“Scarlett wait,” said a voice in her head.
“What was that?”
“Sshhh, it’s OK. It’s me, Neelam. I promise I won’t hurt you or poke around in your mind. Please just wait while I catch up with you, I want to help.”
Scarlett stopped walking, hopefully of her own free will and Neelam soon appeared.
“I can sense you’re afraid at the moment, so it would be wrong of us to make you stay,” Neelam said aloud. “I don’t know what’s happened, but I believe you when you say you don’t remember us.”
“Well, you can read minds.”
She laughed. Scarlett almost did too.
“You weren’t lying then… you really do have powers.”
Neelam nodded.
“We all do. You saw what Dylan showed you. If you remember Dylan at all, you’ll know he’s a steadfast, honest guy who never lies.” She paused. “Scarlett, I want you to know that we love you. You’re part of our family. Whenever you’re ready to find us, or if you remember us or ever need our help, please do get in touch.
“Here,” she placed a small green gadget in Scarlett’s hand.
“This is one of Lucy’s special inventions. Press it anytime and we’ll come running.”
“Thanks,” she said. She wasn’t sure what else to say.
Then Neelam thrust a thousand pounds into her other hand.
“Take this. It’s to help you find somewhere to sleep and eat. I want to know you’re safe. And whatever you do, don’t tell anyone your real name.”
That sounded ominous, Scarlett wanted to ask why, but Neelam hugged her and walked away before she had a chance.
“Thank you,” Scarlett yelled.
She could not believe how kind Neelam had been. It certainly didn’t seem like anyone else in this crazy world was nice.
Scarlett stuffed the money and gadget into the inside pocket of her jacket. Maybe she shouldn’t have run off as quickly as she had, but everything that had happened today had made her super paranoid. She could go back, but she realised it was getting late. Now she had some money for a taxi, she should make another attempt to get back home to East Dulwich. Maybe everything would seem normal once she was in her own bed.
Chapter 3
Scarlett made her way back towards London Bridge station in the hope of finding a taxi office. There had to be one somewhere around there, surely? However, as she trudged past rows and rows of empty shops, she began to lose hope.
“Thank goodness!” she shouted as she spotted what looked like a cab office with a light on. It looked dirty and dilapidated, but it would do considering the circumstances.
She pushed open the door and watched a grumpy old man look up from behind the window to his kiosk.
“Hello?” she said meekly.
“What do you want?” he barked. The place reeked of old cigarette smoke and the man smelt even worse. The walls had turned yellow, probably from years of being exposed to nicotine, and the wallpaper was peeling off in several places. Scarlett really hoped she didn’t have to wait here for too long.
“Could I get a cab to East Dulwich please?” she asked.
“Yeah. That’ll be £300.”
“What? The fare usually costs £30 at the most.”
He laughed. “Kids today, don’t know the value of money,” he muttered.
Scarlett suddenly recalled spotting the extortionate price of coffee in the café, and the homeless man demanding £50 at the station. It seemed that everything had got incredibly more expensive overnight. Was she in the future? No wonder Neelam had given her so much money.
“Don’t be so stupid,” she silently scolded herself before her thoughts ran away with her.
“You want a taxi or what, girly?” the man snapped, interrupting her thoughts.
“OK,” she said begrudgingly.
As the car sped through the streets of south London, Scarlett realised that the whole city looked different. Entire high streets were boarded up and prostitutes and drug dealers lined the pavements of what used to be nice areas. It was like a nightmare. She was so happy when the taxi pulled into her parents’ road, but relief soon turned to horror when she saw that there was no house there. Judging by the scorched floor and ruins, it had been burned to the ground.”
“You sure you got the right address, girl?” the driver asked.
“Yes!” Scarlett didn’t understand.
“Well I’m pretty sure there’s no one home,” he joked.
She didn’t see the funny side. Where had her home gone? Where were her family? She got out of the taxi and took a look around the place where her house had stood. The ground felt cold and grass was growing around the charred ruins. It appeared that the fire had been much more than four weeks ago. It was weird. She glanced up and down the road and noticed the whole street seemed scary – it was nothing like the cosy, tree-lined road she knew. She walked back to the cab. There was no point in hanging around. In fact, she sensed that hanging around was the last thing she wanted to do.
“Can you drive to 14 Lingfield Avenue?” she asked, thinking she could see if her friend Millie was home.
The driver did the short five-minute journey, but there was no one in. She thought of trying to track down Alex’s family to tell them what had happened, but they lived in Didsbury in the north. There was no way she could afford to get a taxi up there. It would probably cost at least £10,000. Who else could she try? Maybe her friend Sarah from sixth-form English class would be home. She lived near here.
“Can you go to 19 Murray Common please?”
The driver sighed.
“I promise this is the last place I’ll try.”
He reluctantly sped to Sarah’s house and Scarlett was delighted to see there were lights on. Someone was home.
She bounced up the driveway excitedly and punched the doorbell. Sarah answered the door.
“Hi!”
Sarah wrinkled her nose. “Do I know you?”
“Stop kidding around!”
