Disrupted (12 page)

Teary sentiment gathered in my eyes. This was the England I knew. I wasn’t home, but it was closer than I’d been for days. And I could lift my head and stretch the creak from my spine, which was totally welcome. “Is this it? Sector 4020?”

“No,” said Clarrie. “This is just the end of our air span. My bird’s only got 20 miles.”

“But we’re still moving.”

“Yeah, right, I keep forgetting where you’re from.” Clarrie hefted herself up and turned around, perching on the dashboard with her feet resting on the seat. We were going slow enough to do that, not more than about thirty miles an hour. “Each city is powered from a central neuron core, Willow. The further you go from the city, the weaker the signal. So outside of a 20 mile radius, my bird’s only drawing enough power to crawl along the floor.”

Chris and I rearranged ourselves during the lecture, me with my bottom propped on top one side of the budgie and my feet on the other side, Chris completely out the cabin, straddling the slim body. And Gale, of course, flopped over the seat.

In case you’re wondering, the budgie was driving itself.

“Not much traffic down here,” I observed. None, in fact.

Clarrie’s laugh was rather abrupt. “Normal people take the Speedway for inter-city transfer.”

“Right,” I said, trying to look as if I knew exactly what a Speedway was.

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Of course I—”

“The Speedway is the underground acceleron that links the cities.”

Her eyes had narrowed on me, so I decided against asking what an acceleron was. Us farm people could only be so dumb before real suspicion set in.

“Can you abort the destination?” asked Chris.

Clarrie nodded. “There’s an emergency lever.”

“Good. You can set us down at the next village.”

“We’re already down,” said Clarrie.

“I mean, drop us off.”

Clarrie laughed. Without her earlier reservation. Finding this very funny.

Me, not so much. “And what are we going to do at the next village, Chris? Steal a hopper? Again? Or wait for Drustan to miraculously divine our whereabouts? Or maybe we won’t have to worry about that. Maybe there’ll be nothing left of us to do the worrying once the Razoks have hunted us down.”

“Those are our problems,” he told me calmly.

I hated it when he went all calm on me.

“Where are you from? Jupiter?” Clarrie shook her head on another burst of laughter. “The last village was reclaimed in 2055.”

Chris ignored that. “Pull the lever, Clarrie. You can set us down right here.”

Oh, crap, I had to talk Chris out of this plan. Post haste. And what was it with the 22
nd
century and reclaiming?

“Don’t be ridiculous,” exclaimed Clarrie, “We’re sure to pass by a city along the way. Not that it matters. I’m not leaving you behind anywhere.”

Thank you, Clarrie. I just have to mention, I really like this girl. She can have Chris, with my blessing. Strike that, she could have my first born child. (Okay, that’s a cheat, because I haven’t forgotten my pitiful future, but intentions count, don’t they?)

Chris strained forward. “I don’t want you involved in this, Clarrie.”

“You should have thought of that before asking me for a lift.”

“I didn’t expect things to get this complicated. Please, Clarrie, go home and forget you ever saw us. We’ll be fine.”

Clarrie flung her arms wide. “Take a look at my bird, Chris. How many green budgies have you seen about? How long, do you think, before whoever’s after you comes after me?”

Chris groaned. Buried his head in his hands.

I don’t know what he was so distressed about. I was with Clarrie on this one, all the way. She and her budgie should so stay with us, at least until we’d reached whatever safe destination Gale had in mind.

Chris glanced up at Clarrie. “You can get rid of the hopper. Fly back to the edge of the city and dump it.”

“The Others would just love that.”

“I’m guessing they’d love you dead even less,” countered Chris.

“Don’t be so bloody dramatic.”

I tapped Clarrie’s arm. Reluctantly, but she had to know and I, apparently, had limits to selfishness and they’d been breached. “Chris isn’t exaggerating. We don’t have many answers, but the questions aren’t looking good. You should probably go, get as far from us as possible.”

Clarrie looked at me for the longest while, and then she looked at Chris even longer. And then she titled her chin at a stubborn angle. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Chris threw his head back. When he came up, he was scowling at me.

I shrugged him off.

Chris as he shuffled all the way down the budgie’s body and ended up resting against a spray of raised metal feathers.

“He’s seriously hot,” Clarrie’s gaze went to Chris. “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

I slid my gaze from Chris to her. “I believe in sludgy knees at first sight.”

