Read Online Pack Animals by Peter Anghelides - Free Book Online

off with a mechanical sigh. ‘If anyone comes up that, send them straight back down again. Can you do that?’
    He stared at her, uncertain.
    ‘Can you do that?’ she persisted.
    Maddock nodded dumbly. He fiddled with his mobile phone.
    ‘Don’t make any calls,’ Toshiko told him. She deliberated on another plausible lie. Didn’t want him calling in the police, or his mates, before she’d swiftly recce-ed the whole area. ‘Need to keep those lines clear for the emergency services.’
    Maddock complied meekly. He plunged his shaking hands in his expensive jacket pockets and gazed with expectant, frightened eyes down the escalator and into the depths of the mall.
    Toshiko slipped into the emergency stairwell and cautiously followed the trail of blood.
    She found the body on the next landing down. From what was left, Toshiko worked out it was a woman in her twenties. The body was twisted, limbs thrown out awkwardly amid crumpled plastic shopping bags. The upper torso was a shredded mess of ripped clothing and torn flesh. A savage slash across the neck had severed her carotid artery, and the wound had spurted lines of dark red blood up against the chipped grey concrete of the wall. The body was cooling. Toshiko closed the corpse’s appalled, staring eyes.
    A scratchy electronic noise came from a lower stair. Toshiko found the open clamshell of a silver mobile phone. She picked it up and listened to a chaotic chatter. ‘Hello, who’s there?’ she asked.
    ‘Tosh! Tosh, is that you?’ the phone said.
    She could hardly believe it. ‘Owen! Did you call this number, or did she call you?’
    ‘Just found this phone,’ Owen’s voice continued. He seemed to be talking to someone else nearby as well. ‘Having a bit of a busy day here, Tosh.’
    ‘Where are you?’
    ‘I’m just in—’ The line abruptly clicked off.
    ‘OK,’ Toshiko said to dead air. She was about to click the phone shut when the speaker crackled and a mechanical voice said: ‘Achenbrite apologise for the interruption in service. Please stand by.’ The message repeated. Toshiko pocketed the mobile, and tapped the connector point by her right ear that activated her Torchwood comms. The same message was repeating: ‘Achenbrite apologise…’ She tapped it off again.
    That couldn’t happen. The Torchwood system was a dedicated network. The screen of her PDA flickered with interference patterns, too. Maybe she could check with Ianto, he might have some idea what—
    She realised she’d instinctively tapped her earpiece again. Easy to get into that habit. Easy to get over-reliant on the technology, she of all people should know that.
    Back up by the library, she found Maddock frowning at his mobile phone. She could hear the same message playing out of it. ‘Thought I told you not to use that thing,’ she rebuked him, and made for the U-shaped stairway. ‘I’m going to make that CCTV check now. You said it was Mr Belden in charge?’ He hadn’t; her PDA had told her that earlier, but the question helped focus the frightened general manager.
    The U-shaped stairs up to the security suite revealed further clues. Close up, the handrail wasn’t just scratched, it was raked along most of its length. Toshiko considered the angle of the freshly gouged grooves and the spatter-pattern of blood on the wall. So the creature had come down this way, leaned against the library window on the lower level, and found an exit in the emergency stairwell. Some unfortunate shopper had bumped into it there and got torn to pieces. The creature had made its way across the upper floor, and then back up these stairs. Toshiko gripped the butt of her handgun, and guardedly negotiated the remaining stairs to the top-most floor.
    The door of the security room had been wrenched out of place. A chunk of plaster beside the hinges was missing. The cracked door lay on the floor. A severed human arm, still incongruously clad in the pale blue sleeve of a mall uniform, stretched