by Rob May
ALIEN DISASTER
Published in 2012 by Rob May
robertwilliammay.com
Copyright 2012 Rob May
Story by Rob May and Andy Strickland
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Rob May studied English at Lancaster University. He is the illustrator for Super Maths World and Super Science World. Alien Disaster is his debut novel. Visit robertwilliammay.com for news and bonus content.
CHAPTER ONE—STRIKE
CHAPTER TWO—SCHOOL
CHAPTER THREE—ESCAPE
CHAPTER FOUR—DRIVE
CHAPTER FIVE—TSUNAMI
CHAPTER SIX—SAUCER
CHAPTER SEVEN—QUAKE
CHAPTER EIGHT—DISASTER
CHAPTER NINE—LEGACY
CHAPTER TEN—DISCORD
CHAPTER ELEVEN—TEMPEST
CHAPTER TWELVE—CRASH
Brandon Walker rolled out of bed at half ten on Saturday morning. Wearing his duvet like a cape, he resettled on a beanbag on his bedroom floor in front of his massive TV. He powered up his stereo and his games console, put his music on shuffle, and then started up a game.
It was the middle of a long hot August. Brandon was fourteen, and could think of nothing better to do with his time.
Half an hour later he put down the controller. He had defeated more than twenty other top-ranking players in a series of closely-fought spaceship battles. His thumbs ached; it was time for a rest. Checking the leaderboards, he was slightly annoyed to see that he was still only number two in the world.
Brandon reached for his phone. He had a new message from one of his gamer friends. It read: watch the skies.
Watch the skies? What was that supposed to mean? Too bad the curtains were still drawn. Brandon shrugged and turned his attention back to the TV. He loaded up a different game and spent the next hour fighting his way methodically through an underground dungeon filled with goblins and giant spiders. At around midday he started to think about breakfast.
He pulled open the curtains and squinted into the sunlight. Then he got dressed, throwing off his duvet and pulling on dark blue jeans and a black v-necked t-shirt. He strapped on a Swatch watch and forced his hands through the tangles in his thick black hair.
Glancing at his reflection in his full-length mirror, Brandon was reminded that his low-key style couldn’t quite tone down the striking gaze of his unusual eyes. They were deep violet, and the light reflected off them in kaleidoscopic patterns. Apart from that, he thought, I’m fairly normal. He turned off his music halfway through a song and then left the room.
Brandon’s quarters were in the attic extension of the large family home. He checked his phone before he started down the stairs; he had another message from a different friend: it’s the end of the world as we know it and i feel fine.
Something was definitely up, but he had no time for his friends’ riddles. Brandon typed an explicit reply, then pocketed his phone and went downstairs.
He walked into the spacious open-plan kitchen. The news was on the big TV and his father was pacing in front of the wide range oven, anxiously listening to his own phone. ‘Morning, Dad,’ Brandon said. ‘Afternoon, I mean. What’s going on?’
‘I’m trying to get hold of your mother,’ his father replied, looking worried. ‘Have you seen what’s happening?’ He gestured towards the TV. Brandon turned to look and caught the story halfway through:
‘… the largest of which are about five metres in diameter. Now experts are saying that these small asteroids—or meteoroids—are expected to disintegrate when they hit the Earth’s atmosphere, but this does mean that lots of smaller chunks of rock will fall as meteors over London. There is no way of predicting precisely where …’
That kind of explained the odd messages that he had been getting. Brandon turned back to his father. ‘That’s pretty scary, Dad. Even a meteor the size of your head could take out a whole street.’ Brandon read a lot of science books when he wasn’t playing video games.
‘Don’t make me more worried than I already am, Son,’ his father said, turning back to his phone. He jabbed at the screen impatiently. Brandon’s father was an art gallery curator; he had little time for modern technology.
Brandon picked up the TV remote and flicked through the other news channels. He read that ATLAS—the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, a network of space observation stations around the UK—had spotted a cluster of about a hundred irregularly-shaped objects just hours away from Earth.
