Alien Disaster

by Rob May

  Their route took them close by smoking meteor craters and big piles of rubble that were once buildings. They had to find a diversion around a gaping hole in the middle of Royal College Street. Kat fell in beside Brandon as they hurried along, walking fast but definitely not running. ‘God, I hope Xander’s okay and his house is still standing,’ she said, seemingly suddenly remembering him as she stared at a ruined row of townhouses.

  ‘Do you know where he lives?’ Brandon asked her.

  ‘Nope,’ she admitted freely. ‘We didn’t actually do much talking.’

  Brandon said nothing. He didn’t know what to say.

  ‘He wouldn’t like to have come on this adventure though,’ Kat went on. ‘I think he would definitely have run straight to the police.’

  Brandon prepared to break it to Kat that Xander Jones was probably dead.

  But she suddenly changed the subject: ‘Doctor Kang seemed interested in your mum’s gizmo,’ she said. ‘Maybe he was a spy, placed at school to keep an eye on you and your family! What do you think?’

  Brandon shrugged. That was exactly what he thought. ‘I don’t know, Kat. He certainly wasn’t on the same side as the monsters though.’

  Jason chuckled. ‘Maybe we’re the spies, Bright Eyes. Keeping an eye on you. Or maybe … even … we’re aliens. In disguise. What do you think about that?’

  ‘You look ugly enough,’ Brandon shot back.

  St. Pancras Station was in chaos. Crowds of people swarmed around the enormous Victorian terminus, desperate to get on board the last trains leaving London that night. Brandon, Kat and Jason pushed their way inside. There were queues at the ticket booths and at the entrances to the platforms; and there were soldiers all around the station providing extra security and controlling the crowds. To get to the Brighton train they would have to push through two levels of shops and restaurants and then get another escalator down to the platform.

  They stood in the shadow of The Meeting Place—a nine-metre-tall bronze statue of an embracing couple. ‘We’ll never get to the train, with or without a ticket,’ Jason said. ‘Coming here was a stupid idea. We could have been halfway up the M1 if we had just gone home and taken Dad’s Merc, but instead this idiot’—he jabbed Brandon’s shoulder—‘wants to jump on a train and—’

  ‘Wait, stop,’ Brandon said suddenly.

  On the level below them, visible through the glass barriers on the balconies, Brandon had noticed a pair of soldiers stop a group of teenagers. One of the soldiers had some kind of handheld device like a camcorder that he was pointing at the kids.

  ‘They don’t look like regular troops,’ Kat observed.

  She was right. They looked like members of some kind of special ops team, dressed in black combat fatigues and Kevlar helmets with night-vision goggles attached. They were fully loaded with weapons: submachine guns, handguns in holsters, and assault vests with daggers and grenades clearly visible.

  The soldier with the handheld device seemed satisfied with his readings and waved the kids along. The two soldiers went back to scanning the crowd.

  ‘They’re looking for us,’ Brandon was certain. ‘Whatever’s interesting to mutant aliens is bound to be just as interesting to secret government agencies.’

  ‘It’s more likely they’re just looking for you if they’ve been watching your family,’ Jason said. ‘Give me the thingy and I’ll get it past them.’

  ‘Okay, but they’re still going to stop me anyway,’ Brandon said.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Kat said. ‘I’ll distract them.’ She looked up at the departure boards. ‘We’d better be quick: the last train to Brighton leaves at eleven. We’ve got five minutes. Split up and meet on the train!’

  ‘Alright,’ Brandon agreed. ‘But don’t do anything stupid. Shouting fire! or something in a crowded station isn’t a very cool thing to do.’

  ‘Trust me!’ she grinned.

  Brandon reluctantly handed the cylinder to Jason, who set off into the crowds, taking a roundabout route to the Brighton platform. Then Brandon started moving, head down, following a different path. He took the stairs down to the lower level then cut through WH Smith to avoid the black-clad soldiers. He was almost at the Brighton turnstiles when another soldier came out of nowhere and blocked his path. The man was tall and imposing, with skin as black as his uniform. He knelt in front of Brandon and tried to smile.

  ‘Hi Brandon,’ he said in a patronising tone. ‘I’m Lieutenant Hewson. Are you alright? Are you looking for your family?’

