"Smiley! Smiley, where's my car? Did you borrow it? You should have told me, you silly girl. We need more milk. I don't care what kind of milk. I suppose if you got me one of every type of milk they do now, the eight of us could all have our own."

This was the greeting Smily received upon her return home, a considerable deviation from the standard "hello, how are you? How was your day?". Having no clue what had happened to her mother's car, she was a little confused. The milk debacle went entirely ignored.

"Mum, I took the bus," She disengaged from the embrace to look her mother in the eye. "I always take the bus."

Unaware of any ill-doing—at least, any beyond the pale—Mrs Sundae gave her daughter a small smile and brushed a strand of Smiley's hair from her forehead before returning to her work.

"Ah well, must have been that boyfriend of yours—haven't seen him all day." She raised her voice so that it echoed out from the kitchen, disembodied teasing turning pointed. "Your 'guests' are also mysteriously absent. Zach and Phred said they don't know anything, but they also said they didn't take the last of the semi-skimmed, so..."

She let the statement hang, certain that her daughter, ever reliable, would fill the blank. No such response came.

Smiley hurtled up the stairs. It would have been nicer—easier—to say she took them two, three at a time, but the girl wasn't that neat with where she placed her feet; it is accurate to say she somehow managed to fall up the stairs.

Into her room—the door was open, not closed as she had left it. She thrust a hand under her bed and into the shoebox, hoping for the silent reassurance of metal on her fingers...

Instead, there was a crackle of something thinner, more brittle. Something decidedly not a revolver. Tactile and shallowly indented with whorls and swirls of writing.

Hesitantly, unsure if she truly wanted to see, Smiley pulled the note from beneath her bed. A note. Not the weapon she had stolen and squirrelled away.

An innocent note, folded to oblivion, with the space in-between the creases stamped clumsily with three letters:

I O U

Zach answered his phone immediately. Phred picked up on the third call, having had to dig his phone out of his sofa.

Phil didn't pick up at all.


"Run!"

There was no real way to be sure who shouted. Maybe it was Viz, who shoved Phil behind him and out the way. Maybe it was Diz, who seized Quiz by the wrist and sprinted in to the blackness of the corridor. Maybe it was Phil, who dragged Diz to his feet when he tripped. Maybe it was Quiz, who snagged Viz by the back of his coat and forced him to join the mad dash away from the firing squad.

Whoever had issued the command was swiftly made irrelevant, as it echoed and reverberated about the metal walls, becoming a many-throated chant—run, run, run... it swelled to a crescendo and pounded against the very nerves, mirroring the increasingly frantic beating of a heart. Then one of the agents fired, and the chorus fell dead as the air was slowly shattered by the subtle fizz of laser fire, a sound like a synthesised dying breath..

That first shot breeched a dam, and suddenly the narrow, unlit space was flooded with deadly bolts. Quick and clumsy with adrenaline, the quartet turned and fled, pursued by light and a hundred pounding feet.

Through the dark they charged, through blackness that was intermittently banished by laughing neon light as cuttingly radiant as dawn. Where the plasma rounds struck the metal walls, they exploded soundlessly, and the pannels became shattered sculptures limned in a sickly glow. Everything Phil could see was lit up in green and broken. He could hear the others running, but the only sign that they remained alongside him was the occasional flash of gunfire that illuminated a limb or wide-open eye, or the occasional push of a hand at his back, someone tugging on his arm and hauling him forwards.

They were running blind, Phil realised with stricken clarity, as though he were a passive observer of this plight and not a participant. This was not a passage they had been through before, nor was it one he recalled from his previous visit. In a mad bid to compensate, he stretched his arms out before him, some vague, unthinking thought deciding it would help.

(Realistically, he knew that if he collided with anything, he would be shot before he could realise what had happened; unhelpful thoughts like that were stuffed into a dark recess of his mind that was quickly becoming cramped.)

In an ideally dramatised world, their chase would be scored with music, something frenetic and electronic. Instead, there was nothing but the slap and clang of many feet against metal, the whisper-heave of panting, and the hiss of laser fire. Most people being gunned down would at least have the crass assurance of going out with a bang; Phil was about to become the only person in the world to get shot with a non-facetious 'pew pew'. He was leaving with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a fireworks fizz, a susurration like scissor teeth in velvet. It was awkward—bizarrely awkward. It gave the mind opportunity, in the blank spaces between weird sounds, to consider its mortality.

