Arrival (11 page)

‘Nothing,' grunted Peter.

‘Peter,' said Jordan gently.

‘It's nothing, all right?' Peter snapped. ‘They're just – I used to be really good mates with those guys, back when we were the only kids our age in Phoenix.'

‘And now…?' Jordan prodded.

‘And now I'm not,' he said bitterly. ‘A month ago, when the really big rush of people came into Phoenix, those guys suddenly started cutting me out of their lives. Shutting down conversations as soon as I came near them, slipping off after school and not telling me where they were going…'

Jordan stared at him. ‘You don't think they have something to do with – ?'

‘Calvin?' Peter snorted. ‘Yeah, right. Those three couldn't keep something like that quiet if their lives depended on it.'

Jordan shrugged. ‘Well, you know them better than I do. But I'm starting to think we're too far down the rabbit hole to rule anything –'

‘Whoa,' said Peter, closing his laptop suddenly.

‘Whoa, what?' I said, looking around.

‘Rabbit hole,' said Peter, which wasn't exactly helpful. He stood up and slung his bag over his shoulder. ‘Library,' he said. ‘C'mon!'

‘Huh?' said Jordan. ‘Peter, what are you talking about?'

But he was already halfway across the playground.

Jordan and I grabbed our bags and chased after him.

The bell went as we reached the building, and kids started pouring into the stairwell between us and Peter. By the time we caught up with him, he was already halfway through the library door.

The library was empty except for a couple of Year 12 kids studying up the back. Peter glanced at the loans desk, saw that no-one was there, then shrugged and raced across to the fiction section.

‘Carroll, right?' he said, running his finger along a row of books. Every single book looked unread.

‘What are you doing?' I said, surprised that Peter even knew his way around a bookshelf.

‘Never mind, found it.' Peter pulled a paperback from the shelf and waved it in front of us.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

‘Is that supposed to mean something?' Jordan asked, glancing at me.

‘It means I finally figured out where – oh hey, miss!'

Mrs Lewis, the school librarian, had just appeared from around the corner, pushing a trolley loaded with books. She was an older lady, somewhere between my mum and my grandma, with a wrinkled face and hair that looked like it had just crossed the line from mostly brown to mostly grey.

‘Hello, Peter,' she smiled. ‘Shouldn't you be on your way to your next lesson?'

‘Free period,' Peter lied.

Mrs Lewis pursed her lips at him.

‘Okay, fine,' said Peter, ‘I'm supposed to be in health – but I just need to check something really quickly!'

‘Go on then,' she sighed. ‘But let no-one say that I didn't
try
to get you to do the right thing!' She stuck a book from her trolley back onto the shelf. ‘And don't come running to me if someone catches you skipping class.'

Peter grinned. ‘No worries, miss.'

‘And don't forget you've still got
Utopia
out,' she told him, shelving a couple more books. ‘It was due back last Friday.'

‘Can I have it for another week?' Peter asked, as though oblivious to the disbelieving looks that Jordan and I were shooting him. ‘I'm still reading it.'

‘Oh, I suppose so,' she said, smiling at Peter like he was her favourite grandchild. She grabbed onto her trolley again and disappeared down the next row of shelves.

‘Thanks, miss!' Peter called after her.

He turned back and caught me smirking at him.

‘What?'

‘Bit old for you, don't you think?' I whispered.

‘What's that supposed to mean?' said Peter defensively.

‘Nothing,' I said, still grinning. ‘I just didn't realise you and the librarian had such a
connection.

' ‘Shut up,' said Peter, punching me in the arm. ‘She just likes me because I borrow a lot of books.'

Jordan raised an eyebrow. ‘You?'

‘What, you think I'm illiterate just because I don't like school?' said Peter. ‘For your information, I'm not
dumb
, I have an
attitude problem.

' ‘Ah,' said Jordan seriously. ‘Of course.'

‘Just ask Staples!' said Peter. ‘I'm sure she'd be happy to tell you how much wasted potential I have.'

‘So are you ready to explain why you dragged us here in the first place?' I asked.

