Arrival (5 page)

‘My parents aren't together anymore,' I said, wondering why this needed spelling out.

Peter shot me a weird look. ‘Oh.'

‘That a problem?'

‘No,' he said quickly. ‘It's just a bit … surprising, that's all. The other families around here are all – I think you might be the only one whose parents aren't together.'

‘Nice going, Weir,' said Jordan. ‘Way to make him feel included.'

‘I didn't mean –' Peter started.

‘Forget it,' I said.

Peter turned his attention back to the computer.

‘What about you?' I asked Jordan. ‘Did you tell your parents?'

‘No. I was going to. But they've got enough to worry about, so I thought I'd wait and –' ‘Take me on yourself?' I suggested dryly.

‘
Well, yeah,' she said, looking embarrassed.

‘I guess that's the point of all this, though, isn't it?' I said. ‘I mean, someone's obviously gone to a lot of trouble to bring us together.'

‘What?' said Peter, his head snapping up. ‘You two?'

‘Right,' said Jordan. ‘The initials. They wanted us to find each other.'

‘And look at the file names,' I said, pointing to the screen. ‘They're labelled A and B, see?'

intSC1002A_lhunter.doc

intSC1002B_jburke.doc

‘What if they're two halves of the same message or code or whatever?' I added. ‘Like, what if we both only got part of the picture so we'd have to put them together?'

‘Yeah,' said Peter, pulling a face at the screen in front of him. He went to the top of my file and started adding what looked like more random letters to the first line.

‘What are you doing?' I asked.

‘Hang on,' said Peter absently, fingers flashing across the keyboard.

‘What I don't get, though, is why
us?'
Jordan said to me. ‘Even if that's all true, why did this person choose us two for … whatever this is? What do we even have in common?'

‘You mean besides an irrational paranoia that this whole town is out to get you?' Peter muttered, still typing.

‘Come on,' I told him, ‘you still don't think there's anything weird about all of this?'

‘Of course it's weird,' said Peter. ‘But you don't even know what this thing
says
yet. Might be worth waiting until we get that much figured out before you start going nuts with the conspiracy theories, don't you reckon?' He kept typing, his eyes flicking back and forth between the two streams of text.

‘Peter,' I said, ‘what are you –?'

‘It's not a text file,' said Peter.

‘Huh?'

‘You're right, it's one file split in half, but it's not a document. It's something else. A picture or a sound clip or – I don't know. Something.' He stopped typing.

‘Can you open it?' asked Jordan.

‘I think so,' Peter said, scrolling through the pages and pages of text, ‘but it'll take a while to put it all back together. I'll take the files home and work on it tonight.'

‘Don't you have to rewrite that essay for Mr Hanger?' I asked.

‘Stuff Mr Ranga,' said Peter with a wave of his hand. ‘Besides, how could I possibly concentrate on homework with all this excitement going on?'

Jordan rolled her eyes at him. ‘You're an idiot. You know that, right?'

The bell rang and we went downstairs to our science classroom. Like everything else at Phoenix High, the lab was brand new and unnaturally clean.

Most of the class was already inside by the time we got there. The kids who weren't chucking paper balls around or harassing the fish in the tank next to the window were sitting in groups of two or three at white lab benches. The bench tops gleamed so brightly it was almost painful.

‘Oi, Weir!' called a voice from across the room.

‘Pay up!'

I looked over and saw Michael sitting at a bench near the back, waving Peter over. Tank and Cathryn were with him.

Peter sighed and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a handful of coins, counted out five dollars, and dumped the money on the desk in front of Michael.

‘Should've listened to me,' said Michael pityingly, gathering up the coins and recounting them. ‘Way too early, man. Seriously, you should've paid me in advance and saved yourself the trouble.'

Peter pulled up a stool at the bench behind them. ‘Hey, what can I say? I'm an optimist.'

‘Bah,' said Michael, pocketing Peter's money. ‘Optimism is for the poor! Trust me, mate, it'll be at least another week before Pryor shows her face around here.'

