There was nothing dramatic about their arrival. They didn't slowly fade into existence, there were no flashing lights or a symbolic crash of thunder; they simply didn't exist and then they did. Sarah opened her eyes, then immediately closed them again. Rain drummed down onto sheet-metal rooftops and washed down through the walkways above them. She opened her eyes again. Erica stood atop a small set of concrete steps below a circular light, the intermittent glow of a dying bulb silhouetted her against a faded red door as she wrestled with the handle. The ground was uneven and rough, pale and unnatural, or at least the parts of it that could be seen through the carpet of filth and detritus were. Rats tunnelled their way through mounds of rotting food and discarded packaging, occasionally stopping to pay some mind to the strangers in front of them.
The almost soothing patter of rain was interspersed with the clank of waste bouncing down the large pipes on the buildings at either side of them, though the large metal containers the pipes aimed at had long since become full. The waste slopped to the ground and created stalagmites of filth and grime that the rats happily used as ladders. Erica shoved the door with both hands and turned back towards her sister. “We need to get inside,” she said. “We'll catch our deaths if we don't.” Sarah turned and addressed the nearest rat.
“Um, excuse me. Could you tell us where we are, please?” The rat looked at her and angled its head slightly, then it went back to ignoring her.
“Rude little thing,” Erica muttered as she wandered towards the opening of the alleyway. She tugged at the rusted chain that secured the gate; it clattered into the slop and disappeared from view. The gate carved a neat path through the filth, which then oozed its way out into the street. The sky burned a dull and disconcerting shade of orange and cast an eerie, hellish light upon the landscape.
They watched both beguiled and horrified as row after row of brightly-coloured metal carriages screamed past them at tremendous speeds, plumes of vomitus smoke left in their wake. Each shiny metal carriage held a single human, and each face of each human held the same expression – impatient anger. Or constipation, they couldn’t be sure. The air hung with smoke, both from the carriages and the large chimneys situated on almost every building as far as the eyes could see, which in itself wasn’t an easy task. It swirled about their heads and stung their eyes, filled their lungs with its burning, acrid stench and made them cough until their throats were raw.
Buildings dominated the skyline, and billboards and screens in turn dominated the red brickwork and loomed down upon passers-by. s that glorified consumption sat juxtaposed with ones that urged against it and offered a non-confidential phone-line to report friends and neighbours for it. Blimps flitted through the sky like ungainly birds and dictated the mood of the populace with news of air-raids, storms, or famine warnings. Closer to ground level, shop displays and signs blazed in varying hues and intensities and added their own equally abhorrent contribution to the area's colour palette. They covered their mouths and noses with their hands and set off towards the source of the odorous, offensive people-boxes on wheels.
Sarah gazed wide-eyed through the rows of shop windows as they went, one in particular caught her eye. She stared in awe, her hands and nose pressed firmly to the glass. The window was, for the most part, so filthy as to render the interior of the shop unobservable to passers-by, but the owner had endeavoured to keep a small patch clean so as to not defeat the entire purpose of having a window in the first place. In it stood a neatly stacked pyramid of boxes, and each box displayed a separate moving image. “Television,” she cooed as she read the display. One box immediately drew her attention; it showed lines of metal carriages driving around a large oval section of road. They were covered in various logos and signs, like the stalls back in Mayflight market, and they were smashing into each other so very fast. It was all terribly exciting – some of them were even on fire!
Her eyes darted from display-to-display but returned every few seconds to the numbered carriages. One such box held two people sat upon a frightfully-coloured sofa, another a rather stern-looking man in a suit. There was no sound coming from any of the boxes, though she assumed that must be a thing they could do.
