I shook my head.
“Not even hardly,” I said.
Lilly raised an eyebrow.
“My parents were barely getting along,” I explained. “Now it’s like nothing ever happened to disturb their happiness.”
“Is that so bad?”
“Not if you like lies so much you want to live one,” I snapped. “My dad ran off, and I don’t see why we should forget it. Forgive it? Sure, we could do that. But forget? Forget the sadness he caused? That would be plain wrong.”
“You think that sadness is better than happiness?”
“No. But it is important.”
“Because we learn from it?” Lilly asked.
I nodded.
“The real question is: do we tell the others?” I said.
“Tell them what?”
“That they just have to go to Naylor’s farm and the nightmare’s over for them.”
“There are few enough of us around as it is,” Lilly said. “Why on earth would we want to tell them that?”
A secret then.
Shared between Lilly and me.
I liked that.
We walked down the road to meet the other two.
CHAPTER 35
We joined up with the others and we told our lie.
Nothing happened, we said.
It almost made me want to retract the lie when Kate O’Donnell gave us a triumphant I-told-you-so look, but Lilly and I had made our pact of silence, so we just fell into step with her and Mr. Peterson and carried on down the road.
My stomach felt empty and hollow and I wished one of us had the foresight to bring some kind of provisions along. It had been a long time since I had last eaten.
That made me think of the second can of Red Bull, and I put my hand in my pocket to pull it out. There was a dull, metallic sound as if the can had hit against something in the pocket, but I didn’t think about it at the time, because I was already greedily pulling the ring pull and taking a couple of sips. I handed the can to Lilly and she smiled, drank a bit, handed it back.
I offered the can to the adults—Mr. Peterson took a drink, Kate just frowned at the can and shook her head—and we kept on walking.
It was Mr. Peterson who heard it first.
I turned around and saw that he had stopped in the middle of the road behind us. He had his head cocked to the left and was cupping his ear with his hand. I motioned to Lilly and Kate and walked back to where he was standing.
“You okay there, Mr. P?” I asked.
He looked exhausted, his face red and blotchy, dark shadows under his eyes, and his graying hair was sticking out at strange angles.
“Can you hear it?” he asked in a breathless voice, and he sounded so earnest and … and afraid I guess, and it contrasted with the silly cupped ear thing that I almost burst out laughing.
Almost.
But then I heard it too.
Lilly and Kate had joined us but I hardly noticed them arrive.
I was listening to the sound.
That is if sound is the right word for it. Because it seemed like it was made up of a lot of sounds: a high-pitched hiss like gas escaping at pressure from a ruptured pipe; an insectile chitter like a locust swarm; that deep, bass vibration we’d heard in the village; a high, keening wail.
It sounded distant.
But not that distant.
Certainly not distant enough.
And I realized that I had heard the sound before, back at Kate O’Donnell’s house, just before she shut her computer down.
“What is that?” Kate asked.
“Nothing good,” I said.
The noise drew closer.
I’m not exaggerating, my skin bristled with gooseflesh.
There was something about the sound that hit me at a primal level, like the sound of a tyrannosaur must have put the fear into a tiny mammal that stumbled into its killing grounds.
Closer, the sound was terrifying.
It sounded like something was out there in the half-light, getting closer and closer to us with every passing second. Something awful, something dangerous, something that we could not even begin to imagine the shape or size of.
We started walking, moving away from the sound. It was all there was to do. Whatever was out there was coming after us, I was certain.
Lilly’s walking pace speeded up, and we all matched her speed.
Everyone’s face reflected their fear.
Fear of whatever was making that sound.
Getting closer with every second.
CHAPTER 36
We ran.
A jog became a run became a sprint and still that sound was close on our heels.
My eyes were squeezed shut and I had stopped thinking of anything except that noise behind us.
Suddenly, I realized: the noise was no longer behind us.
It was to the side of us.
Running parallel to the road, across the fields, shadowing us.
Running parallel to us.
Running to overtake us.
Except, of course, running isn’t the right word for it at all. Sure, I could hear it crashing through the undergrowth at great speed, but there were no footsteps. Just this weird phasing static that was more like some stereo-panning effect from a video game than an actual sound in the real world.
I opened my eyes and started scanning the hedges by the side of the road for a sign of the thing that was making such a terrible noise. I could see nothing there, and that made me even more terrified. I ran faster.
I’ve never been particularly athletic, but I think I could have run for the Olympics if I’d matched the speed I was making then, spurred on by that inhuman sound.
I was even starting to feel that I might outrun it.
Suddenly, Lilly screamed my name.
CHAPTER 37
The sound pulled me back to the real world.
I turned my head to face forwards.
Just in time.
I killed the speed. Ground to a halt and stood there, gasping for air.
I realized that Lilly had just saved my life.
