TEN of THIRTY-TWO
*NOTE – Hello everybody, it's me, TheManFromMudos, and today I'm back with another chapter of 'Xavier'. Now, from this point forward, things are going to be very different. You see, the first nine chapters were almost a backstory in many ways, merely setting things up for the real story by explaining how Matthew and the crew got from the Andromeda to the Angelica. Now, the true narrative begins. Matthew, Xena, Katie and the kids have settled down into their new lives aboard the RCS Angelica, and we can finally get underway with the meat and potatoes of the story, so to speak. I won't keep you any longer, as I fear I've said too much already. What I will say, though, is this: Read on, and please enjoy. It's 'Xavier'. THANK YOU!*
"Matthew!" Katie called out loudly, abruptly awakening me to the sound of crying children. "There's no milk!" I heaved a deep sigh, and sat upright.
"Can't you go?" I shouted back, stretching my arms out with a groan. I looked down at Xena, who still slept soundly beside me. Lucky for some.
"I'm watching the babies!" She replied, her voice hoarse on account of the fact that she'd been up all night. "And you know Xena can't go!"
"Then I'll wake Xena up and she can watch the kids while you go to the shop!" I called, attempting to negotiate a few more minutes in bed. Big mistake.
"Matthew Jones, don't you dare!" Katie shouted angrily. "You let her sleep, you hear me? Now get down here and go and buy some fucking milk!"
"Yes, mother." I replied sarcastically, heaving myself up onto my feet and stumbling over to the wardrobe. 'I don't think I can cope with this for another two years,' I thought to myself. We'd been here for just two weeks, two glorious weeks, and already I wanted to rip my own hair out. If Amanda wasn't crying, Xavier was. If Xavier wasn't crying, Amanda was. If neither of them were crying, I was crying. Oh, the joys of being a parent.
Drearily, I pulled open the enormous wardrobe and reached into it, producing a blue checkered shirt, a pair of grey jeans and braces. Katie, of course, had insisted that we go shopping for clothes a couple of days after we'd arrived, so at least now I had a bit more choice in what I wore. I quickly pulled the shirt over my head, and the jeans up my legs, and slid the braces over my shoulders, before hurrying out of the room and down the stairs.
"Oh, here's the man of the house himself." Katie announced mockingly, rolling her eyes as she rocked Amanda in her arms. "Sleep well, did we?"
"Hardly." I replied bluntly, walking straight past her towards the front porch. I was in no mood for petty, childish remarks at this time in the morning.
"Milk, bread and gravy granules." She continued as I walked back into the living room and sat down to put my shoes on. "Money's on the table."
"Sure we don't need anything else while I'm out?" I asked, reaching for a tattered ten dollar bill that rested on the coffee table in front of me. When she didn't reply after a rather awkward pause, I presumed that this was indeed everything that we needed at this particular moment in time. And so, with a quick 'won't be long' to Katie, I got back to my feet, made my way over to the porch, and pulled open the front door, before stepping out into the garden.
The sun shone down like an enormous light bulb as I made my way down the garden path towards the street. This was, of course, because the 'sun' aboard the Angelica was an enormous light bulb. It ran the entire length of the ship (seventy-two miles, as I had recently discovered), and slowly dimmed in the evenings, before going out at night, simulating a real daylight cycle. The bulb itself wasn't actually visible, though, nor was the ceiling around it, some twelve miles above our heads. In fact, if you followed the wall with your eyes, up into the clouds, you would find that it inexplicably faded away into nothingness about eight miles up. Then there were the clouds. They were generated by huge evaporators placed at strategic points across the country, and although they were actually made from pure water vapor rather than the usual salt water found in natural clouds, the rain felt just as real as I remembered it from back on Earth. There really had been no holds barred in making this ship as Earth-like as possible. That being said, I still got this uneasy feeling every now and then. 'How easily could this ship be destroyed?' I kept thinking. 'Earth was destroyed, and it was tens of thousands of times bigger than this little country-in-a-can, wasn't it?' I pushed these thoughts to the back of my mind, though, chalking it up to simple paranoia.
