Moments after Rose had been taken, Gwen and Owen had convinced Jack to let them follow. To let them try and find Tosh and Ianto, and to try and get Rose back.
Jack had let them go.
There was something in the cellar with three of his bullets in it, and no matter what it took Jack was going to get answers.
He didn't exactly want his team to see the methods he'd be willing to go to while getting those answers.
Kieran had been sent upstairs to lock himself in one of the guest rooms, and Jack had ordered him to stay there and not open the door to anyone but him. The teen hadn't even argued, running up the stairs with the shotgun held, once more, in his trembling hands.
Jack checked and reloaded his gun, before carefully stepping through the cellar door and into the dark, making his way down the wooden stairs swiftly.
He pressed his back against the cool stone wall at the bottom and forced his breathing to remain calm and steady as his eyes adjusted to the dark and he scanned the room for movement.
There were benches, and stools, and a large wooden structure that looked like it belonged in a butcher's shop rather than the basement of a pub, but all was still and quiet.
Seeing nothing, he advanced slowly into the dark until he could see the rows upon rows of glass jars sitting on the cellar shelves. It only took a glance into a couple of them before his lips curled in disgust. They were full of blood and flesh. Some contained whole organs, and Jack felt sick as he realised that this was the harvest from the stripped bodies they'd discovered.
But he'd injured one of them, and he glanced down, finding the dark trails of fresh blood streaked across the cellar floor and he followed it, moving deeper into the darkness.
He checked his surroundings with each careful step and still nearly tripped over a dropped shotgun. A human weapon, his mind supplied uselessly.
Gasping, pain-filled breaths caught his attention, and he snapped around, his gun aimed at the bleeding creature in the far corner of the room. It scrabbled back from him, tugging at the cowl that covered its face, and Jack's skin suddenly felt clammy when he was faced with what looked like nothing more than a simple human man, staring up at him with pain-glazed eyes.
"Help me. Please help me," the stranger whimpered and Jack tensed, his weapon still aimed and ready to fire.
"Did you attack us?" He demanded.
"I'm dying. Help me? I'll tell you everything," the man pleaded, and Jack hesitated.
The look of fear on Rose's face as she had clung to the doorframe swam before his eyes. He'd seen her eyes reflect back a determined resignation when she'd realised he couldn't reach her, and Jack had felt his heart ache.
He was going to get her back.
In a moment he'd holstered his gun, and picked the bleeding man up by his collar, dragging him roughly across the cellar to the wooden structure he'd spotted on his way in.
Its sloped frame made it look almost like a reclined seat, and Jack tried very hard not to pay attention to the grooves in the wood that would make it perfect for bleeding out a carcass.
He slammed the man into the seat-like device, ignoring the groan of pain and glancing around the cellar again, before dragging a laundry basket of linen rags over to his side, shoving a few of them against the man's bleeding torso. He tied another rag around the man's upper leg, nothing bothering to be gentle and ignoring the fresh moans of pain that his rough actions drew forth.
"This'll help you for a short amount of time," Jack growled, "now start talking." He grabbed the man's collar again and pressed him back against the wooden slope, Jack's patience running low with Rose's life on the line, not to mention the rest of his team out there in unknown conditions.
"You've got to get me help! I know where you can—"
Jack smacked the man with the flat of his hand, putting a temporary halt on his babbling as Jack ground his teeth together furiously.
"We had a deal. I help you, you tell me where they've taken the blonde. Then you can tell me what the hell is going on around here!" He snarled, inches from the man's terrified face, but he felt his fury rise to the surface when a hysterical, high pitched laugh was all that escaped the man.
He sounded almost mad when he started gasping between giggles, "You don't know?"
He suspected, Jack admitted to himself, but aliens would be so much easier, and he needed answers. He needed to be sure. Options spun through his mind, how to make the man focus enough to give him what he wanted, and it took seconds for Jack to decide on a route.
He released the stranger's collar and began untying the tourniquet from around his leg. He'd answer Jack's questions, or he'd bleed to death.
"What are you doing?!" The stranger demanded, "Put it back on!"
He struggled to stop Jack from untying the thin cloth that was slowing his bleeding, but Jack slapped his hands away.
"You need to know something," Jack growled, tossing aside the blood-stained rag before leaning back in, his hands grasping the man's head until he could stare directly into his eyes.
"A long time ago I was pretty good at torture," Jack told him darkly, and he let a terrifying grin creep across his face. "You see, I had quite the reputation as the go-to guy. My job required it, at the time, you see?" He explained, shifting one hand to settle around the man's throat, while the other drifted to the nearest gunshot wound.
"That woman your people took is the only family I have left. She's like my little sister. She's one of the reasons I got out of the torturing business... so I'm sure you can imagine how very much I want her back," Jack explained, his voice dangerously soft.
"See, I know where to apply the tiniest amount of pressure to a wound like yours..." his fingers dug inside the bullet hole and found the little piece of metal still embedded in the man's skin. He ground it against the bone as the man shrieked and writhed, but Jack just kept talking.
