Lost on Mars (14 page)

Samuel Clemens had time to let out a startled cry, and then was gone.

Al fell backwards onto the sand and I darted forward to grab Hannah. I was just in time to see the strange assailant rear up again.

It had a massive, undulating form that was hard to get a complete sense of. It was like a colossal silhouette of a monster, cut out of black card. Out of the skies had fallen a paper doll of a behemoth, here to prey upon us, soundlessly and savagely. A Shadow Beast.

I clasped Hannah to me as she screamed. Al was flat on the ground, yelping with shock. Only Annabel was still standing. It was like rigor mortis had set in as she stood there. She gazed up into the dark form of the unknown beast as it reared up again.

I could see it was about to pounce. I could see all at once how it would be. This wretched girl, who hardly had a nice word for anyone and who was never really a friend of mine. This hoity-toity madam who'd been forced by her parents to steal luxury items from wrecked spaceships; who'd been lowered on a rope from the very earliest age into the terrifying deeps. This girl was about to be eaten whole by a creature we had never encountered before.

Annabel simply stared into the hideous face of death as it rose up in two dimensions before her. She didn't look scared, or even all that bothered. As if she didn't like her own life enough to be that upset in her final moments.

The behemoth roared
silently
. And, without even knowing what I was doing, I put Hannah down safely and bolted forward. I pushed Annabel in the small of her back, hard, with both hands. Then I stood before the creature and I screamed at it.

I hollered with all my might and waved my arms about like a crazy lady. I made more noise than I ever had in my life.

And the monster recoiled.

I shouted at the others. ‘Help me! Come on! Make as much noise as you can!'

By then the others – the adults – had realised that something awful was going on and they were heading over, making noises of their own.

‘We need more noise!' I yelled. ‘He can't stand it!'

Even Annabel – lying in the dirt in her finery – gave a few bleating cries. When our screams and shouts reached a crescendo, the Shadow Beast rolled up like a paper blind. It twisted in the air in a weird kind of way. It was hard to pin down with your eyes. And then it was gone. It shot off into the darkest reaches of the sky.

We all cheered like mad. Making such a noise had never felt so good. I hugged Hannah and Al to me until they squeaked. But even though we had beaten the monster back, this wasn't really great news. We had a new deadly predator. Something else to fear as we inched across this arid terrain.

‘And Samuel Clemens is gone forever,' muttered Al, looking woebegone. ‘He was my pet. I taught him everything…'

I tried to commiserate, I really did. I told him that the smoke rings had been very pretty.

After that it was decided – by me – that our troupe of refugees had to make as much noise as possible, at all times. If these Shadow Beasts hated noise, then we would ward them off day and night as best we could, by singing and laughing and talking as loudly as possible. By turning on all the mechanical and electronic devices we had in our possession. I turned on the transistor and the hovercart radio so we had those cryptic broadcasts in loud stereo.

‘Wherewithal, Coconut, Salt-Tang, Rubicund…'

We hit metal parts with improvised drumsticks whenever we could. We made our loud, percussive way across the desert, raising decibels with dust clouds as we went. Ma sat atop our hovercart, strumming thoughtfully on her harp, which gleamed in the midday sun. Her sounds unified our cacophony into a strange kind of tune. For some reason, she wasn't talking to me at all now. Everything I did – including saving Annabel's life and coming up with the idea of noise to ward off silent monsters – just seemed that to make her resent me all the more. I was floating further and further away from being someone she could love.

But I really couldn't afford to get caught up in silly things like feelings. I had to keep my eyes fixed on the road ahead and whatever tribulations we would have to face next.

Just a few days after the horror of the Shadow Beast, Toaster came and told me some striking news.

Even the usually implacable sunbed seemed excited to announce that there was a town up ahead.

22

For a few awful moments I thought I had made a huge mistake.

As we stood there in the middle of the road, I felt sure that I had managed to lead us around in a big circle and we were back where we had started. Surely this was Our Town? We were clearly back again on our own Main Street.

But a few long, silent, ominous moments passed by. We stared round at the buildings and we started to see the differences. Yes, the wooden boards that made up the buildings were the same, and the whole look of things was similar. All were copied from pictures of buildings on Earth. So far, so familiar. But there were differences. Here was the inn. At home it was The Dragon. Here it was McCaffreys. And the big store was McAndrews, and not Adams' Exotic Emporium. Also – and this was the biggest difference, so obvious that it should have leapt out first of all – this place was utterly dead.

The windows were dark and cracked. Every surface was coated in crimson grime from desert winds. An eerie breeze riffled down Main Street, making shutters and loose doors creak on their hinges. These were the loudest noises in the whole place. There wasn't a single living soul anywhere to be seen. I was against it, but the others were determined to explore. They split up and went all over that town, shoving their way into stores and private houses, hunting for life and preserved foodstuffs. To me it seemed disrespectful somehow.

‘Ah, now, Lora,' Ruby said to me. ‘You can't go bossing adults about all the time. People are allowed to do what they want, whatever you think…' She chuckled at me.

So they were doing just what they wanted. Barging into these abandoned houses and coming out with armfuls of loot. Tins, jars, bottles and capsules. They looked almost elated by their findings. I felt disturbed, though. I couldn't help imagining strangers ransacking our own town.

Al voiced one of my troublesome thoughts. ‘But where did they all go? Are they all dead?'

No bodies were found. None of our party came back to announce they had found skeletons sitting up at tables or lying in bed.

