The Hipster Who Leapt Through Time (The Hipster Trilogy Book 2) (29 page)

Moomamu turned back to face the front. He looked at the controls. The wheel. The sticks to his side. The pedals by his feet.
 

“Okay, shouldn’t be too difficult,” he said as he placed his hands on the wheel. “Here we go.”
 

He waited for a second, expecting something to happen. Nothing did.
 

“If a human can do this then I’m pretty sure I can,” he said as he started yanking and pulling on whatever lever and button he could find. He kicked on the pedals as hard as he could and grabbed his hands on the wheel, turning it, but still, nothing happened. He banged his hands on the wheel and they hurt. One more bang and he hit the button that made the car squeal. He regretted that decision immediately.

He climbed out of the car and rubbed his hands together. He still had to make his way to the soft spot. The Light said he had around forty hours before it disappeared. And that must have been around five hours ago now. He didn’t have a clue how he was going to make it there without a human or a cat. How do humans get anywhere without cats?
 

“Hello!” he shouted, not completely sure what he was shouting for or at. ”Help me!”

He walked over to the side of the bridge and leaned over it, looking down at the dark water as the gentle current pushed forward. Farther up the water, he saw a floating machine, tied to the bank on the side. It pulled on its ropes as it tried to escape. I know that feeling, Moomamu thought.

The clouds above were unusual to Moomamu. They were thick and grey. Fine lines of dark black ran through the clouds like veins of an old leaf. The dark lines ran throughout the sky and into the horizon. He hadn’t seen a London cloud for a while, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t how they were supposed to look.
 

He thought of the Thinkers, hiding behind the clouds in the stars. He pushed the thought of the others to the back of his mind as a piece of the dark cloud dropped and started to descend.
 

Definitely not how clouds worked.

The piece of cloud, a ball about the size of his fingernail, fell and grew larger and larger. Moomamu took a few steps backwards and bumped into the moving machine as he noticed the bubble of black working its way towards him.
 

He moved around the moving machine, into the centre of the bridge, and waited for the bubble to crash into the concrete floor in front of him, but it didn’t. Instead, it slowed and stopped at his eye-level. A meter or so in front of him. Just off the edge of the bridge. It was as big as his head. A small tight bubble of black liquid. It was unnatural in the way it hovered. Motionless. Still.
 

Moomamu took another step backwards. He looked up and down the bridge. He thought about jumping off the bridge and into the water.
 

“What do you want?” Moomamu said as he began to walk away from it to the other side of the bridge. He turned his head to see the bubble burst into a fine black mist. Each droplet buzzed in the air. It started to move towards him, slowly at first but quickly picking up speed. He whimpered as he increased his pace and started to run.
 

“Leave me alone!

He made his run up to the far side of the bridge. His bare feet clumsily slapped against the floor as the swarm buzzed through the air with ease.
 

“Help,” he shouted again. “Help me!”

The swarm of black looked like flies. Surely the insects that turned the organic life into dust. As he ran he heard the buzzing grow louder. It was catching up to him. He could almost feel it biting at his ankles. Suddenly he saw people on the end of the bridge, waiting for him. A small group of humans, all dressed in black protective clothing. Helmets with plastic visors. Four or five of them. Shouting at each other. Orders and whatnot.

“Readying the EMP, sir,” one of them shouted.
 

One of the humans waved to him, pointing him towards a black moving machine. Much bigger than a standard moving machine. Armoured with metal plating. Two of the humans were crouched down, clicking away on a small metal box. Pressing buttons.

“It’s not working,” they said. “Repeat. The EMP is not working.”

Moomamu turned his head to see the swarm was on him now. The reflection of daylight bounced off their shells and glittered on the pavement in front of him.

Feeling his heart and blood pumping away, he reached the waving human, who turned to run with him. The human looked strong. A warrior class. Big and brutish. Made to protect. His saviour in …

Oh well. Just as he was starting to admire these great saviours, the swarm of black caught up with the warrior. It climbed inside his helmet. He screamed as he dropped to the floor. Moomamu looked over his shoulder to see the swarm temporarily distracted by their meal. In the man’s clear visor he saw the flesh exposed with red and then white as his bones showed through. The clothing became soft and, as if by magic, the human filling disappeared and the clothing fell flat to the ground. With nothing holding it to the uniform, the protective helmet rolled away and to the side.

Moomamu picked up the pace and reached the other humans. Three of them were over the box now.
 

“What are you doing, you idiots. Run!” he screamed.

One of them looked up and shook his head.

“No need,” he said as they pressed a button.

“Kevin, hit it!” another of them shouted.

A static crackling sound boomed outwards from the box and the swarm fell to the floor, pattering against the concrete.
 

Moomamu looked on and smiled. He tried to catch his breath as he whooped and cheered. He clapped his hands against his chest. He made it.

“Well done, humans. I must say, you did a good—”

He suddenly fell to the floor. A sharp pain on his forehead. Blood tickling his ears. Before he passed out he saw one of the humans leering through the visor of his helmet. His blond curly hair just above his blue eyes. An ugly patch of blonde and ginger above his lip.

“You fucking got my friend killed,” he said before he lifted a small black stick and slammed it down on Moomamu’s head.
 

***

Teeth and claws. Laughter. A gentle purr. A horrific putrid smell of fizzy rotting meat. A pulling on the skin of his back where cat’s claws had become stuck. They pulled and the skin loosened. Blood dripped. Purring. Sweet. Gentle. Laughing again. The smell of the rotting meat. A wayward glance as the claws pulled on his skin and the blood now dripped, loud on the wooden slats by his feet. The smell. The rotting corpses of the previous maulings. The loose fur and skin of one of the dead faces looked up to him and he saw Snuckems’s face smiling. A purring.

