‘I’m sorry about Gavin,’ I say, adding after a pause, ‘And Oscar too.’
‘Me too,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry about everything.’ I wonder if he wants to cry, although he currently looks like there’s nothing further from his mind. He’s too stunned to release such an emotion. He’s almost turned into Gavin. He speaks again, ‘We were going to get married, you know.’
‘I had no idea,’ I say. ‘When?’
‘I don’t know, next summer maybe,’ he sighs. ‘None of it matters now.’ I open my mouth a tiny bit to reply, but Shell hisses at me from the other side.
‘They’re looking agitated, stop talking,’ she warns, and I look at the aliens at the front of our crowd. They do indeed look flustered. Sharp bursts of neon colour flash in front of my eyes and I want to ask for a translation again, but I can’t. Maybe they could actually hear us. A group of them go off to a corner and discuss something in rapid-fire colour swatches, leaving a token few to stare at us with their expressionless faces.
I look around for Priti or Art, but they must be in a row behind me somewhere, as they’re out of sight. While there’s still time, I whisper what might be my final words to Shell.
‘Shell, I’m sorry about Terry.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ she hisses back, tears pricking in her eyes again. ‘I’m just sorry I didn’t kill the bitch that did it.’
‘I don’t imagine she survived much longer,’ I say, finding myself in the position of telling my friend that she may have committed murder and, if she did, that that was a good thing.
‘Too long,’ says Shell, clenching her fists tight. She turns to look at me. ‘Why are Priti and Art here? Why weren’t they merged?’
‘I was thinking the same thing,’ I say. ‘I can only think of one reason.’
‘What’s that?’
I don’t get to reply because a burly man with huge shoulders and a tribal tattoo on his neck and cheek has roared out and leapt on the nearest alien, tackling it to the ground. Within seconds, there is pandemonium. Bright columns of red, the red of London buses, shoot up in front of my eyes and I stare through them at the clamouring of aliens and humans. The attack of the first man spurs others into action and in a blink there’s a mound of writhing fighters ahead of us as indeterminate limbs of various species pile onto and into one another.
I grab Frederik’s wrist and pull us back, snatching Shell around the waist as I do, making a break for the opposite direction to the fight. Art, not seeing us, races past and leaps onto the throng, grabbing a bluish alien head in his hands and twisting it hard like he’s taking the lid off a stubborn bottle. With the others in my grasp, I make for Priti.
Her bruises look worse close up, and it takes her a moment to realise it’s me. She flinches at first, before looking up, her face contorted like she’s going to spit at her assailant, only for it to rearrange into something that looks painful but happy. She throws her slight frame around my neck.
‘You’re alive!’ I shout.
‘We need to get out of here,’ she says. Our ears feel like they’re being mashed as one of the blocky alien spaceships hoves into view, coming down to land in the grounds of the Tower. Reinforcements.
I try to remember from previous visits here if there is more than one exit, but instead my brain is recalling information about the zoo that used to be in the Tower, and a brief biography of Elizabeth I, none of which is useful at the present moment. Grabbing my friends, I make a break for the direction of the exit. I don’t know where we’re going to go, but my only thought is that we need to get away from there immediately.
The aliens, however, have begun to claim the upper hand. They’re using weaponry both terrestrial and alien to take potshots at the humans. We’re outnumbered and the plan of escape remains at the forefront of my mind, until three large aliens loom down on us from the side. I punch out indiscriminately, but my fists do nothing but pummel empty air.
A fist connects with my cheek and I stagger back. Falling onto my arse, I hear an unpleasant squelch and a blade of some kind bursts through the back of Priti’s jacket. She falls onto her knees beside me and I see blood dripping from her lips as her body retreats into the foetal position, her small hands clasping the hilt of the weapon that felled her, as if attempting to pull it out.
