The Dark Giants (5 page)

‘That scanner …’ said Amelia. ‘They have to be tracking something, right?’ She tried
not to think about what could possibly be out here that would take that many weapons
to bring down.

‘Or some
one
,’ said Charlie. He glanced back
the way the giant creatures had come.
‘They were really close to the cottage. They probably just came out of the gateway.’

‘Which means –’

They both darted toward the cottage. ‘Tom!’

Sprinting across the clearing, Amelia saw that Tom’s door was ajar. A weak light
spilled out over the front step, and it was so
quiet
inside that Amelia knew nothing
good could have happened.

She and Charlie hesitated for a moment, but with the aliens out there in the bush
(not to mention whatever they were tracking), it surely couldn’t be more dangerous
for them in here?

Charlie swallowed hard and pushed the door open. Amelia followed him in. Tom’s place
was a disaster. It was always messy, but usually the mess had some kind of order.
This was the chaos of a house that had been ransacked. Boxes had been thrown across
the room, their contents scattered.
The charts James had carefully organised were
strewn over the floor, and Tom’s lamp – the only source of light right now – had
been knocked over.

‘But where’s Tom?’ said Amelia.

‘He’s here,’ said Charlie, looking around the door into the gateway room. Tom lay
flat on his back, his eye wide open, unmoving.

Charlie squatted down and patted Tom’s cheek. When nothing happened, he put his ear
to Tom’s chest to check his heart was still beating, and a finger under Tom’s nose
to feel for his breath.

‘Unconscious,’ he said. ‘Totally out of it, but otherwise fine, I reckon.’ Without
warning, he peeked under Tom’s eye-patch.

‘Charlie!’

‘What? As if you’ve never been curious.’

‘Not
that
curious.’

Amelia brought over an old crocheted blanket
from the back of the sofa and Charlie
tried to roll Tom over onto his side. Tom, though, was completely rigid.

‘It’s almost like …’ Charlie said, grunting with the effort, and then giving up suddenly.
Tom rocked on the floor as though he were a statue, not an actual person. ‘… like
he’s been petrified.’

Amelia winced at the thought, and spread the blanket over him – a useless gesture
if he
had
been turned to stone, but she had to do something. They returned to the
front room, searching for the box James had put all of Foxy’s confiscated property
into. Amelia was utterly unsurprised to see it lying empty on the floor behind Tom’s
desk. Whatever Foxy and his giant friends had come to do, they were now fully equipped.

Amelia picked up Tom’s phone and saw that the spiralling cord that connected the
old-fashioned handset to the dialing part had been cut.

‘Look.’ She showed Charlie the severed wires. ‘We’ve got to tell Mum and Dad.’

With one last look back at Tom, Amelia and Charlie raced out of the cottage and back
through the trees. They were right at the foot of the headland, looking up the steep
slope to the hotel, and the moon came out from behind a haze of cloud, casting a
clear light over everything. Charlie was about to run out onto the open grass, but
Amelia grabbed his arm – she’d spotted the three aliens bursting out of the bush
beyond the hedge maze.

There was a blast of light from the scanner in Foxy’s hands, and then a piercing
scream from a completely different direction.

‘Oh, no,’ said Charlie.

‘Sophie T!’ Amelia was horrified to see her friend standing on the brow of the hill
– just where the rest of them had stood earlier to watch the fireworks. ‘What’s she
doing there?’

‘
Not
being left out.’

‘What about her being afraid of the dark?’

‘Apparently she would literally rather die than be left behind.’

‘Don’t say that!’ Amelia moved out of the grove. ‘We’ve got to help her.’

This time it was Charlie who held Amelia back. ‘Yeah, but not by being caught.’

Amelia watched as all three aliens began running toward Sophie T. Her own heart was
racing – she couldn’t imagine how Sophie T’s must be. ‘OK, we don’t get caught,’
she agreed. ‘But then what?’

The two blue giants were barreling up the slope like charging elephants, running
shoulder to shoulder, and then suddenly they split apart: one circling out to the
right, the other to the left, so that as they drew closer to Sophie T, they were
also cutting off her escape back to the hotel.

‘They’re rounding her up like sheep dogs,’ hissed Charlie. ‘Enormous rhino sheep
dogs.’

‘Charlie, what are we going to do?’

