Springing up, he threw himself across Ash’s back. Daryl grunted in pain as the metal hammered into him from behind, followed by the stinging heat of the explosion. The suit took the brunt of the punishment, but he still felt every impact.
Pushing Ash to the ground, Daryl spun. The men were racing up, guns raised to their shoulders, garbled Dari dialect spilling from their mouths.
“What do you want?” he cried. “We can talk about this. Put down your guns and we can talk about this!”
At once, Daryl realized he was wrong. Whoever these men were, they had no interest in reason or discussion. Maybe they had been, before Ash had started murdering them indiscriminately, but now they were there for one purpose only.
The men’s eyes narrowed. Their fingers tightened on their triggers.
There came a sound like thunder.
Sixteen
The boulder Riley was hiding behind rumbled noisily away from her across the rocky ground. It slammed into the men, scattering them like skittles. Fire spat from the barrels of their guns, sending sprays of bullets zipping through the air in all directions.
Riley kicked backward through the sand, scrabbling to her feet as the men hit the ground hard. With a grinding of tires on gravel, the other jeeps threw themselves into reverse. Ash opened fire, each bolt sending another vehicle flipping into the air.
“Whoo! Yeah!” he howled, as more breams streaked from his open palm. A gas tank went up, the explosion drowning out the screams of the jeep’s occupants. “I am the God of Hellfire!”
The men Riley had knocked over hurried upright and ran, heads down, past the burning wreckage. Ash flexed his fingers and took aim. “Like shooting fish in a barrel.”
“Will you just stop?!” Daryl yelped, stepping in front of him. He gestured to the remains of the gunmen on the ground, and the tangled wreckage of the jeeps. “We won, OK? Let them go. It’s over.”
Ash scowled. “We? I didn’t see you doing anything.” He jabbed a finger toward the carnage. “I did that. No one else.”
Riley raised a hand. “I sort of helped. A bit.”
“Oh, you moved a rock. Big whoop!”
“She saved us,” Daryl said.
“No, I saved us,” Ash crowed. “Or didn’t you notice?”
There was a sound like a twig snapping in the distance. Before Daryl could turn, he felt a bee-sting at the side of his neck. A mist of red colored Ash’s face.
Daryl tried to speak, but all that emerged was a bloody gurgle. He stumbled, clutching at his neck, and the ground raced up to meet him.
He heard Ash say something, then Riley’s face was suddenly up close. She was talking, but he couldn’t make out the words over the crashing of his own pulse. Her face took on a fuzzy edge, and the sky suddenly became much more interesting. Daryl couldn’t tear his eyes away from it. He lay there, shivering, and watched the narrowing strip of blue until the canyon closed in on all sides and drowned him in its darkness.
A light. A scream. Daryl tried to open his eyes, but the muscles wouldn’t respond. His heart boomed, crashed, banged. The surface beneath him was soft like putty, not hard like the surface of the merry-go-round.
It was warm, not cold; light, not dark; here, not there. He tried to sit up, but the softness below squirmed and held him tight, pulling him down.
At last, he forced his eyelids open. At first, he thought he was still outside, then realized the inky blackness above wasn’t the night sky, but a ceiling. He was alone in a room. No, not alone. He wished he were alone.
A horrifying figure watched him from the edge of the room. Daryl tried to scream, but no sound emerged. The figure had to be wearing a mask. He had to be. Nobody looked like that. Nobody human, anyway.
“Welcome, Daryl Elliot,” chimed a female voice. The figure stepped closer. Daryl tried to pull back, but the bed gripped him tightly.
The man spoke, but in a language Daryl couldn’t understand. There was a hiss and Daryl felt a moment of pressure on the crook of his arm.
A coldness crept through his veins, then the ceiling slid away. Daryl saw the stars again, much brighter this time, and then they, too, disappeared into nothing.
“Waah!”
Daryl jumped awake, clutching at his arm, then at his neck. There was something sticky on his throat covering a neatly defined circle of pain.
