Johnny and the Bomb Page 6

  One hundred metres ahead, sixteen-wheeled lorries barrelled onwards, taking a million English razor blades from Sheffield to Italy and, coming the other way, a million Italian razor blades from Rome to England.

  The trolley was, without a shadow of a doubt, going to smash right into the middle of them.

  The air flickered.

  And there were no lorries, or, rather, there were lorries, snorting and hissing and waiting at the lights. The lights ahead of Johnny were green.

  The trolley rolled through, wheels screaming. Johnny looked up into the puzzled faces of the drivers.

  Then he risked a look behind.

  The black car had vanished.

  There were no other turnings off the hill. Wherever it had gone, it hadn’t got there by any means known to normal cars.

  He met Kirsty’s eyes.

  ‘Where did it go?’ she said. ‘And what happened with the lights? Did we travel in time again?’

  ‘You’re wearing your mac!’ said Johnny. ‘You were wearing your old coat but now you’re wearing your mac! Something’s changed!’

  She looked down, and then back up at him.

  Beside the crossroads was the Neil Armstrong Shopping Mall. Johnny pointed to it.

  ‘We can make this go into the car park!’ he shouted.

  The big black Bentley jerked to a halt at the side of the road.

  ‘They just vanished!’ said Hickson, staring over the top of the wheel. ‘That wasn’t … this time travel stuff was it? I mean, they just vanished!’

  ‘I think they went from one now to another now,’ said Sir John.

  ‘Is that … like … these trousers you were going on about, sir?’

  ‘I suppose you could say they went from one knee to the other. One 1996 to another 1996.’

  Hickson turned around in his seat.

  ‘Are you serious, sir? I saw this scientist on TV … you know, the one in the wheelchair … and there was all this stuff about other universes all crammed in, and—’

  ‘He’d know the proper way of talking about it,’ said Sir John. ‘For the rest of us, it’s easier to think about trousers.’

  ‘What shall we do now, sir?’

  ‘Oh, I think we wait until they come back to our now.’

  ‘How long’s that going to be?’

  ‘About two seconds, I think …’

  In the shopping mall, a joke was going wrong.

  ‘Make me … er,’ said Bigmac, ‘make me one with pickle and onion rings and fries.’

  ‘Make me one with extra salad and fries, please,’ said Yo-less.

  Wobbler took a long look at the girl in the cardboard hat.

  ‘Make me one with everything,’ he said. ‘Because … I’m going to become a Muslim!’

  Bigmac and Yo-less exchanged glances.

  ‘Buddhist,’ said Yo-less, patiently. ‘It’s Buddhist! Make me one with everything because I’m going to become a Buddhist! It’s Buddhists that want to be one with everything. Singing “om” and all that. You mucked it up! You were practising all the way down here and you still mucked it up!’

  ‘Buddhists wouldn’t have the burger,’ said the girl. ‘They’d have the Jumbo Beanburger. Or just fries and a salad.’

  They stared at her.

  ‘Vegetarianism,’ said the girl. ‘I may have to wear a paper hat but I haven’t got a cardboard brain, thank you.’ She glared at Wobbler. ‘You want a bun with everything. You want fries with that?’

  ‘Er … yes.’

  ‘There you go. Have a day.’

  The boys took their burgers and wandered back out into the mall.

  ‘We do this every Saturday,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Yes,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘And every Saturday we work out a joke.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you always mess up the punchline.’

  ‘Well … it’s something to do.’

  And there wasn’t much else to do at the mall. Sometimes there were displays and things. At Christmas there’d been a nice tableau of reindeer and Dolls of Many Countries that really moved (jerkily) to music, but Bigmac had found out where the controls were and speeded up everything four times, and a Norwegian’s head had gone through the window of the cookie shop on the second floor.

  All there was today in the way of entertainment were the people selling plastic window frames and someone else trying to get people to try a new artificial baked potato mix.

