Torchwood LA: Family
Chapter 1: The Easy Part
Doot…deet…doot…deet…….
Previously, in the Torchwood Seven universe…
JACK BAUER
"Jack Bauer. Formerly commander of CTU Los Angeles. Decorated for numerous actions taken in defense of United States interests. Arrested for murder of Russian ambassador at New York peace conference." She closed the folder and put it back in the case. "Yes, you'll do," she said.
"My name is Jack Bauer. I am the second in command of this facility"…Adam became agitated at that, to the point of breaking his slouch and sitting up to the table. "'This facility?' Why don't you call it what it is? It's Torchwood! Torchwood!"
"I mean, when you got to Camp Bravo and realized that your granddaughter was not there," continued Gwen… "Of course, the irony is, if your daughter and her family had not been in hiding and using hastily constructed aliases, Teri would never have been in that school to be picked up in the first place…" "Damn you!" said Jack.
GWEN COOPER
"Gwen Cooper," said the woman, offering her hand. "I'm with Torchwood."
Gwen was walking out of the conference room when her cellphone rang. She picked it out of her holder and flipped it open sharply. "What!" she demanded. "Hey, it's me," said Rhys, her husband and best friend. "Hey," said Gwen back…she and Rhys had made a joint resolution long ago not to take out their frustrations on each other.
"And Gwen. It was one of her people in Cardiff who figured out how to drive off the 456, you know. Their own government was trying to take them down, and yet they kept fighting to the end. "
TORCHWOOD SEVEN
"Welcome to Torchwood Seven," said Gwen.
Gwen sat back and explained. "Torchwood was commissioned by Queen Victoria in the 19th Century to defend the Empire from certain…extraordinary threats."
"Jack Bauer," said Ryan by way of introduction, "our chief medical officer, Dr. Greg House."
The following takes place twenty months after the events of 24: Day Eight and fourteen months after day five of Torchwood: Children of Earth. Events occur in an alternate continuity which does not include Torchwood: Miracle Day.
All characters are the property of their respective authors. All original characters and events which occur in this story are mine.
Jack Bauer rounded the corner, nearly tripped over the curb, and just had to stop. He put a hand on the streetlamp and leaned on it, breathing hard. He tried to look to see where the alien had gone, but the thing was just too damn fast, and it was already out of sight.
Gwen caught up to Jack. She had to stop and catch her breath, too.
"Damn," she panted. "I hate Nostrovites."
Jack nodded his assent. He couldn't do much more at the present, as he was still sucking wind. He put his hands on his knees and grimaced as the denim aggravated the wound on his left palm.
Gwen saw it. "Jack, it didn't bite you, did it?" she asked, concern creeping into her voice.
"No," he said. "I never got within twenty-five feet of it." He held his hand out under the light. "I got this when I tried to hop a fence and landed in somebody's driveway." Bits of gravel were still visible in the wound, which was consistent with a scrape.
"Oh, so that was you," said Gwen, sounding very much relieved. Now that she thought of it, she realized that the howl she had heard a few streets back could very easily have been her second in command dropping an F-bomb.
"Yeah," said Jack, straightening up. "What happens if they bite you?"
"The male Nostrovite keeps fertilized eggs in pouches in its mouth, and then implants them in a host," she explained. She pantomimed a hand bursting out of her stomach. "Ever seen Alien?"
"You're kidding," said Jack.
Their conversation was interrupted by Lois on the radio. "Hey guys," she said, "we're getting a new set of 911 calls, heading away from your location and progressing due northwest. All trespassing or prowler reports…definitely your target."
"Intercept them," ordered Gwen. "I don't want LAPD in the line of fire when we take this thing down." She looked around. "Where the hell's Adam with the truck?"
"Sorry," said Adam, and on cue, he came barreling through an intersection in their black SUV. They had gotten out of the truck when their quarry had led them into residential neighborhoods. "I was monitoring rift activity," he continued, "and there is another Event happening right now ten kilometers to our northwest."
