Torchwood Long Time Dead (22 page)

Cutler shook his head. 'Not a chance. But we
might learn something.' He looked again at the
picture. 'Maybe give this to one of your men to get
to the airports. I don't want her knowing we're
looking for her but at the same time, let's keep her
in the country.'

For a long moment, Cutler couldn't speak.
Let's go

to yours. Mine's a right bloody mess.
Wasn't that
what she'd said? Was that a little private joke to
herself? The body tied to the bed had probably been
handsome and toned once, but it was hard to tell
now. The man stared upwards, his eyes still wide
and glazed, and his mouth hung open slightly. His
skin had mottled where the blood was now long
settled and Cutler knew from experience that if
they rolled him over, his back would be purple.

The air stank of the beginning of decay. When had
she killed this man? The night before they slept
together? Who was this stranger?

The sheets were soaked with blood from where
she'd cut him and his naked body was like a
patchwork quilt with squares of skin cut away
on his arms and legs and torso. She d taken her
time killing him, that was obvious, and, although
there were blue edges that gave away the original
colour of the sheets, the bed was now a slick mass
of crimson where he had lost so much blood. His
hands and feet were tied to the head and foot
boards. Was that how she'd got him so helpless?

Lured him in for some fun? Had she actually had
sex with him first? And if so, why had she killed
this man and not him? He thought about the
water she'd probably drugged him with last night.

Had her intention been to put him to sleep and
then kill him quickly? Why hadn't she? Because
she had feelings for him? Could someone capable
of what had been done to the dead man on the
bed even be capable of loving someone? It was like
looking at the actions of a stranger.

Bloody footprints led from the bed to the
window and then to the bathroom, and he followed
her path. Make-up was strewn in disarray across
the surfaces and there was still a wet patch on the
floor where she'd got out of the shower.

'Sir?'

He turned to find Andy Davidson in the

doorway. 'Yes?'

'Station just called. We can't get a trace on her
phone. She's using some kind of blocking device on
it. God knows what.'

'Great.' Cutler wasn't really surprised. 'You
find anything here?'

'Nothing, really. Just a laptop which is clean
and some clothes. Basics in the kitchen. Tea.

Coffee. Milk. Some bread that's going stale.'

'And of course a mutilated corpse,' Cutler
added. Tea and coffee and a corpse. It summed
Suzie Costello up perfectly. Partly so normal, and
partly bat-shit crazy. 'Get the computer to the tech
boys and let them dig around in it. And then get
a team here to get the body.' He'd had enough of
looking at it and headed back to the sitting room.

'Where's Commander Jackson?'

Andy was staring down at his phone, his

expression dark and distracted. Who was he
thinking of calling? His mum? The boss? Cutler
clicked his fingers, and the sergeant looked up
suddenly. 'The Commander?' Cutler asked again.

'Sorry. Outside.' Andy put his phone away. 'One
of his men just turned up. Looked quite freaked
out. Said he needed to speak to him in private.'

'Did he now?' Cutler said, striding towards the
front door. 'We'll see about that.'

He found them in the corridor below, heads close
together, the Commander listening intently as the
other man spoke, his hands animated.

'What's going on?' Cutler asked, glancing
upwards for any smoke alarms and then lighting
a cigarette. The sight of the dead man had added
to the creeping dread that was consuming him
like a cancer on the inside. Whatever was coming,
the time they had to find it was running out. As
if in support of his words, a siren blared in the
distance. There was more chaos in the city.

Commander Jackson nodded at the thin man

who wore an untidy suit rather than a uniform.

'Go on, Dr Holdt,' he said. 'Detective Inspector
Cutler knows about Torchwood and what they
did. In this current situation, we have no secrets
from him.' He turned to Cutler. 'I didn't want your
sergeant hearing anything unusual.'

'So, what
is
going on?'

'There's a manual monitoring device that

Harkness and his team would use to detect
any alien activity or use of alien technology. It
showed—'

'Rift activity?' Cutler cut in.

'That's right.' Dr Holdt looked surprised. 'Well,
we've got it working again and have been trying
to make sense of its readings. There are a
lot
of
readings. The thing is going haywire. There are
major spikes at all the locations the dead bodies
were found, but now it seems as if, alongside
the spiking that we understand, there are these
stranger readings. Almost anti-readings. As
if whatever is happening there is so out of the
machine's remit it can't compute them.' He looked
nervously from the Commander to the policeman.

'And given that the machine's sole function is to
register anything alien, then whatever it is must
be very alien indeed.'

'Has anyone been to the locations of these weird
readings?' Cutler asked.

'Yes, we sent a small team. There are black
patches of something. Or maybe black patches of

nothing
would be more accurate. One of our men
tried touching one and was sucked inside it. We've
sent a couple of small probes in, and the readings
go haywire until the probes are fully absorbed and
then they go dead. The monitors still show that
they're functioning but we can't get any readings.

Whatever's on the other side is - appearances to
the contrary - a long way away.'

This is something to do with the Rift, though?'

Cutler asked.

