Alien Disaster (3 page)

‘Good thinking, Kat,’ Jason said. ‘Always watching my back.’

‘Yeah,’ Kat said. ‘Somebody has to. Sorry, Brandon.’

Brandon was about to reply, but the scene that greeted them back in the cemetery stunned them into silence. Trees were split and on fire, and a thick cloud of brown dust blocked out the sun. Gravestones had been ripped out of the ground and were strewn all around; tombs and monuments had collapsed. Behind them, the metal superstructure covering the staircase had been stripped of the marble mausoleum that hid it. And in front of them …

A crater half a kilometre wide had been punched into the centre of Highgate Cemetery by the two small but amazingly accurate meteors. There was nothing but a great pit full of rock, dirt and smoke. Flashes of metal showed where the top of the roof of the hidden laboratory was.

They paused only for a moment. ‘Keep running!’ Brandon urged.

They ran away from the crater, heading for the distant shelter of the trees and tombs that were still standing by the cemetery wall. A third meteor flashed down from the sky and into the crater, finishing the job that the first two had started. The blast sent Brandon, Kat and Jason flying through the air. They landed in an ancient grove in a tangle of arms, legs, nettles and ivy. Brandon hit his head on a gravestone. His vision blurred and he tasted blood.

It was Kat who pulled them both, dazed and bruised, to their feet. ‘Come on!’ she urged. ‘This isn’t the time to rest in peace!’

They scaled the wall, left the cemetery and ran through the nearby roads without any destination in mind, wordlessly agreeing to simply put some distance between themselves and the crater. More meteors were falling out of the sky all over London. They could hear the impact explosions and could feel the ground shake. People were running about shouting and crying. They passed police cars, fire trucks and ambulances all heading in different directions.

Eventually they emerged on Hampstead Heath and collapsed on the dry grass of the park at the foot of Parliament Hill. Jason and Kat were staring in shock at the clouds of smoke that were rising on every horizon. Brandon tried to call his mother back: no reply. He called his father; the line connected, and then …

He saw it clearly this time: a hot white fireball speeding out of the clear blue sky. It crashed to Earth less than two kilometres away. Brandon didn’t feel the heat or the shockwave this time, but he felt a much more violent reaction in his gut.

‘No,’ he gasped. ‘Dad …’

The meteor had hit home: Brandon’s home.

Brandon sank to his knees. All around him more and more meteors were falling over London, but he could hardly hear them. His mind, usually so sharp and clear, was clouded with shock and grief. He couldn’t make sense of why his whole world had been turned upside down.

His phone was buzzing urgently in his pocket. He fumbled for it: it was his sister Gem calling.

‘Brandon, where are you?’

‘I’m … it’s …’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’m on the Heath.’

‘Listen to me, Bran, we’re in
big
trouble. These meteors … they’re not random; they’re targeting our family! They hit Mum’s lab
three times
! They also took out some army and communications stuff too. This isn’t a natural meteor shower—it’s some sort of attack!’

‘Mum and Dad, Gem, they’re …’

‘I don’t know, Brandon. I’ve no idea where Mum is, but Dad left the house just after you did. He said he was going to the gallery to move his precious paintings, so hopefully he’s okay. I’m in the chopper with James.
You
have to get somewhere safe until all this is over, okay?’

‘Okay,’ he agreed, relieved, but still bewildered. Gem obviously had no idea that he had just been to the lab.

‘Gem, what do you think this—’

He stopped mid-sentence and involuntarily ducked as another meteor streaked overhead at an unnaturally low angle. It landed about four kilometres away, smashing the top off the British Telecom Tower as it went by.

‘Gem?’

There was no reply; his connection had been lost. Jason was looking at his phone like he’d been cut off mid-call as well. Kat’s fingers were moving around her phone’s touchscreen. ‘Internet’s down too,’ she reported.