"If that woman is dead, then there's going to be nothing on this whole planet that will stop me bringing you so much pain that you'll beg for death—"
"Son of a— Stop! You're gonna kill me! Oh please, stop!" The man sobbed, and Jack hissed angrily, face still inches from the begging monster beneath him.
"It's in your power to make me stop," he growled, voice cold. "Just tell me what I need to know. Because in ten seconds I'm gonna go find a sharp object and make you wish you'd never been born."
The stranger spoke.
The more he spoke, the sicker Jack felt.
A swift blow to the man's head and a pair of handcuffs later, Jack had grabbed up the abandoned shotgun from the floor of the cellar and was heading out into the village to look for Rose and his team.
In the dark Rose couldn't see anything, and with her injuries, she knew that she couldn't fight her way free. Instead, he let herself hang limply, forcing her attacker to carry her dead weight.
Kieran had been right, however, and whoever they were, they were strong enough that her limp frame gave them no trouble at all.
Eventually, they stopped, and a torch flicked on behind her, just bright enough that Rose could make out trees on all sides.
"Now, don't make me chase after you, girl. I can kill you before you take ten steps," the voice behind her murmured, so Rose stood still, her fear mounting by the moment but all her captor did was tie her hands behind her back and remove the fabric stuffed in her mouth long enough to tie it around the back of her head properly.
After that, the torch went out again, and she grunted in pain as her body was thrown over someone's shoulder, and they continued moving her away from Jack and the others.
As they walked, Rose struggled to see past the back she was hanging over, to peer around her kidnapper's sides and figure out where they were going, but it was only when she finally spotted a large building, light glowing from inside, that she began to panic.
Legs kicking in the stranger's grasp, hoping to catch him off guard, all her struggles earned her was being thrown, bodily, against the front door of the building, knocking it open as she crashed to the floor with a cloth-muffled grunt and a fresh groan of pain.
"I warned you," came the growling voice as she blinked up at the ceiling and tried to clear her head.
The brightness of the room dazed her, and the ordinary human man standing over her shocked Rose into stillness long enough for him to reach down and grab hold of her long hair, dragging her across the normal-looking living room as she shouted around her gag.
Rose squirmed as the man dragged her between what looked like two plastic shower curtains, and suddenly she watched what seemed nothing more than an average home transform into what she could only describe as an impromptu abattoir.
Eyes spinning around in sudden, chilling fear, Rose felt her blood run cold.
"Get the other two," the man called, and Rose heard movement back in the living room part of the house, but she couldn't see anything more as the man released her now throbbing scalp, dropping her to the floor.
Hanging above her were two, three bodies. No, four, she recounted as stared around the room in growing horror and she choked on the overpowering stench of raw meat and stale blood.
Looking for a way out, Rose realised that she was still trapped. This time between a plastic-coated, blood-splattered wall, and a plastic-covered table as the man leered down at her.
"Now, you stay right there. I've got a whole batch of you to do," he told her cheerfully as though he was planning on dying her hair instead of murdering her, but his grin widened when her eyes narrowed defiantly.
Her stubbornness evaporated, replaced with fiery agony when he landed several swift kicks to her injured side. She cried out, the sound muffled once more by the gag and curled into a defensive ball, staying there as the man moved away.
She struggled to gasp for breath against the fresh agony running down her side, and pain-filled tears were leaking down her face, her body trembling despite her determination to show the man nothing.
A small part of her mind, that sounded reassuringly like the Doctor, whispered that she was probably going into shock.
She couldn't bring herself to uncurl or move, but voices drew her attention back to the world outside of her own pain, and Rose struggled to focus on what the voices were saying.
"If you help us, we can stop all this. Please!"
"I'm sorry..."
She recognised Tosh's voice, and whimpered slightly, wishing she could shout a warning for the woman to run, but also realizing that if she was here it was probably too late for that.
A rustle of plastic told her that the other woman was close, and Rose drew in a shuddering breath as fresh tears escaped her.
"Tell us what these creatures are!" Tosh demanded, and Rose could hear someone else's panicked breathing. She half hoped it was Ianto so she'd know he was alive, and half prayed that it wasn't so that he hadn't also been captured.
"Do they look like us?" Tosh asked, and Rose closed her eyes in muted despair.
Didn't she know yet? Hadn't she worked it out? The monsters that were hunting them were some of the most vicious creatures in the universe. Some of them, Rose knew, could give Daleks a run for their money.
Simple humans.
"How else are we gonna look?" The man's voice came again, and Rose heard the technician gasp before psychotic laughter began to fill the air. The man chuckled darkly and the woman, who Rose assumed had fetched Tosh and her silent companion snickered along with him.
She heard a scuffle, and then a punch landed before someone grunted in pain and Rose winced in sympathy, her own side throbbing at the reminder of the strength the man possessed.
"There are three more out there," the woman said a moment later, and Rose's eyes snapped open to stare at the blood-splattered plastic surrounding her as the man replied.
"Not a problem," he breathed, seeming unconcerned at his opposition, which made Rose start to wonder just how many of them there were.
Did the Torchwood team outnumber them, or was it Jack, Gwen and Owen who had the odds stacked against them?
"How are they?"