  Brandon tried his best to look confused. ‘My name’s Jason Brown,’ he said.

  The man took a closer look, peering into Brandon’s violet eyes. Nearby, one of the other soldiers was pointing the scanning device at Brandon. ‘Facial recognition positive, Sir,’ he reported. ‘That’s Brandon Walker.’

  Just off to one side, Brandon saw Kat running through the crowds, keeping her distance but close enough for the soldiers to see. Brandon’s adrenaline surged and time seemed to slow down. His eyes flickered around, taking in distances and obstacles. He heard Kat shouting and waving her arms. ‘There’s an alien in the toilets!’ she screamed, loud enough to stop people in their tracks. When Brandon saw the soldiers’ heads jerk around and their hands go to their guns, he made his move. He launched his body to one side, then dived into a crowd of startled people. In the other direction, Kat tipped over a table in front of Starbucks, spilling mochas and cappuccinos everywhere, adding to the chaos as people jumped up and started arguing and shouting.

  Brandon raced around the concourse and when he judged the confusion to have peaked, he vaulted the turnstiles and hurtled down the final escalator. He ran down the platform and threw himself aboard the Brighton train.

  Looking back down the platform he saw Kat racing towards the train, just as the doors were starting to close. Brandon held them open and called out to her. Nobody seemed to be following her; she must have given the soldiers the slip. Brandon caught Kat in his arms as she hopped up. They both fell back and collapsed on the floor as the train pulled away and out of the station.

  They found Jason a few carriages down, sitting at a plastic table and rolling the cylinder back and forth across its surface. Brandon and Kat sat down opposite him. Jason rolled the cylinder over to Brandon. ‘Thanks Jason,’ he said. Jason just grunted.

  Kat was laughing. ‘Did you see the way they reacted?’ she said. ‘When they pulled out their guns, everyone went nuts. They really must be expecting aliens.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Brandon said. ‘I’ll only really believe that it’s aliens though when I see a great big flying saucer swoop down out of the sky. Until then we have to keep an open mind. We have to find evidence!’

  ‘Right now we know nothing about anything,’ Jason observed.

  ‘Story of your life,’ Kat teased.

  ‘We know that someone is out to destroy this cylinder,’ Brandon said. ‘And now that they’ve run out of meteors, they’re sending those brutes after us. I wonder how they found us at the school.’

  ‘If they do have a spaceship,’ Kat said, ‘then they might be scrutinising us from outer-space.’

  ‘If they have a spaceship,’ Brandon repeated. ‘I wish I could work out how to open this.’ He was examining the cylinder as he spoke. It had the same weight and feel as a Maglite torch, with the same kind of raised and textured areas, but he could still find no obvious way to open it … if it could actually be opened.

  ‘I just hope that they can’t scrutinise us now that we’re on a speeding train,’ Jason said. He was constantly looking out of the window.

  They sat in silence for a while. As the train cleared London, they looked back and saw flames flickering over rooftops. An ugly glow covered the city: London was burning. The meteor impacts would generate a great deal of heat, Brandon reflected; it was easy to imagine fire catching and spreading through London’s densely-packed buildings.

  It wasn’t long before the train began to slow down.

  Three Bri
dges station. They had cleared the M25—the motorway that circled London—but it was still too close for Brandon’s liking. Somewhere up there was a huge meteor that everyone thought was going to miss Earth.

  He looked out onto the platform when the train doors opened. There weren’t so many crowds here, and most people were getting off, but Brandon carefully evaluated everyone who boarded. He was happy to see that there were no scary creatures or armed soldiers.

  A smartly-dressed man in his fifties sat down nearby—the only other passenger in their carriage. He unfolded a large broadsheet newspaper until he was almost completely hidden behind it.

  ‘Have you ever actually tried reading a paper that big?’ Brandon whispered, trying to lighten the mood. ‘It’s impossible. Your arms ache after five minutes.’

  Kat giggled, but Jason just gave Brandon a blank look as if to say, Who even reads newspapers?

