Earthfall (6 page)

‘Did you hear that?’ Sam said, turning to Jess. His sister didn’t reply. She was staring at a point on the wall, no sign of any emotion on her face, just the same trance-like expression as the silent woman on the television.

‘Jess!’ Sam snapped. ‘What’s wrong?’ He grabbed her shoulder and shook her gently but she did not respond, an occasional slow blink the only sign that she was even awake. He waved his hand in front of her eyes, but her focus never shifted. Sam ran out of his room and down the stairs, two at a time.

‘Mum! There’s something wrong with Jess!’ he shouted as he ran into the kitchen. His mum was on the sofa at the far end of the room, staring at the television, and as Sam approached he felt the first fluttering twinge of panic in his stomach. She wasn’t, he realised, watching the television at all; she was staring at it, her face frozen and emotionless too. Sam knelt down in front of his mum, put a hand on each of her shoulders and shook her gently. His mother’s head rocked backwards and forwards, but there was still no flicker of awareness in her eyes.

Sam stood up, fear replacing panic. He took the phone out of its cradle on the countertop and quickly punched in his father’s mobile number, but the call wouldn’t connect. He didn’t even get his dad’s voicemail. He hung up and dialled Aunt Carol’s number as he’d always been told to do if there was an emergency when his mum or dad weren’t around. The phone rang a dozen times before he heard his aunt’s voice on the other end.

‘This is Carol Burton. I’m afraid I’m not available at the moment, but if you’d like to leave your name and number I’ll . . .’

Sam hung up without leaving a message. There was something seriously wrong and he needed help
now
. He took a deep breath and dialled 999. He stood listening as the phone rang and rang at the other end. He waited, watching as the second hand on the kitchen clock swept around the dial once, then twice. There was no answer.

‘What’s going on?’ Sam whispered to himself.

Suddenly, there was another burst of the skull-splitting, pulsing screech and Sam dropped the phone, wincing in pain. This time the painful howling was quickly replaced by a lower frequency, a throbbing hum. Sam bent down to pick up the phone before looking over at his mother. He gave an involuntary gasp of shock as she stood up and turned towards him.

‘Mum, are you OK?’ he asked. She did not reply, her face still frozen in a neutral, emotionless expression. Moments later she started walking straight towards him.

‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded. ‘Why won’t you answer me?’

She walked past Sam and out of the kitchen, oblivious to his presence. He followed her into the hall and saw Jess walking down the stairs, her eyes empty and distant. His mother opened the front door and walked silently out on to the drive. Sam grabbed Jess’s arm as she passed, but she kept walking, slowly dragging him towards the door. He tried to hold on to her, to stop her somehow from leaving the house, but she pulled relentlessly away from him.

‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ Sam yelled as he finally let her go, and she silently followed their mother through the front door. He chased after them, watching with a growing sense of horror as they walked down the drive and towards the road. This had to have something to do with the low, throbbing sound that seemed to fill the air around him. But if that was true, why had it not affected him in the same way?

Sam ran ahead of his mother, before turning to face her, his arms stretched wide, trying to block her path. Rather than slow her pace she simply walked round him, as if he were an obstacle to avoid. Sam kept moving, trying to block her path again, but it was a futile effort. Whichever way he moved, his mother just changed direction. Jess walked past and Sam quickly realised that trying to stop both of them would be impossible. He followed them, fear and confusion gnawing at his gut.

‘What the hell?’ Sam whispered to himself as he stepped out on to the pavement. Dozens of people were walking down the street, all with the same vacant expression and all heading in the same direction. Sam watched as his mother and sister joined the procession, merging silently with the flow. He followed them, not knowing what else to do. They were being driven somewhere and wherever that was he had to go with them to try to keep them safe and find out what was going on. As he continued down the street, Sam began to realise something else, something deeply disturbing. There were now crowds of people filling the road ahead of them as more people walked out of driveways and side streets, but he still hadn’t seen a single person who seemed to be aware of what was happening.

