Exodus Code (17 page)

On day three, the ‘masochistic madness’, as a blogger had label ed it, was being reported international y; the numbers of women experiencing symptoms of violent mental breakdowns were being registered in six or seven secluded regions across the world. From the highlands of Scotland to the island of Rakiura off the southern tip of New Zealand, women living continents apart were committing random acts of violence towards themselves, their families, their neighbours and their communities.

Thousands of women worldwide had descended into a kind of madness that even the most highly trained psychiatrists and experienced neurologists were having difficulty diagnosing. The only thing the medical community knew with any certainty was that this increase in mental il ness involved a breakdown of each woman’s physical senses, a mangling of what she was feeling, seeing, smel ing, and even tasting.

Jack made a few more notes, sent a couple more emails, and made a secure phone cal . While Gwen was stil in the psychiatric ward, Jack had settled into relative domesticity with Mary, Rhys and Anwen. He knew it couldn’t last, but as long as he was trying to make sense of what had happened to Gwen and these other women, Wales was as good a place as any from which to investigate the phenomenon.

Mary had taken Anwen for a walk in town. The house was quiet. Jack scanned the reports he’d hacked into from the World Health Organization, which had become a clearing house of data from the various medical communities dealing with these afflicted women.

According to the recent reports, no two women reacted the same way when the madness descended upon them: some col apsed from an overwhelming sense of smel ; others felt as if the volume in their surroundings had been cranked too high; a few tasted emotions so strongly they were physical y il ; even more reported that they hal ucinated realities they could never have experienced and heard imagined music and disembodied voices.

After three hours of reading, Jack closed the laptop, got up from the table and, lifting his coat and binoculars from behind the kitchen door, went out to stretch his legs and to think. Outside, he could smel the coming rain… and something else – wood smoke, sulphur and the stink of hot tar. It was mid-afternoon on a cold, dreary Wednesday. He was alone in the street.

He could sense a strange tang in the air. The vaguely ruddy scent of blood and rust drifted towards him, leading him south, towards the seafront. By the time he reached the Marina, the rain was fal ing in heavy, lashing drops and the smel was stronger, as pungent as perfume. It felt ominous. He turned up his col ar and hooked his binoculars over his shoulder. While he walked, he became aware of the silence around him. He could hear the rush of the sea, the rain dripping from his upturned coat col ar down onto his neck, but that was al .

Jack lifted his binoculars to the horizon, scanning the five or six miles of beach to his right. He held his gaze for one, two, three beats, and then he shifted his focus to the Maritime Quarter behind him.

No cormorants. No sandpipers. No gul s. No magpies. No birds of any species anywhere. Jack was not a suspicious man, but he couldn’t help thinking that this was not a good sign.

As Jack was walking across the soft sand, he felt the beach shift beneath him, throwing him off-balance. He recovered his footing and turned back the way he had come, the tremor worsening.

Suddenly, car sirens blasted from the street beyond the promenade, and he saw a smal explosion from a passing car, an exhaust pipe popping. As the ground shook, the car shot off the road, somehow soaring over the low promenade wal , diving nose-first into the sand below.

The tremor stopped. But Jack was stil reeling, his nostrils ful of the stench of burning tyres and hot macadam. He took a couple of strides towards the car, knowing he should help, but the smel clogged his sinuses, and he retched, unable to clear it. He staggered back, breaking into a run, the smel clashing with a nightmarishly amplified ringing of alarms. For Jack Harkness, a man who had leapt into burning buildings and in front of alien war machines, it was al suddenly too much.

Jack ran away.

*

Breathless, bewildered and furious with himself, Jack took off his boots and hung his coat to dry in the kitchen. He put the kettle on, then went to the bathroom and found a towel to dry his hair, which was longer than it had ever been. For some reason, he had very little desire to cut it. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, aware, again, of that peripheral vision of yel ow dots.

As he stared into the mirror, the dots slowly moved front and centre and began to coalesce. The face of a young woman appeared, floating in front of his own. She had black eyes and thick dark hair flooding over her shoulders.

Jack pressed his hand on the mirror, touching her image. He breathed out slowly.

What the hel was that?

Who the hel was that?

MINUTES LATER, JACK stood in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil and staring at a hurried drawing he’d made of the woman’s image.

He had no idea who she was. Not a clue. This ignorance, this lack of knowing, this gap in his understanding was as unsettling to Jack as any of the extraordinary and alien experiences he’d ever had. She’d felt real to him, not a hal ucination. Setting the pad down on the table, he stared out into the eerily empty street, watching two local constables cycling down the road, presumably checking for casualties from the minor quake.

Flipping open his laptop, Jack checked the weather channel. The earthquake had been recorded at 3.4 on the Richter scale. BBC Wales was reporting most of the damage had been to the sea ports and vil ages on the south-eastern coast.

Jack noted the data scrol ing across his computer and the pages and pages of information about the deranged women spread out across the table. He sighed, lamenting how much he missed his team, missed Owen and Tosh, missed the Hub and its battery of computers.

The kettle whistled on the counter behind him. He didn’t move, letting it build up its steam, missing Ianto most of al .

‘I hate doing this shit by myself.’

Coffee in hand, Jack sat down and carried on.

So far, Jack had found nothing of significance, other than the fact that the affected were al women. He was certain this was a critical point, but stil couldn’t see an angle to pursue that might suggest a solution to diminish or stop the outbreaks, never mind understanding the cause.

Jack sat back in the kitchen chair, sipping his coffee. Ianto would have brought him a biscuit or two.

