Meteorite Strike (2 page)

Pulling one of the headphones out of Robert's ear, she said, “I'm going for a walk. Don't get into trouble or Nicole will be very angry.”

He stuck the headphone back and ignored her. Across the aisle, Daniel's head lolled against the side of his chair and he gave a low snore. Sarah shook her head at both of them and pushed herself up. Her legs felt stiff and she couldn't remember a time when she'd sat still for so long.

The lights of the cabin had been dimmed, creating a night-time effect to help the passengers sleep. Walking towards the middle of the plane Sarah had to be careful not to trip on people's feet sticking into the aisle. Most were sprawled in their chairs, some wearing eye masks and earplugs like Daniel, many of them snoring. At the other end of the cabin a baby was crying softly.

She stopped by the emergency exit and looked out of the window, hoping to see something out in the darkness. There was nothing.
Very exciting.

It reminded her of sitting on the edge of Mum's bed in the hospital and being made to look at the Australia guidebook one of the nurses had brought in for them. Mum trying to tell her what an adventure it would be. Listing all the strange animals they only have in Australia. How in the outback you can go for hundreds of kilometres without passing through a town.

“It sounds boring,” Sarah had said, looking away. “I'm not going.”

“Sarah, please,” Mum replied, putting a hand on her arm. “For Robert…”

He'd been sitting in the corner, plugged into a game on the Nintendo. If he could hear their conversation, he didn't show it.

“Everything I like is here. All my friends. School. Why is this happening?” Then she'd thrown her arms around Mum to hide the tears welling in her eyes.

“You've got to be strong for your brother,” Mum whispered back. “I'm not going to be here much longer. Daniel…your dad is going to look after you. He wants to do the right thing this time…”

“And you believe that? He didn't want to eight years ago – not when his job was more important than us. Not when he wanted to follow it around the world and leave us behind.”

“I've spoken to him and he's changed,” Mum replied, taking her hand. “He's more…settled now. He's got a steady job and bought a house in Melbourne – somewhere you can all call home. I want you all to have a new start in Australia and so does Daniel, but he's going to need a lot of help.”

“What about Monica?” Sarah protested. “Why can't we live with her?” Monica was Mum's boss and best friend. She had a big house in the city and a dog and Sarah got on well with her kids – well, most of the time…

“Monica has her own family to take care of,” Mum said firmly. “We've been through this before. Daniel's your real dad and—”

“Beggars can't be choosers, right?” Sarah interrupted bitterly.

Mum sighed. “He wants another chance. Can you give him that, Sarah? For me?”

Sarah looked away, refusing to answer her mother for a long time.

“I'll help with Robert,” she said finally, when it became clear Mum was prepared to wait all afternoon for an answer. “But I won't call him dad – ever. He'll just be a guy we're staying with until we're old enough to look after ourselves. That's the best I can do, okay?”

“Okay.”

For a moment in the plane Sarah actually thought she might start crying again and quickly rubbed her eyes, worried that Nicole might come along and see her upset. The last thing she needed was more sympathy from a stranger. Nicole; the nurses at the hospital; Daniel; why couldn't they just mind their own business?

To clear her head, Sarah went through some of her warm-up exercises from the karate classes she'd been taking for the last two years. In the cramped space she even tried a few attacking stances to stretch her legs. She would have attempted a couple of kicks but she was worried about hitting one of the chairs.

After five minutes she felt pleasantly out of breath and much more energized. Sarah leaned against the wall next to the stewards' station, a little cubicle where they all sat with the curtain drawn. The sound of a conversation reached her ears and before she knew it, she was listening in. The tones were hushed and unmistakeably anxious.

“…we going to have to turn back?” a male voice asked.

“Pete says that we should be okay,” replied a woman Sarah recognized as Nicole. “But there's a cloud of dust the size of a city being blown to the south.”

“What the hell will happen if we fly into it…?”

