Alien Disaster (2 page)

‘Semi-slick tyres,’ Brandon replied, twisting the front wheel to show them off. ‘I take it you’ve not seen the news.’

‘About the meteors? Yeah, I heard. Don’t worry about it. We’re advising people not to panic. The meteors could hit anywhere in Greater London—that’s an area of almost two thousand square kilometres; and there are almost ten million people living here. Even if a meteor big enough to destroy a house hits, the chances of it hitting yours are tiny. You’re more likely to get knocked off your bike by a car.’

Brandon shrugged. He could believe that. It was quite normal for James to be so well-informed: he had some low-level post-graduate job in the government press office, but liked to joke that he was really in the Secret Intelligence Service. He was taking helicopter lessons to further extend his double-oh-seven fantasy.

‘Anyway,’ James said, ‘I’m taking Gem out looking for shooting stars.’

‘Up in the chopper?’

‘Up in the chopper! The first meteors are expected tonight. Want to come along?’

‘Maybe,’ Brandon said. Gem would definitely
not
want him to come along.

James playfully punched Brandon on the shoulder before heading inside. Something about James’ intense friendliness irked Brandon. Gem seemed to like him though.

Brandon sped out of the garage and into the suburban streets of affluent North London. As he freewheeled down the hill he pressed a button on his phone and—even though he was half a kilometre away by now—the garage door slowly shut behind him.

Pedalling fast through the tree-lined avenues of Highgate, Brandon saw people coming out of their houses and looking up at the sky. What they didn’t know—but Brandon did—was that at the moment a meteor appears in the sky, it is then only about a hundred kilometres from the ground, and only about five seconds from impact.

In other words, there would be no time to run. It was probably best just not to worry about it.

He saw his science teacher, Doctor Kang, standing at a corner with a clipboard. Doctor Kang was wearing his white lab coat even though it was the holidays. ‘Hey, Sir,’ Brandon called as he sailed past. ‘Don’t get hit by a meteor!’ Doctor Kang was too busy making notes to notice Brandon.

He rode down to Highgate Cemetery. His mother’s place of work was an outbuilding of the nearby hospital, and adjacent to the cemetery. For some reason though, there was a back door located within the graveyard itself. The main gate to the East Cemetery was closed, but Brandon rode down to a spot a little further on, where a lamppost stood near the iron railings. He propped his bike between them, climbed up with help from the lamppost, pulled his bike up after him—the carbon frame meant that the bike weighed less than ten kilograms—and dropped down easily amongst the graves.

It was still and quiet in the leafy lanes of London’s city of the dead. Brandon had been here many times before, to look for the graves of famous scientists and writers such as Michael Faraday and Douglas Adams. The place was a maze of paths—some narrow and overgrown—that you needed a map to navigate. As he steered his bike past the famous giant stone head of Karl Marx he didn’t see any other visitors or tourists. No doubt they had other things to worry about today, like getting hit on the head by a rock from outer space.

He turned into a narrow path that had almost been lost under a creeping thicket of trees and ivy. When Brandon arrived at his destination, finally emerging in a secluded clearing in the corner of the cemetery, he discovered that he wasn’t alone after all.

The mausoleum that hid a secret door was guarded. As he slowed down and dismounted from his bike, two figures got up from where they were sitting and walked out to meet him.

One of them was swinging a pointed metal stick that looked like it had been torn off some iron railings. The other, the bigger of the two, hefted a dangerous-looking chunk of rock.

‘Hey, it’s Bright Eyes Brandon!’ the big one said. ‘What are you doing here, you freak?’

Brandon took a breath to compose himself. ‘Jason,’ he acknowledged.

Jason Brown was stocky and brawny with a number one crew cut. His twin sister Kat was small and skinny and her dyed-red hair looked like it had been styled with a bread knife. She wore black plastic specs. They both wore denim in various fades and Doc Marten boots. They looked tough and acted tough, but Brandon knew their parents were rich city bankers; Jason and Kat had an easier life than most. What were they doing
here?

‘Well, Bright Eyes?’ Jason said. ‘Have you come to …
apologise
?’

