by Rob May
Rob May studied English at Lancaster University and is the illustrator for Super Maths World and Super Science World. He is the author of Dragon Killer and Roll the Bones, the first two books in a series of fantasy thrillers featuring Kal Moonheart—adventurer, gambler and thief.
Rob is currently working on the third Kal Moonheart adventure, Sirensbane. He is also planning Lethal Planet, the final part of the Alien Disaster trilogy, as well as writing and releasing episodes of LJ, a modern thriller. Rob always previews his new work on Wattpad, the world’s largest writing community, and welcomes comments and suggestions from readers.
Visit Rob’s website, www.robertwilliammay.com, for more details and news.
Books by Rob May
Dragon Killer Series
Dragon Killer—2013
Roll the Bones—2014
Sirensbane—2015
Alien Disaster Trilogy
Alien Disaster—2013
Moon Dust—2014
Lethal Planet—2015
LJ
2014
MOON DUST
ROB MAY
Published in 2014 by Rob May
www.robertwilliammay.com
Copyright 2014 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.
CONTENTS
01—NEPTUNE
02—CATNIP
03—CHIMERA
04—CHTEAU
05—MARINA
06—SAOIRSE
07—THANAMORPH
08—PROTEUS
09—CARDIAC
10—PIRATES
11—MAGNETIC
12—LEVIATHAN
13—ICE
14—ALBATROSS
15—QUARANTINE
16—MERCY
17—DELUGE
18—NIX
19—APPLE
20—POTUS
21—MAJESTIC
22—PRIME
23—SACRIFICE
24—EXODUS
01—NEPTUNE
‘Brandon, you’re flying too close to the water!’
‘I’m trying to avoid those clouds!’
‘Fly though them—they’re just clouds!’
‘I don’t think that they’re rain clouds though … but we’re not going to be able to avoid them anyway—hold on!’
SHUDDER!
‘Hey, keep her steady—I’m trying to eat a sandwich here!’
‘Shields! On!’
‘We haven’t got any shields, Kat!’
‘Is that lightning? What are the odds of getting hit?’
‘Gem, leave it! Don’t set him off talking about probability!’
SMASH!
‘I’d say … that the probability … on a scale of zero to one … is about … one!’
‘Give me the joystick!’
‘You’ve crashed this ship more times than I have, Jason!’
‘I can see land! We’ve made it across the Channel!’
‘Oh good—something else to crash into …’
———
Katherine Brown woke up and opened her mouth ready to shout a warning. The ground was shaking. She checked her shout just in time; it was just another earth tremor, and just another dream about the crash. And if it wasn’t the crash she dreamed about, it was meteors blowing up London, or trains derailing, or floods, earthquakes and explosions. Sometimes she dreamed about wrestling with horrible, ugly aliens. But the worst dreams of all were the ones where she got shot in the stomach at point blank range …
She forced all those nasty thoughts out of her mind. She was alive, wasn’t she? Might as well put on the happy face and see what new challenges today would throw at her. Kat was lying in the middle of a super king-size bed; it was the biggest bed she had ever seen, let alone slept in. All around her were about twenty other beds of various styles and sizes: she had woken up on the basement floor of a large department store. There was a ticket on the headboard that priced the bed at five hundred Euros.
Kat slipped out and got dressed in the dim glow of the battery-operated nightlights that were placed around the basement. Jason was sleeping in the next bed, snoring away, making a noise like a faulty outboard motor. Kat glanced at the board game on the table between the beds and noticed that he had made a move before he had fallen asleep:
S E P E R A T E
She grabbed a pencil and counted up the score. One, two, four, five—double letter score, so that makes six—seven, eight … double word score makes it sixteen. Hang on a sec …
Kat removed the tiles from the board and put them back in Jason’s rack. She pencilled a big round zero on the score pad. Next to it she wrote, lern to spel, luzer.