‘But when exactly are they going to hit?’ he wondered aloud. He navigated to the more detailed online reports. Then his phone vibrated in his pocket. It was his mother calling. ‘Hi—’ he began.
‘Brandon! Don’t say anything.’
Brandon just stood there with the phone to his ear.
‘Is your dad there?’ his mother continued.
‘Yep.’
‘Okay, go to the study where he can’t hear. I need a favour.’
Brandon casually moved back into the hall, then into his mother’s wood-panelled study. He kicked the door shut behind him. ‘He’s trying to reach you, Mum.’
‘I know. I’ll call him in a bit,’ his mother said. ‘I’ve been busy; I’m not at the hospital today.’
‘Okay …’ Brandon left it hanging.
‘I’ll explain later,’ she said. ‘Brandon, I need you to go to the lab and pick something up for me.’ Brandon’s mother was a doctor, a consultant with her own research laboratory at nearby Highgate Hospital. ‘But keep it quiet. You can’t tell anyone; not even your father.’
‘Alright. What am I going to get?’
‘I can’t tell you that either. Just enter the lab by the back door, and when you get inside, check your phone. I’ll mark the exact location for you on your map.’
Brandon smiled. Someone had said a similar thing to him already this morning. In a video game. ‘Mum, how will I get into the lab? Isn’t it all top secret and high security down there?’
‘I’ve thought of that,’ his mother said. ‘Go to the picture of you and Gem on the wall.’
Brandon went and stood in front of the picture of him and his older sister posing with surfboards in the sea on holiday in Devon. ‘Okay.’
‘There’s a safe behind the picture. The combination is one, nine, nine, one.’ Brandon entered the numbers on the keypad and the small door opened with a soft click. Inside, the safe was empty, except for a small memory card that was protected by a toughened metal jacket.
‘What’s on this?’ he asked.
‘Just some data from the tests we ran on your eyes a few years ago. Send me the files now, and I’ll make sure that security recognises your unique retinal pattern.’ She paused. ‘You need to do it now, okay?’
‘Okay. Have you seen the news?’
‘I’ve seen it. Don’t worry about that; you’ve got time. I’ll talk to you later. Thanks, Brandon!’ Then she hung up.
I should have gotten up earlier to deal with everything that’s going on today, Brandon thought. He slotted the card into his phone, ran the contents through an encryption program—he had been brought up to be very security-conscious online—and emailed them to his mother.
Why was she keeping his files on a dedicated card, in a safe? That was a bit extreme, even for her. And what was so important that needed collecting from the lab, today of all days? Medical research was a competitive and secretive industry, so Brandon guessed it had something to do with that.
He paused for a moment before leaving the study; it wasn’t often that he ca
me in here. There was a computer on the large oak desk, and two more pictures on the walls: one of his mum and dad eating ice-cream on a sea-side pier when they were young; and another of the whole family posing in front of Stonehenge.
Brandon wasn’t the snooping kind. He left and closed the door behind him.
He went through the utility room on his way to the garage. His sister was in there, having just got back from a run. She was leaning into the wall, with one of her long legs stretched up so that her foot was above her head. Gem Walker was eighteen years old and taller than her brother. She was dressed in technical-looking running gear that was glossy black with lots of hot pink tubing.
‘What are you doing?’ Brandon asked her. ‘Yoga?’
She dropped her leg, and turned to face her brother, regarding him with her usual cool and amused expression. ‘I need to be supple,’ she explained, brushing her long damp black hair out of her eyes, ‘so that I’m ready whenever I might need to kick you in the face.’
Brandon had no response to that. ‘Tell Dad I’ll be back in a bit,’ he said, but Gem had already gone upstairs.
He went into the garage and pulled his Kona mountain bike down from the rack. He strapped on his helmet and then hit a button on his phone to activate the garage door mechanism. He kicked the pedals into position and hopped up onto them, balancing impatiently until the door was high enough to get under and out. But then a looming figure blocked his exit.