Bauer and Gwen jumped in before Adam had even stopped, and the truck took off to the northwest.
Doot…deet…doot…deet…
"Mommy! Mommy! There's somebody outside!"
"Teri, shush!" said Kim Bauer. Her six-year-old daughter had been saying the same thing over and over again for the past five minutes.
"But mommy—"
"Get back to bed!" Kim was tired. Her husband was working another late shift at the hospital, and that had left her in charge of child care for the evening.
Just when she'd thought she'd won the battle of wills with her daughter, Kim heard a loud metal crash coming from the backyard.
"Mommmyyy!"
"Teri, go back to your room and close the door NOW!" said Kim. As soon as her daughter had closed the door, Kim whirred into action. She went out into the garage and grabbed Stephen's aluminum softball bat, charging out the back door of the garage even as she heard more sounds of movement coming from the area of their shed.
It was when she was outside, in the dark, creeping towards the source of the noise, that her vestigial CTU mindset faded and Kim's brain had a chance to rationally process her actions. She had rushed outside without turning on the back floodlight, as fast as possible, in hopes of catching the trespasser unaware, rather than scaring him away. She had also grabbed a baseball bat, rather than a more useful weapon such as her gun – though, to be fair, the gun she had carried with her the whole time they were on the run in Texas was currently locked in a child-proof gun safe at the other end of the house.
This is just some homeless guy, thought Kim. Threat assessment: low. She decided to go for scaring the intruder away. As she approached the corner of the metal shed, she rapped the bat against it and shouted out a warning.
There was just enough illumination from her neighbors' porch light for her to see the man come around the corner and charge at her. She swung and missed, making another loud bang as she put a dent in the shed door. The man came right up at her and, for a moment, in the pale light, his face looked like something out of a vampire movie. She froze, in the middle of bringing the bat around for another swing, for a second, but that was just enough time for the man to bite her arm. The pain jolted her back to reality, and she swung down hard, connecting with the top of the man's skull. He gave an unearthly howl, and then quickly ran off through the Jacksons' azaleas.
"Stupid…junkie…asshole!" Kim shouted after the retreating prowler, throwing the bat after him as punctuation. As she cradled her injured forearm, she wondered what the hell his problem had been.
Doot…deet…doot…deet…
With Adam swerving around corners as he drove, Jack and Gwen had to work to switch out their pistols for submachine guns.
"How far, Adam?" asked Gwen.
"We're almost to the zenith of the rift," said Adam. "Two minutes out."
Jack finished checking his weapon. "You said these things were intelligent," he looked over to his superior. "It can shape-shift…why doesn't it do that? It could have lost us at the bus station."
"The males are feral," Gwen answered.
"And this one is in 'Daddy Dearest' mode," piped in House on the com link. "Pregnancy can do strange things to animal behavior. Oh, don't let it bite you—"
"It didn't bite me, dammit!" said Jack. He shifted around in his seat, ready to jump out when they reached the engagement zone. "We're sure it's headed here?" he asked, as Adam turned into a driveway and began driving up to a school. As far as he was concerned, the whole business about spacetime rifts, and Los Angeles being connected to a rift originating from Wales that could let aliens travel to our world, was all superscience that was best left to the technologically inclined Torchwood members, while he concentrated on the security aspect of the job.
(When asked if he knew why southern California had so many more earthquakes than were predicted by almost all geological models, Bauer had naively said "plate tectonics." Much mirth had been had at his expense.)
"They can sense the rifts," said Gwen. "And they can sense their native environment, on the other side of the rifts. That's why we're not going to approach it head-on. It may go through the rift on its own, and that would be ideal. We don't want to scare it away from the rift by making premature contact…"
Gwen's words were cut off by a loud bump. Gwen and Jack were thrown around the back seat again. Adam cursed, then shouted to the team, "I think I ran it over!"
As Mitchell stopped the truck, Gwen and Jack were on the move, filing out the door opposite the side of the impact. They came around the front of the vehicle and saw the Nostrovite limping away in the other direction. There was no time to orient themselves to the location of the rift opening; they had no idea whether the alien was trying to find the rift, or escape the vicinity. They opened fire.