‘Can anyone hear me!’ Sam yelled at the top of his voice, almost screaming. There was no response, just the sound of a huge crowd walking in perfect silence. There was something deeply unsettling about seeing such a mass of people and yet not hearing a single murmur of conversation. There was no laughter, no shouting, nothing. As the crowd got larger, Sam struggled to keep both his mother and his sister in sight. They made no effort to stay together and began to drift apart as more men, women and children joined the tide. He realised that before long he was going to have to choose who to stay with, who to follow. Instinctively, he wanted to follow his mother, but she was an adult; she would be more able to look after herself. Jess on the other hand was only a couple of years older than him. He couldn’t stand the thought of her suddenly snapping out of this sinister trance somewhere unfamiliar, frightened and alone. He pushed through the crowd towards her, taking her limp, unresponsive hand in his as their mother slowly disappeared from view. Sam had never imagined that it would be possible to be surrounded by this many people and yet still feel so hopelessly alone.

For the next hour, Sam walked along beside his sister as the ever-growing torrent of people flowed towards their destination. The people surrounding him and Jess were of all ages, shapes and sizes. Some were wearing work uniforms, some were in their nightclothes, a few of them were even naked. Babies or children who were too young to walk were being carried by adults who Sam assumed were their parents but might, for all he knew, just have been the people who were physically closest to them at the time. What was most unnerving was the fact that, just like the adults, none of those children made any sound. Not a single baby was crying.

After a while it began to rain and Sam trudged along, still holding on to Jess’s hand tightly, feeling cold, wet and miserable. He had been walking for several hours and he was starting to feel thirsty and tired. If any of the people around him felt the same way, they weren’t showing any signs of it. He couldn’t afford to stop, though. He knew that there was no way he’d ever find Jess again in the crowd, even if he only rested for a few minutes. He trudged on wondering how much longer he could keep going. There was still the low-pitched throbbing that had now just become background noise, but there was also a higher-pitched buzzing that seemed to be getting louder all the time.

Suddenly, three objects flew out from an adjoining street and shot down the road towards them, flying just a few metres above the heads of the crowd. Sam had never seen anything like them; they looked like some kind of flying mechanical jellyfish, with bunches of long dark tentacles writhing below their floating silver bodies. He felt an irritating tingling sensation in his skull and without warning the entranced mass of people all stopped their relentless march in perfect unison. The silver creatures hovered in the air about thirty metres from Sam and Jess. Sam let go of his sister’s hand and stood perfectly still, staring into the distance, hoping that he looked just like the blank-faced people surrounding him. Somehow the same primal instinct that was making the hairs stand up on the back of his neck told him that he did not want to attract their attention. After a few seconds, sections of the crowd began to break away from the main group and head off in different directions. He waited as the crowd dispersed in front of them, barely daring to breathe as the silver creatures floated towards him. A few seconds later Jess turned smartly to her left and he followed suit, walking along behind her as she joined a group that headed down a side street nearby. Sam resisted the urge to look back over his shoulder as they walked away, fearing that the slightest sign of independent thought might be enough to alert the creatures that he was not under the same spell as everyone else.

They walked for a couple of minutes before arriving at the entrance to a large storage depot. Sam followed behind Jess as she walked inside. Rows and rows of people were lying on their backs, next to each other on the concrete floor of the barn-like structure. They all had their eyes wide open, staring vacantly at the ceiling. Jess and Sam followed along to the end of one of the rows and Sam took his place next to her as she lay down on the cold, hard floor. Sam glanced around as he lay down. There were none of the silver machines in the room as far as he could tell, but he could still feel the tingling in his head, which he assumed meant that they must be somewhere nearby. He lay there in silence; the only sound he could hear was the gentle breathing of the hundreds of people lying around him. A few minutes later the odd itching inside his skull faded away and he lifted his head from the ground, slowly looking around. The floor was filled with people, all lying motionless, their arms and legs straight, their eyes shut. He sat up and gently shook Jess by the shoulder but, as he had feared, she did not respond. Just like everyone else in the room it was as if she had been switched off.

‘OK, Sam, think,’ he whispered to himself. ‘What do you do now?’

