Invaders From Beyond

by Colin Sinclair

  17

  SUNDAY NIGHT STOCKTAKING. It’s more about dream than the reality; imagine you work in a shop where things are sold in volume on a regular basis.

  You could count the things we’re out off on the fingers of one hand, with no need to trawl the aisles and determine the number of garden rakes that still remain.

  I guess it is possible Brackett might have some concerns about shrinkage, palm-blight, the old four-finger-discount—stealing, for those in the back—but this place seems like a long haul to go to just to nick a lawn chair.

  I’m checking the trays of mid-size ceramic pots—still twelve, all in order, thanks—when Jost walks over and says nothing.

  He stands there for a minute or two while I tap a pen down a shelf full of boxed garden lights. Solar-powered—just spike them in the ground—and priced to sell; the boxes are filmed in dust. I make a note.

  “I know you’re not fully on board,” he starts.

  He’s not wrong there. I’m not here for adventure and excitement. Not at home to paranoid ramblings. This is my crappy place-holder job whilst I flail in desperation to find something else. That metaphor doesn’t really work. Is it mixed? Or—

  “I’ve been looking them over,” he goes on. “Something about them sets my hackles rising. Teeth on edge, sort of thing. You get me?”

  “So what is it?”

  Jost shrugs.

  “Look,” he says. “You seem a sensible sort. Level head.”

  Has he met me?

  “You overthink,” Jost says. “You second-guess. Miss your moment, most of the time.”

  Okay, turns out he has.

  “I saw you when the spiders broke free, though,” Jost continues. “You snapped to quick enough. Made the right decisions on your feet.”

  I mumble my thanks.

  That was Friday night. Spiders are the least of our troubles now.

  “So that’s why you should join me for the recon,” Jost is saying. “Once it’s full dark, we’re heading back to Garden World.”

  “What?”

  IT’S JUST A walk in the dark, Jost said.

  Nothing to it, is there?

  We sneak over, we take a look, get some pics, slide back home to Brackett’s.

  If there’s anything to it, we call in the big boys. The cops, the army; the council, maybe, they’re bound to be breaking building regs, at the very least?

  If there’s nothing to it, then Chas is right and life goes on.

  “What have you got to lose?” Jost had asked me.

  Looking around at my job, my life, my place in the world, I couldn’t think of an answer.

  So we’re going to take a long looping course around the back of Garden World, do a bit of sneak-and-peeping; sounded simple enough, way he put it.

  I wasn’t happy with the idea of stumbling around in the pitch dark out there, and said as much to Jost. “Talk to Clone,” he said.

  So I’m tramping down the back stairs and into the hidden jungle.

  I’ve had to head down here a couple of times since my first meeting with Clone. It never gets any less strange. The man himself is never more normal.

  I open the door and step in, slow and quiet.

  The light is almost zero at this point. Just a vague sense of a glow and the shadows of many leaves. The door whispers to a close.

  Clone says he’s running a controlled day-night cycle, but I’ve never been here in anything but warm, damp darkness.

  I don’t want to speak, for fear of upsetting the delicate balance.

  I don’t have to.

  Clone emerges from the gloom in front of me. Looking close to normal in a set of dark overalls.

  “You’re not...” I keep my voice low. “Not decked out in greenery and... stuff.”

  Clone shrugs. “Digging trenches, far end of the basement. Miles of tumbledown tunnels over that way. You’d not believe it.”

  In this place, I’m starting to believe anything.

  “Jost says you have some—”

  “Here you go,” Clone hands me a canvas satchel. “It’s all there. Not the latest model, so you might find them a bit rope-a-dopey. Good enough for what you need, though.”

  I look in the bag. Night vision goggles.

  “Thanks,” I say. And pause.

  Then, “Jost told me to tell you there might be trouble. Later.”

  Clone cocks his head to one side. He normally has a daydream look on his face but now his eyes are fixed, bright, not blinking.

  “Oh, aye?”

