by Moody, David
‘Since last night. I’ve been staying with my uncle,’ she explained, gesturing in the general direction of a couple of houses over the road. ‘I couldn’t stay there, though, not with him and Auntie like that, you know?’
‘I know.’
‘I put Uncle in his chair last night because he’d been lying on the floor all day. When I went back inside just now, he was in exactly the same position as I left him. He hadn’t moved a bloody muscle.’
‘They’re all the same.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I’m going home to get my brother, then I’m going to go on and get my girlfriend,’ he answered without hesitation.
‘Are they like us?’ she asked. He shook his head. ‘Then is there any point?’
‘I have to try.’
She seemed about to argue, about to tell him he was wasting his time, but then thought better of it. ‘What about your friend?’
‘I’m going back to her when I’ve got them. She’s with her daughter. She’s like the others.’
‘How?’
‘What?’
‘Your brother and your girlfriend... how are you going to move them?’
He didn’t have an answer. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I think you should just go back to your friend. Either that or stay here with me.’
‘I can’t. I can’t just leave them.’ Tom slouched down in the corner of the van. Was everything as futile as it was beginning to seem? ‘I have to try.’
‘What do they want?’ Bhindi asked.
‘Who knows? Us, water, clean air...’
‘Well I wish they’d just fuck off. I wish they’d never come here. I never wanted them here in the first place.’
‘You and me both.’
‘All those fucking idiots talking as if they were some kind of gods. We’ve had them rammed down our throats constantly from the second they got here, and now look what’s happened.’ Her voice quickly turned from a whisper to a rant. ‘People are so fucking stupid. So fucking gullible. Always so quick to believe the hype. It’s the cult of celebrity, amplified a thousand times over.’
Tom sat and looked at her. He matched her anger, and also her frustration. No matter how much noise either of them made, he knew there was nothing they could do about their situation.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
‘Don’t go any further into the village,’ Bhindi warned. ‘You’re a fool if you do. The place will probably be crawling with those things before long. It’s only a matter of time.’
‘Well they’re not there yet,’ he said, realising again that a part of him actually wanted the aliens to come down to the surface so he could go out fighting rather than just watching. ‘You sure you’re staying here?’
‘It’s where my family is. Anyway, I’m tired. Too tired to just keep running until they decide they’ve had enough of me.’
Keen to move on, Tom wished her well then climbed back out and shut the door behind him. He looked around anxiously but saw nothing and no one else moving. For a moment even the sky was relatively clear; the myriad alien ships all drifting away from the village for now. Why would they bother with Thatcham, anyway? It was as insignificant in the overall scheme of things as he was.
He began to jog then to run, his confidence returning. If the aliens had wanted to take him out, he thought, then wouldn’t they have already done it? In any event, there was nothing he could do about it, no way he could defend himself against their technology and power, so why bother trying? His irrelevance was strangely reassuring; empowering, almost. Why should they give a damn about me? I’m nothing to them.
Before long Tom was sprinting towards home along eerily silent streets, his echoing footsteps the only noise.
35
The last half mile was the longest. From the moment the bungalow came into view, his pace dropped and the effort required to keep moving increased. The house looked as dead and uninviting as everywhere else, and actually being able to see the building made it somehow feel further away, not closer. His nervousness returned, amplified ten-fold at the thought of what he might find inside.
What the hell am I doing? I can’t take Rob with me, and I’ve got twice as far to go again before I even get to Siobhan.
He stopped and almost turned around, but made himself keep going. He couldn’t not go inside, not now.
This part of Thatcham was as deserted as everywhere else. Tom’s heavy footsteps echoed off the walls of lifeless buildings, his laboured breathing amplified out of all proportion. He turned a corner and almost fell over a body lying sprawled face-down on the pavement, feet hanging out into the road. He recognised the man; he didn’t know his name, but he’d regularly seen him around the village. He crouched down and shook his shoulder. No response. His eyes were wide open, unblinking, staring at nothing, just like the others.
In contrast with the malaise down at ground-level, the skies overhead were again teeming with activity. More ships were arriving by the minute. Some dropped down to perform unknown functions closer to the surface, then rose up and disappeared again. Others cruised imperiously through the cloud cover. One was so impossibly huge that Tom had assumed the sections of its hull he saw belonged to different ships until the entire vessel had cleared the clouds and revealed its full, terrifying magnificence. Another raced directly overhead, tipping over onto its side and zipping through the narrowing gap between two more, covering endless miles in a few scant seconds.
If the skies are this busy here, Tom wondered, then what must it be like elsewhere? How many thousands of ships were now crawling through the atmosphere above every country, swarming over every continent and every ocean? It was hard to believe that they’d taken over without a single shot being fired by either side; embarrassing, almost, that there’d been no final battle. Mankind had facilitated this and made it easy for the invaders. The aliens had almost been invited to browse the planet, then come and take what they wanted.