There are several flashes of colour – blue, green, bluey-purple – and I’m pulled up again by my collar and, along with Shell and Frederik, frogmarched across the courtyard and towards one of the towering grey spaceships, not even taking in the piles of dead and dying bodies either side of us, but understanding that hope is lost. There is no escape now.
Thirty-Four
Uncertain Beginnings
My cheek throbs like there is a grumpy dwarf inside trying to prise a diamond from my flesh with his pickaxe as I am shoved in the back by a large gloved hand, not daring to look either side of me to check that Shell and Frederik are still there.
We are half-led, half-shoved up the ramp and into the spaceship, finding ourselves in a cramped, silver holding bay with three aliens and one other prisoner, a blonde woman in a red blouse and tight black jeans. Her feet are bare and filthy.
An alien presses a large, round, textured button on the wall and a door in front of us slides open. We are pushed inside and the doors close again. There is a small shudder and the room rises up with a slow whir. It’s a lift.
Frederik is crying, large tears running down his face. Shell looks as blank as a sheet of printer paper. She reaches out and squeezes Frederik’s hand. The other woman is shaking, dried blood crusting on her cut lip and scabbed chin. The doors slide open again and we’re in a different room. A few aliens stand in front of us and sharp neon flashes of yellow and green pervade our senses.
‘They want us to move forward,’ Frederik burbles through his tears, so we follow our orders. Once the four of us are standing in the centre of the large, square room, one of the aliens comes to meet us and stands in front of me, both of its heads fixated on mine.
Turquoise, pink, brown.
I look on helplessly, and from my side, I get a flash of mauve and maroon. The aliens turn to look at Frederik, as do I. The leader projects back at him, but we all see the colours.
Cerise, chocolate, it says.
Maroon, mud, white, silver, Frederik replies.
‘What are you saying?’ I ask. The aliens either don’t notice that I’ve spoken, or don’t care. Frederik doesn’t turn in my direction, but replies anyway.
‘They want to know how I can understand them,’ he says. ‘I’m telling them that I don’t know.’
‘Explain that you’re blind,’ I say.
‘But is that the reason?’ he asks. The head alien looks at the rest of us. The woman at the end is sobbing again, louder and louder. On the other side of him, Shell is also looking at Frederik, but choosing to keep quiet. Perhaps she’s wondering why we haven’t yet been killed. I’m trying not to give that any thought.
‘What should I say to them?’
‘Ask them why they’re doing this,’ I say. Annie-and-Matt told us one story, but given their betrayal, there’s currently no reason to believe them. Frederik closes his eyes and points his head down. Has he heard me? He fires off a few colours: grey, mustard, a greeny-blue.
The reply is quick: blood red, gunmetal blue, coal black.
‘They need our planet for mining,’ Frederik translates.
‘But we live here!’ says Shell, sounding so like a child having a tantrum that it feels almost funny. In another situation, I might have laughed. ‘They can’t storm in and take the place, forcing their ways onto us and wiping out those who don’t agree! Tell them that!’
Frederik looks concerned for a moment and then does indeed send a complicated message that may have been the template for Joseph’s technicolour coat. When he’s finished, the aliens share a thought, and we see a bright yellow with pale blue edges, a weirdly joyful colour. They’re laughing. One of them speaks to Frederik again, and he
translates back.
‘They don’t care. They want to know how we can say that what they’re doing is wrong, when they’ve seen what humans have done to each other throughout history,’ he says. ‘It says that what they’re doing is no different to what generations of humans have done to each other: stormed into lands that don’t belong to them, forced their religions, technologies and diseases on the unsuspecting natives and killed anyone who stood up to them. It’s hypocrisy.’
‘But that wasn’t us,’ says Shell, and while I want to agree, it’s a difficult one. It wasn’t us specifically, but it was humanity, and we are part of that. Maybe we do deserve whatever happens to us. Sure, there were patches where we loved one another, developed friendships and considered kindness, compassion and companionship to be important, but more than anything we are a species that kills its own members and claims a greater good. These creatures are of the opinion that merging people is the only way that they can breed, so they’re going to ignore our own biology and make it like their own. Maybe, despite what Annie-and-Matt said, they always knew it was going to fail. Perhaps it was just a quicker way of thinning out the population.