  “He said: keep the place locked down, be prepared.”

  Clone’s teeth gleam in the darkness.

  “Oh, ah’m well prepared, don’t you worry about that.”

  “You are?”

  That’s a relief. Isn’t it?

  “Flick the switch, hit the button. Goodnight Vienna,” Clone says. “No troubles.”

  “No troubles,” I find myself repeating.

  “’Course,” he says. “Ah might very well lose an eyebrow if ah’m no’ careful. You understand me?”

  I don’t.

  “But aside from that, we’re solid,” he goes on. “The bizzies’ll find nothing. My extensive range of specialist product will be nothing but a memory, trust me. Turn, turn, press. Woomf.”

  “Woomf.” I echo.

  “Exactly,” he says. Throws up a little salute and starts backing away.

  “Have fun out there,” he says.

  Yeah, fun. That’s what it is.

  18

  “I DON’T KNOW why I’m doing this,” I’m telling Etty.

  It’s night outside and Jost and I are getting ready for the off. We’re sitting behind a row of shelving, screened from the front of the store by crates and boxes.

  Etty’s treating it like a big lark. It’s not like we’re planning anything illegal. Well, okay, it’s trespass or something like that, isn’t it? I’m no expert.

  “You got a taste for it,” Etty is saying.

  “I did?”

  “Our little sojourn across the way,” she says. “That was the seat-of-your-pants edge your life’s been missing to this point,” she explains.

  “It is?”

  “Your world is bland. Routine. You want the rush. You need to feed the rush.”

  “I do?”

  “It’s a sure way to feel alive,” she says, emphatically.

  “You sound like an aftershave commercial,” I say.

  “I do, don’t I?”

  I wonder if it’s true. Have I been lacking something? When I was a kid I climbed up onto a playschool roof; ran about on the surface of a strange flat other-world of flecked grey tar, tall spikey aerials and fat squat ventilation ductworks.

  I got caught, of course, and punished, and that put the blocks on my adventuring for the foreseeable. Did I harbour a longstanding grudge for missing the head-rush, heart-beat thrill of it all? Did I want to live on edges?

  Maybe I’m just tangled up in the notion of a mystery to be solved, a secret to uncover?

  Perhaps I just want to make a decision instead of drifting with the flow.

  Okay, fair enough, it was Jost who suggested this. But I decided to go along with it, didn’t I? Dynamic.

  “Besides,” Etty is saying. “It’s Sunday night. What else is there to do?”

  “I can think of a few things,” I say.

  Etty’s about to reply—

  “You can tell her about them later,” Jost says. “We’re good to go.”

  Great.

  I stand up. I’m wearing black combats and a hooded black top. The hoodie belongs to Etty; she dug it out of the Land Rover, and it smells of mould and petrol.

  “Like a shadow,” she says.

  Jost is dressed in similar shades of dark. Lot of pouches and pockets and he’s got his own night vision gear; souvenir from the service, he said.

  “Jump up and down,” Jost tells me.

  I do what he says. No rattling, it’s all good.

  “Reminds
me of the mosh pit,” Etty says.

  Jost nods approval.

  “Okay,” he says. “We go out. Kelvin covers the cameras and comms. Francis and Etty act natural—B-A-U—and Chas—”

  I raise my hand.

  “Business as usual,” Jost says.

  I put my hand down.

  “Where was I?” Jost asks.

  Chas is nearby at station one, closest to the main doors, drinking coffee and ignoring all of this.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jost continues, “Chas is security for anything unexpected.”

  That doesn’t seem wise to me. “Security?”

  “He knows how to deal with troublemakers, knows how to do it quick and dirty,” Jost says. Points. “Look at him. He’s like a short, angry ballet dancer.”

  “Hey,” Chas says. He stops. Like he’s trying to figure out if that was insult or praise.

  “Hold the fort,” Jost says.

  “Sure,” Chas replies. “I got your back. The buck stops here. None shall pass.”

