Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘I miss popcorn,’ said Noel.

‘You’re kidding,’ Carl said. ‘Mars wouldn’t be far enough to get away from that stuff.’

‘I miss the smell,’ said Noel, a faint quaver in the back of his voice, and Carl’s expression tightened before he forced a grin and scrubbed his hand annoyingly over Noel’s hair.

‘Your parents work in a cinema?’ Josephine deduced.

‘They run the cinema,’ said Noel proudly.

‘Yeah, I’ve been sweeping popcorn off carpets since I was six, we all practically bleed the stuff now,’ said Carl. ‘Guess you can take the boy out of the cinema, but you can’t take the cinema out of the boy.’ He jostled Noel’s shoulder, then obviously remembered he was talking to Stephanie Dare’s daughter. He looked a little defensive. ‘Mum’s in the reserves too. And Dad’s a shockray warden. And Dad used to be in the regulars. But he got hit over the South Shetlands and it messed up his nervous system.’

I grimaced sympathetically.

‘It’s not that bad. He just shakes sometimes, can’t always hold stuff, that’s all. I’ll get the Morrors back for him, when I have the chance.’

He cleared his throat and frowned into space and we all went back to focusing firmly on packing up our supplies. We hadn’t got anything left to drink, though there were water-purifying tablets and a filtration kit (which was slightly disappointing to Noel, who had been looking forward to boiling drinking water over a fire, even though it’s really hard to get water hot in an atmosphere as thin as that).

We walked down with our empty bottles to the nearest lake. It was all so beautiful with the glitter on the water getting into the air and everything so new and untouched and quiet.

‘Has this got a name?’ wondered Carl, filling the bottle up.

‘ Jerome Lake ,’ said Josephine instantaneously.

Carl frowned, and brooded on this for a moment. ‘Fine,’ he said, and took a swooping leap to land boot-deep in the next pool. He called back, ‘But this is Dalisay Waterhole.’

‘And this one’s Dare’s Pond!’ I said.

And then we were all boinging about and leaping from pool to lake and racing each other to name things. This game wasn’t as much fun for Noel because of course he and Carl had the same surname, and he couldn’t keep up with the rest of us that well, but then he got distracted by some shrimpy things he found in a puddle anyway.

After claiming Jerome Lake, Josephine seemed to be making much slower progress than Carl and me, but the two of us mostly lost track of which ponds were supposed to be ours pretty quickly, and then it turned out that Josephine had been using the pens she’d stolen from the stationery cupboard to write her name on handy rocks before putting them back to mark the spot, as well as logging names, coordinates and pictures into her tablet for posterity.

Carl looked down at the slogan ‘Loch Lena’ neatly printed on to the broad red rock at Josephine’s feet, and then gave her an aggrieved stare. ‘Lend us a pen, then,’ he said.

‘No,’ replied Josephine serenely.

‘Please,’ said Carl, making his eyes very big and sad.

Josephine tapped a pen thoughtfully against her teeth. ‘All right. But on the understanding that this whole area –’ she waved her arm, ‘– is called the Jeromiana Waterlands. Except for whatever bit you peed on. I don’t want that.’

So we took the pens and kept on boinging around until we’d given everything in sight names that got fancier and fancier, and then Carl wondered if the gravity was low enough to let you run across the water like a skimming stone, if you were fast enough.

‘It won’t work,’ said Josephine, and started to talk about gravity and velocity and stuff but then Carl splashed her so she pretty much had to retaliate. And we almost forgot about Morrors and missing grown-ups and everything but being free.

This was all pretty absorbing so it was a while before us older ones noticed that Noel wasn’t playing any more. Instead he was waving and pointing at something in the sky and asking, ‘What’s that ?’

(OK, possibly we had noticed but weren’t paying much attention because he was the little one.)

‘All right, what’s what?’ said Josephine finally.

‘ There ,’ said Noel, and we looked up. I couldn’t see anything at first, just the mirrors tilting lazily on their slow drift past. Then I made out a streak of motion almost straight above us: five little dark specks falling out of the thin pastel sky.

No, not falling, flying – sweeping in at a steep angle towards the ground.

Spaceships? Maybe the adults had finally remembered about us?

Then, I saw the colour of the things – a dull grey-green like the uniforms at Muckling Abbot – and my eyes worked out the perspective and I realised they were both a lot smaller and a lot closer than I’d thought and I took a step back on instinct. Foot-long, conical things – just a bit, I thought, like airborne marrows on the warpath. But then they were closer still and you could see the spinning segments and hear the dull grinding noise as they bored through the air.

One of them plunged into Crystal Mirror (mine) and one into the Cauldron of Doom (Carl’s) and the splash sent up great white pillars of water into the air, descending in Martian slow motion. The other worm-things went straight into the ground – drilling into the rock as soon as they hit it as if it was as soft as sawdust. The Jeromiana Waterlands shook and we grabbed at each other so as not to fall over, but before we had much time to work out how to react to any of this, three crooked furrows spread out from the three holes where the things had landed, as if something was ploughing up the ground from underneath, and a buzzing sound was getting louder.

The worm-things broke the surface, devouring everything in front of them, everything disintegrating under blunt, impossibly hard, impossibly revolving teeth.

‘ Those are my animals,’ said Noel, with a faint air of triumph.

We watched Noel’s Animals chewing up soil and plants and rock. A cloud of colourless dust rose behind them and floated away on the breeze.

‘I don’t like them,’ I said.

‘They’re interesting,’ insisted Noel loyally.

The two animals that had landed in the water were not, apparently, any the worse for getting wet. They buzzed their way to land and began feasting on everything they found there. They were, I suppose, too hungry to be picky.

‘No,’ conceded Noel, tilting his head to one side. ‘I don’t like them either.’

‘Uh,’ said Carl, in a slightly strangled voice, pointing upwards. More specks were descending from the sky.

We had all drawn closer together. ‘Well, we could be taking some fascinating pictures about now,’ remarked Josephine, ‘or we could be running away.’

The nearest worm-thing reared up, and I could see a ring of tiny black eyes, motionless behind the whirring teeth. It was looking at us.

‘I vote run,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ agreed Josephine, ‘I think run.’

‘Why is this something we are talking about?!’ demanded Carl, grabbing Noel’s hand, just as Noel’s Animals decided that we were probably better to eat than rocks and stones, sprang into the air and flew straight at us.

And so we ran. And thank God we were on Mars where running was easy, and thank God we’d all had such a lot of physical training. On the other hand, if only we hadn’t already been jumping about using up oxygen and energy so recklessly.

And if only we’d packed the tent back into the spaceship. It was still standing on its struts, bulging out of the side of the ship.