The thing that had been following us, then moving alongside us, had now overtaken us.
It was waiting there, directly in front of me.
Blocking my way forwards.
It’s not easy to describe it. In fact, the more I think about it, it’s probably easier to talk about what this thing wasn’t, than to struggle with what it was. I mean, I don’t think the thing was solid, and I’m reasonably sure that it didn’t have a form that the human eye could recognize. It didn’t look alive, but it didn’t look not-alive, either. It didn’t look natural, but it didn’t look entirely unnatural.
Oh, yeah, I’m making a good job of this.
Let me try again.
It seemed more like something missing from this world, than something added to it. It was as if there were a tear in the skin of our world, and it had revealed this terrible thing beneath it.
At the time, I remember thinking about those pictures you see in anatomy books, when they show a person, and then the bones and muscles inside them.
You strip away the skin of this world, I thought, and this is what you find hiding underneath.
“What in God’s name is it?” Kate O’Donnell asked, and I saw her cross herself.
I shook my head.
It was too much.
This tear in the world had been following us, hunting us, and now it had us.
And we were too tired and too scared to do anything about it.
It moved closer, pushing against the surface of our world and making the air seem to bulge as it did. I stood there wondering what stuff this … thing, this tear was made of, and I wondered what it would do to us when it reached us: whether it would hurt; whether it would dissolve us, melt us, or suck us through into its cold blackness until we were nothing.
There were tears streaming down my cheeks, and I could feel the cold breath of infinity roaring in my face.
&nbs
p; “Hey!” someone shouted from somewhere behind me. “Are you going to just stand there and let that thing wipe you off the face of the planet?”
I turned around.
Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
By the side of the road, standing straight and tall, stood Danny. He nodded towards the tear in space and cocked his head to one side.
“If you have any interest in surviving the next few seconds,” he said, “then I suggest you toss over that video camera you picked up on the green.”
I thought, The video camera? What is he talking about?
The air bulged again and the tear moved closer.
I thought, How does he know I’m carrying his mum’s video camera?
Danny said, “Quickly. Throw it here.”
I reached down and fumbled the camera out of my pocket. Lights were flashing on its tiny casing.
It had switched itself on when the can of drink hit it.
It had been filming the inside of my pocket all that time.
“Do it now,” Danny advised, and I threw it over to him. He caught it in one hand and switched it off.
Then he smiled and nodded towards the tear in space. It was already drawing back, moving away, as if its interest in us—the interest that had it screaming across the countryside—had suddenly ended.
“Danny, what the—?” I started, but Danny shut me up with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“I guess you all have questions,” Danny said, and his face suddenly looked sad. “Follow me and I’ll try to answer some of them for you.”
Then the sad look was gone.
He turned and started walking into the field behind him, away from that terrible patch of moving darkness, away from the road, away from Millgrove, away from Crowley.
After a few seconds, we followed.
We trudged across a field sun-baked into clay, following Danny Birnie in pursuit of answers. Danny had been there at the start of all this, and there was something right about his being here now.
I realized that I was afraid. Not of the terrible thing that had been seconds away from destroying us, but afraid of my friend.
Of Danny.
Of what he had become.
He walked quickly, neither slowing down nor turning to check that we were keeping up with him. Or if we were even following him, for that matter.
The sky was almost full dark now, with a summer-stuffed moon looming on the horizon, surrounded by wisps of cloud and tiny, icy chips of starlight.
For centuries humankind had stared up into a sky like that and wondered whether they were alone in the universe.
Now I thought we had our answer.
A dark, tall shape loomed out of the darkness ahead of us and Danny led us towards it. Eventually the shape resolved itself out of the near dark, revealed itself to be an old, ramshackle barn on the edge of the field.
“I guess here is as good as anywhere,” Danny said.
He walked into the barn.
It was no longer Danny, I was certain of that. He was one of them. This could be a trap, an ambush, a massacre.
But he might really have answers.
Answers we needed.
We followed him into the barn.
Quietly.
Like cattle.
Or …
EDITOR’S NOTE
The last break in the narrative as the end of the tape once more gets in the way. Howard Tillinghast sees this break as crucial: “This is the point at which innocence breathes its last gasp of oxygen, before revelation takes it away, forever.”
… last side of the last tape I can find. It’s one of Dad’s mix tapes that he makes for the car so he can embarrass us with his bizarre musical taste on long journeys.
Still, I guess we’re almost through now. There’s not a whole lot more to tell.
Only the bad stuff.
The stuff I don’t even want to think about.
This might get a little mixed up, but bear with me, I need to work out the best way to tell you the things I have to tell you.
I wonder if anyone’s listening.
If you are, then I need you to believe me.
It’s the truth.
CHAPTER 38
Inside the barn it was dark, and there was a musty stench in the air that made me gag. My shin crashed into something hard.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Danny said in the gloom. “How thoughtless of me.”
