Serial Sunday: Running Out Of Time, Part II

Edited by David Flin.

Written by:

Heath Aberdeen

Falisha Adiguna

Eesha Haq

Teddy Harrison

Jaiden-David Hinds

Ame Lock

Eden Murray

Betsy Street

Chapter Three.

Mary and Brian set off with a determined air towards the library. They weren’t sure what they were looking for, but they knew they had to find it.

The first thing they did was look up when Halley’s Comet was next due.

“July 28, 2061,” Mary read.

“Oh, good. We’ve got some time, then. What books will we need?”

They eventually took a pile of books about astronomy, about Halley’s Comet, a story called The Hammer of God by Arthur C Clarke, and they also somehow included a book called Magic For Beginners. Neither of them remembered putting it there.

*****

The four children checked to see which gem fragment was the closest to them. It felt like it was one that was south of where they were.

Jason checked the information bar on his talkie watch to find out more.

“It’s at a place called Bright One,” he said. “It seems to be near some unbuilt land filled with water.”

“That’s a sea,” Mei said. “It’s supposed to be like that.”

“How will we get to Bright One?” Eliana wondered.

A man walking past overheard her. “Train from East Croydon. It’ll take you straight to Brighton.”

“Thanks. Umm. Where’s East Crow Down?” Jason asked.

The man looked strangely at him, and pointed at a sign on a building behind him. The sign read: East Croydon Railway Station.

The children went inside. The first thing they noticed was that there were barriers stopping them from going any further. People approached these metal gate-barriers, showed a plastic card to a reader disc on the gate. The gate opened for them, closing behind them when they had passed through.

“How do we get those cards?” Toby asked.

“It’s just a piece of card,” Jason said. “Let’s try.” He took a plastic card from his pocket and tried it on the reader.

It didn’t work.

They all tried several times, but none of their cards seemed to work. They saw that some people were showing one piece of plastic to someone behind a glass screen to one side, and get a piece of cardboard in return.

“This is silly,” Eliana said. She put her talkie-watch next to one of the reader pads. “What sort of a card do we need?” she asked.

The gate opened.

“Well, what do you know,” Jason said. “The watches have watched how to do it.”

They walked down the stairs to a platform and waited for a train that was going to Bright One to come. A tannoy voice announced that the next train to Bright One would be arriving at Platform One.

They looked up and saw that they were on platform two; platform one was on the other side of the tracks.

They jumped down and ran across the tracks and climbed up the other side to get onto the right platform. People shouted at them as they did so, saying that it was dangerous.

“But it’s no more dangerous than dodging the cars on the ground,” Toby said, puzzled. “There are more cars and they don’t run on tracks and come from all directions.”

“Oh,” he then said. “There’s a bridge up there that people are using. I thought that was for cars. It would have been much easier to use that.”

The train arrived and they worked out how to get open the doors and get on.

“Wouldn’t this train go better if it hung from a rail using magnets? That way it wouldn’t touch the rails, so there would be less friction, so it would go better,” Mei asked.

However, they spent most of the time sitting in silence, looking out of the window at the scenery passing by. They weren’t used to actual scenery – trees and fields and animals walking about and everything.

“So that’s what the Earth will look like when it’s finished,” Toby said.

“It’s very green,” said Eliana.

It wasn’t long before they reached Bright One. They got out of the train and looked around. There were a lot of people wandering around; there were a lot of those big buildings that Mary and Brian called shops, and there were a lot of cars buzzing along the ground. There were a lot of lights and noise.

“It’s this way,” Toby said, taking the lead and heading downhill towards the sea and the beach. The beach reminded them of home, although the earth of the Earth back home wasn’t yet fixed in place and it moved and shifted like the sea here.

“What is that long thing sticking out into the water?” Jason asked.

“That’s where we’ve got to go,” Toby replied. “It’s the pier.”

“The water is moving,” said Eliana. “Why isn’t that pier thing moving with it?”

“Because the pier is fixed to the ground beneath the water,” Mei answered.

The children carefully made their way onto the pier. There were crowds of people on the pier, looking at booths and stalls and machines.

“There,” said Toby, pointing at a machine. “That’s where the gem is.”

The machine was a glass box containing a lot of stuffed toys with a metal claw above them. Children turned knobs on the outside of the box to move the claw to try and get one of the toys.

They eventually reached the front of the queue to use the claw machine.

“Which toy should I get?” Toby asked.

Jason thought and concentrated. He could feel the gem, and it was moving away from them. “That one,” he said, pointing to a bear being carried by a child walking away from the arcade.

“Quick, follow that child,” said Eliana.

“Yes, we can see that that’s what we’ve got to do,” Jason replied.

The children hurried to follow the family.

“Hey, wait, you haven’t had your turn,” said the next person in the queue. As the children kept going away in pursuit of the family, he shrugged and took his turn operating the claw.