Brandon tried to keep his head down when he was at school, but his violet eyes made him an easy target. Maybe it was
because
he didn’t seek attention that he got it. He tried not to care; he never
showed
that he cared.

‘Maybe you should be apologising to
me
,’ Brandon countered, ‘for not only getting me a week in detention, but also for making me go through it with
you
!’

The previous term at school the three of them had been grouped together in science class to work through a practical experiment. While Brandon had calmly gone through the process of measuring the rate of reaction of sodium hydroxide in water, Jason and Kat had fooled around and paid no attention. But when Doctor Kang had picked on their group to explain their results to the rest of the class, Brandon had remained silent, leaving Jason and Kat to splutter random nonsense that made them all look like fools. A fight ensued at the end of the lesson, and a series of detentions for all involved quickly followed.

Jason couldn’t think of a smart answer. ‘Look out—
meteor attack
!’ he said, hurling one of his rocks.

Brandon didn’t budge. His reactions were so fast that sometimes he imagined that he saw the world in slow motion. He could see in an instant that Jason’s rock was aimed to land at his feet, and probably wouldn’t bounce in the soft earth, so he did his best not to flinch. When the rock missed Brandon by a matter of centimetres, Jason actually growled.

‘Jason, come on! We need to get this door open,’ Kat said, hovering anxiously behind him. The mausoleum was about the size of a single garage, carved in grey marble with a sloping roof and supporting buttresses. It was modern, despite its classical design. The wooden door was adorned with a single word:
Paran
. Brandon didn’t know who that was, but he knew that behind the door was a staircase that led to an underground tunnel.

‘Is this really the best time to go tomb raiding?’ he asked, trying to think of the best way to quickly get past—or get rid of—the twins.

‘Nope, but we thought it might be a good place to hide from the asteroids,’ Kat said. ‘There are supposed to be secret underground crypts down there!’ She rapped on the wooden door with her stick. She had evidently been trying to use it as a crowbar; the door was already splintered near the lock.

‘Is this your family tomb or something?’ Jason asked. ‘We saw your hot sister running around here before you showed up.’

Brandon ignored Jason’s question. He was wondering if Gem ran through the cemetery often. ‘You don’t really need to be hiding,’ he said. ‘The probability of—’

‘Don’t start boring us with maths,’ Jason warned him. ‘School doesn’t start for three more weeks.’

‘But listen,’ Brandon persisted, ‘The chance of—’

Jason suddenly lunged forward and Brandon hopped to the side to avoid being caught in a headlock. Jason just tried to barge into him instead, and they ended up locked in a wrestling hold, each trying desperately to unbalance the other. Jason was stronger and heavier, but Brandon was quicker with his feet and managed to find a secure footing that would unbalance his opponent. Except when Jason toppled over he brought Brandon down with him, and together they crashed into the mausoleum door head first, breaking it open.

Brandon and Jason disengaged and picked themselves up off the floor. Brandon pulled off his cycle helmet and threw it down. Jason was rubbing his forehead. Behind the wooden door that they had just demolished was a small space and then another door—this one made of thick reinforced steel.

‘Why is there
another
door?’ Kat asked.

Brandon looked around and noticed a tiny camera lens just above the doorframe. As he looked up at it, the door made a soft click and opened inwards slightly. ‘The camera recognised my eyeball’s retina pattern,’ he explained, pushing the door open. ‘It’s not a crypt. My mum works here. I need to go in and get something—’

Jason pushed past him and entered the mausoleum. The inside was floor-to-ceiling steel. Some metal stairs descended into darkness. As Jason started down, strip lighting came on automatically and illuminated his descent. Before he followed, Brandon went back to pick up his bike. It had cost him too much time and money to build to leave outside, even chained up. He carried it down the steps.

Brandon found Jason about thirty metres underground, in front of another solid-looking door. This one slid open in two halves like a lift door as he approached. As it did so, he could see that it was at least thirty centimetres thick.

The two boys entered a large underground chamber that had a stone floor and a metal ceiling that was supported by massive beams, also metal. Steel, maybe even titanium, Brandon thought. The space was partitioned into smaller areas by glass walls. There were lots of machines and computers that looked like they had been left on standby. The opposite wall was hidden in darkness.

