Torchwood: Exodus Code

she’s ever been in hospital before now was to have the kids. When she’s feeling out of sorts, she goes for a night out wi’ her pals, shakes it off, like. She just got our youngest toilet trained and she were so happy not to be doin’ nappies any more.’
    Phil’s voice caught in his throat. Jack poured him a glass of water from the pitcher on the bedside table. ‘Don’t know what I’m goin’ to tell the kids ’bout this.’
    ‘You’ll think of something, Phil,’ Jack handed him the water. ‘Do you know when her breakdown started exactly?’
    ‘Was right after lunch four days ago. I’m sure of it. My 9-year-old called me at work and said mum had run out of the house. By the time I got home, police were already there and said she was in emergency. Said that she’d had some kind of a fit in the shop.’
    Across the room, Gwen let out a high-pitched moan. ‘Shewvee, Shewvee, Shewvee.’
    Jack wanted to ask Phil more questions before the doctor returned and before Mary relieved him, but Gwen was becoming extremely agitated again.
    Suddenly all the women were.
    Jack wished Phil the best of luck and pulled a chair up to the right side of Gwen’s bed. He took her hand. The leather restraint on her wrist was lined with cotton, but because Gwen had been fighting against it, her skin underneath the strap’s edge was rubbed raw.
    Jack dug around in Gwen’s bedside locker and found some Vaseline. Scooping some out with a finger, he massaged the ointment into her wounds.
    Slowly, she turned her head at his touch. Jack smiled and leaned closer. Gwen was crying.
    ‘Jack?’
    He smiled, fighting back his own tears. ‘How are you feeling?’
    ‘Jack?’
    ‘Yes. It’s me.’
    She strained to lift herself up, but she couldn’t. Too much pain, too many monitors, too little strength, too tight restraints.
    Jack put his hands on her shoulders, settling her gently against the pillows.
    ‘Shewvee,’ she slurred, adamantly.
    ‘Gwen, I’m so sorry. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.’
    ‘Esh,’ she said, her eyes blazing, her determination fighting against the deepening sedative.
    ‘S?’ asked Jack, taking her hand again. She squeezed.
    ‘Shoe. Shoe.’
    ‘U?’ Gwen squeezed his hand again, but her grip was weakening. The sedative pulling her under.
    ‘Gwen, that’s great. The letters S and U.’
    ‘Wee… wee,’ she whimpered, and then her eyes drooped closed, her mouth slackened, her grip on Jack’s hand loosened and Gwen was silent and still for the first time in days.
    Jack finally understood what she’d been struggling to tell him. Kissing her lightly on the lips, he whispered, ‘Come back, Gwen. Please come back.’

36
    JACK STOOD IN the hallway of the house, deep in thought. Gwen had spelled out ‘SUV’, but she had drifted into sleep before telling him where she had hidden the keys, never mind the vehicle itself.
    She wouldn’t have been sloppy in her hiding place because she wouldn’t want Rhys to find them, to know that she had a way to get in touch with him. Hiding them in plain sight would not be an option. Besides all the household’s keys were on hooks in the kitchen, an extra set would be easily noticed.
    Since returning to the house, Jack had already rifled through drawers, cupboards and Gwen’s empty gun locker, the firearms confiscated by the police when she’d attacked Rhys.
    He had gone down into the basement and rummaged through boxes of Christmas decorations, old Halloween costumes, discarded wedding gifts and old bikes. He’d taken apart toilet cisterns, lifted floorboards, and cut into walls. He still had not found the key fob. Jack knew he didn’t have much time to keep looking, expecting that Rhys would be home with Anwen soon after taking Mary to the hospital.
    Jack scanned the papered walls in the hallway, thinking that perhaps he’d missed a safe hidden underneath one of the pictures, but he doubted it. Then he spotted a splash of colour under the bed in Gwen and Rhys’s room. Reaching underneath, Jack retrieved a book:
The Day of the Triffids
. Jack skimmed the back cover, reading that the book was a post-apocalyptic novel (not Jack’s favourite genre, but clearly Gwen’s or Rhys’s), where a catastrophic event has left a few surviving humans blind while giant man-eating plants with poisonous stingers walk the earth. Jack knew all about
them
– a nasty species.
    The book was old, its faded yellow cover stained and smelling faintly