  The boys sat down by the ornamental pond, and watched out for the security guards. You could always tell where Bigmac was in the mall by watching the flow of the security guards, several of whom had been hit by bits of disintegrating Scandinavian and bore a grudge. As far as anyone knew, Bigmac had never been guilty of anything other than the occasional confused approach to the ownership of other people’s cars, but he had an amazing way of looking as though he was thinking about committing some rather daft crime, probably with a can of spray paint. His camouflage jacket didn’t help. It might have worked in a jungle, but it tended to stand out when the background was the Olde Card and Cookie Shoppe.

  ‘Old Johnny may be a bit of a nerd but it’s always interesting when he’s around,’ said Wobbler. ‘Stuff happens.’

  ‘Yeah, but he hangs around with Kimberly or Kirsty or whoever she is today and she gives me the creeps,’ said Yo-less. ‘She’s weird. She always looks at me as if I haven’t answered a question properly.’

  ‘Her brother told me everyone expects her to go to university next year,’ said Bigmac.

  Yo-less shrugged. ‘You don’t have to be dumb to be weird,’ he said. ‘If you’re brainy you can be even weirder. It’s all that intelligence looking for something to do. That’s what I think.’

  ‘Well, Johnny’s weird,’ said Bigmac. ‘Well, he is. It’s amazing the stuff that goes on in his head. Maybe he is a bit mental.’

  ‘It’s amazing the stuff that goes on outside his head,’ said Wobbler. ‘He’s just—’ There was a crash somewhere in the mall, and people started to shout.

  A shopping trolley rolled at high speed up the aisle, with shoppers running to get out of the way. It had a plastic window frame hanging on the front and was splashed with artificial potato. Johnny and Kirsty were hanging on either side.

  He waved at them as he drifted past.

  ‘Help us get this out of the back door!’

  ‘That’s old Mrs Tachyon’s trolley, isn’t it?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Who cares?’ said Bigmac. He put his burger down on the edge of the pond, where it was surreptitiously picked up by Wobbler, and ran after the trolley.

  ‘Someone’s chasing us,’ Johnny panted, as they caught up.

  ‘Brilliant!’ said Bigmac. ‘Who?’

  ‘Some people in a big black car,’ said Johnny. ‘Only … they’ve vanished …’

  ‘Oh, an invisible big black car,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘I see them all the time,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Are you going to stand around all day?’ Kirsty demanded. ‘It’s probably got some kind of special shield! Come on!’

  The trolley wasn’t massively heavy, although the piles of bags did weigh it down. But it did need a lot of steering. Even with all of them helping – or, Johnny thought later, perhaps because of all of them helping – it skidded and wobbled as they tried to keep it in a straight line.

  ‘If we can get out of the other doors, we’re in the High Street,’ said Johnny. ‘And it can’t go in there because there’s bollards and things.’

  ‘I wish I had my five-megawatt laser cannon,’ said Bigmac, as they fought the trolley round a corner.

  ‘You haven’t got a laser cannon,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘I know, that’s why I wish I had one.’

  ‘Ow!’

  Wobbler leapt back.

  ‘It bit me!’ he screamed.

  Guilty stuck his head out of the heap of bags and hissed at Johnny.

  Security guards were strolling towards them. There were five ki
ds arguing around a trolley, Bigmac was among them and, as Yo-less would have pointed out, one of them was black. This sort of thing attracts attention.

  ‘This trolley might be a time machine,’ said Johnny. ‘And that car … Kirsty thinks someone’s after it. I mean me. I mean us.’

  ‘Great, how do we make it work?’ said Bigmac.

  ‘A time machine,’ said Yo-less. ‘Ah. Yes?’

  ‘Where’s this invisible car got to?’ said Wobbler.

  ‘We can’t go out of the other doors,’ said Kirsty, flatly. ‘There’s a couple of guards there.’

  Johnny stared at the black dustbin liners. Then he picked one up and undid the string. For a moment his fingers felt cold and the air was full of faint whispers—

  The mall vanished.

  It vanished above them, and around them.

  And below them.

  They landed in a heap on the grass, about a metre below where they’d been standing. The trolley landed on top of them, one wheel slamming into the small of Johnny’s back. Bags bounced out, and Guilty took the opportunity to scratch Bigmac’s ear.