She left her brother sleeping and took the escalator up to the homeware department on the ground floor. The moving staircase wasn’t actually moving; the power was down, not only in the store, but all over town too. Maybe even all over the whole world. Since they had crashed their spaceship on the Normandy coast three days ago, they had not seen another person or found any power or communication lines working. The world seemed to have gone dead.
Passing through the rows of washer-dryers and fridge-freezers, Kat noticed smoke hanging in the air, accompanied by the horrible smell of burning flesh. It appeared that Gem was trying to cook breakfast! Kat found her boyfriend’s sister in one of the show kitchens, shaking a pan of sausages over a gas-powered camping stove. Gem’s long black hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was trying to wave away the greasy cloud with a tea towel. It was a good job the smoke alarms and sprinklers were down.
‘You forgot the oil!’ Kat advised cheerfully.
Gem flipped the whole pan over and smashed it quickly down on the worktop, covering the ruined sausages and containing the smoke. ‘I didn’t forget!’ she fumed. ‘You have to know how to cook in the first place before you can forget! Tomorrow we’re having toast … no, I’d probably get that wrong too. It’s Corn Flakes from now on! Corn Flakes or Rice Crispies for breakfast, lunch and dinner!’
Kat perched on a stool at the breakfast bar and filled a bowl with cereal. She ripped open six small cartons of long-life milk to pour over it. It was pretty awkward being alone with Gem: it wasn’t so long ago that Gem had accidentally shot Kat and almost killed her. They had made up since, and even promised to be best friends for ever and ever, but that was turning out to be a tough promise to keep.
‘None of us are good cooks, Gem,’ she said. ‘This one time, before all this alien stuff happened, Jason tried to make a curry for the whole family: just an instant one, you know, out of a can. But he opened the wrong can, and we all sat down to hot dog food on rice with naan bread.’
Gem sobbed and laughed at the same time.
‘Waffles enjoyed his chicken tikka masala though!’
Gem smiled. ‘Did Waffles go with your parents to the South of France?’
‘No,’ Kat said wistfully. ‘He was in Hampstead Kennels when London got wiped off the face of the planet.’
There was a long silence. Gem was probably wondering whether it was appropriate to offer condolences for a lost pet when millions of actual human beings had died too.
‘We’ll find your parents, Kat,’ Gem said. ‘I promise.’
‘I know,’ Kat said as she finished her last spoonful of cereal, then drank the remaining milk from the bottom of her bowl. She wasn’t too comfortable with Gem feeling that she owed her one. Kat grabbed her ski goggles (command
eered from the sports department) and dust mask (from hardware), and pulled her hoodie up and her gloves on. ‘I’m going outside,’ she said.
———
The world was outside the store was alien. Moon dust filled the air, spread about by relentless high winds. It covered the buildings and roads, and Kat couldn’t tell where the beach ended and the promenade began. She had to be careful not to fall into the open-air swimming pool that was full of lunar debris as deadly as quicksand. Somewhere out there was the sea, but not only could Kat not see it, she couldn’t hear it either—the waves had fallen eerily silent. Far off inland she heard muffled booms as chunks of rock entered the atmosphere and pebbledashed the planet. High up in the clouds of dust, lightning fizzled and flashed. And all of this was thanks to the fact that while Kat was laid up in a hospital bed in an army base in England, her friends had managed to blow up the Moon while fighting aboard a flying saucer. Honestly, you just close your eyes for one minute …
Kat could just about make out the long, wide furrow that their spaceship, Discord, had ploughed up the beach, across the promenade and up the tree-lined boulevard before crashing into the elegant casino at the centre of town. Turning left at the old machine gun bunker (the 1944 Normandy landings—Operation Neptune—had taken place just up the coast), she trudged up the boulevard through the grey dust, passing by the looming hulks of the town’s two main hotels, the Splendide and the Hermitage. The town of Royale-le-Eaux had once been a thriving tourist trap on the Normandy Coast; now it was silent: no bustling crowds, no screaming gulls … nothing.
