Launch
Walking out of Torchwood had an unexpected effect, Torchwood had taken me off the dole- which I didn't know about, and now they stopped paying me, and the dole couldn't mentally encompass a new claim without a P45- which didn't arrive from Torchwood, fuck you, Jack.
The Jokecentre said there was casual kitchen work going at a do. It didn't even make minimum wage. I was going to kill Jack.
So at 6 in the evening I'm standing in the damn rain in a unloved-looking backstreet, waiting to unload a truck. A man with a paunch in chef's whites and a bomber jacket started directing the handing down of boxes from the truck bed, telling people loudly to be careful with them or they wouldn't get paid, they weighed nothing and had chiller instructions on the side, so must've been preprepared food. Then came plastic sealed stacks of metal trays and boxes of glasses, boxes of wine- those a few other chefs unloaded themselves, hmm- keeping the casuals away from the booze, huh? Himself was parked out of the rain inside the door, directing the boxes to different parts of the kitchen as they came in. The trays needed unpacking, and in some cases cleaning, I just started washing them in a nearby sink of water, then hunted around for a cloth to dry them. The cooks were hustling around heating hors d'oeuvres, laying them out on trays- not exactly a taxing job for a chef, when the glasses were unpacked, a lot of them needed polishing too, I set to it. Then I insinuated myself at the tray handout point and put out full trays for the uniformed serving staff, amid all the hurrying and shouting no-one seemed to notice- or mind, I just made sure the returning trays were whipped out of the way quick, anything uneaten going into a discrete pile in reach of everybody, I didn't think anybody in here was doing much above minimum wage, but I was too pissed-off to be hungry myself. I think we'd been at it an hour when the whole building began to shake subtly, a tray of empty glasses began ringing like little bells,
"What the fuck was that?" but no one knew.
I excused myself for a piss- then I went for a wander- nothing like being around Torchwood to make you intensely nosey. I found a back way into the party area, it looked posh- suits, bow ties, evening dresses- there was even a violinist, so I just peered in from a doorway, nobody looked alarmed, but there was a very large, lit up, white capsule in the middle of the floor with four thin clear pillars around it, surrounded by cameras going off and some man in a dinner suit next to it being introduced as 'the visionary Professor Lazarus', and giving a self-congratulatory speech about "..a quantum step forward for humanity..", I heard him say "..hypersonic genetic manipulation..", and was suddenly very nervous, if Torchwood didn't know about this, they seriously should. I stayed where I was and watched the fawning interviewers and the grandstanding.
Then the lights flickered and went dim, and an alarm started whooping, there was some shouting, then a huge breaking of glass and the screaming began, I bolted through the door and immediately wished I hadn't, a scorpion looking like it was tacked together out of corpses and the size of a small bus charged across the room like a rhino, scattering people and furniture, it swung it's sting down onto one evening frocked woman and she dessicated into a mummy in seconds, I really wished I had a gun, then a slight figure in a dinner suit called it's attention away from a couple sprawled on the floor, he taunted it like it was human, called it 'Lazarus', telling it it could not control the change, and killing people would not help it, he called it "..a vain old man..", and then he bolted down a corridor, and the Giger-nightmare scorpion chased him, I ran back into the kitchen and screamed at them all to get out, then I ran back into the main room and scooped up someone on the floor, supported them in the wake of everyone else, we caught up with the back of the crowd, and then they all flowed through the doors, the lights came back onto full, but crashes and falling glass still echoed into the atrium from elsewhere in the building, then a fireball blew out some of the upper windows, showering the people on the steps with glass, sirens began to approach from the distance. Before the police could arrive a black SUV screeched to a halt at the base of the steps, guess who? The Torchwood team tumbled out, hands on their concealed guns and raced up the steps towards me, Jack clocked me and zeroed in,
"What is it?"
"Elephant sized scorpion, drained a woman to a husk, may be intelligent." I said, remembering the slight man with the stupid gelled hair talking to it, "Shit! I think the Doctor's in there." Jack ran straight past me into the building, the team behind him, and I followed. The nightmare scorpion was circling around the capsule, it tested the door handle with a leg, it circled again, the Doctor is in there, Jack braced the webley on an upturned table, but the scorpion whipped round the back of the capsule to what had to be the control consoles and the whole set-up lit up and the pillars began to spin around the capsule. Jack snapped off a shot and the scorpion whipped round in his direction and I saw the travesty of a human face where it's palps should be as it charged, I threw myself sideways, taking someone down with me, then I pushed them in front of me as we scrambled out of it's path- we bolted for the door behind us, it crashed through the table we'd crouched behind, Jack dived through, then Ianto, then Owen, then the room filled with bright light that burned me and there was a noise like a long slow boom and something picked me up and hurled me..