Border Princes

SEVEN

The alley beside the Mughal Dynasty smelled of exhaust fumes and cooked garlic on a Monday morning. The sky was spitting gobs of rain and, from outside the restaurant, Shiznay could hear the shouts of the delivery driver from the meat packers.

She was wearing a jogging suit, her hair tied back, and was lugging four tied-up sacks full of kitchen waste from the Sunday buffet (‘two for the price of one!’).

Shiznay opened the lid of the galvanised dumpster. She heard a scurrying, a settling, and braced herself for the rats that often popped up out of the slurry. Kamil ought to have been doing this drudge work, but Kamil had been out with his mates the previous night, and had greeted their mother’s calls with groans and rebukes. ‘Shiz, Shizzy, be my good daughter and take out the rubbish.’

And she was, always, a good daughter.

She threw the bags of rubbish into the dumpster, swinging from the waist. She heard a stirring, and looked for something to flip the lid shut without having to get too close.

The noise wasn’t a rat. It was coming from behind the dumpster.

Mr Dine unfolded himself and stood up in the light. He blinked at Shiznay.

She stared at him. ‘You,’ she said, ‘should go away.’

‘Shiznay,’ he said, focusing on her. ‘I… I’m sorry, I-’

‘You should go away, right now! You’re not welcome here!’

Mr Dine breathed in and exhaled slowly.

‘Were you… sleeping behind there?’ she asked. ‘Did you sleep there last night?’

He shrugged. ‘I crashed.’

She said nothing, just stared at him.

He looked back. ‘I wanted to come back, Shiznay. To apologise. Is your father all right? I have a horrible feeling I might have hurt him the other day.’

‘He’s fine. But he doesn’t want to see you around here any more.’

Dine nodded, understanding. ‘Of course. I can appreciate why he feels that way.’ He took something out of his jacket and held it out to her. ‘I left without payment transaction. I wanted to repair that error. I trust this will be adequate.’

‘I don’t want any trouble. Just go. Go.’

‘Please take this, Shiznay, and give it to your father, with my solemn apologies.’

He stank. He’d been sleeping in the dumpster, by the smell of it. Reluctantly, she put out her hands, expecting a few crumpled notes.

He put rocks in her hands instead. Grit, more like. She looked down. ‘What is…?’

Diamonds. Eighteen rough-cut diamonds. Or specks of broken glass, but she was somehow sure they were actual diamonds.

‘Who the hell are you?’ she asked.

‘A customer.’

‘I can’t take these.’

‘Why not? Surely they sufficiently reimburse your restaurant for the meal I ran out on?’

‘I don’t know where you got them from. Are they dodgy?’

‘Dodgy?’

‘You know, shonky?’

‘You have used two words I don’t know.’

‘Dodgy? Shonky? How the hell do you not know words like that?’

‘I’m not from around here.’

‘That much is certain. Where the hell did you get a handful of diamonds? You pick them up off the street, did you?’

He looked blank for a moment. ‘I found them in the waste unit.’

‘Right.’

‘A pencil. A broken pencil. Just a stub. One of yours I think. The kind you write down orders with, certainly. It was simply a matter of graphite compression.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing illegal was done. I performed the compression manually.’

‘You what?’

‘It was a simple action.’

Shiznay stared at him. ‘Were you sleeping there all night?’

Mr Dine smiled. ‘From time to time, I am suddenly alerted to action. I usually have little warning, and the priority takes over. I am invested. I can’t argue with it. The calorific cost of alert is huge. I expend at a high level, and then crash rapidly. It usually turns out to be a false alarm.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘I know. Please accept the payment. And please pass on my abject apologies to your father. My intention was not to hurt him. Alert protocols had taken over. The Principal appeared to be in danger. I have no choice but to act when that happens.’

‘Mr Dine, I-’

‘One last thing, Shiznay. Close your eyes.’

She closed her eyes, and heard a slight, whooshing sound. When she opened her eyes again, he had vanished. Which was, of course, impossible, given the geography of the alley.

Unless he had gone…

Shiznay Uhma looked up at the sky, into the sporadic rain.

‘Come back when you want,’ she said.

A fine Edwardian house on a quiet residential street in Pontcanna. A black SUV, the automotive equivalent of mirror shades, sitting outside under the council-tended elms.

This was not amateur. Gwen was quietly delighted at that part. Not so overjoyed about the mucus.

The Droon were migratory, and sometimes came to Cardiff the way that these things did. According to conversations, operational post-mortems, Torchwood had dealt with the Droon eleven times since Jack had taken charge. Three of those occasions had been since Gwen had joined the team. They’d had practice.

