by Paul Magrs
‘Why be upset?’ Sook laughed. ‘You’re doing so well. You’ve been amazing.’
‘Do you think so?’ I looked into her eyes. By now I was used to them, those kaleidoscopes. I could even read her expression, I thought. She was amused.
But all at once I stiffened. I sensed there was something different about Sook. Something had changed her.
‘You’ve come a massive distance, you know,’ she said, and the words bloomed inside my head. It was a long-absent sensation. ‘That’s why it took so long for me to find you. You’ve done better than anyone would ever expect.’
‘We just keep moving,’ I said. ‘Following the signals. Moving on. Surviving.’
‘It’s extraordinary,’ Sook said. ‘I wish you’d let me tell my people all about you. Your determination. Your fortitude. I know they would be interested and impressed. They might start to see human beings as something better than a mere source of nutrition.’
I shook my head fiercely. I didn’t want Sook telling them anything about us. I wanted to be off their radar.
‘Have you been through Our Town?’
She smiled. Again this was a calmer, changed Sook. I felt she was slower in her expressions and choosing her words more carefully, like she was holding back secrets. There were long, considered pauses before she replied to anything I said.
‘I’ve been through your old town, yes,’ she said. ‘But really, those people are of no concern to you now, you know. You left them all behind. They were given the choice. You were most generous. Only a few were brave enough to follow. They are the important ones. The others … not so much.’
Sook wouldn’t say anymore about Our Town and I was keen to suggest something now. I had a prickling in my feet and a tingling in my palms. I had an urge to demand a birthday present from her.
‘A flight?’ she laughed. ‘A night flight? Like we used to?’
Already it seemed like too long ago.
I told myself it wasn’t just for fun, this was practical as well. I would get to see the land all around us. I would get to see where we were going.
‘I’m afraid not, Lora,’ Sook said. ‘We might be observed.’
‘Who by?’
She looked troubled. ‘These are foreign territories to me. You have travelled far. There are people here watching all the time. They aren’t my people. I don’t even know their language. If they saw us flying together…’
‘Oh, OK,’ I said, knowing she was right. I was so disappointed though. I’d imagined floating and zooming about on those new dark, golden wings of hers. They were strong and supple and now that I looked closer, indigo and chocolate brown as well as gold.
I could have felt braver, if I could have flown again with Sook.
But there were other eyes watching us both. I understood that.
Soon enough it was time for Sook to leave, she said, and we parted. I watched her soar away and again I wondered about the changes in her. She had aged. Perhaps she saw the same thing in me. I was fifteen now, after all. And I was a leader.
I walked back to our camp, exhausted.
Ma was awake and waiting for me, some distance from the slumbering mass of everyone else. She was rigid with fury as she grabbed my upper arms. Always stronger than she looked, Ma. I felt that strength now, like electricity jolting through me. She seized hold and shook me until my feet left the ground.
‘Where have you been?’
I’d never seen her looking like this before. I’d seen her worried, upset and crazy, but never as angry as this. It was like there were sparks shooting out of her.
‘You can’t go wandering off at night.’
‘It’s OK, Ma,’ I told her, trying to regain my calm. ‘I was quite safe.’
But it turned out that she wasn’t worried for me.
‘What about the rest of us? What becomes of us if you go away and Disappear? You’ve made us depend upon you. We can’t afford to lose you now.’
Then she broke down and hugged me to her.
I felt a great coldness come up inside me. I needed to harden my heart against Ma. I couldn’t help it. She just saw me as the person in charge now. Not even a daughter anymore.
The following days were difficult. We weren’t really talking to each other. But Ma had enough to do, seeing to Hannah. My sister had come down with a dry desert cough and she turned feverish for forty-eight scary hours. Old Ruby thought she was coming down with the same thing, and declared she couldn’t move an inch further while her lungs and feet were paining her so badly.