It was James—Gem’s boyfriend. He was tall, blonde, solidly built and square-jawed. He wore a blue polo shirt and khaki trousers. An expensive-looking steel diving watch hung around his wrist. ‘Hey Bran,’ he said. ‘Is Gem about?’
‘She’s just got back from a run,’ Brandon told him. ‘She must have just got in the shower.’
‘Oh right. Okay then.’ James went red for some reason. He looked intently at Brandon’s bike. ‘So what’s new on the bike?’
‘Semi-slick tyres,’ Brandon replied, twisting the front wheel to show them off. ‘I take it you’ve not seen the news.’
‘About the meteors? Yeah, I heard. Don’t worry about it. We’re advising people not to panic. The meteors could hit anywhere in Greater London—that’s an area of almost two thousand square kilometres; and there are almost ten million people living here. Even if a meteor big enough to destroy a house hits, the chances of it hitting yours are tiny. You’re more likely to get knocked off your bike by a car.’
Brandon shrugged. He could believe that. It was quite normal for James to be so well-informed: he had some low-level post-graduate job in the government press office, but liked to joke that he was really in the Secret Intelligence Service. He was taking helicopter lessons to further extend his double-oh-seven fantasy.
‘Anyway,’ James said, ‘I’m taking Gem out looking for shooting stars.’
‘Up in the chopper?’
‘Up in the chopper! The first meteors are expected tonight. Want to come along?’
‘Maybe,’ Brandon said. Gem would definitely not want him to come along.
James playfully punched Brandon on the shoulder before heading inside. Something about James’ intense friendliness irked Brandon. Gem seemed to like him though.
Brandon sped out of the garage and into the suburban streets of affluent North London. As he freewheeled down the hill he pressed a button on his phone and—even though he was half a kilometre away by now—the garage door slowly shut behind him.
Pedalling fast through the tree-lined avenues of Highgate, Brandon saw people coming out of their houses and looking up at the sky. What they didn’t know—but Brandon did—was that at the moment a meteor appears in the sky, it is then only about a hundred kilometres from the ground, and only about five seconds from impact.
In other words, there would be no time to run. It was probably best just not to worry about it.
He saw his science teacher, Doctor Kang, standing at a corner with a clipboard. Doctor Kang was wearing his white lab coat even though it was the holidays. ‘Hey, Sir,’ Brandon called as he sailed past. ‘Don’t get hit by a meteor!’ Doctor Kang was too busy making notes to notice Brandon.
He rode down to Highgate Cemetery. His mother’s place of work was an outbuilding of the nearby hospital, and adjacent to the cemetery. For some reason though, there was a back door located within the graveyard itself. The main gate to the East Cemetery was closed, but Brandon rode down to a spot a little further on, where a lamppost stood near the iron railings. He propped his bike between them, climbed up with help from the lamppost, pulled his bike up after him—the carbon frame meant that the bike weighed less than ten kilograms—and dropped down easily amongst the graves.
It was still and quiet in the leafy lanes of London’s city of the dead. Brandon had been here many times before, to look for the graves of famous scientists and writers such as Michael Faraday and Douglas Adams. The place was a maze of paths—some narrow and overgrown—that you needed a map to navigate. As he steered his bike past the famous giant stone head of Karl Marx he didn’t see any other visitors or tourists. No doubt they had other things to worry about today, like getting hit on the head by a rock from outer space.
He turned into a narrow path that had almost been lost under a creeping thicket of trees and ivy. When Brandon arrived at his destination, finally emerging in a secluded clearing in the corner of the cemetery, he discovered that he wasn’t alone after all.
The mausoleum that hid a secret door was guarded. As he slowed down and dismounted from his bike, two figures got up from where they were sitting and walked out to meet him.
One of them was swinging a pointed metal stick that looked like it had been torn off some iron railings. The other, the bigger of the two, hefted a dangerous-looking chunk of rock.
‘Hey, it’s Bright Eyes Brandon!’ the big one said. ‘What are you doing here, you freak?’