Phil struggled through another heave of breath, his lungs bursting. Lasers smelt differently too; of ozone, hot metal, and chlorine. Custom dictated that hell smelled of sulphur and was lit up in red, but Phil was starting to have his doubts. Hell was this—boiling, swimming-pool-scented air and the too-close walls of a convoluted passage coated in tar-thick dark. His body and blood was drenched with it and he couldn't get enough air.

They turned a corner at breakneck speed. Then another, another, another. For quite a while there was nothing but corners. The tunnel was one endless corner that they were bound to turn from then until judgement day. The whirlpool world sucked them down and ushered them ever closer to a more permanent sort of blackness.

Then there appeared a bright square of light at the end of the corridor, a patient halo in the dark. Phil could have screamed in relief; the elevator, running from the basements of the facility to the upper floors.

If they could get inside, they would be safe.

If they reached it before the guard-agents, they could get away.

Phil risked a glance over his shoulder and found himself staring into his own eyes, reflected in aviator shades that were far too close for comfort. Unable to scream, he settled for a dry croak of disbelief and willed his burning legs to carry him faster.

They couldn't—the legs were already doing their best. It was impossible to tell if that would be enough.

Drawing a ragged breath, Phil squeezed his eyes shut and forced himself to keep running towards the point of dull vermillion wobbling about behind his eyelids. Blindness was a comforting alternative to the sight of those blank faces foaming behind him—it wasn't like his sight had been doing much good anyway, what with the lime flames and shredded metal. Not good for the nerves, all that death.

It is said that removal of one sense heightens all the others; while this may be generally true, it was decidedly Not this time. Everything was a slurry of sensation with singular, occasional jabs of clarity, like a pillow with a needle in it. Something exploded underfoot. A pocket of hot wind scalded his cheekbone. Laser fire whispered sweet nothings. A high, sharp voice screamed once. The floor became slippery for a few paces. He was kicking something like a deflated football down the corridor, and every time his foot struck it it squelched. Phil's heart thundered in his ears, it's beating combined into a singular, ceaseless thrum.

The point of redness in the shut-eyed dark grew larger.

Without seeing it, Phil slammed into the back wall wall of the lift and bounced off with the same noise a dodgeball makes after being flung violently at someone's face. There was an indent where his forehead had collided with the wall and a smear of blood on the metal from his freshly bleeding nose; concussing himself by running into a wall had never felt more like victory.

He lay on his back, wet copper on his lips, the lights swirling a waltz in twins, feeling the world sway up and down as though resting on someone's chest. This, of course, was a result of the blow to the head and not an effect of the lift; they had yet to press any buttons that would convince the carriage to convey them to safety.

Phil would think of this in a second—presently, he was dazedly pleased to have made it inside and was considering that Job Done for now.

Hardly a step behind, the aliens joined him, bouncing off of the walls and each other like brightly coloured pinballs. Six hands (four of them Quiz's) mashed at the elevator keypad, uncaring of where they went so long as they left the subterranean nightmare of those lowest floors. Somewhere high above, the motors for the lift whirred to life and pulled tentatively at the worn cables in their grip.

'No hurry gents, take your time... not in any rush down here, you lazy sodding machine.'

With a bone-deep groan, Phil hauled himself to his feet, his brain swaying in his skull like a bit of seaweed in a current, like something that wasn't supposed to be thinking. Through the entryway to his little, boxy haven, he could clearly see the ranks of advancing agents—black and white blurs on black. Stumbling to his feet, he pressed a destination button and held it down with as much force as he could muster, locked in the conviction (as we all have been, at some point) that pressing the button harder would somehow make things happen faster.

The lift doors began to close with the blithe unconcern of a deaf, old woman crossing the road, in happy oblivion to the car speeding her way.

An arm looped about his waist and yanked him into the relative safety in the lee of the door; Diz was one side and Quiz had taken the other, squeezed out of the way of laser fire. Phil was clasped tightly against Quiz and Diz was angrily snatching at Viz, still stood boldly in the door.

Gun still in hand and immovable despite his pilot's desperate efforts, Viz was still taking careful aim in to the encroaching hoard. Despite his grim determination and proficiency with the weapon, the odds were... not promising. A number of his shots were only landing in a body because of the sheer quantity of pursuers, going wide as though the alien were seeing double or triple. The gun in his hand was glowing a low, warning red about the power module. Bodies littered the corridor like a barrier of macabre sandbags, but fresh agents simply clambered over and kept on coming, pouring acid-green fire which barely missed the brash figure stuck in their sight line. Viz, in his arrogance, was spared only by the funnelling of the corridor that sent the hurrying masses knocking in to one another, jostling their collective aim.