Tom stopped again at the bottom of the final climb up to the house, legs heavy with both effort and fear now. He looked up and saw Will Preston still sitting where he’d left him looking out to sea, in the exact same position almost twenty-four hours later.
The wind changed direction momentarily, carrying with it the instantly familiar noise and smell of the ocean, immediately taking him back to the summer just gone before the aliens had arrived, then further back still to distant holidays with Mum and Dad. His heart sank as he remembered when this place had still felt like home... when this place had, as far as he was concerned anyway, been the very centre of the universe.
So what do I do now? Roll over and play dead like everyone else?
Tom wiped tears from his eyes and looked up at his house again – little more than a black silhouette against the dark grey sky. That house had come to mean so much to him... it was the foundation of the new life he’d been building with Siobhan, a life which had been good and which had been getting even better until the aliens had arrived. That was when it had all started to unravel around him. That was when he’d begun to doubt and question himself. And as Tom stood and stared up at the house from the bottom of the climb, he realised it wasn’t me. His increasing loneliness and self-doubt... the disconnection... wondering why he was alienating those people who mattered most... feeling a lack of worth, like he was the odd one out.
There was never anything wrong with me, it was the rest of them. They were suckered in, I wasn’t. I was right all along.
With renewed energy, he dug deep and began the final climb home.
36
Almost an entire day since he’d left, Tom reached his house and let himself inside. He shut the door behind him and stood in the hallway, the noise of his entrance echoing throughout the small building. The house was cold, the air unnaturally still, and yet just being there made him feel immeasurably better. He peered around the living room door and saw his brother sitting on the sofa, eyes fixed straight ahead towards the lifeless TV,
his body completely motionless. He ran to his side.
‘Rob,’ he said, his voice sounding too loud. Rob didn’t flinch. He hadn’t expected him to.
Tom felt a bizarre sense of vindication. Making it back here to this house against the odds was further proof that he’d retained more control than he’d allowed himself to believe. Almost everyone else had descended into catatonia, but not him. He looked around his home. There was the bedroom where he and Siobhan had slept and made love. The patio where they’d sat and talked. The computer he’d wasted half his life on. This was his world. No one else’s. But he also knew that it was lost. He could feel his grip slipping away.
He crouched down in front of Rob. His brother was still breathing – just – and his eyes were open wide, but to all intents and purposes he was otherwise gone. A corpse with a pulse. What Tom would have given to see him smile again, or to hear his voice. And Siobhan... a wave of remorse washed over him when he thought about her being like this, alone in her flat. He cursed himself for having left her yesterday, pictured her sitting naked on the bed where he’d left her. Christ, even seeing a photograph of her would have helped make things a little easier. He could have pretended she was still with him. He wished he could hear her voice. He’d have played back a voice message on his phone or looked through his pictures, but the damn thing had been rendered useless long before he’d smashed it up against Clare’s living room wall. All he had left now were memories.
‘Tom?’
The voice took him by surprise. For a second he was too shocked to react. He remained completely still, almost too afraid to look. But then he did. He stood up and turned around. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
Tom felt himself filling with rage. Standing in front of him – no, not standing, cowering – was Jall. Tom couldn’t control himself. All of the fear and anger he’d been swallowing down immediately came bursting to the surface. He ran at the alien, who tried to scuttle back, and threw a single punch at him. His fist caught the side of Jall’s head, the force of impact sending him spinning away. He lay on the carpet, sobbing, with crimson, almost black blood dribbling from a split above his right cheek. Tom took a step back then came at him again, booting him hard in the gut and hearing something crack.
Jall groaned.
Tom repeated his question. ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house?’
‘I didn’t know... where else to go,’ the alien said slowly, struggling to breathe.
‘Bullshit,’ Tom spat and he came at him again.
Jall tried to move but was still caught just above the pelvis by another brutal kick.
‘Please, Tom,’ he said, sobbing freely, ‘don’t...’
Tom paced the room. ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you now, you spineless cunt.’
‘It’s not what you think,’ Jall said, clutching his ribs and trying to sit up. His right eye was badly swollen, almost completely closed. Tom felt good that he’d inflicted so much physical damage. He hadn’t even started yet. ‘We’re both victims in this,’ Jall continued. ‘You, me... all of us.’
‘What do you mean? What the fuck are you talking about?’
The light in the room decreased ominously, distracting Tom. He glanced out of the window and saw another immense black machine power silently through the increasingly turbulent air, almost covering the entire village with its shadow. A noticeable change in air pressure made the whole house shake. A pair of dirty beer glasses on the coffee table began to rattle against each other.
‘I didn’t know,’ Jall whimpered. He was still on the floor, looking up through the window at the ship in the sky with eyes which seemed somehow to match Tom’s fear. ‘You have to believe me. I didn’t know this was going to happen.’
‘Bullshit. How could you not have known?’
‘I didn’t, I swear. None of us did.’
Tom was ready to kill Jall, keen to wring the life out of the fucker with his bare hands, but he paused. He thought for a moment that he could detect genuine, unexpected emotion in the alien’s voice. He sounded nervous. No, it was more than that, he sounded scared. There was a definite trembling uncertainty in Jall’s tone. Vulnerability, even.
