The Cosmic Ark Read online

  By a what, though? A dinosaur? A dragon?

  “Still wanna stick around?” Ant demanded, raising his voice above the racket emanating from above. It sounded like the roof was being torn off. And it probably was.

  “Not so much,” Liam admitted.

  “But we don’t know what’s out there!” Madison cried, wringing her hands. “And it’s foggy! And dark!”

  It was certainly foggy—if a thundercloud smothering a house could be classified as foggy—but it wasn’t really dark. Still, flashlights might be in order.

  As the ceiling split down the middle and debris showered them, Liam darted for the drawer that held lighters, matches, and other useful things. There were two flashlights, both small but powerful, and he threw one to Madison as he switched his on and headed for the door. The ceiling fan came loose, its fall arrested by half a foot of taut electrical cable. Another roar sounded, accompanied by thumping and tearing and snapping wood. With the continuous vibrations underfoot and frequent shuddering all around, everything in the kitchen was dancing.

  “I’m outta here,” Liam said, trying to quell the rising terror. “I’ll yank the door open and we’ll run, okay? Straight for the hedge.” He thought quickly and pointed with his flashlight. “The new gate Dad installed is that way. We’ll never squeeze through the hedge.”

  “Go, go,” Ant urged, gripping Liam’s free arm.

  Madison reached for Ant’s other hand, and with a chain formed, Liam pulled the door open and dashed out, dragging his friends with him.

  The flashlight did nothing. The fog-cloud was unrelenting, thick enough to bring on Liam’s abject fear of having his nose and mouth smothered. He’d always argued it was a healthy enough phobia, a very real aversion to actual danger, rather like the fear of heights. He normally scoffed at those who were terrified of spiders and pigeons, but right now he’d happily trade places if it meant navigating without fear this choking, sulfurous, yellow-tinted, swirling mass that blanketed his house and yard.

  The roof-monster bellowed again. Liam couldn’t help glancing back, and in the murk he saw a massive black shape, some kind of giant bat, its wings draped across the roof and deadly claws curled around the gutter.

  Chapter 3

  Liam tore his eyes away from the ghastly monster on the roof and blundered onward, trying to concentrate on where he was going. His sense of direction was lost, and it took all his effort to put one foot in front of the other. The hedge had to be right ahead. He reached for it, the fog so thick that his flashlight, hand, wrist, and part of his arm was lost in it.

  Something rushed by from right to left, bumping his flashlight as it went. He felt something cold and wet on the back of his hand. He skidded to a halt and gasped at the hideous creature floating by—something the size of a sheep with a pudgy human face, a large rounded body that glistened and heaved, and dozens of thin, trailing tentacles.

  Ant was right beside him. “What was that?”

  “Don’t know and don’t care,” Liam said. “Let’s keep moving.”

  “It looked like a flying jellyfish.”

  “Is Maddy still with you?”

  “I’m here,” she whispered. She was no more than a shadow even from two or three feet away.

  “Then let’s keep moving.”

  Their nightmarish journey across the lawn took forever. Liam felt like he was moving in slow motion, trying to run underwater with a blindfold on while sharks swam easily toward him. He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt so vulnerable, and his phobia made it worse. Still reaching ahead, his head tilted back in a pointless attempt to avoid the smothering cloud, he began to realize they’d gone off course.

  A squeal sounded to his left, high-pitched and angry.

  Deep, booming laughter came from the right, followed by the yip-yip-yip of something like a dog or perhaps a hyena. Or something . . . else.

  A buzzing creature as large as his head whipped around him. It had a squat, yellow-furred body with ten legs and a shiny black head. Liam ducked to avoid it, but it tore away even before he had a chance to cry out.

  Seconds later he crashed into the hedge and fell into it. Ant and Madison collapsed on top of him.

  He was right. They’d drifted off course and intercepted the hedge at a shallow angle. They’d probably veered diagonally across the lawn and missed the gate altogether. “Stay close,” he whispered, turning and shouldering past his friends.