***

Moomamu screamed as he woke. Something leapt from his chest and onto the floor. He sat up and pressed his back against the wall. It was cold. Ceramic tiles on his naked skin, clammy with sweat. His breathing was heavy. Where was he?

It was bright, too bright. A white light that burned his eyes. He looked around the room. All white tiles. A bed. Some table to his right with medical equipment. Bandages and the like. His head was sore where he’d been struck. The humans in black. The swarm of black.

On the floor to his right. The vibrating sound wasn’t a dream. It was the chunky little ginger thing looking at him. Its pupils narrow — a line of dark against the blue-green.
 

“Thinker is awake,” it said in that familiar deep voice.
 

“Gary?” Moomamu said, feeling his breathing calm somewhat. “Where am I? I thought you were dead? Are we both dead? Is this what the humans refer to as the afterlife. Dammit! I sure didn’t think they were right about that. I’m more of a rebirth kind of Thinker.”

“You’re not dead,” a voice said. Female, familiar. Moomamu looked up to see Luna standing in the doorway. Her red hair tied back and out of her face. The wrinkled skin around her eyes made her look sweeter than ever as her mouth wrinkled at the corners. She was wearing a black short-sleeved shirt with the letters IPC in white on the breast.
 

“Luna,” he said. The word sounded good as he spoke it. “Where are we?”

“Underground. At something called The IPC HQ. It was a school. I think. An upturned sort-of skyscraper, submerged in London. We’re like mole people now.”

Moomamu looked down at himself. He was wearing new pants. They were fresh and as white as a white dwarf. On the table to his side were fresh clothes. The same black shirt that Luna wore and some dark navy trousers. The bed he was in felt like pleasure trapped in fabric. He’d not laid on something so soft for … well, ever.

“Thinker isn’t dead,” Gary said. “How is Thinker alive?”

“What happened?” Luna said, looking at his torn skin, scarred and marked in white and pink. “You look like Gary’s scratching post.”
 

She smiled again, but Moomamu winced at the idea. He reached over and pulled the t-shirt over his head and pulled it down. The soft fabric smelled of flowers and soap. He realised his hair had been cut short and his face had been shaved. He ran his hand over his head and the short hairs bristled against his fingers. Then over his bare chin. The skin was rough and tacky to his fingertips.

“We cleaned you up,” Luna said.
 

“Who’s ‘we’?” Moomamu replied as he stood up and pulled the trousers over his feet.

Luna pointed to a pair of black leather boots by his bed and said, “Put your boots on and I’ll show you.”

He put the socks over his feet one by one, relishing the elastic hug. He then pulled the boots on and they rose halfway up his shins. He tied the laces like a bonafide human, surprising even himself. The neural pathways marked in his human vessel must be doing a lot of the groundwork for him. He hardly had to think about where to thread the laces and where to pull them tight. It came to him naturally. The cat and Luna didn’t notice his achievement.

He stood up and his head felt light. The pain in his skull from the human’s black stick was still present. He touched the painful part of his head and found a lump of swollen flesh protruding. The skin felt tight. He tried to push the lump back in. It didn’t work.

He followed Luna and Gary through a series of hallways and corridors, all empty. Gary kept up by his side, holding his stump to his chest as he scampered across the floor.

Moomamu looked at Gary. He heard him purring. The sound grated against him and the pale lines on his skin grew sore. He lost himself and heard the tearing of his flesh when he noticed Gary looking back at him. He turned away to look at one of the open rooms. A classroom of sorts. Empty desks. A blank board in the front.

“No children in this school?” he said but was met with silence. “I was attacked. By something from the sky.” He tried again, this time, louder.

“That was just a bubble. The main cloud has already passed through London, but it leaves smaller remnants of itself behind. To finish off whatever it missed,” Luna said. Still walking forward. Never turning round.
 

“Not only that, though, I was also attacked by humans, in black clothing.”

As the words left Moomamu’s mouth he was led into a huge classroom — more desks in semi-circles and a stairway that went through the middle towards a stage. At the front of the stage was a short man with giant shoes, a woman with brown skin and what looked like her spawn holding onto her hand, a man with big thick glasses, and a number of people in those black uniforms, sitting in different parts of the room, muttering amongst themselves.

“The best thing we can do right now,” said the short man on the stage, trying to speak over the whispering amongst the men in black, “is leave the HQ, find something more effective than the EMPs. We need to find some way of restoring the Earth so that organic life can regrow, because right now, at this rate, the lack of green organic life is going to destroy the atmosphere. We need to find a way of regrowing, or we could go back to my initial idea of trying to communicate with The Signal.”

“That’s fucking ludicrous,” said one of the men in black uniforms. “It’s just ate the planet. It’s not intelligent. It’s a virus.”

“No!” the short man shouted. “We know it’s intelligent from the way the bubbles move. From the way they respond to talking. From the way The Signal found us in the first place.”

“Why can’t we stay here?” a voice shouted. “Fuck going back up to street level.”

“Well,” the man started, growing angrier with each word. “We can’t
just
stay down here, you fucking pimple. The ventilation system is down because the last team of IPC Security couldn’t do a simple food trip without letting off a fucking EMP right fucking outside! We stay here and in the next couple of days we’ll start losing our minds. Soon enough we’ll start dropping away and will be forced to the surface anyway.”

The room went quiet and Moomamu looked to Luna. She looked up at him as if she were sorry for bringing him to such a depressing conversation.

“It’s okay!” Moomamu shouted from the top of the stairs. He took a step downwards, and then another. He realised how embarrassing it would be if he were to trip and fall down the stairs. “I will help us. I will save the world.”
 

“Right, okay,” the short man said, glancing at Moomamu. “Whoever this person is, go on then, tell us how you propose to do that?”