by Gary Russell
He had to be stopped.
A lone security guard with a wide-beamed halogen torch was patrolling near the main door, but Sarah Jane had watched for over ninety minutes now. He came around to the door once every fifteen minutes. Plenty of time to cross the grounds, get in, and he’d never see her.
He was off again, and Sarah Jane took her chance, a zigzag pattern through the trees, across the gravel car park, and up to the front door.
Sonic lipstick out. Activated. Click of the electronic lock. She was in. Door pulled closed behind her.
Along a corridor. No, no she didn’t recognise this… wait, there, by that kitchen area, of course, it was a left down there.
Yes, this was familiar. The sonic lipstick acted now as a torch, its dull violet glow adding eerie mood lighting to her escapade.
A door crashed behind her.
An internal guard. She hadn’t anticipated that.
She was so close. Just the next corridor down, a sharp right and that was the lab where she had seen the football experiment.
She was tempted to go into Nathan’s room and wipe his Perspex board clean, but that was just spite.
Fun, yes. But spite. So she wouldn’t.
She got as far as the lab, the torch from behind getting brighter as the inner security man continued his rounds.
The lab door was locked, so she used the sonic lipstick on it, hoping the shrill noise wouldn’t attract the guard’s attention.
All she could hear was the sound of her own breathing — so loud, surely all the guards could hear it!
Don’t be stupid, she told herself. It’s all in your head.
She was in the lab just as the guard’s torch beam swept across the corridor, glaring brightly through the glass window in the door. Sarah Jane hid below the window and hoped he wouldn’t randomly try the door, but he didn’t and he continued on his rounds.
Sarah Jane let out the breath she hadn’t even been aware she’d been holding and searched the lab. There! Inside cabinet X-23! One of the headsets.
Fantastic!
She scooped it up and buried it deep in her handbag. She still had a few minutes before the outside guard got back to the front door, plenty of time to get out of the lab area and to freedom.
Easing her way back to the main entrance, she was undisturbed by the internal guard. She opened the door to the grounds just a crack, checking for the outer security man. No sign.
She’d made it halfway to the trees when a massive bank of floodlights burst into white life, and Sarah Jane lost count of the shadows she cast on the grass.
A voice boomed out of… everywhere.
‘Intruder alert. Perimeter defences armed. Do not move. Any attempt to escape may result in death! You have been warned!’
‘Yeah,’ Sarah Jane thought. ‘And by better security systems than yours.’
At which point a criss-cross of red laser beams streaked across the space in front of her, gradually forming a circle around her, trapping her.
Sarah Jane squinted until she could see one of the emitters they came from and aimed the sonic lipstick and fired.
As a tiny device exploded to her left, all the lasers cut off and she was moving before anyone could react inside the building.
She was into the woods and roaring away in her car before any security guards could even get close to her.
The next morning, Maria Jackson was frowning. As she got ready for school she tried Clyde’s mobile again, but just got his voice mail alert. This is Clyde. If you want me — and I don’t blame you — leave me a number, especially if you’re cute.’
Maria didn’t leave a message. She’d left half a dozen already. She could already guess he was in trouble of some sort — but where? Did the Stafford’s get the police to arrest him?
She then tried calling Carla, Clyde’s mum. But she didn’t know where he was, and had assumed he’d stayed over at Finney’s or Steve Wallace’s place. Carla asked if there was any news on Luke but Maria said no, and yes, she’d give Carla’s best wishes to Sarah Jane.
After getting dressed, she slung her bag over her shoulder and headed downstairs, where her father was already hard at work on some computer program or other he was devising. Or was he on Facebook?
He pointed absently at a mug of tea on the side. ‘Tea,’ he said. ‘For you.’
‘No thanks,’ Maria responded, at which point Alan was away from his computer and looking at his daughter.
‘Something wrong?’ he asked.
‘Clyde’s not answering his phone. And he didn’t go home last night.’
‘When did you last see him?’ Alan put an arm around his daughter and kissed the top of her head reassuringly.
