The Serene Invasion (6 page)

“Uganda. She’s a doctor working with the emergency services in Karamoja.”

Cleveland’s rheumy eyes widened. “Not the most... stable, shall we say, area in the world. Your fiancée must be a remarkable person, Geoffrey.”

Allen smiled. “She is,” he said.

The old man patted Allen’s hand like a beneficent grandfather. “Well, it has been wonderful talking to you. I hope you have a pleasant time in Uganda. Take my advice and visit Lake Edward in the south. Just the place for young lovers.” With a smile he lifted himself from the seat and limped back along the aisle.

Allen glanced through the window and stared down at the brilliant blue, beaten expanse of the ocean, feeling obscurely troubled. It was always the same when he was forced to consider his parents, and their deaths.

He tipped back his seat, closed his eyes, and tried to fill his mind with other things.

H
E WAS AWOKEN
a little later by the sound of activity around him. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. Passengers were releasing their folding trays, preparatory for whatever culinary delights Air Europe had prepared for dinner.

He ate a bland curry, overcooked dal and undercooked rice, followed oddly by a slice of polystyrene Victoria sponge, then glanced at the time on his softscreen, which he’d fastened round his forearm. It was five o’clock British Summer Time. Estimated time of arrival in Entebbe was a little after midnight, Ugandan time. He’d booked a hire car and would drive up to Kallani overnight. Time with Sally was precious and he didn’t want to waste a second.

They were flying over the coastline of Northern Africa. The scalloped littoral of Morocco showed as a series of golden scimitars, the destination – before the revolution – of hordes of sun-starved northern Europeans and Chinese.

The plane thrummed inland, and an hour later the first of the Chinese mega-cities came into view.

It looked, he thought, like some kind of computer circuit board, a grid-pattern of prefabricated buildings and domes extending for tens of miles across the parched land. Monorails connected outlying towns which were rapidly being absorbed into the sprawling Cathay conurbation, eating up the terrain towards the Atlas mountains.

At first Allen had viewed with indifference the wholesale economic invasion of northern Africa. It struck him as the inevitable process of colonisation that the communist party of China had so vilified the West for in the past – the inevitable, rapacious rampaging of a regime turning from communism to capitalism.

Sally had set him right on that, listing a catalogue of abuses, both humanitarian and ecological, being committed by the fascist mafia, as she called them, of Beijing. She’d spent an hour telling him about specific instances of Chinese abuse, before relenting and changing the subject.

Afterwards, Allen had thought twice about suggesting ordering a Mandarin take-away.

He unrolled his softscreen and accessed the file containing the images he’d taken on his last trip to Uganda. He scrolled through shots of Sally beside Lake Kwania, looking tired and drawn after a shift at the medical centre lasting for three days with precious little sleep.

The pictures showed a thin-faced woman, not in the least photogenic, with a pinched expression and straggly hair. She was thin, pared down by a combination of a bad diet and overwork, constantly edgy and nervous and burning with the conviction of her political and humanitarian passions.

Allen loved her. For the first time in his life he had found someone he could trust, who he could talk to about his past, who listened to him and understood. As he gazed down at her thinly-smiling face, he realised that she was beautiful, and he felt a little drunk with the thought that in a few hours they’d be together again.

He noticed the first of the domes ten minutes later. He was staring out of the window, watching the rilled foothills of the Atlas mountains drift serenely by far below. They were flying over the southern slopes of the range now, and ahead was the vast stretch of the Sahara. He made out a flash of silver to the west, tucked into the foothills, and assumed it to be the glint of a river. Then he saw another, and another, and was surprised to note that they were domes, great silver hemispheres straddling towns and villages – perhaps a dozen in all, of various sizes, covering the centres of occupation along a winding road that snaked through the foothills.

Ahead to the right was a sizable town, and as the plane overflew it he had a closer view of the dome that arched over its entirety, encompassing its sprawling suburbs and two-storey central buildings like a vast snow globe.

Cleveland, making another trip to the loo, stopped in the aisle. “I suspect it’s the Chinese again,” he said, indicating the dome.

Allen frowned. “But why on Earth would they cover entire towns and villages?” he asked.

The old man shook his head. “They’ll have their reasons,” he said. “They always do, the Chinese – and you’ll find that it will make absolute sense in the long term.”

Cleveland shuffled on and Allen returned his attention to the silvery dome far below. The minute shapes of cars and trucks had halted on the road that appeared to run right into the sheer wall, and he made out what might have been tiny, ant-like crowds of people down there.

He unrolled his softscreen, accessed the net and was about to tap in Africa + Domes + Chinese, when the screen flashed a systems error and closed down. He strapped the screen round his forearm again, eased back his seat and stared out at the passing land far below.

T
HEY WERE FLYING
over the Sahara an hour later when the plane stopped.

The first thing he noticed was the sudden, utter silence – startling after the constant thrumming of the engines. He looked out of the window. Five metres ahead of where he sat, the silver wing – which should have been vibrating ever so slightly – was absolutely still... and, more worryingly, the line of the aileron was unshifting against the arabesque of sand dunes of the distant desert. Startled, he peered directly down. They were passing over a road that cut from right to left through the sand, with a tiny truck on its tarmac’d surface. As he stared, the vehicle remained exactly where it was, unmoving in relation to the line of the wing.

Only then did he look up, across the aisle, and realise that his fellow passengers were likewise frozen. The woman across from him was lifting a sweet to her mouth, her fingers stilled an inch from her lips. Beyond her, a man was in the process of turning a page of the in-flight magazine. In the aisle, a smiling hostess was as immobile as a shop window mannequin.

