[Torchwood] "Never Play With Dead Things" (R)
Title: "Never Play With Dead Things" (Theatrical Release Edition)
Author: matrixrefugee
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Lisa Hallett, Ianto Jones, Jack Harkness, Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato, Gwen Cooper
Length: 4,066
Rating: R
Spoilers: Alternate universe for "Cyberwoman", potential spoilers for the ep.
Warnings: Blood, people-munching, Jack Harkness-munching, character death (Lisa), angst
Prompt: 318. Torchwood -- Team + Lisa -- AU "Cyberwoman:" Unbeknownst to Torchwood, Ianto's been keeping Lisa in their basement and feeding her the brains of people killed in Torchwood missions. Then one day she escapes the basement.
Author's Note: My first stab (Pardon the pun) at writing zombie fiction; ended up a bit longer and crazier than I expected, and I had a different ending in mind (which I might post some other time as a director's cut edition).
"You always said that you never cared what I looked like," Lisa, or this Lisa in another body said, pleading. She went on to tell him something only she could do, about the time he had said that to her, about their camping trip gone hilariously wrong. That stopped Ianto in his tracks, stopped him from following through with the order and stopped him from bracing for the horror he had to enact. She spoke the truth: he had loved her for her mind and spirit, more than her body. Not that he found that part of her unattractive, quite the contrary, but that had taken second place.
He lowered his hand gun, looking from her face to the wreckage of what she had been, the half flesh, half metal and plastic and cybernetic corpse, now covered in blood lacking the back of the skull. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and now that her mind had left that body, perhaps she had escaped the moral dissonance at best that cyberization seemed to cause. Perhaps, in this form, she could be cured, but he did not want to entertain the implications of what had happened to the woman whose body she had taken as her own.
He took her by her arm, glancing behind him to make sure none of the others had returned. "Come with me, I'll have to hide you again, deeper in the sub-basement," he said.
"It worked before, but will it work again?" she asked, concerned.
"That's a risk we'll have to take," he said, leading her away, deep into the archives, where hardly anyone had gone in decades, places even Jack had likely forgotten about.
He lead her to a file room that had been filled back in the 1920s, containing floor to ceiling stacks of sealed boxes and locked cabinets, along with a table and a chair, which made the room perhaps half-habitable.
"Wish it could be closer to three stars, but it was the first place I could think of," he said, drawing up the chair for her. "Once I've given the others the all clear, I'll get you a cot and something to eat." Then with a glance to the crude surgical cut in her scalp, he added, "And some bandages and antiseptic."
"Don't worry about that for now: I'll be all right," she said, sitting down and looking up to him, before putting a reassuring hand on his. "Go to the others, do what you have to do. Tell them you took care of me: that won't be a lie."
"Won't be the whole truth neither," he noted, kneeling down to her level. "Shall I fetch Owen? He could help you. I could bring him around to see this... in a different light, I think."
She shook her head. "No, they have to think that I'm gone."
He nodded. "All right, I'll be back the first moment that I can get away."
"Don't be too long," she said. "I'm starting to feel hungry. It's... been a while since this body ate, I think."
"Great, a pizzeria delivery girl who hasn't eaten in a while. Good to know she was careful with her health," Ianto noted, shaking his head before leaning in to kiss her cheek, a parting touch before rising to return to where they had left the wreckage that she had inhabited.
* * * * *
Owen knelt over the remains of the cyborg, feeling for anything resembling vital signs or signs of functionality.
"Is it deactivated?" Jack asked, keeping a careful distance from the wrecked carcass.
"No heartbeat, no pulse," Owen said, draping his stethoscope around his neck as he rose to his feet. "No tell-tale beeps or blinking lights, either."
"Good." Jack eyed Ianto without turning his head. "I'll oversee the disposal, once you've stripped the unnecessary technology. The guy in Edinburgh should be able to melt them down and make sure they never trouble anyone again."
"That won't be necessary," Ianto said, too quickly.
Jack turned to face Ianto, his pale eyes gone cold. "Oh, you'll be doing the work. I'm going along to make sure it's done right and nothing comes back to come stomping around my house again."
"Dumping the rubbish into the bay? The environmental nutters won't like it," Owen quipped.
Ianto said nothing to this, a factor that twigged Jack's suspicions, but he knelt to gather up the broken body and carry it to the medical bay.
"Can't we give her a proper burial?" Ianto pleaded, as Owen set to work cutting the components free of the body.
"She was listed among the dead at Canary Wharf: her family has been through enough.
Owen glanced up at Ianto. "If it makes you feel any better, you could try sayin' a few prayers over her before consignin' her to them briny deeps?"
"Stop that," Ianto growled, but something didn't look right about his eyes, to Jack's observation. Something was up, but he could not yet put a finger on it.
Once Owen had removed the cybernetic components, locking them in a metal box with an electronic locking device, he then wrapped the body in a biodegradable bag. Ianto loaded the bag into a dinghy that they kept in one of the half-flooded access ports that ultimately lead out into the bay, tubes that had formerly guided Torchwood's Victorian-era immersible. With Jack in the bow keeping a grim eye on him, Ianto rowed out, bound for the dark waters.
