Alien Disaster (5 page)

They stopped running after that. Instead they walked calmly: away from the burning school; away from the growing crowds of people who were shouting and pointing, taking photos and making videos. ‘I need to go somewhere where I can think,’ Brandon said. The twins tagged along. Jason was still wielding the fire axe from the basement.

They wound up in the quiet of Waterlow Park. From here, they could see all of London laid out before them. Although it was now dark, the city was lit and busy, and the sound of confused voices carried across the park. The air was thick with clouds of dust. Helicopters equipped with powerful strobe lights surveyed the meteor craters, and some turned their attention to the remains of the school. Brandon wondered if Gem and James were up there somewhere, or if they’d flown far away from London.

He sat on a bench. Kat sat beside him, and Jason stood nearby looking moody. ‘Okay, so what were those things?’ Jason began. ‘Aliens? After everything you see in films, they end up looking like wrestlers with body paint and Halloween masks?’

‘Ask them if they have acid for blood next time you see them,’ Kat said.

‘There has to be a rational explanation,’ Brandon said, thinking out loud. ‘Those aliens, or whatever those creatures are, were after this,’—he held up the metal cylinder from the lab—‘and those meteors were missiles aimed at my family. Maybe they want my family dead, or maybe they just want to make sure that this thing gets destroyed. We need to find out what the hell it is.’

‘
We?
’ Jason questioned. ‘Are
we
still part of this, Kat? I never liked hanging out with you much at school, Walker. I like it less now that we’re getting bombed and harassed by … those brutes.’

Brutes.
Brandon liked the description.

Kat sighed. ‘Maybe you should hand that thing over to the police or the army, Brandon. They’ll protect you.’

Brandon shook his head. ‘This thing could be too important to give up. My mum insisted that I keep it secret. No, I need to stay hidden: off the radar. In fact I probably should leave London and keep moving. There could be some kind of tracking device in this thing that’s giving away its position.’

Jason looked around apprehensively.

Kat seemed to perk up though. ‘Where could we go?’ she asked.

‘Brighton.’ Brandon said. ‘I
think
that’s where my mum is. A meteor hit there today, round about the time she got cut off on the phone. I don’t know
why
she’s there—maybe there’s another lab—or even if she’s still alive, but she’s the
only
person who can help.’

Kat looked at Jason questioningly.

‘Go then,’ Jason told Brandon. ‘Kat and I will be safer going in the
opposite
direction to you. We’ll let the army know that you’ve got this mess under control.’

Brandon got up.

‘Wait,’ Kat said.

Kat gave Jason a look.
What are you going to do
, it seemed to say,
if what I want to do isn’t what you want to do?
Jason raised his eyebrows in disbelief. She stared him down. Eventually he sighed and shrugged.

‘Great. A trip to the seaside. Where’s my bucket and spade?’

They set off down the hill.

‘Are we walking to Brighton?’ Jason asked.

‘I’m thinking,’ Brandon said. In the distance he could see a bright light moving north along the Midland Main Line. ‘It looks like the trains are running again—the outbound ones at least. The fastest way to get out of London would be by train. What station do we need?’

‘Hmm … St. Pancras, I think,’ Kat said.

‘If the internet wasn’t down, we could have booked a ticket,’ Jason said.

‘Something tells me that every train out of London is going to be fully booked,’ Brandon said. ‘We’ll have to blag our way aboard. Anyway, let’s go—St. Pancras isn’t far. We can walk down through Kentish Town.’

Their route took them close by smoking meteor craters and big piles of rubble that were once buildings. They had to find a diversion around a gaping hole in the middle of Royal College Street. Kat fell in beside Brandon as they hurried along, walking fast but definitely not running. ‘God, I hope Xander’s okay and his house is still standing,’ she said, seemingly suddenly remembering him as she stared at a ruined row of townhouses.

‘Do you know where he lives?’ Brandon asked her.

‘Nope,’ she admitted freely. ‘We didn’t actually do much talking.’

Brandon said nothing. He didn’t know what to say.

‘He wouldn’t like to have come on this adventure though,’ Kat went on. ‘I think he would definitely have run straight to the police.’

Brandon prepared to break it to Kat that Xander Jones was probably dead.

But she suddenly changed the subject: ‘Doctor Kang seemed interested in your mum’s gizmo,’ she said. ‘Maybe he was a spy, placed at school to keep an eye on you and your family! What do you think?’

