The Undertakers Gift (20 page)

‘Enough. It is time for the end. We knew that the Time Rift was too important, too dangerous, to be left in the charge of mere humans – stripling minds, weak and blind as worms in a cosmos more complicated than you could ever imagine. We installed a failsafe here – a device that could be used if and when the Time Rift fell into enemy hands. That time has come.’

‘Enemy hands?’

‘Your hands.’

‘We’re not your enemy.’

‘Nevertheless, you cannot be allowed to govern this Time Rift.’

‘You’ve got us all wrong,’ said Jack. He was trying to keep his voice calm and authoritative. ‘We don’t seek to govern. We try to. . . regulate. Control. It’s damage limitation.’

‘There is no limit to the damage a Time Rift can cause. And this one is too dangerous to be left to the likes of you. The device will be deployed.’

‘What do you mean,’ asked Gwen carefully, ‘by
device
, exactly?’

‘When the Time Rift was opened, the plan would automatically come into operation. A suicide unit would be despatched to Earth to set up a temporal fusion device that would use the power of the Rift to eradicate the human race. The planet will be cleansed by opening a controlled time fissure.’

‘No one has ever opened the Rift,’ said Jack carefully. ‘Well, not recently.’

‘Hokrala,’ said Ianto. He stepped closer to Jack. ‘The Hokrala Corporation has been backwards and forwards through time, using the Rift. That’s what Harold told us.’

‘Warp-shunt technology,’ Jack recalled. ‘They’ve been forcing the Rift wider with every trip. Allowing things to come through with them.
They
set all this in motion. . . they caused this insane plan to be put into operation – and they didn’t even realise it.’ He looked at the pallbearer. ‘This isn’t our fault. We haven’t opened the Rift. Like I said, we monitor it, clear it, keep Earth safe. . .’

‘The situation cannot be allowed to continue,’ the pallbearer stated. Ray’s voice had grown more ragged with every sentence. Now it was little more than a bubbling croak. ‘We have come. The device has been activated.’

‘What device?’ Jack repeated.

‘There is no device,’ Ianto said. He held up his PDA scanner. ‘There is no technological equipment here
anywhere
. I’ve checked and double-checked.’

‘The device does not rely on technology as you know it,’ Ray answered. ‘Our systems were designed long before life evolved on this planet. You would not – cannot – understand.’

‘It’s Frank,’ said Gwen, with mounting horror. ‘You’ve used him, haven’t you? All this. . .’ she gestured angrily at the tubes and wires that stretched from the casket into the dark corners of the room. ‘This is your device, isn’t it?’

‘The device is all around us.’

Gwen aimed her torch upwards, at the ceiling. The light beam trailed the wires and tubes which led from Frank Morgan’s casket into the darkness, and then rippled across a surface full of strange, twisted shapes. The tubes sank into orifices all over the ceiling, which had a disturbingly organic texture. Ianto was aiming his own torch at the walls, which were similarly full of weird lumps and branches. At first it looked as though some tree roots had thrust out of the crypt walls, but then it became obvious that this assumption was wrong.

‘Oh my God,’ breathed Gwen. A tear ran down her cheek and her lips trembled as she realised what she was seeing. ‘Please tell me it isn’t true. . .’

The roots ended in angular, withered claws – the shrunken remains of skeletal hands. And the rest of the mass surrounding it resolved under careful scrutiny, like a macabre optical illusion, into the decaying bodies of animals and people: Weevils, dogs, cats, rats, human beings, all squashed together into one twisted mass, flesh fused together as the putrefaction had broken down the tissue over the years.

‘Antilositic energy,’ Ianto realised. He rechecked his PDA, the blue light flickering across his anguished face. ‘Why didn’t I realise? It was there staring at us all along. No need for electronics or mechanics. It’s living tissue. They’ve used living tissue.’

‘This man is the control element of the device,’ said the pallbearer, and Ray felt her hand jerk towards the casket at the centre. ‘He will undertake the final activation.’

‘Undertake?’ echoed Ianto.

And then it hit Jack like a hammer blow. ‘The Undertaker,’ he said softly. ‘Frank Morgan.’

