The Hipster Who Leapt Through Time (The Hipster Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Hawk & Cleaver

  FREE BOOK

  Dedication

  Book 2

  Quotes

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Appendix

  Part 2

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Appendix

  Part 3

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Appendix

  Part 4

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Appendix

  Part 5

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Appendix

  Part 6

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Meanwhile ...

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Appendix

  It's Not Over

  Book 3

  END OF BOOK STUFF

  The Hipster Trilogy

  About The Author

  H&C

  To Oscar. The only inter-galactic cat I need in my life.

  ***

  STRANGE THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN OUR CORNER OF THE UNIVERSE

  An ancient space-being called Moomamu has awoken on a planet full of talking cats who want to kill him.

  A talk-show host is about to become the next big story.

  An Alien Technician has a job to do — one that involves killing human children.

  Children across the world are waking up with psychic powers.

  A tired Polish immigrant is about to find herself saving the world again.

  And a ginger cat called Gary is the only one who knows anything about anything.

  “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

  John F. Kennedy

  “Tell a man that there a four hundred billion stars and he’ll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it.”

  Steven Wright

  Picture this.

  Waves of bleached white dirt and patches of grass, a cloudless sky, and a man in rags wandering alone. His footsteps leave a trail in the sand behind him.

  The rags are brown leather, beaten and weathered, and cover most of his body, other than his naked, shoeless feet. The bare skin aching each time he presses his feet into the sun-baked floor. Behind him, miles of mostly nothing. Some settlements with a few houses. A man selling ice cream. Some bleached-in-the-sun-white dog-shit, and a fat old American woman trying to give him change.

  “No thanks,” he says as he waves her off.

  He doesn’t need it. He isn’t homeless. The universe is his home. This place, though, is somewhere he’s visited more times than he cares to count. He’s returned for every launch. Each time he watches the events which are about to occur and hopes it won’t happen all over again — the end of the world.

  He winces as the pain on his bare feet pops. A blister. Doesn’t matter. Not too far now. A tall hill waits in front of him. It is just at the top.

  He removes the hood and pulls it back, revealing his dusty grey and brown hair, long and down to his shoulders. His beard, matching in colour, covers his chest where his hair doesn’t. His face is wrinkled and warped from the travel. Tired eyes. Deep creases. Crusty lips. He uses the back of his hand to wipe away the sweat gathering above his eyes. He has the face of a vagabond, and smells like one too. The poorly cared for body of a man who has learned to sleep on any surface. The broken organs of a man who’s drunk too much, from too many different planets, breathed in the air of too many different atmospheres.

  With each step further up the hill, his heart accelerates a notch or two.

  “Okay,” he says in a voice like he’s been eating tree bark. “Let’s take a look-see.”

  One more step and the blue horizon of the sea comes into view. To his right, a sign that reads ‘Cape Canaveral’. He wipes the clumped-up dust from his eyes and looks to the skies. The vessel is already scarring a line of white and fire in the deep blue hue of the atmosphere.

  He drops to his knees and reaches into the fabric satchel hanging from his side. It’s a couple of threads away from falling apart. He pulls out his notebook, places it on the floor in front of him, grabs a bottle of water and unscrews the lid.

  He drinks and watches as the vessel disappears and the line of white fades away. A clear blue sky. Something to be appreciated.

  He lies down on his back. As he bakes in the sun, turning golden brown like a good pie, he thinks back… wait, isn’t that forward? Regardless, he thinks of the cat.

  “I forgive you,” he says. “I forgive you.”

  Nisha Bhatia

  FIVE. THE LIGHTS WERE ON, a wash of yellow heat directed at Nisha, bringing out the makeup she’d been plastered in by the crew. Just enough to cover the bags beneath her eyes. Just enough to hide the hangover.

  Four. The autocue was ready. A square of words to feed into her brain to take the thinking out of the it.

  Three. The guest to her left was nervous. Beads of sweat ran down his forehead. He loosened his shirt collar. Coughed into his hand.

  Two. A drop leapt from the guest’s chin, landed on the slide of skin beneath his throat and disappeared into the black hole of his open collar.

  One. Her stomach turned at the thought of the salty fluids finding the man’s chest hair. Surely a clement forest of dark and grey. She winced, looked off camera, forced herself to think of something else. The thought of the red wine she’d drunk the night before came to her mind and she hiccupped. She needed to stop everything, hold on, give herself some fresh air. Just a quick breather—

  Too late.

  It’s go time.