Still, with his efforts to keep them pushed back—however maniacally foolhardy those efforts were—it was looking like they might, by the skin of their teeth and several miracles, make it out alive. If everyone just stayed away for five seconds more...

(Viz shot a man dead through the head and he, with hydra-like efficiency, was immediately replaced by three others.)

Four seconds more...

(The gun in Viz's hand began to strobe slowly, entering a low power cycle to preserve function.)

Three...

(Another part of Viz's glasses snapped off as a laser beam scorched by, vaporised in a small shower of black filaments and sparks; a million tiny cuts peppered his cheek and temple, and his next shot hit the ceiling.)

Two...

(Phil could see their faces—blank, immobile, human faces, authoritarian and anonymous but alive and full of stories. He could hear them panting too, imagined their hearts beating as hard as his own. They were two meters away and he was filled with the terrified wish that they all just disappear.)

One—

And a lone man broke ahead of the seething frenzy, charging forwards alone, the white-light reflecting off his glasses.

Calmly, with the demeanour of someone flicking lint off a jacket sleeve, Viz shot the stray in the leg. A neat hole burrowed through his kneecap and rendered the joint useless. Propelled by forward momentum, the agent skidded forwards on his knees like an old rockstar across a stage, then fell forwards. His head caught between the closing lift doors.

Now, normally, an obstruction between closing lift doors only causes calamity in the sense that the doors, obstinate and pathetic, Do Not Close, leaving everyone feeling slightly exasperated by the Wonders of Modern Technology. They open and half-close and open again with an attitude similar to that of a particularly slow child trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. But those are doors designed by nice, normal people.

Diz was not nice, normal, or (in the traditional sense) a person; Diz was the designer of the mechanisms behind these elevator doors. Just as he was the designer of other such hits like the V.I. ship's bulkhead doors, the blast doors in the testing bay, the starship airlock doors...

Point is: when Diz made something designed to close, it bloody well closed. Regardless of petty inconveniences like unfortunate people's heads.

It would be nice and neat to say the man's head burst like a balloon. The reality was that it was more like a watermelon—an affair of chunks, and pulp, and odd, stringy, fibrous bits of connective tissue. A thick slathering of brain splattered itself over the floor, the walls, and the occupants, hot, dark, and awful. Nothing inside the newly dead man's head looked the way one might imagine living tissue to look; beyond the pale spears of bone, which were pink rather than white, the flesh was a stew of burgundy, maroon, and purple. The blood looked black in the nightmarish neon of emergency lights, like a Jackson Pollock from hell.

But the doors were closed and (most) of the guard-agents were on the wrong side. Smooth and uncaring as pearl, the elevator heaved its bulk upwards and in to the light of the higher floors. They had gotten away with it. They were safe.

Dripping liberally with the inside of a man's head, Phil wondered a little hysterically if this was what 'safe' was supposed to look like. Every nerve in his body was aflame and his lungs were a juddering, shuddering, uncooperative engine in his chest, a force he had lost control over. His conscious mind could hardly hear over his heartbeat but, in that higher, analytical quarter of his brain that remained absolute in its awareness of the world, he was faintly aware of music playing on a speaker somewhere:

~ I hear the drums echoing tonight, she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation ~

Nobody in the lift carriage spoke. The aliens were too busy fighting for air and Phil was occupied with the struggle of not being violently sick. He breathed deeply through his mouth, nausea sleeting through the fabric of his very being. The elevator was filled with the corrupted scent of something recently alive, and he could feel it settling on him, on his clothes, on his skin. He could taste the warmth of an extinguished life in the air like steam. He made the mistake of glancing towards the doors, where the majority of the mess lay congealed; the centre was still pouring blood, and ambiguous bits of red were still alive with the subtle writhing gestures of worms...

Fighting a retch, Phil stared down at his shoes. Nice, sensible trainers with no connection to homicide. Black, red, and silver, unbranded, new three months ago, laces replaced twice due to his dog, already deeply creased across the—

Something round and gelatinous stared up at him from his left toe. Bile rose like magma in his throat.

