The Silent Invasion: The Change Trilogy Book 1

Part 7

The night the Change arrived there was nothing to suggest the world was about to be transformed forever. I was six, and I remember my father waking me in the middle of the night and carrying me outside. In our backyard he knelt down and pointed upward. From horizon to horizon green traceries of light filled the sky, flaring and fading like shooting stars.

'What is it?' I asked, but my father only shook his head.

'I don't know. Some kind of meteor shower, perhaps. Or a solar storm.'

I was too young to hear the hesitation in his voice, the suggestion he knew it wasn't either, but I was old enough to recognise the look on his face when he put me back to bed a few hours later.

'What's wrong?' I asked, but he only smiled, brushed my hair away from my face and told me it was nothing.

But it wasn't nothing. Later we would realise the lights had been the seedpods that bore the Change to Earth, igniting and releasing their contents as they hit the upper reaches of the atmosphere. My father was a scientist, a geneticist with an interest in divergent biologies, and even that first night he knew that what was happening in the sky was not normal, that it had to be caused by something man-made - a weapon, perhaps - or something even stranger. And so, when we woke the next morning to find what looked like drifts of gossamer spiderweb spread across the trees and streets outside our house he was not delighted but alarmed. To me they seemed beautiful, magical, and I longed to be able to run outside, grab handfuls of them as I could see other children doing. But he locked the door and told me to stay inside, his voice tight and hard as he called his colleagues in search of somebody who might understand what was going on.

He wasn't the only scientist concerned by the arrival of the spores, but for every scientist suggesting we had to take their arrival seriously there were a hundred loud-mouthed conspiracy theorists ranting about alien invasions and nerve toxins and the coming of the End Times, and their clamour drowned out the more sober concerns of people like my father.

And at first it looked like it hardly mattered anyway. For as that first day wore on, in many parts of the world the spores shrivelled and died, their glistening filaments blackening and withering. Standing inside I watched through the window as my father gathered samples, saddened by the sight of something so beautiful fading before my eyes. Within days the world began to forget, the arrival of the spores already little more than a passing wonder, a weekday marvel.

And then, a few weeks after the spores appeared, there began to be disturbing reports from the rainforests of Colombia and Brazil, Asia and Africa. At first these stories seemed almost fanciful: strange phosphorescent fungi that clung to the trees like scales, weird black flowers and mosses that moved. Many were sceptical, even when confronted with images of the local people holding these wonders.

Before long, though, other reports began to emerge, stories of animals altered in bizarre ways, of cattle that no longer slept but circled their paddocks making unsettled, almost human sounds, as if struggling to speak, of birds behaving in confusing and inexplicable ways, of fish that crawled from the water, their fins transformed into limbs, only to drown gulping in the air. And with them came other stories, rumours of people altered not just physically but mentally, of men and women convinced their wives or husbands or parents or children were no longer themselves, of whole villages transformed into something that was no longer fully human. And alongside these reports came other, more frightening stories, of people burning the forest, trying to destroy these new organisms, of massacres in villages afflicted by the transformations, of whole towns found deserted, as if their inhabitants had simply disappeared into the jungle.

Alarmed, governments in Asia and Africa and South America began to cut off the regions affected, denying journalists access even as they scrambled to contain the spread of something they barely understood. But it was too late. For almost overnight hundreds of millions of people had begun to flee north and south, clambering into boats and thronging roads as they sought to escape whatever it was that was happening in the equatorial regions. Frightened they would be infected, or simply overwhelmed by the numbers, governments in the north and south closed their borders, refusing to accept the refugees, leading to armed conflict and disease, and later, as borders began to give way, to waves of insurrection and violence. Economies collapsed as whole countries vanished, becoming little more than lines on maps.

For those like me and my father who lived in places the infection was yet to reach, it was a confusing and frightening time. I remember the roads filled with cars and trucks carrying people south from Queensland and the Territory and countries to the north, the makeshift camps in parks and school halls, the drifting groups of people who began to appear in the streets around our house, many speaking languages I didn't recognise. To the north the Indonesian Air Force strafed Australian ships that were attempting to repel refugees from Indonesia and Timor and Papua. In Brisbane parts of the city were burned as it was abandoned and the border sealed; to the north Darwin was bombed. And what happened here in Australia was only a microcosm of the disasters unfolding in India and China and Malaysia and South America and Mexico.

Everywhere people were fleeing and fighting, those that could save themselves struggling to survive as they were herded into camps or, in some places, killed in their thousands out of fear of infection. It all happened so quickly that it seemed almost unreal, like a dream or a nightmare. Yet what is stranger is the fact that when it began nobody really understood what was coming, or how completely our world would be transformed by the time it was done.

In the same way, as I lay in the darkness of the culvert with Gracie beside me, I couldn't have understood how far the decision I had just made would take me. But as my ears adjusted to the quiet, the sound of the trickling water, the ponk of the frogs, I felt the enormity of what I had just done sink in. We had almost no money, no access to the net, no idea how to get to the next suburb without getting caught, let alone several thousand kilometres north. Worse still I was now a criminal, liable to be shot or imprisoned without trial.

Next to me Gracie pressed her face to my chest. I wrapped my arm around her and hugged her tight, blinking back tears. She was hungry, but the little money I had would only buy food for a day or two, which meant we needed help.

But who could I ask? Not reporting people infected with the Change carried severe penalties, so anybody I approached would be risking imprisonment, or worse, if they helped us.

There was only one person I could think of, and that was Claire. Her words about my father suggested she might understand, that she might help. Because if she didn't, nobody would.