get assistance. And Toshiko would be so solicitous, so eager, so nice about everything that he didn’t think he could bear it.

He didn’t have to think about it for long. From beyond the revolving door came the sound of car horns, angry shouting, and a tremendous crash of metal and glass. There was a flurry of movement in the lobby as guests and staff hurried to look out of the windows. From the first shocked comments he overheard, Owen knew there’d been a serious traffic accident.

Quite how serious he didn’t know until he and the Vredosian got out into the street. The sound of pedestrians screaming was brutally loud once he’d got through the revolving door. Further along the street one of those jointed single-deck buses lay cracked and helpless, partly embedded in a glass shopfront. The DragonLine bus had evidently mounted the angled earthworks by the road repairs, twisting as it went, and then slid helplessly along the road until it mounted the opposite pavement. The concertinaed front of a white van showed where it had careered into oncoming traffic before finally coming to rest with its roof jammed into Wendleby’s department store. Jagged panes from what remained of the store’s plate-glass window rained down like murderous icicles. The rear of a big display poster flapped into the street. He could just read the remains of the shredded banner: ‘MonstaQuest Demonstration Today!’ it declared.

Owen fully expected that he was the first medic on the scene. Beside him in the shadow of the Withington Hotel’s Edwardian portico, the Vredosian flicked surreptitious glances to either side, judging whether she could make a break for freedom. Owen considered the yells of the pedestrians and the roar of the felled bus’s engine. He tutted at the Vredosian and tossed over the key to the thumb-cuffs. ‘Your lucky day,’ he told her. He jogged over to the crash scene, muttering: ‘Some of these won’t have been so fortunate.’

He pushed past the early rubberneckers. ‘Stay back,’ he snapped at them. A peroxide blonde gave him a surly look. ‘You got a mobile?’ he asked her

‘Yeah,’ she said.

Owen stared straight at her. ‘Phone 999.’ The blonde looked surprised. ‘Do it now,’ he told her. She was so shocked that she did so straight away.

The filthy underside of the bus growled angrily nearby, mud and water dripping from its grimy surfaces. The engine was still churning and the transmission whirled. Owen ran round to the back of the bus and slammed his glove on the emergency stop. The engine chattered into silence, which made the hiss of leaking air and the screams of the passengers more audible.

A black and white cab was squished up onto the pavement between Wendleby’s and the overturned rear section of the bus. Owen jumped on the bonnet, then over its cracked ‘For Hire’ sign and up onto the side of the bus. He traversed the length of the coachwork, sensing the metal panels give beneath his weight as he approached the front. The DragonLine emblem, a stylised motif in red and green, twisted its way down the painted body, as though marking out a path for him. At the snarling head of the painted dragon, the orange lights of the destination board in its jaws flashed intermittently, unable to decide where the bus was headed; 207 Lisvane via Llanishen stuttered into 102 Victoria Park and back again.

There was a banging sound from beneath his feet. Owen looked down and saw a scared face looking up at him in desperation. A middle-aged woman hammered with a bloodied fist against the entry doors, slamming against strips of glass that had now become the ceiling that trapped her inside the bus. She forced her fingers through the rubber seal, desperate to pry the doors apart. The blood on her fingers made it too slick to grasp, and her fingers slipped out of sight. She smacked against the glass in utter frustration, leaving a smeared bloody palm print on the glass.

Owen waved her away, hit the emergency door control, and kicked hard on the doors. They flick-flacked open, and he dropped carefully through the gap.

The bus was filled with terrified shouts and screams. The noise worried Owen most. Since he’d lost his senses of touch and taste and smell, he’d become more attuned to sights and sounds. With one side of the vehicle pressed against the pavement, half of the windows were now obscured which meant the flickering lights cast a twilight pall over the interior.

An angry man in his twenties tried to seize Owen’s lapels, but Owen eased him aside. ‘I’m a doctor,’ he said loudly but calmly. ‘Let me help these people. You seem to be mobile?’

The angry man looked a little cowed.

‘Good,’ continued Owen briskly. ‘So help these people climb out of the front doors. I’ll check on the others.’