I heard him moving about and then …
… then it wasn’t dark any longer.
I heard Kate O’Donnell gasp.
Oh, I know how crazy this sounds. Do you know how many times I have run it through in my head and still end up doubting the evidence of my own senses?
An eerie halo of reddish light, bright enough to illuminate the barn around us, suddenly appeared, surrounding Danny.
He smiled.
“Bioluminescence,” he said as if it was another of his conjuring tricks he was performing and he was particularly proud of it. “Knew I could do it, but … well … wow!”
Danny looked at us and shrugged.
“It’s a simple trick, really,” he said. “Basically, I converted some skin cells to photoproteins.” He spoke as if that was not only normal, but something we should understand. “I’m fueling them with some excess calcium that I’m growing from my own skeleton.”
NOTE—“Bioluminescence”
Although dramatically simplified, this is indeed the way that we produce light. One of the strengths of the Straker tapes is, I believe, that they do show us the things we do normally and naturally in a new and different way, as if Kyle is really experiencing these commonplace sights for the first time, in the position of an outsider.
In “Identity Crises: Bodies as Text,” Steinmetz writes: “Things we take for granted are shown in a new light by Straker’s words. Filament networking and bioluminescence are so familiar to us that it takes a boy to remind us how precious these things are.”
He laughed.
“It tickles, if anyone’s interested.”
We stood there openmouthed, trying to work out if Danny was toying with us, or whether he’d really just used parts of his skeleton to light up the barn.
There was a long silence and then Lilly stepped towards Danny with a ferocious look on her face that was altered into something satanic by that strange red glow. Danny shook his head, and there was something about the way that he did it that made Lilly stop in her tracks.
Suddenly, it wasn’t rage on her face.
It was fear.
One small shake of the head and that’s what Danny could do now: stop rage and turn it into fear.
What have you done with my friend? I thought, because this wasn’t him.
“Please,” Lilly said. “Please, Danny. Stop playing around with us. I’ve had enough. I’m tired and cold and scared and I want to go home. What happened today? Why has everyone … changed? What are you?”
Danny looked on the verge of saying something. He had a dreadfully serious expression on his face and seemed to be having trouble finding the right words. Instead he looked around the barn and gestured towards a row of straw bales at the back of the barn.
“Okay,” he said. “Sit down.”
“We don’t want to sit down,” Mr. Peterson said crossly. “We want to know what the hell is going on.”
“Then sit!” Danny said, his face suddenly looking cruel in the red light.
We sat.
“I only have a few hours,” Danny said. “This is a … caretaking routine for the master program that will end as soon as the installer quits.” He paused and reflected on his words. “Actually, and more accurately, it’s a subroutine, but that’s just splitting hairs.”
“The master program,” Lilly said. She turned to me. “That’s what you were talking about. A computer program that was the spaceships and ray guns all rolled into one. You were right.”
Danny laughed.
“Was he?” he said, amused by the idea. “Why, Ky
le? What did you say?”
His gaze made me feel nervous.
“I said that our planet was being invaded,” I said. “That we were experiencing an alien invasion that doesn’t waste ships or troops, and doesn’t give us a chance to fight back.”
Danny raised an eyebrow.
“Sounds fascinating,” he said, his voice dripping with condescension. “Tell me more.”
I felt a sudden, red urge to punch him in the face.
Instead I carried on.
“Whenever I try to get my head around all of this, I keep coming back to computers,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s because we first saw the weird language on Kate’s iMac, but it made me realize that an invasion doesn’t have to be violent. Because an alien race could send a signal across space, a signal that contained a computer program designed to overwrite humanity and all the things that make us human. With one clever piece of software they could change us all, at once, into the image of themselves.
“Maybe human DNA has been altered by this signal. And human brains are being reprogrammed to mimic the invaders’ brains.”
Danny grinned as if he was delighted with my words. He clapped his hands together and then rubbed them against each other.
“Oh, how delightful,” he said, again with the patronizing tone, the superior air. He was almost daring me to continue.
“We just happened to be in your trance when the signal was transmitted,” I said. “A one-in-a-million chance. It meant our brains were in a different state, and the signal passed us over. Maybe our invaders had considered every possible human state—from awake to asleep and everything in between—but hadn’t considered hypnotized. Maybe there’s a tiny percentage of humanity that—for a variety of reasons—will be immune to this invasion by upgrade. Us. The zero-point-four.”
“Zero-point-four,” Danny said, rolling the phrase around his mouth, still obviously amused. “Oh, yes, you are zero-point-four. You must know, or at least sense, that you are no longer … relevant.”
“We feel pretty relevant,” Mr. Peterson said.
“Of course you do,” Danny said solemnly. “But you’re wrong.”
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