‘And this is his gift to you,’ said the pallbearer. With that, it released its grip on Ray.

The last thing she felt was a sudden coldness as if she had been immersed in ice water.

Then nothing.

FORTY-FIVE

Ray’s blackened corpse collapsed at the feet of the pallbearer.

‘No!’ screamed Gwen, and in that instant Jack had whipped his revolver up for a snap shot, his finger yanking on the trigger in his haste to slay the pallbearer.

The shot went wide, the bullet scything past the side of the pallbearer’s head.

It missed because Jack had rushed his shot, possibly the final, most vital shot of his long life. And he had rushed it because the pallbearer had brought up its own weapon at the very same instant and fired at him. Jack saw the flechette glint in the torchlight, and it filled his vision in less than a second, aimed straight at his forehead. But he was already moving, flinching away, using reflexes that were born of a lifetime of dodging death – and sometimes failing.

The blade glanced off the side of his skull and embedded itself in the wall.

Jack spun, the Webley flying from his hand. He crashed to the floor at Gwen’s feet, where she knelt to help him up. The skin at the side of his head had been sliced open to the bone, in a long gash stretching from his right eyebrow to the back of his ear. He lay still, his eyelids fluttering.

‘Jack. . .!’ Gwen turned his face towards her, felt the hot blood running over her fingers.

A shadow fell over them.

She looked up and saw the pallbearer. Its narrow yellow eyes blazed down at her from between the bandages.

And then a deafening crash of gunfire sent the pallbearer hurtling backwards, flipped practically head over heels in a spray of black slime. It rolled to a stop next to the casket and melted slowly into the flagstones.

Ianto sat clutching the MP5, smoke curling up from the barrel. His finger was still clenched on the trigger, the magazine emptied. His face was a mask of white fury.

The other pallbearers were all sinking slowly to the ground, their mission complete. They expired with soft, liquid noises, oozing away through the cracks between the flagstones. They left nothing but piles of bandages and rags and a stench of death.

‘We’ve got to. . . stop it. . .’ Ianto croaked. ‘The Undertaker. . . got to stop it. . .’

Gwen looked back at the casket. Frank Morgan’s emaciated skull was twitching and jerking and pulses of luminescence were shooting out along the plastic tubes connected to the rest of the chamber.

‘What’s going on?’ Frank’s voice broke through the strange, heavy silence that had filled the crypt like glue. ‘Am I back in the trenches? All I can hear is shouting and gunfire. Tell me I’m not back on the front line. . . Lord, but I don’t want to die. . .’

His voice fell away to a thin whine. The tubes were beginning to glow now, flickering like fluorescent lights as the pallbearers’ unnatural device came online. The crypt was lit by an ethereal green light, and Gwen could see the tubes throbbing and pulsing like living things, see the alien juices flowing inside like blood through veins. As the light grew brighter she could see the dead things that lined the walls starting to move as well, ancient tendons and dried muscles twitching spasmodically. The entire chamber was crawling back to life. Dust began to trickle from the ceiling.

Gwen looked down at Jack, brushing grit from his forehead. He was still out cold.

‘Do something,’ Gwen told Ianto.

‘Gun’s empty,’ Ianto gasped. His face was white, his lips grey. ‘Can’t feel. . . anything. . .’

‘Ianto!’

He keeled forward, losing consciousness. His hands were shaking, and his legs began to tremble as if his whole body had entered into some kind of fit.

‘Assassin,’ croaked Jack. His eyes flickered open, sore and narrow.

‘What do you mean?’

Jack heaved himself upright, shaking his head. The right side of his face and neck was crimson. ‘It’s the assassin they sent for me,’ he said, crawling over to where Ianto lay. ‘It got Ianto by mistake.’

He rolled Ianto over onto his back and loosened his tie.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Gwen. ‘What assassin?’

‘We got it wrong,’ Jack explained heavily. ‘The Hokrala didn’t send a man with a gun. They knew that wouldn’t work against me. So they sent a different kind of assassin.’

