Alien Disaster (6 page)

The brute aimed down at Brandon as soon as it saw him. Brandon rolled to one side. He heard a fizzing sound and smelled burned carpet. Then Jason and Kat were there. Maybe they instinctively knew that there was nowhere to run on a train, or maybe they even had some kind of crazy plan.

‘Grab its legs!’ Jason ordered as he held on to the brute’s gun barrel and tried to point it away from them. Kat wrapped her arms around its thigh. ‘This is a citizen’s arrest!’ she shouted. Brandon tried to unbalance the brute by lifting its foot off the ground.

The thing just roared and shrugged them all off. It pointed the laser gun again at Brandon, whose fast reactions saved his life: he tilted his head to one side as a bright blue laser beam fired out and blasted a hole straight through the carriage’s bodywork. Then the brute caught sight of the man with the newspaper, who was trying to leave his seat as calmly as he could manage. The brute zapped him dead.

But immediately after that there was an extremely loud clattering sound, and the ugly creature dropped dead with a multitude of bloody bullet wounds in its chest and head. Brandon turned to look, and saw Lieutenant Hewson at the other end of the carriage, standing in a firing position and still aiming down the sights of his submachine gun. Two of his men were behind him, both with readied weapons.

Hewson lowered his gun and began to walk forward. ‘It was a mistake to run last time, Brandon,’ he said, his expression serious. ‘You’re in a lot of danger. Come with us and we’ll protect you.’

Brandon, Jason and Kat all stood up slowly. Kat wiped the brute’s sticky blood off her glasses. ‘Protect us from what?’ Brandon challenged. He kicked the still twitching foot of the creature. ‘From these guys? Do you even know who they are?’

Hewson hesitated a moment, then said, ‘Do you?’

He has no idea
, Brandon thought. Then Hewson suddenly raised his gun again. For one awful moment Brandon feared that Hewson was going to shoot him, then he sensed movement behind him: three more brutes had piled out of the cubicle and into the carriage.

Kat grabbed Brandon’s arm and pulled him out of the aisle and down between the seats. Two of the brutes were unarmed and charged up the carriage while the other one fired lasers at rapid speed. Hewson fired again, unloading ten rounds of nine millimetre bullets in a single second and killing one of the charging brutes. Then he was forced to drop his gun and engage the other in hand-to-hand combat.

‘We’ve got to get off this train!’ Jason yelled from where he was crouched across the aisle, underneath a table.

‘Will we get fined if we use the emergency stop?’ Kat shouted back.

The other soldiers couldn’t get a line of sight while their commanding officer was wrestling with the enemy. While they were trying to find a target, a window shattered, and yet another brute swung in and cannonballed into both soldiers, knocking them off their feet.

Lieutenant Hewson had managed to pull out his knife—a wicked-looking six-inch blade with a serrated edge—and was hacking at his opponent. Dark red blood was spurting out of the brute’s shoulder, but it kept on fighting, trying to pin Hewson to the carriage floor.

The brute with the laser gun was inching up the length of the carriage. When it had passed the table that Jason was under, he jumped up, ran to the doors and hit the emergency stop button. All three soldiers and three brutes were thrown about the carriage as the train’s air brakes slashed its velocity.

Both Kat and Jason started kicking out at the head of the brute that was sprawled on the floor. As they did that, Brandon was thinking: his mind focusing on the situation despite the chaos around him. The doors wouldn’t open until the train was at a complete stop—if they opened at all. The only immediate exit was through the window or—

Past the open door of the toilet cubicle he could see how the brutes had gained entrance.

‘The roof,’ he said, pointing up to the hole that the creatures had cut. He led the way, climbing up using the hand dryer and toilet roll dispenser as footholds. Up on the roof there was no sign of whatever vehicle had dropped off the brutes. He turned back and helped Kat up and then Jason. The brute was still after them; its clawed hands grabbed the lip of the hole in the roof and it prepared to pull itself up. Jason took the fire axe that he was still carrying out of his belt and brought it down on the brute’s fingers. They chopped clean off, and the creature fell back into the cubicle.