  “Hey,” I say to Etty, “how come Francis hasn’t left yet? His shift was over hours ago.”

  “Idiot,” she says.

  Chas shakes his head.

  Over at station two, Francis is helping Kelvin set up some tiny grey-screen monitors, scavenged from Jost’s security room. They’re sharing a joke and beaming like fools.

  Oh.

  “I get it,” I say.

  “Good,” Jost says. “I was beginning to think your observation skills weren’t up to the task. Let’s move.”

  Jost heads off, quick march.

  Etty grabs my arm as I turn to go.

  “With your shield or on it, right?”

  She smiles at me and walks away.

  19

  EVERYTHING IS PALE green or dark green through the lenses of the night vision gear weighing down my head. Passive, Jost called it. Intensifies available light, and there’s not much of that around here. We’re hundreds of metres from the nearest lamp-posts. The two bright spots are Brackett’s and Garden World.

  The landscape looks like a battlefield. One of the industrialised warfare ones, with trenches. Given Jost’s history, I’m keeping these thoughts to myself.

  You can’t argue with it, though. The ground is broken and blasted, gouged and gutted, abandoned and—

  And then the wreckage left behind is colonised by whatever’s suited to the new terrain. In the end, it’s all about territory.

  Jost, a few steps ahead, raises a fist and I freeze.

  He lowers his hand, palm flat, sinks to a crouch and I follow suit.

  We had a quick briefing—that’s what he called it—before we snuck out the back door at Brackett’s.

  This means stop, that means go, if I point at my eyes I want you to look around your immediate area. That kind of thing. They’re not all official, he’d told me, just a way to get the message across. I’ve seen war movies. I know the score. Or think I do.

  “Comms check,” Jost says.

  We’ve got the one radio between us. Kelvin and Jost have done something to it that boosts the power and extends the range. Whatever it was involved taping extra batteries and a long twist of antenna on to it—the whole thing is strapped to Jost’s chest at this point—and linking up a microphone and a single-ear headset.

  “Six-five to Control,” Jost is saying, into the mic. “No pick up at that address.” I can’t hear the response, I presume some coded phrase that tells him everything is A-Okay.

  Jost takes a moment to scan the area. I follow suit, even though he hasn’t given the signal. Running along the right side of our course, spoil from a canal-dredging project that got bogged down in council bickering and an inevitable funding crisis. The consultants and project managers got their money and walked; the local populace get unruly heaps of dark mud and river bed rubbish. You’re welcome.

  To the left, an unfinished apartment complex rises in several storeys of blank-faced concrete, before ending in forests of rusted rebar and billows of torn plastic sheeting.

  The city centre and accompanying prosperity were meant to sprawl in this direction, sweep out and raise up everything in sight. Instead, the money trickled away like the tide retreating, leaving everything washed up and gasping for air.

  “End of the fucking line,” I say. Quietly, of course; I’m not an idiot.

  Questioning look from Jost.

  “This place, Brackett’s. Us.”

  Kelvin the bright-brain in a crappy job, Chas the chancer, Etty whose career died before it got started.

  “I’ve got... issues,” I say. “And I’m guessing there’s, y’know, a story, with... whatever happened to you.”

  No-one chooses this on purpose, do they?

  It’s very still out here.

  The wind doesn’t trouble us, there’s not a lot to hear except the hum of distant traffic and a stir of trees from somewhere in the darkness.

  And apparently a mysterious whine that the young alone can detect. Children and bats, that’s their audience. I’m too old for that shit.

  “Shellshock,” Jost says.

  I don’t—

  “That’s what they used to call it. Neurasthenia. Blokes. Younger than Laura, even. Stuck in uniform and shoved into the firing line. No wonder some of them folded under the weight of it all, under the burden of a world changing all around them.”

  I don’t want to ask, but somehow I say, “Is that what it was like for you?”

  “Too many days in combat,” Jost says. “Too many nights under fire. Far from home, away from friends, family. It’s normal to tire of the notion you can cope.”