The child and his parents left the pier. The four of them had to hurry to follow. The child was excited about having won a bear and kept talking loudly about making a brother for the bear.

The child and his parents were obviously going somewhere, as they didn’t pause at any of the shops on the way.

“Where are they going?” Toby asked.

“We’ll know soon enough,” Jason replied. “Look, they’ve stopped and they’re going into that shop there.”

It was a small brick building and the windows were full of teddy bears. A sign hung over the door reading: Build-A-Bear.

They followed the child and his parents into the shop.

There were teddy bears everywhere, and there were several benches with tools on them. The tools were fixed to the benches with string. There were boxes of fabric and stuffing and buttons on each of the benches.

The child put the bear he’d won at the pier – the bear containing the gem – on the floor near where people hang their coats. He listened with the other children in the room as an oldish, bald man wearing a white lab coat explained how to make a teddy bear.

“We have to get that bear,” Toby whispered to the others.

“But how? We can’t just steal it?” Jason replied.

“Well, I’m going to make a bear,” Eliana said. She went to one of the tables and started to follow the instructions, frequently glancing at the bear they needed.

While she worked, the others talked through various plans to get the bear. None of the plans seemed to be any good.

Meanwhile, Eliana continued to make her bear. Toby noticed that the bear she was making looked very similar to the one that they wanted.

“I’ve got an idea,” he whispered.

“One of you can distract them and switch this bear with that bear,” Eliana said.

“Oh,” Toby said. “That’s what I was going to say.”

“It must be a good idea, then,” Mei said.

They tried to cause a distraction, but found it hard. All the children were concentrating on the bear they were making.

They tried using their talkie-watches to change their clothes, but no-one noticed. They tried making the bears talk, but the children making them had already put voice tapes in. They tried stealing the stuffing from the tables, but the assistants kept filling the stuffing boxes up.

While they did this, Sugarlemon got bored. She started to flap her wings and hopped onto one of the benches to play with the stuffing, hitting it from side to side with a paw.

“Mum,” said the child trying to work at this bench, “why has that cat got wings?”

“Don’t be silly, Aldrin. Cats don’t have wings.”

Sugarlemon looked at the woman, gave the stuffing one last pat, unfurled her wings and flew up to one of the shelves. As she flew, she turned her head and poked her tongue out at the woman.

“Wow!” said the child as pandemonium burst out in the shop. Everyone was pointing at Sugarlemon and shouting and getting very excited.

Of course, this scared Sugarlemon, who flew higher to get out of reach. This made the children and adults even more excited. This meant they made even more noise.

“We need a distraction,” Jason said.

The other three just looked at him. “I think there already is a bit of a distraction,” Toby said.

While everyone watched Sugarlemon fly around the shelves, Mei grabbed the bear Eliana had made, and swapped it with the one they wanted. The two bears looked similar, but they weren’t identical. Still, it was good enough and they hurried outside before anyone noticed.

As they were leaving, they heard Aldrin say: “I want a cat with wings. I’ll make one if I have to.”

“Do you think he will?” Toby asked Mei as they left. At least they had the first gem fragment.

Chapter Four.

Mary and Brian read through all the books they had got. They didn’t understand everything. To be precise, they didn’t really understand much. However, they had to sort things out, and knowing what asteroids were was the first step.

They also read the book about magic from cover to cover and back again. It was fascinating. Luckily, there were a lot of other books in the series.

The trouble was that these books were very expensive. They were also very hard to get.

They eventually found a place in London that sold these books, but they were horribly expensive.

“I think I need to learn about astrophysics,” said Mary, “and you can learn about astromagics, Brian.”

*****

“Where’s the next gem piece?” Toby asked.

Mei shrugged. “It’s hard to tell. It keeps moving. Never very far, but it just keeps on doing it. It’s got a thing about royalty. It was in Bell Mural. It’s moved from there, and it’s now in Hemp Town Caught.

“What are we waiting for?” Jason said. “Let’s go. How do we get there?”

“It can’t be difficult. Schools have trips there all the time,” Toby said.

“Why?” Eliana asked.

“What do you mean, ‘why’?”

“Why do schools have trips to Hemp Town Caught? It’s a royal palace. Are they expecting the children to learn how to be royal? Do they think some of the children may be royal? Are they going to get the children to kiss the frogs there to see if any of them turn into princes? The frogs turning into princes, not the children,” said Eliana.

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. A lot of their historical documents, the ones written by Fairy Tails, said that if you kiss a frog, it turns into a prince.”

“What happens if they kiss a prince?” Jason asked.

Eliana shrugged. “I guess they’ll turn into a frog. It must get really confusing.”

Meanwhile, Mei asked her talkie watch how to get there. “East Crow Down station again,” she said. “Then we need new clothes at Clap Him Junction because we have to change there.”

