We ran for our lives.
It was Pee’s fault.
At first we were frozen, crouched there in the dark, barely able to breathe, staring at something that had changed our world in an instant from one that we knew, and understood, into…something else. We just stared.
But then he whimpered and ran, snapping our paralysis like a rib, and we jumped up and chased after him. Fear clogged my throat, oozed out of my pores, pounded in my brain. A mindless panic expanded inside me like an airbag, pushing my personality out. I wasn’t myself anymore, just a running thing.
And all the while I was dimly aware of a small part of myself, a silent observer that was actually excited. But my mind was a muffled voice now, sent out of the room for its own good. Survival was everything. Luxuries such as thinking could come later – if there was a later.
I was in third place, behind Pee and Osmo. I stumbled endlessly over the uneven ground because I couldn’t see a thing, but once we got past the perimeter fence, and in amongst the warehouses, I started to make good speed. I was about to overtake Pee, who had slipped into second place behind Osmo, when my inbuilt chivalry started to kick in, just as automatic as my running. I couldn’t leave any of them behind, especially someone as little and helpless as Pee. It’s not that I’m brave or something. I know I’m not. It’s just that my body decides things for me sometimes. So I slowed down, expecting Sal to catch up and overtake at any moment, because she was easily faster than Pee. Then if anyone were going to fall victim to what was behind us it would be me.
But Sal didn’t catch up.
We were all the way to the hole in the wall that leads back onto Brookland Common by the time I realised. I had to shout to the other two to stop. Otherwise they would have run all the way home without looking over their shoulders once. Our throats were dry and tight from breathing the cold air so hard. The streetlights on the far side of the wall coated us in an unhealthy yellow brown light.
“Sal’s still back there.” My voice sounded like somebody else’s, so serious.
Beneath my coat my back was hot and clammy, while above the neckline my ears glowed with the cold. Osmo swore. Bits of gravel and broken glass crunched beneath our feet as we started back the way we had come.
We didn’t speak at first. There was no question of us carrying on without Sal. So we jogged wordlessly back in amongst the warehouses and commercial units. Osmo and Pee were looking wide-eyed and haunted.
“Is it me or are we dreaming this?” I muttered eventually. Osmo nodded. Pee had a fixed frown on his face, as if he was sitting an exam, or as if he were constipated or something. He kept making this mewling sound from way back in his throat. I don’t think he realised he was doing it.
“What are we going to do? I don’t know what we think we’re going to do!”
“Shut up, Pee. I’m scared enough as it is.”
“Just don’t think,” said Osmo. “Just shut up and don’t think and keep on going.”
It was the only sensible idea.
When we got back to the fence I crouched down and took the lead, still playing the protector. I kept low behind the overgrown weeds and bits of wall, working my way forward. Every now and then a glimpse of the golden light caught me, and I reeled in disbelief that we hadn’t imagined it, some kind of group hallucination. But I still wasn’t convinced that I wasn’t dreaming.
We could leave her, I thought to myself, cringing at my own cowardice but following the thought anyway. Maybe it was too late to help her. Maybe it would be more use to go and get help. But my body decided to keep going forward.
We finally got as close to where we’d left Sal as we were going to get without giving ourselves away. I inched my head over the edge of some crumbled old brickwork, trying to keep my face in the shadow of a spindly old bush that was leaning over from the other side. When I saw what I saw my chest started to shudder, and I couldn’t stop it for the life of me.
My god, it was real.
•
Sal liked science fiction and I think that had a lot to do with why she hadn’t followed us. I don’t know how many girls are into science fiction compared to boys, maybe more than you’d think, but Sal loved it. I know she believed in life on other planets because she’d told me. As far as she was concerned it was simply a question of when the human race would be mature enough to receive our visitation from the stars. That’s if the aliens weren’t already here: learning about us, guiding us, helping us to evolve. It seemed plausible to both of us.
