Torchwood First Born (15 page)

I nodded. I loved her. I think I did. Or at least I knew that telling her this made her happy.

'You are beautiful and amazing,' I told her.

She smiled, and rubbed my hair. 'Oh, Sebastian,'

she sighed, 'I love you very much.'

She hugged me and I noticed that she had lost weight.

I got a new mother. Her name was Eloise.

Eloise was nice. But Eloise was not very happy.

She received a lot of emails that made her cross and angry.

'Is there anything I can do?' I asked her.

She looked at me. Hard.

'No,' she said. T don't think there is. Sorry, Sebastian. But thanks for trying.'

Rhys

Oh god.

I got back to the caravan and it was empty. No Jenny. No Anwen.

I spent a couple of seconds thinking nice normal don't-panic thoughts. Like the two of them were down the toilet block, maybe. Well, actually I ran there. No sign of them.

I looked around at the desolate caravan park. No pram. The pram had gone. No bloody pram marks.

Maybe she was just taking the baby for a walk. At night. In the rain.

I pulled my mobile out. Force of habit. There was hardly ever a signal here. Occasionally you'd get the ghost of a single bar. Not this time - it was useless.

I needed Gwen. I needed to find our baby. I felt sick. I stood around the caravan, trying not to panic.

But I
was
panicking. I decided that there are a couple of things in this world that you are allowed to panic about. One of them is when your baby goes missing.

When I was young, my mum was always losing me in shopping centres. No matter how many times she'd say 'stay there, by the stairs,' I'd always wander off. This was because shopping was dull, even then, and it was always much more fun to hide in the racks of clothes pretending they were a tepee. You're a selfish bugger when you're young, and if you're stood around in the Ladies section of M&S there's nothing to do. So of course you wander a bit. You'll get back there in the end.

The trouble I got in. The fury from my mother.

Oh, she'd shout at me, clap me round the back of the neck, and order me never to do it again. But I would.

Because shopping was boring. I once got so lost I got tannoyed. I was dead proud of that, but my mother was furious and ashamed. 'Never do that again,' she said, and burst into tears when we were back in the Chrysler.

I never really understood what the problem was.

Until one day when I stood at home having lost my baby. Up until that moment I had known where my child was every second of every day. And now I didn't.

I ran up and down the lane. It wasn't exactly a coordinated search. It was more like panicky oh please god, oh please wandering. I wasn't coping well. I tried a few deep breaths, I tried taking stock, I tried making a bloody list, but none of it worked.

My baby was missing and I felt too sick to think straight.

That's the odd thing about having a baby. Up until the birth, you know, I was... well, I was kind of mentally prepared and everything. I was pleased we were having a kid. I wanted to be a Good Dad. But that was it... you know, pleased as punch and dead proud... but no actual FEELINGS for it.

But as soon as the baby was born, as soon as I heard her crying and knew that Gwen was OK, as soon as I saw her... she upgraded my brain. Rhys 2.0. My mind was reprogrammed. Both Gwen and I were suddenly slaves to our dear little parasite.

We were putty in her tiny hands. We put up with the sleep deprivation, the boredom and the endless reams of grubby demands. Because Anwen was ours.

And we would do anything for her, because she was the most important thing in the world. Our puny dictator. Our world.

But then, just for a moment, we took our eyes off her. It would, of course, have to be because of that bloody alien stuff. The life we thought we'd left behind. Gwen's life.

Just for an instant, I flared up with rage. Somehow this was Gwen's fault.

But it wasn't.

With the loss of Anwen, everything about me crumbled. I went from being Rhys Williams, proud dad and loving husband, to just a very scared, pathetic man sobbing in an empty country lane in the rain. When you are an adult, you spend a lot of time pretending to be a grown up. You're not really.

Everyone is still about 14. You just pretend you're not. You drink beer, you talk about sex, you swear, you buy a house, you have kids, you get a job... you do everything you can to prove how grown up and adult and important you are. But really, really, you're not.

You've no bloody idea how to live your life. You're just doing what everyone else does in the hopes that you're somehow doing it right. Shoring yourself up against the real world. The world that was cruel and terrible and took everything away.