“And we don’t run across the tracks at Clap Him Junction because that’s as dangerous as crossing the road,” said Toby.

Travelling by train was something that they were now familiar with. It wasn’t long before they got there.

A school group was entering, so they tagged on to the end of the queue.

“What’s that?” one of the schoolchildren asked, pointing at the falcat.

Mei stroked the winged cat. “Sugarlemon,” she said. “My pet.”

Once they had got through the ticket barrier, the four children hurried to the maze. That was where the gem piece was.

As they hurried off, a group of the schoolchildren gossiped about them.

“What do you think it was?” one asked the others.

“What, the cat with wings?”

Another child shrugged.”Mum’s going to get me a winged cat for Christmas.”

“No, she isn’t. Winged cats don’t exist. Everyone knows that.”

“So what was it that we just saw?”

“A really good model.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Well, whatever it was, I want one.”

*****

Toby led the way towards the maze. He was keen to catch the gem quickly. If they spent too long, it might move out of the grounds.

“The maze can’t be that big,” Eliana said.

They came to the entrance, and looked puzzled.

“It’s made of bushes,” Jason eventually said. “Don’t bushes grow?”

“Are they Birnam bushes?” Eliana asked. “I read about Birnam. Their trees move around. That would make a maze really hard, if the walls moved.”

(In Shakespeare's Macbeth, a prophecy that states Macbeth will never be beaten until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Later in the play, his enemies camp in the wood, cut down many of the trees, and use the boughs to disguise their march to Dunsinane...)

“There’s only one way to find out,” Toby said, striding in. “The gem is that way,” he said, pointing at a hedge wall.

“We can’t go that way,” Jason replied. “We can only go left or right.”

They argued for a bit, and Eliana wondered if they might meet a minotaur. “That would be cool.”

They walked around for five minutes and got no closer to the gem.

“It’s moving. It’s doing it deliberately,” Jason said.

“Where are we?” Eliana asked.

“I don’t know,” Mei said.

“Are you saying we’re lost?” Jason asked.

“No, I’m not saying that. I’m very carefully not saying that, even though it’s true.”

“You don’t know that we’re lost.”

Mei pointed at a half-eaten apple lying on the ground. “This is the third time we’ve passed it. If we’re not lost, we’re certainly not getting anywhere.”

“I have got a map,” said a man. He was tall and rotund and had a very red face and he kept mopping his brow with a bright blue handkerchief. “It’s a very simple maze,” he said. “Follow me and I’ll show you the way out,” he said, striding off confidently. Several people who admitted to being lost followed him.

“I’ll wait here for you,” said Eliana, who sat down to rest her feet.

Ten minutes later, the man returned to the spot, coming from the other direction with a small crowd of people following him. “I was just checking,” he said, before leading the way off again.

Ten minutes later, he was back again, and people were starting to get annoyed with him. “I have a map,” he said, waving it.

Another man said a very bad word about the map.

“It was a simple confusion,” the man said, before heading off again.

Ten minutes later, he was back again. Mei sat down with Eliana to wait for them to come back again.

Ten minutes later, the man and those following him were back again. “I’ve worked out what the problem is,” he said.

“The problem is,” Jason said, “the problem is that you don’t know where you are on the map.”

“Let the boy try,” said a stout woman. “He can’t do any worse than you.”

“Should we tell them?” Eliana asked Mei.

“They’re having fun. We’ll wait for them to get bored.”

Ten minutes later, Toby stumbled into the centre of the maze. “There. Now we know where we are,” he said, trying to sound confident and trying to pretend that this was what he intended.

Ten minutes later, he was back with Mei, Eliana, and Jason.

“We’ve got the gem,” Eliana said. “Rather than going to it, we decided to wait until it came to us.”

“That was all part of the plan,” Toby said.

Mei thought for a bit. “OK,” she said. “How do we get out of this maze?”

Chapter Five.

It hadn’t been easy to find out where the next gem was. It seemed to be up in Scotland, and getting there was not going to be easy. No trains stopped nearby, and there weren’t many buses.

“Maybe we could use one of those cars,” Toby suggested.

“What, the cars that go on the ground? They’re dangerous,” Mei replied.

“They can’t be that dangerous. We haven’t seem many actual accidents, and that’s when they’re being driven by these ancient humans. How hard can it be?” Toby sounded quite convincing. He sounded so convincing that the others agreed.

They looked at a car.

“One person drives these?” Jason said.

“That’s right,” replied Mei, looking at the car they had borrowed.

“There are three pedals on the floor, and each has to worked by a foot. You need two hands for the steering wheel, one hand to change gear, one hand to work the indicator, one hand to operate the windscreen wiper, and one hand to press buttons on the dashboard. The driver needs three feet and six hands,” Eliana said.

“That seems to be right,” Toby said.