Phil was sick before they reached the chorus.


At least the place they arrived was somewhere familiar.

The green corridor of the third floor looked somewhat worse for wear; not in the manner of a place which had been subject to any rigours of activity, but in the fashion of something abandoned to decay, a place rinsed thin by apathy. Plaster flaked from the ceiling, lights crackled and convulsed, tiles wobbled underfoot, and the wallpaper was damp and sagging. Despite all this, the layout was welcomely familiar, and they set off towards the aircraft hanger without hesitation.

Behind them, the lift began its arthritic descent back to the lower floors, summoned by the agents waiting below. It's bell rang wildly, screaming 'TIME'S UP!'

Fresh adrenaline doused the ache of abused muscle. Newly terrified, desperately hopeful, the four raced down the corridor, closing whatever doors they could behind them in the hopes that it would buy them even a few more seconds of time. There was no way to lock them without a keycard, but Diz and Quiz took the time whenever they could to splice the few wires that protruded from the mechanism. They spilled through the final door in to the airy warehouse as a singular force and, without so much as a glance around the room, set to barricading the entryway with scraps of metal left lying around and a stick welder stolen from a maintenance cupboard.

Only then, with the hunt briefly stalled, did they look at the place they had ended up. As remembered, the aircraft hanger was immense and, though it hadn't escaped the progress of rot entirely, it seemed in better condition than everywhere else, perhaps due to its scale; lightbulbs hanging by wire threads were swallowed up by the shadows lining the cathedral-like ceiling and the faded colour of the walls was a fact secondary to their immensity. The portal to outside set high in the wall had been left open, admitting a breeze that took away the choke of mould and damp and replaced it with the brisk freshness of the sky. Still, there persisted a note of char...

(In one of the far corners there sat Nitwit's body, already dissected and disposed of. This went unacknowledged.)

With slow, spellbound steps, the quartet approached the centre of the room and the structure it hosted. Dry leaves, blown in through the vents, clustered in its sheltering corners, rustling like scattered bits of rattlesnake. Had any of them looked down, they would have noted that they were following the path left in the dust by a familiar, one-footed tread, flanked either side by a two-footed human gait, but they didn't look. In slack disbelief, they all stared at the prize lying brazenly at the end of their harrowing quest.

There it lay, their last chance, the culmination of their collective hopes.

It looked only vaguely like a spaceship, and a great deal like a head on collision between two freight trains. What wasn't broken was irreparably burnt, and much of it managed to be both. In one word, it was unsalvageable. In two; devastatingly unsalvageable. Upon seeing it, many would have had reasonable ground to disagree that such a complete mess ever had the power of flight to begin with.

If a person ever managed to find themselves in a situation where their entire survival depended on finding a glass of cold Coke, and someone handed them a mug of lukewarm Pepsi, gave them the finger, and ran off into the sunset with their mother, they would have a decent idea of how the Vizion aliens were feeling at that juncture.

How the hell that situation would come about is as much a mystery as what the three would do now that they were all so thoroughly doomed.

"Can you fix it?" Viz asked, in a leaden voice that already knew the answer.

Diz, who was staring at the vessel he had created and destroyed with an expression of betrayal and forlorn bleakness, exhaled sharply.

"... Given enough time and full access to the facility... no." He slowly shook his head. "I didn't think the landing went this badly..."

Phil hadn't realised, until that moment, how much he had been relying on the aliens' own belief that their spacecraft would still have the essential elements of 'spacefaring' and 'craft'. They had pooled together their scraps of hope and purchased a dream, a patchwork picture of a miraculously functional ship, and chased after it with such conviction that it was jarring now to discover it false. He had thought that his recollection of events was wrong, that the fire had maybe made it look worse than it really was, that the details in his mind were blurred by haste and horror, but no—he had been right the first time. It had been as bad as it seemed. And this disappointment was the price for getting caught up in the aliens' delusions.

Around him, he could feel that ardent belief in an impossible escape burn through and die.

To Phil, now was the perfect opportunity for a second plan, the wheels of invention ever-turning in his mind starting to pick up the pace once more. For the aliens, now was the opportunity for an absolute crisis.

"What do you mean you can't fix it?!" Wailed Quiz, suddenly looking very frightened, like man dunked into icy rapids. He had, Phil realised, up to that point had full confidence in Diz and Viz's ability to fix things. "You have to!"