With the lights of the harbor well behind them, the two slid the bundle over the gunwales, letting it slide into the water with a soft glub to indicate its progress to the bottom. Ianto remained strangely silent during the whole procedure, a silence that Jack hoped came only from the young man's anger.
* * * *
The next day passed with little incident, aside from a Weevil incursion that resulted in a few mangled civilians. Ianto, as always, prepared the dead for disposal, bringing them to an empty storeroom while he waited for nightfall.
He could not have predicted, however, what he found later, when he went to check on Lisa and bring her some food.
Lisa knelt on top of the table where he had laid out the body of a lorry driver, digging at the man's badly chewed shoulder with her fingers, pulling a chunk of meat from his chest.
"What are you doing?" he demanded, horrified.
She looked up at him, blood dripping from her mouth, as if she had been at work on the corpse for some time, her eyes pleading. "Ianto, I got so hungry, I couldn't help myself."
"Put that... flesh... down," he faltered, looking from her blood-covered face to the corpse.
"I had to eat something," she pleaded.
"I couldn't come down sooner, not without the others getting suspicious," Ianto said. "I'll get you something soon, just... don't do this again," he said.
She set down the gory clump. "You can't just leave me down here. I've been out of the sun too long."
"I know. I'm sorry, love, I just... I need to come up with a plan," he said. "To get you out of here and back to my place."
"You'd do that?" she asked, hopefully.
He nodded. "I'll think of something. But first, I need to get that body out of here."
"I'm sorry if I made a mess of it," she said, looking from the body to Ianto. "I don't know what came over me."
"It's all right: the blame is mine. I should have gotten you something sooner," he said. "I'll do right by you, I promise."
* * * *
The following morning, when Ianto arrived in the Hub, he found the rest of the team gathered about one of the monitors on Tosh's work station, watching a news report.
"Local police have no leads as to what caused the disturbance, or why the man was in the bay. But the body is believed to be that of Bryn Johnson, a lorry driver who vanished, following a recent attack by a rabid Rottweiler."
"So, someone got an explanation why we've got a one-man version of 'Night of the Living Dead' playing in Cardigan Bay?" Jack asked, arms folded on his chest.
"Weevils caught the rage virus?" Owen suggested.
"Space diseases come through the Rift?" Gwen offered.
"Perhaps, if something came through carrying a pathogen not found on earth," Toshiko added.
"Whichever it is, let's load up for zombies and move out," Jack said, heading for the armory. "Ianto, stay here and man the phones: tell them it is a simple case of rabies."
"Be sure to have yer boom-sticks ready," Owen said, following Jack.
This was going from bad to worse, Ianto thought. Once he was alone, that gave him the chance to bring more food and clean bandages down to Lisa.
He found her slumped back in her chair, last night's box of Thai takeaway set out on the tabletop, picked at but hardly eaten.
"Something wrong with it?" he asked, concerned.
"It won't go down properly." she said, shaking her head. "Has to be flesh, I don't know why."
Ianto smirked. "I suppose there's one way to dispose of the bodies."
She managed a wavering smile in reply. "I'd earn my keep that way."
"All right. I'll see if I can bring another one down soon. Knowing what goes on around here, you should have a fairly steady supply," he said. And if it came to that, they had a ready supply of bodies in the cold storage.
Sure enough, the team returned an hour later, bringing along the bodies of two dock workers, bitten by the zombie lorry driver.
"Classic zombies, if you ask me," Owen said, surveying the now headless bodies laid out on slabs in the morgue.
"Do we know of any disgruntled rogue Voudon practitioners in the area?" Jack asked, looking to Gwen.
"I meant classic in the cinematic sense," Owen said. "Haven't heard of a Voudon zombie passin' its mojo to another person, and they don't get chompy unless they've been ordered to."
"So where is this coming from?" Gwen asked.
"Space germs aren't out of the question," Jack said. "Could be something lurking at the bottom of the bay. Too bad we lost the immersible during the 1906 earthquake; that could have come in handy about now."
Ianto watched all this over the CCTV monitors. He would have to be careful and start cutting up Lisa's leftovers, to keep this from happening again.
He waited till nightfall to bring another body down to Lisa. Gwen and Owen had left the Hub together, while Tosh had gone with Jack to see a man on the bay about an immersible.
"I wish I could take you back home to my flat," Ianto said, as Lisa tucked into the second of the bodies. It bothered him that he had so quickly adapted to his lover's new, strange needs.
Lisa looked up from the hunk of meat in her hands, swallowing. "Won't people grow suspicious? What of your team?"
"They don't suspect anything just yet: they're distracted by some trouble in the harbor," he said. He could not yet bring himself to even entertain the thought that Lisa had any responsibility for the zombie incident, though the notion lurked in his mind.
"Be thankful for small mercies," Lisa said, with relief. "But if you could bring me out, how would you feed me?" she asked.
"I could always get a hearse on the cheap, sneak the bodies in through the rear door," he said, thinking ahead. "Might cut them up in pieces, make it easier to transport."
"I'm not certain that would work," she said, shaking her head. "It seems the meat has to be on the bones."