In the crash, passengers on the left had been thrown forward and to the right. People struggled to free themselves from the piled bodies crushed against the roadside windows. As the walking wounded struggled forward to the newly opened doors, Owen decided to start his triage at the back of the vehicle. He stepped gingerly on the edges of seats, making his way to the rear, calling for calm. Bodies slumped against windows that were etched in red where blood had seeped through the cracked glass. And beyond that, the stark grey of the road. Hands grasped at his legs as he passed. He muttered apologies for not stopping, and promised to return.

Owen reached the rear of the bus at last, and started to offer advice about raising injured limbs and applying pressure to wounds. He knew he himself would be unable to detect pulses, so he directed willing passengers to assist, indicating where they should feel for the carotid or radial arteries.

A woman who might have been in her forties was crying softly, saying over and over that she couldn’t stay, her daughter would be waiting, she needed her mobile phone.

‘What’s your name, my love?’ Owen asked her.

‘Shona,’ said the woman. ‘I’m going to be late for my daughter.’

She was wedged in among the bent steel of a seat. She stared up at Owen, her hands clutching the mangled metal frame. As Shona tried to lever herself out, her eyes pleaded with him.

‘Give me a hand,’ demanded a grey-haired man, nudging Owen’s arm.

‘It doesn’t hurt, Daniel,’ said Shona. ‘It’s just, I’m stuck.’

‘We only just met,’ said the grey-haired guy. ‘Bloody funny time to make new acquaintances. Anyway, barely a scratch on her. Let’s get her out of here.’

Owen tugged him aside and spoke directly into the man’s ear. ‘Can’t tell whether she has internal injuries. Please wait.’ He looked beneath the seat as the old guy fumed beside him and Shona continued to whimper. Owen could see her legs were twisted out of shape. Fresh blood streamed down. In the cramped and chaotic conditions, he knew he could do nothing for her. She couldn’t feel any pain. Owen felt the familiar sick helplessness of his early days in A&E, when he’d been at the site of his first RTA. He wanted to save this woman, get her to her daughter. But he knew it was just a matter of time before she died. He knew what awaited her then. And there was nothing he could do about that, either.

A look passed between him and the old guy. He’d seen the blood now, too. The slightest motion of Owen’s head informed the other man. Daniel’s eyes started to fill with tears. ‘I’ll stay with her,’ he told Owen. ‘Until…’ He swallowed the rest of the sentence. ‘Until the ambulance men arrive,’ he said to Shona, and smoothed the hair from her eyes with a liver-spotted hand. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing.’ He turned aside to Owen and hissed: ‘What happened to the brute who started all this? Where is that scumbag?’

Owen’s face showed his bafflement.

Daniel was struggling to stay calm for Shona’s sake. He jerked his head towards the body of a large woman that was spread-eagled across two broken seats. ‘Took a knife to her and then ran off down the bus…’ The rest of Daniel’s muttered diatribe was lost on Owen, who was studying the tear marks around the fat woman’s neck. That ragged edge wasn’t like a knife wound. Could she have sustained it in the crash?

A young lad in a university scarf, green and red and white, struggled noisily with the rear emergency door. No, that red was more blood on a Cardiff scarf, wasn’t it? The door sprang open, and he started to help people over and out.

Owen gave a hand to a couple of shocked teenage boys. One of their friends was scraping around in the debris and trying to pick things up off the broken seats. ‘Leave them, Alwyn!’ called one of his mates.

‘They’re ultra-rare!’ bleated Alwyn. ‘I can’t leave my MonstaQuest cards in all this!’

Owen eased him away by the elbow. ‘Even so, it’s more important that you leave.’ He plucked a couple of the cards out of Alwyn’s fingers to make his point, and scrunched them into his own jacket pocket. The lad grumbled, but allowed himself to be hauled to safety by the other teenagers.

Owen rolled his eyes in despair, and looked at where the rest of Alwyn’s cards had dropped against the cracked window. In the middle of the scattered pile was a mobile phone, open and flashing. He stretched across and retrieved it, picking bits of glass from the silver fascia. The photo display showed a smiling young woman, labelled ‘Jenny’. He could hear a voice on the line. ‘Hello, who’s there?’ it asked.

Bloody hell, thought Owen what are the odds? ‘Tosh! Tosh, is that you?’

She sounded just as surprised. ‘Owen! Did you call this number, or did she call you?’

She? That would be Jenny. ‘Just found this phone,’ he explained.

