The Hipster From Outer Space (The Hipster Trilogy Book 1) (6 page)

BOOK: The Hipster From Outer Space (The Hipster Trilogy Book 1)
13.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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“Sorry?” June said.

“Have you not been listening to all my talk about the universe, the … the fucking shortness of life?”
 

“What did you say?”
 

June’s voice shifted. The swearword seemed to slap her out of her daze.
 

“Sorry June, but maybe I’ve not been making myself clear. It’s my fault, not yours, it really is.”

“So are you coming to the training? Are you going to help the team?”

“June, I’ve been at every single training day, every event, every rally, everything for the last five, maybe six years …” She took a deep breath. “Of course I’m going to be there.”

“Okay, brilliant news,” June said. “I’ll update the Facebook group and maybe even send a Tweet about it to our followers. Carol is on the team.”
 

June hung up and Carol sighed.
 

It didn’t matter, she thought. “We’ll all be dead soon anyway.”

Indie’s ears perked and she sat up. A car was pulling up on the driveway.
 

Aidan Black

Aidan had been following the long-haired man from the café for twenty minutes, before he saw him turn into an empty cul-de-sac. He walked all the way up the street past several houses of nothing and entered the one on the end.
 

It was semi-detached. The windows were boarded up with metal sheets and there was a brown Ford Fiesta parked outside the front. The front wheel and the rear bumper were missing. The windscreen was buried in a sea of parking tickets. And there were bin bags taped to where the rear passenger seat window should’ve been.

Aidan waited and watched from the entrance to the cul-de-sac, hands in his pockets, chewing high-strength mint chewing gum. He waited twenty minutes before he decided that he could go and get the van.

By the time he parked up, it was starting to rain. It was the fine rain that foreshadowed the coming storm.
 

He got out, double checked that his tools were in the back, and locked it up.

He stepped into the garden through the open gate — all rust and black paint. The grass was overgrown and there was a kid’s rusty bike with a bush growing through it.

He did his best to step quietly. He looked at the small gaps in the boarded windows to see if he was being watched.

It doesn’t matter.

“It does if I get arrested,” he said.
 

He walked up to the front door and looked into the house through the frosted glass but he couldn’t see anything. No movement. Nothing.

He walked around the side of the house where he’d seen the long-haired man walk, treading as carefully as he could. He could see where a fence would have been, but it was now open to any and all squatters.

Harsh breaths was laced with clean menthol. He took the gum from his mouth and pressed it into the brick wall of the house.
 

He looked for a weapon but couldn’t see anything.

You don’t need a weapon.

Aidan peeked his head around the corner of the house and saw a back garden worse than the front — more grass, a children’s climbing frame in pieces, and a shed with broken windows. But no people.

He held his breath to listen but still couldn’t hear anyone.
 

He heard cars passing, trees swaying in the wind, and children playing somewhere in the distance, but he couldn’t hear … Wait …


Glass crushing underfoot somewhere in the house. Maybe upstairs? He couldn’t see anything in the window above his head. He took a step further into the garden. The back door to the kitchen was open. He took a step inside.

It looked like the kitchen from his childhood. In fact, everything about this house reminded him of his childhood. The house he grew up in was different. As different as two houses could be, but there was something about the rusty faucets and the dirty floor. Those fucking rusty faucets. He could swear he’d used those faucets in his youth. It was like someone had moved the faucets of his parent’s home and slotted them here just to fuck with him.

Aidan took another step forward and a rat jumped out and ran past his foot. Aidan shook his head in disgust.
 

“Fucking rats,” he muttered under his breath.
 

The floor was as dirty as they come but it had been swept. All the empty beer cans and food had been pushed to the sides. He was tempted to turn the faucet to see if the place had running water, but decided against it.

He held his breath again and listened.

Nothing.

He carefully placed one foot in front of the other, again and again. The thought of taking his suit to the dry cleaners came to his mind. He did his best to forget, to focus.