Peter's eyes flashed back down to the book in his hand like he'd forgotten he was even holding it. ‘Right!' he said excitedly, opening it up and flipping through the pages. ‘Yeah, okay, so you know all that stuff Crazy Bill was shouting out at the airport?' he whispered. ‘All that raving about the trial and all that?'

‘What about it?' I asked.

‘It wasn't just raving,' said Peter, frantically turning pages. ‘I
knew
I'd heard it before and I finally figured out why. It's a poem, from this book, somewhere near the beginning, I –'

Peter froze, eyes glued to the open book. Then he slowly turned the book around and held the page up in front of our faces. Like he'd said, there was a poem there. The words were all arranged into the shape of a mouse's tail and I recognised some of them from Crazy Bill's dummy spit at the airport.

But it wasn't the poem that had stopped Peter in his tracks. A picture had been drawn across the page in black marker, over the top of the printed text.

It was kind of hard to figure out what we were looking at. There was a cluster of boxes, like a bird's eye view of a little town, with a line stretching out that might have been a road, and lots of messy scribbles that I guessed were probably trees. Then I noticed two big Xs, one on the road and one in the trees, and suddenly realised what I was seeing.

‘A map,' said Peter. ‘That crazy psycho left us a map.'

Chapter 16

W
EDNESDAY
, M
AY
13
92
DAYS

I sat on my bed, flicking through the 150 still-not-working satellite channels, waiting for Peter to show up.

We'd spent the rest of yesterday trying to make sense of Crazy Bill's map. It hadn't taken long to figure out that the little town was Phoenix, and that the two Xs were places along the main road out of town.

But after a whole afternoon of throwing around theories about what could be out there that Crazy Bill was trying to point us to, we'd eventually decided – much to Peter's disappointment – that the only way we were ever going to find out was by following the map and checking it out for ourselves.

Thanks to the curfew, there wasn't really much we could do until the weekend, but we'd decided to meet at Jordan's house after school to come up with some sort of plan. Jordan was already there, but her parents had asked her to come straight home from school for a family meeting or something, so Peter and I had both gone home to wait for a couple of hours before we went over.

For a while, I'd actually been trying to catch up on some homework. But when you know the human race is about to be wiped off the face of the earth, quadratic equations suddenly seem a whole new level of pointless.

At about ten to five, the doorbell rang. I grabbed my backpack and went downstairs.

But when I got to the door, it wasn't Peter. It was Mr Ketterley, the guy who'd met Mum and me at the airport. It was strange to think that had only been a week ago.

‘Hey there, Luke,' he said. ‘Is your mother around?'

‘No,' I said slowly, wondering what this was about. ‘She's still at work. Why?'

‘Just doing my rounds,' Mr Ketterley smiled. ‘Thought I'd drop by to check that you two are settling in okay. What about you, buddy? Got everything you need?'

I could think of about a hundred different responses to that question, but I wasn't about to say any of them out loud.

‘What's the story with the phones?' I asked, already knowing what the answer would be.

‘Still working on it,' said Mr Ketterley. ‘We're having a tough time figuring out the exact source of the problem. But we'll get there, kiddo, don't you worry about that. I'll be sure to let you know as soon as we're back online.'

‘Thanks.'

‘You miss your dad, huh?' he said, looking genuinely sorry about it.

I shrugged. I'd been trying not to think about it too much. ‘I just don't like being so cut off, you know?'

‘Why don't you write him a letter?' Mr Ketterley suggested. ‘Stick it in the mailbox and they'll send it out with the next supply truck.'

‘Yeah,' I said, catching sight of Peter wheeling his bike in through the gate. ‘Yeah, okay, I'll do that.'

‘G'day, Aaron,' said Peter, coming up the path, looking slightly confused to see him there.

‘Oh hey, Pete,' said Mr Ketterley. ‘You two off somewhere?'

‘Friend's place,' said Peter.

‘Right.' Mr Ketterley smiled again. ‘I'd better be on my way, then. Let your mother know I came by, will you, Luke?