‘Is it Jenny?’ Shona asked weakly from beside him.

‘No, it’s someone I know,’ he said gently. And then into the phone again: ‘Having a bit of a busy day here, Tosh.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m just in the middle of an RTA, outside the…’ He trailed off as the sounds of a dead line filled his ear. The call had been interrupted, and there was no connection. Time enough later to call Toshiko back.

Most of the walking wounded had evacuated. Those who remained were the trapped and the dead. A thin voice called from the length of the bus: ‘Please help me!’

A middle-aged Chinese guy was bent over a woman. Her long, light-brown hair spilled over the cheap upholstery of a ripped-out seat. Her eyes stared sightlessly. Owen held the man’s shoulders and gently pulled him away. He saw that the Chinese guy’s right foot was cocked unnaturally over to the left, with a gash through his faded jeans. A serious leg injury could be fatal, and if the femoral artery in the man’s thigh was compromised then he might bleed to death within the next ten minutes. Owen clumsily removed the guy’s belt and looped it around the injured leg. ‘God, what happened here?’

The Chinese guy grimaced as the tourniquet bit. ‘Some kid in a Halloween mask went berserk with a knife. Killed the driver. The bus ran out of control.’ He gritted his teeth, and his eyes showed his fear. ‘Is it a terrorist attack?’

‘A knife?’ Owen checked the driver, dead in his cab. The man’s arm, shoulder and throat were all torn to shreds. Again, not the clean edges from a knife, or from metal and glass laceration.

The Chinese guy lashed out awkwardly with his good leg. His foot connected with a leather-clad figure that had fallen into the seat beside him. The figure stirred and groaned.

‘Hey hey hey!’ shouted Owen. ‘Knock it off!’

‘He’s the terrorist,’ spat the Chinese guy.

That’s no terrorist, realised Owen as the figure reared up. It’s a Weevil. And it’s really badly pissed off.

The Weevil threw back its head and howled. The Chinese guy shrank back, but had nowhere to go. The Weevil’s scored face hissed and spat at him.

Owen slapped the Weevil in the face. ‘Come and have a go,’ he said, ‘if you think you’re hard enough.’

Christ, he thought as the creature snapped its head round to face him, you’d better be right about this, Harper. Since his resurrection, Owen had discovered that his very presence seemed to cow the creatures into submission. But did this one know he was King of the Weevils? Or was he about to become Snack of the Weevils?

The creature’s sunken eyes glittered at him. It growled softly, and lowered its head.

Owen blinked slowly. ‘Good boy.’

A brace of emergency vehicles screeched up outside the bus. The area was abruptly bathed in their strobing blue lights, and the bus echoed with the piercing wail of their sirens. Spooked, the Weevil leaped from cover and fled through the bus doors.

Owen struggled around to find his gun in the back of his belt. With so little feeling in his hands, he had to double-check anything that he reached for when it was out of sight. He cursed. Couldn’t feel for a pulse, couldn’t feel for a gun, what bloody good was he?

By the time he’d scrambled after the Weevil, it had already battered its way past the crowds gathered outside. He watched helplessly as it vanished into a side alley. By the time he got down, the creature would be back in its sewer home eating shitcakes.

Owen slammed the side of the bus in frustration, and got a satisfying clang with the butt of his gun. He registered the shock on the paramedics’ faces, and reholstered it. He sat heavily on the side of the overturned bus and swore again. A flapping shape in Wendleby’s window behind him caught his attention, fitfully illuminated by the flashes from the emergency vehicles. If his heart had still been beating, it would have leaped into his mouth. The shape was just the MonstaQuest display poster. But the big cartoon artwork on the poster bore an alarming resemblance to the Weevil.

Owen reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved the couple of crumpled MonstaQuest cards he’d snatched from Alwyn. From each of the oversized playing cards, stylised pictures of Weevils leered back at Owen. Just like the one who’d escaped down the alleyway. They seemed to mock him. King of the Weevils, indeed.

The orange indicator board in the dragon’s jaws seemed to have decided its status at last: ‘Out of Service’. That reminded him about his interrupted call with Toshiko. He tapped near his earlobe, and called in to speak to her.

What the hell…?

‘Achenbrite apologise for the interruption in service,’ said a calm voice.’ ‘Please stand by.’