The Undertakers Gift (3 page)

He lurched awake with a sudden, vast gulp of air. It was dark, but there was nothing on top of him other than a bed sheet.

‘Bad dream?’ Gwen Cooper asked. She was standing at the end of his bed, watching him, smiling.

‘Yeah. I get a lot of those now.’

‘It’s only to be expected,’ Gwen told him. She sat down on the bed next to him, naked. ‘After all you’ve been through.’

Jack smiled and reached out to her, stroking the bare flesh of her arm. It was cool and creamy in the darkness. Her hair hung like a thick black curtain over her shoulders, and her eyes glittered. Jack’s gaze travelled down her face and neck, examining the curves, looking for any imperfections and finding none.

‘You are wonderful,’ he told her truthfully.

‘I know,’ she whispered, leaning in to take his kiss. Jack reached up, cupping the back of her head in his hand and pressing his lips onto hers. She tasted of clear mountain stream water, cold and refreshing and full of life. Jack pulled her down onto the bed, turning her over so that he could look down into her eyes.

Gwen’s eyes were incredible; huge, dark pools that could take you down, deeper than Time. She gazed up at him, languid and adoring. He kissed her again, climbing on top of her.

‘Where is everyone?’ he asked, without quite knowing why. A twinge of guilt?

‘They’re dead, Jack,’ she replied. ‘They’re all dead.’

Jack frowned. He wanted to kiss her again, but something was niggling at the back of his mind. Something wasn’t right.

‘Do you forgive me, Jack?’ Gwen asked.

‘Forgive you?’ He gave an uneasy laugh. ‘What for?’

‘Killing them all, of course. You can be so silly at times, can’t you, Jack?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I had to make the choice. Remember? I had to kill one person to save everyone else. That was the choice you gave me.’

‘Choice?’

She was smiling at him in the darkness but she was hurting him as well. Her fingernails were digging into the flesh of his shoulders like claws, and now he realised that the warm, tickling sensation on the skin of his back was not the gentle caress of her fingertips, but the blood running out of the scratches she had made.

‘Gwen!’ he gasped, like a lover in climax. ‘Let go!’

‘I’ll never let you go, Jack,’ she told him, and the claws sunk deeper into his flesh until he could feel them scraping on the bones of his shoulders. He tried to push himself off her, but she was hanging on with a fierce, agonising grip. Her legs folded around his waist and suddenly he felt as if she was going to crush him.

‘Let me go!’

‘
Never
.’

She was still smiling, her face completely relaxed and showing no sign of strain. And yet Jack was pulling away from her with all his strength. The muscles were hardening under his skin, sinews straining, but it had no effect. He might have been a child in her arms. He started to cry, tears falling onto her face. She laughed and opened her mouth to catch them.

‘Please!’ Jack cried. ‘Please stop!’

‘I killed them all, Jack,’ she repeated. ‘Every last human being on the planet. It’s just us now – you and me. And I’ll never let you go.’

‘The hell you won’t!’ Jack roared. He closed his hands around her neck and squeezed, pushing his thumbs deep into the soft part of her throat to close off the windpipe. He gritted his teeth and bore down on her, determined to kill.

But she just smiled at him as if she couldn’t feel pain and didn’t need to breathe.

And then something occurred to him, a tiny detail that was as obvious now as the pain from his lacerated back: she had no pulse. He had his fingers clamped around her neck and he could not feel a pulse. She was already dead. But she hadn’t stopped smiling.

When she opened her mouth, he saw that it was full of earth, black and crumbling and twisting with moist, pink life. With a final, choking cry Jack tore himself free, hurling himself off her, tangled up in the sweat-cold sheets.

‘Bad dream?’ asked Ianto politely.

Jack sat up abruptly, blinking in the sudden bright light. He was panting hard and he could feel the perspiration on his neck and chest. The sheets were twisted around him but he was alone in the bed.

Ianto stood at the base of the bed, suited and booted. He looked ready for business. ‘I don’t dream,’ said Jack eventually. It had taken a while to get his breath back. ‘I don’t even sleep. Not properly. You know that.’

