The Serene Invasion (8 page)

A schoolgirl tapped the policeman on the shoulder, then dug around in her satchel. She produced an exercise book and a pencil, which the officer took with what Allen interpreted as a sheepish expression.

Tongue-tip showing in concentration, the officer wrote a line of laborious capital letters and pressed it against the wall of the dome.

Medical centre closed
– Allen read –
attacked yesterday by terrorists
.
I will go and try to find out more.

Allen nodded, a cold feeling of numbness spreading upwards from his chest.

The policeman hurried away.

Allen slumped to the ground and leaned against the sun-warmed wall of the dome, watched in silent sympathy by the schoolgirls on the other side.

CHAPTER THREE

J
AMES
M
ORWELL
J
NR.
liked to think of himself as an altruist.

As a billionaire, his opponents and detractors liked to say, he could afford to be. But the fact was that many of his rich friends and colleagues hoarded their wealth like misers, pathologically opposed to giving away the odd few hundred thousand to good causes. Not James Morwell Jnr... He had a slush fund of five million US dollars which, every year, he dispensed with the largesse of a Victorian philanthropist, bestowing tens of thousands on charities and good causes around the world – tax deductible though it might be.

His father, who had risen from working-class obscurity in inner-city Toronto to become a multi-millionaire before the age of thirty, had insisted that James’s philanthropy was nothing more than a sop to his conscience. “You’re a lily-livered milksop, boy, and you don’t like the darker side of what we do...”

Which was wrong, James had tried to argue to no avail. He had no qualms about the millions he invested in the arms industry, and certainly none about the millions he took from it in profits. War was a function of what it meant to be a human being, and always had been; if people were willing to fight, then Morwell Enterprises was more than willing to furnish them with the means to do so. And anyway, these days the arms that he supplied to various regimes around the world functioned often as a deterrent against military aggressors – so his detractors had no moral legs to stand on.

Not that the arms industry was the only arrow in Morwell Enterprises’ well-stocked quiver. He owned, at the last reckoning, over a thousand companies worldwide which traded in everything from cosmetics to couture, oil to nuclear energy. He even owned three of the top ten sub-orbital airlines.

But his abiding pride – perhaps because it had been the branch of Morwell Enterprises that his father had been least interested in – were the dozen companies which gave citizens the information they needed to make judgements about the world in which they lived and worked. He owned the world’s largest internet newsfeed, TV channels in every continent, a thousand newspapers globally, and three of the biggest publishing companies in the West.

It was said, and Morwell was proud to quote the statistic, that on average nine out of ten individuals on the face of the planet digested news put out by some organ of Morwell Enterprises every day.

Little wonder that he was a personal friend of the current US president, the Republican Lucas Blanchfield, and counted several of the British royal family as intimate acquaintances.

Even his father, a famous misanthropist who guarded his privacy with the same suspicion as he hoarded his millions, had not had anything like the degree of influence that his son, over the years, had carefully acquired.

Morwell Jnr. was young, healthy, and fabulously rich, and his greatest fear in life was losing what he had.

He was still in his early thirties – an age when the spectre of mortality was yet to appear above the mental horizon; he had rude good health maintained by well-monitored physical exercise and the country’s finest doctors; and his business ventures had never been in better shape.

H
E WAS IN
his penthouse office when the dome appeared miraculously over New York.

He had just stepped from the gym where he kept a rubber effigy of his father, which he cathartically beat with a baseball bat every morning. In consequence he was feeling revitalised and ready for whatever the day might bring.

In thirty minutes, at eleven, he had an informal get-together with his team of advisers, specialists who kept him abreast of world events. He enjoyed these sessions, enjoyed listening to experts expounding. He had a keen analytical mind himself, and an ability to synthesise what he learned at these meetings and then recycle it, at swish Manhattan soirées, as his own original observations.

He crossed to his desk and was about to summon Lal, his personal assistant – or facilitator, as he liked to call the young Indian – when he caught a flash of something out of the corner of his eye. He turned and stared through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall. Something coruscated a matter of metres above Morwell Tower, the country’s tallest building.

It looked, for all the world, like the inner curve of a dome seen from just beneath its apex. As if all New York had been placed under a mammoth bell-jar.

He noticed his softscreen flashing on his desk, and said, “Activate.”

Lal’s thin, keen face flashed onto the screen. “Sir, I think you should take a look through the window.”

“So I’m not hallucinating, Lal. What in God’s name is going on?”

“I... I don’t know, sir. It happened around thirty minutes ago. I tried to summon you.” Lal hesitated. “There have been other... ah, developments.”

“Go on.”

“I think it would be best if I were to show you, sir.”

Morwell was in a mood to humour his facilitator. “Very well, Lal. We have a little time before the think-tank cranks in to action.”

“I think they’ll have a lot to talk about,” Lal said cryptically. “I’m on my way.”

While Lal took the elevator up from the seventy-fifth floor, Morwell turned to the window and stared out. He could see, in the distance, the great convex arc of the bell-jar sweeping out over Long Island, and in the other direction over New Jersey... So what was it? Some vast and ingenious prank? A fabulous and daring work of improvisational art? Whatever it was, he reasoned, it was not real... in the sense that it not was a solid, physical thing, but more likely a projection of some kind.

“Sir.”

Lal crossed the penthouse office and stood before the desk, his carob-brown eyes ranging over its surface as if in search of something.