"What is there to fix?" Diz murmured, voice cloudy with defeat and soft in the way of worn out things. "We're finished. It's done."

For the first time in a short and not-so-pleasant history, Phil agreed unreservedly with Diz. The old plan was dead—long live the new plan. Unfortunately nobody else—not even Diz, his mind as silvery and practical as a trap—seemed ready to share this pragmatism. Quiz started to wring his fingers hard enough that the bones cracked, his breaths shallow and frantic, bordering on hyperventilation.

"No, no, no, no." He seized ahold of Viz's bicep and shook it plaintively, terrified. "One of you do something."

Viz turned, face scrunched up in a snarl, and shoved the smaller alien away, his hands making agitated, angry gestures at nothing. Compared to Quiz, he didn't seem to be breathing at all.

"Shut up, both of you!" Wildly, he cast about the empty room in search of something, anything. He looked as though he wanted to tear the ruined spaceship aside like a particularly solid magician's curtain to reveal a different one. "It can't be over. It won't end like this, it can't!"

Phil's emotional investment in the situation had always been contingent on the prospect that the aliens would leave. As such, he was not emotionally devastated to discover their path to freedom not so much blocked as blown to smithereens—disappointed, yes, and certainly he was afraid, but he was still in a temperament to think of things logically. Which is why he was the only one to hear it when, all the way down the corridor, numb, senseless feet, wielded like clubs, kicked the first of the locked doors in.

The chase was afoot once more.

"I'm pretty sure this conversation can happen somewhere else, if you guys don't mind," Phil called out, voice forcibly chatty, conversationally hysterical. "Y'know, in one of those many places where death is less imminent..."

And here, it slowly dawned on him that, in a teamwork situation, there are significant disadvantages to being surrounded by deeply unbalanced psychos who have just experienced an extreme emotional shock after having the worst week of their lives for a while. All around him, the three aliens fell apart.

"I'm sorry," Quiz gabbled tearfully, his wet black, eyes huge with terror. "I'm so, so sorry. I never meant for this to happen, I wouldn't have done it if I'd known I swear—"

"It's all over," Diz whispered, and he didn't speak again. With the tenderness of someone stroking the wing of an injured bird, he reached out and ran a finger over the fractured patters cobwebbing the viewport.

"You useless, feckless, cowardly, spineless—" Viz paced the length of the wreck, jerking around like a crazed puppet with half its strings cut. It wasn't clear who this rant was directed to—Quiz, Diz, Phil, the situation generally, Viz himself, the ship. It didn't seem to matter. It certainly didn't help.

At the entrance, the battery continued, the volume of footsteps increasing in a series of hollow-throated 'BOOM's as the stampede broke through sheet metal with the power and diligence of people who couldn't feel their hands. Swallowing dryly, Phil tried to count how many of their meagre barricades remained; surely it couldn't be many now...

"Guy I am dead serious—we have to leave now."

Nobody moved. Viz ranted; Quiz apologised; Diz was cenotaph silent. If Phil had been blessed with hair, he was pretty sure that would have been the moment he tore it out.

And then there was a calamitous sound of rending, and they were down to their final line of defence, the warehouse door itself. Through the gaps in their barricade, Phil could see the final, flimsy piece of industrial strength steel shuddering in its frame from unseen blows dealt by a hundred fists. In a roll like thunder, the commotion was echoing through the ventilation ducts, the scuffling sound of jostling bodies without the accompanying voices issuing apologies, rebukes, and non-verbal acknowledgements of nearly falling over—all the sounds of a crowd except the sort which make it human.

Beyond that door was nothing that could be reasoned with. Beyond that door was an army with its heart hollowed out, led about by a kill-order like a good dog on a leash. Beyond that increasingly unstable door was a foam frenzy of black-suited piranhas, jaws champing, eyes full of mindless misery...

Still nobody moved. Phil felt his last nerve snap like a handful of raw spaghetti.

"LISTEN UP, YOU EXTRATERRESTRIAL FUCKWITS."

It was the kind of shout that echoed at least twice. Everything stopped—the multiple crises, the banging at the door, the sense of inescapable doom. Even the leaves shut up. All three aliens turned to Phil with identical, aghast expressions, all thought of their imminent death suspended. Phil cheered himself on, feeling his body reel more air in to continue its shouting, the words wrenched from somewhere deep inside him, the dark hole into which he had stuffed all the doubts and fears of the day.