It was only a short walk down the street on which we now lived to the local shops. They were few in numbers, to say the least, and only one of them was an actual 'convenience store', but there was also a Chinese take-away, an antiques dealer and a Post Office. Directly in front of this unusual selection of shops, there was a bus stop, at which buses typically arrived every half an hour, or every hour on Sundays. This skeleton timetable didn't bother us, though, as we had our own transport, albeit in the form of a two-seater Antorani Erinome which was probably twelve years past it's last MOT date. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. The point is that there was a bus stop, and behind the bus stop were the shops. And it was in one of those shops that I, in just a few short minutes time, would purchase a bottle of milk, a loaf of bread and some gravy granules, which I would then pay for with the ten dollar bill that Katie had so graciously given to me. Interestingly enough, the symbol on the note was similar in appearance to that of a pound, but it had the same vertical lines running through it that a dollar sign had. Even more bizarrely, I had recently discovered that the dollar was subdivided into coins called pence, not cents, and that there were only eighty pence in a dollar! That's right, twenty-fourth century Sedna and the currency wasn't even decimalised.
A moment or two later, reaching the entrance to the shop, I pushed open the simple wooden door and stepped inside. The place was empty, of course, as it was still quite early in the morning. Even the shopkeeper was nowhere to be seen, although I assumed he was probably in the back taking stock or something, as I could hear the clattering of tin cans being stacked upon one another. I quietly made my way towards the fridges at the bottom of the aisle directly in front of me, in which milk and other dairy items were usually kept. Silently pulling out the largest bottle of milk I could find, I walked around the corner and up the next aisle, where I found a jar of coffee. I grabbed some tea bags as well, since I greatly preferred tea to coffee, something which sadly couldn't be said for Katie. Finally, I rounded another corner, and then another, onto the shop's fourth and final aisle. Scanning the shelves from top to bottom, I eventually found the gravy granules, and plucked them from their position beside the less popular, although equally flavoursome, gravy stock cubes. All I had to do now was head over to the till and pay, before going home to inevitably repeat the process two or three more times today. Yes, this was the life I now led. Once an action-packed rollercoaster of adventure and excitement, now nothing more than a constant cycle of going to the shop, and then going back home, over and over again. Indefinitely…
"Sorry, mate." The shopkeeper called, suddenly running up to the counter from the room behind. He quickly took the handful of items that I had collected and swiped each of them with a barcode scanner. Milk – A dollar twenty. Coffee- A dollar thirty-eight. Gravy granules – A dollar six.
"That's… three dollars and sixty-four pence, please." The shopkeeper announced as he slid the gravy granules into a plastic bag alongside the milk and coffee. I handed him the humble ten dollars that Katie had so kindly allowed me to spend, and a few moments later, he passed me a handful of change in return, namely a five dollar coin, a one dollar coin, and several four pence pieces. Stuffing the change into my pocket, I lifted the plastic bag from the counter before me, and was just about to leave when the door opened, and two elderly women walked into the shop, chatting loudly to one another.
"Well, it's outrageous, isn't it?" One of the women said, her voice slightly croaky and hoarse. "And it's not as if anybody's doing anything about it."
"No, but what can they do?" The second woman replied. I could tell by her much clearer voice that she was a few years younger than her counterpart.
"Well someone has to do something." The first woman demanded. "I mean, Anne…it could be one of us next." That was when I became really intrigued.
"I know what you mean, Susan." The second woman agreed. "It happened to Mavis' son a few days ago. The whole family's devastated." Their voices became harder to hear then, as they rounded the corner at the end of the first aisle. Reluctantly, I followed them, eager to hear more of their conversation.
"Did they tell the police?" The first woman, who's name I now knew to be Susan, asked as she pulled a tin of baked beans from a nearby shelf.
"Of course they did." Anne assured her, nodding as she spoke. "They said they'd see what they could do, but things are busy at the moment."