Well, that complicated the matter. "We'll work that out. Till then, seems you'll have to stay down here."
She put a comforting hand, albeit a bloody one, on his. "It's not so bad down here, and you're not far away."
It worried him that the surgical cut in her scalp barely showed signs of healing. But he could not bring himself to point this out to her, and so he changed the bandages as if she healed normally. He could not say what bothered him more, the obvious continued decay of her humanity or the team's search for answers to the zombie incursion.
* * * * *
The man with the immersible had agreed to loan the Torchwood team the use of his craft, on the condition that it returned to him intact.
"We scoured the entire seabed of the harbor," Jack reported at a debriefing that evening. "Nothing down there that looks like it could cause people to turn into zombies."
"No, we just found out that Jack has no sense of direction underwater," Owen piped up.
"So would anybody, and I was dodging boats overhead," Jack replied, grumpily.
"Unless common rubbish can cause a dead body to turn into a zombie," Gwen said, dubiously.
"Might happen if our dead lorry driver was a tree hugger," Owen said. Eying Gwen, he added, "Your man's in haulage: he ever mention any save-the-whales types in his line of work?"
"Rhys never mentioned any, and he'd be the first to get sarky about tree-huggers," Gwen replied, giving him a Look.
"So we've ruled out something in the water," Tosh said, bringing the debriefing back to the subject at hand. "What else does that leave us?"
Jack let out an exasperated sigh. "A whole lot of question marks. I say we chalk this one up to something that came through the Rift and call it closed till we find another possible lead."
Ianto, who had been listening in silence, felt his heart rate slow down to a reasonable pace. He'd have other reasons for his pulse to speed up again, if Lisa's food supply ran out.
* * * *
Which came within three days, once he had disposed of the last of the Weevil-chomped corpses. Aside from a box of alien tech that turned up at a flea market and turned out to be a bunch of broken hair driers from a rock off Rigel, as well as the odd Weevil sighting in Splott, nothing happened, much less something involving fatalities.
"Did you find anything for me?" Lisa asked, when Ianto came to her hiding place the evening of the fourth day, to change her bandages and to bring her an e-book reader to help her pass the time. She had told him before that she could pore over the files from the 1920s only for so long before she felt herself going cross-eyed.
"I'm afraid not, but I may have an idea," he said.
She sighed. "You keep saying that, and I've peeked under my bandages," she said, giving him a deadly serious look. "Ianto, what's happening to me? What am I becoming?"
He replied too quickly. "It doesn't matter," he argued, denying the inevitable. "You're still you, you're just... different."
"Have I changed too much?" she asked. "Will I stay like this forever? Your team will find out soon enough: what are you going to tell them when that happens?"
"I'll tell them that you weren't in your right mind when your cyberized mind put your brain into this body," he replied, evenly, surprised and even concerned by his own calm. "That you did this only because you couldn't bear to die that way, in that form."
She looked at him, her eyes narrowed, unconvinced. "I hope that will be enough for them."
He would have to find another way to keep her fed, he told himself as he returned to the surface. Even if it meant resorting to methods which he normally would not even consider. Perhaps he could find some derelict that he could lure down here.
* * * * *
Jack never slept deeply and even on the nights when he did sleep, he never slept for more than a few hours, usually in the darkest hours of the night. And never if the Weevils were restless, or he had found a hot date. But that night, he awoke out of a sound sleep, hearing footsteps overhead and a sudden loud clank.
"Okay, these people need to stop coming into my house and raiding the refrigerator," Jack growled, heaving himself off his bunk. Grabbing an electric torch and his sidearm from a shelf he mounted the ship's ladder to the hatch and heaved it open before hauling himself out.
Clicking on the torch and keeping the Webley leveled he panned the beam of light slowly along the catwalk. Nothing lurked in his office or in any of the other work spaces. Opening the door of the hothouse, he peered inside: the Rigellian passionflower had retracted its tendrils close to its main stem, but one tendril peeked up as if in greeting, and the man-eating plant from Clom had flared its petals, ready to strike.
Something clanked in the cold storage area. Jack turned on his heels and hurried to find the cause of the noise.
On arriving there, he found several of the drawers hauled open and empty, smears of blood stained the lips of the drawers and something had ripped off several of the doors. He panned the light around the chamber. More drawers yawned open, like graves in a 14th century danse macabre.
Something moaned behind him. Jack turned, the beam of his torch lighting the glassy eyes and slack faces of several human figures. Blood covered their clothes and a large bite showed on the shoulder or the neck of each figure.
"Wonderful, my own zombie flick, and I'm the star," Jack quipped, aiming for the forehead of the closest zombie and firing. A bullet hole opened in the figure's brow and the zombie collapsed on its face. The gunshot seemed to set the rest into a frenzy and the horde lumbered toward him. He fired, felling several, but more trampled over the fallen before them. He fired again, till the firing pin clacked on empty chambers. And more were coming.
"Gonna have to get creative," Jack said, turning the handgun to use it as a small truncheon....