Brandon shrugged. That was
exactly
what he thought. ‘I don’t know, Kat. He certainly wasn’t on the same side as the monsters though.’

Jason chuckled. ‘Maybe we’re the spies, Bright Eyes. Keeping an eye on
you
. Or maybe … even … we’re aliens. In disguise. What do you think about that?’

‘You look ugly enough,’ Brandon shot back.

St. Pancras Station was in chaos. Crowds of people swarmed around the enormous Victorian terminus, desperate to get on board the last trains leaving London that night. Brandon, Kat and Jason pushed their way inside. There were queues at the ticket booths and at the entrances to the platforms; and there were soldiers all around the station providing extra security and controlling the crowds. To get to the Brighton train they would have to push through two levels of shops and restaurants and then get another escalator down to the platform.

They stood in the shadow of
The Meeting Place
—a nine-metre-tall bronze statue of an embracing couple. ‘We’ll never get to the train, with or without a ticket,’ Jason said. ‘Coming here was a stupid idea. We could have been halfway up the M1 if we had just gone home and taken Dad’s Merc, but instead this idiot’—he jabbed Brandon’s shoulder—‘wants to jump on a train and—’

‘Wait, stop,’ Brandon said suddenly.

On the level below them, visible through the glass barriers on the balconies, Brandon had noticed a pair of soldiers stop a group of teenagers. One of the soldiers had some kind of handheld device like a camcorder that he was pointing at the kids.

‘They don’t look like regular troops,’ Kat observed.

She was right. They looked like members of some kind of special ops team, dressed in black combat fatigues and Kevlar helmets with night-vision goggles attached. They were fully loaded with weapons: submachine guns, handguns in holsters, and assault vests with daggers and grenades clearly visible.

The soldier with the handheld device seemed satisfied with his readings and waved the kids along. The two soldiers went back to scanning the crowd.

‘They’re looking for us,’ Brandon was certain. ‘Whatever’s interesting to mutant aliens is bound to be just as interesting to secret government agencies.’

‘It’s more likely they’re just looking for
you
if they’ve been watching your family,’ Jason said. ‘Give me the thingy and I’ll get it past them.’

‘Okay, but they’re still going to stop me anyway,’ Brandon said.

‘Leave it to me,’ Kat said. ‘I’ll distract them.’ She looked up at the departure boards. ‘We’d better be quick: the last train to Brighton leaves at eleven. We’ve got five minutes. Split up and meet on the train!’

‘Alright,’ Brandon agreed. ‘But don’t do anything stupid. Shouting
fire
! or something in a crowded station isn’t a very cool thing to do.’

‘Trust me!’ she grinned.

Brandon reluctantly handed the cylinder to Jason, who set off into the crowds, taking a roundabout route to the Brighton platform. Then Brandon started moving, head down, following a different path. He took the stairs down to the lower level then cut through WH Smith to avoid the black-clad soldiers. He was almost at the Brighton turnstiles when another soldier came out of nowhere and blocked his path. The man was tall and imposing, with skin as black as his uniform. He knelt in front of Brandon and tried to smile.

‘Hi Brandon,’ he said in a patronising tone. ‘I’m Lieutenant Hewson. Are you alright? Are you looking for your family?’

Brandon tried his best to look confused. ‘My name’s Jason Brown,’ he said.

The man took a closer look, peering into Brandon’s violet eyes. Nearby, one of the other soldiers was pointing the scanning device at Brandon. ‘Facial recognition positive, Sir,’ he reported. ‘That’s Brandon Walker.’

Just off to one side, Brandon saw Kat running through the crowds, keeping her distance but close enough for the soldiers to see. Brandon’s adrenaline surged and time seemed to slow down. His eyes flickered around, taking in distances and obstacles. He heard Kat shouting and waving her arms. ‘There’s an
alien
in the toilets!’ she screamed, loud enough to stop people in their tracks. When Brandon saw the soldiers’ heads jerk around and their hands go to their guns, he made his move. He launched his body to one side, then dived into a crowd of startled people. In the other direction, Kat tipped over a table in front of Starbucks, spilling mochas and cappuccinos everywhere, adding to the chaos as people jumped up and started arguing and shouting.

Brandon raced around the concourse and when he judged the confusion to have peaked, he vaulted the turnstiles and hurtled down the final escalator. He ran down the platform and threw himself aboard the Brighton train.