“They think it's going to bypass Melbourne. We can go around…”

“What about the airport? Sounds like it's going to be chaos…”

“And the news? Passengers will be seeing it on the in-flight TV when they wake up…”

Interested, Sarah moved a little closer, accidentally knocking the thin wall with her foot as she did so. The voices stopped. She stepped back as the curtain was drawn open.

“Anything wrong?” asked Nicole, calm as ever.

“I…I want a drink. Please.”

Nicole looked back at the group huddled in the cubicle. Even in the dim light Sarah could see that the male attendant was white as a sheet.

“I'll bring it to you in a minute, Sarah. Go back to your seat, please.”

“Is there something…”

“Go back to your seat.”

Sarah turned and walked slowly back down the aisle, aware of Nicole watching as she went.

She found Robert asleep with the DVD still playing. As gently as possible, she pulled the headphones from his ears and turned off the machine to save the battery. Then she started flicking through the in-flight TV to find a news channel. It didn't take long before she'd found what had worried Nicole and the others so much.

An American station was showing satellite footage of what looked like a cloud passing through the centre of Australia. Based on her knowledge of the size of the place, Sarah could see that it must be huge. A headline running across the bottom of the screen read:

BREAKING NEWS: METEORITE HITS CENTRAL
AUSTRALIA. EMERGENCY SERVICES ON
HIGH ALERT. HUNDRED-KILOMETRE-WIDE
DUST CLOUD SPREADING.

Sarah's mouth went dry. They were flying straight towards it.

2

“I want some answers and I want them now!” a man's voice demanded, loud enough to make heads turn along the cabin.

The passengers had started waking up in the half hour since Sarah returned to her seat. Things got interesting once they started checking out the news reports on the in-flight TV. Word of the disaster spread like a virus. People shuffled in their seats, had whispered conversations and rang buzzers for the flight attendants up and down the aisles. Sarah was almost glad of something to relieve the boredom of the long night. Robert woke up and for once didn't start straight back into one of his films.

“What's going on, Sarah?” he asked, tugging on her arm as she craned her head past the seat to see what was going on. A few rows back, a man stood in front of the white-faced male attendant, screaming abuse while his wife tried to calm him down.

“Sarah!”

She half-turned back to Robert.

“It's okay, nothing's happening,” she said. “Watch another DVD or play a game.”

Her brother narrowed his eyes, just like he always did when he wasn't going to take “no” for an answer. At ten, Robert was almost four years younger than Sarah, but she realized he wasn't stupid.

“Okay, okay,” she said, flipping the TV to the news station. “There's been a meteor crash. It hit somewhere in the middle of Australia. You know what a meteor is?”

“Of course I do,” Robert said, rolling his eyes. “A lump of rock flying through space. And if it's crashed to earth it's called a meteorite, actually. Miss Dobson says…”

Sarah could tell Robert was about to go into one of his speeches about what his teacher said on a subject, which he did from time to time. She always teased him about being in love with Miss Dobson, which drove him nuts.

“Fine, you know more about it than I do,” she said, putting on the cheap, chunky headphones the attendants had provided rather than listen to her brother go on.

On the news, the presenters were doing much the same things they had been doing fifteen minutes before: watching the satellite footage, making guesses about the size of the cloud and repeating numbers for people to call. She got the feeling they really didn't have that much new information to give.

Robert tugged on her arm again and she pulled off the headset with a look of annoyance.

“I don't like it, Sarah,” he said, a note of fear in his voice.

Behind them the voices had gone up a notch in volume. The angry man was still shouting and some other passengers had joined in. Nicole was trying to calm everyone down. It didn't seem to be working.

Across the aisle, Sarah saw Daniel also turn in his seat. He'd finally taken off his mask and removed the ear plugs. He rolled his eyes at her and shook his head.

“Some people, eh?”

The Aussie lilt to his accent still sounded alien to her. How could they have a dad who spoke like that? And he dressed dorky too, in a jacket and shirt that made him look like an elderly professor, although Sarah knew he wasn't that old.