'Yes and no. Maybe something that once

came through the Rift helped cause it, but our
sources tell us that in the last hour NASA have
been recording some kind of spatial disturbances
but aren't giving any details - and I think that's
because they
cant'

'Jesus.' The Commander had visibly paled.

They were all out of their depth here, that much
was clear, but Cutler reckoned that Jackson had
it worst. The scientist's brain would be finding
this fascinating as well as terrifying, and Cutler
at least had come across alien activity twice
before. For the Commander, even though he was
in charge of the Hub site,-this was a whole new
world opening up.

This was a whole new world opening up.
The
phrase replayed in his head and hit him like a
bucket of cold water. That was the terror. The
awful dread. A whole new world - no, not a world

- a
dimension -
was opening up.

'Something's trying to absorb the world,' he
muttered. His hand trembled as he sucked hard
on the cigarette. 'We're being pulled into the
darkness.'

'That doesn't make sense,' Dr Holdt shook his
head. 'We're getting no clear readings that would
be expected from anything coming from space.'

'This isn't our known space.
This
shouldn't be
here.' Cutler fought the panic that made him want
to throw himself out of the nearest window rather
than face what was coming for them.

'What about the people Sue Costa - Suzie

Costello's been murdering?' Jackson asked. 'The
ones with scrambled brains and no eyes. How do
they tie in?'

Cutler's head throbbed. 'I'm not sure they're
entirely dead.'
The screaming of millions.
'Their
bodies might be, but their consciousnesses? Their
souls? I think they're in that other place. The one
that's now spreading out in the dark patches and
pulling people in whole. That's what it wants. Us.'

He was right, and he knew it. He'd felt it, a slight
tug just before he'd remembered the previous
night. There had been something pulling at him
and he now knew where it was coming from. 'We
need to stop it. Now, before it's too late.'

'How?' Commander Jackson asked. 'How the

hell do we do that?'

'Suzie Costello,' Cutler said. 'We need to draw
her back to us. This started with her coming back
to life in the Torchwood vault and there has to be
some technology at the bottom of this. Something
she's using. She killed your man there and hasn't
stopped since. And I'm not talking about that poor
sod back there in the bed. I mean the exploding-eyes victims. Given that she's clearly very bloody
clever and she's been sitting in your office for days,
I bet she knows that we're looking for her by now.

Why has she kept on killing like that? Knowing
that it'll draw attention to her and is also making
the darkness stronger? She must know these dark
patches all over the city are down to her. Why
hasn't she stopped?'

Both of the other men stared at him. For people
clearly experts in their respective fields, neither of
them would have been any good as policemen.

'Because she
cant
,' he finished. 'And that's our
hook.'

'Have you got a plan?' Jackson asked.

Yes,' Cutler answered, nodding slowly. 'I think
I do.' As he ground his cigarette out on the carpet
he wished it had brought him some relief.

After a while, not wanting to draw attention to
herself, even though most people were avoiding
coming near her, Suzie had taken refuge in the
ladies' toilets. When she'd stood up and seen how
her shadow stayed behind on the seat, she wasn't
sure whether to laugh or cry some more. In the
end, she chose crying.

Her phone had been ringing over and over, and
she turned it off as she sat in the locked cubicle
and rested her head against the wall. Quiet. She
needed some peace and quiet so she could think.

Try and find a way out of this.

Over the past twelve hours she'd felt everything
start to crumble. Control was shifting. Was it
because she'd let her guard down with her sudden
rush of feelings for Cutler? Had thinside sensed that and managed to somehow
overpower her management of it? Or was this just
the inevitable turn of events? She was still Suzie
Costello, and she still wasn't quite as good as she
thought she was. She
had
become Death - and so
much more - but only because the vast awfulness
behind her eyes had made it so. She was a puppet,
nothing more.

Her head ached with the distant screams of
those it had already taken. Not just the ones she'd

shown
, but others, people who had wandered into
the driftwood of darkness that had broken away
from her. She could feel those pieces, though,
deep in her core wherever the device had gone
to. They were still part of her and she part of it.

What would happen to her when it had consumed
the world, she wondered? Would it send her back
to the nothingness of death or drag her into the
agony with all the rest?

Her mouth twisted into a bitter smile and her
eyes filled with tears again. Why could nothing go
right for her? Where had the new Suzie gone to
now? Where was all that confidence? She peeled
more skin back from her fingernails as snot ran
from her nose. This wasn't how it was supposed to
be. Not at all. What was she supposed to do now?

She should be long gone, and she'd probably left
it too late. Cutler wasn't stupid and neither was
that old buffoon Jackson. They'd know she wasn't
who she claimed to be by now, even if they hadn't
figured out exactly who she was. They'd have
alerted the airports, if nothing else. It was all such
a mess.

She winced as a fresh scream filled her head
and then faded as the hell inside her took it. One
more dark shadow she'd left behind somewhere
serving its purpose.

'Just leave me alone,' she mumbled. 'Just take
them and leave me alone.' For an awful moment,
she thought she heard laughter coming from the
dimension that looked out on the world from within
her tiny body. That was new. There had never
been anything obviously sentient about it before.