Erica kept one hand clamped firmly over her face and tugged at Sarah’s dress with the other. The images on the box flickered away, as did those on the billboards and screens above them. The ones that hung from the blimps, too. An image of a blonde woman with a sharp suit and a worried look on her face faded into view. She read from a sheet of paper in front of her. Sarah's attention waned in response and she somewhat begrudgingly pushed away from the window. The words 'Breaking: Alien Invasion!' flashed across the screen in bright red capital letters. This was accompanied by an unflattering picture of the Tirrens. Studious-looking men in neatly pressed lab coats poked and prodded at them, then eagerly jotted their findings down. At the forefront stood the smartly dressed grey-haired man from earlier.
Erica pushed open the door and walked into the shop. Sarah eagerly followed. The interior of the shop felt like something they were more used to, or at least something they could live through. Fans in the ceiling rattled and whirred as they circulated and filtered the air around them. It had an odd kind of smell that you could, but definitely didn't want to, taste; a stale, sweaty odour, but it was an improvement over the stench and drizzle of outside. They closed the door behind them and stood for several joyous moments below a metal vent that blew hot air down at them before they venture further inside the shop.
Pieces of electronics flashed and buzzed and vied for their attention, time and money. Movies, games, hardware, software; every wall and nearly every surface plastered with signs and labels, ludicrous prices and indecipherable payment plans that seemed to nearly always involve organ donation. Sarah ran her hand covetously across the rows of electronics as she walked through the shop, and stopped at each one in turn and jotted down the name and description in her notebook.
A balding, middle-aged man looked up from his newspaper and pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose. He rose gingerly and tucked the end of his tie into his trousers at a jaunty angle to disguise the pasta stain on his shirt. The saffron shirt had been his wife's idea, and she'd insisted it made him look ten years younger. He'd insisted it made him look like an idiot and the only way he'd look younger was if he wore it on his face, but she insisted he stop insisting or else he'd have to make his own dinner. He stalked confidently towards the wide-eyed yokels. How did it go again?
“Hello and welcome to Electric Depot; look at our things. My name is Clark, how may I help you?” he said in the sort of calm yet enthusiastic tone that people that want to sell you pyramid schemes use. That wasn't quite how it went, but it was Friday afternoon, and it would just have to do.
“Um, oh, yes. The boxes in the window,” Erica said.
“Colour televisions,” Sarah corrected.
“Colour televisions. We need to hear what the people inside them are saying. It's very important.” Erica spoke slowly and deliberately to get her point across, quite like how tourists think speaking their own language slowly and with an O at the end of every word will make the locals understand them.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Is she normally like this?”
“This is her on a good day.” Sarah patted her sister’s shoulder and turned back to Clark. “We need you to adjust the noise on the televisions, it's very important.” She pointed towards the long shelf of televisions behind him, they were all showed the same broadcast as the ones in the window.
Clark turned towards the array of unaffordable televisions of not-lasting quality and slowly removed his glasses. He leant across and turned the dial – it was the same broadcast on every channel. He adjusted a separate knob on the central television and shakily reclined against the counter behind him.
“And now we go live to our correspondent on the street,” the newsreader said.
“Thank you, Kathryn. We are live outside of Trinity Park, where in the early hours of this morning, it was said that two extraterrestrial beings – and I stress official reports do not refer to them as aliens – were brought for interrogation. We've been told that we can expect some kind of official briefing within the next hour or so. Back to the studio.”
“How do we get there?” Sarah asked.
“The base? They won't let you in. Now are you going to rent something? Because I need to get home.” He pointed at the television. “I don't know if you noticed.”
“Can you tell us where the base is?”
“Phone a taxi,” Clark snapped.
“Okay, but I have two questions.”
Clark rolled his eyes. “If you promise to leave, I will phone you a taxi to take you there.” He carefully enunciated every word and spoke very slowly, like how locals deal with tourists that come up to them and speak slowly in their own language while adding an O to the end of everything. It was a zero sum game, where each side would think the other less and less intelligent until one side would be reduced to grunting to get their point across. At which point, they would lose the game entirely. Clark had won this game, and the small girl seemed equal parts delighted and mystified when he picked up the telephone and called for a taxi. “Ten minutes,” he said. “It's stopped raining, so you can wait outside. And for heaven's sake, cover your faces. There’s so much filth out there that you could inhale a whole dinosaur before lunch.” He held the door open and gave the girls a weary smile as he waved them out.
