Human.4

Scream. He’s got a print of it in his study, and we used to joke that it was the real thing, back when the original got stolen. The painting shows a figure—you can’t really tell if it’s a man or a woman—standing on a bridge, in front of a blood-red sky. A couple of figures are watching in the background, but they’re not important, the main focus is that figure in the foreground; hands on either side of its face, its mouth wide open.

I’ve looked at that picture more than a hundred times, hanging there over my dad’s desk, and I have tried to figure out what is going on in that figure’s head, to make it look so full of despair.

I still don’t know, but I saw it imprinted across the faces of everyone in Millgrove.

Everyone except four, anyway.

I—I haven’t got the words to describe how disturbing the sight was. Every one of those faces was gripped by some fear, or despair, that had literally frozen them to the spot. It was too unreal, too weird, and I turned away.

Mrs O’Donnell had sat back down, and was gazing around her in snaps and jerks.

I felt a pressure on my arm and realized that Lilly had just grabbed hold of it as her eyes raked the scene, trying to understand what she was seeing. It felt… good . . . to have her reach out for me in that moment.

As I said earlier, strange dynamic.

Mr Peterson’s face had turned ashen and he was just staring ahead with his eyes bulging out of his head.

And then I got it.

It was a joke.

Something that Danny had told them all to do when we woke up, just to mess with our heads.

It was part of the act.

I laughed.

'Very funny, everyone,' I said loudly. 'You had us worried, there.'

No one moved. No one laughed. No one did anything but remain still.

I waited.

Nothing.

No joke, then.

So what was going on?

Chapter 7

A weird kind of panic descended.

I mean, this was just plain freaky.

These were all people we knew; people we saw every day; people we had grown up with; said 'hi' to if we saw them on the street.

But they weren’t moving.

They weren’t moving at all.

I’m not sure I’ve done this… stillness . . . justice yet. I mean, this wasn’t people pretending to be still. You know, like when they play musical statues, or whatever, and they freeze, but not really.

The truth is, people can’t stay still for long. Not without a whole lot of practice. Not this amount of people. Not for this long. Human bodies aren’t built for inactivity. They sway. They smile. They move, even if it’s only a little. They giggle.

None of the audience was doing any of these things.

It was eerie and unnatural.

Mrs O’Donnell said, 'I’ve had enough of this.'

She got to her feet, stomped over to Danny and pushed him, very gently. He didn’t offer any resistance. He moved, but in the way an inanimate object moves when pushed. He swayed slightly. Then stopped. His face didn’t change. Not a muscle of his body twitched.

Mrs O’Donnell snapped her fingers in front of his face. He didn’t react. He didn’t even blink, and I realized that I hadn’t seen any of the audience blink in all the time we had been awake.

I had a really bad feeling spreading through me, the kind that brings bumps of gooseflesh up on the skin of your arms. That makes the nape of your neck feel cold.

Mr Peterson was sitting, rocking backwards and forwards, while his lips moved in silent conversation with himself.

'What’s wrong with him?' Lilly asked.

I shrugged.

'Shock, I guess,' I said. 'I sort of feel like sitting down and doing it myself.'

I pointed out over the audience.

'The question we ought to be concentrating on is: what’s wrong with them?'

Lilly took my arm again, and her fingers fixed tight this time.

'What about Simon?' she whispered.

'Let’s go see,' I said, feeling disappointed. How bad is that, by the way? To feel disappointed that she was concerned about my best friend?

I led her from the stage and on to the green below.

Among the crowd, the level of weirdness was raised by a factor of ten.

Or twenty.

Down there, the effect was even more astonishing.

It was as if everyone had been switched off in the middle of whatever it was they were doing. Like the stopped mechanical exhibits you’d see at closing time in a museum, turned off in mid-motion.

People held canned drinks in the air. Kids had their hands in packets of crisps. Old man Davis was frozen in the midst of scratching his nose. Annie Bishop and her boyfriend, Nigel Something-or-other, were in the middle of a kiss. Ned Carter was looking up at the sky. Ursula Lincoln was coughing, with her hand up to her mouth.

About halfway to where we had left Simon I found my mum and dad. They were just sitting there, totally still, my mum’s finger pointing accusingly at my meek-looking dad. They had been arguing, and then they had just stopped.

There were only four of us outside of stopped time, and able to move around those that were frozen in it.

But it wasn’t time that had stopped. Things were moving. It was only the people that were stopped. There were flies buzzing around; wasps crawling around the drinking holes of soft drink cans; clouds of midges swirling in the summer air. Birds still crossed the sky. A cool breeze blew, carrying sweet wrappers and other discarded items. Mrs Winifred’s Italian greyhound, Bambi, was walking around, looking lost.

Whatever this was, it seemed only to affect human beings.

All human beings except me, Lilly, Mrs O’Donnell and Mr Peterson.

It was one hundred per cent weird.

'I’m scared,' Lilly confessed.

'Me too.' I smiled a tight-lipped smile. 'But we’ve got to keep it together. There’s an explanation for this. We’ve just got to find it.'

'Well, I don’t have an explanation,' Lilly said, pouting. 'Not a one. I mean this is impossible, you realize that, don’t you? It’s like one of those awful movies on the Sci-Fi Channel. I really hate science fiction.'

Standing there—looking afraid, with fear-wide eyes, dilated pupils and all her usual defenses down—Lilly looked . . . well, really pretty.

It’s something about her that she tries to hide, so I guess it’s her way of staying out of things, by distancing herself from them. You don’t get involved, you don’t get let down, I guess.