This sinks in.
‘And the grey cloud they killed those people with?’ asks Shell. Jay, despite the pain he’s pretending he’s not in, appears to be enjoying putting his years of reading science fiction novels to use.
‘Nanobots,’ he says. Aside from Kay, who nods along with him, the rest of us look at him with a distinct lack of understanding. ‘Oh, come on, nanobots!’ Ruby shakes her head, Alex shrugs, I rummage in my memory banks through old episodes of Doctor Who and Douglas Adams novels, and finally say, ‘That’s super-tiny robots isn’t it?’ Jay goes to answer, but obviously gets another burst of pain. Kay squeezes his hand and, once sure that he’s not about to keel over, continues on his behalf.
‘Yeah, nanobots are very tiny robots that scientists reckon we’ll be able to use to do things like surgery from inside the body,’ says Kay. ‘There are other applications too, but that one gets talked about a lot.’
‘But that’s hugely distant tech, isn’t it?’ I say, and immediately feel stupid. If aliens are capable of crossing the vastness of space and arrive in one piece on another planet, they’re clearly more advanced in the technology department than humans. As a species, we’re still impressed with Angry Birds.
‘My theory,’ says Jay, sharing a look with Kay, ‘well, our theory, is simply that those grey clouds are thousands and thousands of nanobots that are supposed to merge people. The aliens have two heads so it’s not too big a leap to assume that they were once singular.’
‘We wondered if it was a breeding thing,’ Kay puts in. ‘Maybe they merge and become one being to breed, like anglerfish and stuff. If that’s the case, they’re trying to use the same technology on us, but the nanobots can’t deal with human biology and it’s messing up and causing those grotesque things we saw on the TV.’
As I wonder what anglerfish have got to do with it, Terry and Pete return and are confident that we can throw one or two of the spare metal parts onto the tracks. Shell and Alex go down with them to help lift, while Jay, Kay, Peregrina, Ruby, Catsby and I remain seated, all lost in our own thoughts. If Jay and Kay are right and, given the amount of science fiction they consume, it’s probable, then humanity is even more fucked than I had first realised.
At least, most of humanity is. I can see a glimmer, a faint light at the end of the tunnel, which suggests I could be alright, for now at least. But is it a light at the end of the tunnel, or an incoming locomotive?
My thoughts are interrupted by the clang of metal on metal.
‘Tracks are dead,’ Pete shouts up. We make our way down onto the tracks, Jay-and-Kay moving slowly, but with Shell and her gun behind them, ready to take out anything that tries to make an ambush attack. We walk in single file up the railway, Terry leading us. That doesn’t fill me with masses of confidence as, even though all he needs to do is follow the tracks, he gives the impression of someone who could get lost walking up a spiral staircase. I can’t even begin to work out how long it’ll take us to get to St Simon’s, the next stop, and no one is much in the mood to do mental arithmetic and provide an answer.
After about half an hour walking, Jay apologising the whole time for slowing us down, St Simon’s station comes into view. There is no one there. A few pigeons strut about the platforms, bobbing their heads and pecking at the concrete, like it’s another ordinary day on Planet Earth. We decide that we should rest here for a while.
Shell goes first up onto the platform, wielding her rifle and looking around for any evidence of non-pigeon life. As someone who always comes across as so well put together, even after a bottle of wine, it is strange to see her holding a gun, her brown hair windswept and out of control. She looks back down to us, her green eyes trying to hide their fear but failing, and nods that it’s safe. Everyone follows her up, with me bringing up the rear this time, looking backwards along the deserted track, my pistol pointed ready, even when my muscles protest at being held aloft.
We move into the small café on the platform and rip open some food, eating crisps and chocolate bars, and slumping down onto the hard, plastic seating. I wipe my brow and it feels like it’s been days since I last slept, but it’s barely three o’clock and I know I woke up this morning with far fewer worries. Time gets skewed when the world goes to shit. I eat my Twix and wonder if this is an elaborate dream, like the one I had a few months ago where zombies were chasing me through a dockyard, and I ended up escaping to my parent’s old house and destroying the stairs so they couldn’t get me. That was about as vivid as this.
