by Elle Simpson
Toni, equally predictably, was busy in the kitchen making some poor snails very unhappy.
And me? I was watching the news channels on the TV above the bar and waiting for the imminent demise of humankind to begin.
I had the volume turned down low so I couldn’t torture myself with constant pre-apocalyptic narration. But the screen cut away suddenly, catching my attention, shifting to some on-scene reporter looking twitchy. So I reached for the remote and tuned in long enough to hear “—join me now at the United Nations in New York, where the Akanarin delegation is due to arrive again at any—”
And then I tuned right back on out again.
Creepy Bob, unsurprisingly, was rolling news. Mostly, that news seemed to be reports of standard diplomatic stuff. Meeting people. Shaking hands. A surprising amount of photobombing selfies.
(No holding of babies though, thank god.)
She’d even done an interview with some bigwig TV reporter. Answered a few questions. Smirk-smiled mouthlessly for the camera while doing it. And how creepy was that? Hearing Creepy Bob’s freaky voice coming from the TV, but still even then managing to bypass my ears. Hearing it without hearing it, you know? Eurgh.
Everyone Creepy Bob met on screen though, reporters included, seemed bright-eyed and bushy-tailed – and totally freaked out in a camera-friendly way. No scrambled egg brains to be found.
So everything…seemed to be going just like Colin had said it would. Creepy Bob might’ve been creepy and evil, yeah, but at least she was being predictable about it. She’d make her move at the gala. And everything would be fine just as long as Colin got back before then.
Whump!
A noise out in the hall broke through the anxiety mega-spiral. I decided to live just a little more dangerously and tipped back on my bar stool. Balanced there long enough to see Toni taking a battered Ikea bag from one of the supersoldiers, who were arriving on mass for a late breakfast.
Which was paella. Again. They were big into Toni’s paella, were the supersoldiers – which, okay, not my idea of a hearty morning meal, but I wasn’t about to start arguing with the highly trained killing machines.
“What’s that?” I called from my perch, like the grumpy, nervy, squawky parrot I so truly was right then.
“Some of your clothes from the cottage,” Toni said, pulling the bag behind him into the bar. “They made it through the decontamination process before the demolition people arrived.”
“Oh my god, really?” I wobbled down off my stool, completely, irrationally excited. This was the best news I’d had in days.
(It’d been a tough few days, okay? Decontaminated retail therapy was just what I needed.)
Maybe my favourite jeans had survived the scrub down, or the amazing dress I’d worn to Makayla's sixteenth, or my old junior hockey hoodie that was the comfiest, softest thing I owned.
Buzzing retail hardcore, I took the bag from Toni and pulled it open.
Then, “Oh yeah,” I said. “Of course, yup, so totally should’ve seen that coming.”
Inside the bag? My school uniform and my bridesmaid’s dress from Auntie Joanne’s wedding last year.
And that was all. Nada else.
“Like, should’ve seen it coming before I even saw it coming.” I hauled the dress out the bag – and then kept on hauling. “Didn’t even need to be psychic.”
“Wow,” Toni breathed. “That’s a lot of, uh, how do you say…?”
“Tulle, Tone. It’s a bumtonne of tulle.”
Toni said, slowly, as if he was choosing his words really carefully, “What…what would you call…this…colour, exactly?”
“Poo green,” I said. Because sometimes you just have to call a poo-green tulle explosion a poo-green tulle explosion. “It’s poo green, Toni Mac.”
Toni sucked his teeth for a second. “Yeah, that’s exactly what you’d call it.”
“It was a strange wedding,” I said after we’d stared in appalled silence for a while.
“Unique, for sure,” Toni agreed. “What a thing to survive, huh?”
“I’m pretty sure it could survive a nuclear apocalypse, Tone,” I said. And then I had to try and push down the horrible, increasingly likely thought that I might just get the chance to test out that hypothesis in the next few days.
So it was easier to just carry on staring in horror at the tulle explosion instead. God, Creepy Bob could clone me five times over and there’d still be enough room for me and all my doppelgängers under that skirt.
