Chapter 21 - Feel Ginger’s pain

I come running into the Flight Lieutenant’s office. Now there is a throbbing. It’s there, though I guess I don’t notice it. But slowly it comes, a force that just won’t be reckoned with, growing. And then I do feel it. Nausea, seasickness as I begin to feel disorientated. I feel unstable, so I go to sit down, but my legs are beginning to wobble as I move to the nearest seat. They feel empty; lacking the energy needed to get me anywhere. As I stumble, I manage to fall into the seat. The world ever so slightly spinning around me, but I’m at that stage where I can neutralise it by staring at a fixed point. I stare at a wall, as fixed as you can get, and as I get it to stop spinning by keeping it within the same space, slowly it begins to stop. It’s still, it’s moving. Not around, towards me, coming forward before retreating. Backwards and forwards with a slow pulse, it gets closer each time, and the momentum is building again. Backwards and forwards, backwards and coming towards more and more. More and more. It’s picking up speed, and it keeps coming closer before moving away until it’s about to hit me. It really will hit me. As I put up my hands defensively, I wrench my eyes away from the wall, where they seem rooted and focus on a window. At first it’s relief but now the window’s doing it with the same intensity, it’s actually hitting me at this point, I can feel, the slam, the slam, the Slam, The SLAM, as it hits me, it hurts, a lot. I can’t even see it now; I’ve got my eyes closed. But it’s hitting me, and now it’s got a sting to it, a hard sting, like a concrete slap. It’s hitting my face. 

I can’t open my eyes due to fear, but I feel that if I can, I can understand what’s happening to me. All I can see is a colour, I can’t even work out what colour it is. It’s grey, or has become grey, and as my focus adjusts, I can just manage to get glimpses, just ever so short glimpses of the concrete that is hitting my face. At some point, I have fallen over so that the window has become the cold hard floor outside of the building. The Smack SMACK is still hurting me, and I start screaming out for it to stop. STOPPP!

I manage to screw myself up into a ball. And in doing so, I turn onto my back to take the pain away from my face. Just the back of my head now, which has a hard, dull thud, more unbearable than the hard stinging slaps to my face. I can see sky now. The blue, blue sky. And I can see clouds. I wish I could say that they were puffy and white, but they are as hard and as black as the cold concrete beneath me. But the clouds do not come as much as I dread them coming. This is not calm, just a fateful dread. 

I begin to take in the trees, which have exactly the same swishing backwards and forwards momentum of everything else. I cannot but admire its gracefulness. No momentum is lost, just a swiftness, a graceful air as it sways, swings even, backwards and forwards. The branches hurt, ripping at me, leaves smacking me as would hands, branches hitting with the force of an iron bar, trunks with the force of a train. The clouds and the sky however are still, calm. I can feel something within me, a shaking, but I am not physically shaking. This is the shake of a thousand neurones fired into action, the adrenaline pumping round my body, the emotions finally stirring after a lifetime, as I am frightened. Screaming stop and it never will. 

I am immobilised, not panic stricken but shocked out of sense. I can still feel the smack of the concrete, as the trees move, the concrete comes, as the concrete moves away, the trees come. I am a ball in a tennis court, that’s all that I am. 

I am pulled up. Pain that I thought I could feel comes in the form of a slap, a real slap. The slap of a human who is shouting at me and with the slap comes the noises I thought I could hear, but I now know not to exist. What does exist are the words of the man shouting calm down. The slaps still come but from the man, the other world disappearing with each actual bit of pain. Now I am frightened, not of this man, but what has happened, I cry. I cry and fall to the floor; the man is calmer now. Can I help? He gets me a cup of tea. It’s a cliché, but a cliché I am more than willing to accept, to hold on to. To drink the tea acts as a placebo, calming me down. A placebo because, right now, I can believe that the tea really will calm me down. Of course the caffeine and sugar helps, but not so much as psychologically. 

I get up, now that I am calm. I pass people, a girl is crying, no it’s a he, but he gets me crying as well. A girl is laughing, she makes me laugh. Someone is silent, I’m silent. Someone looks shocked, I feel shocked, and so on. I have to walk away from where I was as quickly as possible. I can put the past behind me, but I know that it will always come back in some form, to be relived somehow. And it does. Everyone is talking about it. When I watch the pictures, it seems that they are all news items talking about it. Newspapers, books all have it in depth. The world is not ready to let go yet, or rather that I am not, no matter how deeply shocking it is. I long for Dee Dee’s hand, but as I think about Dee Dee, she becomes you, Holly.

These are not thoughts. They are feelings, instincts, the beginnings of thoughts as my mind tries to grasp some sense before the next thing comes along. I make my way slowly back towards the Flight Lieutenant’s office. I’m being careful not to trip on any bits of mortar lying around me. I don’t like the way that they are looking at me. They look menacing, dangerous. Some are levitating, I don’t know how. Must have something to do with similarly charged magnetic forces, caused by the explosion, that is making the bits of mortar repel from the surfaces that once spawned them and making them float. 