  I don’t say anything else.

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder is the brave new name for it,” he says. “Doesn’t make it any easier to reintegrate when you get back, though. And it’s not like the home front helps any. Torn between indifference and jingoistic nonsense; stuck in the middle of two tribes spouting shite on stuff they’ll never understand.”

  It’s odd hearing this. Not least because he’s wearing his own night vision gear—big dark frame covering up his eyes and half his face—and it’s like a solemn heart-to-heart from someone in a chair at the opticians.

  “Anyway,” Jost says. “I was bad to a lot of people for a long time. Drove them to distraction.”

  A long pause. “Pushed them away, didn’t I?”

  I can’t find a response that isn’t glib and pointless.

  “I’m getting better,” Jost continues. “One day at a time. Slow and steady wins the race.”

  I nod agreement.

  “It’s why you’re wrong,” Jost tells me.

  That’s unexpected. Although, given how wrong I’ve been so often, I shouldn’t be shocked.

  “It’s not the end of anything,” Jost says. “It’s better than that.”

  “Is it?”

  “Think of it as a last chance. First rung of the ladder up, yeah?”

  He looks around the blighted waste ground all around us.

  “This is your chance to start again,” he says. “Isn’t that worth defending?”

  20

  WE’RE UP TO the wire on the perimeter of the Garden World car park.

  Jost is on the radio again. “Six-five to Control. I’m at the address. I’ll have a look around.”

  There are the parked trucks that caught Kelvin’s eye. A bright smear of light spills out from a large open roller-shutter at one end of the main building. Not many people about at this hour.

  “You should shut off your goggles,” Jost is telling me. “You’ll need a few minutes to adjust.”

  I press and twist the relevant switch; a low buzz I hadn’t noticed fades away.

  When I take the night vision goggles off my head, everything looks strange and grey.

  Jost is still wearing his set; big green bug eyes staring in my direction.

  “You’re not taking yours—”

  “I’m staying here.” He pats his stomach. “I’m not as fit as I was. Not q
uite up to the running around stuff.”

  I spend most of my time on the couch playing Xbox games. I’m not a threat to Usain Bolt’s record.

  “I’ll give a signal if there’s any trouble we can’t handle.”

  “A signal?”

  “You’ll know it,” Jost says. “Take this.”

  I’m expecting a weapon of some sort. I’m surprised when he hands me a heavy woven strap with a loop at one end. “This is a dog lead.”

  “Anyone asks, you’re looking for the family pet. Alsatian. Female. Answers to Charlie. Short for Charlemagne.”

  “You’ve thought this one through.”

  The other end of the lead is frayed, there’s no hook to connect it to a collar.

  “Oh, right,” I say. “That’s how Charlie escaped.”

  Obvious.

  I’m well into wondering how I’m going to attach this to her collar when I remember the dog does not exist. Not here, anyway.

  “This as well,” Jost says. He shoves something into my hands that looks like a torch. It’s wrapped in tape, but there’s no glass and the buttons are covered. It’s very heavy.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “A second chance. If you get cornered. Twist the top”—he mimes the action—“and throw it towards the ground. Throw it hard. Away from yourself. Got that?”

  “Away,” I nod. “Gotcha.”

  “Try and get some pics.” Jost hands me a camera; dark red compact with a tiny viewfinder and a lens that whirrs in-and-out when you’re focusing. “It’s not great but it performs well in low-light. We’ll see what we can see.”

  “You work with what you have,” I say, tucking the camera into a side pocket.

  “That’s the spirit.”

  There’s already a hole cut in the wire, either from an earlier Jost visitation or just because this thing was put up three or four years ago when the site was first developed and no one has looked at it since.

  I slide through the gap as Jost holds back a fold of fencing. I’m about to move when he says, “Wait one.”

  I stay where I am and try not to breathe too heavy. I’m crouching down and my knees are starting to burn in protest.

  “Indigo unit at your nine o’clock,” Jost is saying.