  “Hello. You’re watching The Good Morning TV Show with me, Nisha Bhatia.” She ran on auto-pilot. The words fell from her mouth as easily as alcohol found its way in. She smiled, all-pearly-whites, cheeks to the ceiling, and made sure to look at the right camera. Easy. The red light marked the spot. “Welcome back. I hope you had a chance to grab a cup of tea and a bit of brekkie. In the last segment, we got to meet Barry and his dog, Susan — the record-breaking Great Dane, the biggest dog in the c
ountry.” None of her own words. All from the autocue. “Can I just say, somebody should talk to that dog: she was backstage demanding treats. You could say, she was being a big you-know-what.”

  That last bit wasn’t on the autocue. Improv. Not her strong point. She laughed at her own joke anyway. She couldn’t leave it hanging.

  She saw the twenty-plus crew members hiding behind the wall of equipment, dancing in the darkness, never smiling, always working. If she did catch a smile from one of them it was likely to be a smile at her expense for saying something stupid on-air. Like just then.

  She looked over to her next guest. A thuggish man who’d killed people in the desert and written a book about it because it had made him feel bad. She laughed a little louder until he joined in with his own faux-chuckle.

  “And now I’m joined by my guest — soldier, writer, warrior, Alan Whitman.” She turned to him. “How are you doing today, Alan?”

  Nisha forced her eyes to stay on his, but she found her focus dropping to the sweaty open collar again. She tried to stop, to keep on the blue circles of his eyes. Wandering even a millimetre would look huge on the camera. The hundreds of viewers drinking their tea, eating their toast, would look at her roaming eyes and think she was aloof or disinterested, which is a big no-no for daytime TV presenting.

  “I’m good thank you, Nisha,” he said, a little too quiet, but it was okay. It would be one of the heartfelt interviews rather than the loud and bubbly ones. She lifted her knee and wrapped her hands around it, interlocking her fingers. A posture she’d found to make guests feel relaxed, at home, easy peasy.

  The idea was to make the guest forget about the camera. To forget that the footage was being broadcast to millions of British people. Hell, there was even the internet now. They could say something stupid. End up remixed and auto-tuned. They could go viral.

  He nervously coughed into his hand and his eyes darted from one side of the room to the other.

  “All things considered,” he finally added.

  “That’s right,” Nisha said, trying to match his sombre tone. “Because you’ve not had a good time of it recently, have you, Alan?”

  “No, I haven’t, to be honest,” he said, shaking his head like a child who’d had a bad day at school.

  There was almost an awkward silence before—

  “Go on,” she said, willing him onwards.

  “So, I’m a soldier — served in Iraq.”

  She nodded, leaned in closer. She could smell the oily mist of sweat that surrounded him. A salty aura. She tried to hide her disgust. She had to show concern when it was due, happiness when it was due. She was a puppet. The producers of the show had their hands inside her. Her operators.

  “And … I saw things, action, killing; horrible, dreadful things that no one should ever have to see in their lives.”

  “Mmmmm,” she said, nodding harder. In the fake window behind her they had a backdrop of the River Thames. The big wheel — the London Eye — in plain sight. She wondered if she’d ever go on it. It was a still picture, but the wheel seemed to be spinning on its axis. Slowly, but moving for sure.

  “Yes, well.” He wiped the sweat from his brow. “There are times now … when … I wake up from my nightmares and … these nightmares are so bad I often wake up and the bed is saturated.”

  There was a moment of silence. Uncomfortably long until—

  “Saturated?” she said, lost in the conversation. ”With sweat?”

  Alan shook his head. He was confused. Reddening. Maybe even embarrassed.

  “Go on,” she said, watching the wheel spin in her peripheral vision.

  “So I, with the help of my family, wrote a book which documents my experiences … the horror of it all … the killing …” Alan’s voice trailed off.

  In the distance, she heard a faint whine, quiet at first, but building. She felt off-kilter. More than the hangover. Her balance was off, like the world’s gravity was rotating around her head, pulling her downwards towards an ever-moving floor. She could see Alan — suit and sweat — and she could see the cameras, the crew, even the backdrop of London, but it was all too distant. The wheel shouldn’t be moving. It didn’t make sense to her. The planet spun with increasing intensity and she couldn’t make sense of it. She needed to lie down. If she could just lie down for a second.

  Please …

  If she could please just fucking lie down!

  …

  Somewhere someone asked if she was okay.

  She couldn’t answer them. She was passed all that now. She needed to sleep it off — whatever it was.

  The heat of the studio lights was now a physical force, pushing her to her side, forcing her over herself. The world spun, faster and faster. Her limbs loosened, detached even, and a spiral of black worked its way outwards from the centre of the chaos until it swallowed her up.

