Flight of the Girl, Chapter Five

The subsequent fade-back-in brought Miss Ugly to the other end of town, so the clock tower was now nearer than the funfair. Her webbed feet were planted on promenade, the beach was directly to her right, while behind her the concrete walkway ended in police tape and a giant jagged crack.

Jenny’s intuitions had been spot-on, Miss Ugly noted. The thought made her all the more proud of having selflessly stranded her out of harm’s way.

For Miss Ugly’s supernatural powers, though slow in operation, dependably carried her to those she sought. When that quarry was on the move, she landed up where they were going to be.

Which meant her wait wasn’t long.

Indeed, when a twisting tangling fury of green rounded the bank of dunes ahead and shot not for Miss Ugly but the chasm, it was so swift that its head passed her by before she had a chance to strike at it. So much for the proper way of doing such things, grumbled Miss Ugly to herself, just before seizing the serpent’s attention by striking instead at its tail.

This whipped from the sword-slash, and terrible chrome-plated fangs took its place.

Miss Ugly held her broad blade before her in both wingtips to shield herself from the snapping jaws, as heavy jointed bodywork drove down upon her and pushed her webs back. Side-stepping with a duckling’s innate nimbleness she put space between herself and the predator, but no sooner had it gone snout-first to the ground than that same extremity rebounded and came about again, the rest of the sinuous body following in a flow. Clashes and clangs of ivory on armour sounded out as Miss Ugly again and again deflected the lightning-fast thrusts, while from roiling darkness overhead new inundation began to sweep the strand.

It was the last of the swirling stormfronts pushed by that which even now was putting Planet Earth’s cloud-cover behind it.

The comet, so-called, was nearly here.

Miss Ugly hadn’t had an easy time of it when last she locked with this foe, and today it was in a fighting frenzy to broach her line of one and dive for the canyon beyond. She couldn’t swat it back indefinitely if it wasn’t going to tire. At last relentlessness won out against endurance, and a darting blow to the duckling’s breast felled her.

It wasn’t for fear of another, fatal dash that Miss Ugly urged herself to rise. The snake couldn’t do very much in that regard. She’d died so long ago that it was well out of her system.

But her adversary didn’t even try. It merely resumed its course.

And Miss Ugly, strive as she might, could only lie winded in the pelting rain, which was actually very pleasant for her since she was what she was, but even so, if Flashsatsumas and Mini-Flash Juniper had been correct then the snake had now but to swim a short stretch and it would be curtain-call, first for this town and ultimately the globe, which would mean Miss Ugly had failed in her duty and had never owned a carriage and…

Motor-roar was sounding from the town end of the strip.

Wearily Miss Ugly raised her fuzzy damp head.

There was Pat.

He was bearing down on the handlebars of his quad-bike, chin set and eyes facing front though the rain battered him from landward. Standing water fanned before Miss Ugly’s wondering ground-level gaze as the chunky segmented tyres thundered by her, and the snake for all its single-mindedness could not ignore such a tumult. It froze in its tracks and arched, but as speedy a serpent as it was, Pat knew how to get every ounce of power out of that engine. He clipped green steel and immediately pulled a handbrake turn, screeching round along the wet runway to finish with twin tailpipes pointing at the void, and his prow between that destination and the reeling reptile which craved it.

“Get her out of here, Maureen,” instructed Pat, meaning Miss Ugly, and his sister wasn’t slow to scramble from the pillion and haul their duckling friend to ringside.

From the snake issued as blood-curdling a hiss as might have been expected, and then some.

“Yeah, mate,” replied Pat. “That’s what you said last time.”

And he put the quad in gear.

Those few who were still trapped in town turned their boding faces heavenward, as the later and larger guest from the cosmos appeared on the teeming horizon.

Flashsatsumas had made his position clear on whether or not it was a comet, but had any of the civilians been present to hear him, their first impression would have been that he’d erred. The thing itself seemed at a glance to meet every uninitiated Earthling expectation of what that astronomical phenomenon looked like. It was a colossal burning ball of rock and ice, white flames etching it against an inky firmament, and it was coming on like nobody’s business.

Farthest from shore was the neighbourhood of railway station and gasometer, and with a massed intake of breath the spectators hard by in the streets held for an impact on the latter vast drum, which would swallow up town in a fireball there and then.

Town was spared that. The comet tore by over the gasometer’s summit.

Shopfronts and gable-ends along the darkened valley of Main Street transmuted fleetingly to planes of sere light as the blazing tumbling gargantuan cast its frightful radiance down from the slates and chimney-pots it traversed. Pavement trembled underfoot, the very flags sounding back the incoming’s barrelling boom. When these reverberations were done, gaping townsfolk were left to marvel on the more limpid luminescence of particles and gases streaming behind, trailed in the astral juggernaut’s wake.

Thus might many a hypothetical human have learned first impressions were often wrong.

Their supposed comet was a ship alright, just as Flashsatsumas had affirmed.

The aliens were in its tail.

They swam and swarmed amid the phosphor nebulosity like pond-bacteria viewed through a microscope, and their shapes were as outlandish to terran eyes, each one different but all akin in some aspect of design to the snake. Gleaming beings of chromium steel, spindly and slithery, their unearthly physiques exhibited one minute what might have been fingers or feet, and the next appendages more like weapons or ominous-looking machine-tools. Where there were eyes, they glowered unblinking through the intermingled mesh whose many-riveted orbit followed the contrail’s endless undulation.

This nightmare vision was blessedly brief for all who beheld it. The comet’s tail was in as great a hurry as that which had dragged it from the stars to town.

There however lay a different source of anxiety.

It had to do with how few heartbeats now separated the raging rock from the roundabout at road’s end, and the benevolent old sentinel which time out of mind had watched over it.

Not the clock tower.

It had been the topic of picture-postcards for generations!

Not the clock tower…!

END OF CHAPTER FIVE