As for love at first sight, that was more a matter of not wanting to believe than a firm opinion. I mean, love was difficult enough with being dependant on a single random coincidence, wasn’t it? One bad arrow and that was you. Whereas sludgy knees all over the place gave one a fair to good chance to pick a pair here and there and progress the relationship at leisure.

“I didn’t either,” Clarrie said. “Until now.”

“Maybe it’s sludgy knees disguised as love,” I tried.

“No.”

Fine, so it wasn’t sludgy knees.

I sighed into the cool breeze. I’d have to do something now. Stop this thing, as mum would say, in its tracks.

“He’s much younger than you,” I warned tentatively.

“Really?” I had her full attention again. “Not by much, I’m guessing.”

I hesitated. Then, “Sixteen.”

“So when’s his birthday?”

“How should I know?”

She frowned at me. “Some friend you are.”

“I never said I was his friend.”

“Oh? Then what are you to Chris?”

Well, nothing. Obviously.

I looked over to Chris. His head was turned, his gaze fixed into the distance, giving me a free pass to admire the square edge to his jaw, the blonde hair cutting across his cheek in the wind. Admire? But, yes, he wasn’t half bad looking, I realised with a jolt.

How had I not noticed those striking features before? I knew I was looking at him through Clarrie’s eyes, (he’d never looked this good through mine,) but I wasn’t sure I could ever go back to looking through my eyes.

Add to that sludgy knees on close contact and the few weird moments and soul-type glimpses, and I was in trouble.

Clarrie cupped her hands at her mouth and raised her voice, “Hey, Chris. When is your birthday?”

He bent his head our way. “Why?”

“So I can buy you a cake, you idiot. Just answer the question.”

He frowned at her. “August 19.”

Clarrie smiled sweetly, then turned that smile on me. “Four months younger? I think I can live with that.”

Yeah, four months and a hundred odd years, I wanted to add. But didn’t. Chris would have to take care of this one, when and if he chose.

Chapter 13

T
he reclaiming of villages made for a strange landscape. There was absolutely nothing about us but yellow meadows and grassy fields and thick forest.

And I mean nothing.

No woolly sheep dotted the hills, no cows to give us dirty looks, no occasional horses on the trot. The lonely road stretched on for miles without the usual signposts pointing to sleepy villages with names like ‘Churton Clutton’ and ‘Hatton Heath’ and ‘Pudding Lake’.

I don’t know where the farms that Clarrie spoke of were, but they weren’t in this countryside. Then again, I was starting to think these ‘farms’ were outposts in the Arctic Circle or something. Clarrie had been suspiciously unsuspicious of the gaping holes in our modern-day awareness.

When we finally approached a city, all I got to see was a blunt silhouette on the horizon blinking beneath a dense cloud of local hopper activity. Clarrie cramped us all inside, hooded down and we went airborne, hopping the next forty miles or so in under three minutes. We went on this way for about two hours, using the cities’ neuron cores for gigantic hops and crawling along the roads between the energy surges.

During one of these crawls, Chris examined Gale. He found a seamless strip beneath her right arm that peeled back to reveal a flat touch pad roughly the size of a thumbprint. Genius that he was, Chris pressed his thumb to the pad.

The good news: a blue cursor flickered, indicating life beyond meltdown.

Less good newsy like: that flickering cursor appeared to be waiting for something more.

The bad news: we’d arrived.

My expectations have been rather pitiful of late, but Sector 4020 plunged me to a whole new low. We’d come to a stop on the cusp of a hill, and below us sprawled Gale’s idea of a safe haven.

It looked a little like a neglected council estate, rows of terraced housing with sad frontal facades packed onto a forsaken lane that wound long and lonely down the hill and along the sea front. The gardens were patches of strangled flowerbeds with the odd mangy tree. Weed grass pushed up through cracks in badly bricked patios. Not so much as a shadow moved in the muggy air.

Sector 4020 was a ghost town.

Seriously.

Even the mud-churned sea lay heavy in its inlet, as if it couldn’t be bothered to wash up on the shore.

“Gale must have had a reason for sending us here,” said Chris, failing to reassure himself (let alone us) if his frown was anything to go by.

“You’d think,” I muttered.

Clarrie was naively upbeat.

“Of course she had a reason,” she said as she lifted Gale out of the budgie and locked it. “I bet that Razok doesn’t even know this place exists.”