“Make them stop shouting, Sarah,” Robert whined, grabbing at her arm. She was about to turn and tell him to shut up when Daniel leaned across the aisle and offered something to him.

“Do you like kangaroos?”

Robert looked at him, a little taken aback. He'd kept his distance from Daniel since their first meeting in the hospital, instinctively mistrusting anyone who was an adult and not Mum.

“Sure, I guess,” he said after a moment. “I've never seen one for real.” He took the object from Daniel's hand.

“Those are my photos,” Daniel said. “I've seen loads. Was going to give them to you when we reached Melbourne, but perhaps you'd like to see them now.”

Robert started leafing through the little album and Sarah looked too, despite herself. The photos showed shot after shot of kangaroos in the wild, probably taken out in the bush somewhere.

“Cool,” whispered Robert. “Could you feed them?”

“No, those were wild animals,” Daniel explained. “But if you keep flipping there are some pics that were taken when I visited one of the wildlife parks. You can buy a bag of food and they eat from your hand.”

“Wow. Look at the size of that spider!”

“Yeah, that was a huntsman I snapped when I was camping. It was as big as my hand, but it's the little ones you have to watch out for really. Some of them can kill a man with their venom. Hold on to the album for a while.”

With that, Daniel sat back in his seat with a wink to Sarah. Engrossed in the pictures, Robert had completely forgotten the noise of the arguing passengers. Sarah had to admit it had done the trick and she felt she owed Daniel something, against her better judgement.

“Thanks,” Sarah said quickly as she looked back up the aisle.

Daniel smiled at her. “No worries. I'm sure it's going to be okay. You don't have to be afraid.”

“Who said I was afraid?” she replied defensively, suddenly regretting trying to be nice to him after all. Clearly he still thought she was six years old.

She was about to say something more when, without warning, the dimmed cabin lights flicked on at full power. A calm voice of authority from the cabin speaker cut through the noise.

“This is your captain speaking… Please could all passengers return to their seats and fasten their seat belts. Stand by for another announcement.”

Silence fell in the cabin. People who were out of their seats quickly returned to their places and sat quietly, as if they'd been told off by a teacher. Up and down the plane, seat belts clicked as they were fastened. The attendants walked back towards the middle of the plane, in control again. Nicole looked a little red-faced following the disagreement, Sarah noted.

A minute later the speaker delivered another message.

“This is Captain Klein… As you're probably all aware, there's been an incident below us. At present I can't give you too much information about the meteorite. If you've been watching the news, you probably know as much as I do. All I can tell you is that you're in the safest place right now. We're either going to fly round or over the dust cloud, but even if we do have to go through for a while, our GPS system will keep us right on track.”

Someone down the front of the plane let out a cheer and a ripple of applause spread down the aisles. Sarah stole a look at Daniel. Although he was listening intently to the message, she noticed he wasn't clapping.

“We're expecting to land in Melbourne in just over two and a half hours. Until then, I'd like all passengers to refrain from using mobile phones and keep seat belts on. There's been some magnetic disturbance due to the impact and we don't want to take any chances. The cabin crew are now going to run through emergency procedures once more. So sit back, stay calm and we'll be in Melbourne before you know it.”

There was more applause, a little quieter this time. The flight attendants started demonstrating where the emergency exits were, like they had done at the start of the flight. Everyone seemed to be paying attention this time.

Sarah looked over at Daniel, who was frowning.

“Is there something wrong?” she asked after a moment.

He looked round at her, as if surprised that she had spoken to him.

“Oh… It's nothing…”

Sarah sighed and leaned a little closer so that Robert couldn't hear.

“Stop treating me like a kid, okay?” she said quietly. “You weren't clapping like everyone else. Why?”

He looked at her for a moment, as if considering carefully what he said next.

“If anything happens, you and Robert stick close to me.”