Mr Mumbles

The distant thunder of gunfire ricocheted from somewhere near the village centre. A scream followed – short and sharp, then suddenly silenced. There were no more gunshots after that, just the triumphant roar of something sickening and grotesque.

I heard Ameena take a step closer behind me. I didn’t need to look at her reflection in the window to know how terrified she was. The crack in her voice said it all.

‘It’s the same everywhere,’ she whispered.

I nodded, slowly. ‘The town as well?’

She hesitated long enough for me to realise what she meant. I turned away from the devastation outside. ‘Wait…You really mean everywhere, don’t you?’

Her only reply was a single nod of her head.

‘Liar!’ I snapped. It couldn’t be true. This couldn’t be happening.

She stooped and picked up the TV remote from the day-room coffee table. It shook in her hand as she held it out to me.

‘See for yourself.’

Hesitantly, I took the remote. ‘What channel?’

She glanced at the ceiling, steadying her voice. ‘Any of them.’

The old television set gave a faint clunk as I switched it on. In a few seconds, an all-too-familiar scene appeared.

Hundreds of the creatures. Cars and buildings ablaze. People screaming. People running. People dying.

Hell on Earth.

‘That’s New York,’ she said.

Click. Another channel, but the footage was almost identical.

‘London.’

Click.

‘I’m…I’m not sure. Somewhere in Japan. Tokyo, maybe?’

It could have been Tokyo, but then again it could have been anywhere. I clicked through half a dozen more channels, but the images were always the same.

‘It happened,’ I gasped. ‘It actually happened.’

I turned back to the window and gazed out. The clouds above the next town were tinged with orange and red. It was already burning. They were destroying everything, just like he’d told me they would.

This was it.

The world was ending.

Armageddon.

And it was all my fault.

THIRTY-FOUR DAYS EARLIER… (#ub8195ffd-7c3d-53b2-875b-ffa87097df10)

Chapter One JINGLE HELL (#ub8195ffd-7c3d-53b2-875b-ffa87097df10)

If Nan had made the joke about the frosted glass once, she’d made it a hundred times. It wasn’t even very funny the first time round.

‘Look, Kyle,’ she’d say between tracks of the cheesy Christmas hits CD she was inflicting on me, ‘the glass in the windows is more frosted up than the frosted glass in the door!’

The first few times I laughed. The next few I smiled and nodded. By the seventh time I’d taken to ignoring her completely. It was the only way she was going to learn.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I don’t like my nan. She’s actually pretty cool most of the time. For a seventy-four-year-old with two plastic hips, anyway. It’s just that her mind plays tricks on her sometimes.

Up until I was about six or seven, Nan used to stay here in the house with us. It was Nan, Mum and me, all living together and getting along fine.

Then one day Nan forgot her name. It just popped right out of her head one morning, and she had to ask Mum what it was. The whole thing seemed hilarious to me at the time, though Nan and Mum didn’t see the funny side.

Everything was OK again for a while, then Nan started to get more and more confused. She’d wake up in the night and not know where she was. Some days she’d believe she was a little girl again, dodging the bombs in the Second World War.

One time she thought I’d vanished. For three whole days she couldn’t see or hear me, even when I was standing right in front of her, waving my arms and shouting. It freaked Mum out. After that, the doctor said it was best if she didn’t live with us any more.

The home Mum found for her seemed quite nice. Everyone there was friendly, and Nan seemed happy enough. She still spends every Christmas Day with us, but I don’t get to see her much apart from that. The doctor says she’s getting more and more confused with every day that passes, so she’s pretty much confined to the home all year round. She doesn’t seem to mind.

Her ‘confusion’ was why she kept repeating the joke about the frosted glass over and over. Well, that and the fact she’d had four sherries in forty minutes.

When Nan wasn’t making wisecracks about the temperature she was grinning like a maniac, and watching me play with the action figures she’d given me. Every year I try to explain that I haven’t played with action figures since I was five. Every year she buys me more.

Last year it was Power Rangers. The year before that it was Spider-Man. The years before that? I can’t remember. I had no idea who this year’s merry band of misfits were, either. One looked like a cat dressed as a cowboy. If I kind of closed one eye and tilted my head to the side another one looked like a monkey in a dress. A bit.

I did my best to look excited for Nan’s sake, and smacked them against each other a few times as if they were fighting. Even now, with all the crazy stuff I’ve seen in the past few hours, I can’t think of many reasons why a cowboy cat would be fighting a monkey in a dress. It seemed to make Nan happy, though, so I kept it up until she started snoring her head off in front of the fire.

With Nan asleep I was free to go and check out the smell that had been wafting in from the kitchen for the last twenty minutes. Mum was making Christmas lunch for the three of us, and I could hardly wait.

Usually Mum’s cooking was something to be avoided. Feared, even. For a woman who could burn a boiled egg, though, she somehow always managed to make a mean turkey with all the trimmings come December 25

. It was her own kind of Christmas magic. Not as spectacular as flying around the world in one night, but impressive all the same. Such a gift, of course, didn’t come without a price…

‘Kyle Alexander, touch those sausages and I’ll break your fingers!’ Mum snapped. I hadn’t even noticed the plate of half-sized bangers cooling on a wire rack next to the cooker until then, but suddenly I wanted them more than anything else in the world. ‘I mean it,’ she scolded, stepping back to avoid the heat as she yanked open the oven door and slung in a tray of potatoes. ‘I need them. If you’re hungry have a mince pie.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ I shrugged, and I wasn’t. I just wanted a little sausage. The look on Mum’s face told me if I took one I’d be signing my death warrant, so I slowly stepped away, keeping my hands in clear view at all times. For 364 days of the year Mum is pretty easy-going, but mess with her when she’s making Christmas dinner and you’re opening the door to a world of pain.

She swept past me and tore open a drawer. I could hear her muttering to herself as she rummaged around, getting more and more annoyed as she realised that whatever she was looking for wasn’t where she thought it was.

‘Need a hand?’ I asked. I didn’t know the first thing about cooking, but thought I’d offer anyway.

‘Have you seen the – Aha!’ Like a tiger pouncing on its prey, Mum bounded across the kitchen and snatched up two complicated-looking kitchen utensils. At least I guessed that was what they were. They might have been instruments of torture for all I knew. In the mood she was in she’d probably use them too.

I knew it wasn’t the right time to ask the question. Sometimes it seems like it’s never the right time to ask the question. I always ask it anyway. I can’t help it. It just slips out.