  And then there was silence, except for Bigmac swearing.

  Johnny opened his eyes. The ground sloped up all around him. There were low bushes at the top.

  ‘If I asked what happened,’ said Yo-less, from somewhere under Bigmac, ‘what’d you say?’

  ‘I think we may have travelled in time,’ said Johnny.

  ‘D’you get an electric feeling?’ said Wobbler, clutching his jaw. ‘Like … all your teeth standing on end?’

  ‘Which way did we go?’ said Yo-less, still talking in his deliberate voice. ‘Are we talking dinosaurs, or mutant robots? I want to know this before I open my eyes.’

  Kirsty groaned.

  ‘Oh dear, it’s going to be that kind of adventure after all,’ she hissed, sitting up. ‘It’s just the sort of thing I didn’t want to happen. Me, and four token boys. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. It’s only a mercy we haven’t got a dog.’ She sat up and brushed some grass off her coat. ‘Anyone got the least idea of where we are?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Yo-less. ‘I see there’s grass. That means no dinosaurs. I saw that in a film. Grass didn’t evolve until after there were dinosaurs.’

  Johnny stood up. His head was aching. He walked to the edge of the little hollow they’d landed in, and looked out.

  ‘Really. Someone’s been paying attention,’ said Kirsty. ‘Well, that narrows it down to some time in the last sixty million years.’

  ‘Proper time travellers have proper digital readouts,’ Wobbler grumbled. ‘No grass? What did dinosaurs eat, then?’

  ‘You only get digital time machine clocks in America,’ said Bigmac. ‘I saw a film about a time machine in Victorian England and it just had light bulbs. They ate other dinosaurs, didn’t they?’

  ‘You’re not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more,’ said Yo-less. ‘It’s speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bigmac. ‘One Million Years PC. Get it? ’Cos there was this film called One Million Years BC, but—’

  Kirsty’s mouth was open.

  ‘Do you lot go on like this all the time?’ she said. ‘Yes, you do. I’ve noticed it before, actually. Rather than face up to facts, you start yakking on about weird things. When are we?’

  ‘May the twenty-first,’ said Johnny, sitting down next to her. ‘Just gone half past three.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Kirsty. ‘And how come you’re so sure?’

  ‘I went and asked a man who was walking his dog,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Did he say what year?’

  Johnny met Kirsty’s gaze. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I know what year.’

  They climbed out of the hollow and pushed their way through the bushes.

  A scrubby field stretched away below them. There were some allotment gardens at the bottom end of the field, and then a river, and then the town of Blackbury.

  It was definitely Blackbury. There was the familiar rubber boot factory chimney. There were a few other tall chimneys as well. He’d never seen those before. The man with the dog was watching them from some way off. So was the dog. Neither of them seemed particularly Jurassic, although the dog looked somewhat suspicious.

  ‘Wha . . ?’ said Wobbler. ‘Here, what’s been happening? What have you done?’

  ‘I told you we’d travelled in time,’ said Kirsty. ‘Weren’t you listening?’

  ‘I thought it was just some trick! I thought you were just messing about!’ He gave Johnny a very worried look. ‘This is just messing about, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Wobbler relaxed.

  ‘It’s messing about with time travel,’ said Johnny.

  Wobbler looked scared again.

  ‘Sorry. But that’s Blackbury all right. It’s just smaller. I think we’re where the mall is going to be.

  ‘How do we get back?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘It just sort of happens, I think.’

  ‘You’re just doing it with hallucinations, aren’t you,’ said Wobbler, never a boy to let go of hope. ‘It’s probably the smell from the trolley. We’ll come round in a minute and have a headache and it’ll all be all right.’

  ‘It just sort of happens?’ said Yo-less. He was using his careful voice again, the voice that said there was something nasty on his mind. ‘How do you get back?’

  ‘There’s a flash, and there you are,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘And you’re back where you left?’

  ‘Of course not. Only if you didn’t move. Otherwise you go back to wherever where you are now is going to be then.’

  There was silence while they all worked this out.