Peregrina has let Catsby down after he got fidgety in her arms, and he’s curled up under a table, looking slightly perturbed by the whole situation. He keeps looking at me like this is my fault. I check my phone, but there’s nothing to report. I’ve got 52% battery, so I turn off everything that might speed up the discharge, but whatever I do, it isn’t going to last long.
Jay-and-Kay are snuggled up close on a pair of seats. His trouser leg is wet with blood, despite the tea towels wrapping the injury. His face still hasn’t returned to a normal colour.
Colour.
A flash of mauve in my left eye, and a shot of pumpkin orange in the right. My heart stops and we freeze.
‘What do we do?’ whispers Peregrina. Everyone looks at someone else, as if one of us has the answer. We don’t need to discuss what it means, but we do need a plan. However, it’s very hard to make a plan when you don’t know what you’re up against. How many are there? Which direction are they coming from? Are they capable of sensing us? There are too many unknowns in this equation.
We sit quietly for a moment longer, as a line of colour – various shades of red and yellow – snakes across our pupils. I have the horrible feeling that we’re surrounded. I raise the pistol and notice that my hand is shaking like a jellyfish with Parkinson’s. This is a nightmare.
Pete stands up and creeps towards the door, his ursine figure blotting out the window and putting himself in direct line of potential fire. He’s raised the rifle a little and his finger is on the trigger. He moves forward a couple of steps. Peregrina reaches out for him, feebly, but she doesn’t dare speak, so he doesn’t notice. Without turning around again, he speaks.
‘Four of them,’ he whispers, yet it still sounds like the clanging of Big Ben in the otherwise silent room. ‘Move slowly out the way we came in, back onto the tracks, and we’ll have to run.’
‘Run?’ whispers Kay, harshly. ‘Jay isn’t running anywhere!’
‘I can if I have to,’ he says, although I can’t help but feel that it’s false bravado. His leg is in a bad way – there was something wrong with that dog. He stands up, propping himself up with the spade and hobbles towards the door before anyone can stop him. Shell gets up and joins Pete, and they both stand there with guns aloft. I gesture that everyone without a gun needs to get a move on – Terry is to stay.
‘We’ll hold them back,’ I mouth, not really believing it myself, but the others obey and move back out to the tracks. Catsby doesn’t move; instead he sits under the table and licks himself, like none of this is his problem. He’s changed his tune.
I get a sharp, stabbing pain behind my left eye and my field of vision fills with an orangey-mustard sort of colour which can only mean one thing. Bullets are flying and I can’t tell if it’s us or them. I click the trigger of the pistol a couple of times and feel the recoil down my arm, but I’ve got my eyes squeezed shut, so I don’t know if I hit anything.
‘Run, now! Follow the others!’ shouts Pete and, without giving it much more thought, we turn on our heels and pile out of the door. I nearly run straight into the door frame, but dodge it in time.
‘We got three of them,’ says Terry as we haul ourselves down off the platform and onto the tracks, trying not to trip up and jog towards the others. We catch up to Jay-and-Kay, the others already considerably further ahead, although throwing looks over their shoulders every couple of steps. Jay is, as I predicted, struggling, and trying very hard to convince Kay to go on and save herself.
She is refusing to do so. They’re both crying, scared and clinging to one another, yet still moving forward one painful step at a time.
Terry tries to pick Jay up, but Jay refuses and lashes out. I’ve never seen him angry.
‘Don’t! Leave us!’ he shouts. I look up and on the platform I see the remaining alien, even uglier in person than on the screen. Maybe it looks malevolent, but it doesn’t have much of an expression. It’s looking down at us though and presumably projecting something into our minds, as an ocean blue wisps through my field of vision. Terry has already turned and run; Shell and Pete are hovering. I don’t want to go.