"I have come too damn far to be taken down because you arseholes couldn't get your shit together when it counted. In case you didn't realise, I've got a life here! I've got people to go home to, and like hell am I letting you stop me! Maybe you ruined your own lives—maybe you fucked yourselves and each other over in obscure and unimaginable ways—but you're not getting me, do you fucking understand that?

"This is not how it goes! This is not how the story ends for me!

"So you sorry sons of alien bitches had better get your fucking acts together, because I swear on the soul of my fucking left toe that I will cast the lot of you in to the goddamn sun if I die here. I will haunt you. Do you hear me? Do you sad sacks get it? WE NEED TO LEAVE NOW!"

Silence rang like a crystal bell, fractured in to snow splinters, and shattered softly. Phil felt his head break through deep waters, a lacework of sea foam breaking over his head, leaving him gasping in what was, suddenly, very open air. The aliens stared at him as though he'd somehow become someone different; he felt very exposed, slightly shuddery, and stuffed full of red-ribbon wrath at their helplessness. Every breath felt cold and mint-crisp in the bubbles of his lungs—he was suddenly painfully, vibrantly alive.

"We can't leave," whispered Quiz, his voice full of something damp and apologetic—things Phil did not have time for.

"Fine, you can't leave the planet and you're fucked. We can still leave this room. Your whole thing was about leaving rooms in strange and unexpected ways."

Technically, this had been Phil's thing, but the alien simulations had been meticulously designed to facilitate those adventures, five programmed pennies in the hall and everything. He knew he could work it out if they just gave him something to work with, anything

"Oh," Diz said tonelessly, before vanishing.

He was gone for only a few minutes, but it felt like an age. When he returned, he was dragging a bundle of spindly, metal somethings that clattered.

"Repair bays have ladders."

It took several ladders welded together to span the distance to the exit shaft, the whole, unruly conglomeration laid precariously against the wall and shored up with the movable scraps of melted 'spacecraft'. Halfway up the structure already by virtue of being its builders, Viz and Diz were the first to make it to open air, followed closely by Quiz (who was surprisingly fast.) When Phil attempted to follow, his limbs moved in jagged, uncooperative ways, having lost all knowledge of ladders and the mechanics of climbing one.

Mistakenly, Phil glanced over to the door; through the barricade (which now stood alone) poured blindly waving arms, like sea creatures extruded from a blistered wall of coral in the deep; they were zombie-like in their torn suits and bruised, bloodied knuckles, and horrific in their multitude. A fresh thrill shimmered down Phil's spine in bloody colours.

Suddenly climbing was easier; the taste of outside was tainted by the sour tang of metal and oil.

When designing the chute, it's ability to be climbed was not something anyone had kept in mind, and that was woefully evident to the poor sods struggling through the ascent. Phil's trainers slipped and slithered in all manner of unhelpful ways and he realised, far too late, that it would have been prudent to remove them entirely. Sticky grease and a sheen of oil coated the walls, nestling in the spiralling indents and bolt holes that would have otherwise made for ideal handholds. Very quickly, Phil's hands were rank with sludge, his nails filled with opaque slime in amber and black. In the warehouse below, the barricade finally gave way; in a move borne more of panic than plan, Phil kicked their makeshift tower over, where its shoddily welded seams came apart on impact with the floor.

Tumbling out in to uncaring daylight was the most painful way to greet that afternoon, and Phil hated his adoration of it, how vital it felt in that moment of escaping death to have the skin scraped off his hands and knees. The asphalt of the roof sandpapered every inch of exposed skin and chewed his hoodie to pieces of gummed felt as he rolled down, down, down, until at last he bounced off the gutter and spiralled towards the ground proper.

Hands caught him, which was both a surprise and a relief—he had not been eager to add a broken arm to his combined concussion and nosebleed.

When they returned to Mrs Sundae's stolen car, which looked now terribly inadequate and a little silly in the face of the facility and all it represented, everyone spent several long seconds frantically yanking on their respective door handle before realising that Phil needed to disable the locks. This took the better part of a minute, one filled with fumbling and yelling. The group tumbled inside—Phil in the driver's seat, Quiz beside him, Viz and Diz sprawled across the backseat—all panting like racehorses, considerably worse off than they had been when they left only hours earlier.