Once through the kitchen, he was in the empty living room, and, just like the kitchen, it had been tidied. The crap and the rubbish had been pushed to the sides. Someone had been nesting.

Still no weapons. He clenched his fist and stepped with more urgency, expecting to see the long-haired man at any time.

Rip his tongue out.

“I won’t do that,” he whispered. “I’m not going to rip a poor fucker’s tongue out.”

He made his way to the exposed stairway and walked upwards. They creaked under his weight. He held his breath. He pushed on and picked up the pace. At the top of the stairs was the bathroom, which he looked in first.
 

Broken mirror pieces on the floor. No sink. A toilet with no seat. Other than an empty pizza box and some old cans of Special Brew, the shower was empty.

He turned back on himself walked into the adjacent bedroom, now making more and more noise.
 

“Come on, I’m not here to hurt you,” he said aloud. He pushed open the other bedroom door. “I’m here to help you.”

Kill him. Rip his tongue out. Burn his skin.
 

“No!” he shouted as he walked into the master bedroom. “I’m not going to do that.” There was a soiled bed mattress on the floor and rubbish pushed to the edges of the room.

Find him. Kill him. If you want to be successful you’ve got to …

“Shut up,” he said. “For fuck’s sake.”
 

He looked around, his fists ready. But he was alone. He breathed in through his nose three times, and then out through his mouth three times. It was a calming technique. It worked.

“Sixty foot and made of diamond,” he whispered.

He walked to the bedroom window to see if the man had escaped when he wasn’t looking.

He’s here.

Aidan heard the footsteps too late. He heard a thud, followed by an immense surge of pain running down the back of his neck.

Carol Francis

Jim groaned as he sat down on the reclining chair in the living room. He groaned more as he put the leg rest up. He pulled his baseball cap down so the peak covered his eyes and it wasn’t long afterwards that he drifted off to sleep.
 

A man at peace.

Carol had been watching him from the kitchen. From where she was stood she could see through the glass kitchen door, through the glass living room door, all the way to the other side of the house. In this case she was looking at Jim’s part of the house.

Her part was the kitchen. It wasn’t a derogatory thing and it was never an official rule. It just ended up that way. Like moons to their planets, they’d settled and found themselves caught.

Carol preferred the kitchen anyway. Full of dog agility memorabilia, photos of Indie when she was a pup, and even the dogs before her.

It’d been a long time since Carol had awoken on Earth. She found herself trapped in a female human body. She woke to find herself lying next to a naked man called Jim. Apparently it was her husband. She didn’t like him at first, but eventually she got used to sack of meat and life.

And then she lived on. She aged, like the others. She had to get a job and pay the mortgage, like the others. And she even went through menopause, like the others. Females, at least. She also gave birth to two human children — Katie and Jake. One was now a veterinary nurse, and the other was Jake.
 

It had been a long time since they’d left this house in the middle of the countryside in England, but they visited every now and again. Christmas, odd birthdays, whenever there was alcohol.
 

Carol grabbed the kettle and filled it with water. She took two mugs, yellow and blue pottery given to her on her wedding anniversary, and put a tea bag in each one. She put a spoonful of sugar in Jim’s and half a sugar in hers. She was cutting down.

As the water boiled she stared out the window, at the garden where the children had grown up and played. The tree that Jake had fallen from and broken his arm. The hole in the fence where Katie had kicked a football. She looked at the grass, which the gardener regularly cut. The shed. The yellowing patch on the wood where Indie kept pissing on it.

She filled the cups with the boiling water, stirred in the milk, and took one of the mugs into the living room.

As she entered Jim awoke with a “Huh?” and a “What the…” and then he sat himself up. When he saw the mug of hot tea in Carol’s hand he relaxed and said “Thanks”.

He then grabbed the remote and turned on the TV.

“Cracking game on the course today, Caz,” he said.
 