Looking back down the platform he saw Kat racing towards the train, just as the doors were starting to close. Brandon held them open and called out to her. Nobody seemed to be following her; she must have given the soldiers the slip. Brandon caught Kat in his arms as she hopped up. They both fell back and collapsed on the floor as the train pulled away and out of the station.

They found Jason a few carriages down, sitting at a plastic table and rolling the cylinder back and forth across its surface. Brandon and Kat sat down opposite him. Jason rolled the cylinder over to Brandon. ‘Thanks Jason,’ he said. Jason just grunted.

Kat was laughing. ‘Did you see the way they reacted?’ she said. ‘When they pulled out their guns, everyone went nuts. They really must be expecting aliens.’

‘Maybe,’ Brandon said. ‘I’ll only really believe that it’s aliens though when I see a great big flying saucer swoop down out of the sky. Until then we have to keep an open mind. We have to find
evidence
!’

‘Right now we know nothing about anything,’ Jason observed.

‘Story of your life,’ Kat teased.

‘We know that someone is out to destroy this cylinder,’ Brandon said. ‘And now that they’ve run out of meteors, they’re sending those brutes after us. I wonder how they found us at the school.’

‘If they do have a spaceship,’ Kat said, ‘then they might be scrutinising us from outer-space.’

‘
If
they have a spaceship,’ Brandon repeated. ‘I wish I could work out how to open this.’ He was examining the cylinder as he spoke. It had the same weight and feel as a Maglite torch, with the same kind of raised and textured areas, but he could still find no obvious way to open it … if it could actually be opened.

‘I just hope that they can’t scrutinise us now that we’re on a speeding train,’ Jason said. He was constantly looking out of the window.

They sat in silence for a while. As the train cleared London, they looked back and saw flames flickering over rooftops. An ugly glow covered the city: London was burning. The meteor impacts would generate a great deal of heat, Brandon reflected; it was easy to imagine fire catching and spreading through London’s densely-packed buildings.

It wasn’t long before the train began to slow down.

Three Bridges station. They had cleared the M25—the motorway that circled London—but it was still too close for Brandon’s liking. Somewhere up there was a huge meteor that everyone
thought
was going to miss Earth.

He looked out onto the platform when the train doors opened. There weren’t so many crowds here, and most people were getting off, but Brandon carefully evaluated everyone who boarded. He was happy to see that there were no scary creatures or armed soldiers.

A smartly-dressed man in his fifties sat down nearby—the only other passenger in their carriage. He unfolded a large broadsheet newspaper until he was almost completely hidden behind it.

‘Have you ever actually tried reading a paper that big?’ Brandon whispered, trying to lighten the mood. ‘It’s impossible. Your arms ache after five minutes.’

Kat giggled, but Jason just gave Brandon a blank look as if to say,
Who even reads newspapers
?

‘Brandon,’ Kat said. ‘What if Brighton’s been overtaken by aliens? What if they’ve captured your mum and we have to sneak in and rescue her? Or what if—’

‘What if she’s already dead?’ Brandon said. The shocked look on her face told him that she actually hadn’t considered that possibility. ‘Sorry Kat, I don’t mean to be pessimistic. I just don’t know what we’ll find.’

Kat’s happy face turned glum.

Brandon got up from his seat. ‘I’m just going to the …’ he said, nodding towards the end of the carriage.

‘The bog, yeah,’ Jason said. ‘Don’t fall in.’

Brandon walked slowly down the carriage, looking at his reflection in the windows as he went. They were in the middle of pitch black countryside, so for all he knew they were surrounded by UFOs or stealth jets or big flying alien worms. He smiled at his own imagination.

He glanced at the headlines of the man’s newspaper as he passed him in the aisle. It was the morning edition, printed before the meteors started to fall. The front page picture was the Prime Minister visiting Paris and meeting the President of France. Brandon wondered what tomorrow’s headlines would be. Would
The Times
even manage to get out a Sunday edition?

He reached for the cubicle door. Before he could grab the handle, the door was flung open, and Brandon fell backwards to the floor as one of the huge brutish creatures stepped out. This one was wearing dirty blue overalls, and was toting what could only be a laser gun: a shiny metallic weapon with a transparent barrel in which blue energy flashed about like bottled lightning.