‘Sure.'

‘And make sure you two are home by the time it gets dark,' he said, looking up at the sky. A strange look flashed across his face. ‘You wouldn't want Officer Calvin to catch you breaking his new curfew.'

‘So, you're still not buying any of this?' I said as we rode past the Shackleton Building and out behind the school a few minutes later. ‘Even after the map?'

‘The map proves nothing, mate,' said Peter. ‘If I got into your maths textbook and wrote you a letter saying the saucer people were invading, would you believe that too?'

‘What do you think is out there then?' I asked. ‘I mean, he's obviously got
something
to show us.'

‘How should I know?' said Peter. ‘Maybe Crazy Bill's got a shack out there in the bush or something. Turn right up here,' he added, pointing to a side street up ahead.

‘A shack?' I smirked as we rounded the corner.

‘And he's, what, inviting us over for dinner?'

‘All right, genius, what do
you
reckon is out there?'

‘Dunno,' I admitted. ‘Don't think he's trying to organise another meeting, though. At least, that's not all he's doing. There are two places marked, right? I reckon there's stuff out there that he wants us to see.'

‘Oh, good,' said Peter. ‘So you've narrowed it down to
something.

' ‘Two somethings,' I corrected.

‘Right, well, that's
much
better.' He pointed up ahead again. ‘It's on the end here. The one with the swing set.'

‘Uh-huh,' I said. ‘Do I want to know how you know
exactly
where Jordan's house is?'

‘Probably not,' he grinned.

‘You know, I think you may have actually crossed the line into stalker territory.'

‘Nah,' said Peter. ‘It's only stalking if you get obsessive about it.'

The whole town of Phoenix was pretty much just one big ring of housing blocks with the town centre in the middle. Jordan lived at the far end of her street, which meant that her house pressed right up against the bushland on one side, with only a bike path and about fifty metres of grass separating her place from the trees.

We pulled up at the house and dropped our bikes on the front lawn.

‘What I don't understand,' I said as we walked up the front path, ‘is why Bill thought shouting out some random poem was a good way of leading us to his map. What made him think we'd ever figure out that his jabbering was something from a book?'

‘Probably just the first thing that popped into his head,' Peter said with a shrug. ‘I mean, he didn't exactly have a lot of thinking time, did he?'

‘So you don't reckon he drew that map until
after
the airport?'

‘Why would he?' said Peter. ‘If security hadn't come and broken up our meeting, he could've just shown us this stuff himself, right?'

‘But then how'd he get into the library without being seen?' I asked, reaching for the doorbell.

Peter didn't have an answer to that one.

We heard the sound of running footsteps inside and then a girl, maybe five or six years old, opened the door. She was like a half-size scale model of Jordan, exactly the same, right down to the Phoenix school uniform and the braids in her hair.

‘Who are you?' she asked, gazing up at us.

‘We're here to see Jordan,' Peter said.

The little girl's eyes went wide and a huge smile spread across her face. ‘Are you her
boyfriends?'
she gasped.

‘No,' I said quickly, ‘we're just –'

‘You
are!'
she said. ‘I know you are!' She ran away down the hall, giggling, ‘Jordan! Jordan! Your boyfriends are here to see you! They want to give you a kiss!'

Peter shrugged. I raised an eyebrow at him and walked inside.

This was the first time since arriving in Phoenix that I'd been inside anyone else's house, and it was a really weird experience. It was like walking into my own home after school one day and discovering that another family had moved in and replaced me. Jordan's house was
exactly
the same as mine – same rooms, same furniture, same everything.

Mini-Jordan reappeared in the hall, still giggling, dragging the real Jordan by the arm.

‘Come on!' she said, pulling Jordan down the hall with both hands. ‘See? Here they are! Now, which one are you going to marry?'

Jordan sighed and said, ‘I see you've met my sister.' There was a weird look on her face. A sort of shell-shocked expression.

Jordan's little sister was staring back up at Peter and me now. Her face was twisted in concentration, like she was sizing the two of us up.