He winced as he craned his neck to look around, and saw that he was back aboard Yufo. Riley was perched on a putty-like stool, watching him. Her face split into a grin as their eyes met.
“OK, so the good news is you’re alive,” she said. “The bad news is you’re going to have an insatiable desire to eat human brains. Sorry. Couldn’t be helped.”
“What happened?” Daryl croaked. The words felt like crushed glass in his throat.
Riley held out a half-full bottle of water. “Sniper,” she said, as Daryl took the bottle. “Little sips, by the way. Little sips.”
Daryl gulped down what was left in the bottle in one go. “Or, you know, just neck it,” Riley shrugged. “No pun intended.”
She pointed to the wound on Daryl’s neck. “Who am I kidding? That was totally intended. I thought that up, like, three hours ago while I was sitting here.”
“You’ve been sitting here for three hours?”
“I wish! More like three days.”
Daryl’s eyes went wide.
“I’m kidding. It’s been about three hours, yeah.”
She hopped off the stool and studied the side of Daryl’s neck. “Does it hurt?”
“A bit. Probably not as much as getting shot in the throat should, though.”
“Hath put some gloopy stuff on it. He said you heal fast, too. Good job, otherwise we might have lost you, and where would our love triangle be then?”
“I suppose it’d just be a love line,” Daryl said. He smiled, but it made his throat hurt, so he stopped.
“Want me to get Hath?” Riley asked.
“No, I’m fine,” Daryl said. He sat up and swung his feet down onto the floor. The room spun unpleasantly.
He was still wearing the flesh-like red outfit and noticed for the first time that Riley wasn’t. She was dressed in a floor-length black skirt and an even blacker jumper with holes for her thumbs to poke through.
“You ditched the meat onesie?”
Riley looked down. “What? Oh, no. I just figured it out. Look.”
Leaning forward, she prodded Daryl on the shoulder. “Popeye the Sailor Man,” she said. Daryl shuddered as the fabric swam and slithered across him.
A moment later, he was dressed like a cartoon sailor, complete with bell-bottom trousers and a tiny white hat. There was a pipe in his mouth, and what felt like a tin can in his inside pocket. He pulled the pipe out before speaking.
“Um… great. Not really a look I’d have chosen for myself.”
Riley cocked her head. “No, maybe not.” She pressed him on the shoulder again. “Tell it what you want to wear.”
Daryl hesitated. He’d never really given any thought to the stuff he wore, it was just sort of there. “T-shirt and jeans,” he decided. The Popeye outfit snaked sickeningly over his skin, and when Daryl next looked down he was wearing the world’s plainest white t-shirt and most bog-standard pair of jeans.
“You look like my dad,” Riley laughed, then a flicker of something sad flitted across her face. She rallied quickly. “You can be as specific as you like. I think it sort of hones in on what you’re thinking and—poof—makes it happen. It’s clever stuff. You know, for rubber.”
“It’s not rubber,” Hath intoned. He stepped in through the open door, and Riley moved aside to let the alien examine Daryl’s neck.
With a rip, he tore the sticky dressing away, taking half of the hairs on Daryl’s neck with it. “Ow! A bit of warning might be nice next time,” said Daryl.
Hath studied the wound. “Are you planning on getting shot in the throat a second time?”
“Well… no,” Daryl admitted. “Not if I ca
n help it.”
“It is healing well,” Hath said, straightening. “It should be gone within a few hours. You are lucky.”
“Getting shot in the neck’s lucky where you come from, is it?” Daryl asked. He meant it to come out jokey, but there was an accusing tone to it.
“It could have been your head,” Hath said. “Or one inch to the right. You could have drowned in your own blood in a distant desert, leaving your world to be ravaged by an alien warlord. So yes—I’d say you were lucky.”
“Fair point,” Daryl admitted. His voice still sounded croaky. He gingerly touched the wound and felt a sting of pain radiate out from it. “Couldn’t you have just used Dotdocs?”