* * * * *
Ianto knew something was wrong the moment he walked into the Hub the next morning: the metallic tang of blood and something else hovered in the air. Tosh, coming in behind him, nearly bumped into him. "Blood? Where's that coming from? Did the power go out in the cold storage?" she asked.
"Oi, I was askin' that meself," Owen called from the entryway, Gwen at his heels. "Someone forget to pay the utility bill?"
The reek of death under the scent of blood set Ianto's stomach churning and he rushed to the cold storage area.
The drawers stood open, some with their doors ripped off, some flung onto the floor, all empty, all bloodied. A slick of blood and God only knew what kind of fluid and gobbets of chewed flesh covered the tile floor.
"Bloody hell," Gwen exclaimed, staring at the mess. "What happened here?"
"Something you care to explain, Ianto?" Owen asked, arms folded on his chest, looking at Ianto, a dubious frown twisting his features.
"What makes you think that I had anything to do with this?" Ianto snapped back.
"You ran here to follow the scent," Tosh pointed out.
"Doesn't take much to put two and two together and come up with a logical answer," Gwen added, eying Ianto suspiciously. "And where's Jack?" she added, looking around.
"Over here," Jack's voice called from the medical bay, his cocky baritenor weaker than they had ever heard it. "What's left of me...."
Gwen bolted for the medical bay, Ianto on her heels, Owen and Tosh tailing them. A trail of blood and gunk leading the way, warning of more horrors to come.
They found the medical bay splattered with more blood and gobbets of flesh, half-gnawed corpses littering the floor. A blood-covered arm with a leather wrist-strap and a leg lay on the surgical slab, next to a bloodied bone saw. Jack sat propped in one corner, back against the wall, naked and covered from head to foot in blood. Clumsily wound bandages wrapped what remained of his right arm and left leg.
"Busy night fightin' the undead, Jack?" Owen asked, his pale face gone a shade of green and his lower jaw clenching a bit, his adam's apple bobbing several times in succession. Tosh turned her gaze away, breathing heavily.
"Had to empty the armory into their heads, but that didn't keep me off the bill of fare," Jack said, looking to the surgical slab.
"You're not... you're not going to bite us?" Gwen asked, her hand already gone for her sidearm.
Jack shook his head. "No, I read somewhere you can't get the zombie virus -- or some forms of it, anyway -- if you cut off the parts they've bitten. I'm lucky they only got two bits of me, but even that was no picnic in the park. I just came to from the blood loss." He looked to the crudely bandaged stumps. "Give me a day, they'll grow back."
Owen, Tosh and Gwen exchanged confused looks. Ianto could not tear his eyes from the bandaged remains of Jack's limbs.
"You got a bandage fetish, Ianto, or do you have something else to say about what woke me out of a sound sleep last night?" Jack asked, looking up at Ianto, looking him in the face, Jack's pale eyes gone so cold that they clearly brooked no argument or refusal to reply. "I know you've been going into the archives a bit more than usual lately. Care to explain what you've got hidden down there now?"
"I couldn't help myself: Lisa. She'd taken another body, sewn her brain into another girl's skull," Ianto blurted out. "I couldn't let her go, not after all that. I thought I could contain her, that I could keep her fed on the bodies you make me throw out, like so much garbage."
"So you ran out of food for her and she went nuts," Jack said, completing the story. "Where is she now?"
"I haven't seen anything that looks like her," Ianto replied. "Not in this mess."
"Go find her," Jack ordered. "Finish her off. A shot to the head or slicing off the head with a machete should do it. Owen, Gwen, go with him and make sure he puts an end to this. Tosh, a little help getting onto the slab and finding some clothes? Normally, I don't mind the naturist look, but not when I'm missing part of what nature gave me."
"You make me do this, I'm done here," Ianto snapped back.
"Fine. You've violated our trust in you one time too many," Jack snapped back.
"Jack --" Gwen started to say.
"Don't you start, Gwen. You saw what this thing caused. We can't keep something like this under wraps. What happens if she gets loose? You want a zombie plague on your hands?" Jack snapped.
Ianto turned and headed for the armory, finding a rifle and loading it. He heard Owen and Gwen's footsteps behind him, but he did not turn to look at them, not even as he made his way to the room in the archives where he had holed up Lisa.
He found her cowering in a corner, bathed in blood, arms wrapped about her knees, quivering. If she had the tears with which to cry, she would have been weeping, but her half-undead state had likely shut down that part of her. Ianto paused in the doorway, lowering his rifle.
If she looks up, I can't kill her, he thought.
Lisa stopped quivering and it was as if a switch had thrown in her head. She looked up only to lunge at him, her mouth open in a snarling moan, hands reaching for his throat. On reflex, he raised the rifle, and fired.
A blackish red hole opened in her cheek and she stumbled back. Gwen and Owen, now flanking Ianto, opened fire, peppering the ghoulish creature with bullets, sending her sprawling. Ianto stepped closer, aiming the rifle toward Lisa's forehead and fired, blowing the top of her skull off. Lisa's jaws snapped at the air once, uselessly, then her head rolled to one side and she lay still.
"Is it... is it over?" Gwen asked, dry-mouthed.
"Yes, it's over," Ianto said, lowering the rifle.
