The Silent Invasion: The Change Trilogy Book 1

Part 3

Although it was still cool in the shade you could smell the approaching heat in the air. Two houses along the Ayres kids were coming down their drive. I stopped for a few seconds to let them get ahead of us, then pulled Gracie in the opposite direction.

'Come on,' I said.

We made our way quickly toward the trees at the end of the street. As we passed the old playground that stood beside the last house Gracie hesitated. 'I want to play for a while,' she said.

'Not now,' I said. 'We need to keep moving.'

'Why?'

I glanced back up the street. Tim would be leaving for work soon and I didn't want him to catch us standing here. 'Just because.'

The street followed the line of the hill, and at its end, where it met the bush, two paths ran off in different directions. The first headed upward and back along the rear fences of the houses along our side of the street, the other downward, through a line of trees toward the dam where I had found Gracie the day before. We took the second, winding out around the side of the dam, and then on, beside the creek.

I knew this path well. For the first year or so after Dad Changed I stayed with Vanessa in the house where Dad and I had lived before he met her. It was the only house I had ever known, and although after Mum died it was just me and Dad, it was home. Once he was gone it was different, yet somehow being there still helped. But when Vanessa met Tim they wanted somewhere new, somewhere that wasn't the place Vanessa had shared with Dad and wasn't so close to the city and the refugee camps, and so they moved up here, into the hills.

At first I hated it, hated everything about it: the heat, the quiet, the other kids. I was so angry I couldn't see that what I really hated was leaving our other house, and life without Dad. If it hadn't been for Gracie, who was little more than a baby then, I think I would have run away, gone into the city or to one of the camps. Anywhere but here. But I knew I couldn't leave Gracie, so instead I began to escape out into the bush whenever I could. A kilometre or so along the track the creek drained into a concrete culvert, and I used to sit on the side and look at the water as it trickled by.

Then one day, a few months after we moved here, I had an argument with Vanessa. I don't remember what it was about, but whatever it was it was enough to send me running out of the house and down toward the creek. I wanted to be alone, but more than that I needed to be in motion, to lose myself in the ache of my muscles, the burning of my breath in my chest.

I must have run for half an hour or even longer, my feet slipping on the loose ground as I pelted through the trees and the bushes that grew along the line of the creek, until eventually the land began to flatten out, the bush giving way to the back fence of a house. It was small, built out of orange bricks with a red tiled roof, and although the fence was still standing I could see from the long grass and broken furniture in the backyard that it was unoccupied.

I was old enough to know it wasn't safe to go poking through abandoned houses, but as I stood looking at the yard choked with weeds and the back door that stood half open, something came over me, and with sudden determination I clambered over the fence and crossed the yard to the house.

Inside it was dark, the air thick with the smell of mould and decay. Looking around I could see I wasn't the first person to come here: the shelves had been stripped and somebody had sprayed Die Die Die on one of the walls in black paint. But despite that there were still signs of the people who had once lived here. On one wall hung a row of framed photos; images of a family, a mother, a father, two children. They weren't doing anything special – in one a boy stood on the pedals of a bike, his face turned to the camera as he pulled a face; in another they sat in a line on a beach – yet I was struck by the wastefulness of it all. Where were they now? Were any of them alive? Had they Changed? Or had something else happened to them, something worse? I saw a chair and, suddenly furious, I kicked at it, then I picked up a book and threw it, then another, before finally grabbing the shelf and tipping it over. Only when I was done did I realise I was crying.