Shell is angry, far beyond upset. Frederik looks sad and hopeless. I am drained and so tired that, if I were to lay down, I would fall into an irresponsibly deep sleep.
‘We will take you as prisoners,’ Frederik translates, toneless. ‘You seem to think you know better, so you will come with us and speak to our… not sure on that word, but something like council or government.’ Then what? Death? A museum exhibit?
‘No!’ barks the other woman behind us. I’d forgotten she was there. She rushes forward as if to attack the leading alien, but the head not watching Frederik was already looking at her and she doesn’t last a second. The alien pulls out a short knife and the woman’s throat is sliced open, a jet of blood squirting forward and landing on the alien’s spacesuit. Another alien steps forward and drags her lifeless body out of the room, a trail of red in her wake.
The alien shoots a few more colours at Frederik – cream, crimson, silver – but he doesn’t translate, instead shakes his head and closes his eyes. The alien turns and barks coloured orders at its crewmates, who move to a series of screens on the far wall. Each head looks into a small black screen and, after a few seconds, each one turns into a different colour. I sense that they’ve activated something, presumably the craft.
My mind reels as I realise that this could be the last time I’m anywhere near my home. Not just my house, but my planet. Faces and events pour through my head and the last few days replay like a sped-up DVD. Lara-and-Steve’s wedding, Catsby, Peregrina punching the vicar in the face, Kevin-and-Gary’s ugly deaths in the British Museum, Alex’s suicide, Annie-and-Matt’s betrayal, Pete, Art attacking an alien threat, Priti attacking a school bully in a hedge maze, serving coffee with Gavin, meeting Frederik, swapping chocolate bars with Shell, at a loud and sweaty Burnt Fudge concert with Jay-and-Kay, Georgina throwing my Kindle in a pond, Iris welcoming me on my first day at work, the moment we first saw aliens, hearing that my parents had died, coming round after my appendectomy, stealing bikes, breaking Georgina’s heart, Jay’s trilby on a pile of clothes, Ruby’s mangled body.
Important moments mix with unimportant ones, and I realise that they were all important and maybe one day I’ll realise I learnt something from one of them that may save my life again. I’ve survived this long, and I’ve got no idea what’s going to happen next, but I’m not alone and maybe that’s a better thing than I ever realised.
The floor beneath us shakes and everything rises.
*
THE END
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Unbound for taking a chance on the book and guiding me through the process of crowdfunding a novel. Thank you to Debi Alper and Andrew Chapman, my keen-eyed editors, for their patience, humour and understanding.
Thanks to my family, and to all my friends. I’m not going to name names for the fear of missing someone out, but thanks for believing in me, your ongoing support, and any drink you’ve ever bought me.
Thanks to the British Museum, Natural History Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum for being such wonderful institutions that I can wander round in for free in the name of research. Thanks to Frank Turner for providing me with a soundtrack that accompanied most of the writing of this book – as well as everything else I’ve done in the last ten years.
And thank you to everyone who pledged their support to make this book a reality. I really could not have done it without you.
Bonus material
Lara-and-Steve
Everything is relatively calm on the ship. Lara quickly notes that they are the youngest people on board by about thirty years, but also that there is an extensive wine list and cocktails available most of the day.
There had been some debate about whether the ship would be allowed to set sail given the news from Paris, but they’d finally been given the go-ahead as they were heading away from the incident. She was grateful, at least, that they hadn’t been flying as, following on from the numerous crashes the night before, flights the world over had been grounded.
It does strike her as odd, however, that every time she sees a television that first day, it’s tuned to adverts for the cruise they are on; an ever-repeating PowerPoint presentation highlighting the various shows, bars and swimming pools on offer. Even the one in their cabin picks up no reception, and when Steve asks a member of staff what’s going on, she says there’s a problem with the service that they hope will be resolved soon, and hands him some complimentary vouchers for one of the bars.