‘Guys, you have to come on,’ I plead. I risk a glance up and see the alien extracting its silver box. ‘You need to come with us, please!’ But Jay-and-Kay are ignoring me, instead staring into one another’s eyes. Kay clasps her hands to Jay’s face, whispering to him that she loves him.
‘I will always love you,’ she cries, ‘Always. Remember that.’
‘You too, angel,’ warbles Jay. He sniffs and chuckles through his tears, ‘Remember the cone of ham?’ And she laughs too, despite herself. Some long-standing joke between the two of them, a joke that no one else will ever get, but had maybe solidified their relationship for some incalculable reason. Here stands proof that no matter how close I am to my friends, I will never have that intimacy with them. I feel a large hand grab my wrist and I’m pulled off, but not before I raise the pistol one final time and shoot a bullet at the alien.
Somehow it hits, and the alien’s left head explodes into something that looks like stringy blue spaghetti bolognaise. It falls back, but it’s still too late. A grey cloud is descending on the Englishman and the American, and I finally turn my head away when the first screams start.
When I do risk a look back, there is a bloody mess of flesh and ripped clothing on the tracks, with a perfectly undamaged trilby resting on top.
Seventeen
Iris-and-William
Iris Burke is the most recently acquired of my friends, the two of us having met three years ago in a staff meeting on the first day of term. The school, Fairmill Community College, was the same one that I had attended as a student from eleven to eighteen, which made the whole thing a little less scary and daunting than it could have been. I had, at least, a vague idea of where everything was, although it turned out that the administration offices had moved, the Geography and History departments had swapped around for some reason, and a new Drama block had been built.
A few of the staff were the same, although they looked much older than I remembered, and while a few recognised me, most of the ones who had taught me had left, being replaced by a new swathe of young men and women who looked like they were pretending to be adults in their parents’ work clothes. This included me, in a pale pink shirt, grey trousers and leaf-green tie.
I had been collared in the corridor by the Head of English, Anita Joyce, and had thirty copies of The War of the Worlds thrust into my arms, which I was assured I would need for my first class. Before I could go and find my classroom, we were being shunted into the staff room for a pre-student encounter briefing.
Even at the time I thought it was a pointless endeavour, given that the last three days had been endless meetings, lesson plans and trying to remember everyone’s names. Ruby was already deep in a conversation with her fellow history teachers, so I tried to manoeuvre myself to an empty seat, dropping several copies of the play as I did. The woman I sat next to picked them up for me and piled them at my feet with the others I put down. She was blonde with watery blue eyes and a large garnet embedded in a silver necklace. She was my age, I guessed, and we smiled politely at one another.
‘Hello. New to the game?’ she said.
‘Yep, and bricking it,’ I said with a nervous chuckle. The headmaster was faffing about with some papers at the front of the room and other teachers were still piling in. ‘Sorry, I haven’t seen you around yet. I don’t know your name.’
‘Oh, it’s Iris.’ She smiled and held out a small, soft hand for me to shake. ‘You’re English, I’m guessing? No wonder we haven’t met yet; I teach Food Tech.’
‘Ah, yes, other side of the school and curriculum,’ I nodded. ‘Dexter, by the way.’
‘Nice name,’ she said. ‘I used to have a dog called Dexter.’
‘Um,’ I managed, but our conversation was cut short by the headmaster, David Tubby, a man whose name fitted his frame and who possessed a body odour problem to match, finally deciding he was ready to speak and clearing his throat with a noise like a bulldozer.
David was fond of his own voice and played with his wedding ring as he spoke, rambling on about – well, to be honest, I can’t remember a single thing he spoke about in that meeting. After twenty minutes of unnecessary introduction, all of which was reiterated in an email later in the day, the teachers moved with the hive mind of one and began to file out of the door clutching coffees, books, bags and laptops. Iris picked up half of my book stack.
‘You can’t carry them by yourself,’ she said, smiling again. ‘I don’t have a class until second period today, so it’s no bother.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, grateful. ‘There’s honestly no need.’