“But they’ve only got two feet and two hands,” Jason pointed out.

“No problem. I’ll sit beneath the wheel and operate the pedals. You operate the steering wheel. Eliana can change the gear and work the indicators, and Toby can work the windscreen wipers, the dashboard, and direct things. How hard can it be?”

They tried. It turned out to be very hard. It involved a lot of shouting and no-one really knew what they were doing.

They asked Mary and Brian about it. “Can you drive?” Toby asked.

“Well, go-karts, yes. I guess cars aren’t much harder.”

“Can you drive us to Scotland?”

“I don’t see why not,” Mary said. “It’s the school holidays and Mum and Dad are working and won’t be back until this evening. What can possibly go wrong?”

“Did you have to say that?” Toby sighed. “Now something’s bound to go wrong.”

*****

Seven hours later, the six children looked at the car. It had just stopped for no reason.

“Why has it stopped?” Mei asked.

“I don’t know,” said Brian. “It was going fine, and then it just spluttered and stopped.”

“I know what happened. I was there,” said Mei.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”

“It’s not going. That’s wrong. Why isn’t it going?”

“What did I say? Something was bound to go wrong as soon as you said nothing could go wrong,” Toby said.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Jason. “The gem is in that forest. Brian and Mary can fix the car while we get the gem.”

They walked into the forest. It wasn’t long before the branches and leaves covered the sky, making everything in the forest dark and gloomy.

The wind blew through the branches, making eerie noises; noises that jangled the nerves and set their teeth on edge. Except for Eliana, who wasn’t troubled by it.

“It’s like another maze,” Mei said. “How do we find the gem?”

“I think the trees might walk around,” Eliana said. “We must be close to Birnham, and its trees are famous for walking.”

“Trees can’t walk, Eliana,” Mei said.

“Birnam trees walk. They also dance because they go to Dancing Name. It stands to reason that if they have a dancing name, it’s because they dance.”

The others ignored Eliana as she explained and explained about the walking trees.

“What’s that noise?” Toby asked.

“That’s Eliana talking,” Jason replied.

“No, not that. The other sound.”

They listened carefully and asked Eliana to stop talking. When they did so, they could hear a clicking, chittering sound.

“It’s probably just an animal of some sort,” Jason said. He didn’t think that walking trees were likely.

The sounds started to come from all around them.

“Several animals,” Jason added.

“Let’s stay focused on what we need to do,” Jason said. “Which direction is the gem?”

Mei pointed. She happened to point in the direction where the animal noises were loudest.

As they walked forward, they started to bump into sticky strands stretching from branch to branch.

“What are these things?” Eliana asked.

“Sticky strands,” Jason replied.

“Yes, I can see that, but what are they?”

“Sticky strands?” Jason said.

“I would guess they are some sort of animal secretion that it uses to trap birds and things.”

“What’s that!” Mei pointed at a dark shape scuttling about in the forest, about the size of a dog.

The forest grew darker and darker; the trees became older and more twisted and gnarled and felt somehow menacing. As it got darker, it became a lot colder.

The children could hear scuttling noises among the trees to either side of them, and ahead of them and behind them. The further they moved, the more sticky strands they came across.

It wasn’t long before they found it difficult to move without brushing against sticky strands. These were very difficult to pull off – they stuck to their fingers when they tried.

They could see the scuttling shapes getting closer; spiders the size of small dogs, spinning webs and strands between trees.

The spiders chittered louder and louder. It wasn’t long before there was nowhere for the children to go. Every direction was blocked by thick, sticky strands.

They could feel that the gem fragment was close, but most of the spiders were also in that direction.

“Leave our gem alone,” one of the spiders chittered.

“It gave us brains.”

“It made us big.”

“It made us strong.”

“Wait,” Eliana said. “You can talk?”

The spiders chittered loudly among themselves. It sounded like laughter.

“What are you going to do?” Toby asked.

“Oh, nothing much. We’ll eat you, and then see if the fallen star makes us grow even bigger.”

Toby picked up a stone and threw it at the nearest web. It hit with a splat and the web shook, the stone sticking firmly. A spider fell to the ground.

“Spiders are sensitive to vibration and things. They feel stuff in their webs, so if we shake the webs enough, they’ll get dizzy.”

The others started picking up sticks and stones and throwing them at the sticky strands. After a while, spiders began falling to the ground and they scurried about in circles, confused and squealing and dizzy.

“Quick, while they’re all distracted,” Toby shouted.

Jason dashed in and grabbed the gem fragment, then they all ran away before the spiders recovered. They ran through the forest, scratching themselves on branches and creepers.

The further they got from the forest, the more the spiders shrank back to their normal size.

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David Flin has written & edited a large number of alternate history books and all-ages novels, and edited Comedy Throughout the (P)Ages and How To Write Alternate History.