“Yeah?”

“Couple of birdies. Nothing major, but it was on eight where I normally struggle, but today … It just seemed to go right.”

Carol nodded and smiled at her husband.

She looked at the living room they’d decorated. The clay cat ornaments they’d brought back from their holiday in Turkey. The reclining chairs that cost them a bomb. The wooden floors that she’d insisted on Jim fitting, even though she didn’t care.

Jim changed the channel to some sports programme — reports on the Tour de France. That was her cue to leave and make her way back to the kitchen. She stroked the wallpaper as she went. It was the wallpaper that they had picked together.

“Love you, Jim,” she said.

“Huh?” he said as he sipped from his tea, his mind fixed on the men in Lycra riding bikes up hills.

She closed the living room door, and made her way back into the kitchen where her tea was waiting.
 

She drank from it. The first time she was given tea she thought it was the worst thing in the world. The bitterness of it. That was around thirty years ago, when she woke up in that body, in that life, and she’d been stuck there ever since.
 

She went along with it at first because she thought it would be advantageous. The whole family thing was giving her food and shelter and insight into a world she’d only seen from afar.
 

Of course there were questions. She didn’t know anyone’s name. She didn’t know her own address. She didn’t know who The Beatles were.

Her family thought she was ill. A condition or something. The doctors had a name for it.
 

But now here she was.

She drank her tea and watched her husband through the opening in the doors. She drank and watched and realised that she may well love the man, just like a real human, but it didn’t change the fact that he was about to die, along with everyone else. The planet, the people, the species. It was all coming to an end and there was nothing she could do but die with the people she loved.

Moomamu The Thinker

So …

First day on planet Earth. What a piece of shit.

The main thing Moomamu noticed was the clusters of human beings running around. They were acting like their lives meant something, like his. They didn’t realise that he’d seen so much life come and go on all manner of planets, even asteroids, in all manner of forms. Life comes and goes. There’s nothing special about it.
 

He didn’t care to guess, but he would estimate that there were around seven billion humans on the planet … give or take.

Well, that was nothing. It was no miracle.

Moomamu had seen countless life cycles of stars — even galaxies — never mind human beings. Having said that, Moomamu
did
feel a lot better now he knew he had a source of income. Currency was important.

It didn’t take him too long to find his way back to the box-room. An hour or so. It was easy for him. He worked it out a lot quicker than any humans would’ve done.

He walked back to the flat building — a big chunk of white with hundreds of doors side by side. Each little door was probably packed to the brim with humans. The thought made him sick.
 

Number 154 was the one he’d found himself in that morning. The one with the female human and the cat. He walked up to the white door and he pushed on it. It didn’t move. It was stuck. He tried pushing harder.

Nothing.

It was jammed. He tried banging his fist against it, and yelling. He tried to use the swear word he’d heard earlier that day.
 

“Fuck,” he said to the door. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

It was non-responsive.

A man and a woman with their spawn in a wheel-cart of some sort walked past him. They avoided his eye contact as they walked to 156. The man pulled out a small metal finger and slotted into a hole in the door. When they pushed against it, the door opened.

“Huh,” Moomamu said.

His own door had a small metal circle with a hole in it. He looked at his own fingers. Far too big. But then he noticed a stick on the floor and he tried that, but it didn’t fit either.

“Fuck,” he said again. But the door remained stuck.

The skies were darkening as the Earth rotated away from the sun’s light and its warmth. His body felt cold. His nipples became firm again.

In quiet desperation he dropped to the floor and sat with his knees up to his chin. The floor was so cold against his skin that his buttocks clenched.

“Well, this is good isn’t it?” he said to the sky, hoping that somewhere up there a Thinker might be watching.
 

There must be one of them up there somewhere. A little blue orb of consciousness just like him, looking down.
 

BOOK: The Hipster From Outer Space (The Hipster Trilogy Book 1)
13.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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