Майк Ланкастер: Human.4

I walked in with Lilly following close on my heels.

There were two other people in the shop: Tony Jefferson, standing behind the counter, and Eddie Beattie over by the drinks cooler.

Tony had been freeze-framed in the act of refilling one of the displays of Wrigley’s gum that stood on the counter, strategically placed for those last-minute buys.

Eddie Beattie was choosing a can of high-impact cider from the fridge, and he looked like he’d just made up his mind and was reaching towards a shelf in the cooler when…

When whatever happened, happened.

Up until that moment I had been thinking that the state of the people on the green had something to do with Danny and his hypnosis. I know it wasn’t a likely idea, but it was a lot more comforting than any other I could come up with.

But Tony and Eddie hadn’t been present at the green.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t restricted to the talent show audience.

"Is it just Millgrove?" Lilly’s voice quavered. "Or is it the whole world?"

I shook my head.

"There’s only one way to find out," I said.

I popped the catch on the shop counter, just like I’d seen the staff do for years, and I lifted the flap that let me in. I ignored Tony, located the radio he kept behind there, flicked the power button and turned up the volume.

A harsh shriek of static tore through the still air.

"Sorry," I said, turning the volume down a few notches so the noise didn’t quite hurt. Then I spun the tuning dial, searching the wavelengths and bands for a signal.

Any signal.

All I found were variations on the same general theme of ear-splitting interference.

"Is it broken?" Lilly asked.

I tried to remember if it was playing earlier when we’d stopped in for cold drinks, but if it had, it hadn’t registered.

"I guess it could be," I said. "Or something could be jamming radio signals. Or, I suppose, I could be finding no stations because there are no stations out there to find…"

Lilly’s suddenly panicked face told me that maybe some of my ideas ought to remain inside my head, and not be just thrown out at someone unprepared for them.

"Or maybe it’s sunspot activity, electromagnetic storms, UFOs, or the well-planned revenge of the dolphins," I said, trying humor instead.

"How can you make jokes at a time like this?" Lilly demanded and I felt about an inch-and-a-half tall. "It’s not as if you have a particularly good history as a comedian."

"Actually, I’m just trying to find a way to deal with all this," I said. "I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m not taking things seriously, I honestly don’t know what else to do."

"Simon keeps saying how immature you are," she said coldly.

I felt my cheeks get hot.

"Still," she added cruelly.

Lilly’s words stung, and I blurted out, "What are you talking about?"

"Just what I said," she said. Then she looked down at her feet. "Look, can we not do this now?"

"You started it."

"See?" she said, almost victoriously. "Immature. You started it ," she whined.

I had a hundred things I could say on the tip of my tongue; all witty, devastating, and some of them were even true…

"I think I’ll try the phone," I said instead.

Run through the numbers you’d try in a situation like this one and I bet the first one you’d dial is the same number I did.

Three digits.

999.

Emergency Services.

Didn’t even ring.

I’d got a dial tone, but when I put the numbers into the keypad the phone just went dead. There was an empty, hollow silence. Then a few, ominous clicks on the line. Then more silence.

I tried another couple of numbers I knew—a friend in Crowley and another in Cambridge—and got nothing. I rang my own home phone. Nothing again. No line outside the village: no line inside.

I put the phone down.

"Well?" Lilly asked.

I shook my head.

"Phones are dead," I said.

"How is that possible?"

"I don’t know. Maybe whatever this is stretches further than Millgrove."

Lilly’s face screwed up and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. I wouldn’t have blamed her. I felt like crying myself. To her credit she pulled herself out of it before the tears actually started.

"So what do we do now?" she asked.

I shrugged, then realized that was a bit cold. It might sound a little self-absorbed, but Lilly’s words about Simon thinking I’m immature kept ringing in my head. Yeah, I know: way to turn a crisis of maybe global proportions into a bit of navel-gazing about whether my best friend really likes me.

I needed to rise above it.

Deep breath.

"We go back," I said. "Back to the green. There’s got to be something there that can tell us what’s happened."

Lilly didn’t look convinced but she nodded.

We started towards the door. I grabbed a couple of cold cans of Red Bull from the fridge and left the exact change on the counter.

Lilly pointed up at the CCTV camera above the door. A red light shone below its lens.

"Maybe it can show us what happened," she said hopefully.

I shook my head.

"It’s a dummy," I told her. "Danny helps out here, and he said it’s not real. A shop-lifting deterrent."

"Oh," Lilly said.

"Good idea, though," I said clumsily.

"Thanks," Lilly said.

An uneasy truce had perhaps been reached, just before a fight broke out.

And then we left the shop in silence.

When we got back to the green, it hadn’t changed. I think that I had been hoping that things would be sorted out by the time we returned, that everyone would have started moving again and we could just forget all that had happened, laugh it off and wait for a sensible explanation on TV later on.

Mrs O’Donnell—it was still hard to think of her as Kate—looked like she’d aged about five years in the time we’d been away. She was usually a neat, forty-something woman with a peroxide bob kind of hairstyle that made it look like she wished she was still in her thirties.

Or twenties, even.

Now her hair was messed up, her face was beaded with sweat, and frown lines plowed up her brow.

She was standing over the fetal form of Mr Peterson and was obviously losing patience with him. In fact, she seemed on the verge of delivering a kick to his backside.

She looked relieved to see Lilly and me, even when we shook our heads to show her we’d made no progress.

"He’s been like this since you left," she said, pointing to the prone form of the ventriloquist. "You kids are handling this a whole lot better than he is."

I wondered if that meant we were pretty darned tough.

Or whether we simply lacked the imagination to see how bad things really were.

We told Mrs O’Donnell about our trip to the shop. She seemed especially disturbed by the fact that the phones weren’t working, but to be honest I was too. It hinted at a problem that stretched further than the village boundaries.

"We need a TV," Mrs O’Donnell said. "The Internet. Anything that will give us a bigger picture."

"The radio and telephone don’t work," Lilly reminded her.

"Doesn’t mean that every form of communication is down," Mrs O’Donnell said. "Come on."

"Where?" Lilly asked.

"My house."

"What about him?" I pointed at Mr Peterson.

Mrs O’Donnell shook her head.

"We’ll have to come back for him," she said. "I can’t get him to do anything but that."

"Let me try," I said.

She nodded.

I crouched down over the man. His eyes were squeezed as tight shut as eyes can be. His lips moved rapidly, but no sounds came from between them.

"Mr Peterson?" I said. "Can you hear me?"