Torchwood: Exodus Code

perfume. It felt ominous. He turned up his collar and hooked his binoculars over his shoulder. While he walked, he became aware of the silence around him. He could hear the rush of the sea, the rain dripping from his upturned coat collar down onto his neck, but that was all.
    Jack lifted his binoculars to the horizon, scanning the five or six miles of beach to his right. He held his gaze for one, two, three beats, and then he shifted his focus to the Maritime Quarter behind him.
    No cormorants. No sandpipers. No gulls. No magpies. No birds of any species anywhere. Jack was not a suspicious man, but he couldn’t help thinking that this was not a good sign.
    As Jack was walking across the soft sand, he felt the beach shift beneath him, throwing him off-balance. He recovered his footing and turned back the way he had come, the tremor worsening.
    Suddenly, car sirens blasted from the street beyond the promenade, and he saw a small explosion from a passing car, an exhaust pipe popping. As the ground shook, the car shot off the road, somehow soaring over the low promenade wall, diving nose-first into the sand below.
    The tremor stopped. But Jack was still reeling, his nostrils full of the stench of burning tyres and hot macadam. He took a couple of strides towards the car, knowing he should help, but the smell clogged his sinuses, and he retched, unable to clear it. He staggered back, breaking into a run, the smell clashing with a nightmarishly amplified ringing of alarms. For Jack Harkness, a man who had leapt into burning buildings and in front of alien war machines, it was all suddenly too much.
    Jack ran away.
    *
    Breathless, bewildered and furious with himself, Jack took off his boots and hung his coat to dry in the kitchen. He put the kettle on, then went to the bathroom and found a towel to dry his hair, which was longer than it had ever been. For some reason, he had very little desire to cut it. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, aware, again, of that peripheral vision of yellow dots.
    As he stared into the mirror, the dots slowly moved front and centre and began to coalesce. The face of a young woman appeared, floating in front of his own. She had black eyes and thick dark hair flooding over her shoulders.
    Jack pressed his hand on the mirror, touching her image. He breathed out slowly.
    What the hell was that?
    Who the hell was that?

34
    MINUTES LATER, JACK stood in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil and staring at a hurried drawing he’d made of the woman’s image.
    He had no idea who she was. Not a clue. This ignorance, this lack of knowing, this gap in his understanding was as unsettling to Jack as any of the extraordinary and alien experiences he’d ever had. She’d felt real to him, not a hallucination. Setting the pad down on the table, he stared out into the eerily empty street, watching two local constables cycling down the road, presumably checking for casualties from the minor quake.
    Flipping open his laptop, Jack checked the weather channel. The earthquake had been recorded at 3.4 on the Richter scale. BBC Wales was reporting most of the damage had been to the sea ports and villages on the south-eastern coast.
    Jack noted the data scrolling across his computer and the pages and pages of information about the deranged women spread out across the table. He sighed, lamenting how much he missed his team, missed Owen and Tosh, missed the Hub and its battery of computers.
    The kettle whistled on the counter behind him. He didn’t move, letting it build up its steam, missing Ianto most of all.
    ‘I hate doing this shit by myself.’
    Coffee in hand, Jack sat down and carried on.
    So far, Jack had found nothing of significance, other than the fact that the affected were all women. He was certain this was a critical point, but still couldn’t see an angle to pursue that might suggest a solution to diminish or stop the outbreaks, never mind understanding the cause.
    Jack sat back in the kitchen chair, sipping his coffee. Ianto would have brought him a biscuit or two.
    In his head, Jack flipped through the files of the local women who’d been affected at the same time as Gwen. These women were a good sample of all those who’d been struck. If he could understand the cause – because there was a cause, he thought. This was not random. This was not some kind of mass female hysteria. Jack had lived through far too much to believe for one second there wasn’t something or someone