In fact, it isn’t until late on the Monday night, while Dexter and his friends are dealing with a psychotic priest in a formerly quiet country church, that Lara-and-Steve realise things have gone to shit. Phone signal was patchy for the first bit of the journey, and then non-existent, until someone managed to connect to Twitter and learnt that they are one of the most concentrated collections of humans left on the planet.
Lara wakes up very early on the Wednesday morning, head pounding from the six or seven margaritas she drank the night before to blot out the thoughts of what was happening on land. Internet signals had died the previous day, and word had filtered down through worried staff and eager-to-panic passengers that the ship had begun to drift off course. With no ability to contact the mainland back in Britain, it was possible that no one knew where they were.
Lara slips out from under the covers and peers out of the porthole to the grey expanse of sea and sky. It is darker than she’d expected and she checks her watch – several minutes past seven o’clock. Where is the light?
The scream is her second hint that something has gone wrong. Steve wakes with a start and leaps to his feet, naked save for a single sock that he’d been unable to wrestle off in his drunken state the night before. He fumbles on a nearby hook for a dressing gown and wraps it around himself. Someone pounds past their door – lots of people. With a look at one another that conveys several emotions at once – not least panic, fear, surprise and adoration – Lara snatches up the key card to the room and they open the door, joining the crowd of silver-haired runners who aren’t encumbered by false hips or crutches.
They pile into a central atrium and up the stairs onto the deck. If any of the staff present are meant to be keeping people away, they aren’t doing a very good job as they stand, like everyone else, with their necks craned skywards. Directly above them hovers a large square. The base of one of these spaceships they’d heard about.
It’s about thirty feet above the highest point of the ship, but it is so vast in size that it casts a shadow over the whole deck.
‘What is it?’ shouts an old lady, bent double and unable to tilt her head up to look. ‘What’s happening? Tell me what’s going on!’ She bangs her cane against the water-spotted wood in defiance, but it’s to no avail. Everyone ignores her – Lara thinks it’s probably better she doesn’t know.
There isn’t m
uch screaming now. The odd blast, but generally people mutter and talk amongst themselves. A man, the captain judging by his uniform, stands on a higher deck with a megaphone and says, ‘Attention, ladies and gentlemen!’ Most people turn to him, save for a few old folks who either want to keep looking at the thing above them, or didn’t have time to put their hearing aids in and don’t know he’s there.
‘I think… I would ask you all to…’ but he can’t find the words and instead says, rather pathetically, ‘Free drinks all round.’ Despite the fact it’s not even seven-thirty, this seems to be enough for some people, who immediately forget the aliens hovering above them and push their way back through the crowds to one of the bars.
Lara grabs for Steve’s hand and squeezes tight.
‘I have to call home,’ she says. Steve nods, finally tears his eyes away from the shape and follows his wife back into the bowels of the ship.
An hour or so later, Lara dials numbers, trying to get hold of people. Her mum doesn’t answer and her heart sinks. She tries another number and manages to get through to Kerry. They say a hurried goodbye before Kerry’s phone dies. At least, Lara chooses to believe that it is the phone that has died. Georgina’s phone doesn’t connect either, nor Kay’s. She presses the icon for Dexter and puts the phone to her ear. It rings for what feels like an aeon, before the noise stops and she hears a voice.
‘– calling!’ It’s Dexter. But that’s all she hears. His phone – it must have been his phone – dies too. Steve comes back in the room, a bottle of uncorked Malbec in each hand. He kicks the door shut and knocks the lock closed, passes one of the bottles to her and sits down on the bed, picking at the label. They both ignore the fact that they’re already hungover and they’ve not had breakfast.
‘Did you get through to your parents?’ says Lara, panicked. ‘I can’t get through to anyone else now. Are your parents OK?’ Steve looks up slowly, not quite meeting her eyes.
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