"Waaaakeee…uuuupp….Biiiitzziii…"
She screamed with fright as the strangers in hazard suits mobbed her, their uncouth arms grabbing for the baby she held. Summoning an ounce of courage, she swiped at one of the creatures and managed to knock off the veil over its head. To her astonishment, she was glaring at the face of…
"Desirée?"
The woman from Torchwood smiled. "Good morning, Bitzi," she said gently.
The rabbit woman drowsily reached for her horn-rimmed glasses as her hostess bent over to retrieve the fallen helmet. Bitzi, having regained her sight, glanced around the now-lit bedroom. Petula was sleeping silently in the crib. Desirée was snapping her full-body environmental suit back together. Harry was missing from the other side of the bed.
"What's with the space suit?" she inquired, sitting up. "And where's Harry?"
"I don't know where Harry is," replied Desirée, her voice now transmitted through an electronic speaker below her visor. "Beat and Buster are gone too. They must have left during the night."
Bitzi felt her heart shrink to the size of an apricot pit. They've abandoned me, she told herself.
Desirée tossed another suit onto the mattress, one that came complete with oxygen tanks attached to the back. "Put this on," she ordered.
Don't panic, thought Bitzi, resisting the tears that threatened to come. They wouldn't leave me here…in the middle of London…would they?
"Put it on," said Desirée, this time more firmly. "We have reason to believe that the city is under attack by an alien biological weapon."
"Petula," said Bitzi, her voice cracking. "Will she be all right?"
"She'll be confined to an environmental chamber," Desirée told her. "Now put on the suit. There's no time."
----
Not far from London, Buster and his newfound friend Roland watched the first rays of dawn appear over the horizon. The British aardvark boy idly picked up a newspaper that had been discarded on the airport floor. He scanned the headline and grunted thoughtfully. "Iran Offers to Support Lebanon Cease-fire. Bloody dull, that. It should say, World Ends Tomorrow."
"For me, it's already ended," said Buster, gazing dolefully at the blank screens suspended from the ceiling. "There's no more TV."
"Nothin' left to do but read books," Roland observed. "This is the day the schools have been preparin' us for, it is."
The plexiglass windows quivered slightly as a faint rumbling sound reached Buster's ears. "Cool," he remarked. "Fireworks. I guess we won the war against the aliens." The distant boom was followed by another, then yet another.
Beat scurried up to the boys, her face pale with fright. "Take cover!" she bellowed, waving her arms frantically.
"What's all this, then?" Roland asked her.
The girl only pointed. Buster and Roland followed her trembling finger to a faraway grassy hill, over which soared a formation of fluorescent, lime-green objects. Another group consisting of more than a dozen flyers was passing above the center of London. Their speed was unbelievable, and Buster thought he could pick up the unearthly whine of high-pitched jet engines. More explosions were heard, these somewhat louder than the first, and preceded by small bursts of light.
"Bloody 'ell," muttered Roland. "It can't be."
"Can't be what?" said Buster curiously.
Beat let out an ear-splitting shriek. "It's an air raid, you silly goose! We're being bombed!"
----
After a night of restless slumber on one of George's sleeping bags, Francine awoke to find that the world, or at least the room, was still as she remembered it. Her first impulse was to find a snack, and she followed it, tiptoeing stealthily to avoid waking the kids who crowded the floor. On her way to the kitchen she beheld a sight that made her gasp in horror. Jenny's position on the couch hadn't changed, but now her face and hands were grotesquely swollen, and a wet, mucoid substance coated her skin. Worse yet, the alien girl's chest showed no sign of heaving up and down. For Francine, mere suspicion was enough; she wasn't brave enough to put her fingers on Jenny's slimy neck to check for a pulse.
"Omigosh!" she blurted out. "Wake up, everybody! Jenny's dead!"
Arthur, D.W., Vicita, Tommy, Timmy, Jenna, Alan, and Fern all shot up from the bags, blankets, or bare carpet on which they had been sleeping. Tegan, reclining in the wheelchair, raised her head.
"Dead?" said Alan, startled. "How can you tell?"
"She's not breathing," said Francine. "See for yourself."
All the kids turned their gaze to the motionless Kressidan girl. "Somebody check her pulse," Fern recommended.
"I'm not gonna do it," said Jenna. "I don't want to get that icky gunk on my fingers."
"I'll do it!" Tommy offered.
"No, I'll do it!" Timmy countered.
"What's a pulse?" they asked together.
"I'll do it," said Tegan, her voice fuller than before, yet still weak. "I'm the oldest."