  Here by the hedge, the yellow cloud was considerably lighter. Liam tried to peer through small gaps but saw only a hazy smudge. He hurried alongside, keeping the foliage close to his left shoulder, feeling a constant tug on the back of his shirt as Ant held on. He trusted that Madison was back there too, clinging to Ant’s hand.

  A snarl sounded mere yards away, and Liam picked up his pace rather than freeze. Whatever it was came into view briefly, a plump humanoid figure about his height, either bald or wearing a helmet, its face impossible to make out except for dark fuzzy shapes that might be enormous eyes.

  Liam reached the low picket gate and fell against it with relief, feeling for the latch. First Ant then Madison were right behind him, breathing down his neck. A deafening roar came from the house as the giant bat monster continued to tear through the roof. Almost at the same time, a warbling whisper floated down from above, a sound that gave Liam the heebie-jeebies. Something ten feet away howled.

  “Let’s go,” Ant pleaded, urging Liam forward.

  After a few steps, the haze faded, revealing actual daylight as well as the green grass and other darker smudges of reality. With relief flooding through him, Liam hurried away from the gate, dragging his friends with him.

  Blinking rapidly, he took in the wonderful sight before him—Madison’s house, standing in its neatly trimmed yard beneath a cloudy sky with rays of sunshine trying to break through.

  The three of them turned around. They were twenty feet from the hedge. On the other side, the eerie storm cloud rotated at a steady walking pace, hemmed in at the bottom by the leafy border but spilling over the top and spreading outward in the form of wispy fingers.

  Liam rubbed his face. “Okay, I’m just about ready to wake up now.”

  “Me too,” Madison said. She fished in her pocket and pulled out her notebook. How she could coolly write down the details of their encounter at a time like this was beyond Liam. His own mind was scrambled, his nerves fried, and she had to be pretty freaked out by the whole thing too. Perhaps her habit of recording everything calmed her. Or maybe she was made of sterner stuff than either of the boys.

  She started murmuring as she wrote. “Huge monster-filled storm in Liam’s backyard. Assuming what I wrote last night was accurate, the wormhole opened at 4:03 PM . . .”

  Liam and Ant exchanged a glance and waited patiently. They both knew Madison’s notes were important somehow, a record of their weird and crazy experiences. With all the dates and times carefully logged, maybe one day a pattern would emerge, providing them with a method with which to predict when wormholes would open and spew forth their demented denizens.

  She looked up. “Is all this our fault, do you think?”

  “You think someone’s got it in for us?” Liam said. “Why?”

  “Because you stole a time wand,” Ant murmured.

  “Well, technically speaking, I stole a wormhole wand, and that gravedigger Rock Dwarf gave me a time wand in exchange.”

  Ant snorted. “Which the Stick Insects sniffed out a mile away.” He reached out and tapped Liam in the middle of his chest. “What if the guy who shot you is annoyed because you haven’t delivered his message? Maybe he’s unleashing his fury on you.”

  Madison put her notebook away. “We’re all in this together. I really don’t want anyone finding out about our secret. If our parents figure it out, they’ll call in the authorities and we’ll be overrun by Government scientists, and nothing will be the same again. If this storm is our fault somehow, then we need to fix it.”

  She sounded so determined tha
t Liam and Ant knew better than to argue.

  “Okay,” Liam said. “Wormholes are usually open about forty minutes, right? How long do we have left?”

  Ant pulled out his mobile phone. It showed 4:14 PM.

  Liam gaped. It seemed impossible that such a short amount of time had passed. “So we still have twenty-five minutes before it shuts down,” he said when he’d recovered from his surprise.

  “And traps all these monsters here,” Madison added. “Not sure I like that idea.”

  As if to punctuate her remark, several roars and screeches came from the fog beyond the hedge.

  “I want to see where the wormhole is,” Liam said. “It has to be above the cloud.” He craned his neck. “Can’t see a thing from here though. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “We’re coming too,” Ant started.

  At that moment, a voice called from Madison’s house. “Are you guys okay?” Her mom was leaning out of the kitchen window. “Come in out of this awful fog. I’ve been trying to call you, Madison. Is your phone on?”