Before the heavy dustfall, debris from the moon had settled into orbit around the Earth, forming incredible rings like those of Saturn. For a couple of weeks, that was where everyone thought it would stay. But then chunks started falling into the atmosphere, a worldwide meteor storm this time, that threatened to erase all life on the planet by blocking out the sun and polluting the air. Kat kicked the deadly dust ahead of her with her Doc Marten boots; it was like walking through snow. It was only September, but it felt like winter already. One minute it had been a blazing hot summer, the next it was like Christmas … that’s if someone had been dreaming of a grey Christmas instead of a white one.
The front facade of the casino had been demolished, and Kat could see right in to where Discord lay on its side, nose pointing upwards where it had come to rest halfway up the grand staircase. Moon dust wasn’t getting in for some reason, and as she got closer she still couldn’t see why; it was as if an invisible force field blocked the entrance. But as far as space-age tech went, Discord was decidedly retro. So what was keeping the dust out? What trick had Brandon come up with this time?
She walked through the ten-metre-wide rent in the wall. As she did so, she felt a tingle on her skin, like she was being nipped in a hundred places by small insects. Of course: the bionoids—Brandon’s microscopic robot helpers—had spread out to form a protective barrier against the outside world.
Brandon must have sensed Kat enter (the bionoids were linked to his consciousness) because he poked his head out of a hatch on the side of the spaceship. ‘Hey, Kat!’ he said. ‘Come and see what I’ve got.’
She went over to him, gave him a clumsy kiss and tried to run her fingers through his thick black hair. He batted her hands away; he was obviously more interested in the little gadget in his hands. ‘What is it?’ Kat asked. It was a tiny three-centimetre-square piece of circuit board with a glowing light in the middle; the sort of thing that might fly out of a desktop PC if you took a hammer to it.
‘It’s Discord’s superluminal drive,’ Brandon said proudly. ‘The thing that allows it to travel faster than light. I don’t think I can repair Discord myself—and the bionoids only do biological repairs, not engineering—but it got me got thinking: this little gizmo is the only thing that really matters anyway. If Earth is really dying, then the superluminal drive could be humanity’s only hope of survival, if we can find someone who can figure out how it works!’
‘You said you thought you’d be able get us flying again, Bran,’ Kat said. ‘We were going to look for my mum and dad before you go off trying to save the world.’
‘I know,’ Brandon said, but his expression was doubtful.
‘You don’t sound very hopeful,’ Kat said, putting a hand on his arm.
‘I’m sorry, Kat—it’s just that … we’re here, in northern France, and your parents are in the south. That’s almost a thousand kilometres. It’ll be a tough journey, and even if we make it, they might not even still be there. Or they might be …’
‘What?’ Kat said. Say it!
Brandon was distracted by something out in the dust. His alien eyesight was a useful early warning system. By the time Kat saw the approaching shape, Brandon had his arm protectively around her. The thing striding towards them was a muscular humanoid wearing a motorbike helmet. When it reached the bionoid barrier, it stood still, pointed at Brandon and made a strange gesture with its hand in front of its head.
Brandon nodded, and Jason stepped through the barrier and pulled off his helmet. ‘I’ve got a question for you guys,’ he said. ‘What’s the freakiest thing that you’ve ever seen?’
‘Your face,’ Kat said without missing a beat.
Jason had bulked up considerably in the weeks since the alien disaster. Back in England, at the RAF base, a combination of hormones, military rations and frantic workouts in the gym had transformed his already solid body. He was starting to look like the supersoldier that he dreamed of being.
‘What’s going on, Jason?’ Brandon asked. ‘What have you seen?’
‘Something really weird in the alley down the side of the store. Come and see! Gem’s gone and left some food out for it to try and encourage it to come back.’
