Agnes placed her hands on her hips and waved away an approaching camera crew. 'Mrs Cooper, please continue the excellent civil liaison work that you've been undertaking. The rest of us have a sample of that creature which we shall examine in the Hub. We'll be back as soon as we can.'

Back at the Hub, Agnes, Jack and Ianto stared at the open cash box. Inside, the fragment of the Vam had expanded to fill the tin, which was starting to rattle slightly. Already the sides of the tin were melting. They'd rapidly transferred it to a containment field.

Jack set up a chemical a.n.a.lysis while Agnes demanded an inventory of weapons from Ianto. She was hoping there was something somewhere in their armoury. She scanned down the clipboard Ianto had presented her with. 'It's a shame we don't have a giant containment-field generator,' she tutted, running a finger down the list.

'Don't look at me,' Jack shouted over. 'There's not much call these days to contain something the size of a small village.'

As she flung herself through the gap, the air behind her lit up a bright, crackling blue and a wave of heat rushed past her. She landed awkwardly on the ground.

A hand reached down to help her up, but she ignored it.

'I should have expected to find you here,' she said.

Jack grinned. 'We've contained it.' He gestured to the troops behind him operating the field barriers. 'A little something I brought back from Torchwood India about ten years ago. Seems to be doing the trick.'

Agnes carefully smoothed down her hopelessly creased skirts.

'An appearance at the last minute, I see, Harkness. If you had been earlier, we might very well have saved some of the facility.'

Jack demurred. 'We've contained the threat. And, bonus, we got you out alive. Another second and you'd have been sealed on the other side of that force wall for ever.' He sighed.

Agnes glared at him. 'Not for ever, Harkness. I believe those shields will only hold back the threat for five thousand years. A postponement, not a defeat.'

Jack grinned. 'Well then, after our time, I hope.'

Agnes paused before replying. 'Sadly unlikely, Harkness. When those walls come down, I shall be waiting. And so, I fear, shall you.'

Jack smiled, 'Like a bad penny, ma'am,' he said.

And this time, when he offered her his hand, she took it.

Agnes looked up. 'Ah yes,' she said crisply, 'I remember. You only just got out of there alive, didn't you, Harkness? I trust that the barriers around that place are still working? We could dismantle them, I suppose, but then that would just unleash. . . no.'

'I don't think a force field would work anyway,' sighed Jack. The light blue field around the blob had started to spark and crackle alarmingly. 'That creature is drawing energy off of it. Very efficiently. Our sample could very well become another of those things.'

Agnes glanced sharply at the shuddering ma.s.s. 'I do so hate something I can't shoot. What does the a.n.a.lysis suggest?'

Jack tapped a screen. 'Oh,' he said.

At exactly the same time, the ma.s.s quivered, shook and died.

'A chemical spill?' asked the man from BBC News.

'Oh yes,' said Gwen.

'It's the size of a football pitch.'

'It's a big chemical spill.'

'And appears to be moving.'

'Spilling. It's what spills do.'

He looked at her, boiling with frustration, and then turned on his heel and stormed off to shout at his camera crew. Gwen stood her ground, checking that the broadcast damper in the SUV was still working. Good. Something the size of that thing would only cause a national panic.

She was so sodding tired and not a little drunk. It had been quite a day, and looked like getting a whole lot worse. Despite what Agnes had said, they'd worked so hard to stop something like this happening. As soon as those coffins had turned up, Jack had said they were trouble. But this was getting off the scale rapidly and horribly.

Her phone chirruped again. She sighed and answered it. It was, no doubt, someone else's boss's boss's boss angrily demanding an explanation he could give his boss. She breathed in, said to herself very quietly, 'This is not my fault.' Then she took the call.

Trying to coordinate a civil response was proving tricky. The police had been easy keeping people away, stopping traffic all fairly easy, and no worse than sealing off St Mary Street from the innocent on a Sat.u.r.day night. Getting those shop people off to hospital had got rid of a few ambulance crews, but more kept turning up, as though waiting hopefully for casualties. The firemen had, eventually, been persuaded to stop spraying the blob with water all that was doing was making the ground slippery.

The firemen had sent a special chemical spills team out, who strode around wearing white protective suits, but at least they backed up her cover story.

Someone had set up floodlights, which gave pa.s.sers-by a jolly lovely view. It wasn't going to be long before a camera crew set themselves up outside Gwen's damping field and the whole thing went global.

Perfect, she thought.

She was now tentatively explaining to a nice man from the a.s.sembly that, no, Cardiff didn't need evacuating, and no, reports he'd heard of a nuclear weapon or terrorist strike were rashly ill-informed. 'It's just a big black blob. It's eating things. We just need to keep everyone out of its way while we work out what to do with it,' she explained, endlessly patient. 'We're Torchwood. This is why we're here. This is what we do,' she said calmly and with total authority.