Jordan and I took the two empty spaces at Peter's bench. Cathryn swivelled around on her stool, sizing us both up.

‘You hanging out with these two now?' she asked Peter, not taking her eyes off us.

Peter shrugged. ‘You want to give me a reason not to?'

I gave him a questioning look, but he was too fixated on Cathryn to notice.

‘Do whatever you want,' she said. ‘I just thought the last six months might have counted for a bit more than that.'

‘Hey, don't go making this about me!' Peter snapped. ‘Any time one of you feels like letting me in on what you're all –'

‘Pete, look,' said Michael, turning around, ‘you know it's not up to us.'

Peter got up off his stool, but before he had time to say anything else, a kid who'd been standing guard at the door pulled his head back into the room and yelled, ‘Benson's coming!'

Everyone raced to their seats and scrambled to pull out their laptops. Seconds later, a tall, skinny woman with red-framed glasses walked into the room. She glared at the class like she was sure we'd all been up to something, then turned around and wrote a heading up on the board.

Comparative Embryology.

We all opened our laptops and copied down the heading in silence.

I glanced sideways at Peter, who was still staring daggers at the back of Michael's head. What in the world was all that about? The whole thing reminded me of what Mum and Dad were like near the end, when conversations could go from civil to screaming in twenty-five words or less.

Jordan turned to speak to Peter, probably looking for an explanation too, but he shot her a don't-want-to-talk-about-it look and she let it drop.

We spent the rest of the class making slide shows to explain how, when you get right down to it, every animal starts out as the same little orange blob. Or something.

This gave Peter a bit of time to work on recombining the files on his computer, quickly flashing up his science work whenever Ms Benson walked past. By the time the lesson was over, he was still less than halfway done, but at least he'd calmed down a bit after his run-in with Cathryn.

And even though Peter thought the whole coded message thing was bit of a joke, Jordan managed to convince him to take the files straight home after school and keep working on them. Then again, I reckon Jordan could probably have convinced Peter to chop out his own tongue with a butter knife if she'd wanted to.

As soon as I got home, I made another pointless attempt at trying to get in touch with Dad, and then went upstairs, set my laptop up on my desk, and waited.

I tried to get through some of my growing pile of homework, but I was too distracted. Peter had promised to let us know as soon as he figured anything out, and I kept stopping every two minutes to check if he'd emailed yet.

Mum came home at 7.00 p.m. with a takeaway salad and two boxes of microwave macaroni cheese. The closest thing she could manage to her promised home-cooked meal. I ate quickly and then raced back upstairs.

At 10.30 p.m, the reply from Peter finally came.

hey Luke
I figured out the message. turns out it's an audio file.

I've listened to it a couple of times already … it's gotta be a joke
but I reckon you guys should probably hear it for yourselves.

meet me at the fountain tomorrow morning – 6.30 before it
gets too crowded.

mate if this thing is legit … we are all in some
SERIOUS
trouble.

Chapter 7

F
RIDAY
, M
AY
8
97
DAYS

‘About time,' said Jordan as I pulled up next to the fountain in the morning and ditched my bike on the ground. She and Peter were already sitting on one of the wooden benches that surrounded the fountain, clutching coffee cups. ‘What took you so long?'

‘What do you mean?' I yawned, grabbing my phone to check the time. I glanced at Peter, who for some reason was looking extremely pleased with himself. ‘You said six-thirty, right?'

‘Huh?' said Jordan. ‘You told me six.'

‘Did I?' said Peter, quickly wiping the grin off his face. ‘Oh. Sorry.'

Jordan turned her attention back to the computer sitting open on Peter's lap.

I shot a confused look at Peter, who winked at me behind Jordan's back. He performed a silent fake yawn and mimed putting an arm around her shoulder.

‘Are you kidding?' I said. ‘Do you have to pull that crap right
now?'

‘Pull what crap?' said Jordan, looking up again.