"They're in a good state," the woman replied, and Rose could hear the grin in her voice, even as the man who'd been punched groaned in pain.
Rose recognised his voice, it was definitely Ianto, and her brow furrowed as she struggled to think of some way for them to get out, to get away.
"I think they're the best we've ever had," the woman continued, and Tosh cried out, making Rose wince again.
'What would the Doctor do?' she asked herself quietly, but for the first time in a long time, she didn't have an answer to that question.
In this situation, what would the Time Lord do? Tied up, gagged, and about to be sliced into bite-sized pieces. She didn't have his sonic screwdriver to cut herself free from her bindings, she didn't even have her gun, and she couldn't wield words like the Doctor, even if her tongue had been free.
Not having an answer to that question chilled her more than anything else, and Rose shivered violently as fear, unlike anything she'd felt since the last time she'd faced a Dalek, took hold of her mind.
"Oh, I forgot to tell you. I went after the boy, but came back with something better," the man announced gleefully, and Rose braced herself as he came back around the table, leaning down quickly to drag her onto her knees, a grunt of pain escaping her as he held her upright, one hand clenched around her arm and the other brushing her blood-streaked blonde hair away from her tearstained face.
She could finally see Tosh and Ianto, both on their knees, both staring at her with a mixture of pain, fear, and horror on their faces as their captor pulled the gag from Rose's mouth. She drew in a deep lungful of air, before offering Tosh and Ianto a forced smile.
"Fancy seein' you here," she tried to lighten the mod, but her voice was shaking despite her best efforts, and Tosh just shook her head in desperate denial.
"Rose..." Ianto choked out, and she forced her smile wider and shoved her fear to the back of her mind, silently begging him to be brave.
The woman was holding his head by the hair, twisting his head around to stare at her, but it didn't look like Ianto planned to tear his eyes away from her battered form anytime soon.
"Oh, look," the woman cooed patronisingly, and Rose bit back a smart-arsed comment. She could feel her shirt sticking to her side, soaked through with blood from where the man had kicked her gunshot wounds open, and she knew she looked terrible. She didn't want Tosh and Ianto to be as scared as she was right then, so she forced herself not to shatter.
She could break down later, in her room, with Jack, she told herself. She refused to consider the possibility that they might not make it out alive. She still had to find the Doctor, there was no way Rose was going to let herself be dinner to a bunch of cannibals.
"She's not a Rose, she's meat," the man holding her corrected Ianto firmly, slapping her cheek.
'Like he's displaying a cut on the butcher's counter in Tesco', Rose thought to herself, shuddering at his casual touch even as he pushed her roughly down onto her stomach, forcing her to twist her head to keep Tosh and Ianto in view.
The man approached Tosh and Ianto, back to his cheerful self and seemed to try to reassure them with a hand on each of their shoulders, "I'm afraid we're all just meat."
With that, the woman pushed Ianto to the floor, releasing his hair from her grasp as she and the man left the plastic-covered abattoir together.
As quickly as she could without making her injuries worse, Rose rolled onto her back and sat up, leaning her back against the improvised butcher counter as she panted through the pain, trying to ignore her bleeding side.
"Get ready to run," Ianto growled softly as he and Tosh staggered back to their feet, but Rose shook her head.
"I can't run. You go—" she tried, but they ran out of time for discussion as the two cannibals returned, the man holding a baseball bat, the implications of which made Rose want to instantly throw up.
"What are you going to do? Put us on meat hooks?" Tosh demanded, sneering slightly, and Rose had to admire the woman's guts, especially considering that it was looking increasingly likely that they would all end up on meat hooks before the sun came up, but their captors just laughed.
The woman moved away, but the man stalked further into the room, the bat shifting in his hands.
"No," he replied seriously, "not yet. You see, meat... it has to be tenderised," he explained, eyes glittering with visceral excitement and he placed one hand on Tosh's shoulder, the end of the bat resting very lightly against the woman's chest and Rose growled protectively.
"Too scared to beat on someone who can fight back?" She snarled, and the man leaned around Tosh slightly to sneer at her.
"Don't be too eager, I'll get 'round to you soon enough," he reassured and Rose couldn't quite smother a shudder as he moved onto Ianto, running his eyes over her teammate before Ianto suddenly tipped his head back and swung it forward, hard.
His head connected with the cannibal's nose, and Rose shouted at Tosh to run.
"Go! Get the others!" She cried, but Tosh hadn't hesitated, moving the moment Ianto had struck. Rose's words followed after her, out of the building, and the blonde desperately hoped it would be enough to get them all out alive.
Their captor caught Ianto before he could even get out the front door and the man knocked him down with one blow, throwing him back into the abattoir and keeping him there with a kick to the gut.
He stalked back into the main house, and Rose shifted over to Ianto's side, pressing her leg along his back and hoping that the reminder that he wasn't alone would be some measure of comfort.
That comfort didn't last long though, as moments later the man returned, a large machete in one hand and the woman behind him again with her shotgun in her hands.
The man took the gun just long enough to strike Ianto's head with the wooden butt, and no matter how fast she tried to crawl back from her own blow, the wooden stock connected hard, and dark oblivion took her.