Only You Can Save Mankind

'Yeah?'

'Is Bigmac in?'

'Dunno.'

Johnny knew about this. There were only four rooms in the flat. Bigmac's family was huge and lived all over the town, and practically no member of it knew where any other member was until they were quite sure who was asking.

'It's me, Johnny Maxwell. At school.'

Clint was trying to push a fifteen-centimetre-wide head through a five-centimetre-wide hole.

'Oh. yeah.' Johnny felt that he was being carefully surveyed. 'He's down the pub. Yeah.'

'Oh, right,' said Johnny in what he hoped was a nor- mal voice. 'I mean, yeah.'

Bigmac was thirteen. But the landlord of The Jolly Farmer was reputed to serve anyone who didn't actually turn up on a tricycle.

His way home led back past the pub anyway. He agonized a bit about going in. It was all right for Bigmac. Bigmac had been born looking seventeen. But Bigmac turned out to be outside anyway, leaning against the bonnet of a car. He had a couple of friends with him. They watched Johnny intently as he approached, and the one who had been nonchalantly fiddling with the car's door handle stood up and glared.

Johnny tried to swagger a bit.

'Yeah, Johnny,' said Bigmac, in a vague kind of way.

He's different here, Johnny thought. Older and harder.

The other youths relaxed a little. Bigmac knew Johnny. That made him acceptable, for now.

'Don't often see you up here,' said Bigmac. 'You drinking now or what?'

Johnny got the feeling that asking for a Coke would definitely be bad for his street cred. He decided to ignore the question.

'I'm looking for Plonker,' he said. 'Wobbler said you know him?'

'What d'you want him for?' said Bigmac. On the wall in school, or down at the mall, Bigmac wouldn't have even asked. But there were different rules here. Like, in school Bigmac tried to hide how good he was at numbers, and up here he had to hide his ability to hold a normal conversation.

Johnny saw a way through.

'Actually I'm looking for his sister,' he said.

One of Bigmac's friends sniggered.

Bigmac took Johnny's arm and led him a little way off.

'What'd you come up here for?' he said. 'You could've asked me tomorrow.'

'It's ... important.'

'Bigmac! You coming or what?'

Bigmac glanced over his shoulder.

'Can't,' he said. 'Got to sort out something else.' One of the kids said something to the other one, and they both laughed. Then they got into the car. After a little while it started up, bumped up on to the pave- ment and off again, and then accelerated into the night. They heard the tyres screech as it turned the corner on the wrong side of the road.

Bigmac relaxed. Suddenly he was a lot less tough. and a bit shorter, and more like the amiable not-quite- thicko Johnny had always known.

'Didn't you want to go with them?' said Johnny.

'You're a right nerd, aren't you,' said Bigmac, in a friendly enough voice.

'Wobbler says you have to say dweeb now, not nerd,' said Johnny.

'I usually say dickhead. Come on, let's go,' said Bigmac. 'Cos there'll probably be some unhappy people around here pretty soon. 'S'their own fault for leaving a car here.'

'What?'

'Dweeb. You don't know nothing about real life, you.'

'It's just games,' said Johnny, half to himself. 'All dif- ferent sorts. Bigmac?'

Somewhere away in the distance a car horn wailed, and was suddenly cut off. Bigmac stopped walking. The breeze blew his T-shirt against him, so that 'Ter- minator' was superimposed on a chest that looked like a toast rack.

'What?' he said.

'Look, have you ever wondered what's real and what isn't?'

'Bloody stupid thing to wonder,' said Bigmac.

'Why?'

'Reals real. Everything else isn't.'

'What about, - well, dreams?'

'Nah. They're not real.'

'They've got to be something. Otherwise you couldn't have them, right?' said Johnny desperately.

'Yeah, but that's not the same as really real.'

'Are people on television real?'

'Course!'

'Why're we treating them as a game, then?'

'You mean ... on the News-'

'Yes!'

'That's different. You can't have people going around doing what they like.' 'But we-' 'Anyway, space games aren't real,' said Bigmac. He kept looking down the dark street. Johnny relaxed a little. 'Are you real?' 'Dunno. Feel real. It's all crap anyway. 'What is?'

'Everything. So who cares? Come on, I'm going back home.'

They strolled past what had been, in 1965. an environmental green space and was now a square of dog-poisoned earth where the shopping trolleys went to die.

'Plonker's a bit of a maniac,' said Bigmac. 'Bit of a wild man. Bit of a loony. Lives in a big posh house, though.'

'Where?'

'Oh. in Tyne Avenue or Crescent or somewhere,' said Bigmac.

A blue light lit his face for a moment as a police car flashed past the end of the road, its siren dee-dahing into the distance.

Bigmac froze.

'What's his real name?' said Johnny.

'Eh? Yeah. Carry. I think.'

Bigmac was staring at the end of the road. The blue light was still visible. It had stopped about half a mile away; they could see it reflected off an advertising hoarding.

'Just Carry?' said Johnny.

Bigmac's face was wet in the light of the street lamps.

'Might be Dunn,' said Bigmac. He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

Another siren echoed around the night. An ambu- lance went past on the main road, ghostly under its flashing light.

'Look, Bigmac-'

'Bugger off!'

Bigmac turned and ran, his Doc Marten's crashing on the pavement. Johnny watched him go. He thought of all the things he should have said. He wasn't stupid. Everyone knew what happened to cars around the dark tower. What could he say now?

And his body thought: You don't say anything. You do something. It started running all by itself after his friend, taking his brain with it.

Despite a bedroom full of weight-training equipment that would have been of considerable interest if the police had ever bothered much about a recent theft down at the Sports Centre, Bigmac wasn't in much of a condition. He had been born out of condition. Johnny caught him up on the bend.

'I told you ... to ... buggeroff! Nothing todo ... withyou!' said Bigmac. as they headed towards the distant lights.

'They crashed it, didn't they.'

'Nozzer's a good driver!'

'Yeah? Good at going fast?'

There was a crowd standing around at the traffic lights further down the road. As they ran, another ambulance overtook them and rocked to a halt. The crowd parted. Johnny caught a glimpse of - well, not a car, but maybe what a car would look like after trying to be in the same place as a liquid-cement truck. It had ridden up the pavement and lay on its side. Its load was fast becoming the biggest brick in the world.

In the distance there was the scream of a fire engine, getting nearer.

He grabbed Bigmac's arm, pulling him around. 'I don't think you want to go any closer,' he said. Bigmac shook himself free, just as the police managed to lever the crumpled door open.

Bigmac stared.

Then he turned, tottered over to a low garden wall by the roadside, and was sick.

When Johnny reached him his whole body was shak- ing, with cold and terror.

'Bugger you, I could have been in that, you-' Bigmac was sick again, all down the front of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Johnny took his coat off and put it over the other boy's shivering shoulders.

'they kept goin' on at me, I told them, I said-'

'Yeah. Yeah, that's right,' said Johnny, looking around. 'Look, you just sit here ... there's a phone, You just sit there, all right? You just-' 'Don't go away?

'What? Oh. Yes. Right. Come on then'

Click!

'Hello, this'

'Yo-less? It's Johnny.'

'Yes?'

'Your mum in the hospital tonight?'

'No, she's on days this week. Why?'

'Can you get her to bring her car down to Witheridge Road?'