Across from them, at the other end of the car park, a graffiti covered panel was scrolling slowly upwards like the curling lip of some slowly smiling mouth revealing the gleam of black teeth. Cars—at least a dozen of them.

"Drive!" It was a day of orders, that one—who was giving them, and who was obeying, were secondary concerns.

With a jerk, Mrs Sundae's stolen car stumbled forwards and began to amble placidly down something that Phil was now recognising as an airstrip. Inverted in the rear view mirror, the agents' cars eased from the darkness of their garage and swarmed after them like a hoard of flies after a lump of rotting meat on a string.

Something in Phil's hands cracked, sweat-slick and slippery on the wheel.

Snarling—almost screaming—Viz ripped his shades away from his face, single eye blinking rapidly in the sudden light, and removed a rectangular component from its housing. He forced it in to the depleted gun; immediately, the weapon's power-level leapt from 'LOW' to 'FULL'.

Diz hesitated for a stretch, before reaching into his coat. From it, he pulled a sleek, silver revolver; one with six, silver bullets, and a wooden stock stained with something dark.

Smiley's gun.

Phil filed that neatly away under Things To Scream About Later.

"So," he ventured, wrestling with the uncooperative gearstick. "Seeing as you guys are seasoned criminals, d'you have any good advice for someone driving a get away car? It's my first time."

Surprisingly, Diz's answer was candid.

"Yes, actually. One: nothing is worth getting caught over."

There were implications to that Phil would have quibbled over, had his attention not been riveted by the road.

"Two: if you can't be faster than your pursuers then at least be more reckless. Ideally, be both."

Phil risked another glance at the rearviews; a sleek, black machine, all gleaming bodywork and snarling engine, was approaching with the ease and grace of a predator. Hungry black. Funeral black. Mrs Sundae's car rolled sedately along, like a shopping trolley drifting down an isle.

"Three: know your surroundings. If possible, drive at night or in the dark."

Nothing could stuff the sun back in to its place below the horizon, and its light was was glorious, radiant, and really fucking unhelpful. The little car making its uninspired getaway was as conspicuous as ink stains on a wedding dress. Daylight beat down on them like a judge's gavel, unmarred and blinding.

'Where are we? Where the flying hell are we?!' Despite a decent amount of flailing, the Sat-Nav touchscreen remained blank. Ahead was the motorway which had initially delivered them, still teeming with cars full of ordinary people with their tidy lives and normal problems. And here they were, about to crash in to them with drama dragged straight from a B-movie.

"Basically, Phil..." Diz concluded, clicking the safety switch off the revolver and lining it up with the cars in the back window. "I advise you to drive like you don't mind dying."

Viz smashed one of his elbows into the glass of the rear view the same second Phil floored the accelerator and sent them hurtling forwards in to the melee of traffic waiting on the long road to freedom.


Metaphorically speaking, there are two types of backseat drivers; the first is your mother, sat in the passenger seat like a malcontent duck, yelling because you happened to edge over the speed limit in a twenty zone.

The second was a megalomaniacal alien sprawled over several seats to steer a car going at a ridiculous speed, screaming at you because your brain had finally caught up with the situation and you had folded in upon yourself like a particularly distressed lawn chair with a quiet 'holy shit' and refused to continue driving. You only still have you foot slammed as far down on the accelerator as it will go because your body is doing a particularly inspired rendition of that one time you took too many shrooms and forgot how to move and speak.

As they barrelled down the motorway at speeds the designers of the small car had never envisioned—voices raging, laser guns sparking, and car tyres screaming—Phil pondered the fact that these things aren't always metaphorical.

'I never passed my test. I don't have a license. Do these guys count as illegal aliens? I should ask Quiz if they have passports. If we get pulled over, they're going to have to write a new book to throw at me. We need to stop and get petrol on the way back, or The Doctor's gonna be pissed.'

As car chases went (in the general scheme of both historical and contemporary car chases) theirs was probably not the most dramatic. Indeed, it likely didn't even make the honourable mentions. Blackout drunks had wrought worse in a single terrible night than them, elaborate domino sequence of disaster though they were. It would later make the news more for the novelty of it all than its list of casualties.

But, as a person subject to car crashes could testify, even the smallest incident felt monumental when your life lay on that thin line between continued, painless existence, and the slow death of being mangled by a careless lump of hot metal. Sliding into a ditch feels like plummeting off a cliff. Losing control on icy roads feels like a roller coaster from some sick nightmare. Airbags sucker punch the unsuspecting with force that would make Muhammad Ali proud. And this...