Mr and Mrs Peeters lived in that fine Edwardian house on that quiet residential road. They’d lived there for twenty-six years. Mr Peeters was a retired history teacher, and his wife still taught piano privately. The Droon lived inside Mr and Mrs Peeters. They’d lived there for eight months.

James and Toshiko had gone around the back of the house. Gwen and Jack had approached the front door. Owen watched the side gate by the neatly maintained garage. They had brought the essential kit: audio paddles, tongs, Loctite baggies, pac-a-macs, surgical gloves, wet-wipes, tight-res scanners and carpet cleaner.

The thing with the Droon was that they were generally harmless. On arrival, they took up residence somewhere warm and moist, like a sinus passage, and stayed there, in a kind of contented fugue state. The worst harm they ever did was to trigger mild, cold-like symptoms.

Unless they hatched.

Mostly, they went away again without hatching after a few months. Just went away, or simply died and were ejected, into a Kleenex or during a sneeze, without their place of residence ever knowing about it. It was unnecessarily difficult and risky to try to remove them in their fugue state: better by far, for the health of the host, to allow them go to away of their own accord.

But, one time in ten, they pupated and advanced to the next phase of their haphazard, incomprehensible life cycle. That one time in ten required swift reaction. Fighter Command.

Sudden elevations in alpha-wave patterns were a reliable overture to hatching. As soon as the Peeters had been identified as Droon carriers, Toshiko and Owen had snuck into their house one afternoon and wired it with pattern monitors.

‘Spike’s increasing,’ Owen said, checking his compact scanner. His Bluetooth carried his words to the others.

Jack rang the bell.

Mrs Peeters was a nice, elderly lady with a terrible head-cold. She squinted at Jack and Gwen with swollen, half-shut eyes.

‘We’re from the Gas Board,’ said Jack, igniting a toothy smile.

That didn’t seem especially credible to Mrs Peeters. A pretty girl in a black bomber jacket and a matinee idol in a greatcoat, both of them wearing clear plastic pac-a-macs over the top of their outer clothes. Sniffing and rubbing her nose on a hankie, she asked to see some proper ID.

With a simple, deft gesture, Jack showed her an audio paddle instead. By the time Mrs Peeters had realised the thing in his hand wasn’t a laminated ID, the paddle — a matt-black plastic instrument the size and shape of a flattened salad server — was pressed against her forehead and Jack had thumbed the small, red ‘on’ switch.

Mrs Peeters took it rather well, all things considered. She let out a sharp moan, staggered backwards with her fingers pressed to her temples, and pressurised slime cannoned out of her violated nostrils.

‘Catch her,’ Jack advised.

Gwen was already doing so. She secured Mrs Peeters’ falling form around the shoulders, dragged her quickly and gently into the hall, and lowered her onto the hall runner. Jack stepped inside behind them, and closed the front door.

Mrs Peeters was effectively unconscious, but her body bucked and rocked with involuntary coughs and throaty choking noises. An impressively noxious quantity of viscous yellow mucus was flowing from her mouth and nose.

‘Recovery position,’ said Jack. ‘Keep her airway clear.’

‘Doing it,’ Gwen replied. She had rolled Mrs Peeters onto her side, and reached her fingers into the lady’s spluttering mouth, pulling out globules of mucal matter. Thank God for surgical gloves. And pac-a-macs. The blast pattern of Mrs Peeters’ first sneeze covered the front of Jack’s plastic slicker like glue.

‘Give her another go,’ Gwen said.

Jack bent down and administered the paddle to Mrs Peeters’ head again. As they hatched, the Droon were especially vulnerable to infrasonic bursts.

Mrs Peeters began to rack and cough more violently. A much more considerable flood of mucus began to pour out of her head, thick and soft like sugar icing.

‘Oh, that’s nasty,’ said Gwen, hard at work.

A voice called out from somewhere. A man’s voice, calling his wife’s name between phlegmy coughs.

‘Tosh?’ Jack advised over his headset.

At the back of the house, in a dew-damp garden of mature apple trees and hydrangeas, Toshiko and James started to move. James had already popped the catch on the French windows.

The back room was a sitting room, with a handsome baby grand and antimacassars over the chair backs. An aspidistra stood on a jardinière beside a rack of sheet music. A number of school photographs hung on the walls; tiers of uniformed kids staring at the camera in landscape format.

James and Toshiko went out into the hallway. The voice floated down from upstairs. ‘Viv? Who is it? Who’s that at the door?’

Back down the hall, by the front door, Jack and Gwen were dealing with Mrs Peeters. The poor woman was emitting wet, splattery sneezes and gurgles.

Without waiting for further instruction, James and Toshiko went up stairs.

