Disrupted (9 page)

Chapter 10

T
here’s a Razok at the door.

Sounds like a childhood nightmare. Only, I was wide-awake and the Razok was actually guarding the door outside Drustan’s building. According to Gale, who’d returned in a blaze of orange and bad news.

So, we couldn’t get back to Drustan’s the usual way, but that was okay.

We had a plan.

I’m not saying it was a good plan (for the record, I’d voted strongly against it,) but it was a plan.

Even Gale was glumly sceptical, plodding the sidewalk with us instead of going airborne at shoulder level, and it was her plan.

Chris was oddly motivated.

I suspected swelling on the brain due to recent electrocution, but I wasn’t about to finger his scalp for proof.

Before ‘The Moment’, I wouldn’t have hesitated.

Post ‘The Moment’, I had to deal with issues like (a) Would he think I was groping him? and (b) Was I groping him? and (c) Hadn’t I relinquished all responsibility for that weird moment to post-trauma endorphins? and (d) What if that weird moment attacked again while I was groping him? and (e) ... well, you can see why it was just easier to agree with Chris when he’d hurried us from Ye Olde Cactus with, “Any plan is better than no plan.”

“Besides,” he’d added to me, “this way we get to ride in one of those land hoppers.”

“Or not,” I’d muttered. “It’s a hundred percent more likely we’ll be slapped in cuffs and shoved into a smelly cell with ASBO retards and murderers.”

Still, like Chris said, no one else had a better- or any- plan.

Which is why Gale had her face pressed to the blackened glass wall of the first residential building we’d come across (Chris and I were on watch duty for the Razoks and the police,) and why I was doing some quick math. Would my dad still be practising law at the age of 131 and what were the chances he had the same mobile number for my statutory call?

“No good,” declared Gale, being the only one who could see through the blackened glass. “We need a place that doesn’t have a reception desk.”

In other words, a place where no one was around to ask awkward questions or stand witness at out inevitable trial.

The next building had no reception, but it did have voice regulated access to the elevators. We tried an interesting range of funny voices, but the doors refused to ping. Since the landing bays were on the roof and the average building was about 300 floors, we decided to move on.

“Wouldn’t a shopping centre be easier to target?” I suggested as we shadow-stepped further along, looking every bit the fugitives we were about to become. “At least we’d only start breaking the law after we’d reached the parking lot.”

“It’s called a docking platform,” said Gale, clearly talking down to me, “and the very fact that any idiot has access to public docking platforms is why we’re not.”

I rolled my eyes, but didn’t even feel tempted to scratch back at her bitchiness. That was just Gale being Gale, I told myself. Like one of those ancient computers that had to spit out miles of paper before producing anything useable.

“The land hoppers are locked down,” Gale prattled on, “and the 24 hour security surveillance at public docking platforms would bust us long before I cracked the digi-key. So, no, it would not be simpler.”

“Okay,” I huffed. “I get it already.”

And in case you haven’t got it yet, here’s our über plan: Sneak back into Drustan’s apartment via the rooftop, thus avoiding nasty Razok guarding the street entrance. For our plan to work, obviously, we needed to get onto the roof, and to do that, we needed to appropriate a land hopper in a not so conventional manner.

I’d like to take this opportunity to state, in black and white, (and I give full permission for this declaration to be used as evidence in the event of my defence trial) that I’m being forced totally against my will to be an unwilling accomplice by the following unforeseen factors:

(a) I was out-voted.

(b) Even if inflation had been roughly zero percent in the last hundred years, my five pound note would still not buy us a quick hop on a Hopper Taxi. Apparently hard cash went out of circulation in 2053.

(c) We are on the run from Razoks, and everyone knows they once planned to conquer earth i.e. very bad guys.

(d) Gale is a bully.

Gale stopped us at a revolving type door that had a keypad entry system.

“I think I can get us inside here. Cover me,” she said as her fingers went to work on the keypad, flashing through five-digit sequences faster than my eyes could read.

The street was busy, but no one seemed inclined to mind anyone else’s business. I suppose if we beeped long enough (after every incorrect sequence,) we’d eventually attract some unwanted interest.

“She wants us to create a diversion.” Chris moved in front of Gale, looking at me.

When I didn’t respond (because, really, I wasn’t about to turn circus tricks just to draw attention away from Gale) his look turned meaningful, willing me to understand whatever goes on inside the head of a sixteen-year-old boy.

“If we just stand here doing nothing,” Chris was forced to explain, “it will look like we’re up to no good. We should, um, do something.”

“Oh, you mean like—” Oh! I pulled a disgusted face at him. “I am not kissing you and I don’t care how many movies think that’s a believable distraction.”

His cheeks went a dull red, as well they should. “What are you—”

But I wasn’t finished. “It’s just a lame excuse for the bad-ass guy to feel up the naive girl during a lull in the action sequences. Honestly, Chris, I expected better of you.”

I also sounded freakishly like my mum just then, but she was obviously onto a good thing. Chris was practically squirming in remorse at his underhanded free-kiss gambit.

“I don’t want to feel you up,” choked out Chris, no longer meeting my eyes.

“You’re not going to kiss me either,” I growled loudly.

His cheeks went from dull to glowing. “You’re the one that mentioned kissing.”

“And you’re the one that wants to kiss me.”

“I don’t want to kiss you.” His gaze dropped to the floor, where he was scuffing one shoe to an early death on the paving. “And will you stop yelling about it?”

“I wasn’t yelling.” I lowered my voice. “I wasn’t yelling.”

Chris glanced up at me with a ‘Whatever’ look. His cheeks were no longer flaming in shame. They were a mottled mix of embarrassment and—oh, no, shyness?

