Meteorite Strike
Authors: A. G. Taylor
METEORITE
STRIKE
Behind them the night lit up a brilliant yellow. A split second later the sound of an explosion assaulted their ears. Through the swirling storm Sarah could see flames rising hundreds of feet into the air.
The plane had blown up.
Burning pieces of metal and debris fell through the air and landed all around. Suddenly, with the fire blazing high into the night, their present shelter didn't seem so safe. Daniel grabbed their arms and led them on into the darkness once more.
About the Author
A.G. Taylor was born in New Zealand and grew up in East Anglia. He studied English Literature at Sheffield University and teaching at Cambridge. For the last ten years he has worked as a teacher in England, South Korea, Poland and Australia. He currently lives in Melbourne with his partner, her whippet, his Italian greyhound and numerous computer games consoles.
METEORITE
STRIKE
A.G.TAYLOR
First published in the UK in 2010 by Usborne Publishing Ltd., Usborne House,
83-85 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8RT, England.
www.usborne.com
epub edition © 2010
Copyright © A.G. Taylor, 2010
The right of A.G. Taylor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Cover illustration by Adam Willis.
The name Usborne and the devices
are Trade Marks of Usborne Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or used in any way except as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or loaned or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781409531821
Batch no. 00543-2
Contents
Nicole the air hostess was perfectly lovely: tall, thin and blonde with a calm voice that suggested she'd never raised it in her life. Sarah hated her from the moment they met.
“Hey, is that
Iron Man
? Cool movie.”
“I've seen it twenty times,” Robert replied, holding up the portable DVD player they'd been given for the flight. He seemed unaware of just how annoying Nicole was.
“Great,” Nicole went on, flashing her blue eyes and leaning over Sarah to paw at the machine. “They've got
Wolverine
on the in-flight movies. You should check it out.”
“We saw it in the cinema.”
“I thought it was way better than the last
X-Men
film⦔
Finally snapping, Sarah pushed Robert back a little too roughly, almost causing him to drop the player. He let out a cry of annoyance and the attendant looked at her in surprise.
“I know what you're doing,” Sarah said flatly, meeting her eyes.
“I'm sorry?”
Sarah sighed loudly. “It's in your job description to make sure that the kids on your flight are having a
swell time
. Well, we're fine. So you don't have to pretend to be interested in what we're doing or what we have on our iPods.”
“I just wanted to make sureâ”
“If we want you, we'll press the button,” Sarah interrupted, pointing to the panel in the handrest. “You don't have to keep bothering us.”
Annoyance flashed in the woman's eyes. Then she put that fake smile back on her face for Robert's benefit.
“You want anything, just call, okay?” she said to him, talking past Sarah.
“Sure thing, Nicole.”
“Sure thing, Nicole
,” Sarah mimicked under her breath as the woman walked away up the aisle of the plane. No doubt she was going back to the flight attendants' cubicle to tell them about the horrible girl in seat 28B.
Well, what do I care what she thinks?
Sarah thought angrily.
“Why were you so mean to her?” Robert asked, looking round with disapproval in his eyes.
“I hate adults like that. Ones who pretend to like all the same things you do. Wolverine
is cool. Justin is cool.
Yeah, right.”
“I thought she was nice,” Robert said, looking down at the player again. A lock of blond hair fell across his face and he brushed it out of his eyes with the back of his hand, just like Mum used to do with hers.
Sarah put her face close to his so she could make her point.
“She's paid to be nice, idiot.”
Robert said nothing. He just put the headphones in his ears and started the movie again without even looking at her. Conversation over. He'd been doing that a lot recently. Sticking his face in the DVD player, the Nintendo or one of the other expensive toys he'd been bought whenever things got too difficult. Like things with Mum. Sarah knew from experience that he wouldn't even try to talk for another hour. Fine. She didn't want to hear how great Nicole was again, anyway.
“What are you two bickering about?”
Bickering?
Eyebrows raised, Sarah looked across the aisle at the person who'd spoken.
“Bickering, Daniel?” she asked. “Just who says
bickering
any more?”
Daniel made a face and stroked a hand through his closely trimmed hair, just like he always did when he was annoyed and trying to hide it. In the month since he'd walked back into their lives, she'd picked up on that particular habit fast.
“I don't know, Sarah,” he replied, mimicking her sarcastic tone. “I guess I must have heard it on an old,
old
TV show.”
“Was it called
Ten Phrases for Wannabe Dads,
Daniel?” Sarah smirked, pleased with her own cleverness.
His jaw tightened visibly. “No, Sarah. I seem to remember it was called
Annoying Littleâ”
Daniel stopped in mid-sentence, clearly with some effort. He placed a sleep mask over his eyes again and pushed his chair into the recline position.
“Wake me up when you're ready to be friendly,” he said as he put in a set of earplugs.
Sarah opened her mouth to say something, but realized that it was useless. Both her travelling companions were dead to the world, cocooned in their little bubbles. Worst of all, she was stuck with them: an annoying kid brother and an equally annoying adult. If Mum were there on the plane it would have been okay, they could've talked, but she wasn'tâ¦Daniel was.
Daniel, their biological father (or
accidental dad
, as Sarah preferred to think of him), had walked out of their lives eight years before. After that, the most Sarah and Robert received from him every year were birthday and Christmas cards (usually bearing stamps from different parts of the world and containing American dollars that Mum would change at the bank).
Her memories of Daniel as a father were hazy, and for Robert, who was barely two years old when he left them, non-existent. There had been happy times, of course â Sarah remembered trips to the beach or the cinema as a family, before Robert had arrived. But those images were indistinct compared to the last one of Daniel and Mum arguing in the hall. There was a suitcase on the floor. Mum picked it up and threw it at himâ¦
“If that's what you want, just get out, Daniel!”
Sarah often wondered what had really happened, but Mum had always refused to say â just that their dad had to leave because his work was on the other side of the world. But they'd been happy, hadn't they? She'd blamed Mum for a long time after Daniel left. Then she became angry at him. Then she didn't feel anything at all.
It was only when Mum became sick that Daniel returned â appearing off a long-haul flight from Australia four weeks before. Since then he'd been hanging around on the sidelines, having hushed conversations with Mum and the doctors when they all thought she wasn't listening. Sarah knew what the discussions were about, of course: what to do with them after Mum died.
Now, they were left with himâ¦
Trying to tear her mind away from those thoughts, Sarah turned her attention to her television screen. Using the handset, she flipped to the flight progress channel. A misshapen white blob representing their plane was crossing a map of the world from England on the way to Australia. They'd already stopped in Hong Kong on the first part of the journey, which had taken almost thirteen hours. The map zoomed in and Sarah could see that they were now passing over the north-western part of Australia.
Almost two hours before, she and Robert had become excited when the map had finally shown the plane over Australia. But looking out the window they'd only seen a lot of blackness. It was three in the morning local time, after all. For ages after that, there seemed to be no progress on the map whatsoever. Sarah was beginning to get the idea of just how big the country was when she looked at the remaining flight time. Their destination was Melbourne, in the south-east of the country, and there were still a few hours to go until they touched down there.
After a while Sarah gave up trying to see if the plane on the screen had moved. She was bored and there was nothing on the in-flight programme that she wanted to see. And fat chance of getting the DVD player away from Robert while he was watching
Iron Man
and in a sulk. She couldn't sleep either. Although her eyelids felt heavy, the constant hum of the engines kept her awake. This second part of the trip was starting to seem even longer than the first, she thought with a sigh.
Finally she decided to stretch her legs to relieve the boredom.