He pulled Ianto’s tie free and ripped open his shirt, pulling the material away from his chest and stomach. The rashes had turned from a livid red to black.

Black that was moving.

Gwen’s hand went to her mouth as realisation struck. Patches of Ianto’s skin were covered with tiny, glistening black insects. They were burrowing away at the flesh, eating down through the skin. Many of them were fat with blood, their segmented bodies taut and glossy.

‘Xilobytes,’ said Jack, his mouth turning down with revulsion. A sob broke through his words. ‘They must have been in the writ – just a few microscopic larvae. You couldn’t see them with the naked eye but they were there – probably hidden in the watermark. They must have got onto Ianto’s skin and got to work. They eat through human flesh, growing all the time, excreting a powerful local anaesthetic. He wouldn’t have felt anything but an itch. They’re feeding and multiplying, and if we don’t do something they’ll eat him right through to the bone.’

‘But. . . what can we do?’

Jack took in a deep, shuddering breath. ‘There’s only one way to stop them – it’s risky, though. You have to wait for them to get big enough and then pick them off with your fingers one by one and kill ’em.’ To demonstrate, he chose one of the fattest insects and pulled it out of the wound. It left a bright spot of red where it had been.

Jack threw the wriggling creature on the floor and squashed it under his boot. Then he looked up at Gwen and met her eyes. ‘Think you can do that?’

She shook her head, horrified.

‘Then I’ll do it,’ Jack said. ‘But that means you’re gonna have to deal with Frank.’

Gwen looked back up at the casket. The tubes were flexing like the legs of some giant mutant spider. Frank Morgan’s skull was still talking, but she hadn’t heard a word of it in the last few minutes.

‘Is there anybody there? I can hear voices. Where are you?’

He was growing more agitated, and his voice had descended to a deep, inhuman growl. As she watched, the dried skin that covered his eye sockets was suddenly forced apart as he opened his eyes for the first time in decades. Two darkened eyes forced their way through the dry folds of skin, swivelling madly, covered in bulging red veins. The eyes seemed to lock onto Gwen.

‘Is that you, Gwen?’

‘You gotta kill him,’ Jack told her urgently. ‘Now!’ He picked another couple of Xilobytes out of Ianto’s wounds and crushed them.

Gwen picked up Jack’s revolver and aimed the heavy gun at Frank’s open head. ‘How will that help?’ she asked. ‘He’s already dead. Half his head’s missing for God’s sake. He’s just a load of dried-up flesh and bone!’

‘He’s the Undertaker,’ Jack insisted. ‘He’s the control element of the time fissure. I know he’s already dead. He was put there by the Already Dead. There’s nothing they don’t know about that sort of thing. Kill him –
now
.’

‘Gwen? Is that you? Are you there?’ Frank’s reedy voice grated on her nerves. ‘You’re the only friendly voice I’ve heard in ages, Gwen. Don’t tell me you’ve gone.’

‘I’m here,’ Gwen heard herself say, still aiming the Webley.

‘And what about the yank? Captain Whatsisname? Is he here too?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do us a favour, love, and get us out of here. . .’

Jack reached up and grabbed Gwen’s hand. ‘Do it now!’

‘I can’t!’ Gwen wailed. ‘I can’t shoot him, Jack. He’s a human being, a person. It’s murder.’

‘You said yourself, he’s already dead!’

‘But he’s not, is he? Listen to him, Jack!’

Jack looked imploringly at her. ‘He’s one life, Gwen. A life that should never have lived like this. If you don’t kill him now then thousands – millions – of people are gonna die!’

‘I can’t do it, Jack.’

‘You must!’

Frank’s voice wheezed out of the darkness. ‘Gwen? Jack? What’s happening? I feel strange. . . so strange. . .’

Gwen let go of the gun with a cry.

And then, for Jack Harkness, it all seemed to fall into place. The dreams, nightmares, about Gwen – future echoes distorted by the Rift and his own subconscious: warning him that it would come to this. A choice between one life and millions, a choice Gwen Cooper could not be expected to make. The responsibility would be his, and his alone. Destruction on a scale unheard of, death upon death, millions of lives lost. A world of suffering.