But where we disagreed, me and Sal, was the bit about how ready we humans were for first contact. I thought it should be any day now – well, I felt ready, personally, being an evolved, well-balanced individual. And though Sal seemed to agree that I wasn’t the most stupid example of the human species she’d ever met she didn’t have that much faith in the rest. As far as she was concerned it would probably be another thousand years before humanity got over itself finally and grew up.
“Human development,” she said, “if you average it out around the globe, is about equivalent to that of a teenager. Or in other words: we’re pretty messed up.”
I liked Sal. Well, that might be a bit of an understatement. Actually, saying ‘that might be a bit of an understatement’ might be a bit of an understatement. She was a deep thinker, a fast runner and she liked Star Trek. And yes, she was cute. So cute, in fact, that she could have got away with having a horrible personality, if that had been her bag. And, let’s face it, most cute girls try that on for size, for a while at least. She was way too cute to hang around with me. But somehow, through some weird space-time anomaly, she’d inherited the geek gene. She was talking about learning how to speak Klingon so she’d be able to swear at Mr. Michaels without him realising. I didn’t think it would work. Ask somebody if they want a nice cup of tea in Klingon and they’ll think you’re swearing at them.
But yeah, out of the four of us, she was definitely the most likely to ignore popular opinion. Even if it meant hanging around on her own to face something potentially dangerous. Even if her three friends were in the process of running for their teeny little lives.
I peered over the top of the wall from the safety of my shadows and I saw Sal kneeling in front of the thing that was glowing with that golden light, the thing that had floated down from the sky.
“Do you think it’s taken over her mind?” whispered Osmo.
•
I was George. Back then I was what some people would call ‘precocious’, at least in some areas of my development, meaning my head. For a fourteen year old I could knock out a pretty deep short story, the kind that made my English teacher, Miss Schneider, think the sun shone out of my notebook. These days, because of what happened to me, I’m not the old George anymore, precocious or otherwise. There are moments, like right now, as I write these words, I don’t even feel human. But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself.
It was back in the olden days – not just a different century but a whole different millennium – back when we still watched Friends, back when my 10-gigabyte hard drive still seemed pretty impressive. I lived at Number Nine, Iron Street, Banford. I went to Penrose High School. I hung around with Sal and Osmo and Pee. On Saturdays we’d go ice-skating at the rink in Kurtsholme and then wander around the market, eating butter pies and trying to avoid anyone from school. The dockland waste ground at Five Elms marked the northernmost point of our wanderground. To the south we wouldn’t normally go further than the woods at Hensley Edge, although now and again, just to shake things up, one of our random end-of-the-line bus journeys would take us further. And occasionally we’d take the train to Blackport, of course. Never dull.
By evening we’d be piling heavy-eyed into my house, or Osmo’s or Sal’s – not Pee’s – for our tea. We’d doss around indoors for a while, but sooner or later a morbid compulsion would draw us back outside to see who was out and about that was worth avoiding. Banford was a buzzing place. There was always something, at least on a Saturday, anyway. I’m not saying it was always something nice, but there was always something.
Sundays, on the other hand, tend to be deadly boring wherever you are. Well, you canna change the laws of physics can you? On Sunday we would zombie-walk from one morose limbo moment to the next. Well, that’s how I remember it. This particular Sunday was the most boring ever - Granddaddy Sunday - right up `til 7:40pm, when we saw the light in the sky from Openshaw New Road and we set off chasing it. It’s funny how the most overwhelming events in life always seem to be preceded by quiet moments.
We followed the light from the far side of the cemetery. It drifted slowly enough for us to keep sight of it as we ran down the main path that splits the cemetery in half. We were scared we’d lose it as it fell behind the trees near the perimeter, and there was a lot of cursing and scuffling as we fought with each other to be the first to get through the gap in the fence. But as we emerged from the trees we saw that its descent had slowed. It hung in the air, seeming lost, seeming to wait for us. In the end the timing was perfect. By the time we crossed Brookland Common and passed through the old industrial estate, and were pulling up behind the protective cover of the bit of wall on the waste ground near the docks, we were just in time to see it land barely ten metres in front of us.