  ‘Brandon,’ Kat said. ‘What if Brighton’s been overtaken by aliens? What if they’ve captured your mum and we have to sneak in and rescue her? Or what if—’

  ‘What if she’s already dead?’ Brandon said. The shocked look on her face told him that she actually hadn’t considered that possibility. ‘Sorry Kat, I don’t mean to be pessimistic. I just don’t know what we’ll find.’

  Kat’s happy face turned glum.

  Brandon got up from his seat. ‘I’m just going to the …’ he said, nodding towards the end of the carriage.

  ‘The bog, yeah,’ Jason said. ‘Don’t fall in.’

  Brandon walked slowly down the carriage, looking at his reflection in the windows as he went. They were in the middle of pitch black countryside, so for all he knew they were surrounded by UFOs or stealth jets or big flying alien worms. He smiled at his own imagination.

  He glanced at the headlines of the man’s newspaper as he passed him in the aisle. It was the morning edition, printed before the meteors started to fall. The front page picture was the Prime Minister visiting Paris and meeting the President of France. Brandon wondered what tomorrow’s headlines would be. Would The Times even manage to get out a Sunday edition?

  He reached for the cubicle door. Before he could grab the handle, the door was flung open, and Brandon fell backwards to the floor as one of the huge brutish creatures stepped out. This one was wearing dirty blue overalls, and was toting what could only be a laser gun: a shiny metallic weapon with a transparent barrel in which blue energy flashed about like bottled lightning.

  The brute aimed down at Brandon as soon as it saw him. Brandon rolled to one side. He heard a fizzing sound and smelled burned carpet. Then Jason and Kat were there. Maybe they instinctively knew that there was nowhere to run on a train, or maybe they even had some kind of crazy plan.

  ‘Grab its legs!’ Jason ordered as he held on to the brute’s gun barrel and tried to point it away from them. Kat wrapped her arms around its thigh. ‘This is a citizen’s arrest!’ she shouted. Brandon tried to unbalance the brute by lifting its foot off the ground.

  The thing just roared and shrugged them all off. It pointed the laser gun again at Brandon, whose fast reactions saved his life: he tilted his head to one side as a bright blue laser beam fired out and blasted a hole straight through the carriage’s bodywork. Then the brute caught sight of the man with the newspaper, who was trying to leave his seat as calmly as he could manage. The brute zapped him dead.

  But immediately after that there was an extremely loud clattering sound, and the ugly creature dropped dead with a multitude of bloody bullet wounds in its chest and head. Brandon turned to look, and saw Lieutenant Hewson at the other end of the carriage, standing in a firing position and still aiming down the sights of his submachine gun. Two of his men were behind him, both with readied weapons.

  Hewson lowered his gun and began to walk forward. ‘It was a mistake to run last time, Brandon,’ he said, his expression serious. ‘You’re in a lot of danger. Come with us and we’ll protect you.’

  Brandon, Jason and Kat all stood up slowly. Kat wiped the brute’s sticky blood off her glasses. ‘Protect us from what?’ Brandon challenged. He kicked the still twitching foot of the creature. ‘From these guys? Do you even know who they are?’

  Hewson hesitated a moment, then said, ‘Do you?’

  He has no idea, Brandon thought. Then Hewson suddenly raised his gun again. For one awful moment Brandon feared that Hewson was going to shoot him, then he sensed movement behind him: three more brutes had piled out of the cubicle and into the carriage.

  Kat grabbed Brandon’s arm and pulled him out of the aisle and down between the seats. Two of the brutes were unarmed and charged up the carriage while the other one fired lasers at rapid speed. Hewson fired again, unloading ten rounds of nine millimetre bullets in a single second and killing one of the charging brutes. Then he was forced to drop his gun and engage the other in hand-to-hand combat.

  ‘We’ve got to get off this train!’ Jason yelled from where he was crouched across the aisle, underneath a table.

  ‘Will we get fined if we use the emergency stop?’ Kat shouted back.

  The other soldiers couldn’t get a line of sight while their commanding officer was wrestling with the enemy. While they were trying to find a target, a window shattered, and yet another brute swung in and cannonballed into both soldiers, knocking them off their feet.

  Lieutenant Hewson had managed to pull out his knife—a wicked-looking six-inch blade with a serrated edge—and was hacking at his opponent. Dark red blood was spurting out of the brute’s shoulder, but it kept on fighting, trying to pin Hewson to the carriage floor.