‘Maybe the whole town just got up and walked,' said Ma, digging through a small case of fancy toiletries Al had brought her. ‘Just the same as we did. Maybe they felt the danger and the need to flee, just like us.' There was a strange expression on her face, as she sniffed the jars of unguents and sprays. I recognised the signs of her rising panic and dismay. I knew she was liable to cause a scene if we didn't get ourselves sat somewhere calmly, in safety. The noonday heat was making her mad.

I watched the others – the Adamses, Madame Lucille and Ray – coming back to our vehicles loaded down with gear. They were consuming stuff already, winching open tins of lobster and chicken. Al spilled a whole can of olives in the dust. Aunt Ruby came over proudly to show me three tins she had found – mandarin segments in sugar water. She joined the others in digging out the contents of these rusted tins with fingers and pen knives and feeding their faces right there on the spot. Even Mrs Adams was eating like that. It was every man for himself, with no sharing.

Madame Lucille was in one of her fancy get-ups. She was watching me watching the others. She gulped down sardines in tomato sauce, and blobs of bloody, fishy stuff were stuck in her thick beard.

‘You think we're all disgusting,' the dressmaker said.

‘W-what?'

‘Grabbing and being selfish and greedy and gobbling all this stuff down at once,' she said. ‘That's what you think we're like, don't you? You think we should be fairer and nicer and share everything out properly.'

‘Well,' I said. ‘I suppose I…'

But Madame Lucille interrupted, ‘You're just a little girl. What do you know about real life or real people? You think everyone should listen to you because they all respected your Da and you knew what his plans were. But your plans don't sound so great to me. You don't really have the right to tell us how to carry on. No one's gonna listen to you forever.'

She stopped then and all that could be heard was the noise of my family and the others chewing and swallowing.

‘Listen, Lora,' said the dressmaker. ‘Can you hear it? That's the sound that human beings make. Greedy, rapacious human beings. Consuming stuff. That's what they do. That's human nature. And there's no use pretending – little girl – that it can be any nicer or nobler than that.'
Madame Lucille leered at me and crammed the last fistful of ancient sardines into her mouth.

People were dropping cans on the ground when they emptied them. Plaggy wrappers and packets, too. Who would care about litter, here in this dead town?

Dead Town. That's what I started calling the place, right that minute.

I turned away from the bearded dressmaker and went to my family. I wanted to concentrate on them and push out of my thoughts what Madame Lucille had said. I was seriously wishing that the other townsfolk hadn't come along with us. I hated seeing the Adamses carrying looted boxes back and forth, working so expertly on renewing their supplies.

I found Ma feeding Hannah pink pressed meat. Hannah's eyes were gleaming. ‘It's good,' she grinned at me. ‘Have some!'

Truth was, I wasn't even sure that I liked any of the people who'd tagged along with us. Maybe excepting Vernon Adams, who could be quite decent. But hadn't he always made it his business to profit from supplies found in tombs?

After Hannah ate her fill of the fake-looking meat she dozed off and I picked her up. It was time to find some shelter out of the sun. Toaster helped with Ma (who was starting to flip out, clutching her new toiletries case, staring wildly about) and we went to find somewhere to rest.

‘They've all Disappeared, haven't they?' I asked Toaster. ‘The people here didn't wander off or leave to find somewhere new. They were all taken away and Disappeared.'

The sunbed nodded curtly, as if he had been thinking that exact same thing.

‘I don't like it here,' Ma grumbled.

The problem was that she had run out of the tablets that she took every day. As soon as we found somewhere indoors to sit, I checked her purse and found the bottle was empty. I couldn't make sense of the label. All I knew was that they came from Adams' Emporium. They were purple and she got them in jars of one hundred at a time. She had been getting them for as long as I had been alive. Foolishly, I'd always imagined they were some kind of lady's thing for keeping your breath nice and sweet.

‘They're for my nerves,' Ma confided, looking panicky. ‘They keep my nerves in check. They are nerve medicine.'

We were sitting just inside an opened doorway. A dark hallway led into the main body of someone's home. We perched there, Ma staring fixedly at the storefront across the street. McAndrews. It looked very like the Adams' place.

‘I thought I could do without them, Lora,' she said, thickly, as if she was dying of thirst.

Across the street our friends were ransacking the McAndrew's Emporium. The doors hung open and there was a flurry of activity within. I left Hannah sitting with Ma and went to see.

Shelves and drawers had been emptied. Boxes, packets and jars had been opened and there were spillages all over the wooden floors. Mrs Adams was behind the till, just as she would be in her own shop, glaring at ledgers with an expert eye.

It seemed that not all of this damage was caused by our party. There had been other refugees who'd been through this way. Some of the damage was old. There were dried, sticky stains on the counters and a nasty smell from rotted supplies.

Al was filling his pockets with confectionary. ‘How long do you suppose it is, since the original people cleared out?' Gobstoppers and lollipops were dropping out of his clothes.

I shrugged at him. It was impossible to know how long Dead Town had been as dead as this. There were no calendars up. Mrs Adams was hogging the ledgers and papers, so maybe she'd uncover some details. The wooden clock was smashed and frozen at just after midday.

I went into the store cupboards and found the pharmacy supplies. There were little drawers and ranks of colourful jars. Mercifully, they were mostly untouched.

‘The purple ones,' Al said, peering over my shoulder. I sighed and pointed out at least four types that looked similar to Ma's favourites. ‘What do you think all these are for?' he asked, whispering. ‘I didn't know folk could have so much wrong with them…'

‘Ailments and diseases,' I said. Both my brother and I had always been really healthy. No childhood illnesses to speak of. Much the same for Hannah. We were advertisements for prairie living. Ruby and Grandma had both lived to ripe old ages, too. (I reckon they must both have been over sixty, at least!) In many ways life on Mars was really good for human beings.

In other ways, not so much.