But here I was and I knew I was doing it all wrong.

Eloise

Things got interesting at that point.

Gwen Williams... Oh, she was tired, almost exhausted. If I'd been her doctor, I'd have sent her straight home to bed. But she was still pressing on.

Yet underneath all of the bags and the puffy cheeks, her eyes were wide alert and intelligent.

You know something about stuff like this, I thought. You do. You're quite alert, lady.

She seemed unfazed about Sebastian's true nature. Intrigued. Not in an 'oooh blimey' way, more as though she'd put together a mental list of quite tough questions.

'So, how long have you two been in the village?' she asked. Question Number One. She'll know that we'll both give different answers. She listens as Sebastian says that he arrived in 1991. Quite innocent. Quite candid.

'After the children stopped being born?'

'Oh yes.'

'Right.' Question Number Two was brewing, somewhere. You could tell it was ticking away.

Gently. Gently.

'Would you like a cup of tea?' asked Sebastian. 'Or coffee?' His unconcern about Billy lying in front of him... even I found it a bit chilling.

'What's going to happen to Sasha?' asked Gwen.

Ah, there it was.

Sebastian responded to this blankly, confused.

'Well, I would hope that... the authorities would want to...'

Gwen snorted. 'PC Wandering Hands? No chance.

Poor cow. That woman is messed up. She needs proper help.'

'No, I quite agree, Mrs Williams,' I covered quickly.

'Sasha could have harmed her child very badly.'

Wrong thing to say. 'And her not being able to have her own child... might not have had something to do with it?' She looked at me. Full beam.

I rose up, aggressively firm. I was angry, angry with myself because I suspected that somehow...

somehow we
were
to blame. 'No, no, no. It's a separate issue. And a lot of the parents have taken to their children very well. Overall the project is a success.'

'But why?' demanded Gwen. 'Why do it at all?'

She glanced at Sebastian. 'I mean, no offence, but there's no need to have done this... unless... I mean, what's the real reason?'

'I don't know what you mean,' I said.

'Yeah,' snorted Gwen. 'But what about you, Sebastian? Why were you born? The children themselves don't know. What about you?'

'I don't know. But initially... I think the people who created me wanted me to be a soldier.'

Cat. Out. Of. The. Bag. Jeez.

Gwen boggled. Worried. 'What? I'm sorry, what?'

'Oh, that was the original nature of the experiment.' I tried to flap this away, but I felt a worried sense in my guts. Real worry.

There was no stopping Sebastian now, though.

'Oh yes. They discovered the tree, and saw in it a seed bank. It is how my race visits other planets -

a seed bank lands and learns all it can about the environment before germinating a seed, growing a creature that can survive on the planet that it has landed on.'

'So you don't really look like this?'

Sebastian looked puzzled. 'I... I do. But my own species has no form of its own. We spread through the universe like... dandelions on the breeze.'

'Yeah.' Gwen looked sceptical. 'Dandelion soldiers?'

'No,' said Sebastian. 'That was the idea of man.

They worked out how to manipulate the coding of the gene bank before they activated it. I was the prototype.' Suddenly he seemed sad. 'I am a disappointment. I am no good at killing.'

I walked Gwen back to her car. I could see her anger, but I headed it off. I didn't really feel like any confrontation. None at all. I was dog tired. We both were. She looked so exhausted she might cry.

'You're growing soldiers.' Her alarm was clear.

Put like that, it sounded really bad. But then again, she didn't know the full story.

'Yeah.' I took time over my breath. Keep casual.

'Some cockamamie idea. Some bright spark realised the Scions were a synthetic life form. They could be easily controlled. Made subservient. Perfect little disposable soldiers.'

Gwen stared at me.

'But don't worry - they got the mix wrong with Sebastian, bless him. He's as docile as a kitten. Of course, nowadays we understand so much more about the DNA helix, but back then it was like sewing with a chisel.'

Lights came on the road up ahead of us. A car engine driven badly to the gates. For an instant I flinched - what if this was an attack? What would we do?

Instead the car stopped at the fence. One of the Scions, Peter, was driving. His mother, Mrs Harries, got out and started waving at us frantically. Calling out Gwen's name. Over and over.