  The brute with the laser gun was inching up the length of the carriage. When it had passed the table that Jason was under, he jumped up, ran to the doors and hit the emergency stop button. All three soldiers and three brutes were thrown about the carriage as the train’s air brakes slashed its velocity.

  Both Kat and Jason started kicking out at the head of the brute that was sprawled on the floor. As they did that, Brandon was thinking: his mind focusing on the situation despite the chaos around him. The doors wouldn’t open until the train was at a complete stop—if they opened at all. The only immediate exit was through the window or—

  Past the open door of the toilet cubicle he could see how the brutes had gained entrance.

  ‘The roof,’ he said, pointing up to the hole that the creatures had cut. He led the way, climbing up using the hand dryer and toilet roll dispenser as footholds. Up on the roof there was no sign of whatever vehicle had dropped off the brutes. He turned back and helped Kat up and then Jason. The brute was still after them; its clawed hands grabbed the lip of the hole in the roof and it prepared to pull itself up. Jason took the fire axe that he was still carrying out of his belt and brought it down on the brute’s fingers. They chopped clean off, and the creature fell back into the cubicle.

  The train was coming to a grinding halt in the middle of a stretch of dark countryside. The only light came from the north, where London was glowing orange, red and yellow. The flames lit up grey clouds of smoke that hung above the wounded city.

  It was all Brandon could do to take his eyes off the sight. ‘Let’s get down as soon as it’s safe,’ he said, turning to face the twins. ‘We’ll just have to make a run for it across the fields.’

  Kat was pointing over his shoulder, her mouth open in shock. He turned back to look, and saw something that he’d never ever forget.

  A titanic meteor.

  It must have been two hundred metres across; as big as the Olympic Stadium. When it hit the centre of London, it hit with the energy equal to that of a hundred megatons of TNT. It was the biggest explosion that the world had seen for ten thousand years.

  The sound wave hit them with an almost physical force and they all fell over on the roof of the train. Then the shock wave lifted the whole train off the tracks and slammed it back down several feet to one side. Brandon, Jason and Kat all rolled off the roof and fell onto a grassy slope. As he tumbled down head over he
els, Brandon could feel the hot wind from the explosion blasting at his skin.

  Then he rolled to a stop. He lay there, eyes closed, expecting to feel the pain from the inevitable injury.

  The pain didn’t come. But still, he almost didn’t dare open his eyes.

  An hour later: a country lane. The darkness was absolute.

  ‘Turn the lights back on!’ Kat squealed.

  ‘Alright!’ Jason snapped. ‘I just twisted the lever the wrong way, that’s all.’ He flicked the headlights back on, then pulled the lever back to turn on full beam.

  Luckily for Brandon, he was oblivious—slumped in the passenger seat of the stolen car, drifting restlessly in and out of sleep. His body ached in several places, but he was more tired than anything.

  They were driving as fast as Jason dared down dark country roads towards the south coast. The mysterious metal cylinder rolled around in the footwell. They had given up trying to guess what it was or what it did. Their only aim was to get to the last-known location of Brandon’s mother and look for answers.

  Jason pulled up in front of a sign at a junction. ‘Okay, which way?’ he asked impatiently. ‘Cuckfield? Cowfold? Is this Narnia? Where the hell are we?’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a main road somewhere that goes straight down to Brighton from London,’ Kat said. She was sharing the passenger seat with Brandon. ‘The M23 turns into … well, it must be the A … the A23?’

  ‘Well, obviously!’ Jason argued, as if he knew this all along. ‘The problem is that I can’t get there from here, because I don’t know where there is and I don’t know where here is.’ He pulled away in the direction of Cowfold without explaining his decision.

  The cool night air came in through the open window on the driver’s side door. They had found the car—an old gunmetal two-seater MG—in the barn of a farm that they had stumbled across while fleeing the train wreck. Jason had straight away got excited about attempting to hot-wire the car, while Kat and Brandon were still reeling in shock from the events that had interrupted their train journey. In less than ten minutes, Jason had popped off the ignition cover and found the starter and power wires. One spark later, and the engine was humming.