Ten minutes passed like ten hours as their eyes watered and their noses ran a marathon down their faces. They secured a handkerchief over their noses, but it didn't make them feel any better, only like they were waiting to rob someone. A bright yellow carriage pulled up in front of them and flashed its lights. The dim, slightly cracked sign on the top of it read 'Taxi'. A corpulent man with a face like a bar of soap opened the side window and spoke very politely in a confusingly aggressive tone.
“You the ones Clark called for?”
“Yes, that's us,” Erica said.
“All right, get in, then.”
Erica opened the door and crawled across the seat. The interior of the taxi was tattered and had mostly given up on trying to look like anything at all really, especially the interior of a taxi. The material lining the roof had begun to wear away and revealed unpainted slithers of the framework and hints of what the material looked like before more than decade of nicotine was a thing. It might not have been a problem had the wiring for the lighting not been hanging down like murderous strands of spaghetti that required a constant awareness, especially when going around corners.
The seats were covered in a fabric that looked like a large tarantula died and some industrious soul had found a use for it. It was foul, smelly and quite sadly bordering on indestructible. When the end of the world really did come, all that would be left were tardigrades and the seat covers of every taxi ever made. Sarah clambered in and shut the door behind her. It gave a satisfying click-clack sound as it did.
“What are these?” she asked. She held up a thick nylon strap.
“They're, er, seat-belts. You fasten them over you so you don't break my window if I have to stop all sudden-like.”
“Oh, okay.” Sarah wrestled back and forth with the belt but managed admirably.
“Where to, then?”
“Do you know where the base is?” Erica asked. “There.”
“Oh, you're army brats. That would explain literally everything." Erica looked out the window as the car pulled away. Whole social ecosystems crammed inside tiny metal boxes zoomed by for destinations and adventures unknown. She stared intently at each one and tried to get a feel for the people around her. Aside from her own family, she had never seen another human before, and here there were thousands of them speeding along uneven stretches of tarmac to indeterminate destinations in metal boxes that belched filth and smoke into the sky.
How many people in each building, she wondered, how many millions more were there? If it hadn't been for the smell and very much everything else about the taxi, she could have seen herself getting used to the travelling. Sarah watched the counter that took pride of place in the centre of dashboard. As they travelled, the numbers gradually increased – something she noted next to the rough sketch she’d drawn in her notebook.
“What are the numbers for?” she asked.
“It's the, uh, meter. You really are from out of town, aren't you? Clark said you was. It keeps track of how much the ride will cost.”
“Oh, I see,” she said. She returned to her notebook and wrote, ‘Oh, bugger, what are we going to do?’ then passed it across to her sister. Eric nodded, then closed the notebook and passed it back.
“So, how do you know Uncle Clark?”
The man adjusted the rear-view mirror and focused on Erica. “We have the odd drink down the pub. He never mentioned having a-”
“-Sister. Isla. Lives out of town. Haven't spoken in years, trying to patch things up.”
“Oh, I see. Hope everything works out for him. Clark's not a bad guy, really.”
“He's really not, which is why he said he'd pay for our fare. He's a very kind man that just wants the best for his only nieces. He said he'd pay you next time he saw you, if that’s all right.”
“Typical bloody Clark, if you'll pardon the language. Army base, then? You believe this alien nonsense?”
“The people on the television seem adamant, but what do they know?”
“Yeah, don’t get me started on that lot. I mean, look at them.” He raised a single finger from the steering wheel and pointed to the crowd that snaked its way around the hill in front of them. “That’s the base there. Good luck getting anywhere with those rats in the way.”
“Don’t worry,” Sarah said. “We’re usually good with rats.”