  For a second she was weightless.

  For a second she was at peace.

  She wasn’t dead. Neither was she alive. She just was. Maybe it was heaven. Maybe this was the afterlife and she was about to spend eternity doing this. Floating and whatnot.

  She was now well above planet Earth. Stars were all around her. Moons and suns too. Glorious nebulae oil paintings draped over her. She was in space. But it was all only on her left side. It was her other side, the right one, which was pitch black. Devoid of light or wonder. All of life on her one side and nothing but dark emptiness on the other.

  Before getting a chance to wonder what had happened to the stars, something moved. Something in the void. She couldn’t see the figure itself, but could make out its movements in the thick black, like a watery creature swimming in the night sea, catching glimmers of the moonlight.

  The movement was small and distant. Taking up nothing more than the palm of her hand, but then she realised she’d been focusing on a single part of the whole. Like she was looking at an ant on a patch of grass, and only after refocusing her eyes she saw that the ant was surrounded by an army of others. The floor crawling with life.

  This was much the same. As her eyes refocused, shifted perspective, she realised that the black she saw before her wasn’t an absence of light and stars. It was a mass itself. It was so big, so enormous, that it blocked out the whole of space on her one side. And it was the mass that was moving towards her, creeping forward.

  She heard its vibrations. The fractal grinding of magnets and metal colliding. It was a vessel of sorts — a spaceship. Not solid, but made of millions, maybe billions, of tiny moving blocks. Forever changing its shape, rearranging, screaming as it did so, like the ant army, migrating to a new nest.

  She looked on in wonder and fear as it crawled towards her. The moving parts of the ship climbed over her, screaming, consuming her, pulling her inside, where each of the tiny black parts tore her body to pieces on a microscopic level, atom by atom. It didn’t need her flesh for food or sustenance, but it wanted her dead, and any other lifeforms it came across. It was rage, pure and simple, divided up into robotic nano-machinery. Chaos. A flood. A signal.

  She shrieked as the last of her was consumed and the lights became clear again.

  Movement.

  People.

  It was the camera crew. They were looking at her — the producer to her right, slack-jawed, the tight skin of his bald head reflecting the studio light.

  She looked to her left to see the soldier, the author. His face was one of surprise. She followed his gaze to his wrinkly old hand resting on her shoulder. She saw the curls of hair on the backs of his fingers and the yellowing fingernails.

  “Are you okay?” he said, more confident than ever.

  The producer, peering over the autocue, had his hands pressed together, praying for a miracle. Not another headline.

  “Yes,” Nisha said finally. “I’m fine.” She forced her lips to part, her bleached teeth to show. She shook her head and said, “I came over all funny for a second.” She brushed her head to emphasise the funny-ness of it all.
<
br />   The soldier’s hand retreated and they turned back to the camera with the little red light on it.

  “And speaking of funny, please join us after the break where we’ll be talking to professional funny man, comedian Roy Lacey.”

  “And my book?” the soldier interjected.

  “What?” Nisha said.

  “Can I quickly plug my book?” His face showed genuine concern for the first time.

  “Oh yes, yes, of course,” Nisha said. “Please remember to go and buy The Man Who Went To War by our friend Alan Whitman, available from all good bookstores. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Alan. I found your words inspirational and thought-provoking.”

  With each word she spoke she could feel the rage prodding at her from behind the wall of cameras, waiting for the right moment to pounce — the commercial break. The producer in the shadows.

  “Thank you,” Alan said, now smiling, all relaxed. Like he was settling into his favourite chair to read a good book. “Thank you.”

  JoEl The Engineer

  His name was JoEl The Engineer. Pronounced Joh-Ehl Duh Enj-Inn-Ear.

  He pressed his fingers against his lenses, making sure they were secure against his skin. The lenses, with their brown-red tint, showed a different shade of Earth. Oh, how the world had changed. A smile crept up on him as he looked upon the humans.

  No more horse-slaves carrying their masters in their little wooden carriages. No more dark streets filled with the dying and the plagued. Oh, humans, he thought to himself, you’ve outdone yourself.

  “Marvellous,” he said.

  He smelled the fine pollution lining the air and, to him, it smelled like progress. It wouldn’t be much longer, at this rate, before the humans took their seat in the Galactic Community. Maybe in the next century or so. JoEl looked forward to it. He enjoyed the ethnic diversity within the Community — a collection of planets, sharing in technology and resources, and governed by a hand-grown collective of great minds.