‘And here comes Foxy …’

Foxy was nowhere near as quick as the giants, but he was direct. Instead of helping
the giants outflank Sophie T, he ran straight at her, yipping and growling the whole
time.

‘Tom’s out cold, Leaf Man’s in the Nowhere,’ Amelia thought out loud. ‘Mum and Dad
are in the hotel. So’s Lady Naomi probably, but we can’t get there without going
past
them
–’

As Foxy drew closer to Sophie T, she began to shrink back from him.

Charlie groaned. ‘Look behind you, Sophie, you dope. Haven’t you ever watched a horror
movie?’

By stumbling
away
from Foxy, Sophie T was walking straight into the waiting hands
of Spike and Beard.

Foxy yipped and waved a hand (Amelia thought he was telling off the giants, warning
them to leave Sophie T alone), but it only made Sophie T back away faster. Finally
realising that his natural form and voice were making things worse, Foxy switched
on his holo-emitter.

The shabby corduroy man appeared and began speaking to Sophie T in English. His high
voice carried clearly in the still night air, and Amelia could hear that it was shaking.
Foxy must be freaking out, too. ‘It’s OK,’ he quavered. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.
You’re OK.’

Beard growled. ‘In English,’ snapped Foxy. ‘The poor child is frightened enough as
it is.’

Beard snorted, then rasped, ‘You think we care if it’s frightened? Get rid of it.
We’ve got less than an hour before our wormhole leaves, and so far you’ve achieved
nothing.’

At the sound of a new voice behind her, Sophie
T spun on the spot and reeled back
as she took in the enormous creature towering over her. She gave a cry – not so much
a scream as a choking in-breath of dismay – and then Spike pointed at her, a light
flashed, and … nothing. Sophie T didn’t move. She didn’t so much as squeak, or even
drop the hand that was lifted partway to her mouth. It was as thought she’d been
frozen, or …

‘Petrified,’ whispered Charlie.

‘At least we’ve caught something,’ said Spike. ‘It’s only a tiny little wriggler,
but better than nothing.’

‘We’re not taking a human child!’ Foxy yipped. ‘This has nothing to do with the contract
I signed.’

‘Contract?’ sneered Beard. ‘Do you see any contract lawyers around? We’re here to
turn a profit, and if you’ve got any brains in that tiny head of yours, you’ll do
what we tell you. And quickly.’

Foxy, to his credit, did not back down. Hands on hips, he said, ‘I’m a scientist,
not some hired thug. This is a little
girl
– native to this planet. I agreed to help
return a feral animal to its home planet,
not
kidnap a person from hers. Profit has
nothing to do with my motives.’

Beard began to tremble and heave, his breathing becoming jerky, noisy and more horrible
than anything Amelia had heard so far. She realised he was laughing. ‘Pick it up,’
he said to Spike. ‘We’ll deal with our little
scientist
later, once the mission is
completed.’

Spike picked up Sophie T, tucked her under his arm like an umbrella, and laughed
in Foxy’s face.

‘How much less frightened is she, now that she’s heard all that in English?’ he guffawed,
and then turned and followed Beard into the bush.

Foxy stood uselessly for a heartbeat or two in the moonlight, and then scurried after
them.

Amelia, still crouched and hiding, covered her face in her hands. ‘Oh no. Oh, we’re
dead. Sophie T’s dead!’

‘Not yet,’ said Charlie. ‘It doesn’t sound like they’re going to eat her, so that’s
good.’

‘Yeah, but –’ Amelia took a deep breath, trying to get some sense into herself. ‘But
what do we do? We can’t stop them. No-one in Forgotten Bay would be strong enough
to get in their way.’

‘Tom has that shotgun.’

‘And Tom’s unconscious – same as Sophie T,
I’m guessing –
and
his place is in the
opposite direction to those guys.’

‘Who are totally getting away while we talk about it,’ Charlie pointed out, helpful
as ever.

‘What about Mum and Dad? And James? Have they seriously just
slept
through all of
that?’

‘Look,’ said Charlie. ‘Hotel: that way.’ He pointed up the hill to their right. ‘Kidnapping
space-giants and Sophie T: that way.’ He pointed down to the bush ahead of them,
and to the left. ‘And they’re moving fast. Choose.’

‘I could –’

‘No,’ he cut her off. ‘We don’t split up. I don’t mind doing something insanely dangerous,
even if it is only Sophie T we’re trying to save, but I won’t do it alone.’