‘Oh, don’t be daft.’ She tucked a strand of blonde hair back behind her ear. ‘Now, which room are you in?’
As we walked to E5, navigating around the students – they were so small – we found out a few things about one another. She was single, having moved from Bournemouth to escape a troublesome ex-girlfriend, and had been teaching at Fairmill for a year. She was originally from Newton Heath, a few towns over. She had never read The War of the Worlds, but was a huge fan of Marvel comics and said that if she were to go on Mastermind, the Avengers would be her specialist subject.
Once at my classroom, she deposited the books on my desk.
‘I know it’s always daunting at a new place,’ she said, ‘so if you need anything, even just to touch base with someone when the madness gets a bit much, let me know. Email, call, it’s always fine. I’m in classroom FT2; you’re welcome to drop in.’ I thanked her and she parted with a small wave as the Year 10s filed noisily into the classroom chattering like baboons, using slang that may as well be a foreign language for all the sense it made to me.
From this tiny act of kindness, a charmed friendship arose. We ate lunch together a couple of times a week, traded comic books for poetry anthologies, and I sampled her cookies and cakes whenever possible. She hadn’t really known Ruby beforehand, but it turned out that they got on well. She did however already know Annie and Lara, having met through mutual friends, so we often hung out in the evenings too.
Iris – a genuinely kind soul and the final piece to the puzzle that is my social network.
*
How Iris met William Beery, however, is of practically zero interest to anyone who isn’t either of them. They had been at school together, on nodding acquaintance terms, not seen each other for many years, and met again in a bar a few weeks after I’d met Iris. They’ve been together ever since.
He’s tall with shoulder-length black hair and an implied troubled past that I’ve never been curious enough to ask about, but the burn scars on his neck and barbed wire sleeve tattoo up his left arm speak volumes. I get the continued impression that he doesn’t like me, or indeed any of the other seven billion people on the planet he is not related to or sleeping with.
That’s all there is to that.
*
Over a period of many years, these friends that I’ve discussed became my family. I’m aware that in the story of my life the word ‘family’ has been conspicuously absent so far, and that’s for the simple reason that I don’t have one.
My parents had one child, me, after years of trying. When I was ten they were involved in a seventeen-car pile-up on the M40 on a freakishly wet day in July. Both died instantly and I went to live with my mother’s father, Ernest (he always insisted on being called Ernest, as if embarrassed by the famili
al link), who had more important things on his mind than the care of his pre-teen grandson.
I’m not suggesting that I had an abusive or neglectful time with him. In fact, it was nothing of the sort. He was already retired and I wanted for nothing as he wouldn’t question spending his money on me. My friends were always welcome, he paid my way through university and he did love me, although he would never have said the words, or given any physical indication of doing so. Men of his generation didn’t, I suppose. Or maybe he just never had the time – there were horses to bet on and cricket games to watch.
Ernest died after two strokes when he was seventy-six. I was twenty-one and, just like that, all alone in the world. He had left me whatever money remained, but the accounts, while not insubstantial thanks in part to my parents’ life insurance, had dwindled due to the fact he was a shockingly bad gambler. It later turned out he was still paying maintenance to a woman he had got pregnant in the fifties. I found that out at the funeral, when she introduced herself to me, as well as her son, who was sort of my uncle. I never saw either of them again.
Since then, my friends have been my family more than ever. Priti, Shell, Peregrina, Ruby and Lara came to the funeral with me, making sure I was OK. I wasn’t, and I can’t pretend otherwise, but it made me appreciate them all the more. I had a few relationships, but my friends always came first.
At the heart of it, this is why I get so sad about my friends all pairing up. If they go off, I am left by myself, and no one deserves that. Not even Hitler died alone.
Oh god, don’t go down that avenue.
Enough back story; there’s an alien invasion in progress.
Eighteen
Midnight Mass
The Third Wheel Page 10