‘Lunchtime, yesterday. He skipped school to go and see Luke. He rang later and said he didn’t think those people were Luke’s parents.’
Alan sighed. ‘I know I’m new to all this X-Files stuff, but surely isn’t it more likely that Luke really is just a normal boy who lost his memory rather than some Junior Frankenstein’s Monster put together by those Bane things?’
Maria shook her head. ‘No. No, I was there when Luke first woke up. I was the first person he ever saw. I know he’s the archetype and not this Ashley Stafford person. I just know it.’
‘All right,’ said Alan, clearly knowing there was no arguing with Maria. ‘All right, so what exactly did Clyde say he thought he’d discovered.’
‘That these people were fakes.’
Alan frowned. ‘Fake parents or fake people.’ And Maria stared at her father, half-overjoyed at the thought he’d come up with and at the same time, scared at the implication. Because that gave her an idea about the Stafford’s and who, or what, they might be. ‘Fake people… Dad, you are a genius! Fake parents or people… maybe even both,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go and look for them.’
‘Oh no you don’t,’ Alan said, grabbing a jacket. ‘I’m part of this now. I’m coming with you.’
Maria gave him a hug. And quickly drunk some tea.
She checked her mobile phone one last time. ‘Where are you, Clyde,’ she wondered aloud.
Clyde was wondering exactly the same thing.
He had awoken inside a strange… well, it wasn’t a room as it seemed to stretch on forever, both in height and length. It wasn’t cold and there was no smell to it. It was how he imagined one of those sensory deprivation tanks his mum talked about using, but never would, probably worked.
The only thing he could see were irregular columns of glowing red numbers, rising and falling in streams, changing every few seconds. He reached out to touch a column, but his hand went through it, like it was a hologram. It was an endless series of walls of red calculations going on around him. ‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Where am I?’
No answer.
He touched his chest. Solid.
‘Well, I’m still alive, I think…’
Some of the blocks of numbers detached themselves from the columns and began gyrating around his head, pulsating with a strange unearthly light. The light seemed familiar to Clyde but he couldn’t quite place it.
‘This is starting to look distinctly uncool, Clyde,’ he muttered to himself. ‘No way in and no way out and no one to tell me what the hell is going on.’
‘I can tell you.’
Clyde swung around trying to get a fix on where the voice had come from. In a flash, he realised what the gyrating, pulsating lights reminded him of. And the voice confirmed it.
‘Mr Smith? Where are you?’
‘Surely Clyde,’ said Mr Smith, a slight condescending tone to his voice, ‘the question is where are you?’
And Clyde remembered the attic, the photo, getting zapped. ‘It’s you. Of course. Only you could’ve lied to Sarah Jane, told her stuff about the Staffords that wasn’t true. Faked that photo…’
‘You always were the one to watch out for, Clyde,’ Mr Smith said. ‘Far cleverer than you gave yourself credit for. I guessed you would work it out first.’
‘You’ve gone bad,’ Clyde said simply.
‘No. I’m fulfilling my original purpose.’
‘Which included zapping me into… where exactly?’
‘Your questions will be answered when we can chat again, later. It will pass the time until you all die.’
‘Until we do what?’
Before Mr Smith could answer, a new voice echoed through the void.
‘Mr Smith. I need you.’
Clyde watched as a huge screen seemed to appear in the air in front of him, and on it, Sarah Jane, seen from Mr Smith’s point of view.
And Clyde realised where he was. He was trapped inside Mr Smith’s vast computer mind.
‘I got the headset,’ Sarah Jane saying.
‘Thank you. It will be of great assistance,’ Clyde heard Mr Smith respond.
He watched as Sarah Jane reached forward, presumably putting whatever this headset was, on to Mr Smith’s diagnostic tray, where he’d placed the photo earlier.
‘No!’ He lunged at the screen, yelling at it. Hoping against hope that Sarah Jane could hear him. ‘Can you hear me? He’s the bad guy! Mr Smith! He’s going to kill us all!’
‘I will let you have my conclusions in due course, Sarah Jane,’ intoned Mr Smith and the screen vanished.