"No, I'd say it's just begun: the clean-up, that is," Owen said.
Author: matrixrefugee
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Lisa Hallett, Ianto Jones, Jack Harkness, Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato, Gwen Cooper
Length: 4,066
Rating: R
Spoilers: Alternate universe for "Cyberwoman", potential spoilers for the ep.
Warnings: Blood, people-munching, Jack Harkness-munching, character death (Lisa), angst
Prompt: 318. Torchwood -- Team + Lisa -- AU "Cyberwoman:" Unbeknownst to Torchwood, Ianto's been keeping Lisa in their basement and feeding her the brains of people killed in Torchwood missions. Then one day she escapes the basement.
Author's Note: My first stab (Pardon the pun) at writing zombie fiction; ended up a bit longer and crazier than I expected, and I had a different ending in mind (which I might post some other time as a director's cut edition).
"You always said that you never cared what I looked like," Lisa, or this Lisa in another body said, pleading. She went on to tell him something only she could do, about the time he had said that to her, about their camping trip gone hilariously wrong. That stopped Ianto in his tracks, stopped him from following through with the order and stopped him from bracing for the horror he had to enact. She spoke the truth: he had loved her for her mind and spirit, more than her body. Not that he found that part of her unattractive, quite the contrary, but that had taken second place.
He lowered his hand gun, looking from her face to the wreckage of what she had been, the half flesh, half metal and plastic and cybernetic corpse, now covered in blood lacking the back of the skull. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and now that her mind had left that body, perhaps she had escaped the moral dissonance at best that cyberization seemed to cause. Perhaps, in this form, she could be cured, but he did not want to entertain the implications of what had happened to the woman whose body she had taken as her own.
He took her by her arm, glancing behind him to make sure none of the others had returned. "Come with me, I'll have to hide you again, deeper in the sub-basement," he said.
"It worked before, but will it work again?" she asked, concerned.
"That's a risk we'll have to take," he said, leading her away, deep into the archives, where hardly anyone had gone in decades, places even Jack had likely forgotten about.
He lead her to a file room that had been filled back in the 1920s, containing floor to ceiling stacks of sealed boxes and locked cabinets, along with a table and a chair, which made the room perhaps half-habitable.
"Wish it could be closer to three stars, but it was the first place I could think of," he said, drawing up the chair for her. "Once I've given the others the all clear, I'll get you a cot and something to eat." Then with a glance to the crude surgical cut in her scalp, he added, "And some bandages and antiseptic."
"Don't worry about that for now: I'll be all right," she said, sitting down and looking up to him, before putting a reassuring hand on his. "Go to the others, do what you have to do. Tell them you took care of me: that won't be a lie."
"Won't be the whole truth neither," he noted, kneeling down to her level. "Shall I fetch Owen? He could help you. I could bring him around to see this... in a different light, I think."
She shook her head. "No, they have to think that I'm gone."
He nodded. "All right, I'll be back the first moment that I can get away."
"Don't be too long," she said. "I'm starting to feel hungry. It's... been a while since this body ate, I think."
"Great, a pizzeria delivery girl who hasn't eaten in a while. Good to know she was careful with her health," Ianto noted, shaking his head before leaning in to kiss her cheek, a parting touch before rising to return to where they had left the wreckage that she had inhabited.
* * * * *
Owen knelt over the remains of the cyborg, feeling for anything resembling vital signs or signs of functionality.
"Is it deactivated?" Jack asked, keeping a careful distance from the wrecked carcass.
"No heartbeat, no pulse," Owen said, draping his stethoscope around his neck as he rose to his feet. "No tell-tale beeps or blinking lights, either."
"Good." Jack eyed Ianto without turning his head. "I'll oversee the disposal, once you've stripped the unnecessary technology. The guy in Edinburgh should be able to melt them down and make sure they never trouble anyone again."
"That won't be necessary," Ianto said, too quickly.
Jack turned to face Ianto, his pale eyes gone cold. "Oh, you'll be doing the work. I'm going along to make sure it's done right and nothing comes back to come stomping around my house again."
"Dumping the rubbish into the bay? The environmental nutters won't like it," Owen quipped.
Ianto said nothing to this, a factor that twigged Jack's suspicions, but he knelt to gather up the broken body and carry it to the medical bay.
"Can't we give her a proper burial?" Ianto pleaded, as Owen set to work cutting the components free of the body.
"She was listed among the dead at Canary Wharf: her family has been through enough.
Owen glanced up at Ianto. "If it makes you feel any better, you could try sayin' a few prayers over her before consignin' her to them briny deeps?"
"Stop that," Ianto growled, but something didn't look right about his eyes, to Jack's observation. Something was up, but he could not yet put a finger on it.
Once Owen had removed the cybernetic components, locking them in a metal box with an electronic locking device, he then wrapped the body in a biodegradable bag. Ianto loaded the bag into a dinghy that they kept in one of the half-flooded access ports that ultimately lead out into the bay, tubes that had formerly guided Torchwood's Victorian-era immersible. With Jack in the bow keeping a grim eye on him, Ianto rowed out, bound for the dark waters.