‘Nothing, don't worry,' I muttered, sitting down next to Peter. ‘Have you listened to it yet?'

‘No, we were waiting for you,' said Jordan. She turned to Peter. ‘Go on. Show us.'

‘Wait a sec,' I said, glancing up and down the street, checking to make sure we wouldn't be overheard.

As usual, there were a dozen or more security guards patrolling the street. Across the fountain, two of them were having an argument with Crazy Bill, who they'd just found sleeping under a tattered blanket in one of the gardens that decorated the town centre. Then there was the normal crowd of business people riding by on bikes or lining up for coffee, but none of them seemed –

‘Come on,' said Peter impatiently. ‘Settle down, will you? As if anyone walking past is going to care what three random teenagers are looking at on their computer.'

‘Fine,' I said, turning back to the screen. ‘Go ahead, play it.'

The clip was all muffled and distorted, like it had been recorded on a phone in someone's pocket. There was a tapping sound, footsteps maybe, then a warbled voice.

‘I take it our final arrivals have landed?' the voice said. It was a man. He sounded like he might have been around my dad's age.

‘Yes, sir,' said a second, deeper-voiced man. ‘Aaron is showing them to their living quarters as we speak.'

‘Nothing concerning to report?' the first man asked easily.

There was the sound of a chair being pulled out. Then the second man spoke again. His voice sounded familiar, but it was hard to place through all the static.

‘No, sir. The boy has a father on the outside with whom he was quite fixated on getting in touch, but –' ‘That's me!' I said, suddenly realising. ‘I asked to call my dad as soon as –'

‘Shh!' hissed Jordan. I shut up and went back to the recording.

‘I assume you explained the situation to him,' the first man was saying.

‘Yes, sir,' said the second man. ‘Aaron made it clear that communication with the outside world is impossible.'

‘Good,' said the first man. ‘I trust that Tabitha is prepared?'

‘Yes, sir. Dr Galton made the final adjustments this morning. We're ready to begin, pending your authorisation.'

‘Excellent. Yes, by all means, begin the countdown.'

‘Yes, sir.'

I glanced at Peter and Jordan, but from the looks on their faces they obviously couldn't make any more sense of this than I could.

There was a long pause. When the deep-voiced man spoke again, he sounded as though he was choosing his words very carefully.

‘Sir,' he said slowly, ‘might it not be wise to commence final lockdown procedures ahead of schedule, now that all of our candidates are inside?'

‘Bruce, we've been over this before,' said the other man wearily. ‘The town has already been secured. You've made sure of that yourself. Any further action at this point would only create panic.'

‘My men would be more than capable of subduing –'

‘At what cost, Bruce? We have two thousand candidates. That's all. We can't afford a bloodbath.'

‘But, sir, if someone from the outside –'

‘In a hundred days there won't
be
anyone left on the outside! Until that time, it is imperative that the people of Phoenix remain under the belief that their lives are progressing as normal.'

There was another long silence. It took me a second to realise that I wasn't breathing.

‘Yes, sir,' said the deep-voiced man, eventually.

‘Of course.'

‘We're on the home stretch now, Bruce,' the other man said. ‘When the countdown expires, Tabitha will cleanse the outside world of the human plague, and we who are left can get on with the business of rebuilding things. Until then, you and your men just focus on keeping the peace.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘A hundred days, Bruce. That's all. A hundred more days and then this will all be over.'

The static crackled for a few more seconds and then the recording cut out.

For a minute we sat there, trying to process what we'd just heard. Trying to make sense of something that didn't make any sense at all. My thoughts flew straight to Dad, back in Sydney. If this thing was for real… ‘It's a joke, right?' said Peter way too lightly, breaking the silence. ‘Got to be. There's no way this is real. It's impossible.'

‘What's impossible?' said a curious voice from behind us.

Peter slammed his laptop shut. I spun around.

Mr Larson, our English teacher, was right behind us, eating a bagel. How long had he been standing there?

‘Nothing, sir!' said Peter, a little too cheerfully.