Torchwood: Exodus Code

reduce the symptoms for these afflicted women, we and our health partners across the world are recommending that health professionals keep their patients sedated and under close supervision.’
    ‘Appropriately informative and necessarily vague,’ he said when he’d finished.
    ‘Perfect.’

39
    RHYS WAS SLUMPED at the Coopers’ kitchen table, a half-finished beer next to him. His wrist was in a cast, his eyes red-rimmed, his left one circled in purples and yellows. Panic and worry were the only things keeping him from collapsing from exhaustion.
    Gwen’s attack on Rhys, her subsequent arrest and now her escape from the hospital had made the national news – ‘Madwoman on the Loose’ – including the drive-time phone-in show on Red Dragon radio that had been debating her plight with a variety of mostly uninformed sources. One of the callers claimed to have a contact in the Welsh police department who revealed that ‘This Cooper girl is a violent nutter that should have been sent straight to jail’ and that ‘the police should be taking a much tougher stance on these attacks, but they aren’t because they were women what was doing them.’ Within hours, this supposed leak had scratched and clawed its way up to Andy’s superiors, who wanted to know what the hell was being done to find Gwen.
    Andy had returned to Swansea after his afternoon shift with more information for Jack about the other women who’d experienced public breakdowns around the same time as Gwen’s. He had promised more help that night, but since the ‘leak’ he’d been reassigned to set up a phone bank, taking tips on sightings of Gwen. The news that these breakdowns were now worldwide was sinking in and had also resulted in a deluge of calls from men and women in the area wanting to report their own family members for being ‘off their effing rockers’.
    Jack poured Rhys another beer, setting it next to a frozen dinner he had zapped in the microwave. ‘Andy has squads monitoring the motorway, Cardiff airport, the train stations and all the ports. If Gwen tries to leave Wales, he’ll find her. The press are all over Gwen’s story, and he thinks that will help.’
    ‘He’s wrong,’ said Rhys.
    ‘I know. Gwen isn’t going to leave you or Anwen. I think she just wants to come home.’
    ‘Andy will have some of his boys watching the house, too, then,’ said Rhys. ‘He’s turning into a smart lad.’
    Jack nodded. ‘I spotted one on the street, doing a pretty good job of standing casually outside the bookie’s having a smoke. If you see him, congratulate him on his choice of tracksuit. Showed off his bottom magnificently.’
    For a while the two men sat in silence, listening to Anwen chatter to herself, telling stories about angry giants as she built a tower for her dolls and then crashed her truck into it.
    ‘What about all the other women?’ asked Rhys. ‘Did they hurt themselves too?’
    Jack opened the files that Andy had left that afternoon. ‘The most violent clusters in the UK so far are women in the Scottish highlands, one cluster on the west coast and one near John O’Groats. Each of the women severely mutilated themselves, then attacked a close family member. In two cases, the woman murdered a loved one. Andy says the total as of this afternoon is 264 women across the UK. More internationally.’
    ‘Bloody hell,’ said Rhys, his wrist throbbing, his dinner congealing on the plate in front of him. He looked about as pathetic and troubled as Jack had ever seen him look. ‘What the hell’s going on, Jack?’
    ‘Wish I knew, Rhys.’ Rolling up his shirt sleeves, Jack lifted Anwen up and set her in her high chair, tucked a bib under her chin, and sliced bananas and toast onto her tray, most of which she tossed back at him, giggling.
    ‘You’re good with her, you know,’ said Rhys, popping open another beer, quickly heading from numb to useless in any research tasks Jack had in mind for him that night.
    ‘She’s a good baby,’ said Jack, handing her a triangle of toast slathered in Marmite.
    ‘It’s bloody Torchwood again, isn’t it?’ said Rhys, who had spent most of the past few nights at the hospital, returning in the morning only to check on Anwen, shower and change his clothes and pick up some clean ones for Gwen. Jack was afraid that he might lose himself in his drinking if they didn’t figure something out soon.
    ‘Well, I’m fine,’ said Jack, wiping Anwen’s face which was smeared