Toni nipped off to give Lottie her breakfast and make ours. I abandoned my dress on the floor where it belonged, climbed back up onto my stool, and then thwacked my forehead down to the bar.
Things got a bit emotional then. I had to will my eyeballs to suck some tears back in, mainly because it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I could do nothing and I could tell nobody anything and I was entirely, totally, completely useless.
“Hannah, come get breakfast!”
Well, maybe not completely useless. I could absolutely still stuff my face.
I rolled my head against the wood until it rolled right off the bar, then I rolled the rest of me through to the kitchen.
No paella. Toni had done us a Full English. He’d even heated up some baked beans, and baked beans make Toni’s cheffy heart hurt. I gave his shoulder a grateful, grumpy headbutt as I sat down, just to let him know I appreciated it.
“Oh, wait. I forgot.” Toni exited stage left. I heard him rummaging around in the sideboard by the main door and when he came back to the kitchen, he had an envelope in his hand. “Here. For you.”
“What is it?” I asked through a mouthful of fried egg and clogged arteries.
“A card, I think. Came first thing. Sorry, I forgot all about it.”
I gave the envelope a puzzled once-over. No stamp or postmark. Just my name in flowery calligraphy on the front and a fancy gold-wax seal on the back. “The postie got through the cordon?”
Toni shook his head. “Some kind of special courier. Had a security escort and everything.”
“Security…” My heart thumped once, and hard. “Oh…”
I reached for one of Toni’s fancy kitchen knives to break the seal. Inside the envelope was a sheet of creamy white card, gilded at the edge and thick enough to stir a cup of Mum’s builder’s tea.
I tilted the card this way and that, trying to make sense of the writing. And when I finally did?
“Oh god.”
Miss Hannah Stanton is cordially invited to attend a gala in honour and welcome of our extraterrestrial guests.
The invite was signed with a name I didn’t know, date and time for some hotel with a New York address. Dress code was white tie. Death was increasingly imminent.
“What’s wrong, kiddo? You’ve gone kinda green.”
Wordlessly, I held out the invite for Toni to read.
“When’s this?” Toni asked, pointing to the date. He fished his glasses out of his pocket and put them on. “Tomorrow, right?”
“What? No.” I looked again. I dug out my phone. Today was the 22nd. The invite was for— “Tonight,” I said. “Oh my god, it’s tonight.”
I sat there, brain frantically maths-ing away. The gala started at nine o’clock New York time. The invite said I had to be there at seven. Even if Colin made it back early, would that still be early enough? And if Creepy Bob made her move before then, would the massed whatevers of the Whatever Council – would they be enough to save the day if humanity was already a compelled herd of scrambled-egg-brain robots?
“Oh god.”
“They must’ve pushed the date up a little,” Toni said, completely sensible and entirely oblivious. “It must be hard, you know, coordinating the schedules of all the VIPs. Because that’s got be a pretty fancy guest list.”
A fancy guest list full of every major world leader, head of state, and all the people other countries put on their coins.
“Oh my god.”
“I don’t think they’l
l let you take your phone, so no pictures. But steal Mum and me a goody bag or two, huh?” Toni said.
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. All I could do was stare dumbly down at the invite. I wasn’t even scared anymore. Just numb. Just straight up shocked.
But the thing is, me in shock must be pretty indistinguishable from me in the usual Full English saturated fat-induced food coma, because Toni just left me to it and started tidying up.
He shifted the plates to wipe the worktop, took the dishes to the sink, lifted the discarded envelope – and a little sheet of folded paper came fluttering out.
“Huh. We missed something.” Toni picked up the note and squinted.
“What does it say?” I asked, so totally not in any way at all even slightly wanting to know.
Toni squinted some more. “That you’re, uh… Oh. Getting a lift to New York.”
Like, that was kind of obvious. I was a good swimmer, but I wasn’t Atlantic Ocean good. “A flight, you mean?”
“Well, yes…sort of.”
I knew a hella ominous pause when I heard one. “What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
Toni handed the note over. My eyes read the words on the note. My brain made sense of the words. My heart stopped beating because of the words.