‘Whoo! Really spiking now!’ Owen warned over the link.

‘Understood,’ replied James. An upper landing, with a blanket box and some framed watercolours and mezzotints of Snowdonia. A rattling, fluid cough coming from a nearby bedroom.

Mr Peeters had taken to his bed the day before. The room smelled of menthol and cough linctus. There were two boxes of tissues beside the rumpled bed. Mr Peeters had made it to the doorway, unsteady and flushed. He was wearing flannelette pyjamas and a worried expression.

‘Who…?’ he began to say.

‘Health visitors,’ said Toshiko smoothly. ‘Your wife called us.’

‘Just sit back down on the bed, Mr Peeters,’ said James, ‘you ought not to be walking around.’

Mr Peeters was too poorly to argue. He allowed himself to be manoeuvred back onto the bed. He was still confused, flu-stupid. He sneezed, and snot hung from his left nostril like an icicle.

Toshiko helped him wipe with a tissue.

‘Why are you wearing plastic macs?’ the elderly man asked.

‘It’s raining,’ said Toshiko.

‘Just going to take your temperature, Mr Peeters,’ said James, producing an audio paddle.

‘There we go,’ said Jack. Gwen had already spotted it in the pooling mucus. A wriggling blob, pale blue and sickly, about the size of a cockroach. Jack fished in with the stainless steel tongs, grabbed the blob out of the jellied goo and bagged it.

‘Watch closely,’ said Jack, ‘there may be more than one.’

‘What’s the maximum you’ve ever seen?’ asked Gwen.

‘Six,’ said Jack.

‘From one nose?’

‘Unlikely as it seems.’

‘There’s another!’ Gwen announced, with distaste.

This blob was more active, its blue casing slightly ruptured to reveal something sharper and blacker inside. It wriggled away across the parquet flooring.

There was no time for finesse with the tongs. Jack grabbed it with his gloved hands and shook it off his fingers into another baggie. He held the baggie up to the light and shook it, studying the tiny, grotesque thing wiggling inside.

‘Just in time,’ Jack said. ‘That one had almost shed.’

Mrs Peeters had gone into a paroxysm of gagging coughs. The matter flowing out of her mouth and nose was thinner suddenly. Watery snot streaked with blood. The pool on the floor widened.

‘Any more?’ Gwen asked.

Jack scanned the woman. ‘No,’ he said, but he gave Mrs Peeters a third blast with the paddle to make sure. ‘Her body is just voiding now,’ Jack said. ‘Cleaning out the nest. Go put the kettle on.’

Toshiko extracted the third organism from Mr Peeters’ phlegm-stoppered mouth and cleared his airway. She’d had to take the old man’s false teeth out. The thing clamped in the jaws of her tongs was almost all the way out of its pale blue casing. It had begun to unfold. Black, barbed, needle limbs the length and thickness of pencils quivered as they filled with ichor and began to inflate.

‘Yuck,’ she said.

‘Kill it,’ said James. ‘It’s too well formed to just bag.’

With a grimace, Toshiko dropped the emerging thing into a bag, put the bag on the corner of the bedside cabinet and flattened it with a sharp blow from a hardback Wilbur Smith.

‘I think he’s clear,’ said Jack. He had Mr Peeters’ limp form rolled forward and well supported, so that the muck drooling out of him could pour onto the bedroom carpet. There was a lot of it, like wallpaper paste stained with brown sauce.

Toshiko scanned the unfortunate ex-history teacher.

‘We’re there. He’s clean.’

Owen paced on the path beside the garage. Birds twittered obliviously in the wet trees above.

‘Come on,’ he called. ‘Are we done yet?’

‘Owen?’ Jack replied, after a pause.

‘Yeah.’

‘Get the carpet cleaner and the scrub-packs from the SUV.’

‘How does that end up being my job?’ Owen complained.

They put the couple to bed, and wiped the place down. Owen grumbled as he went to work with the mop.

‘This is disgusting,’ he said.

‘You should have been here earlier,’ Gwen said. She’d made the rehydrating drinks as per Jack’s recipe: salts, glucose, antibiotics, warm water, plus a subtle cocktail of drugs that wiped short-term memory. Gwen wasn’t fond of using those.

‘You want me to strip out the pattern monitors?’ James asked.

‘We’ll come back in a week and do that,’ said Jack. ‘Better keep them under watch for a few days more.’

They bagged up the soiled macs and gloves and disposable towels in waste sacks, and locked up after them.

Later, when Mr and Mrs Peeters woke, tucked up in bed, they were both feeling very much better.

As the team got into the SUV, Gwen’s cellphone rang. She checked the display. RHYS.

She pressed ‘reject call’.