The three of them sat atop the hovercart at the rear of our raggy-tailed convoy and dragged along so slowly. I was leading at the front, with Toaster beside me. Toaster trained his electronic eyes ahead, all around us, like an old sea captain exploring the wet deserts of Earth. He was scoping out the land for us as the dusty coughs of our womenfolk rang out pitifully.
Mr Adams walked with us some days and he was glad of the company. His own wife and daughter were feeling raspy and poorly too, and they had decided they weren’t talking to him. They had now come to the conclusion that joining our gaggle of sickly refugees had been an almighty mistake. They were poor, homeless and destitute and it was all his silly fault.
The Adams women sat atop their hovercart in their best bonnets as their vehicle went puttering along on its skirts. They looked stupidly snooty. Mrs Alice Adams and Annabel stuck their noses in the air and they wore every ruffle and bow that they still possessed. The blasting heat and scorching winds blew them about, but still these two silly females sat there on show, as if they were on their way to a garden party and we were just their servants.
Madame Lucille walked alongside us up front for a while. She made humorous remarks about the way some people carried on. I couldn’t help thinking that Madame Lucille looked a bit of a ridiculous sight herself, with several weeks’ worth of chin stubble growing through her cakey layers of make-up. At times I felt like I was travelling with the circus, or a troupe of human freaks, and we were looking for a place to set up our show. I longed to run off – leave them to their own devices and see how far they’d get. But I knew of course that I couldn’t. I’d catch a glimpse of little Hannah or hear her poor hacking cough (too big and loud for that tiny body of hers) and remember how much I loved her. I’d remember how much I loved the rest of them – even Ma when she was being so chilly and brusque. Or Al, who seemed to be in a stupendous, ongoing sulk with me.
‘I’m the boy,’ he’d reminded me, one night as we sat in our camp, eating a fiercely spicy goulash Mrs Adams had prepared. She had sprinkled her priciest spices into the cauldron over the fire, and let us know just how richly she was treating us.
‘So what?’
‘Why should you be in charge? You should at least let me help you more.’
But I knew Al didn’t really want any kind of responsibility. He was just letting off steam at me. He was allowing his resentment to spill over, like milk boiling out of the pan onto a hot stovetop. One night he let out Samuel Clemens, the lizard bird he had smuggled out of town under his coat. Oh, everyone knew he had it. Everyone knew he’d brought it from Ruby’s attic. He thought he was being so clever, stealing tidbits of food and snaffling scraps away for that evil-looking critter. In recent days he’d been trapping desert rodents for the ugly thing to tear to shreds. If any of us hadn’t known about Samuel Clemens before, we certainly did once he started gurgling and gobbling up the desert rats.
Al got cocky. He let the lizard bird fly free one night. He was showing off to snotty Annabel and little Hannah. I could hear them whooping with delight, some distance away from the camp. At first I was alarmed that Hannah was up and about with her fever only just gone. I went to investigate and, sure enough, there was Al, making Samuel Clemens turn cartwheels in midair while the little girls clapped and cheered him on.
The creature puffed out pretty jets of flame. He blew rings of bright pink smoke. Even I was impressed by the display. I was about to say so. I was also going
to tell Al what I thought of him leading the girls so far away from the safety of the camp. These two things were on the tip of my tongue when something terrible happened.
It happened – not in a flash, because the thing that dropped out of the sky was so dark. A flash is a brilliant thing. This was a vast piece of darkness. It fell out of the evening sky. It fell onto the lizard bird and swallowed him up in one go.
Samuel Clemens had time to let out a startled cry, and then was gone.
Al fell backwards onto the sand and I darted forward to grab Hannah. I was just in time to see the strange assailant rear up again.
It had a massive, undulating form that was hard to get a complete sense of. It was like a colossal silhouette of a monster, cut out of black card. Out of the skies had fallen a paper doll of a behemoth, here to prey upon us, soundlessly and savagely. A Shadow Beast.
I clasped Hannah to me as she screamed. Al was flat on the ground, yelping with shock. Only Annabel was still standing. It was like rigor mortis had set in as she stood there. She gazed up into the dark form of the unknown beast as it reared up again.