‘But I was –’

‘And neither will you.’

Amelia groaned in frustration. He was right,
and she knew it, so their only options
were raising the alarm (by which time, who would know where they had taken Sophie
T?) or …

‘There’s no choice.’ Amelia got to her feet. ‘We have to go after them, and –’

‘Yeah?’

‘Hope for an opportunity,’ she finished lamely. ‘I think the best we can do is try
to catch up.’

‘Good enough,’ said Charlie. ‘Let’s go.’

Even without a plan, it was good to be moving. Just the physical work of running
uphill, thinking where the aliens could be headed, and listening for clues, cleared
Amelia’s mind. She was too busy to feel the full force of her fear, and to worry
about what might happen next. All she had to do was find the trail.

They reached the edge of the lawn beyond the hedge maze, and paused in front of the
wall of dense bush.

‘Which way?’ said Charlie.

Amelia scanned left and right, wondering if the aliens had actually been headed anywhere,
or if they were just randomly ploughing through the trees.

‘Wouldn’t you think guys that big would leave a more obvious path?’ said Charlie.

‘Maybe if we could see as well as Lady Naomi –’ Something caught Amelia’s eye: the
faintest suggestion of a yellow glow amongst the undergrowth, and then it was gone.
‘That way, come on!’

The bush was vicious. Serrated leaves and thorny twigs grabbed at them with every
step, and their pyjamas were not designed to cope with any of it. ‘I’m sleeping in
jeans from now on,’ puffed Charlie.

‘Look, look!’

Ahead, a good-sized branch of a banksia tree
was snapped in half and dangling. It
was so high up that Amelia could only have touched the break with the tips of her
fingers at a full stretch.

‘They’re making a path through – Yeah, see? There.’ She pointed in the darkness.
‘The ferns have all been squashed flat.’

They picked up speed, then slowed down again almost immediately. They wanted to follow
the aliens, not catch up to them. Through a gully, then a grove of straggly gums
(more branches snapped), and up a rocky rise, and then so deep into the bush they
were far past the farthest they’d ever been. And that had been with Lady Naomi and
in full daylight. And then they saw the aliens.

But where was Sophie T?

Several small trees had been knocked down and piled to one side, making a rough clearing.
The giants had taken off their backpacks and Spike was rummaging through his.

Amelia and Charlie hunched down behind a boulder and watched. Foxy was still engrossed
in his scanner. Beard was noisily chewing on something, and scratching his belly
contentedly. Charlie nudged Amelia: there was Sophie T, still in that exact position
they’d last seen her, with a hand partially raised. Only she wasn’t standing now,
she’d been laid down on the ground, and was almost hidden in the long grass. Safe
– for now.

Spike stood up straight, yawned, and began humming as he fussed about the baggage,
hardly paying any attention to Sophie T.

They don’t seem interested in her at all,
Amelia thought.
Then what? What could get
these giants to team up with Foxy?

Spike laughed back and then said again to Foxy, ‘So where’s the beast? You said you
had a signal.’

‘I have,’ Foxy yipped. ‘Or I did. These animals are incredibly hard to track.’

‘No more excuses!’ snapped Beard. ‘If we miss the wormhole, we miss the sale, and
if that happens, I think you’ll find it
incredibly hard
to make it up to us.’

‘Sale?’ said Foxy. ‘What sale?’

Beard snorted. ‘You don’t think we came all the way out to Earth without having a
buyer lined up already, did you?’

‘But I never agreed to help you
sell
a wild animal – I was helping you save it!’

‘Oh, you’re helping, all right,’ said Spike. ‘Helping save our business. Helping
our reputations –’

‘Helping us make a good impression on the Guild,’ Beard added.

Charlie nudged Amelia again, and she saw what he’d noticed: Sophie T’s fingers were
beginning to twitch. Whatever Spike had done to petrify her, it was starting to wear
off. But how long before Sophie T could move enough to get away?
The moon was so
bright, Charlie and Amelia had no chance of sneaking over and carrying her off without
being caught too.

Amelia turned to look back the way they’d come.
How long would it take us to go get
Mum and Dad?
And then she realised something terrible.
I don’t remember the way home
– I think we’re lost.