Hath shook his head. They wouldn’t have just fixed your wound, they would have fixed all of you,” he said. “They’d rewrite your genetic code at the molecular level, stripping you of your abilities, and returning you to the way you were before.”
“So none of us can use them? Ever?” Daryl asked.
A look passed between Hath and Riley. She tried to smile, but her eyes betrayed her and she quickly looked down at her feet. “Not yet,” said Hath. “Not until the world is safe.”
Daryl felt the room spin faster. A wave of heat washed over him, prickling his skin. He began to lie back down. “I should probably rest.”
Hath’s face suddenly filled his field of vision. “Rest?” said the alien. “You’ve done nothing but rest for the past three hours.” He made a gesture with his hands and the bed rolled into a vertical position, standing Daryl upright. “Rest is over. You have a lot of training to catch up on.”
Seventeen
Daryl, Riley, and Ash stood side by side with Hath pacing slowly in front of them. They were all gathered in Yufo, and although Daryl had half-expected them to zoom off to some war-torn Middle Eastern country, there was no sign that the ship was going anywhere.
As he paced, Hath looked them all up and down in turn, and Daryl felt like a criminal in a police line-up.
“Your last outing was disappointing,” the alien said at last.
Daryl touched his throat. “That’s one way of putting it.”
Hath flinched, annoyed by the interruption. “You all failed. Not one of you reacted appropriately.”
“Hey, man, I reacted,” Ash said, swaggering forward a step. “I reacted like… BOOM!”
Hath closed the gap between them in one pace. He glowered down at Ash, barely containing his anger. “Reacted? Yes. Appropriately? No.”
Ash swallowed hard, but stood his ground. “Felt pretty appropriate to me.”
The alien’s whole body seemed to stiffen, and for a moment Daryl thought Hath was going to lash out. Ash must’ve sensed the same, because he shuffled back a half-step while trying to maintain the illusion that he hadn’t.
After a few long seconds of tense silence, Hath shook his head. “It was my fault. You weren’t ready.”
He turned his back on them and waved his hands in the air. A spinning hologram of the Earth appeared in the air and immediately grew smaller and smaller as the image zoomed out.
Soon, the whole solar system filled one end of the ship, casting a shimmering glow across Yufo’s dark walls.
“Pinpoint Skalgorth,” Hath said.
A dotted line stretched out from the image of Earth, passing right in front of Daryl and the others. Their eyes followed it, until it stopped at an image of the much larger Skalgorth, silently creeping through space.
At first, Skalgorth didn’t seem to be moving, but if Daryl really looked hard, he could see it was creeping forward. The movement was minute—no more than fractions of a millimeter every few seconds—but now that he’d noticed it, it was unmistakable.
He looked away from the planet to see Hath watching him. “How long?” the alien asked.
Daryl glanced at the others. “Until what?”
“Until it gets here. Based on its current speed.”
“It’s not moving,” Ash said.
Daryl looked across at the solar system, then back at Skalgorth. “How should I know?”
“How long?” Hath asked again. There was an impatient edge to his voice, which reminded Daryl of his PE teacher, Mr Collins, and he suddenly wanted more than anything to get the answer right.
He looked between the two planets, following the line. There were no numbers anywhere, nothing to indicate distance or velocity or anything else that might help him. There were two spheres, a dotted line, and not a lot else to go on.
And yet, something in his brain was stirring. Facts and figures he’d read long ago about the size and scale of the universe were rising up from the fog of his memory. He suddenly knew the distance between Earth and the Sun, and so using that as his starting point he could potentially…
“Sixty-seven hours, eleven minutes,” Riley announced.
Daryl turned to her and gaped. “What? How… Is that right?”
Riley nodded.
“How did you figure that out?” Daryl asked.
Riley pointed past him. “It’s written on the wall up there in flashy lights.”
Ash snorted. “So much for the super brain.”