  “Yeah, but there’s no signal.” Madison dug her phone out of her pocket to show her, then did a double take. “Oh. Looks like there is now that we’re out of the cloud.”

  “And what about the house phone? Nobody’s answering it.” She broke off as the sound of splintering wood tore through the air. “What’s all that noise I keep hearing? What’s going on over there?”

  “A tree,” Madison told her. “It’s dropping branches everywhere.”

  Her mom frowned as more snaps and cracks filtered out of the gloom. “Branches? But there’s no wind! Oh, this fog is scary. I’ve never seen anything like it. I called your dad. He’s nearly home, and he can see this cloud, says it’s a big patch of yellow mist on the horizon. He says it’s like a teardrop hanging from the clouds.”

  She went on to explain that she was trying to figure out who to report this to. Thick, yellow, isolated fog didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Maybe she should call the fire department . . .

  Liam whispered to Ant and Madison, “Keep her busy. I’ll be right back.”

  He jogged down the horseshoe gravel driveway until he reached the lane. His friends’ voices faded as he went, all manner of white lies slipping uneasily from their lips.

  Trees lined the narrow lane as far as the highway about a mile to his left and a quarter-mile to the right where it ended at the lake. Liam knew he wouldn’t see much of anything with all those overhanging branches, so he stopped at the very end of the driveway, turned about, and squinted up at the storm with an unhindered view.

  The cloud towered high above, far wider at its base. It was still hard to see properly though, so he hurried down the lane and peered up through the trees as he went. If it were a twister, it was the weirdest looking one he’d ever seen—a slow, silent rotation, standing upright like a mountain rather than inverted or tubular as tornadoes usually were. Above it, ordinary thunderclouds filled the sky—but the yellow cloud seemed oddly detached from it.

  Because it wasn’t a tornado.

  He reached the lake. The algae-covered marshes near the bank were swarming with dragonflies and pond-skaters. He considered climbing aboard his boat and rowing out to get a better look at the storm but decided that would take too long. The view was good enough from here.

  From this distance, both his and Madison’s houses were lost in the woods, but the curious yellow-tinted cloud rose high above. Now it looked rather like a teardrop just as Madison’s dad had reported. If there was a wormhole up there somewhere, it was invisible, either lost in the hanging cloud cover or just too hard to see from this distance. But Liam had no doubt it was there. This fog-like mass had poured out of it and slowly spread outward.

  Right over his home.

  Appalled as well as intrigued, he hurried back up the lane and turned into Madison’s driveway.

  “There you are!” Madison called as she hurried down the drive to greet him with Ant in tow. “Mom’s calling the fire department. She thinks there’s a fire somewhere. And that giant bat thing has been at it again, tearing bits off your roof. We need to do something.”

  The fire department.

  A strange feeling passed through Liam again. First the yellow cloud, now the fire department. He’d seen this. The time wand had given him a glimpse of the future and shown him this exact scene. Or at least the aftermath. And he knew everything would be okay except for the roof.

  He glanced up at the moving wall of cloud, half expecting the gargantuan creature to come hurtling out. Why hadn’t it already? For that matter, why hadn’t anything else emerged from the fog?

  “I went to the lake so I could see the storm from a distance,” he said to his friends. “It’s definitely not a tornado.”

  “I told you,” Ant said. “It’s spewing out of a wormhole.”

  “Right,” Liam said. “What time is it now?”

  Madison glanced at her watch. “4:26.”

  “Closing in fifteen minutes then. And leaving all these beasties behind. Unless . . .”

  His friends tilted their heads and waited.

  Remembering what he’d seen in his short trip to the near future, he knew his parents would come home soon and talk to the fire department without a great deal of concern on their faces, which told Liam he and his friends would live through this. But there was no guarantee as to the safety of others in town if these creatures escaped.

  The idea that raced through Liam’s mind was foolhardy, crazy, and impossible, but he saw no other option. He jabbed a thumb toward the gate. “Come on. We need to catch us a ride.”

  Chapter 4

  “This is nuts,” Ant muttered.