They were as trapped as Sophie T, with no way to get help. Even if they somehow stole
Sophie T back from the aliens, what could they do next? There was nowhere safe for
them to go, and nowhere to hide as long as Foxy had that scanner. Unless Charlie
knew how to get back to the hotel …

She turned to ask Charlie, but found to her horror that he was gone. A moment later,
she spotted his pale face on the other side of the clearing, peeking out from behind
the pile of ripped up trees. Her whole body was flooded with relief, but then she
froze:
If I can see him, then he
can see me. And if we can see each other, then what
if –?

Before she could finish her thought, a hand the size of a garbage tin lid had snatched
her from behind the rock. Charlie blurred out of view, but she could still
hear
him
clearly enough. ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ he yelled. ‘You put me down!’

The alien did – and a second later, Amelia was plonked into the grass too, right
next to him and Sophie T.

‘Nice work,’ grinned Beard. ‘Three human pups will bring an excellent price.’

Amelia shuffled over to Sophie T and put an arm around her. She was as stiff as a
doll, but her hand was now clenched into a fist. The grass rustled around them.

‘Do you think our buyer will be interested?’

Beard scoffed. ‘The pit mistress won’t be interested in them!’

‘Pit mistress?’ said Foxy. ‘You don’t mean – are
you telling me you intend to sell
that magnificent grawk to a pit-fighting gang?’

Amelia looked at Charlie, horrified. They were hunting Grawk!

Charlie nodded grimly, but then shot Amelia a significant look. Her eyes widened
as she guessed what he was thinking: things were looking very bad for them – almost
Krskn-level bad, with all this talk of being sold to aliens – but they’d just heard
a chink opening in the aliens’ plan.

‘You savages!’ Foxy howled. ‘I thought you were selling to a zoo, at least – but
pit-fighting? You butchers!’

Yep.
Foxy was no longer on the space-giants’ side. That left the tiniest hope he
might decide to be on theirs.

‘Try to move,’ Charlie whispered to Sophie T. ‘If you can hear me, if you’re not
still unconscious, try to move. We’re going to try to rescue you.’

Sophie T lay frozen, not even an eyelid flickered, but she made a little grunt in
the back of her throat that sounded a lot like, ‘Huh!’ Amelia noticed her fist tightening
until the knuckles bulged.

‘She can hear us,’ she said, and began massaging Sophie T’s hand and wrist. ‘She’s
trying.’

‘Oh, I am sick of your yapping,’ Beard growled, and Amelia started, thinking he was
speaking to her. But the giant was still staring down at Foxy. ‘You took the job,
now
do
the job. I doubt you’ll have anything to complain about when you get paid.’

Amelia sank lower into the grass.

‘It’s working,’ Charlie breathed as Sophie T’s shoulders moved under his clumsy back
rub.

‘It’s not about the money!’ Foxy said. ‘I wanted to save –’

‘Look,’ Spike sighed. ‘It’s only one grawk.
Look at the big picture: are you going
to save it, or save yourself? Because only one of you is going to come out of this
happy. Why not you?’

Foxy turned away, muttering furiously.

‘Just get on with it,’ Beard shouted.

Sophie T, meanwhile, was now beginning to wiggle both feet, and her face was slowly
melting to form a new expression. It was an expression of pure terror, but even that
looked better to Amelia than the awful stiff blank her face had been before.

Foxy yelped with alarm, and for a second Amelia thought he’d spotted Sophie T’s gradual
recovery. But he was staring at his scanner in amazement. ‘It’s here!’ he yipped.
‘The grawk. It’s –!’

‘Where?’ said Beard. ‘I don’t see anything.’

‘You won’t – oh.’ Foxy shook the scanner and knocked it with the heel of his hand.
‘There’s
something wrong with it – this doesn’t make sense – it’s not –’

‘Stop gibbering!’ Beard bellowed. ‘It’s not what?’

‘Not possible!’ Foxy gasped. ‘Never heard of –’

‘What?’ said Spike. ‘
What?’

Foxy only pointed into the bush, his face as contorted with fear as Sophie T’s. The
two alien giants and three human children all looked.

At first there was nothing but the tangled black wall of the surrounding bush. No
sound, no movement, not the slightest shiver of a clue of what was to come. And then
two yellow saucers glowed through the undergrowth and a deep grinding noise rang
out in the night air, filling Amelia with terrified joy as Grawk sprang into the
clearing – as huge and solid and ferocious as a tiger.