I don’t want to kiss you.
Of course he didn’t. My mistake crept up my throat like a heated rash. How stupid am I? Chris wasn’t a normal delinquent boy who thought about copping a feel at least once every seven seconds. Chris was, well, obviously uneasy at just speaking about it. His idea of a diversion was probably a boring debate on the merits of some or other scientific hot bed.

“That’s it,” said Gale into my mortified silence.

The keypad beeped twice, and then the door started revolving.

With a grunt, Chris lunged into the triangular cubicle. Gale flew onto his shoulder and, without thinking, I lunged in after. Because I hadn’t horrified myself enough just then, I found myself in a full frontal crush up against Chris’s back. If he so much as flexed a muscle, he’d smudge my breasts.

“You know that whole kissing thing was just part of the diversion,” I whispered.

“Sure.”

I felt him stiffen against me. Urgh. He did so not believe me.

“You kissed?” squealed Gale as we tumbled out other side the revolving glass.

Chris forged ahead, muttering, “We argued about it.”

“You wanted to and he didn’t,” concluded Gale gleefully. And wrongfully.

“Keep up,” I told her, but only for Chris’s benefit. “No one wanted to kiss anyone. The argument itself was the diversion, it could have been about anything.”

“And kissing just happened to be the first topic that came to mind?”

Put that way... I jogged to catch up to Chris as he reached a bank of glass elevators on the far side of the lobby.

While we waited for the elevator, Chris studied his feet. I briefly considered explaining our ‘argument’ a little more, just to be sure he fully understood that it hadn’t been about kissing but was actually about diversions. Not trusting my ability to outwit a straight A student, I instead took a determined interest in our surroundings.

The floor was black marble, the walls a soft white but slashed with what looked like black lightening bolts. I hugged myself, suddenly cold. I don’t know if the shiver came from the stark décor, or from the crime we’d already started committing.

“Doesn’t this bother you at all?” I blurted out. “Sorry, but stealing a vehicle is way out of my fun league.”

“This isn’t exactly my idea of fun, Willow.” Then he looked at me, and whatever he saw took the sting out of his voice when he admitted, “Of course it bothers me. But not as much as the Razoks bother me.”

“They do sound creepy.”

“According to Gale,” snorted Chris. “It’s not so much their looks that worry me.”

Hearing her name, Gale flitted closer and he turned to her. “So, what’s the story with these Razoks? Did they really attack earth?”

“Oh, huh?” Gale flew up against the barrier glass of the elevator, her eyeballs springing out to angle a view up the shaft. “Incoming.”

“I’m not just mildly curious, Gale.” Chris’s fingers closed around the top of her tubular body and jerked her face up to his. Her eyeballs plopped back into place. “If they catch up to us, I need to know what they’re capable of.”

“They’re capable of bad things, Christian Wood.”

I rolled my eyes. “That helps.”

Gale wrapped her arms around his neck, as if this was a lover’s embrace and not an interrogation. “It’s not a secret, Christian Wood. Everyone knows, but what if I tell you before you should know and it somehow changes your destiny—”

“If Chris dies, he won’t have any destiny at all.”

I knew I’d got to her from the yellow tinge showing through lime.

The elevator door slid open, but no one moved.

“About the Razoks,” I prodded. “You were saying?”

“It was terrible,” said Gale in a woe-is-me voice.

I almost rolled my eyes again, but when she slid her arms from Chris’s neck to drop lightly to the ground, I reconsidered her dramatics. This was Gale, and she’d voluntarily un-clinched herself from Chris. What could be so terrible, in Gale’s synthetic range of horrors?

“What happened?”

“The Razok ships started advancing,” she said. “We attacked, but nothing seemed to stop them. Nuclear missiles, launched from all over the world, were useless. They either disintegrated on impact or simply bounced off the ships. Then the Razoks fired back. It looked like a comet, a streaking white light with a burning tail.”

Gale paused, tilting her head all the way up to look into Chris’s eyes. “That single missile wiped South America off the map. One moment it was there, and then it just a huge crater of burning rubble.”

I was no longer cold. My skin was clammy with sweat.

“Not a crater of rubble,” murmured Chris, his voice a raw whisper I could barely hear. “A crater of charred body pieces and—” He snapped his eyes to me, gave his head a rough shake.

I stared at him, confused. It sounded as if he’d been remembering, but that was impossible. Imagining, I corrected myself. He was just imagining the picture Gale had painted.

Gale went on, oblivious to Chris’s weird side-remark. “The world went into panic. Half the population remained indoors, glued to their screens and the streaming footage of what used to be South America. The other half took to the streets, grouping around prophets of doom preaching end-of-the world sermons. The Razok approach continued, threatening total annihilation if they were met with any more futile resistance.”

“How?” Chris swallowed visibly as he dropped his gaze to Gale. “How did we defeat them? What weapons can destroy something that bounced a nuclear missile?”

“I’m not privy to military secrets, Christian Wood.”

“But we did defeat them,” he said under his breath, reassuring himself. “We survived.”

“Of course we did,” I agreed. Some of the clamminess left my skin. I had to remember that this was all in the past.

Except it wasn’t, was it? For me and Chris, this was all still to come.

“We did,” confirmed Gale dramatically. She was totally getting into the story-telling mode, hugging herself about twenty times over with those stretchable arms, eyeballs quivering for added effect, her colouring a weird electric blue. “The madness went on for about two hours, and then... it was amazing. We launched twelve missiles. Each hit their target and the entire Razok fleet vaporised before our eyes. Not one ship made it to earth. That was an amazing few minutes. It felt as if the entire world took a collective sigh.”

I didn’t blame the world one bit. I mean, I’d only heard the story second-hand, I was giving a collective sigh all on my own.