Lal was in his mid-twenties and a direct beneficiary of one of Morwell Enterprises’ humanitarian projects. Morwell funded schools and academies across the world, and from them drew the finest pupils to work in his many companies. Lal had been plucked from the slums of Calcutta at the age of fifteen, educated to a high standard and processed through the Morwell business empire. Five years ago James Morwell had installed Lal as a researcher in one of his newsfeed companies. In three years he’d worked himself up to become its editor, at which point Morwell swooped again and promoted Lal to the role of his PA.

Now Lal took up Morwell’s stiletto letter opener and slapped his palm with its blade.

Morwell gestured to the bell-jar. “Any ideas?”

“I have people working on it, sir. But one thing is for certain – it’s not an illusion, as I first thought. Reports are coming in from Long Island, sir. People are reporting that the dome is solid, a wall that has cut off the entire city of New York. But not only that, sir – the domes have covered all areas of population, no matter how large or small, starting in northern Canada and sweeping the globe. There are reports from every northern continent... every village, town and city is at present under a similar dome to this one. And as I speak, they are appearing over areas to the south of here.”

Morwell sat down in his swivel chair.

Not likely, then, to be a daring work of art...

“You said there have been other developments?”

“That is right, sir. Observe.” Lal placed his left hand flat on the table top and – before Morwell could stop him – raised the paper-knife and made to bring it down on his palm.

Morwell winced, then looked up and saw Lal’s oddly comic grimace of effort. The man was shaking.

“Lal? What the hell...?”

“I... am trying... sir... to stab... my... hand!”

“Have you taken leave of your senses? I don’t want blood all over my...”

Lal lowered the knife. “I cannot do it, sir. That is the thing. It is impossible. Reports from all across the northern hemisphere – acts of violence are no more. Boxing matches have ended in farce, with opponents unable to trade punches. Police report aborted bank raids and gunmen unable to pull the trigger...”

Morwell’s first impulse was to laugh and accuse Lal of playing a practical joke. He glanced at the calendar, but it was April the 30th, not the first.

He stood quickly, crossed the room to the gym and slipped inside. He snatched up the baseball bat, strode across to the rubber effigy of James Morwell Snr., and raised the bat.

He had no trouble at all in beating the figure to hell and back.

He returned to the office with the bat, and Lal was staring at the carpet and pretending he hadn’t witnessed his boss’s little weakness.

“Sir?

Morwell approached Lal. “If you’re pulling some kind of joke, Lal, you’re gonna be awful sore in the morning.”

Impulsively he raised the bat, meaning to swing it with reasonable force into the Indian’s midriff.

He stood with the bat in mid-air, and tried to swing...

He was frozen, as if the impulse to act had lodged somewhere between brain and arm.

He strained in an attempt to swing the bat, but the only result was that his arm began a palsied tremor.

Sweating, and not only with the effort of the abortive exertion, Morwell slumped into his swivel chair and told Lal to get the experts in here, on the double.

CHAPTER FOUR

A
NA
D
EVI SQUATTED
on a girder beneath the footbridge at Howrah station and watched the Delhi Express slide alongside platform ten. She shared her perch with a grey-furred, red-bottomed monkey a couple of metres away, but that’s all she was sharing with the devil. She clutched a banana to her ragged t-shirt, and the monkey eyed the fruit with greedy, beady eyes.

“
Chalo!
” she yelled at the animal. It remained where it was, watching her impassively. It would be a mistake to start eating the banana now, even though she was hungry, because the monkey would be incensed by the aroma and try to snatch the fruit from her.

And every fool knew that the station monkeys were diseased, and that one scratch or bite could spell a lingering, painful death.

Down below the train halted and disgorged a thousand passengers. The crowd flowed along the platform towards the exit and the stairs to the other platforms, and seconds later Ana heard the thunder of footsteps just above her head.

The cacophony of the pedestrians succeeded in doing what she had failed to do: the monkey pulled back its lips to reveal a set of wicked, curved incisors, gave a howl, and bounded off along the girder-work of the bridge.

Ana laughed, peeled the banana and wolfed it down.

The footfalls above her head diminished, the train eased itself with a hiss from the platform, and comparative calm settled over Howrah station.

Ana missed her brother, Bilal.

Most of the time she was fine. She had friends among the kids who made Howrah station their home, a gang of boys and girls fiercely loyal to each other because they had no one else. It was the only family she had ever known, though she had a vague recollection of the aunt and uncle who had looked after her and her brother when their parents died in the cholera epidemic of 2014. Then Ana’s aunt had fled her uncle when Ana was six, and had been unable to fend for two hungry, growing children. Bilal, fifteen at the time, had taken Ana to Howrah station, where he had friends among the street kids who lived like monkeys in the rotting infrastructure of the old buildings. He’d lived with her there for a time, begging and stealing and making sure that she was provided for. Then, just as she was settling into life at the station, Bilal disappeared.

He’d gone to sleep with her one evening in the ancient goods truck they used as a bedroom, tucked up with her and a dozen other children like sardines in a can, and in the morning he was gone. There wasn’t even a gap where he had been, because the other kids had shuffled up to let another child lie down. He’d owned nothing other than a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and an enamelled metal cup, white with a blue rim, and much chipped. After a day of searching the station and the streets around about, she’d given up in despair.

Then Prakesh, a friend a year older than Ana, had dragged her along to platform fourteen and pointed down at the silver tracks. There, crushed flat and the enamel shattered, was a cup just like Bilal’s. She’d jumped down, despite the danger, and retrieved it. On its flattened underside was the letter B that Bilal had scratched to make the cup his very own.