I could see it was about to pounce. I could see all at once how it would be. This wretched girl, who hardly had a nice word for anyone and who was never really a friend of mine. This hoity-toity madam who’d been forced by her parents to steal luxury items from wrecked spaceships; who’d been lowered on a rope from the very earliest age into the terrifying deeps. This girl was about to be eaten whole by a creature we had never encountered before.
Annabel simply stared into the hideous face of death as it rose up in two dimensions before her. She didn’t look scared, or even all that bothered. As if she didn’t like her own life enough to be that upset in her final moments.
The behemoth roared silently. And, without even knowing what I was doing, I put Hannah down safely and bolted forward. I pushed Annabel in the small of her back, hard, with both hands. Then I stood before the creature and I screamed at it.
I hollered with all my might and waved my arms about like a crazy lady. I made more noise than I ever had in my life.
And the monster recoiled.
I shouted at the others. ‘Help me! Come on! Make as much noise as you can!’
By then the others – the adults – had realised that something awful was going on and they were heading over, making noises of their own.
‘We need more noise!’ I yelled. ‘He can’t stand it!’
Even Annabel – lying in the dirt in her finery – gave a few bleating cries. When our screams and shouts reached a crescendo, the Shadow Beast rolled up like a paper blind. It twisted in the air in a weird kind of way. It was hard to pin down with your eyes. And then it was gone. It shot off into the darkest reaches of the sky.
We all cheered like mad. Making such a noise had never felt so good. I hugged Hannah and Al to me until they squeaked. But even though we had beaten the monster back, this wasn’t really great news. We had a new deadly predator. Something else to fear as we inched across this arid terrain.
‘And Samuel Clemens is gone forever,’ muttered Al, looking woebegone. ‘He was my pet. I taught him everything…’
I tried to commiserate, I really did. I told him that the smoke rings had been very pretty.
After that it was decided – by me – that our troupe of refugees had to make as much noise as possible, at all times. If these Shadow Beasts hated noise, then we would ward them off day and night as best we could, by singing and laughing and talking as loudly as possible. By turning on all the mechanical and electronic devices we had in our possession. I turned on the transistor and the hovercart radio so we had those cryptic broadcasts in loud stereo.
‘Wherewithal, Coconut, Salt-Tang, Rubicund…’
We hit metal parts with improvised drumsticks whenever we could. We made our loud, percussive way across the desert, raising decibels with dust clouds as we went. Ma sat atop our hovercart, strumming thoughtfully on her harp, which gleamed in the midday sun. Her sounds unified our cacophony into a strange kind of tune. For some reason, she wasn’t talking to me at all now. Everything I did – including saving Annabel’s life and coming up with the idea of noise to ward off silent monsters – just seemed that to make her resent me all the more. I was floating further and further away from being someone she could love.
But I really couldn’t afford to get caught up in silly things like feelings. I had to keep my eyes fixed on the road ahead and whatever tribulations we would have to face next.
Just a few days after the horror of the Shadow Beast, Toaster came and told me some striking news.
Even the usually implacable sunbed seemed excited to announce that there was a town up ahead.
22
For a few awful moments I thought I had made a huge mistake.
As we stood there in the middle of the road, I felt sure that I had managed to lead us around in a big circle and we were back where we had started. Surely this was Our Town? We were clearly back again on our own Main Street.
But a few long, silent, ominous moments passed by. We stared round at the buildings and we started to see the differences. Yes, the wooden boards that made up the buildings were the same, and the whole look of things was similar. All were copied from pictures of buildings on Earth. So far, so familiar. But there were differences. Here was the inn. At home it was The Dragon. Here it was McCaffreys. And the big store was McAndrews, and not Adams’ Exotic Emporium. Also – and this was the biggest difference, so obvious that it should have leapt out first of all – this place was utterly dead.
