0.4

Mr Peterson looked confused, as if I was missing some obvious point and he wasn’t sure how to explain it in easier terms.

‘It means that… we are the only… the only ones left… four… four against all…’

His voice trailed off and suddenly his face lost its urgent intensity, going slack, almost sleepy.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you mean.’

Tears streamed down his face and he gave me the weakest of smiles.

‘I… I… I’ve groken ny gicycle,’ he said in Mr Peebles’ voice, a falsetto voice of utter insanity. ‘I get you don’t really care oo- at’s wrong with ne.’

And then he started laughing, laughing in that awful, high-pitched way that he reserved for his ugly-headed ventriloquist’s dummy.

I got up, feeling very cold and very scared. We all backed away from that terrible sound and left the green.

10

Mrs O’Donnell’s house was on Carlyle Road, an old terrace that ran behind the high street. It’s one of those narrow streets that mean people have to park half on and half off the kerbs.

We were midway up the road when Mrs O’Donnell stopped. A beautifully clipped hedge bordered a tiny concrete garden and I thought we had arrived at her house, but she pointed through an open front door where two young children – a boy and a girl – had been in the process of coming out, perhaps on their way to the green, before being struck down by the… event.

The girl was waiting by the front door; the boy was stuck, mid-stride, in the hallway.

‘Annie and Nicholas Cross,’ Mrs O’Donnell said, and I thought I could see tears in her eyes. ‘I babysit for them now and then. She’s six and he’s eight. They’re nice kids. What could have done this to them? To everyone?’

I wondered why she was asking us.

But what could have done it?

And then I made one of those unlikely connections the human brain is so good at making – joined together a couple of pieces of information that really didn’t belong together.

Today’s events and something that happened a couple of years ago.

There were some local kids near Naylor’s farm, on the outer reaches of the village, who swore blind that they saw lights in the sky over one of old man Naylor’s grain silos. Bright, moving lights that didn’t behave like ordinary aircraft.

To start with there was a certain amount of sneering and laughing, but they were absolutely certain, and a report made it into the local weekly paper.

Although why alien craft always appear over grain silos and open fields rather than over towns and cities has always bothered me. If there really were aliens flying their spaceships above places in the middle of nowhere… well, maybe they aren’t all that smart, you know?

Anyway, I suddenly started wondering whether it might be connected. I’d joked about UFOs earlier to Lilly – went down like a lead battleship, too – but what other alternatives were there?

A chemical accident.

A biological plague.

A fracture in the fabric of time.

Were they any more likely?

I thought about the mad things that Mr Peterson had said. Things I had ignored because… well, because they were so mad. But had he seen something that our eyes hadn’t?

Had we been invaded and didn’t even know it?

I shook my head to clear the stupid thought. What kind of alien invasion would cause people to stand still, for goodness sake? I mean, how was that an invasion exactly?

I was filling the gaps in what I knew, and painting them ET green.

Surely that was a sign of madness, too.

Mrs O’Donnell’s house was tidy and neat, just like the woman herself. Actually, being honest about my first impression, it was way more than tidy: as if its contents had just come out of protective coverings. There was a heavy smell of furniture polish and artificial flowers. I guessed she spent a lot of her free time cleaning.

The walls were pastel pink with paintings of flowers and horses hanging on them. The books that graced her neat shelves were all of the chick-lit variety. I realised that Mrs O’Donnell had, at no point, expressed concern for a Mr O’Donnell, and her house reflected his absence from her thoughts.

The TV was small and old-school, and it wasn’t even hooked up to a hi-fi. There was a DVD player and a cheap Freeview box. She switched on the TV and its screen came up blank. No static, just a blue screen. She flicked through the channels slowly with a remote, as if she wasn’t a hundred per cent certain how it worked. There were no stations, just the same, neutral, blue screen. She killed the TV and shook her head.

The living room led on through an arch into a dining area, with the corner made into a workstation. A very neat workstation: computer, keyboard, mouse. No piles of papers or stacks of disks.

She pushed the power button to boot up her iMac and we waited for it to warm up.

It only took a few seconds of absolute silence for us to realise that something had gone wrong.

The usual Apple loading screen did not appear.

In its place were strings of characters that did not belong to any alphabet I have ever seen. Odd, hook-shaped characters; spiky circles that flexed and pulsed; characters that twisted together, seeming to revolve on the screen; characters that looked like they could be meant to represent human eyes; and a large number of short lines that bent at such weird angles they made me feel… uncomfortable viewing them.

It was like a language, I guess, but with letters that moved, constantly changing, evolving.

‘What is this…?’ Mrs O’Donnell asked, desperately pushing keys.

‘It looks like a virus,’ Lilly said, staring over Mrs O’Donnell’s shoulder.

‘I don’t think it’s a virus,’ I said. ‘Look at the way it’s set out. It looks like a document. I think that it’s text, just not in a language we can read.’

Lilly made a ‘hmph’ sound.

‘What?’ I asked her, perplexed.

‘You are such an idiot,’ she said.

‘What did I do?’ I protested.

‘I think that it’s text, just not in a language we can read.’ She mimicked me with a cruel tone that made it sound a whole lot sillier than when I’d said it. ‘What’s that even supposed to mean? And how is it supposed to help us?’

I suppose that it’s time to throw some light on this… oddness… that was happening between Lilly and me.

Just to get it out of the way.

Now seems as good a time as any.

You see, I actually went out with Lilly for a few weeks.

This was quite a while before Simon did.

We were a couple of kids at school who fancied each other and ended up being girlfriend and boyfriend.

For a while.

I don’t really need to go into all the details. You… well, you know how it is. You spend a few break times together, you hold hands, you write their name in an exercise book or two, feel stupidly jealous if you see them talking to any other boy. You laugh at each other’s jokes, and find yourself thinking about them when you’re not together.

I even went back to her house once.

Just once.

That was kind of the trouble, really.