His options were limited. Jess wasn’t going anywhere right at this moment, but there was no way of knowing when the people around him might get back on their feet and start walking once more. If he wasn’t there when that happened, he knew he’d probably never see Jess again. He decided to check what was going on outside. Only then would he know if it was even possible for him to try to get his sister out. There were no windows on this floor of the building, but a door on the far side of the room had a ‘Stairs’ sign on the wall beside it. He stood up and carefully picked his way between the dormant bodies, heading for the exit. Looking back across the room, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle at the sight of the dozens of unconscious but strangely stiff bodies, all lying in neatly ordered rows. He shuddered involuntarily and stepped through the door, creeping quietly up the stairs, ears straining for any sign of the return of the sinister silver machines.

The upper floor was filled with empty offices and the only light in the gloomy space was coming from the monitors on the desks displaying the open documents and web pages that had been suddenly abandoned. Sam walked into one of the offices and looked out of the window. It was getting dark outside and the rain was heavier. The streets below were empty; there were no signs of life, either human or alien.

‘You’re certainly not from around here, are you?’ Sam whispered to himself as he looked at the giant vessel that hovered over central London, clearly visible from here, despite the fading light. As he watched, he saw several smaller shapes, illuminated by green light, drop from the underside of the larger ship and then shoot off, flashing through the sky above the city rooftops. It felt ludicrous, but the more he looked at the huge floating object and thought about the bizarre events of that day, the more he was forced to admit to himself that the most likely explanation was that it was the work of an extraterrestrial intelligence. That still did nothing to explain what it was that these visitors had done to the people downstairs or what their future intentions might be. Sam feared that whatever they were planning it was nothing good.

He walked back to the desk in the room and sat down in front of the keyboard. He clicked the icon on the computer’s desktop and opened the browser. He was half expecting an error message, but the internet connection still seemed to be working. He spent nearly an hour looking for signs of life online, but there was nothing. The last posts on any of the forums or blogs he visited were startled reactions to the arrival of the alien vessels all over the planet, but then there was silence. It confirmed one thing, Sam realised as a chill ran down his spine: whatever had happened to everyone, it hadn’t just happened here in London. It was the same everywhere – this was global.

He put his head in his hands, rubbing his temples, fighting to control the rising tide of panic that he could feel in his gut. He told himself to stay calm, that everyone might wake up in the morning and that the intentions of the extraterrestrial visitors might not be as sinister as they appeared. Or it could be just as bad as it seems, said a nagging voice in the back of his mind, and you’re going to die, frightened and alone.

‘Stop it!’ Sam said to himself, standing up and slamming his hands down on the desk. He couldn’t afford to panic; he had to think. Not just for his sake, but for his sister as well. He had to come up with a plan and hope that if he could get Jess far enough away from the city then whatever influence the aliens were exerting over her would fade and perhaps she might wake up.

‘Great, so all I’ve got to do now is work out how exactly I’m going to get an unconscious fifteen-year-old zombie girl out of London,’ Sam said with a sigh. He couldn’t carry her any distance and even if he could figure out how to drive a car the roads were all blocked with abandoned vehicles. He realised that, unless she woke up from her current brainwashed state, he really only had two options. Either he stayed with Jess and waited for her to wake up or he left her here and tried to find somewhere safe to hole up on his own. It was an impossible choice.

Sam suddenly became aware of a low throbbing rumble that seemed to be getting gradually louder and louder. He hurried to the office window and saw that one of the smaller objects that had dropped from the bottom of the main alien vessel was heading in his general direction. He watched as the dark triangular object grew larger and realised with a growing sense of horror that it wasn’t just heading in his
general
direction – it was heading straight towards him! He ducked below the window, just as a bright, white light flooded the office. He crawled across the carpet, towards the door, as the building’s windows rattled and the white light swept back and forth across the offices. At the top of the stairs leading down to the warehouse area, he looked back over his shoulder just as the window exploded inwards in a shower of glass. Now he could hear another sound: the high-pitched whine of the silver jellyfish-like creatures that had shepherded them into the building earlier. Three of the creatures floated in through the broken window and glided towards the desk, their writhing tentacles reaching out and gently caressing the computer keyboard and monitor. Sam realised now what he’d done. Somehow, his attempts to find signs of life on the internet must have attracted the creatures’ attention and they had traced the network activity back to this location – which meant that now they knew that somebody here wasn’t really quite as asleep as they were supposed to be.