Sod it. She called Rhys. 'You watching the news?'

'No!' he laughed back. 'Why would I? There's a Two Pints Two Pints marathon on BBC Three. What is it, love?' A slightly forced tone. 'World finally ending, is it?' marathon on BBC Three. What is it, love?' A slightly forced tone. 'World finally ending, is it?'

'Yeah,' said Gwen.

'Want to talk about it?'

'Not really.'

'Fine.' In the background, Gwen could just hear him turning down the pre-recorded laughter of a studio audience and a little bit of applause. She imagined him, spread out in the flat, taking up both his and her halves of the sofa, bottle of beer resting on the floor. He'd probably made lasagne. Yeah, that'd be nice.

'Lasagne's in the oven,' he said. 'You gonna be long?'

'Dunno,' she sighed. 'Like I said, world ending.'

'Well, just try and pop in before it's all over.'

'I love you,' she said, and got back to being patronised by someone from the Welsh Natural Disasters Prevention Agency who had a) got her number from somewhere, and b) not realised that this wasn't a natural disaster or that the horse had already bolted and that yelling about a nice new stable door wasn't going to do much good. Lovely, she thought this is let's b.o.l.l.o.c.k Gwen Cooper day. If I'd wanted that, I'd have gone and been a traffic warden. The nice thing about Torchwood was that you could always be sure that you could ring round and get all the authorities on your side. The disadvantage was that this meant they all had your phone number, and had a nasty habit of ringing you up at the first sign of trouble. Sometimes, she just wished they'd all sod off.

Behind her, the big black blob, glistening under all that water, reached out casually and consumed a fire engine.

The Vam exulted. These creatures knew about it and they feared it. That was the true feast of the Vam. The sheer joy of what it was doing fuelled its expansion, and it swelled and twisted, sucking the very last of the toy shop into itself and swelling out. It realised it was surrounded the forces of the locals making a first doomed attempt at containment, with all their little vehicles, or, as the Vam thought of them, snacks.

It considered what to do next, idly popping out a few thousand eyes to watch the conflagration beneath. Obviously it was going to expand, to surge and devour, but in which direction? It could sense a large cl.u.s.ter of. . . suburban dwellings on the other side of the road. The crowd which was currently watching it, learning to fear and curse the name of the Vam, why, they had streamed from them in curiosity. The Vam could just extend out a little way and take them with very, very little effort.

So it did.

'Get back!' screamed Gwen. Everyone had been busy watching one side of the creature devouring the fire engine, but she'd noticed the back swell out and start to topple over onto the watching crowd. She grabbed a discarded loudhailer that the emergency services had been using to shout at each other and screamed into the crowd, 'Run!'

The crowd heard her, but stood frozen, staring at the surging ma.s.s.

A lone photographer ran forward, crouching down in front of the monster. Horrified, Gwen screamed at him through the loudhailer. 'For Christ's sake get out of the way, you b.l.o.o.d.y idiot!'

The crowd's natural deference to someone in authority perhaps mixed with their vague feeling that it wasn't all that usual to be sworn at through a loudhailer prompted almost everyone to leg it. But the photographer stood his ground, trying to get the perfect shot. Which he did. And then the Vam ate him and then his camera.

A sticky black curtain poured down between Gwen and the crowd. She could see them running away, and that was all she needed to know.

Then the beast, as though sensing that she had warned its prey, splattered and oozed down on her.

Agnes looked up from the microscope. 'Fascinating. Complex hydrocarbons, elementary protein strains. This is like a primordial soup that was too lazy to bother evolving out of the swamps and just. . . became a self-regenerating organism.' She giggled. 'I suppose you're all rather used to the principles of Mr Darwin, but I must admit, I still find it all rather novel. Even when I'm confronted by marvels of creation that outcla.s.s anything offered by the Galapagos, I'm still. . .' She smiled. 'This is an extraordinary example of an efficient, lethal being.'

'It's petrol,' said Jack. 'It's petrol that thinks.'

'Actually,' muttered Ianto, 'strictly speaking, it's closer to diesel.'

'What?' Agnes looked at them both. 'And you really. . .?' She stopped, frowning. 'If you'll excuse me, I just need to go and check something on your internet.'

'OK,' said Jack. 'While you do that, I'll just upload our results to a concerned colleague at UNIT. She's our unofficial scientific adviser and she may be able to offer a slightly more complex a.n.a.lysis.'

Agnes waved a hand distractedly at him. She was already sat down at a terminal, pulling information out of it.

'Righto,' sighed Ianto. 'I'll make some tea, then.'

Gwen was still alive, marvellously. She wasn't quite so sure about everyone else around her, but the noise and the smell were extraordinary. It was like a gas station mixed with rotten trout. And it was everywhere.