Kat and Brandon got ready to follow him. They hadn’t seen any signs of wildlife yet since touching down in the French town. ‘Let’s go take a look,’ Brandon said, as he pulled up his hood. ‘But if Gem’s feeding it, then I feel sorry for it already.’
02—CATNIP
They walked together back through the swirling dust to the store. This time they didn’t have their hoods up: Brandon had shaped a protective sphere around them with the bionoids. They had left Discord abandoned in the casino; exposed to the elements now, it would deteriorate along with the rest of the world thanks to the scouring dust and wind. Before they had left, Brandon had picked up an abandoned gaming chip off the casino floor and used a thin drill bit to cut a slot inside, into which he fitted the superluminal drive. Kat had noticed with alarm that the chip had a face value of a thousand Euros. ‘It’s worth a lot more than that now,’ Brandon had told her.
There was another tremor as they walked. Brandon had surmised that without the Moon acting as a counterweight, the balance of the Earth had been completely thrown off. Kat linked her arm with his as they walked; her clever, nerdy boyfriend. ‘Isn’t this romantic?’ she said. ‘Walking with your girl through an apocalyptic landscape?’
‘It’s definitely a novel experience,’ Brandon said.
‘What?’ Jason said, from just behind them. ‘Walking with a girl?’
Kat prepared herself for a verbal spat, but Brandon just laughed Jason’s comment off. Since the chaos of the alien invasion, Brandon seemed to have become more detached, and less willing to join in jokey banter. Perhaps it was his new-found confidence—forged by the trouble and chaos he had managed to navigate his way through recently—and his growing command of the bionoids.
If anything though, it made Jason just try even harder to break through his armour. Jason had done what Brandon had refused to do: he had shot and killed alien invaders. Now it seemed like all he wanted to do was lash out and hurt something else. When he couldn’t find a fight, he took all his aggression out on twenty-kilogram dumbbells, and by heaving his body up and down on a chin-up bar.
Good job I haven’t changed, at least, Kat thought to herself. Oh no, good old Kat—always trying to find the bright side of any situ
ation.
‘It’s nice when the storm lets up enough to have a brisk walk,’ she commented. ‘We need a little exercise now that we’re not being chased around all the time by horrible monsters!’
‘Don’t speak too soon,’ Jason said ominously.
They approached the store entrance. A metallic blue Jeep Cherokee was parked up outside: Jason’s choice of vehicle for when they left town. He had been scavenging around for petrol cans so that they could travel with more than a full tank. The tough-looking, snub-nosed four-by-four looked like it could cut through the dust storm easy enough. Jason slapped the bonnet affectionately as they passed.
Inside the store, they found Gem in a gloomy staff room off the main shop floor, peering out of a window. She waved a hand at them to slow them down. ‘Shhhh,’ she hissed. ‘It was just here. My god, it’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.’
Kat moved up to the window as quietly as she could, with the boys right behind her. Outside she could see nothing: just an empty loading bay swirling with dust. Gem went to a nearby door, opened it just a crack, and threw some chocolate-coated cornflakes out in to the alley. She pulled the door shut fast. ‘It seemed to like those,’ she told them.
It? Kat pressed her nose up against the window. Her breath condensed on the glass. Ever since the moon dust had blocked out the sun, it was chilly all of the time.
‘If it comes back,’ Jason said, ‘I’ll whack it.’ He was hefting his weapon of choice—a forty centimetre dumbbell bar—and smacking it against his palm.
‘Jason, quiet,’ Brandon said. But Kat could see that Brandon was on edge too. There was a ticklish static in the air, like in the moments before a lightning strike, and Kat could tell he had the bionoids on high alert. She toyed unconsciously with her own weapon: a serious-looking Bowie knife she had picked up in the hunting section of the sports department. Fourteen-year-old kids armed like muggers, but these days it didn’t feel strange. You just didn’t know what was going to come at you from out of the dust; a human, an alien, a mad dog …