With some exertion she wheeled her chair to Jenny's side, and rested her bony fingers against the narrow part of Jenny that attached her head to her torso. Seconds passed as the other kids waited expectantly. At last Tegan declared, "It's not much, but it's there. She's still alive."
"Hooray!" D.W. exulted.
"She looks like a bee stung her in the face," Vicita remarked.
George and Sal, clad in their pajamas, hurried into the living room to examine the alien. "It's some kind of weird reaction," said George.
"I hope she doesn't blow up," Sal added.
Jenny remained bloated and unresponsive as the kids deliberated uselessly. Finally giving up in their search for a way to help her, they applied their attention to their growling stomachs. "What have you got to eat?" Arthur asked the moose boy.
"Um…eggs, milk, pancake mix, baking soda, oatmeal, onions, and a bottle of something called Zinfandel," was George's reply.
"Okay," said Arthur thoughtfully. "Do you know how to make pancakes?"
"I tried to make a pancake once," George told him.
"He flipped it, and it landed in my hair," said his little sister.
"My dad showed me how to make them," said Arthur, "but that was when I had my glasses."
"Excuse me," said Tegan, raising her strained voice as far as she could. "I just came out of a coma. I can't handle solid food."
A round of volunteering followed, and Fern and Alan went off to the corner drugstore on a quest for liquid nutritional supplements. "I can't believe we're trusting Tegan," said Fern darkly. "Even in a wheelchair, she's still dangerous."
"She can't do anything to us with her powers gone," said Alan.
"Yeah," said Fern, "but what if the other Brainchildren are loose? If all the guards have gone crazy, there's nothing to stop them from breaking out."
"Don't worry," said Alan. To emphasize his words, he tenderly wrapped his fingers around the poodle girl's hand.
"Oh, Alan," Fern giggled. "You read my mind."
They walked along, hand in hand, doing their best to ignore the scenes of forlorn children and crazed grownups on both sides of the street.
It wasn't easy. "This is what you get for not listening to Pat Robertson!" a woman screamed at them.
"Jim Emerson is keeping Roger Ebert sick so he can publish his own reviews!" a man yelled. "Spread the word!"
It was a four-block trip to the local Greenwall's pharmacy, where Alan and Fern were surprised to happen upon rich girl Mickie Chanel and her foster brother, Zeke England. The two were arguing at the drugstore entrance as an occasional child walked in, picked up a candy bar or bag of chips, and walked out without paying.
"You can't be serious!" Mickie snapped at the Pomeranian boy. "I'm not leaving money on the counter where anybody who sees it can grab it."
"But taking something that's not yours is stealing," Zeke told the aardvark girl. "And God says stealing is wrong."
"If you love God so much," said Mickie, "then why don't you marry him?"
"Because God says same-sex marriages are wrong," said Zeke flatly.
A minute later, as Fern and Alan emerged from the pharmacy bearing several cans of Ensure in their arms, they saw that Mickie and Zeke were still at it. "Look around you, Ezekiel," said Mickie earnestly. "The whole town's one big madhouse. There's no one to cook our meals for us. There's no one to serve our meals to us. How do you expect to survive, unless you take what you can find?"
"My folks taught me how to dig for truffles in the woods," said Zeke.
"What are you, crazy?" said Mickie. "You don't find truffles in the woods, you find them at the chocolatier's."
The return trip went by quickly, Fern and Alan exchanging affectionate glances now and then as they walked. Upon stepping through the doorway into George's house, they immediately dropped the cans they were carrying…and put up their hands.
The kids and Jenny were still there, but had been joined by no fewer than six cat women, each wearing a uniform with red and green stripes and toting what looked like a platinum-coated shotgun. They stood at each corner of the living room as if occupying strategic positions, except for one, who had holstered her weapon and was sitting contentedly in the lap of the oblivious Mr. Nordgren.
"Th-they're here," Alan stammered fearfully. "They took us by surprise."
"That's not fair!" Fern protested. "We didn't have a chance to prepare ourselves!"
One of the cat women strolled toward them, and Alan recognized her as the would-be murderer of Bitzi's adopted baby. "There's nothing you could have done," she told them in a menacingly silky voice. "We've been watching you from the beginning."
"What do you want?" demanded Alan, his arms still elevated.
"Your planet," the cat woman replied. "Your men. And a small nugget of information you're keeping locked up in that crafty little brain of yours." She pointed the barrel of her shotgun directly at Alan's nose and inquired, "Where is Petula Winslow?"
----
to be continued