"Well, it's been happening across the country, hasn't it?" Susan remarked. "I'm surprised the government hasn't even acknowledged it."
"I thought that seemed odd, too." Anne agreed, leaning down to pick up a box of cereal. I was less than three feet behind the two women at this point.
"Excuse me?" I announced, unable to simply stand back and listen any longer. The two women turned on their heels instantly, shocked by my presence.
"Yes, love?" Anne replied, smiling warmly, the way old ladies often do. Susan, on the other hand, had a much sourer, more world-weary face.
"I was just wondering what you ladies were talking about?" I explained, doing my best to return a comforting smile and not look like a stalker.
"Well…" The kindly woman began, looking around cautiously as if she was about to disclose some highly confidential information. "I-"
"Look, Anne, I've got to go." Susan interrupted abruptly. "My appointment's in half an hour and I don't want to miss the bus."
"Alright, Sue. I'll pop round for a cuppa later, eh?" Anne called as Susan ambled her way over to the counter. "I'm sorry about her, love. She's a bit more uptight than myself, you see. Mind you, I've known here since I was your age. Before that, even. She's a few years older than me, though. In fact, I think she's-"
"You were saying?" I interrupted slightly impatiently. As much as I was enthralled by this… gripping tale, there were more pressing matters at hand right now.
"Oh, sorry my dear, I didn't notice I was rambling." She chuckled. "Well, it's like this, you see. I have a friend called Mavis, she lives in the next village over. Lovely little place, next to the River Malder, you know. Anyway, she rang me the other day, she was sobbing her eyes out, I tell you. So I said 'What's wrong, Mavis? Why are you crying?' And then she told me. Well, her eldest son's only gone missing in the middle of the night, hasn't he?"
"Missing?" I asked, furrowing my brow in confusion. "What do you mean 'missing'? Did her run off, was he kidnapped?"
"Well, that's just it, isn't it?" Anne remarked, shrugging her shoulders. "I mean, you've got to think, haven't you: Who'd kidnap a forty-three year old man from a little village in the middle of nowhere? But there's more. Because Mavis' grandson, who also lives with them, says he got up for a drink of water in the middle of the night and heard people moving about. Next thing you know, he's running into Mavis' room crying his eyes out, screaming that he's seen these strange men in blue hazard suits dragging his dad of the house." My jaw dropped at this. I could hardly believe my ears. Strange men in blue hazard suits? Dragging a little boy's dad away? This was clearly more than just a kidnapping. I had to know more.
"And the police haven't done anything about it?" I asked, thinking back to the conversation I had overheard between Anne and Susan moments earlier.
"Not a thing." Anne replied, shaking her head as she spoke. "And you know why, don't you? It's because they're as clueless as we are! This has been happening up and down the country ever since the ship took off. Rumour has it that there's four or five a night disappearing in the city. It's in all the local papers. And yet, the national media hasn't even acknowledged that there's anything going on."
I continued to run through everything Anne had told me in my head for several moments. It just didn't make any sense at all. Dozens of people were disappearing every week, and the police weren't doing anything about it? The government, and the ship's military, weren't doing anything about it?
"Why?" I asked aloud, more confused now than I had been before, when I was simply listening into the conversation without any context.
"Don't ask me." Anne replied, shrugging her shoulders. "Sounds like organised crime, though. And on a large scale, at that. But there are loads of organisations with research facilities on this ship. Kovacs Extrasolar Solutions, the Montreal Technical Association. Anyone could be behind it."
"Yeah…" I said distantly, lost in deep thought. "Anyone…" I looked over Anne's shoulder as I spoke, and saw a newspaper on a nearby rack with the headline 'Tinsworth Woman Vanishes – Again'. The one beside it read 'Two Kidnapped in Headby in Single Night'. Suddenly, this rush of emotions washed over me. I was fearful and worried, yet strangely intrigued. So many questions buzzed around my head. Who was behind this? Why were they doing it? Could one of us be next? But most of all, somewhere deep down, although I'm ashamed to admit it, I was excited.