“Oh. My. God.”
My ride to the gala? Was Creepy Bob.
22
It was a little after midnight when the terraformer arrived, dropping down out of the night, this big black lump, blacker than the sky somehow.
But when it landed in the field across from The Snail’s Arms, I could see a faint reddish light pulsing under the surface, like blood under your skin when you press your hand to a torch – like the ship was alive somehow.
Just looking at it made me shudder.
“Cold, love?” Mum asked, wrapping her arm around my shoulders.
“Nah.” I didn’t think anyone surrounded by so much tulle could ever be cold again. “Just a little nervous, you know?” Where ‘little’ suddenly meant ‘I’m so terrified it’s possible I might pee myself.’
Creepy Bob came stalking over the fields towards us, backlit by her creepy spaceship, like something straight out of the cheesy sci-fi movie we were all living in suddenly.
“Hannah,” she said as she reached us. “A pleasure.” She gave me a non-pervy but still entirely creepy once over. “You look…lovely.”
Creepy Bob had dressed up too. Some kind of ceremonial brooch-type thingamajig was stuck to the middle of her spindly chest, glittering just a little in the light spilling out from The Snail’s Arms’ open doors.
“You look, uh…almost completely naked,” I said. “I mean, you’re – you’re working it, though.”
Mum cleared her throat in a way that usually meant, ‘Stop talking, Hannah,’ so I took her phlegmy advice and did.
“Are you ready to depart?” Creepy Bob asked.
“Um…” Like, no, not even slightly ready to depart. I never wanted to depart. I just wanted to stay right where I was, stick my fingers in my ears, and pretend everything was fine.
But the thing was? If I was the only one who knew what was potentially about to go down, then I was the only one who had even the slightest chance of stopping it. I had to go.
But the thing also was? If it all went down before Colin got back, then this was it. This was my dramatic, heroic goodbye moment.
So, “Just two seconds?”
I turned to Mum and Toni and hauled them into a hug. Mum squawked in surprise. Toni went with it, because he is a hug monster. “I love you both so much.”
“And we love you too, kiddo,” Toni said. He pulled back a little to take a look at my face. “Hey, you all right?”
“I’m fine. And I have to go now,” I said, forcing my arms to unhug. “But really, I’m totally fine.” And I don’t know who I was trying to convince, but I certainly didn’t convince Mum.
“Sweetheart, if you’d rather not go to the gala, then it doesn’t matter. We’ll just tell them you’re not feeling well.”
Mum and Toni weren’t coming to the gala, which meant Mum and Toni were safe. And to keep them safe, I needed to get Creepy Bob as far away from them as I could. Then I had to hope that outside of a nuclear bunker, Little Buckford was the safest place they could be. Because, legit – it’s always New York that gets blown up first in sci-fi movies. New York, then Washington, then London. Had to think a tiny, random village in the middle of Bum-Fiddle Cheshire would be pretty low down the list.
That’s what I had to hope. It was pretty much my only hope.
“Mum, I’m fine. Really, I am.” I took a deep breath, turned to Creepy Bob. “Sorry. I’m ready now.”
“Then we shall depart.”
I followed Creepy Bob back across the fields. The return leg took a little longer, mainly because I had to hitch up a continent’s worth of tulle any time a stile got involved in the equation.
Then I had to take Creepy Bob’s hand to clamber up through the open hatch and into the ship. And let me tell you, there is not enough brain bleach in the world to make me forget that.
(Or, you know, enough actual bleach to disinfect all the evil alien creepiness. Eurgh.)
The hatch came closed behind us with a distinct squelch. I only just managed to hide my shudder and then—
“Oh my god!”
—didn’t manage to even remotely hide my startle.
Kal. Standing there, half hidden in the shadows. He’d been so quiet and so still that I hadn’t even known he was there until my eyes knew he was there.
“Oh god, you gave me such a fright.”
“It doesn’t understand you, Hannah,” Creepy Bob said, all creepy condescension. “It has no capacity for independent thought, let alone speech.”