There was no comparison to what this was—parts of other cars spiralling past the windows; collisions happening, left, right, and centre; weaving their way through the fabric of disaster like a particularly capricious needle with death chasing them in convoy—

Holy shit.

Not helping was the fact that Diz was driving. Diz drove like a man who's having a seizure paints—badly. He drove as though there was a bomb strapped to the car which would detonate if he didn't switch gears every five seconds. If there was a vehicular equivalent for throwing yourself bodily down the stairs, this was it. Apparently, contorting yourself enough that your head is under the dashboard as you drive severely hinders performance. Who knew?

Quiz was helping—

"Roundabout!"

Another series of screams. A Sudan to their left swerved into the dividers.

Phil amended: Quiz was trying to help. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Quiz's version of help was... unhelpful. Communications between between Diz and Quiz were being held at the top of both their voices, and Quiz's pitchy screech was getting lost in the symptoms of a stress headache.

"Go left!"

"Left?"

"Right!"

A yank of the wheel sent the car veering merrily into oncoming traffic.

"You said right!"

"The other right! As in, you were—" Quiz pinched the bridge of his flat nose. "Just—just go left."

"THERE IS NO 'OTHER RIGHT'!"

"Diz—"

"YOU WERE A NAVIGATOR FOR THE ENQUIRY, FOR ALPHIM'S SAKE! YOU KNOW THERE'S ONLY ONE RIGHT!"

If one were hoping to experience something similar, they would be advised to imagine a bad soap opera and a comedy going at 95 mp/h, because that's pretty much what it was.

Viz was still shooting at whatever was happening behind them, and this was what was causing most of the issues behind them. The fact that he was the epicentre of disaster didn't seem to encourage him, in any way, to stop.

Finally, its reserves run quite dry, Mrs Smiley's car gave a noncommittal splutter and a heaving, shuddering lurch. With the abstract air of smugness held only by inanimate objects doing things they weren't meant to, the engine gave a last, hearty cough and settled into long overdue retirement.

"... Car's gonna stop..." Phil croaked.

All three aliens swore profusely in their nonsense language.

"Get us off the road," Viz commanded roughly.

Phil complied, in a fashion. Through the bollards they went, like so many other cars before them on that day—through railings, through a thicket of gorse deep as a festival crowd, and down a sharp incline into a ravine where they finally came to a halt. They were out the car in the next second, struggling through the brambles and tangled thorns until they fell into the gulch of a ditch. From there, they crawled through the mud, dismal, damp, and gritty, following the waterlogged channel along until it shallowed and concluded in a field where sheep watched them flee. They hopped hedges and fences, ran past the derelict remains of old farm buildings and the gaping mouths of abandoned mines, sprinting towards the edge of the sky where the clouds were growing grey and aged. They were racing the end of the day and, by degrees, they were winning.

"Can... we... stop... now?" Phil asked around gasps. None of the others answered him but, when he tried to slow his pace, a hand reached back and hauled him along. He had the vague idea that they were searching for something.

Their day ended the way their night began; in a forest.

Finally, the punishing pace let up and Phil was given opportunity to appreciate the fact that he truly couldn't feel his legs anymore. Twilight had sucked all the warmth out of the world—both colour and temperature—and, as they stumbled over roots and fallen branches, he reflected that this was an awful way to spend what was likely a very pleasant evening indoors. Autumn had yet to cast its change over the woods, but the possibility was palpable in the chill of the air and the dusky, brittle whisper in the leaves above. Another time, Phil might have wondered if there was something portent in all this happening at the end of summer, but right then he only really cared that it was cold.

They walked until they found a clearing and then, at long last, they stopped.

This is the place where explanations happened and Phil found his answers—both the sort he had waited seven, long years for, and the ones that had screamed in to existence since then, during their charge through mayhem and death. All his childhood disillusionment fell away like the pieces of a dried husk—the obsolete chrysalis, the too-small shell. It was a process as old and necessary as the universe, but that didn't mean it didn't leave him feeling lost; he felt there should have been some more monumental setting for it than those old woods with their ageing emerald crowns.

But no. Here they sat. And here, in the evening of the year, the story was told over a campfire made of damp, spitting wood, with a distinct lack of bonfire related niceties such as marshmallows.

As with the 'backseat driver' situation, these things are usually more metaphorical.