The barrage of meteors started to slow down. Plumes of smoke were rising all over London. There was a haze of dust in the summer sky. Then one more meteor flashed across the horizon; this one exploded in mid-air as a missile came up to meet it. It looked like a defence of sorts had finally been mustered.

‘We need to get somewhere safe,’ Brandon said. ‘Somewhere that’ll survive a meteor strike.’

Kat nodded in agreement. ‘An underground tube station?’

Jason shook his head. ‘Everyone in London will have the same idea. We’ll never get out in time if the place gets hit more than once, which it might do if we keep hanging round with this loser.’

He meant Brandon, of course. Brandon ignored him, although his point was a good one. ‘We want somewhere with a deep cellar; somewhere that won’t be full of people … What about your place?’ he asked the twins.

‘Get lost!’ Jason snorted. ‘Our parents are on holiday—the south of France. Lucky for them!—but they’d kill us if they got back and the house had been flattened.’

Kat sighed. ‘I know a place,’ she said reluctantly. She dug into her pocket and pulled out her keychain. She held up one of the keys on it for them all to see.

‘What’s that for?’ Jason asked. ‘Some kind of secret underground bunker? If you’ve got a key to a safe place, then what were we doing earlier trying to break into a crypt?’

‘It’s my secret place,’ Kat said. ‘Come on!’ She walked off across the heath.

Jason looked at Brandon, who just shrugged.

‘Who keeps secrets from their twin?’ Jason muttered darkly, then followed after Kat.

‘Are you alright, Brandon?’

‘Yes. Well, no, obviously; I’m worried about my mum. But I’ll keep it together for now if I can. We have to focus on staying alive.’

‘I’m impressed,’ Kat said. ‘You’re tougher than I thought.’

‘If you’re so tough, Bright Eyes,’ Jason grunted, ‘then maybe you could give us a hand ripping the bottom out of this fence.’

They were trying to break into the grounds of their school, Highgate Academy. Brandon helped Jason pull back some wooden planks until they snapped off, then they all squeezed through the gap. They headed over the football pitch toward the looming three-storey buildings.

It was mid-afternoon. In the past hour, no more meteors had fallen. The city was subdued; the only sound was the wail of distant sirens.

‘Head towards B Block,’ Kat said. ‘There’s a door there to the cellar boiler room. That’s what the key’s for.’

‘I don’t remember being issued with a boiler room key on induction day,’ Jason remarked sarcastically.

‘Ha! I nabbed it off the caretaker’s key chain. He’s always leaving it in the lock. Handy place to hide when I want to skip double maths.’

‘You should have let me know,’ Jason said. He was in a lower maths set. ‘I could have joined you. What I wouldn’t give to have a place to escape double maths, let alone killer asteroids.’

Kat didn’t reply. She looked slightly uncomfortable.

They made it to the main doors. Jason kicked them in and the three of them entered Highgate Academy, a modern privately-funded school with a mix of new buildings and older ones from the sixties. The Latin motto on the crest over the door read: Docendo Discimus.
By Teaching, We Learn.

Jason caught Brandon’s eye. ‘I guess that now that we’re back here, it means that the holidays are definitely over.’

Hidden in the shadow of a bank of lockers under B Block’s main stairwell was a small cellar door. Kat opened it with her key. They went down two flights of narrow stairs into the underground boiler room.

Kat found a light switch. The bare bulb that hung from a wire lit a gloomy brick-lined space that was criss-crossed with a maze of pipe work. In the centre stood two massive iron soot-stained tubular boilers. Between them there was an old table and four plastic classroom chairs.

Jason was carrying an armful of booty that he had gotten from smashing open a vending machine. He and Kat sat down on the plastic chairs and started to feast on chewy toffee bars, chocolate, crisps and fizzy pop.

Brandon got out the cylinder from the lab. It was his first opportunity to take a closer look. It was about sixteen centimetres long and four centimetres in diameter, and made of smooth, polished metal; maybe steel or aluminium. The ends were slightly wider, but they didn’t appear to unscrew; the whole cylinder looked like it was machine-tooled from one piece of metal.