“Oh…sucks to be him, I guess?” And yeah, it so totally did.
Because now I knew to look for it, all I could see on Kal’s face was the compulsion, that blank, empty, awful look. And his freckles, they were still silver…but wrong somehow. All dull and waxy. No shine.
Kal – he didn’t look well at all.
“If you would come with me, Hannah,” Creepy Bob said, gesturing with her whole arm, so over the top, like one of those weirdly handsy waiters in fancy restaurants who won’t let you put your napkin in your own lap.
I didn’t know where I was supposed to be going, because the handsy-waiter gesture seemed to be directed right at a big, blank expanse of wall. But I went with it, and just as we got there, two doors appeared and then sort of sucked out of existence. There was a room beyond: circular, faintly slimy, maybe a couple of metres across.
It must’ve been some sort of fancy lift, but the doors hardly closed before they opened again. Kal stepped out and stood aside, and Creepy Bob looked like she was just about to handsy-waiter me again – until, that is, she stopped, head tilted, looking down at…
Oh god.
Looking down at the beacon, where I’d strung it round my neck with some copper wire I’d nicked from the Big Dish’s maintenance lab.
“Uh…” My heart thumped so hard I swore I felt it knock against my ribcage
“What an interesting piece of ornamentation,” Creepy Bob said.
“Uh…”
She reached out, took the beacon between her thumb and a four-knuckled finger, and I heard Colin’s voice in my head.
(Not in a telepathic alien way, just fyi. In an ominous flashback kind of way.)
It won’t stand close inspection.
How close was close? Was this close too close? I couldn’t take the chance. I had to try and distract her.
“Isn’t it, though?” I said, brittlely bright. “Interesting, I mean? My Uncle Desmond, right? The uncle I named Des after? Him? He’s got this thing about rocks. Like, not a weird thing though. He’s a geologist, and geologists are really big on rocks. Like, rocks get their rocks off, you know?”
“No,” Creepy Bob said, head beginning to cock in shades of confused as her gaze shifted from the beac
on up to me. “I do not know.”
“Anyway,” I barrelled on, “my Uncle Desmond’s like, ‘I found this really cool rock, Hannah,’ and I’m like, ‘Cut me off a slice of that, Uncle Des,’ and he did, and now I have this really cool rock necklace.”
That got another head tilt. The beacon got another creepy fondle. “I can’t say it feels overly cold.”
“Oh no, not like cold cool,” I said, babble still set to full blast. “Like, cool cool, you know?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Oh…”
Creepy Bob let the beacon drop. It smacked me hard in the sternum. “Ow,” I whispered as she stalked off.
(I keep saying stalked. She didn’t stalk. She gave the impression of stalking without actually stalking, because I don’t think you can stalk when your legs are five-foot-long pipe cleaners. So imagine a flamingo trying to stalk, but then also imagine the flamingo is an evil alien. That’s how Creepy Bob stalked. She stalked like a creepy evil alien flamingo.)
Kal didn’t follow Creepy Bob. He stayed where he was, did nothing but stare blankly into the middle distance, eyes dull and silver and not blinking at all.
“I’ll just…?” I did a handsy-waiter gesture of my own. “I’m guessing I’m supposed to…?”
But Kal ignored me. Or maybe he didn’t – I wasn’t sure if he even consciously knew I was there. And still he didn’t move, not until I’d stepped out of the squelchy space elevator too.
Then he slipped past me, out into the huge, open room beyond. There was a console there, one that looked a little similar to Colin’s, but the glass wasn’t white – instead, this weird, iridescent greeny-black that pulsed a little, reddish then a deeper red when Kal did something that made the engines kick up and my stomach swoop.
We were taking off.
I inched another step into…had to be the bridge, I guessed? It was a vast space anyway: this massive, rounded triangle, pointy at the back end, floor-to-ceiling windows up in front, and the console where Kal sat smack in the middle. But other than that, the room was empty. If there were any other Akanarin on board, they weren’t here. Just me and Kal and Creepy Bob.