Allen was about to stand up in alarm, attempt to see if everyone was similarly stricken with this paralysis, when an incredible rush of heat passed through his head and he was no longer aboard the plane.

He was flat on his back, seemingly floating in mid-air. He could feel no support beneath him. All was grey above. He tried to move his head, to look to either side, but was unable to do so. He wanted to cry out, but he could not move his mouth to articulate the words. He felt naked, though he was unable to look down the length of his body to see if this were so.

Later, he would wonder why he did not panic. It would have been a very reasonable reaction, given the circumstances. The fact was that he felt very calm, not in the least frightened. He felt a certain odd distance, a sense of remove he had once experienced when being sedated for a minor operation.

He recalled articulating the thought,
What is happening to me?
– and receiving a reply, as if in his head:
Do not be afraid.

He wanted to laugh out loud but was unable to do so.

Seconds later he saw a bright light directly above him, dazzling. Silhouetted in the light was the outline of a human form, leaning over him. He felt only peace, as if he were in the presence of someone who, he knew, wanted only the best for him. The head-and-shoulders shape was dark, shadowy, there for a second and then gone.

He felt something ice cold on his chest, frozen pin-pricks dancing up his sternum towards his head. His instinct to cry out in alarm was stilled by the strange conviction that all was well, that he had no cause to panic.

Even when he saw what was dancing up the length of his body, climbing over his chin, then his lips and nose, and progressing to his forehead, he did not attempt to cry out. He felt no dread or horror, even though what might have been a flashing, silver-limbed mechanical spider was squatting above his forehead and lowering an ovipositor towards his skin.

Later he would describe what followed as being like the sensation of a dentist’s drill, accompanied by a high-pitched sound, felt rather than heard, a droning conducted through the bone which the ovipositor was presumably boring. Oddly he felt no pain.

A second later he experienced a blinding mental flash – which he could only describe, later, as feeling as if all his synapses had fired at once.

Then the spider, its job done, was dancing back down his face and body. He saw the human shape again, dark but benign, lean over him as if in inspection.

He was washed with a sensation of ineffable peace.

He blacked out, and an instant later was back in his seat on the plane.

He sat very still, sweating, and gripped the arm-rests. The engine was droning, the plane vibrating slightly. A glance through the window assured him they were in motion once again, the wing shaking, the desert passing by below. He glanced across the aisle: the woman was chewing the sweet that just seconds ago she had conveyed towards her mouth, and her neighbour was flipping through the magazine. The smiling air hostess approached, eyes flicking professionally over her charges.

She registered something in his expression and leaned towards him, her smile expanding in query. “Can I help?”

Before he could stop himself, he said, “Is everything okay? I mean... the plane...?”

She must have dealt with a thousand air-phobics in her time. She said reassuringly, “Everything is fine; no need to worry. We’ve lost on-line capability, but it should be up and running shortly. We will be arriving at Entebbe in a little over three hours.”

“I thought...” He shook his head. “No, I must have been dreaming.”

She smiled again. “If I can get you anything?”

“No. No, I’m fine. I’m sorry.”

“Not at all,” she said, laid a perfectly manicured set of crimson-glossed nails on his hand, then moved off down the aisle.

The aftermath left him feeling both embarrassed and frightened. What he had experienced was as real as everything else that had happened over the course of the past few hours: the plastic meals he’d consumed, his chat with Cleveland...

The plane had stopped dead in its flight, along with everyone aboard... except him. Then he’d found himself floating naked in a grey space, with a spider drilling into...

He gave a small involuntary gasp and reached up to touch his brow, expecting to feel the messy evidence of an incision there.

All he felt was a coating of clammy sweat.

He recalled the peace he’d experienced, the reassuring words in his head, exhorting him not to fear. The odd thing was that he had felt no fear then, while undergoing whatever had been happening to him, but now, looking back at the episode, he was overcome by a wave of retrospective dread.

Could some form of dream be held accountable? He thought not. Epilepsy, then? A brain seizure resulting in a hypnagogic hallucination? But the experience had seemed so damned real. He had seen his fellow passengers freeze... and yet they had experienced nothing.

He stood and walked down the aisle, scanning the seats for the ex-MP. He found the old man reading a Kindle. Cleveland looked up and smiled.

Allen said, “This might sound strange...” He paused, licked his lips, and was aware of Cleveland, and the elderly lady beside him, looking up at him expectantly. He went on, “You didn’t happen to notice anything...
odd
, a few minutes ago?”

“Odd, dear boy?”

He wished he’d never asked the question. “I mean... did the plane seem to... No, I’m sorry... I must have been hallucinating. I must have dropped off... a nightmare.”

Cleveland reached out, solicitous at Allen’s agitated state. “Are you sure you’re okay, Geoffrey?”

Allen smiled. “Absolutely. A dream, that’s all. I’m sorry...”

Cleveland smiled his reassurance that it was no bother at all, and Allen returned to his seat.

He stared down at the distant desert and attempted to regain some measure of the sense of peace he had experienced during the hallucination.

E
NTEBBE RUSHED HIM
with its usual sensory overload of chaotic, over-populated, frenetic activity he should have been accustomed to by now – from his many visits to cities in Africa and Asia – but which always struck him anew.

The press of importuning humanity and the accompanying noise was a shocking assault. Crowds surged in the streets outside the airport, a morass of brightly coloured humanity seething even now, a little after midnight, under the glare of halogen floodlights. The constant babble of voices, blaring music, and traffic noise only confused the visual chaos – and, as if this were not enough, the stench of Africa, diesel, dung and cooking food, overlay everything. Even the humidity, he thought, was an unwelcome sensory burden.