Brandon took a breath to compose himself. ‘Jason,’ he acknowledged.
Jason Brown was stocky and brawny with a number one crew cut. His twin sister Kat was small and skinny and her dyed-red hair looked like it had been styled with a bread knife. She wore black plastic specs. They both wore denim in various fades and Doc Marten boots. They looked tough and acted tough, but Brandon knew their parents were rich city bankers; Jason and Kat had an easier life than most. What were they doing here?
‘Well, Bright Eyes?’ Jason said. ‘Have you come to … apologise?’
Brandon tried to keep his head down when he was at school, but his violet eyes made him an easy target. Maybe it was because he didn’t seek attention that he got it. He tried not to care; he never showed that he cared.
‘Maybe you should be apologising to me,’ Brandon countered, ‘for not only getting me a week in detention, but also for making me go through it with you!’
The previous term at school the three of them had been grouped together in science class to work through a practical experiment. While Brandon had calmly gone through the process of measuring the rate of reaction of sodium hydroxide in water, Jason and Kat had fooled around and paid no attention. But when Doctor Kang had picked on their group to explain their results to the rest of the class, Brandon had remained silent, leaving Jason and Kat to splutter random nonsense that made them all look like fools. A fight ensued at the end of the lesson, and a series of detentions for all involved quickly followed.
Jason couldn’t think of a smart answer. ‘Look out—meteor attack!’ he said, hurling one of his rocks.
Brandon didn’t budge. His reactions were so fast that sometimes he imagined that he saw the world in slow motion. He could see in an instant that Jason’s rock was aimed to land at his feet, and probably wouldn’t bounce in the soft earth, so he did his best not to flinch. When the rock missed Brandon by a matter of centimetres, Jason actually growled.
‘Jason, come on! We need to get this door open,’ Kat said, hovering anxiously behind him. The mausoleum was about the size of a single garage, carved in grey marble with a sloping roof
and supporting buttresses. It was modern, despite its classical design. The wooden door was adorned with a single word: Paran. Brandon didn’t know who that was, but he knew that behind the door was a staircase that led to an underground tunnel.
‘Is this really the best time to go tomb raiding?’ he asked, trying to think of the best way to quickly get past—or get rid of—the twins.
‘Nope, but we thought it might be a good place to hide from the asteroids,’ Kat said. ‘There are supposed to be secret underground crypts down there!’ She rapped on the wooden door with her stick. She had evidently been trying to use it as a crowbar; the door was already splintered near the lock.
‘Is this your family tomb or something?’ Jason asked. ‘We saw your hot sister running around here before you showed up.’
Brandon ignored Jason’s question. He was wondering if Gem ran through the cemetery often. ‘You don’t really need to be hiding,’ he said. ‘The probability of—’
‘Don’t start boring us with maths,’ Jason warned him. ‘School doesn’t start for three more weeks.’
‘But listen,’ Brandon persisted, ‘The chance of—’
Jason suddenly lunged forward and Brandon hopped to the side to avoid being caught in a headlock. Jason just tried to barge into him instead, and they ended up locked in a wrestling hold, each trying desperately to unbalance the other. Jason was stronger and heavier, but Brandon was quicker with his feet and managed to find a secure footing that would unbalance his opponent. Except when Jason toppled over he brought Brandon down with him, and together they crashed into the mausoleum door head first, breaking it open.
Brandon and Jason disengaged and picked themselves up off the floor. Brandon pulled off his cycle helmet and threw it down. Jason was rubbing his forehead. Behind the wooden door that they had just demolished was a small space and then another door—this one made of thick reinforced steel.
‘Why is there another door?’ Kat asked.
Brandon looked around and noticed a tiny camera lens just above the doorframe. As he looked up at it, the door made a soft click and opened inwards slightly. ‘The camera recognised my eyeball’s retina pattern,’ he explained, pushing the door open. ‘It’s not a crypt. My mum works here. I need to go in and get something—’