We’d parked the budgie under the dripping branches of an ancient tree to obscure it from sky prowlers. Clarrie walked up to where Chris and I stood. “Well, come on. We should check it out.”

I gave her a sour look.

Once upon a time, I would also have been that eager. Now I was not entirely sure we wouldn’t encounter a host of actual ghosts down there. Or a bloodthirsty zombie, at the very least. I mean, if aliens are real, where does one stop?

Clarrie was halfway down the hill before Chris and I started moving.

“I don’t like this,” I told him. “I just know that if Gale was awake, she’d be screaming ‘Run, Christian Wood, run,’ right about now.”

Chris chuckled. “That does seem to be her favourite plan of action.”

I found myself smiling at him. “Yeah, that, and pinging me with an eyeball. Chris...” I stopped walking.

He stopped as well, turned back to look at me.

“What will we do if Gale doesn’t reboot? How will we get in contact with Drustan?”

Chris backed up to stand right up close to me. He didn’t say anything at first, just looked at me. Something was building in his expression, turning on the silver glint in his eyes, flattening the line of his mouth.

More bad news, I supposed.

“Ask yourself this instead,” he finally said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Now that was an endless list of possibilities. All of the bad sort.

I ticked them off for him. “Possessed by ghosts. Eaten by a Razok. Beheaded by a zombie. Drained by a vampire. Lost forever in the 22
nd
century.” I’d reached my last finger, but there was still the other hand and a lot more bad.

Chris stopped me with a very droll, “And here I always wanted to know what went on in a girl’s head.”

But he wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t laughing. He was looking at me, and whatever had been building in his gaze was now fully built. His eyes were a delicious warm grey, holding mine like an intimate caress, making me feel all toasty and dreamy and curly-toed.

Oh, crap, we were having another moment, weren’t we?

“Hey,” called Clarrie up the hill, “you two coming or what?”

“Or what,” I replied under my breath, and started walking again.

Chris caught up to me.

“The worst that can happen,” he said softly, “is finding yourself pinned beneath me in Biggs Hill. Remember what Drustan said? We can only return to the exact moment we leapt from. And that whole thing about the universal balance of souls? I don’t think you can die here in this time, Willow. If anything happens, you’ll just be thrown back to our own time.”

“You- you’re sure about that?”

“Pretty much.” Chris grinned at me. “But try not to prove me right, okay?”

I returned a weak grin. It was nice of Chris to leave out the part about him being stabbed to death on Biggs Hill forest floor if the worst came to happen, but it was still there, a throbbing boil on the tip of my nose that I couldn’t look past. If we were thrown back to our time before Drustan sorted out the past, Chris would die. And I already knew what that felt like, thanks to Gale.

As we trundled down to the bottom of the hill where Carrie waited, the tight knot inside my tummy unravelled into threads of guilt and panic—spreading through me, casting a net from within and gathering the bits and pieces of my messes into a pouch of uneasy clarity.

I would not let Chris die.

Whatever happened, he had to come out of 2106 alive. I’d started this horrible sequence of events, and I knew I had to finish it. I wasn’t brave and I wasn’t strong, and I just hoped I was up to it (whatever it was) when the time came.

No, what I actually hoped was that it would never come to that at all.

As soon as we reached Clarrie, she grabbed Chris close and pointed to a second-story window of the first house in a long row. “Someone’s up there. The curtain moved a moment ago.”

Chris and I looked, but the curtain refused to twitch again. I let my eyes roam further, over all the windows down the row, then along the empty street. It was unnaturally still.

Although quite natural, I suppose, for a ghost town.

I wanted to grab Chris close too, but Clarrie had got there first. So I took Gale from her instead, and wrapped my arms around a tube of lifeless metal for comfort.

“Maybe we should knock on a few doors,” said Chris. “Gale must have thought someone here will help us.”

“Or,” I suggested nervously, “we could just hang around a bit until, you know, we can figure if the locals are friendly.” Or zombies.

I gazed about us, but there was nowhere to hide. Well, lots of shadows and dark alleys between the terraces and stuff, but I’m totally not that girl – the one who runs into the darkest alley when chased by vampires and/or zombies and/or aliens, that is. Seriously, if you want to be that stupid, you deserve to be dead.

“I’m with Chris,” said Clarrie. “We should get off the street if possible.”