One hits me in the head. It knocks me to the floor. There is blood oozing from my head now. It’s beginning to clot. And from the clots grow shapes that get up and move around. One of the blood clots picks me up. It takes me above the stars and shows me the world. It looks terrible, covered in a dark grey fog. All land and sea completely obscured. I could not tell that this was Earth if I did not know it was Earth. And then the blood clot drops me and I fall. Though out here in space it does not feel that I’m falling, more that the world is coming towards me, that I’m calling it like a faithful little dog. Eventually I hit the cloud cover. It is hard. However, not rock solid enough for it to shatter my bones instantaneously, but instead it compresses, before expanding, ejecting me thousands of miles back out into space. I vomit. I continue to vomit until I puke out the tea. When I finally do, I swallow it down again. The caffeine brings me back to life. I pick myself up off the floor of the Flight Lieutenant’s office, away from the pool of blood. I put my hand to my wound to stem the bleeding.

“Sir, Sir! You’ve got to tell everyone Sir!” I speak.

The Flight Lieutenant is puzzled. It never takes much. “Tell them what, old bean?”

“You’ve got to warn everybody about the alien fleet, Sir.” Self-doubt settles in, nice and snugly. It shuffles around in the bed for a few minutes, admittedly, but as soon as it’s found that position which is comfortable enough, I know it’s not going to be budged.

“What alien fleet. Stop babbling, boy.”

“Yes Sir, sorry Sir.” I pause. You don’t know what it’s like to be in outer-space. It takes your breath away. I catch it. “Sorry about that Sir. When I was out in the craft just then, Sir, I heard this beeping sound, Sir. Then, when I was just pushing random buttons, trying to find out how to fire, I heard them speaking. It must have been a radio, or something.”

The Flight Lieutenant is amazed.

“A radio in a plane. What a jolly clever idea! But why? I don’t understand. Who would you need to talk to?”

“Yes, well, I didn’t manage to listen to all of it, I was trying not to crash the craft, but I heard them say that they were going to send out a large fleet of their ships to destroy us all. We must do something, Flight Lieutenant, and we must do it now.”

“Well, what do you suggest?”

“I suggest that you get on the wireless and tell everybody to get underground or as far away from any towns, cities and large groups of people as possible. And I want you to repeat that message in as many languages as you possibly can.”

“Straight away Sir!” says Flighty. He is getting things a bit confused. At least, I think he is. What is bothering the Lieutenant even more, though, is that he can only speak English, more or less. He won’t be able to follow my orders through and he won’t have the ingenuity to find someone who can. That’ll teach me right for trying to take control when I really shouldn’t. 

“In the meantime, I’m going to say hello some old pals of mine in outer-space.”

The Flight Lieutenant is close to cracking by now. The flying bits of mortar have been hitting his much more robust body and it is growing spider-web like cracks. I give it two, maybe three more hits before he shatters completely.

“What are they doing out there?”

I lean over the table. Blood from my head pools on the surface. I can see my own reflection. The room itself appears to be growing clouds of my own blood.

“Preparing to kill us all, Sir.”

“They can’t be that good friends of yours then, surely?”

“Cheerio,” I say, before dashing out of the room.

Chapter 22 - William seeks vengeance

We are no more than twenty minutes into space now. But I feel that it is time for the humans to pay. Skernajj is right, and what he said to me earlier has stuck in my head. It is the ray of sunshine that I need to hold on to now. My belief has been encapsulated in his little statement. ‘It is our world, we must fight for it’. Perfectly stated. 

I reach over for the microphone. I make sure that it is the Security Chief that I am talking too. 

“It is Yertjuk, your Presence, Sir.”

Baffled slightly by what he has just said, I take my turn to speak into the microphone. “Tell the…” even to this very moment, I cannot help but think of my people as a nation. Just a small, unified group of people, on one island amongst many, populated by others. No. I am not in charge of just one ship; I am in charge of many. One ship may be a nation, but what do you call a fleet of civilians? We are not a world, anymore. “Tell my people, that the time has come. The time to claim our world is now. Tell them,” and I look at Skernajj when I say this, “tell them Earth is our world, and we must fight for it.” There is no sign of appreciation on Skernajj’s face. It is as if he has not even heard what I have just said. 

“Yes, Sire,” is Yertjuk’s reply. “Sir…”

“I want a fleet organised and ready by the time we are back. I want it sent off to Earth when I arrive. Will this be possible?”

“Sir, you know that we have been prepared for this moment. But Sire…”

“Good, then there should be no delay.”

“Sire, it appears that you are being followed. It appears that one of the Smoovs we sent out earlier is returning. But, Sire, what has happened about the other two?”

I sit back to contemplate this for a moment. It has to be the human. But, why? What can he achieve? I lean back towards the microphone. Unfortunately, not so simple as it sounds. Though this is a two seater Smoov, the microphone is positioned in front of the driver. Now, I am not driving, it is Skernajj, which means that I have to lean into him every time I need to speak into it, blocking his view of the monitor in front of him. Not a very well designed Smoov, but luckily, in space there is nothing much to hit.

“I want a security team there waiting for him when he arrives.”

“But why, Sire? And where are the other two?”

“He is not one of us. The others are dead.”

“Sire, I don’t understand.”

“Just make sure that there is a security team ready for the second Smoov.”

“Sire, I personally will head that team.”

“Good, now get that fleet sorted. Now!”

I end the transmission. Skernajj slightly relieved that he is now able to fly properly. I turn to him. “How’s it going?”

“It’s been a good journey, so far. We are making good time.”

“You were right, you know.”

This time he turns to me. This time he acknowledges the power of his words. “Thanks.”

I relax into my seat. The Earth won’t be ours. It is ours. How quaint.