The staircase that they had come down had turned back on itself several times, but Brandon had been keeping track and calculated that the vast space before them was directly under the cemetery. He was amazed; he had thought that his mum’s lab was nearer the hospital.

‘What does your mum do here?’ Jason demanded to know.

‘She’s a doctor. But she doesn’t treat patients much. She does medical research down here all day, I guess. Something to do with genetics. I don’t really know—’

‘And what’s so important that you have to get it today of all days?’

‘I’m not sure. I didn’t ask,’ Brandon said.
Why didn’t he even ask?

Jason rolled his eyes.

Kat came down the steps behind them. ‘Wow! This place looks like it would be safe from a
nuclear bomb
, never mind an asteroid.’

‘Actually a big enough meteor could release as much energy as a nuclear explosion,’ Brandon informed her. ‘A meteor is a shooting star: a falling meteoroid. An asteroid is bigger …’

Brandon trailed off as Jason glowered at him.

Kat gave Brandon an apologetic smile. Jason started off into the lab and more strip lights flickered on as he explored.

Brandon checked his map on his phone and headed off in a different direction: to where he assumed his mother’s office was. Kat loitered by the door; she seemed more interested in admiring Brandon’s bike where he had left it propped against the wall.

As he walked around, Brandon wondered again exactly what it was his mother did down here. Not all of the equipment in the various different sections looked medical. Pinned to the glass walls were blueprints of what looked like industrial or military armoured vehicles. There were also a lot of maps too: detailed plans of complex cities or road networks, Brandon couldn’t tell which.

There were experimental stations loaded with chemistry apparatus, but a lot more space was devoted to computers and servers. There was a worktop that was home to an array of handheld gadgets; another workstation had a large magnifying glass positioned in a frame above the surface of the desk. Brandon peered in as he passed—there was a microchip under the lens.

The spot that Brandon’s map on his phone directed him to wasn’t an office or a desk, but a locker on one of the side walls. Like everything else here, his mother had somehow set it to open as he approached. He looked inside …

There was a loud bang and Brandon staggered back. The floor shook and lots of things around the chamber crashed to the ground. The ceiling lights went out and an instant later low-level red lights came on. He heard Jason shout, ‘Kat!’ and Kat shout, ‘Jason!’

Brandon grabbed what was in the locker—a metal cylinder that looked like a lightsaber handle—and ran back through the lab to the entrance. His phone buzzed as he got there. It was his mother.

‘You found it.’

‘Mum, I think a meteor just hit!’

‘Good grief! Brandon, get out of there! The place won’t withstand more than two direct strikes.’

More than two strikes?
Why would any place get hit twice? Brandon had an awful sense of foreboding. ‘Mum, I—’

‘Go, Brandon, but don’t go home. Bring the cylinder to—’ There was a crash and a buzz and the line went dead.

‘We have to get out of here,’ Brandon told Kat. Jason came running over from wherever he had been exploring. The door that they had come in through had closed and Brandon stood in front of it, waving desperately for it to recognise him again.

‘We’re not going anywhere!’ Jason argued. ‘This is exactly where we need to be!’

Kat nodded in agreement.

‘We’re going to get hit again,’ Brandon said urgently.

‘What? Why?’ Kat said. ‘Lightning never strikes twice. Nor do asteroids … meteors … whatever you call them …’

There was another bang and they all fell over. This time all the lights went out and a whooping siren started up. Several of the glass partition walls cracked loudly.

Jason turned on a Maglite that he must have picked up somewhere in the lab. He turned the beam on the door and Brandon could see that Kat had stuck her iron stick in the gap before it had sealed completely. He and Jason each grabbed one half of the door and pulled it open, and Kat wedged her stick horizontally across the gap. It bent under the pressure as they all ducked under it, and snapped in two when they were halfway up the stairs.

‘Let’s hope the door at the top isn’t shut too,’ Jason said.

‘It isn’t,’ Kat said emphatically.

When they reached the top Brandon groaned. While they had been exploring the lab,
somebody
had carried his top-of-the-range dual-suspension mountain bike back up the stairs and stuck it in the doorframe. As they stepped over it he could see that it was mangled beyond repair.