With the lights of the harbor well behind them, the two slid the bundle over the gunwales, letting it slide into the water with a soft glub to indicate its progress to the bottom. Ianto remained strangely silent during the whole procedure, a silence that Jack hoped came only from the young man's anger.
* * * *
The next day passed with little incident, aside from a Weevil incursion that resulted in a few mangled civilians. Ianto, as always, prepared the dead for disposal, bringing them to an empty storeroom while he waited for nightfall.
He could not have predicted, however, what he found later, when he went to check on Lisa and bring her some food.
Lisa knelt on top of the table where he had laid out the body of a lorry driver, digging at the man's badly chewed shoulder with her fingers, pulling a chunk of meat from his chest.
"What are you doing?" he demanded, horrified.
She looked up at him, blood dripping from her mouth, as if she had been at work on the corpse for some time, her eyes pleading. "Ianto, I got so hungry, I couldn't help myself."
"Put that... flesh... down," he faltered, looking from her blood-covered face to the corpse.
"I had to eat something," she pleaded.
"I couldn't come down sooner, not without the others getting suspicious," Ianto said. "I'll get you something soon, just... don't do this again," he said.
She set down the gory clump. "You can't just leave me down here. I've been out of the sun too long."
"I know. I'm sorry, love, I just... I need to come up with a plan," he said. "To get you out of here and back to my place."
"You'd do that?" she asked, hopefully.
He nodded. "I'll think of something. But first, I need to get that body out of here."
"I'm sorry if I made a mess of it," she said, looking from the body to Ianto. "I don't know what came over me."
"It's all right: the blame is mine. I should have gotten you something sooner," he said. "I'll do right by you, I promise."
* * * *
The following morning, when Ianto arrived in the Hub, he found the rest of the team gathered about one of the monitors on Tosh's work station, watching a news report.
"Local police have no leads as to what caused the disturbance, or why the man was in the bay. But the body is believed to be that of Bryn Johnson, a lorry driver who vanished, following a recent attack by a rabid Rottweiler."
"So, someone got an explanation why we've got a one-man version of 'Night of the Living Dead' playing in Cardigan Bay?" Jack asked, arms folded on his chest.
"Weevils caught the rage virus?" Owen suggested.
"Space diseases come through the Rift?" Gwen offered.
"Perhaps, if something came through carrying a pathogen not found on earth," Toshiko added.
"Whichever it is, let's load up for zombies and move out," Jack said, heading for the armory. "Ianto, stay here and man the phones: tell them it is a simple case of rabies."
"Be sure to have yer boom-sticks ready," Owen said, following Jack.
This was going from bad to worse, Ianto thought. Once he was alone, that gave him the chance to bring more food and clean bandages down to Lisa.
He found her slumped back in her chair, last night's box of Thai takeaway set out on the tabletop, picked at but hardly eaten.
"Something wrong with it?" he asked, concerned.
"It won't go down properly." she said, shaking her head. "Has to be flesh, I don't know why."
Ianto smirked. "I suppose there's one way to dispose of the bodies."
She managed a wavering smile in reply. "I'd earn my keep that way."
"All right. I'll see if I can bring another one down soon. Knowing what goes on around here, you should have a fairly steady supply," he said. And if it came to that, they had a ready supply of bodies in the cold storage.
Sure enough, the team returned an hour later, bringing along the bodies of two dock workers, bitten by the zombie lorry driver.
"Classic zombies, if you ask me," Owen said, surveying the now headless bodies laid out on slabs in the morgue.
"Do we know of any disgruntled rogue Voudon practitioners in the area?" Jack asked, looking to Gwen.
"I meant classic in the cinematic sense," Owen said. "Haven't heard of a Voudon zombie passin' its mojo to another person, and they don't get chompy unless they've been ordered to."
"So where is this coming from?" Gwen asked.
"Space germs aren't out of the question," Jack said. "Could be something lurking at the bottom of the bay. Too bad we lost the immersible during the 1906 earthquake; that could have come in handy about now."
Ianto watched all this over the CCTV monitors. He would have to be careful and start cutting up Lisa's leftovers, to keep this from happening again.
He waited till nightfall to bring another body down to Lisa. Gwen and Owen had left the Hub together, while Tosh had gone with Jack to see a man on the bay about an immersible.
"I wish I could take you back home to my flat," Ianto said, as Lisa tucked into the second of the bodies. It bothered him that he had so quickly adapted to his lover's new, strange needs.
Lisa looked up from the hunk of meat in her hands, swallowing. "Won't people grow suspicious? What of your team?"
"They don't suspect anything just yet: they're distracted by some trouble in the harbor," he said. He could not yet bring himself to even entertain the thought that Lisa had any responsibility for the zombie incident, though the notion lurked in his mind.
"Be thankful for small mercies," Lisa said, with relief. "But if you could bring me out, how would you feed me?" she asked.
"I could always get a hearse on the cheap, sneak the bodies in through the rear door," he said, thinking ahead. "Might cut them up in pieces, make it easier to transport."
"I'm not certain that would work," she said, shaking her head. "It seems the meat has to be on the bones."