She opened her eyes, and realised she was buried under bricks that were shifting as though some enormous weight was. . . Oh G.o.d. The thing was on top of her. The bricks ground and shifted as the black ma.s.s moved, and pressed down against her. . . and then suddenly went away.

Gwen, gagging, eyes watering from the stench, pulled herself gently up. She'd have liked to think she sprang up immediately, but it actually took her about two minutes before she plucked up the courage to move. Her body had just frozen with the sheer horror of it all.

She realised that all that had been on top of her was a tendril of the creature, which was shifting its shape, rolling out thick coils across the ground as it moved its bulk. She scrambled out from under the bricks and stood watching as it swept some abandoned cars towards itself. Ahead of her, she realised, were a few scattered policemen. She looked for a face she recognised in the crowd but couldn't see any. A camera crew had a.s.sembled by a toppled ambulance, trying to get a picture lit. Some firemen stood around in a desultory fashion. Behind her, she was aware, the crowd had re-formed.

Her phone rang. It said 'withheld', which promised yet another furious government official. She nerved herself for the inevitable.

As she took the call, she watched one of the firemen being hunted by a flapping tendril. It closed in on him, and he threw out a hand to defend himself. Instead, it latched on to his hand, and dragged him towards itself. Colleagues ran towards him, trying to free him from the tendril. Instead it flowed under him and snared them too, pulling them in a leisurely, macabre tug of war towards itself. With shouts and yells, they braced themselves, pulling in a macho fashion, with some laughter and encouragement. But gradually they realised the hopelessness of their situation and just pulled back against the inevitable.

The crowd started to scream and cry. Some brave souls rushed up, and they too became ensnared, inching painfully towards the bulk of the monster.

Gwen switched off her phone mid-rant and just watched, horrified.

Agnes stood up from the terminal and crossed over to Jack. 'Did you send those findings on to your United Nations contact?'

'Yes,' said Jack. 'And they're very interested.'

'I bet they are,' snapped Agnes. 'You are to have no further communication with them.'

'What?' said Jack. 'But-'

'They've reached the same conclusions about this creature as I have myself. And they leak like a colander. In the last two minutes I have had offers of a.s.sistance from the Kremlin, from the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and from the Oval Office. It is vitally important that we get back to that creature before anyone else does.'

There was nothing they could do. Onlookers stood by the sweating, crying chain of people, carefully not touching them, just watching, not meeting any of their desperate eyes.

Gwen ran up. 'What's your name?' she asked the first fireman.

'Ted,' he replied. 'I've caused all of this, haven't I?'

'No,' said Gwen. 'It's a trap, that's all.'

He strained, trying to lift a hand from the impossibly viscous ma.s.s that was oozing around his wrists and then he looked at her. 'Can you get my phone?' he pleaded.

Gwen reached out, and then stopped. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I daren't touch you.'

'Oh G.o.d,' he sobbed, and was dragged another step closer to the monster. 'I want to phone my girlfriend.'

'Sure,' said Gwen. 'Just tell me the number.'

He shook his head, tears streaming down his cheeks. 'That's the problem. I don't know. I can never remember it. I just want to speak to her.' He looked up at the shuddering ma.s.s, now so close to him, and he turned back to Gwen, his eyes as frightened as a child's. 'Oh G.o.d,' he breathed. 'I've not got long have I?' He slumped forward, the tendril jerking him even closer.

Gwen nearly reached out to him, but stopped herself. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'But it's OK. Tell me her name I can find the number out. The people I work for are very good.'

'Ianto?'

'Yes?'

'Can you get me a number for a Lorraine Leung?'

'Sure. Why?'

'It's important, that's all.'

Gwen held the mobile as close to the man as she dared.

'The mobile you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please call again later.'

The man just stood there, shaking all over, and was dragged even closer to the beast's shimmering surface.

As the SUV roared up the road, the sky around them darkened. The creature had raised itself up, almost blocking out the sun. It looked like a swollen cloud come to Earth.

Sat in the front seat, Agnes looked at it. And she smiled, slightly.

The fireman screamed as his hand touched the surface of the creature, flowing around and sucking him in.

Gwen stood, watching, crying. 'I'm sorry,' she shouted. 'Sorry!' She wanted to reach out, to touch him as he struggled, but she kept her hands by her sides. 'Sorry,' she said again.

Ted drew breath as his body vanished into the creature, his head twisting around to look at her. The black gel oozed around his face, pouring into his eyes and his nose. His mouth opened wide and screamed. And then the scream stopped, and Gwen was just staring at a wide-open mouth poking out of the shuddering black ma.s.s.

The mouth spoke. 'This is the feast of the Vam,' it said.

And then the fireman pulled the rest of the crowd in after him.