Sarah gave her a look that assured her she wasn’t joking.
“Oh for goodness sake, Sarah, please tell me you know who I am.”
“But… I don’t. Sorry.”
“We sit together in English!”
“Are you mad? I don’t even study English.”
“At sixth form…”
“I left school at 16 to work with my dad. The sixth form shut down when the government cut education funding two years ago.”
“What… but…”
“Sorry. I don’t know you. Please go away or I’ll fetch my father.”
Then she shut the door in Scarlett’s face.
Scarlett trudged back down the front yard to the waiting car.
“This not your house either then?”
She shook her head dejectedly.
“Come on girl, are you drunk or something? Don’t you know where you live?”
“I… I’m sorry. Can you please drive me to a hotel back in London? A cheap but decent one.”
“Alright, girl, but it’s gonna cost yer.”
“Doesn’t it always?” she thought as she sunk into the seat and flung her head into the backseat defeatedly.
Half an hour later, Scarlett was standing in a Travel Hut near Liverpool Street Station, but check-in was taking longer than she would have liked. After ten minutes of being ignored by the shoddy receptionist, who seemed far more intent on flirting with a customer, she rang the little bell for the third time.
“What?” the surly blonde snapped as she shot Scarlett a dirty look.
“Can I have a room for the night?” Scarlett asked, staring at the receptionist defiantly. There was no way she was letting this catty little madam intimidate her.
“Yeah,” she glowered. “Take room 475. What’s your name?”
“Dorothy Dove,” she lied, recalling what Neelam had said about not giving out her real name.
“Alright, Dorothy. Here’s your key. The stairs are on the left.”
T
he world’s worst receptionist then threw the key at her and returned to making gooey eyes at her love interest.
“Thanks,” Scarlett snapped sarcastically.
She headed up the stairs and made her way to the room. It was damp, mouldy and smelly and the dirty cream décor left a lot to be desired for, but it was better than being out on those crazy streets.
She picked up the remote, flopped on the rickety bed and switched on the TV. It looked like an old set from the 1980s, so she was pretty amazed that it worked as it clicked into life to show some boring drama. Scarlett changed the channel with a flick. Boring soap full of people shouting at each other. Flick. Boring manufactured girl band pouting and miming like robots. Flick. Boring news. Flick. Hang on, maybe she should watch the news to see if she could learn a few things. She clicked back to the previous channel.
A woman was reporting from a riot in Sheffield. From what she could gather, hundreds of people were ambushing the home of a gas company boss in protest. Something about the prices having got so high that only the rich could afford them.
Another journalist was at a homeless shelter on the outskirts of Birmingham. It was full to the brim of poor families who had lost their homes and jobs. One member of the public started to say something about the jobless being made to do time in a workhouse to earn their benefits, but the reporter wound the story up right away.
The next story focussed on a group of anti-war protesters in Trafalgar Square. The police were being horribly heavy handed. It sickened her. Surely that wasn’t allowed? But an official was defending their behaviour as being necessary – he was even commending the officers and the journalist was lapping it right up.
The world had gone mad and horrendous overnight. What could have happened?
“Maybe I have travelled to the future?” she thought. After all, this was like the world she knew, but a million times worse and it couldn’t get this bad overnight. Surely more than four weeks must have passed. Scarlett laughed at her own theories and again wondered if she’d been watching too many sci-fi films. She wished Alex was here. He’d talk some sense into her and tell her to stop letting her overactive brain run away with her.
She suddenly had an idea. She picked up the TV remote again and switched to Teletext. There in the right hand corner was the date: 15 November, 2013.
A quick calculation told her that was right. It really was just four weeks after her birthday back in mid-October.
Why was the world so different then? She didn’t understand. Her brain hurt with the confusion and possibilities and she rubbed her eyes with tiredness and frustration.
“Maybe I’m still asleep?” Scarlett decided. “In a coma or something. Or maybe I’m on another Earth? Maybe I am in the future, but someone is trying to hide the fact from me… or maybe… maybe I am exhausted and thinking nonsense.”
“Get some sleep and think about it in the morning,” a wise voice inside her head said. She was never going to achieve anything while she was so manically tired, so she had might as well get some rest. Tomorrow, and possibly every day to come, was going to be a long day.
Scarlett woke at 7.30am and couldn’t get back to sleep. After wondering what to do next, she remembered seeing an internet café near reception, so she headed down there.
She paid ten pounds for an hour and sat down. She looked in her purse and realised she was getting through the money Neelam had given her far too quickly. This hellish place sure was expensive. She switched on her computer, logged in and typed “Scarlett Shortt” into the search engine. Nothing. No Facebook, no Twitter, no official records. No mention of her at all.
“That’s weird,” she thought. She deleted Scarlett and typed in her mum’s name, “Alice”.
Links to several news stories came up on the screen. The headlines were all similar.
“Family die tragically in fire”; “Blaze kills couple and son”; “House burns down, killing three”.
It couldn’t be true. She clicked on the top one.