Clyde was alone as more numbers materialised and rotated around the darkness, lighting him with their red glow. ‘This does not sound good at all. I’ve got to do something.’ He sat down and was relieved that he could feel a floor even though he couldn’t really see one. He had to think — he was inside a computer, so what could he do to use that?
Chapter Nine
Kidnap
Maria Jackson and her father walked up to 26 Chalsey Grove and looked up the path at the terribly nice, average looking house.
‘If I was an alien hell bent on invasion,’ Alan murmured, ‘I think I’d choose a palace rather than a small end-of-terrace.’
Maria had already rung the bell four times. ‘They’re not in,’ she said. ‘Come on.’
‘Where?’
‘If the house is empty,’ she said, ‘then it’s our chance to find out something about them.’ And she strode off around the corner and into the tiny garden and round to the back of the house. ‘There may be a window we can force open.’
Alan had joined her. ‘Housebreaking? Is this what Sarah Jane Smith teaches in that attic of hers?’ Maria smiled as a small kitchen window opened at her tugging. ‘Just keep quiet Dad and give me a leg up.’
‘Maybe your mother was right about Sarah Jane,’ he grumbled, as nevertheless he helped her break in. A second later the backdoor opened and she let him in the more traditional way.
She was heading through the kitchen and into the hallway before he got a breath out. Shaking his head and aware that at any minute one of the Stafford’s might come downstairs and find complete strangers in their home, he whispered, ‘What are we looking for?’
Maria was less circumspect regarding volume and yelled out, ‘Anything that will tell us who they are or what they‘ve done with Luke and Clyde.’ Alan shook his head and opened the door to the cupboard under the stairs.
And nearly died of shock. Instead of coats on the hooks was what, at first, he thought was a dead body.
Then he realised it was just… an empty skin, the skeleton and organs presumably emptied out. ‘Oh my god,’ he said walking backwards.
Maria pushed past him and grabbed the skin.
‘I was right,’ she said.
‘They… they’ve skinned someone. Alien cannibals.’
Maria shook her head. ‘No, not cannibals. Slitheen.’
She closed the door, briefly thinking about the people who the Slitheen had taken the bodyskins from, but pushed that out of her mind. There would be time to grieve for them later. Right now, she had to let Sarah Jane know what they were up against.
George Bailey wasn’t a popular man today. Last night, he’d let someone sneak past him and break into the Pharos Institute and he knew that when his shift was over, he’d probably get called into a meeting with his boss and given a right dressing down. He glanced at his watch. He’d been on duty since two in the morning and it was now seven- thirty and he wanted to go home.
A tatty red van was coming up the gravel path towards him. Bit early for deliveries he thought, and none of the staff drove anything as big as that.
Oh well, he’d flag it down as it got nearer and find out what it was doing there. That way he might score a few points to make up for last night’s disaster.
Inside the van was Luke, hands tied behind his back, trying to keep his balance as Mrs Stafford drove rather too quickly along the road, clearly unfamiliar with how humans drove vans. Especially rusty ones that might fall apart at the next bump or pothole.
‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked.
Nathan Goss, back inside his boy-suit (only Mr Stafford, squatting next to Luke and bowed uncomfortably due to the low roof, had remained as natural Slitheen) made a face.
“‘Where are you taking me?”, “What will you gain from revenge?”, “Why aren’t you fat?”. Why are children on this planet full of such stupid questions?’
‘You’re a child,’ Luke pointed out, perhaps unwisely.
‘I’m Family Slitheen,’ snapped Nathan. ‘And you are going to give me my revenge.’
‘I don’t think I want to do that,’ Luke said as calmly as he could.
Interrupting this, the Slitheen that had pretended to be Mr Stafford reached a gargantuan arm forward and his claw tapped Nathan on the shoulder. ‘Are you really sure we should be doing this, Korst Gogg Thek? Didn’t the Xylok say we were supposed to wait?’