In his head, Jack flipped through the files of the local women who’d been affected at the same time as Gwen. These women were a good sample of al those who’d been struck. If he could understand the cause – because there was a cause, he thought. This was not random. This was not some kind of mass female hysteria. Jack had lived through far too much to believe for one second there wasn’t something or someone behind what was happening.

It wasn’t until day five that Jack witnessed something that was the breakthrough for which he’d been searching, the understanding that might help him bring Gwen home.

*

Jack was stretched across the couch in the living room reading to Anwen.

Rhys had gone to fetch Mary from the hospital and bring her home for tea.

Gwen and the other women remained sedated and mostly incoherent, their families taking turns sitting watch al day at their bedsides, vigils that were occurring al over the world where clusters of women had been afflicted.

‘No,’ said Anwen as Jack opened the colourful new alphabet book he’d bought for her. She turned to the bright red apple on the first page with a speckled worm crawling through its core carrying a bag of books.

‘A is for Apple,’ said Jack.

‘No,’ said Anwen, slapping the picture of the apple.

‘Oh, I’m pretty sure that A is for Apple,’ laughed Jack, ‘at least in this universe.’

Anwen grabbed the book from Jack and began to flip through the pages until she reached L where there was a picture of a large luscious lemon with striped straws sticking out al over it. She poked her finger at the lemon and said, ‘Apple.’

No matter how insistent Jack was, Anwen was unyielding.

He carried her into the kitchen and showed her the fruit bowl. ‘Anwen, show Uncle Jack the apple.’

He held her forward and she picked up the only apple left in the bowl. He peeled it and cut it into slices, and they shared the snack, while he thought things through.

Later at dinner, he told Rhys and Mary what had happened.

‘She recognises the shapes,’ he told them. ‘So what was confusing her? Do you think she might be colour blind?’

Mary was clearing the table, stacking the dishes in the sink. ‘I don’t think she is. She has no problem pointing out colours in her rainbow book.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Jack, fil ing the sink with water and suds to wash the dishes. ‘No worries. Maybe she was just mixed up.’

When the house was quiet and everyone asleep, Jack tiptoed downstairs and sat at the dining room table. In the pale moonlight beaming through the windows, he sorted al the information he had gathered, including the image of the women in the mirror, into a narrative of sorts.

By the time the sun came up, Jack believed he had hit on something, and it unsettled him.

THE SECURITY GUARD on duty outside the locked ward had been eyeing Jack suspiciously since coming on duty at the shift change. He instinctively deferred to a senior officer, but this man’s uniform looked oddly old-fashioned – as if he’d stepped out of a vintage comic book. ‘You’re the kind of man me mam warned me of,’ the guard muttered to himself.

Now the man was violating the locked ward’s protocols. Looked like he was going to break into the ward with al those nutty women. Before the guard could cal for assistance, Jack returned to the desk and handed over his belongings, including his coat, a leather wrist-strap, his passport, and his phone al of which the guard looked at quizzical y before dropping into a Ziploc bag. Once Jack had signed the visitors’ log, the guard buzzed him into the ward.

‘Keep your voice low, your head high and your hands where I can see them at al times. D’ya hear?’

Jack saluted. ‘Loud and clear.’

Pausing at the door, Jack was overwhelmed with the sharp pine scent of antiseptic, the metal ic odour of blood, the heavy breathing and the quiet moaning of the patients invading his senses at once. His fingertips began tingling. He stared down at his hands. He opened and closed his fists, but this served only to spread the stinging to his knuckles where he felt a dul throb.

When he looked up, three fiery interlocking red rings shimmered before his eyes. Jack stared over at Gwen quietly moaning in bed below a high barred window. The rings were identical to the image she’d carved on her arm. Jack exhaled slowly. The rings floated in front of his field of vision, bouncing like an animated 3D image on an invisible screen inches from his face. He glanced from Gwen to each of the other women in the ward. The rings fol owed his line of sight.

Jack took a deep breath, reaching his hand up to touch one of them. The image danced in front of his hand. No matter what Jack did, the rings remained between him and whatever he was looking at.

‘Oi. What’s going on in there?’ asked the guard, his voice crackling through the intercom.

Jack turned and waved at the guard. The rings disappeared.

Jack raked his hands through his hair, knowing that he had been lying to himself and he had been for weeks. Exhaustion, loneliness, blood-letting, the effects of nearly dying, al those were the lies he’d been using as excuses for this deepening emotional fragility he was experiencing, for it was a wave of fear, a tug of intensity and a strange email that had brought him back to Wales in time to stop Gwen hurting her family.

Jack couldn’t explain how his need to help her had been triggered by a scent on a distant world, the smel lingering from a dream he’d had or a memory that was seeping back into his consciousness from an age ago. Jack knew he could no longer ignore the rock-hard bad feeling lodged in his gut that something troubling was happening on Earth, and that Gwen and al these mad women were somehow part of it.

The only other visitor in the psychiatric ward was a stocky man in his thirties, leaning over the woman with one side of her face bandaged. He was gently brushing a section of his wife’s hair, an act so intimate and tender that Jack averted his eyes for a beat, but the man caught Jack’s stare.

‘At night when we watch the tel y,’ he said, his voice heavy with sadness, ‘I always give ’er hair a brush, like. She says it makes her ’ave good dreams.

Don’t know what else to do to make her be stil .’ Every few beats his wife would jump, her arms and legs spasming against the blankets.

‘Name’s Phil Newman,’ he said when the spasm subsided. ‘This is my wife, Lizzie… Elizabeth.’

‘My sister,’ Jack said, nodding towards Gwen, who was mumbling in her partial y conscious state, and stil fighting against her restraints. ‘I’m hoping the sedative settles her soon. I’m afraid I don’t have her hairbrush with me.’