Ianto gently placed the fresh mug of coffee on the bedside table. ‘What are you doing in bed, then? Alone, I mean?’

Jack watched Ianto warily for a few seconds before replying. ‘I don’t know. Thinking. Drifting. Dreaming, I suppose.’

‘Sometimes I think you could do with some proper sleep.’

‘I doubt it.’ Jack picked up the coffee and sipped it, considering. ‘It was a nightmare.’ He sounded confused, as if a nightmare was the very last thing he expected. ‘I was being buried alive. No surprise there, I guess. But this was . . . different . . .’ He didn’t want to go into any detail about Gwen now. That was one fantasy that had to be kept under lock and key.

‘Perhaps it was the pizza last night. Too much cheese before bedtime.’

Jack shook his head, not in the mood for jokes. ‘How’s Gwen?’

‘Fine – as far as I know. Rhys has gone to a hauliers’ convention or something in Gloucester. She misses him but otherwise she’s OK. Why? Shouldn’t she be?’

‘I don’t know.’

Ianto started to lay Jack’s clothes out. ‘Gwen told me about the alien at Tommy Greenway’s funeral last week. I believe we can expect another visit from our friends at Hokrala.’

‘Yeah.’ Jack climbed out of bed. He was naked, and Ianto suddenly felt absurdly overdressed in his three-piece pinstripe and silk tie. But Jack didn’t seem to notice. ‘That’s not what’s bothering me,’ he said.

‘Then what is?’

Jack headed for the shower. ‘When you’ve lived in one place for long enough you get a feeling for it. You can tell when something’s wrong.’

He ran the water and stepped behind the frosted glass. Steam filled the cubicle as the water heated up and Jack became a pink blur.

‘And something is wrong, then?’ Ianto asked.

‘You said it. There’s so much coming through the Rift at the moment – it doesn’t feel right.’

‘It
has
been unusually active recently,’ Ianto agreed, taking a notebook out of his pocket and flipping it open. ‘We’ve been rushed off our feet since Jackson Leaves and the xXltttxtolxtol. And of course, um, Agnes . . .’

Jack flinched, but Ianto carried on regardless.

‘Then there was the Greenway funeral, and the Fairwater Death Sticks. There’s been a Grolon rat infestation in Butetown. Couple of Blowfish low-lifes loose in Splott. Our electrical friend in Cell One . . . The list goes on. In fact, we’ve never been so busy.’

‘I know, I know,’ Jack said, splashing. The water had flattened his hair over his face. ‘But it’s not that. There’s something else.’

Ianto watched the islands of soap lather shift like continents over the vague shape of Jack’s chest before being rinsed away.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ Jack continued, ‘but I can
feel
it. Something bad is coming our way, Ianto.’

Ianto watched for another full minute as Jack let the hot water stream down his shoulders and back before asking, ‘Care for some company in there?’

Jack’s blue eyes flicked open, the lashes thick and wet. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not right now.’

FOUR

Ray was sitting in Wynnie’s flat, hugging a cushion.

‘You look totally wrecked,’ observed Wynnie. He placed a mug of tea on the low table in front of her.

Ray didn’t even look up. Her fingers were white where they dug into the old velveteen cushion.

Wynnie cleared a space on the coffee table, pushing aside a pile of music magazines, research papers and empty cans of Red Bull so he could sit down. Then he faced Ray and stared at her until she did look up.

‘Never thought I’d see the day when you were lost for words,’ he told her. ‘Must’ve been a hell of a party.’

‘Hell of a party,’ she repeated dully. ‘Good one.’

‘Here,’ Wynnie pushed the tea towards her. ‘Drink. It’s got sugar in it. Looks like you could do with it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re in shock. That much is obvious. Drink the tea and then tell me what happened. From the beginning. From when you left the party.’

He gently removed the cushion and gave her the mug of tea.

‘I think I saw a little bit of hell last night,’ she said.

‘Care to expand on that?’

So she told him. Everything.