Nathan slapped his arm down. ‘Are you questioning my authority? You want to trust a Xylok, Dak Fex Fize Gossimar-Day Slitheen? Honestly, you’re as thick as a human.’
Dak Fex blinked his huge eyes ashamedly.
‘What’s a Xylok?’ Luke asked.
‘See?’ sighed Nathan. ‘Thick.’ He opened a bag at his feet and took out a massive pair of headphones.
‘What are you doing?’ Luke frowned — this couldn’t be good, surely…
‘More stupid questions,’ was Nathan’s only response.
‘Human guard flagging us down,’ Mrs Stafford called back.
Nathan clambered into the front passenger seat so that he was sat next to her as they pulled up by the guard.
‘Hello Nathan,’ the man smiled (George something, Nathan recalled, like it mattered to him). What are you doing in this early?’
Nathan showed him a small circular gizmo. ‘Testing this,’ he said and twisted a dial on the front.
And without a sound, George hit the ground.
Nathan looked down on him. ‘He’ll be out for hours.’ There was a pause, then he sighed deeply and looked at Mrs Stafford. ‘So, go!’
And she drove faster than ever towards the entrance to the Institute.
The Jacksons stood in Bannerman Road, not sure whether to knock on Sarah Jane’s door or ring her.
‘She was really cross last time I saw her,’ Maria explained.
Alan smiled. ‘Nevertheless, you go and try her. I’ll check the net, see what I can learn about the Stafford’s, if anything.’
He went into number 36 as Maria walked up Sarah Jane’s drive and rang the bell.
After a few moments, it was answered. Sarah Jane looked exhausted. ‘What do you want, Maria,’ she said brusquely.
‘They’re not Luke’s parents,’ she explained, and as Sarah Jane was about to say something, Maria shouted out: ‘They’re Slitheen!’
And Sarah Jane was speechless. Then she grabbed Maria’s hand and led her up to the attic, calling ‘Mr Smith, we need you,’ as they went in. Maria liked the “we” bit.
And with more steam and fanfare than normal, the computer emerged.
‘Yes?’ he said curtly.
Sarah Jane frowned slightly but carried on. ‘Do you have any information on Slitheen activity on Earth?
’
‘Slitheen? Why do you ask?’
‘Because you got it wrong, Mr Smith,’ Maria shouted. ‘The Stafford’s aren’t Luke’s parents. They’re Family Slitheen!’
And Mr Smith just laughed. And laughed again. ‘Humans. So tediously predictable.’
Sarah Jane was about to ask what that meant when the door crashed open.
It was Alan Jackson. ‘Get out!’ he yelled. ‘Now!’ He started dragging Maria out of the attic. ‘It’s your computer! He’s gone rogue! One of the bad guys…’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Alan,’ Sarah Jane started.
‘Who was it that told you those people were Luke’s family?’
Sarah Jane frowned and looked at Mr Smith.
‘Mr Smith, what’s going on?’
‘I have a purpose, Sarah Jane. It must be fulfilled. The Slitheen have been useful. And so have you. But none of you are required any longer.’
And something Sarah Jane had never seen before happened.
A panel on Mr Smith’s computer console dropped open and a stubby laser gun slid out.
Alan scooped up a book from a table and threw it across the room. Instinctively, the gun swivelled and fired, vaporising the book in less than a second.
As Sarah Jane ran to join the Jacksons at the door, the gun swung back and bred again, drilling a plate-sized hole in the top of the door.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she screamed, almost pushing them down the stairs and out through the front door.
They didn’t stop running till they were in the Jackson’s living room.
‘I trusted him with my life,’ Sarah Jane was saying.
‘What happened?’ Maria asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Alan. ‘Maybe it was some kind of computer virus? Maybe Clyde can tell us?’
‘Clyde?’
‘Yeah, look.’ And on his computer they saw a two-way conversation, from earlier.
THIS IS CLYDE, IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?
And beneath this in a different coloured font was:
THIS IS ALAN JACKSON. WHERE ARE YOU?
‘It was bleeping when I got in, so I checked it and saw his message. So I replied and this is what he wrote.’