  Liam paused briefly at the threshold of the narrow gate in the hedge, then plunged deeper into the smothering yellow cloud. But Madison grabbed his arm, halting him in his tracks. “Ant’s right,” she hissed. “There has to be a less crazy way to get up to that wormhole.”

  “I’m listening,” Liam said.

  She stared at him intently, eyes narrowed.

  He waited.

  Finally she sighed. “I’ve got nothing.”

  Liam nodded. “That’s my house. Like you said, we need to do something. What if those monsters spread out and run off through the trees, invading homes and killing people?”

  “Maybe they’ll be sucked up into the wormhole before it closes,” Ant argued.

  Liam peered through the gloom. It was even darker and thicker than before. Something rushed by, a childlike body with a large head, giggling maniacally. Straight after that, a creature silently floated through the gloom. He didn’t get a good look at it, but it left a horrible stench in its wake.

  “That one,” Ant said, nudging him. Despite his reluctance, he recognized that something had to be done and that time was running out. “Hurry!”

  Ant plunged into the fog after the shadowy, floating creature. Liam and Madison tore after him. Though only a few yards behind, it was like following something in the periphery of the eye, frustratingly hard to focus on.

  “Stay close,” Liam told Madison over his shoulder.

  “You stay close,” she retorted as she put on speed and passed him.

  The floating creature—the flying jellyfish Ant had so accurately described earlier—veered left and started to ascend. It was onto them. Ant pounced and snagged one of its trailing tentacles. “Got it! Hurry!”

  Madison was on it next, her long legs flying up as she dove. Liam leapt into the fray a split-second later, not caring what part of the alien creature he grabbed hold of as long as he grabbed something. The three of them grappled with the struggling beast, and it flailed and turned, emitting a shriek.

  It bobbed up and down, tentacles trailing in the grass as Liam and his friends wrapped themselves around the hideous appendages and tried to keep their feet firmly grounded. “No, no, no, no, no,” the floating alien cried in its entirely too-human voice.

  “Yes, yes, YES!” Liam said. “Take us up.”

/>   “No, no, no—”

  “I said take us up!”

  The creature stopped thrashing and sank to the grass. Liam found himself kneeling and staring over the humped back at Ant on the other side, and at Madison near the rear end. The flying jellyfish was no longer flying. Its rounded, glistening body heaved as though suffering from shock.

  Keeping a grip on one tentacle after another, Liam crawled around to the front so he could talk to the creature face to face. He fought the urge to reel backward when he came across the ghastly features. It was definitely human—a round face with two ordinary, sorrowful eyes, a rather fat nose, and a mouth that turned down at the corners. It was like a man had been absorbed into this giant jellyfish, and now he looked out on the world from his repulsive body.

  “What are you?” Liam asked, knowing he had no time for answers right now.

  The creature offered no reply anyway. It stared at him wide-eyed, its mouth opening in a grimace as though waiting to be bludgeoned to death.

  “Never mind,” Liam said. “You need to take us up there. Up to the wormhole. Okay?”

  He jabbed his thumb skyward, and the jellyfish man frowned. “No hurt?”

  “No hurt,” Liam agreed, beginning to feel sorry for the thing. “If you take us to wormhole.”

  Ant and Madison hunkered lower, trying to wrap themselves up in tentacles ready for lift-off. “Quit trying to talk to it,” Ant gasped. “It can’t understand you.”

  “Sure it can,” Liam said. He glared at the creature. “So what about it?”

  “Too heavy,” the pudgy face said, its eyes darting from side to side. “Take one. No hurt. Take one.”

  “See?” Ant said. “Gibberish.”

  A thunderous roar came from the house, and a metallic clatter rattled across the lawn. It sounded like the gutter and drain pipe had come loose and crashed down. Three figures blundered by, each a different size and shape, one upright on two legs, the others scampering on all fours. The nearest, coming straight at Liam, had black fur and bristling porcupine quills across its back and shoulders. Whatever this foul, snarling, doglike beast was, thankfully it veered off in another direction.