‘What are you talking about?’ Tom demanded. ‘Tell me everything or I’ll kill you.’
‘Those ships out there,’ he said, lifting an overlong finger and pointing, ‘they’re nothing to do with me. They’re nothing to do with any of us here.’
‘What are you saying? You’re not making any sense. If these ships aren’t yours, whose are they?’
‘They belong to my race, but not to those of us here. I’m not who I thought I was.’
Tom ran forward again and kicked out at the alien, catching him off-guard. He screamed out with pain.
‘Stop this! Isn’t what you’ve done already bad enough? Don’t make things worse than they already are. Start talking sense.’
The alien rolled over on his side, clutching his left arm and howling like a wounded animal. Tom grabbed his collar and pulled him up onto his feet then shoved him towards the other end of the room, into the space between Rob and the TV on the wall, literally backed into a corner.
‘Talk!’ Tom screamed at him.
‘Things aren’t what they seem,’ he said, watching Tom’s every movement. ‘Remember that first night we met and we talked about what I did and why we were here?’
‘I remember. What about it?’
‘Most of it wasn’t true.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
‘But it’s not what you think. I didn’t know. I genuinely didn’t know... none of us did. I remember you getting angry because you couldn’t believe the utopian society I was describing.’
‘Well that was clearly bullshit...’
‘Not to me. I believed it.’
‘Believed it? Past tense? Start from the beginning and tell me everything.’
Jall’s breathing was laboured. His one remaining good eye locked onto Tom’s face. ‘You were told we were on a mining mission, and that our ship was damaged in an accident, remember?’
‘I’d worked out that that wasn’t true.’
‘I hadn’t.’
‘What?’
‘I had no idea. None of us did. Our ship was a probe, sent here to record information about your planet to see if it was habitable.’
‘Bastards.’
Tom took another step forward, Jall took several more back until he hit the wall and could go no further. He held his hands up in submission, wincing when he moved his injured left arm. ‘I swear, we didn’t know,’ he said.
‘How could you not have known?’
‘The exact same way the entire human race were fooled. We’ve been reprogrammed, Tom, we all have. The truth was hidden from us. Since long before we arrived here, constant signals have been broadcast alongside your transmissions. Remember back when we first talked, I told you how we’ve learned to alter everything at a microscopic, sub-atomic level? We can change anything physical into anything else, and Tom, everything is physical. Even a thought. At the end of the day, it’s just a series of connections in the brain. Everything can be reduced down to a yes or no answer, remember? On or off. Plus or minus.’
‘But how...?’
‘For you it was a long, on-going process,’ Jall explained, regaining a little confidence. A process which has been running for the last seventeen months or so. Television, radio, the Internet, films... everything has been augmented.’
‘Subliminal messages?’
‘If you like, but far more complicated than you make it sound. The more advanced a society, the more susceptible it often is. You rely on so many different means of communication – you’re lost without them. Everything you’ve consumed over the last year and a half has been interrupted and modified prior to it reaching you. Think about it, Tom, how else could we have been allowed to arrive here like we did? We were dropped right into the middle of your civilization – a civilization which has been s
teadily tearing itself apart for years – and most people accepted us without question. You’ve never trusted each other, never mind anyone else, and you were manipulated into letting us in. You had to believe the story, and so did we. Didn’t you think it was strange?’
‘Right from the moment I first saw your ship. But everyone just accepted it.’
‘So did we. The illusion was complete. We were manipulated too.’
‘What do you mean?’
The alien’s voice wavered again. ‘I’m as much a victim as you are, Tom.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘It’s not. My colleagues and I fully believed the stories we were telling you. We didn’t know what we were really here for. I truly believed I was stranded.’
‘But you’re not, are you? You’ll be able to hitch a lift home on any one of those ships out there.’
He shook his bulbous head and wiped his eyes. ‘There’s no way out of here for me.’
‘Why not? That doesn’t make sense.’
Jall hesitated before answering. ‘We’re political prisoners,’ he said, ‘and this is our sentence. You were right, Tom, there is no utopia. Our world is ruled by a brutal regime far worse than any you’ve had here. Libya, Syria, Iraq... they pale in comparison to those who rule my people. I foolishly tried to make a stand, and this is my punishment. Exiled from home, and sentenced to death.’
‘So how do you know? Have they suddenly switched off your programme?’
‘Pretty much. I realised as soon as I saw things start to change yesterday. I recognised the pattern, and the arrival of the fleet today just confirmed what I’d thought. I know what those ships are for. As soon as I saw them, things started to unravel and I remembered. They planned it this way. They want us to know what’s happening. It’s the final part of the punishment, to be fully aware at the end. It would be better to be like Rob and all the rest of them. They won’t know anything. They’re already gone...’
Tom was punch-drunk, unable to take it all in. These new revelations were almost impossible to process. ‘Why...?’