Gwen started running towards her. On impulse.

How did she know? They say animals know when it's time for them to die. They say twins know what each other are thinking. But what genetic fluke was it that told Gwen that someone had stolen her baby?

G w e n

They took me to Rhys.

I was fairly sure I'd stopped screaming by that point, but the wrinkles in his face told me that just maybe I hadn't. I didn't know whether to hit him or hug him, but he risked a hug anyway, grabbing me and holding me while I shouted at him.

It felt almost all right. Being with him. But still I felt alone. Like I wasn't complete. A bit of me wasn't just missing, it had been ripped out like a handful of hair.

'Jenny,' said Rhys.

He had to say it a couple of times. I just wasn't taking anything in. I was just shouting at him, demanding my baby back.

Eventually something made me stop and take it all in. Jenny. My head replayed all those moments.

Her fascination with Anwen. Her desire to befriend us. Her eagerness to please. To hold her. She was a girl. She had been for a very long time.

I remembered what I was like at that age - if I wanted something, I went out and I got it. Didn't matter if it was a boy, a handful of stolen sweets, or some boots. Had to have 'em.

She had just wanted a bloody kid. So she stole one.

What a mess.

*

The village had gone into shock. Shock with pitchforks and torches. They looked like a Frankenstein mob, only they were scouring the countryside.

I was standing there, in the middle of the village green. Surrounded by men and women I'd never spoken to. They were squeezing my arm, saying stuff to me. Then going off, out into the night, to look for my baby. People are nice. But there was something more to it than that. The looks I'd seen before -

the envy, the resentment, the jealous hatred - all replaced with something both noble and repellent -

they saw me as more human now. Someone to be pitied and helped. Incomplete. Just like them.

Rhys came back. Which I guess meant he'd been away. Things were a bit jumpy.

'I'm cold,' I told him.

'Yeah, love,' he said, wrapping a blanket round me. 'You've been standing here for an hour.'

I balled a hand into my eyes. 'What time is it?'

'Doesn't matter,' he said. 'We're staying awake until she's found. We all are. The whole village.'

'I should never have left her with Jenny,' I said.

He looked away. 'It's OK.'

'No. No, it isn't.'

'We'll get her back.' Again he didn't look at me.

'We've got to find her.'

'Yes.' There was something in his voice. But I picked away at it. Provoking it. Until he finally snapped.

'This is your bloody fault!' He didn't raise his voice. It was worse. A quiet despair. 'Aliens. First you get dragged in, then you pull me in... but I never thought you'd include our daughter. You promised.'

'Yeah,' was all I could manage, and even that hurt.

He was so right, I was furious and wanted to punch him. But I couldn't scream or shout. 'I promised. But I lied. We're never going to escape this.'

'No,' Rhys growled like an angry dog. 'We're getting her back. Then we're leaving. No more of this. Torchwood is dead. Let someone else pick up the pieces. Look what it's cost us.'

'Everything,' I said without thinking.

Rhys didn't say anything more.

Mrs Harries came up to us, holding tumblers.

'Brandy,' she said. 'That's supposed to be good for shock. But I got this whisky from Mrs Meredith ages back. Hoped the kids would have a crack at it. But no. Bloody saints. Anyway, give it a go.' She pressed the glass into my hands and I swigged at it. I didn't even feel it burn.

'Where are the children?' I asked.

She looked away, reticent. Suddenly I was the one to tiptoe around. 'In the village hall. I got Peter and Paul to round them all up and take them there.

I didn't want them left hanging around. Not after what happened earlier.'

I stood there. Trying to say something. Nope. I had nothing.

She tutted, and looked unguardedly annoyed with me. 'I know it's not your fault, love, but it's all falling apart. None of this would have happened...

None of it...'

Not if I hadn't come to Rawbone. I knew what she meant. But I just couldn't agree.

'This was never going to work. Not in the end.'

'But we were trying so hard.' Her voice a frustrated whine, Mrs Harries turned away from me, walking off towards the village hall. 'You make me realise how much I've lost, Gwen,' she said. 'Drink your whisky and come with me. We'll get your baby back.'