The windows were dark and cracked. Every surface was coated in crimson grime from desert winds. An eerie breeze riffled down Main Street, making shutters and loose doors creak on their hinges. These were the loudest noises in the whole place. There wasn’t a single living soul anywhere to be seen. I was against it, but the others were determined to explore. They split up and went all over that town, shoving their way into stores and private houses, hunting for life and preserved foodstuffs. To me it seemed disrespectful somehow.
‘Ah, now, Lora,’ Ruby said to me. ‘You can’t go bossing adults about all the time. People are allowed to do what they want, whatever you think…’ She chuckled at me.
So they were doing just what they wanted. Barging into these abandoned houses and coming out with armfuls of loot. Tins, jars, bottles and capsules. They looked almost elated by their findings. I felt disturbed, though. I couldn’t help imagining strangers ransacking our own town.
Al voiced one of my troublesome thoughts. ‘But where did they all go? Are they all dead?’
No bodies were found. None of our party came back to announce they had found skeletons sitting up at tables or lying in bed.
‘Maybe the whole town just got up and walked,’ said Ma, digging through a small case of fancy toiletries Al had brought her. ‘Just the same as we did. Maybe they felt the danger and the need to flee, just like us.’ There was a strange expression on her face, as she sniffed the jars of unguents and sprays. I recognised the signs of her rising panic and dismay. I knew she was liable to cause a scene if we didn’t get ourselves sat somewhere calmly, in safety. The noonday heat was making her mad.
I watched the others – the Adamses, Madame Lucille and Ray – coming back to our vehicles loaded down with gear. They were consuming stuff already, winching open tins of lobster and chicken. Al spilled a whole can of olives in the dust. Aunt Ruby came over proudly to show me three tins she had found – mandarin segments in sugar water. She joined the others in digging out the contents of these rusted tins with fingers and pen knives and feeding their faces right there on the spot. Even Mrs Adams was eating like that. It was every man for himself, with no sharing.
Madame Lucille was in one of her fancy get-ups. She was watching me watching the others. She gulped down sardines in tomato sauce, and blobs of bloody, fishy stuff were stuck in her thick beard.
‘You think we’re all disgusting,’ the dressmaker said.
‘W-w
hat?’
‘Grabbing and being selfish and greedy and gobbling all this stuff down at once,’ she said. ‘That’s what you think we’re like, don’t you? You think we should be fairer and nicer and share everything out properly.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I suppose I…’
But Madame Lucille interrupted, ‘You’re just a little girl. What do you know about real life or real people? You think everyone should listen to you because they all respected your Da and you knew what his plans were. But your plans don’t sound so great to me. You don’t really have the right to tell us how to carry on. No one’s gonna listen to you forever.’
She stopped then and all that could be heard was the noise of my family and the others chewing and swallowing.
‘Listen, Lora,’ said the dressmaker. ‘Can you hear it? That’s the sound that human beings make. Greedy, rapacious human beings. Consuming stuff. That’s what they do. That’s human nature. And there’s no use pretending – little girl – that it can be any nicer or nobler than that.’ Madame Lucille leered at me and crammed the last fistful of ancient sardines into her mouth.
People were dropping cans on the ground when they emptied them. Plaggy wrappers and packets, too. Who would care about litter, here in this dead town?
Dead Town. That’s what I started calling the place, right that minute.
I turned away from the bearded dressmaker and went to my family. I wanted to concentrate on them and push out of my thoughts what Madame Lucille had said. I was seriously wishing that the other townsfolk hadn’t come along with us. I hated seeing the Adamses carrying looted boxes back and forth, working so expertly on renewing their supplies.
I found Ma feeding Hannah pink pressed meat. Hannah’s eyes were gleaming. ‘It’s good,’ she grinned at me. ‘Have some!’
Truth was, I wasn’t even sure that I liked any of the people who’d tagged along with us. Maybe excepting Vernon Adams, who could be quite decent. But hadn’t he always made it his business to profit from supplies found in tombs?
