Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

I didn’t look back, though the buzzing seemed to be practically in my hair now and my own breathing and my heartbeat were almost as loud. I bounded up and through the slit in the tent and Carl threw Noel up after me and I dragged him inside, and then Josephine and Carl climbed in too, neither of them yet missing any pieces but with Noel’s Animals right there behind them. We charged into the ship and Josephine and I started fiddling with the buttons to fold the tent back in, but at this point one of Noel’s Animals drilled through the wall of the Flying Fox, and buzzed and bounced around inside like a very large flesh-eating wasp and so we got more preoccupied with screaming and looking for things to hit it with.

‘Hey, what’s going on, guys?’ asked the Goldfish pleasantly, as the Animal bounced off the opposite wall, chewing a chunk out of it as it went.

‘KILL IT, KILL IT, DO THE ZAPPY THING,’ I howled, ducking as the Animal flew at my face.

Carl hurled himself into the pilot’s seat, grabbed the controls and very rapidly got us out of there, which was great, except we were now lurching around in a small spaceship in the sky above Mars with:

a) the door still open

b) a big bulgy tent hanging out of one side

c) a horrifying flying monster-thing inside and trying to eat us

d) the rest of the horrifying flying monsters still coming after us.

The Goldfish gamely started trying to zap the Animal but it isn’t easy shooting a moving target, in a confined space that is also moving, with a number of children you’re programmed to protect right there. The air filled with the smell of scorched metal and the Animal remained perfectly healthy. It lunged at Josephine and ate a hank of her hair as she dodged out of its way.

‘Get the tent in – I can’t steady her,’ yelled Carl, unaware that this wasn’t as much of a problem as the Animal on a beeline for his head. Josephine grabbed her bag and swung it by the strap and batted the creature away from him, and I was never going to complain about anyone carrying a bag full of rocks with them anywhere again. The Goldfish took another shot but the Animal was too fast for it. Then just to make everything even better, the ship swung over sideways so the wall became the floor, and Noel fell through the door into the tent, which was of course still open to the air at the far end.

‘Noel!’ I bawled, hurling myself towards it. Noel was still there, thank God, clinging to one of the dangling struts.

‘Noel? What’s happening?’ asked Carl anxiously, dragging the Flying Fox through a terrifying swerve that I was almost sure was going to shake Noel off but somehow didn’t. I heard the ship’s guns go off so I supposed Carl was firing at one of the Animals outside the ship.

‘Nothing! Everything’s fine!’ I said in a ridiculously cheerful way, feeling that giving the pilot anything more to worry about wouldn’t be productive.

‘Uh, help, please?’ said Noel, sounding vaguely embarrassed as the tent bounced and thrashed in the whirling air.

I really couldn’t get near him. Fortunately we had somebody there who could fly.

‘Get him, Goldfish!’ I yelled, and the Goldfish stopped trying to shoot the Animal and dived into the tent.

Which left me and Josephine to tackle the Animal on our own.

Josephine swung her bag again and this time it exploded against those whirring teeth in a shower of interesting stones and highlighter pens.

I swung a bottle of water (it was at least moderately heavy), and Josephine hurled one of her stones with excellent aim for someone who was so terrible at Flight and Combat Training. The Animal actually dropped to the ground for a second before bouncing back up at us again, and so for a while it was just a matter of us both yelling, ‘AAAAARGH!’ and throwing anything that wasn’t tied down. Most of what we threw got eaten, which at least slowed the Animal down. Then it came at me again, and as I threw myself out of the way I knocked into the food crate, which I grabbed, and emptied everything out. And then I threw the crate over the Animal and jumped on top of it.

This happened so fast that even before I’d finished doing it, I was thinking, ‘I’m not sure I thought that through,’ because the crate was made of plastic and the thing could chew through rock. Still, I guess suddenly being in a small space, especially after having been bashed on the head with a number of stones, must have slightly confused the Animal, because it knocked about like a wasp in an upside-down glass for longer than I expected before it remembered its own killer spinning teeth . I had no idea what to do next when it bored through the side of the crate, but Josephine stepped on its back and pinned it to the floor, those awful teeth gnawing the air as it twisted and struggled and tried to get its maw to her feet. Then the Goldfish hovered back into the ship with Noel wrapped around it like a baby monkey, and I grabbed its nose and aimed it at the appalling thing under Josephine’s feet, and shouted ‘FIRE!’ and the Goldfish did exactly that.

The Animal twitched mightily and went still.

Josephine sat down abruptly on the floor. Someone, possibly me, must have finally got the tent inside but I don’t really remember much about that. The main thing was that Carl got proper control of the ship and we shot away at top speed with a flying worm from outer space lying dead in Josephine’s lap.

‘Space Locusts,’ said Noel. ‘We should call them Space Locusts.’

‘That’s a good name for them,’ agreed Josephine. ‘Ow,’ she added, pulling her hand away from me.

‘I’ve got to disinfect it,’ I said. ‘It might have… space germs.’

The spaceship had shaken and rattled its way through a few hundred miles of sky before Carl had to drop us on a flat-topped mountain above a maze of jagged rifts and canyons scribbled in an angry mess over the ground. I’d got the first-aid kit out and was doing my best to patch everyone up: we were all a bit bloody but the slice the Space Locust had taken out of Josephine seemed to be worst. And then there were the jaggedy tears it had made in our uniforms – special high-tech made-for-Mars fabric isn’t much good with holes in it. But duct tape turned out to be excellent for both problems.

Meanwhile Noel, under Josephine’s direction, had laid the worm on a rock and was trying to dissect it. He had taken pictures of its eyes (seven) and segments (five) but the knife Josephine had found in the ship’s survival kit couldn’t get through the hard shell to find out what its insides were like.

‘OK, I admit I see the point of taking duct tape into space now,’ I said, using a piece of it to stick some gauze to the back of Josephine’s hand.

‘I told you, that was Lena’s idea. And she’s almost always right,’ said Josephine, sounding mildly disgruntled about it. ‘Goldfish, can you very carefully shoot a seam through the creature’s exoskeleton?’

But the Goldfish couldn’t.

We heard something go clank inside the spaceship, and Carl swearing. He had pulled off a panel (it was almost falling off anyway) and was burrowing around in the engines, so I guess it was a good thing he’d got some getting-into-the-guts-of-spaceships experience back on the Mélisande after all.

Josephine gave up on cutting open the Space Locust with a sigh. ‘I wish I could see what was going on inside this thing. But I suppose it doesn’t really matter.’ She wrapped up the Space Locust in a towel and contented herself with patching the ruins of her bag together with duct tape and a staple gun, so that she had somewhere to put it. ‘Either the Morrors are breeding these things as weapons, or they aren’t , and this is a completely new problem. We’ve got to get it to the government.’