Human.4

nine-hundred-and-ninety-six did not; whose version of the events would you believe first? Honestly, it wouldn’t be ours.'

I had stopped listening.

My mind had just slotted some details together, and I felt a shiver travel the length of my spine.

'Oh,' I said. 'Oh no.'

Mrs O’Donnell looked over at me.

'What is it?' she asked.

Her voice seemed to travel miles to reach me through the sudden rush of panic I felt.

'Oh no. No no no no,' I said. 'How many people did you say live in Millgrove?'

'It’s about a thousand,' she said. 'Just under, I think.'

'And how many of us were hypnotized ? Are seeing things differently to everyone else?'

'Four,' she said, as if explaining something to a very dull child.

I didn’t care.

The numbers were too terrifying.

'So, what are we, you know, as a percentage of the village’s population?' I asked, feeling sick, hoping my maths was wrong.

'Well, we would be four out of a thousand . . . Which would make us . . . let me think…' She stopped. 'Oh,' she said coldly. Her face had lost some of its color. She looked at me. 'That’s very good, Kyle,' she said. 'We are in trouble, aren’t we?'

'Er, what are we talking about here?' Lilly asked, bemused.

'What percentage of the village population do we represent?' I asked her.

She shook her head. She should have worked it out way sooner than me.

'The answer is zero-point-four,' I said. 'We are zero-point-four of a per cent.'

Chapter 21

'We have to find Rodney,' Mrs O’Donnell said and it took me a few seconds to work out who she was talking about. Even though we had been talking about the four of us, it seemed crazy that I could have forgotten about the fate of the fourth person.

Mr Peterson.

Last seen in a fetal ball on the stage at the talent show.

Where we had left him.

'What happened to him?' I asked. 'I mean, after everyone started moving again?'

'I don’t know,' Mrs O’Donnell said. 'I was so relieved, I . . . I kind of forgot about him. I wandered down the high street, sort of in a daze, but no one was talking. They were just filing past, completely silent. When I spoke to someone they responded, but it was like they would rather not be talking. As if there was something . . . new . . . going on in their heads. They no longer seemed to need to chatter away about nothing. It was eerie. Like . . . like a funeral, or something.'

I drained the orange squash and rolled the glass around on my trouser leg.

'I . . . I need to ask something,' I said. 'And . . . well, there’s no sort of easy way to . . . Are we talking aliens here, do you think?'

Both Lilly and Mrs O’Donnell looked at me seriously.

It was Lilly who spoke first.

'There’s no such thing as aliens,' she said definitely.

'Wow, I had no idea that scientists had actually figured that out,' I said. 'Last I heard they were still keeping an open mind.'

'You know what I mean. No little green men and silver spaceships.'

'That’s not the only kind of alien life possible,' I said. 'Has anyone seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers?'

Mrs O’Donnell sighed.

'You do realize that was a film?' she said caustically. 'Not a documentary. And Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn’t really about aliens. It was about Communism, and the remake was about the changing roles of men and women in modern society.'

'I thought they were from outer space,' I said grumpily. 'In fact, I remember them saying that the pod things that took over people and changed them were aliens.'

Mrs O’Donnell’s face told me that she thought I had missed the point that she was making.

'The differences in text and subtext aside,' she said, 'you’re thinking that alien pod creatures arrived in Millgrove during a village talent show, and took over everybody except the handful of people hypnotized by a boy magician?'

'Yeah, well you put it that way and it sounds kinda stupid,' I said. 'But pod people was only meant as an example from a science fiction movie. We are agreed that something weird happened, aren’t we? I mean, this isn’t everyday Millgrove, is it? People that we know are acting strangely. We recognize their faces, but no longer recognize them.'

'We have no way of knowing what happened when we were in trances on that stage,' Mrs O’Donnell said, 'but surely it’s more likely that it’s US who are at fault, that we’re seeing things differently—'

'Have you managed to get any TV or radio signals?' I interrupted. 'Managed to reach anyone by phone? Are you getting anything on your computer except those symbols we were looking at earlier?'

The look on her face answered my questions for me.

'Look,' I said. 'I’m a kid. I know that. But it doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of seeing what’s going on around me. We are in deep, deep trouble here, and if you want the absolute truth I really don’t know what to do about it. But I do know that hiding my head in the sand is the wrong thing to do.'

I was getting frustrated and flustered.

I was even waving my arms in the air.

'I think that’s why Lilly and I ran here. To get an adult to help us work out a way to put all this right. To bring our parents back to us. To make things go back to the way they were. We need you, Kate.'

It was the first time I’d called her, or even thought of her, by her first name.

'OK,' she said, getting to her feet. 'We’ll go and find Rodney Peterson and then we’ll head out of town. We’ll get help. We will find people who can figure this thing out.'

'Thank you,' I said.

She smiled.

'It’s fine, Kyle. Now let’s get going.'

Chapter 22

We got into Kate’s car and the plan was simple. Stop off and check on Mr Peterson, and then get the heck out of Millgrove.

None of us was really surprised when it refused to start. The car didn’t make a sound. There was no ignition straining against a flat battery sound. Not a spark of life in the engine at all.

So we walked down the deserted streets, aware of just how strange it was that they were deserted. We knew that there were people inside those houses, but there were no signs nor sounds of life. It made me think of those ghost towns in Westerns. If a couple of spiky tumbleweeds had