It drifted down from the sky like the first star leaf of some great universal autumn. We could see what it was now, in the centre of all that shining: an inhuman figure, clutching a smooth golden ball.
It was impossible to tell whether it was the ball that was shining or the figure or both. We watched from the shadows. It floated gracefully down, but when its feet touched the ground it tipped backwards drunkenly, falling against the low remnant of another wall. The brickwork crumpled beneath its weight. All was still for a moment. The figure didn’t move. Maybe it was dead. We held our collective breath, despite all of the running we had just done. Then it looked directly at us.
It’s funny that we had run all that way there, and then, at a panicked squeak from Pee, we turned around and started to run back again.
All of us except Sal, of course.
•
From the safety of my shadows I could see Sal kneeling on the floor, looking into its face.
“Do you think it’s taken over her mind?” whispered Osmo.
They were both completely still, just looking at each other, and this did seem scary to me – as scary as if it were chasing after her with a ray gun. I couldn’t even summon the courage to answer the question, I was so afraid of being heard.
Pee put his back against the wall, slumped down onto his bum and moaned.
“We’re going to die,” he croaked.
I was dimly aware of him puking up. Me and Osmo continued to watch the scene in front of us. And that’s all we did. We should have been working out some plan to rescue our friend, but we didn’t even try. We just cowered there in the shadows and waited. It makes me feel sick when I think about it.
What broke the spell in the end was Sal herself, standing up and turning around and walking towards us. The light was behind her and all around her, casting her face in shadow so we couldn’t see her expression. We had no way of telling if it was our Sal or if she’d been taken over by a telepathic nightmare from the stars. A bit of drool at the corner of her mouth would have been enough for me. I would have been off and running again.
“Come over,” she said as she drew near. “He knows you’re here. It’s alright.”
She sounded pretty normal. As she reached the wall I was able to make out her face. She did have something of a stunned expression, wonderstruck I’d say, but I could tell at once that it was the real her in there.
“Are you alright?” asked Osmo, and for a moment I felt bad that I hadn’t asked first, but then he said, “You’re not going to turn into a bug-eyed monster, are you?”
“I’m fine, honest. You’ve got to come over. It’s amazing. You’ll regret it if you don’t.” Sal’s voice was alive, I mean, really alive – I’d never seen her so switched on. She was having the biggest moment of her life.
Me and Osmo looked at each other. It was one of those looks that only happen now and again, that you share with someone who’s in the exact same extreme situation as you, when you’re both feeling the same feelings, thinking the same thoughts. We both nodded minute little nods at the same time. I turned to Pee who was still on the floor.
“Do you wanna stay here, Pee?”
Pee looked like a trapped animal, like a mouse that’s been caught and you can see its heart fluttering through its ribs.
“Yeah,” he managed. “Just for a little bit.” None of us blamed him. I nearly got down there and joined him. Sal smiled.
“Come out when you’re feeling a bit braver, Pee.” Pee nodded seriously, and his eyes rolled in their sockets, scanning the darkness behind our little wall, making sure the rest of the world was still normal. Sal turned to me and Osmo. An excited light danced in her eyes, but her breathing was measured, her body language calm.
“It’s okay,” she said levelly.
She took the time to look each of us in the eye, to communicate her confidence. I felt myself stand up straighter. The small part of me that had been excited all along suddenly stepped forward, elbowing my fear to one side. Osmo managed to raise his eyebrows high and puff out his cheeks. He shrugged in a mock devil-may-care way and the three of us relaxed a bit, looked more like our old selves.
“Come on,” said Sal.
She beckoned with her head for us to follow her. I’ve got to say that with the golden white light behind her, and my bloodstream pumping with adrenaline and everything, she did look beautiful in that moment. I’m sure me and Osmo were both ready to faint on the spot - with the intensity of the situation, you know. I feel like fainting every time I think about it.
We shuffled out from the shade of our barricade and into the beams of an alien light.
“By the way,” said Sal, “he’s telepathic.”