And yet …

As he weighed the cylinder in his hand, Brandon could feel a strange sensation, as if the centre of gravity of this seemingly solid object was almost imperceptibly shifting as he rolled it in his palm. The more he concentrated on the feeling, the more it seemed that the very atomic structure of the metal was responding to his thoughts.

But how could it?

Jason belched loudly and snapped Brandon’s focus. ‘Aren’t you going to eat any of this delicious meal that I prepared?’ Jason asked. Brandon craved savoury food and grabbed a couple of packets of cheese and onion crisps. Kat was downing multi-coloured sugar-coated chocolate drops like an addict.

Jason leaned back in his chair and stretched. ‘So who’s throwing these meteors at us then if they’re not randomly flying in from space? Are there terrorists up in a space station now, catching asteroids and then aiming them at us?’

‘Or maybe …
aliens
!’ Kat said excitedly. ‘
Aliens
could do it. I saw a film once where
aliens
flung
alien
meteors at Earth from their
alien
homeworld!’

‘You can’t just
fling
a meteor from one planet to another,’ Brandon argued. ‘And anyway, you can’t be so quick to blame it on aliens. Jason’s probably closer to the truth: it’s more likely to be terrorists. Have you heard of the Drake equation?’

Jason rolled his eyes. ‘Of course not.’

‘It’s a formula for estimating the number of alien civilisations that might be out there in the galaxy,
within contact distance
,’ Brandon told them. ‘The result usually comes out somewhere between one and zero. But nearer zero.’

Jason wasn’t listening. He had picked up a black school pullover that had fallen off the back of his chair. ‘Is this yours, Sis? Oh, hang on, there’s actually a name tag in it!’

‘It
is
mine!’ Kat said, making a grab for it ‘Give it here.’

‘No, it’s not. The tag says … Xander Jones?’

Kat’s face was bright red.

‘Wait a minute! Is this why you kept this place secret? You meet your secret boyfriend down here? Xander Jones? That posh fool?’

‘He’s head boy!’

‘He’s a sleazebag! You do know he’s officially dating the head girl?’

Brandon decided to leave the twins to it. ‘I’m going to risk heading up to the computer lab,’ he said. ‘The mobile network is still out, but the internet might still be coming through the cables. I want to see what the rest of the world is saying about these meteor strikes.’

They ignored him and continued bickering, so he left the boiler room and went back above ground.

The school was eerie and quiet. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows through the tall glass windows, and Brandon found himself turning corners carefully, as if there might be someone or something lying in wait around them.
Blame Kat and her talk of aliens!

He passed the science labs, where a great deal of the equipment had been provided by technology companies that his mother had links with. Brandon and Gem’s parents could have sent their kids to Highgate’s historic private school, but instead saw that their money and influence could be better used to equip the Highgate Academy with state-of-the-art facilities.

He walked through the extensive library on the third floor and went into the computer lab. The computers had all been turned off for the summer, but Brandon knew the set-up and went about hitting all the switches that booted up a desktop PC and all its peripherals.

The internet was on, but it was slow; the meteors must have been hitting switching stations all over London, and it would take time to re-route around the outages. Brandon went straight to the news sites to check what was going on. It looked as if hundreds of meteors had fallen within a twenty kilometre radius around Highgate, damaging cars and property all over London. Outside the capital, the largest meteor of the day had flattened The Grand Hotel in Brighton.

I’m not at the lab
, his mother had said. Was she even in London?

Scientists and army chiefs were debating on whether to try using lasers or missiles to shoot down any future meteors, and whether to try and destroy or just deflect them. The ATLAS station had spotted an enormous asteroid that was two-hundred metres across: big enough to destroy London. Thankfully its velocity would take it on a path that missed Earth by just under three times the distance to the moon. It was impossible to detect how many smaller meteoroids were still on their way.