“The hard way is not necessarily the correct way,” Hath said. “Learn to be more observant.”
He was disappointed, Daryl could tell, and as he waved away the hologram his face was grim with determination. “I rushed you into live combat because time is running out. However, I cannot risk putting any of you in danger again. Were you to be killed, the effects would be catastrophic.”
“He means he’d miss us,” Riley said in a stage whisper.
“So how are we supposed to train?” Ash asked. “I’m bored of shooting at tin cans. Can we go for something a little more high tech this time?”
Hath took a step back and rocked on his heels. “Something ‘high tech’?” he said. “I’m sure that can be arranged.”
The floor shifted beneath their feet. All three teens looked down to find Yufo’s black surface gloop over their shoes and curl up their legs. They tried to pull free, but the blackness sucked them down like quicksand, and the more they fought, the quicker the inky dark crawled upward.
“What the Hell?” Ash barked.
“Really not liking this,” said Riley. The gloop had swallowed her up to the waist and was still on the rise.
The stuff flowed up across Daryl’s chest. He twisted and struggled as he felt it creep like fingertips through the hair on the back of his head. He heard Riley and Ash cry out in shock and turned just as the blackness covered their faces, muffling their screams.
Daryl gasped as he felt the oozing fabric seep into his mouth like liquid. It flowed down his throat, suddenly icy cold. He thrashed and squirmed and choked, but the black goo had him now, and there was nothing he could do to fight it.
Riley opened her eyes and screamed and screamed and screamed.
Eventually, once she’d got all the screaming out of her system, she stopped. She was wearing her fleshy red outfit, with no sign of the black gloop anywhere.
She was no longer aboard Yufo or, at least, she didn’t think she was. Instead, she was in… nowhere. There was a bottomless black void in all directions, with nothing or no one to be seen.
“Well, this is homey.” She shuddered. “Hello? Anyone there?”
She turned to find Hath standing in front of her. “Wow, you move fast,” she said. “Where is this?”
“This is the ship.”
Riley looked around. “We’re still in Yufo?”
“More like it is in you,” Hath said. “When it cocooned you, it began this simulation. This is where you’ll train.”
“Wow! It can simulate lots of black nothing!” Riley said, twirling on the spot with her arms out. “This is amazing!”
She stopped twirling. “That was totally sarcasm, by the way. I could have simulated this just by closing my eyes.”
“Perhaps,” said Hath. He shrugged and clicked his fingers. “Perhaps not.”
At the c
lick of Hath’s fingers, everything changed. It was as if a light had been switched on, obliterating the darkness and revealing the real world that had been lurking beneath it.
They were standing on a rocky outcrop overlooking a vast expanse of uneven sand. It could have been the same place they’d gone for training earlier, but could just as easily have been any other boulder-strewn patch of desert.
Riley scuffed the ground with her feet, kicking up a cloud of dust. “That’s quite a lot more impressive,” she admitted. “This is seriously a simulation?”
Hath nodded. “Here, you can practice using your abilities in safety,” he said. “Let’s begin.”
He stepped aside just as a streak of red slammed into the ground in front of Riley, churning up the rock and spraying deadly shards in all directions.
Riley stumbled back, holding her hands in front of her then spreading them wide, like a swimmer doing the breaststroke. The slivers of flying stone parted harmlessly around her.
Something sleek and silver was slicing across the sky. It was a little larger than man-sized and moving at an impossible speed. It banked low, opening fire with another burning red energy blast.
Riley raised both hands up and the ground shook beneath her feet. A shield of heavy rock bloomed up in front of her, before shattering with the impact of the laser fire. This time, she was too late to deflect the stone chips. She could only cover her face with her arms as a downpour of half-melted fragments fell like hail around her.
When the pieces had all fallen, Riley raised her hands. The man-sized flying object was still up there, no doubt already lining up its next shot. It was time to level the playing field.
“That’s all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more. Trigger happy flying dude… come on down,” she said. And with that, she threw a hand to the sky.
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