“A couple and their 11-year-old son were tragically killed in a blaze last night...” it read. “... Firefighters battled to save Alice and Tom Shortt, both 41, and their son Daniel, 11, but sadly none of them survived. The cause of the fire is unknown.”
Scarlett refused to believe it. Her whole family was dead? The date on the story said January 7 2011, so how could that be? That was almost three years ago and she knew they hadn’t died then, she’d seen them every day since. The reports must be wrong.
But what if it was true? Her heart sank. That was too horrible a thought to imagine.
She read some of the other articles, hoping to find more information, but there was nothing. It seemed suspicious to her. Why had there been no investigation to show what happened? Scarlett’s experience of reading the news told her there should be more details available than this. And why hadn’t she been named? Surely the grieving daughter would have been mentioned. It really was like she didn’t exist. It felt like the more answers she tried to find, the more questions cropped up. It was frustrating.
Scarlett grabbed a notepad and pen she’d taken from the hotel room and jotted the information down. She tried several more searches for information about herself and her family, but there was nothing to be found.
What about if she looked up Alex? Was he in this crazy world? Had he survived the crash? She typed in “Alex Connor”. Nothing. He didn’t exist either. That was interesting. She glanced at the clock and saw she still had 15 minutes of internet time left.
“Well, I’d might as well try a different line of investigation then,” she thought.
She typed in “wanted”, “London” and “super powers” to see if anything would come up about the teens she’d met last night. Again the search engine gave her a page of articles. At the top of the page was a row of images, none of them were very clear. She clicked a fuzzy group one so she could go to the page and see it in a larger size. There they were. Neelam, Lucy, Jay, Dylan. And Scarlett.
“That’s me! I really do know them.”
She sunk a little lower into her seat to be less conspicuous, suddenly aware that if she was one of them, then she was wanted too. She went back to the list of news articles and clicked through to read one of them.
“The super menace group are still at large and The London Evening News has got an exclusive picture. If you know the identity of any of the people in this photo, call us on 020 7999 1000. We’ll call you straight back.
“The group, as you may remember, are to blame for the Victoria Incident that devastated the capital and indeed the whole country last year. It’s time they were brought to justice.”
Victoria Incident? What did that mean? She looked at the list of articles again. “What could those nice kids – and me – have done that was so bad?” she wondered. Scarlett refused to believe it was true.
“Menace or heroes?” asked the title of a blog. Displayed below were the first words, which read: “The government are quick to persecute the so-called super-power menace, but how do we know they’re bad? Well, maybe they’re not if you believe…” Scarlett hit the link to read the rest of the article, but it wasn’t there. There was just a blank screen saying “This page has been removed”.
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would have said as she ventured into her Wonderland. Why had a positive article about the super teens been removed? Why were her family reported as dead? And why didn’t she exist? It was a mystery. Scarlett was beginning to realise that nothing was as it seemed it this twisted world.
She hit the back button again to try to find more, but at that second, the glass front of the café shattered as a policeman came flying through it and landed by her computer. Scarlett span around in disbelief, checking herself for cuts. She should have known things wouldn’t stay quiet for long. She was beginning to hate this place, wherever it was.
She looked outside. Dozens of police were marching to the scene – she could count at least ten rows of them. Well she thought they were
police anyway. Their black, military-style outfits and the helmets that covered their faces made them look so much more imposing than any cops she’d seen before and the sight of them striding towards the building carrying guns scared the life out of her. Since when were they all armed? Remembering that she was a wanted woman, Scarlett decided to make a quick exit amidst the commotion. She logged off her computer, then snuck out into the crowds.
Chaos was reigning. A group of troublemakers about her age were fighting with the police. Scarlett couldn’t believe her eyes – they had super powers, but it only took her a second to realise they weren’t the teenagers she had met yesterday.
“Who are they then?” she wondered. Something told her she didn’t want to hang around to find out, so she put her head down and kept on walking. But it was too late. She’d already been spotted.
“Hello Scarlett,” smiled a girl with curly dark hair, who had flown from nowhere to be hovering in front of her. “Well, well, we never expected to see you again.”
Chapter 4
“Yowch!” Scarlett yelled as the crazy flying girl punched her round the face. Something told her that, whoever this teen was, the two of them weren’t friends.
“Ethan!” she shouted. “Look who I’ve found. I told you she wasn’t dead.”
Scarlett turned round to see the boy she was talking to. He was about her age, 5ft 10in with a blond, floppy fringe that moodily covered one eye. He was throwing little round bombs around left, right and centre, before stopping to run over to them.
“Hi Scarlett,” he said with an unwelcoming tone. “You survived then?”
“Survived what? Do I know you?”
“I think she’s gone mad,” the flying girl laughed as she eyed Scarlett up and down. She sure was pretty, if you like sexy stunners with killer hourglass figures and bouncy, curly hair. Scarlett fingered her own super-straight locks with envy.
“Shut it, Sasha,” Ethan snapped. “It’s obvious she’s bluffing.”
“No I’m not! I honestly have no idea where I am, who you are, who anyone is.”
Out Of Time Page 3