  ‘You mean,’ said Bigmac, ‘that if you walk a couple of metres, you’ll be a couple of metres away from where you started when you get back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even if there’s been something built there?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Yes … no … I don’t know.’

  ‘So,’ said Yo-less, still speaking very slowly, ‘if there’s a lot of concrete, what happens?’

  They all looked at Kirsty. She looked at Johnny.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Probably you kind of … get lumped together.’

  ‘Yuk,’ said Bigmac.

  There was a wail from Wobbler. Sometimes, when it involved something horrible, his mind worked very fast.

  ‘I don’t want to end up with just my arms sticking out of a concrete wall!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it’d happen like that,’ said Yo-less.

  Wobbler relaxed, but not much. ‘How would it happen, then?’ he said.

  ‘What I think would happen is, see, all the atoms in your body, right, and all the atoms in the wall would be trying to be in the same place at the same time and they’d all smash together suddenly and—’

  ‘And what?’ said Kirsty.

  ‘—and … er … bang, good night, Europe,’ said Yo-less. ‘You can’t argue with nuclear physics, sorry.’

  ‘My arms wouldn’t end up sticking out of a wall?’ said Wobbler, who hadn’t quite caught up.

  ‘No,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Not a wall near here, anyway,’ said Bigmac, grinning.

  ‘Don’t wind him up,’ said Yo-less severely. ‘This is serious. It could happen to any of us. We dropped when we landed, right? Does that mean that if we suddenly go back now we’ll be sticking out of the floor of the mall, causing an instant atomic explosion?’

  ‘They make enough fuss when you drop a Coke can,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Where’s Wobbler gone?’ said Kirsty.

  Wobbler was a disappearing shape, heading for the allotments. He shouted something.

  ‘What’d he say?’ she said.

  ‘He said “I’m off home!”’ said Johnny.

  ‘Yeah, but,’ said Bigmac, ‘… where he’s running now … if we’re where the mall is … will be … then over there’s the shopping estate. That field he’s runni
ng across.’ He squinted. ‘That’s where Currys is going to be.’

  ‘How will we know we’re about to go back?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘There’s a sort of flicker for a moment,’ said Johnny. ‘Then … zap. Er … what’ll happen if he comes out where there’s a fridge or something? Is that as bad as a concrete wall?’

  ‘I don’t know much about fridge atoms,’ said Yo-less. ‘They might not be as bad as concrete atoms. But I shouldn’t think anyone around here would need new wallpaper ever again.’

  ‘Wow! An atomic Wobbler!’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Let’s get the trolley and go after him,’ said Johnny.

  ‘We don’t need it. Leave it here,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘No. It’s Mrs Tachyon’s.’

  ‘There’s just one thing I don’t understand,’ said Yo-less, as they hauled the trolley across the field.

  ‘There’s millions of things I don’t understand,’ said Johnny.

  ‘What? What? What are you going on about now?’

  ‘Televisions. Algebra. How skinless sausages hold together. Chinese,’ said Johnny. ‘I don’t understand any of them.

  ‘The trolley’s got no works,’ said Yo-less. ‘There’s no time machinery.’

  ‘Maybe the time is in the bags,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Oh, right! Bags of time? You can’t just shove time in a bag!’

  ‘Maybe Mrs Tachyon didn’t know that. She’s always picking up odds and ends of stuff.’

  ‘You can’t pick up time, actually. Time’s what you pick things up in,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘My granny saves string,’ said Bigmac, in the manner of someone who wants to make a contribution.

  ‘Really? Well, you can’t pick up the odd half-hour and knot it on to another ten minutes you’ve got spare, in case you haven’t noticed,’ said Kirsty. ‘Honestly, don’t they teach you any physics at your school? Fridge atoms was bad enough! What on earth’s a fridge atom?’

  ‘The smallest possible particle of fridge,’ said Yo-less.

  Perhaps you could save time, Johnny thought rebelliously. You could waste it, it could run through your fingers and you could put a stitch in it. Of course, perhaps that was only a manner of speaking and it all depended on how you looked at it, but Mrs Tachyon looked at things in a corkscrew kind of way.