When she’d finished, pale and trembling, she sipped the tea. Wynnie sat back and stuck out his bottom lip. On anyone else it would look like a sulk. On Wynnie, it meant he was thinking. Behind the lip rings, tongue piercing, eyebrow studs and blond dreadlocks, there was a first-class brain breezing through the final year of a postgraduate Chemistry course. Some people said Wynnie was only doing the Ph.D. in his spare time, when he wasn’t playing bass guitar in his band or drawing comics for the student rag.

‘So,’ Ray said at last. ‘Do you think I’m going bonkers, then? Cos I do.’

‘You’re sure no one slipped you anything at the party?’

‘Absolutely sure.’

‘No one tampered with your drinks?’

‘No way.’

‘You didn’t drop any tabs? Not even E?’

‘Nothing. I was a tiny bit pissed but that’s all. Not so I couldn’t walk home on my own. Just a bit. . . you know. . .’

‘And this thing in the casket. . .’

Ray’s eyes snapped shut. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Not any more. I don’t even want to
think
about it.’

‘OK. Fine. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll go back to the place you saw these guys, now, in broad daylight. Check it out, see if there’s anything there.’

Ray opened an eye, glared suspiciously at him. ‘What, like evidence you mean?’

‘I dunno. Anything. You never know.’

‘There won’t be anything. It all just disappeared. Like a. . . like a. . .’

‘Dream?’

‘Like a nightmare.’

FIVE

The SUV cruised along Penarth Road with Jack at the wheel. He seemed distracted, braking late and accelerating with undue aggression. The engine growled impatiently as the big black chassis muscled its way through the morning traffic.

In the passenger seat, Gwen was reloading a customised automatic. It was a Glock 19, a compact, lightweight nylon-based polymer-frame pistol Ianto had given her to field-test. She snapped a full magazine into the butt – fifteen rounds of tungsten-core 9mm parabellum – and pulled back the slide to load the first cartridge into the firing chamber.

‘So, these Hokrala people. We met them last year, didn’t we?’ she asked.

‘The last time we saw them was just after the Strepto hag business,’ Ianto confirmed from the rear seat. He was examining the computer displays mounted into the backs of the front seats. ‘We get a visit almost every year. They’re lawyers, apparently. From the future.’

‘Hokrala Corp’s a big-shot law firm from the forty-ninth century,’ said Jack. ‘They have access to warp-shunt technology and they’ve been trying to land a writ on Torchwood for years.’

‘A writ?’ Gwen frowned. ‘What, you mean they’re trying to sue us? What for?’

‘Screwing up.’

‘Come again?’

‘They want to sue us for mishandling the twenty-first century,’ Jack explained, giving the steering wheel a sudden yank and sending the SUV into a tight right hander. The big tyres snarled across the tarmac.

‘When it all changes,’ Ianto added helpfully.

‘But Torchwood’s been going for
ages
– I mean, since Queen Victoria’s time,’ argued Gwen.

‘Yeah,’ nodded Jack. ‘But aliens have been coming to Earth since the dawn of time. The Silurians, the Neolithics, Egyptians, Greeks, Aztecs, Incas, even the Spanish Inquisition – they’ve all claimed first contact at some point.’

‘So why are we the lucky ones then? And who the hell were the Silurians?’ Gwen grabbed an armrest as the SUV swerved through the traffic. ‘Why are these Hokrala people so interested in Torchwood?’

‘Could be because of the Rift,’ Ianto said. ‘Maybe it gives them access to the twenty-first century.’

‘Makes sense, I suppose.’

‘And then there’s me,’ Jack said.

‘You?’

‘Hokrala and I go back a long way. Or is that forward? It’s hard to say – but either way, it’s personal. They just don’t like me.’

‘Why? What’ve you done?’

‘Annoyed them, big time,’ Jack said. ‘You’ll see. It didn’t surprise me when Harold said they were gonna have me assassinated. They’ve been itching to do that for years.’

‘Who is this Harold person, exactly?’ Ianto asked.