Terry Pratchett - Johnny and the Bomb

They stared at her.

"Vegetarianism," said the girl. "I may have to wear a paper hat but I haven't got a cardboard brain, thank you." She glared at Wobbler. "You want a bun with everything. You want fries with that?"

"Er ... yes."

"There you go. Have a day."

The boys took their burgers and wandered back out into the mall.

"We do this every Saturday," said Bigmac.

"Yes," said Wobbler.

"And every Saturday we work out a joke."

"Yes."

"And you always mess up the punch line."

"Well ... it's something to do."

And there wasn't much else to do at the mall. Sometimes there were displays and things. At Christmas there'd been a nice tableau of reindeers and Dolls of Many Countries that really moved (jerkily) to music, but Bigmac had found out where the controls were and speeded up everything four times, and a Norwegian's head had gone through the window of the cookie shop on the second floor.

All there was today in the way of entertainment were the people selling plastic window frames and someone else trying to get people to try a new artificial baked potato mix.

The boys sat down by the ornamental pond, and watched out for the security guards. You could always tell where Bigmac was in the mall by watching the flow of the security guards, several of whom had been hit by bits of disintegrating Scandinavian and bore a grudge. As far as anyone knew, Bigmac had never been guilty of anything other than the occasional confused approach to the ownership of other people's cars, but he had an amazing way of looking as though he was thinking about committing some rather daft crime, probably with a can of spray paint. His camouflage jacket didn't help. It might have worked in a jungle, but it tended to stand out when the background was the Olde Card and Cookie Shoppe.

"Old Johnny may be a bit of a nerd but it's always interesting when he's around," said Wobbler. "Stuff happens."

"Yeah, but he hangs around with Kimberly or Kirsty or whoever she is today and she gives me the creeps," said Yoless. "She's weird. She always looks at me as if I haven't answered a question properly."

"Her brother told me everyone expects her to go to university next year," said Bigmac.

Yoless shrugged. "You don't have to be dumb to be weird," he said. "If you're brainy you can be even weirder. It's all that intelligence looking for something to do. That's what I think."

"Well, Johnny's weird," said Bigmac. "Well, he is. It's amazing the stuff that goes on in his head. Maybe he is a bit mental."

"It's amazing the stuff that goes on outside his head," said Wobbler. "He's just-"

There was a crash somewhere in the mall, and people started to shout.

A shopping trolley rolled at high speed up the aisle, with shoppers running to get out of the way. It had a plastic window frame hanging on the front and was splashed with artificial potato. Johnny and Kirsty were hanging on either side.

He waved at them as he drifted past.

"Help us get this out of the back door!"

"That's old Mrs Tachyon's trolley, isn't it?" said Yoless.

"Who cares?" said Bigmac. He put his burger down on the edge of the pond, where it was surreptitiously picked up by Wobbler, and ran after the trolley.

"Someone's chasing us," Johnny panted, as they caught up.

"Brilliant!" said Bigmac. "Who?"

"Some people in a big black car," said Johnny. "Only ... they've vanished ... "

"Oh, an invisible big black car," said Yoless.

"I see them all the time," said Bigmac.

"Are you going to stand around all day?" Kirsty demanded. "It's probably got some kind of special shield! Come on!"

The trolley wasn't massively heavy, although the piles of bags did weigh it down. But it did need a lot of steering. Even with all of them helping - or, Johnny thought later, perhaps because of all of them helping it skidded and wobbled as they tried to keep it in a straight line.

"If we can get out of the other doors, we're in the High Street," said Johnny. "And it can't go in there because there's bollards and things."

"I wish I had my five-megawatt laser cannon," said Bigmac, as they fought the trolley round a corner.

"You haven't got a laser cannon," said Yoless.

"I know, that's why I wish I had one."

Ow.

Wobbler leapt back.

"It bit me!" he screamed.

Guilty stuck his head out of the heap of bags and hissed at Johnny.

Security guards were strolling towards them. There were five kids arguing around a trolley, Bigmac was among them and, as Yoless would have pointed out, one of them was black. This sort of thing attracts attention.

"This trolley might be a time machine," said Johnny. "And that car ... Kirsty thinks someone's after it. I mean me. I mean us."

"Great, how do we make it work?" said Bigmac.

"A time machine," said Yoless. "Ali. Yes?"

"Where's this invisible car got to?" said Wobbler.

"We can't go out of the other doors," said Kirsty, flatly. "There's a couple of guards there."

Johnny stared at the black dustbin liners. Then he picked one up and undid the string. For a moment his fingers felt cold and the air was full of faint whispers

The mall vanished.

It vanished above them, and around them.

And below them.

They landed in a heap on the grass, about a metre below where they'd been standing. The trolley landed on top of them, one wheel slamming into the small of Johnny's back. Bags bounced out, and Guilty took the opportunity to scratch Bigmac's ear.

And then there was silence, except for Bigmac swearing.

Johnny opened his eyes. The ground sloped up all around him. There were low bushes at the tap.

"If I asked what happened," said Yoless, from somewhere under Bigmac, "what'd you say?"

"I think we may have travelled in time," said Johnny.

D'you get an electric feeling?" said Wobbler, clutching his jaw. "Like ... all your teeth standing on end?"

"Which way did we go?" said Yoless, still talking in his deliberate voice. "Are we talking dinosaurs, or mutant robots? I want to know this before I open my eyes.

Kirsty groaned.

"Oh dear, it's going to be that kind of adventure after all," she hissed, sitting up. "It's just the sort of thing I didn't want to happen. Me, and four token boys. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. It's only a mercy we haven't got a dog." She sat up and brushed some grass off her coat. "Anyone got the least idea of where we are?"

"Ali," said Yoless. "I see there's grass. That means no dinosaurs. I saw that in a film. Grass didn't evolve until after there were dinosaurs."

Johnny stood up. His head was aching. He walked to the edge of the little hollow they'd landed in, and looked out.

"Really. Someone's been paying attention," said Kirsty. "Well, that narrows it down to some time in the last sixty million years."

"Proper time travellers have proper digital readouts," Wobbler grumbled. "No grass? What did dinosaurs eat, then?"

"You only get digital time machine clocks in America," said Bigmac. "I saw a film about a time machine in Victorian England and it just had light bulbs. They ate other dinosaurs, didn't they?"

"You're not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more, " said Yoless. "It's speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons."

"Yeah," said Bigmac. "One Million Years PC. Get it? "Cos there was this film called One Million Years BC, but-"

Kristy's mouth was open.

"Do you lot go on like this all the time?" she said. "Yes, you do. I've noticed it before, actually. Rather than face up to facts, you start yakking on about weird things. When are we?"

"May the twenty-first," said Johnny, sitting down next to her. "Just gone half past three."

"Oh yes?" said Kirsty. "And how come you're so sure?"

"I went and asked a man who was walking his dog," said Johnny.