Well, that complicated the matter. "We'll work that out. Till then, seems you'll have to stay down here."
She put a comforting hand, albeit a bloody one, on his. "It's not so bad down here, and you're not far away."
It worried him that the surgical cut in her scalp barely showed signs of healing. But he could not bring himself to point this out to her, and so he changed the bandages as if she healed normally. He could not say what bothered him more, the obvious continued decay of her humanity or the team's search for answers to the zombie incursion.
* * * * *
The man with the immersible had agreed to loan the Torchwood team the use of his craft, on the condition that it returned to him intact.
"We scoured the entire seabed of the harbor," Jack reported at a debriefing that evening. "Nothing down there that looks like it could cause people to turn into zombies."
"No, we just found out that Jack has no sense of direction underwater," Owen piped up.
"So would anybody, and I was dodging boats overhead," Jack replied, grumpily.
"Unless common rubbish can cause a dead body to turn into a zombie," Gwen said, dubiously.
"Might happen if our dead lorry driver was a tree hugger," Owen said. Eying Gwen, he added, "Your man's in haulage: he ever mention any save-the-whales types in his line of work?"
"Rhys never mentioned any, and he'd be the first to get sarky about tree-huggers," Gwen replied, giving him a Look.
"So we've ruled out something in the water," Tosh said, bringing the debriefing back to the subject at hand. "What else does that leave us?"
Jack let out an exasperated sigh. "A whole lot of question marks. I say we chalk this one up to something that came through the Rift and call it closed till we find another possible lead."
Ianto, who had been listening in silence, felt his heart rate slow down to a reasonable pace. He'd have other reasons for his pulse to speed up again, if Lisa's food supply ran out.
* * * *
Which came within three days, once he had disposed of the last of the Weevil-chomped corpses. Aside from a box of alien tech that turned up at a flea market and turned out to be a bunch of broken hair driers from a rock off Rigel, as well as the odd Weevil sighting in Splott, nothing happened, much less something involving fatalities.
"Did you find anything for me?" Lisa asked, when Ianto came to her hiding place the evening of the fourth day, to change her bandages and to bring her an e-book reader to help her pass the time. She had told him before that she could pore over the files from the 1920s only for so long before she felt herself going cross-eyed.
"I'm afraid not, but I may have an idea," he said.
She sighed. "You keep saying that, and I've peeked under my bandages," she said, giving him a deadly serious look. "Ianto, what's happening to me? What am I becoming?"
He replied too quickly. "It doesn't matter," he argued, denying the inevitable. "You're still you, you're just... different."
"Have I changed too much?" she asked. "Will I stay like this forever? Your team will find out soon enough: what are you going to tell them when that happens?"
"I'll tell them that you weren't in your right mind when your cyberized mind put your brain into this body," he replied, evenly, surprised and even concerned by his own calm. "That you did this only because you couldn't bear to die that way, in that form."
She looked at him, her eyes narrowed, unconvinced. "I hope that will be enough for them."
He would have to find another way to keep her fed, he told himself as he returned to the surface. Even if it meant resorting to methods which he normally would not even consider. Perhaps he could find some derelict that he could lure down here.
* * * * *
Jack never slept deeply and even on the nights when he did sleep, he never slept for more than a few hours, usually in the darkest hours of the night. And never if the Weevils were restless, or he had found a hot date. But that night, he awoke out of a sound sleep, hearing footsteps overhead and a sudden loud clank.
"Okay, these people need to stop coming into my house and raiding the refrigerator," Jack growled, heaving himself off his bunk. Grabbing an electric torch and his sidearm from a shelf he mounted the ship's ladder to the hatch and heaved it open before hauling himself out.
Clicking on the torch and keeping the Webley leveled he panned the beam of light slowly along the catwalk. Nothing lurked in his office or in any of the other work spaces. Opening the door of the hothouse, he peered inside: the Rigellian passionflower had retracted its tendrils close to its main stem, but one tendril peeked up as if in greeting, and the man-eating plant from Clom had flared its petals, ready to strike.
Something clanked in the cold storage area. Jack turned on his heels and hurried to find the cause of the noise.
On arriving there, he found several of the drawers hauled open and empty, smears of blood stained the lips of the drawers and something had ripped off several of the doors. He panned the light around the chamber. More drawers yawned open, like graves in a 14th century danse macabre.
Something moaned behind him. Jack turned, the beam of his torch lighting the glassy eyes and slack faces of several human figures. Blood covered their clothes and a large bite showed on the shoulder or the neck of each figure.
"Wonderful, my own zombie flick, and I'm the star," Jack quipped, aiming for the forehead of the closest zombie and firing. A bullet hole opened in the figure's brow and the zombie collapsed on its face. The gunshot seemed to set the rest into a frenzy and the horde lumbered toward him. He fired, felling several, but more trampled over the fallen before them. He fired again, till the firing pin clacked on empty chambers. And more were coming.
"Gonna have to get creative," Jack said, turning the handgun to use it as a small truncheon....
* * * * *
Ianto knew something was wrong the moment he walked into the Hub the next morning: the metallic tang of blood and something else hovered in the air. Tosh, coming in behind him, nearly bumped into him. "Blood? Where's that coming from? Did the power go out in the cold storage?" she asked.