Jack's bullets hit, but the Nostrovite did not go down. In fact, it merely adjusted its course toward a grove of trees. In the dark, Gwen could not tell if the grove was part of a larger wooded tract or not. She could only see that they were losing containment on the creature. She fired again, this time two short bursts. The Nostrovite fell forward, definitely slowed. She held her fire as Bauer ran up and finished the alien off with two shots to the back.
Gwen met up with Jack. They stood looking down at the alien. Then they began to look around, to make sure their chase had not been seen by anyone.
Doot…deet…doot…deet…
"I'm taking you to the hospital," said Stephen, as he finished bandaging his wife's arm. "We need to run some tests for infection, put you on antibiotics…"
"I'm not going to the stupid hospital," said Kim. "He bit me; we didn't share needles," she added. "You can't get AIDS from biting."
"No, but there are a lot of other things you can get!" insisted Stephen. "Hepatitis, for one. Not to mention the chance of infection to the wound."
"I'll go to the clinic tomorrow," compromised Kim. "I'll have Dr. Thomas look at the bite."
"What were you thinking?" Stephen all but shouted. "He could have had a gun!" The stress of finding out what had happened that night was wearing him down.
"I don't know! I just reacted," Kim answered. Her adrenaline rush was coming back.
"You 'just reacted?'" said Stephen. "Someone tries to break into the shed, and you leave Teri alone and rush out into the night to brain them with a baseball bat? My God, Kim! Who are you, your father?"
Kim did not respond. Instead, she turned and went up the stairs to the bedroom. Stephen belatedly realized that he had crossed the line, and tried to mumble an apology. All he heard in response was a slamming door.
Doot…deet…doot…deet…
House was standing at the autopsy table as the team filed into the medical bay. The dead Nostrovite was laid out on it, the doctor having already begun his post mortem. Bauer took up a position close to the head, but it was Gwen whom House addressed.
"Just as you feared," the doctor said. "The egg sacks have been emptied."
Bauer looked at where House was pointing. He could see the slits cut into the creature's cheeks. A small amount of black, jelly-like substance – not unlike caviar, he thought – was visible near the slits. But it was only a small amount.
"Does that mean what I think it means?" asked Jack.
House nodded. "It means someone is about to have a very bad day."
Doot…deet…doot…deet…
Almost immediately after passing through the vortex, the Nostrovite elder realized that something had gone wrong with the transdimensional crossing. She barely had time to process that thought when her young companion's telepathic death scream hit her full force. The psychic blast was strong enough to knock her off of her feet. However, it stopped just as soon as it started, and the Elder was able to pick herself up. From the brevity of the scream, she knew that her friend's death had been quick, most likely the quick death one received from materializing deep underground.
She paused to get a telepathic "sniff" of the alien world on which she now found herself. Once again her sense of balance was assailed by the multitude of signals she was forced to take in, but this time she held her footing on the strange, black artificial rock with which the inhabitants of this planet had seen fit to cover the ground. She could not sense any others of her species, not even the male – her friend's mate - whom they had chased through the rift. But she could sense young, forming and growing inside of some unknown alien host. The Elder stretched tall, trying to hone her delicate fix on the larvae she had sworn to help protect and raise to maturity.
"Hey, bitch!" came a voice. "This is my corner!"
The Elder turned to see what had made the sound: one of the bipedal natives of this planet was walking menacingly toward her. The Elder's telepathic senses were not yet acclimated enough to her new surroundings to translate the creature's words, but she knew a territorial challenge when she heard it.
Fortunately, the primitive electric light source suspended above the Elder was shining at such an angle as to not allow the native to see that the Nostrovite bore very little resemblance to the natives of this planet. Consequently, she was able to allow the native to get very close to her before she struck. As her camouflaging reflex kicked in and she began to take on the appearance of the now deceased native, it occurred to the Elder that she had not eaten all day.
Doot…deet…doot…deet…