The train was coming to a grinding halt in the middle of a stretch of dark countryside. The only light came from the north, where London was glowing orange, red and yellow. The flames lit up grey clouds of smoke that hung above the wounded city.

It was all Brandon could do to take his eyes off the sight. ‘Let’s get down as soon as it’s safe,’ he said, turning to face the twins. ‘We’ll just have to make a run for it across the fields.’

Kat was pointing over his shoulder, her mouth open in shock. He turned back to look, and saw something that he’d never ever forget.

A titanic meteor.

It must have been two hundred metres across; as big as the Olympic Stadium. When it hit the centre of London, it hit with the energy equal to that of a hundred megatons of TNT. It was the biggest explosion that the world had seen for ten thousand years.

The sound wave hit them with an almost physical force and they all fell over on the roof of the train. Then the shock wave lifted the whole train off the tracks and slammed it back down several feet to one side. Brandon, Jason and Kat all rolled off the roof and fell onto a grassy slope. As he tumbled down head over heels, Brandon could feel the hot wind from the explosion blasting at his skin.

Then he rolled to a stop. He lay there, eyes closed, expecting to feel the pain from the inevitable injury.

The pain didn’t come. But still, he almost didn’t dare open his eyes.

An hour later: a country lane. The darkness was absolute.

‘Turn the lights back on!’ Kat squealed.

‘Alright!’ Jason snapped. ‘I just twisted the lever the wrong way, that’s all.’ He flicked the headlights back on, then pulled the lever back to turn on full beam.

Luckily for Brandon, he was oblivious—slumped in the passenger seat of the stolen car, drifting restlessly in and out of sleep. His body ached in several places, but he was more tired than anything.

They were driving as fast as Jason dared down dark country roads towards the south coast. The mysterious metal cylinder rolled around in the footwell. They had given up trying to guess what it was or what it did. Their only aim was to get to the last-known location of Brandon’s mother and look for answers.

Jason pulled up in front of a sign at a junction. ‘Okay, which way?’ he asked impatiently. ‘Cuckfield? Cowfold? Is this
Narnia
? Where the hell are we?’

‘I’m sure there’s a main road somewhere that goes straight down to Brighton from London,’ Kat said. She was sharing the passenger seat with Brandon. ‘The M23 turns into … well, it must be the A … the A23?’

‘Well, obviously!’ Jason argued, as if he knew this all along. ‘The problem is that I can’t get there from here, because I don’t know where
there
is and I don’t know where
here
is.’ He pulled away in the direction of Cowfold without explaining his decision.

The cool night air came in through the open window on the driver’s side door. They had found the car—an old gunmetal two-seater MG—in the barn of a farm that they had stumbled across while fleeing the train wreck. Jason had straight away got excited about attempting to hot-wire the car, while Kat and Brandon were still reeling in shock from the events that had interrupted their train journey. In less than ten minutes, Jason had popped off the ignition cover and found the starter and power wires. One spark later, and the engine was humming.

Brandon had just wanted to collapse into the straw of the barn, go to sleep and forget about everything. Instead he had found himself trying to get some rest in a badly-driven car. He tried to shake off his exhaustion—and hunger; he was so hungry—and attempted to concentrate on the problem of getting them heading in the right direction.

He leaned across Kat. ‘Go up that hill,’ he said, pointing it out to Jason.

Jason took the junction too fast, throwing Brandon and Kat across the car. But he stayed on the road at least, and soon brought the car to a skidding halt at the top of the hill.

They could see the remains of London to the north: a dull red glow flickering behind a smothering swathe of smoke. Kat stared out in awe. ‘I know it’s wrong,’ she said, ‘and maybe it just hasn’t sunk in yet, but it’s almost exciting: like some horrific news story that you just can’t get enough of. Is it wrong to feel like this?’

