Serial Sunday: The Galton Horror IV

By Charles E.P. Murphy

The spacesuit was watching them now. What was it thinking behind that screen? Could anyone ever know?

“I won’t patronise you,” said Dr Barrington. “This is an alien and we are working for him. There’s nothing else it could be.”

Gunnar had been hoping that wasn’t it. He’d waited for the big reveal of a man in a mask, for this to be something other than what it was. The spacesuit would reveal a celebrity and they’d go ‘surprise!’ and this was all a hidden camera show. But there really was nothing else.

“It all goes back to the Shackleton 1 probe,” the man continued. “The visitors spotted it and tracked it back to Galton, and conveniently the future Prime Minister—as he all knew he would be—was here when they made contact. Negotiations were started. We thought the visitors must be desperate. In exchange for a few isolated sites, they would gift Britain technology over a decade ahead of the norm. Tony told me we were taking them to the cleaners!”

He spoke with the amused embarrassment of someone remembering when he’d been five.

“Do they do Faustus for your GCSEs?”

“There was an episode in The Simpsons,” said Gunnar in a whisper. “Homer sold his soul for a donut.”

 “There you go. We’d all heard stories about deals with devils and how they go wrong, but we ignored it. Once the visitors had landed, once we’d let them in, they went to work. There are now fourteen sites in the country and they are embedded into Britain’s technology, which is fast becoming the world’s technology. We’re their bridgehead. They’ve already won.”

“There’s just one of them here,” Gunnar said, a futile prayer.

“Yes, only one or two can be at a site. The atmosphere, the gravity, all of that’s bad for their agents, and every trip increases the risk of being spotted too early.”

Barrington pointed towards the butchery; Gunnar didn’t look. “That’s what all this is for. It’s easier to get us to come to them, as it were.”

Casually, metal prongs emerged from the man’s wrist, and he fired a beam of light into the floor. It left a scorched hole. The very beam stank like the alien coils had. Like nothing on Earth; fundamentally wrong, a new predator in the woods.

“I remember being normal, fully human Dr Barrington and I’m sure if I’d asked myself from back when, he’d say I’m not really him anymore, I’m one of the visitors. But I can’t really care. And yes, that’s what we’ve done to your classmates. Not just at your school either. Get them while they’re young, you could say! As for the tramps we’ve had bussed in, well, mostly they’re just warm bodies to move about. Drones, let’s say. Not everyone needs to be one of the visitors.”

Gunnar didn’t have the words for that. Amy did. She had a stream of them, all rage and bile, and all of that sound and fury achieving nothing.

“Language,” Barrington said, absurdly stern. “I need you children to understand what this is. This is widespread—it is industrial. The visitors are winning. They have ninety thousand converted agents like me spread across the country.”

It echoed like a bomb blast in Gunnar’s mind. Ninety thousand. Ninety. Thousand. 

You couldn’t do something on this scale without the government, the army, MI5 knowing. Not unless too many of them were among the ninety thousand. Not unless the aliens had already taken over Britain.

“And both of you showed the initiative to be among them,” Barrington continued. “Most of your classmates will just be warm bodies, but you have what it takes to be among the section leaders. It’s a good thing you missed the trip, we’d have never realised how useful you were otherwise.

“However, we really only have the spare implants right now for one of you.”

He looked at both of them like picking out new shoes and made another cry at the spacesuit.

Gunnar thought fast for something he could say that would convince Barrington to not do this, and the answer came to him.

But it came too late for him to say it.

***

Amy knew piss-all about Galton Spaceport. It was just nerd stuff irrelevant to what she’d ever do with her life. Kids like her wouldn’t go into the future and she knew it. All the Internet did was show her how much other people had. She’d only asked for the basics about the spaceport from Gunnar and assumed he’d figure out anything more while she did the actual leading.

Now she was on her own and had only understood every other word this bearded man said. She wasn’t completely sure of his name. But she knew she was going to die.

Worse, he was going to turn her into something that wasn’t her. Gunnar had got to go out as himself. Everything she’d ever been would be wiped clean for some imposter to walk around in her skin.

Fear ripped through anger. She had no front left. But deep within fear, her fight-or-flight still screamed fight, and it screamed that this bastard was too self-assured to think she could escape, like they were too self-assured to think someone would run in (and how well has that worked, Amy? she tried not to think) because they were stronger, smarter, and better than human plebs, they were winning and you were losing. Beings had come from outer space and proved they were just more smug gits thinking they could patronise her.

Just more smug gits thinking she wouldn’t do anything, could ever do anything.

And just like Gunnar Glass, they didn’t know she’d been suspended from school for bringing a knife.

Just a little pocket one to show off. She’d never intended to use it. Doing that sort of thing was far more than she wanted to get involved with. The teachers had caught her and suspended her. She’d brought the knife to school again today to show off to her friends – her murdered friends –that the teachers couldn’t keep her down.

 She’d brought the knife with her to the Spaceport.

She took that little knife and stabbed with all her might and hate into the rocket scientist’s leg, and then she stabbed out at the spacesuit. She hadn’t been trying anywhere specific but through blind luck, she jammed the knife right into his elbow seam.

Something tore. And then sickly orange foam poured out of the hole in great gushing spurts, and the spacesuit fell back in a spasm, a piercing wail from its head like a radio being tortured. Amy ran away and didn’t look back, not at the scream, not at the cries of rage, not at the human footsteps running after her, not as the sporadic blasts of death ray went past her. She just legged it before they came after her.

And once she was out of the Spaceport, she kept running. She ran out of town. She’d killed one of the aliens, maybe, hopefully, hurt it anyway; and she had photos of their works. Their plan had been mildly set back. She, some pleb, had shown them up. And what happened when teachers got shown up by her?

They retaliated. They retaliated massively to show their strength and power.

Behind her, something lit the night. She didn’t see where it came from—a building? A hidden spacecraft? The converted men? The alien? Wherever it was, it wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t them hiding.

This was the show of strength. This was the aliens thinking: let’s kick things off early.

Already, in the distance, she could hear the sound of alien weapons begin to echo in Galton as their agents activated. As her classmates activated. As the town ceased to be.

Every argument she’d ever had with her parents and sister stopped mattering. Her fingers fumbled her home number and the phone told her there was no signal. The network was gone. It was probably gone all over Britain.

Maybe this would help the rest of the Earth. Maybe the aliens striking early would hurt them. Maybe she’d doomed her home but saved everywhere else. God, she had to hope so.

Above, a Concorde screamed, and it continued to scream as it fell on neighbouring Floodbridge.

Amy continued to run and hoped she was running somewhere.

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Charles EP Murphy is an author who, among other works, wrote the books Chamberlain Resigns, and other things that did not happen and Comics of Infinite Earths for Sea Lion.