I glared at Clarrie. Of course she was with Chris. How could I miss it, the way she was latched to his side? Now there, I thought smugly, was an excellent candidate for zombie bait.

Oh, hell. I sighed in contempt at myself and hugged Gale closer. Clarrie hadn’t done anything wrong. She certainly hadn’t stolen Chris from me.

I couldn’t help noticing how he didn’t shrug her arm away. As he’d done each and every time I’d reached for him. I hadn’t taken offence, thinking it to be Chris-thing. Now I wondered if maybe it was actually a me-thing.

“Oi,” called an angry voice without a face. “What you lot doin’ here, eh?”

I peered into the dark alley between two terraces, fully expecting a ghostly spectre to float out.

But the boy striding from the shadows was solid and real, and coming straight at me. “What you doin’ with Gale? Where’d you find her? Hey, what you done to her?”

I jumped behind Chris and Clarrie (protecting Gale, of course), and stayed there as Chris stepped in time with the boy, blocking his efforts to get at Gale as he circled.

“You know Gale?” demanded Chris. “Who are you?”

The boy stopped to stare at Chris. He was skinny, maybe a year or so younger than us. Torn jeans, a long white T-Shirt, and barefoot, although he looked more strange than scruffy. He had a nobbly blue knitted cap pulled low, hiding his hair and covering his ears. Some guys can carry it off, but not this one. His jaw was too square and jutting, his nose too long, his cheekbones too sharp and high. Then again, if he was going for the menacing beastie look, he was carrying it off all too well.

“I ask the questions, you hear?” growled the boy, making another stab through Chris and Clarrie to grab Gale from my arms. “You give Gale here to me, do you hear? How did you get her, huh, and what you done with Mr. Wood?”

“Mr. Wood?” said Chris and me together in some type of unified stupor. Sometimes, we are just so bonded.

“Who’s Mr. Wood?” Clarrie wanted to know.

“Chris,” I whispered sceptically, not really rating our chances if I was right, “maybe he’s the one Gale came looking for. He seems to know Gale, and you.”

“How do you know Mr. Wood?” said Chris to the boy.

“I knows ‘im.” The boy shoved his hands in his front pockets. His voice turned shifty. “What’s it to you?”

“And Drustan Corwyn? Do you know him as well?”

“I knows of ‘im. Knows enough to know he don’t like us. Don’t ever come here, he don’t.”

“But you do know Gale? I don’t see—”

“Hey!” His manner changed again, from shifty to downright ugly. “I told you, I ask the questions. Now gimme—”

“Marlin Cobblin,” interrupted a screech from above. “Get yourself inside at once!”

We all turned to stare up at a face peeking out of the window Clarrie had pointed to earlier. A crop of dark blonde hair framed the face in a short bob.

“Aw, ma, they got Gale and she’s hurt. I ain’t gonna let them—”

“Don’t you ‘aw, ma’ me, mister,” hissed another voice. From another head that popped up at the window. This head had bright orange hair twisted into a bun on top. “Do as you’re told.”

“Gale?” A third head popped up. With spiky purple hair gelled and frizzed to stand on end. “Did I hear Gale was here? Marlin, sweetie, is that Gale with you? Bring her up, then, what you’re waiting for? We haven’t seen her in ages.”

“Jazz,” protested the orange bun sternly, “we’re not inviting strangers inside.”

“Don’t be daft. They’re not strangers if Gale’s with them.”

“So, Marlin, are you going to invite us up?” asked Clarrie with a smile that could charm the fake tan off a wannabe socialite.

“S’pose you’d better come on, then,” mumbled Marlin, leading the way with Chris and Clarrie in tow.

But not before I saw the pink flush dusting those sharp cheekbones.

I could also have raised a flutter of pink dust, I thought sullenly as I followed through a peeling door that hadn’t stood the test of salty air and sea-swept gales, except I wasn’t into corrupting younger boys. And what was she about, charming strange boys when she was so in luurve with Chris?

I narrowed my eyes on her perfectly snug bottom as I trudged up the set of narrow stairs, and thought how easy it would be to hate Clarrie. And how that was definitely something worthwhile to aspire to.

One day.

When I could actually breathe again and stand on steady legs instead of the feeble rubber that swayed and threatened to collapse beneath me.

Because just then Marlin opened a door on the second landing and we bustled through into a cosy sitting room, and came face to face to face with his three-headed mum.