‘I don’t feel excited,’ Brandon said. ‘But I’m not distraught either … I just feel detached from it all. It doesn’t seem like it’s real yet.’

‘What is
wrong
with you two?’ Jason said in exasperation. ‘This is a catastrophe, and it might only be the beginning. Do you still think it could be something other than the start of an alien invasion, Brandon? Only aliens would destroy London.’

‘Humans have never needed help from aliens to destroy each other,’ Brandon replied philosophically. ‘I think I’m still going to need to have a close encounter to believe it’s aliens.’

‘That fight in the train not close enough for you then?’

‘I think I’d have to talk to them to be sure,’ Brandon said, smiling for the first time since the train crash. ‘I think that would be a close encounter of the
fifth
kind.’

‘Whatever,’ Jason said. ‘There’s the road we need, anyway.’ He pointed out a glowing line running from north to south in the distance. The traffic was heavy, despite it being three in the morning. People were panicking and rushing to their families; the ones that weren’t bolting their doors and hiding under their beds, at least.

‘And there are your flying saucers!’ Kat said in an awed voice.

Breaking through the cloud layer were speeding, glowing shapes, twisting and looping tighter and faster than any aeroplane possibly could. They zipped up and down the length of the main road, occasionally shooting out across the fields and back. One was heading their way.

‘Lights,’ Brandon hissed. ‘Kill the headlights, Jason.’

‘Yeah,’ Jason agreed, plunging them into darkness.

The craft hovered closer, shooting a beam of bright light down into the valley below, illuminating the road that they needed to take. The beam of light then began sweeping back and forth across the road and the surrounding fields, getting closer with every pass.

Brandon couldn’t help staring at it, open-mouthed. It really did look saucer-shaped, although it was hard to make out any details: it was like trying to identify a car coming towards you on a dark road with its headlights on.

‘We’re sitting ducks,’ Jason said. ‘I’m getting us out of here.’ He released the handbrake.

Brandon saw Jason’s plan, and it was a good one: Jason timed it so that as the searching beam swept across the road and out across the fields, he rolled their dark and silent car down the road and into the valley beyond. There was a frightening few seconds when they were descending in pitch blackness, with Jason trying to control the speed of the plummeting vehicle with his foot on the brake pedal.

Then they were clear. Jason fired the engine while they were still rolling, and they soon joined the flow of traffic on the busy A23 heading down to Brighton. The flying saucers had moved away, hunting around in England’s villages and lanes.

Brandon watched them go. What destruction would follow, he wondered, if they couldn’t find what they were looking for?

‘Anyone got any sweets for the journey?’ Kat asked hopefully.

They arrived at the outskirts of Brighton at almost five in the morning. The sun was beginning to rise. This was quite a rare sight for Brandon; usually at this time on a Sunday he would be looking forward to another six hours’ sleep.

Instead he was stuck in traffic. The road into town was bumper to bumper; cars were queuing to get in, and there was also a long jam on the other side of the road heading out. It was like both morning and evening rush hours at the same time, when everyone really should still be in bed.

A giant billboard loomed over them as they sat in the queue. A nineteen-thirties-style girl in a bikini and a floppy hat posed by a pool above the words BRIGHTON, AMUSEMENTS, SURF BATHING. Parked behind the billboard was a tank. Two soldiers in khaki were watching the road.

‘I don’t
think
that they’re after us,’ Brandon observed. ‘It was just those special ops troops in black that know who I am.’

‘These guys are just looking for under-age drivers without a license!’ Kat laughed.

Jason sat up straighter in the driver’s seat and tried to look manly.

Kat was playing with her phone. ‘No signal or internet around here either,’ she said. ‘How can the whole internet be down everywhere?’

‘Maybe the army are blocking it here,’ Brandon guessed. ‘Or
something else
is.’