"Oi, I was askin' that meself," Owen called from the entryway, Gwen at his heels. "Someone forget to pay the utility bill?"
The reek of death under the scent of blood set Ianto's stomach churning and he rushed to the cold storage area.
The drawers stood open, some with their doors ripped off, some flung onto the floor, all empty, all bloodied. A slick of blood and God only knew what kind of fluid and gobbets of chewed flesh covered the tile floor.
"Bloody hell," Gwen exclaimed, staring at the mess. "What happened here?"
"Something you care to explain, Ianto?" Owen asked, arms folded on his chest, looking at Ianto, a dubious frown twisting his features.
"What makes you think that I had anything to do with this?" Ianto snapped back.
"You ran here to follow the scent," Tosh pointed out.
"Doesn't take much to put two and two together and come up with a logical answer," Gwen added, eying Ianto suspiciously. "And where's Jack?" she added, looking around.
"Over here," Jack's voice called from the medical bay, his cocky baritenor weaker than they had ever heard it. "What's left of me...."
Gwen bolted for the medical bay, Ianto on her heels, Owen and Tosh tailing them. A trail of blood and gunk leading the way, warning of more horrors to come.
They found the medical bay splattered with more blood and gobbets of flesh, half-gnawed corpses littering the floor. A blood-covered arm with a leather wrist-strap and a leg lay on the surgical slab, next to a bloodied bone saw. Jack sat propped in one corner, back against the wall, naked and covered from head to foot in blood. Clumsily wound bandages wrapped what remained of his right arm and left leg.
"Busy night fightin' the undead, Jack?" Owen asked, his pale face gone a shade of green and his lower jaw clenching a bit, his adam's apple bobbing several times in succession. Tosh turned her gaze away, breathing heavily.
"Had to empty the armory into their heads, but that didn't keep me off the bill of fare," Jack said, looking to the surgical slab.
"You're not... you're not going to bite us?" Gwen asked, her hand already gone for her sidearm.
Jack shook his head. "No, I read somewhere you can't get the zombie virus -- or some forms of it, anyway -- if you cut off the parts they've bitten. I'm lucky they only got two bits of me, but even that was no picnic in the park. I just came to from the blood loss." He looked to the crudely bandaged stumps. "Give me a day, they'll grow back."
Owen, Tosh and Gwen exchanged confused looks. Ianto could not tear his eyes from the bandaged remains of Jack's limbs.
"You got a bandage fetish, Ianto, or do you have something else to say about what woke me out of a sound sleep last night?" Jack asked, looking up at Ianto, looking him in the face, Jack's pale eyes gone so cold that they clearly brooked no argument or refusal to reply. "I know you've been going into the archives a bit more than usual lately. Care to explain what you've got hidden down there now?"
"I couldn't help myself: Lisa. She'd taken another body, sewn her brain into another girl's skull," Ianto blurted out. "I couldn't let her go, not after all that. I thought I could contain her, that I could keep her fed on the bodies you make me throw out, like so much garbage."
"So you ran out of food for her and she went nuts," Jack said, completing the story. "Where is she now?"
"I haven't seen anything that looks like her," Ianto replied. "Not in this mess."
"Go find her," Jack ordered. "Finish her off. A shot to the head or slicing off the head with a machete should do it. Owen, Gwen, go with him and make sure he puts an end to this. Tosh, a little help getting onto the slab and finding some clothes? Normally, I don't mind the naturist look, but not when I'm missing part of what nature gave me."
"You make me do this, I'm done here," Ianto snapped back.
"Fine. You've violated our trust in you one time too many," Jack snapped back.
"Jack --" Gwen started to say.
"Don't you start, Gwen. You saw what this thing caused. We can't keep something like this under wraps. What happens if she gets loose? You want a zombie plague on your hands?" Jack snapped.
Ianto turned and headed for the armory, finding a rifle and loading it. He heard Owen and Gwen's footsteps behind him, but he did not turn to look at them, not even as he made his way to the room in the archives where he had holed up Lisa.
He found her cowering in a corner, bathed in blood, arms wrapped about her knees, quivering. If she had the tears with which to cry, she would have been weeping, but her half-undead state had likely shut down that part of her. Ianto paused in the doorway, lowering his rifle.
If she looks up, I can't kill her, he thought.
Lisa stopped quivering and it was as if a switch had thrown in her head. She looked up only to lunge at him, her mouth open in a snarling moan, hands reaching for his throat. On reflex, he raised the rifle, and fired.
A blackish red hole opened in her cheek and she stumbled back. Gwen and Owen, now flanking Ianto, opened fire, peppering the ghoulish creature with bullets, sending her sprawling. Ianto stepped closer, aiming the rifle toward Lisa's forehead and fired, blowing the top of her skull off. Lisa's jaws snapped at the air once, uselessly, then her head rolled to one side and she lay still.
"Is it... is it over?" Gwen asked, dry-mouthed.
"Yes, it's over," Ianto said, lowering the rifle.
"No, I'd say it's just begun: the clean-up, that is," Owen said.