Out of Time by John Marsden Read Free Book Online

from sunglasses to a balaclava.
    â€˜That’s just the thing,’ the woman said, as James’ father filled it with snow and settled it onto his daughter’s head.
    â€˜Well, thank you very much everybody,’ James’mother said. ‘You’ve been most helpful. James should have known better than to take his sister off the groomed runs. Now,’ she said to the man, ‘you must tell us where you are staying, so we can return your bag.’
    â€˜Oh, there’s no real need,’ the man said. ‘I’m at Michell’s chalet, if you happen to be passing, but don’t go out of your way. And my name’s Herbert, Frank Herbert. You could just leave it at Reception.
    â€˜Well, we’ll certainly get it back to you,’ James’ mother said. ‘James can drop it in this afternoon. And now James,’ she said, turning to him, ‘You can go straight over to Running Waters and find the Newcombes and tell them we’ll be late for lunch. Tell them we’ll drop Ellie at the Medical Centre and then come over, but they’re not to wait for us. You can come back to the Medical Centre then and look after Ellie.’
    James skied down to the chair lift, relieved to be away. He spent the afternoon hanging around the Medical Centre, and then baby-sitting Ellie back at the flat. Outside, the sun still shone and the snow was a white dazzle.
    â€˜WHEN THE WAR is over,’ the girl with the scarred face thought, as she followed her parents wearily through the city, ‘I’ll eat chocolate again. I’ll smell coffee. I’ll swim in clear clean water.’ The handle of the bigger bag was cutting intolerably into her left hand, so she paused again to change the bags over. ‘I wonder how muchweight the human body can carry, and for how long?’ she thought. ‘There must be a limit. I wonder if after a while it stretches your bones, or if the muscles tear away from your bones, or what?’ She looked up and altered direction slightly, to stay in touch with the weary backs of her parents, a metre or two in front of her.
    They were angling across the main square, seeming to dodge by instinct the human traffic: pedlars, beggars, refugees, police and soldiers. A group of nuns hurried past, their faces impassive but their eyes narrowed and concerned. On one of the public buildings a banner still hung, torn by time and twisted by weather. It was no longer possible to read it. Its message, that must recently have seemed so urgent, so important, had been superseded by the counterattack from the south. Nevertheless, the girl tried to read it, to reconstruct the words from the fragments that she could see. At least it was something for her to do, something specific.
    She paused again in the middle of the square to change hands. The crowd was getting more dense and for a moment her parents disappeared behind a flurry of grey clothing. The girl gave a start forward, then calmed when the crowd parted and her mother’s back came into view, fifty metres away. As she prepared to thread her way through the people again, to shorten the invisible cord to her parents, everything changed. The buildings moved, as though they were not stable and permanent, but instead were made of sand and could be shuffled at will. The ground under her feet shifted and reorganised itself, lifting her as it did so, and causingher to stumble. The sky darkened to grey, and then to complete black. All this happened in the time it took her to drop the heavier bag and open her mouth. Then a moving wall of air and sound hit her and she staggered backwards. The sound that came with it deafened her: an earthquake of a sound, a whole world of sound, a Heaven and Hell of noise.
    She opened her mouth a little further, to scream or cry out, but any sound she made, even the thought of a sound, was blown away by the noise. She saw that the old clock tower was coming towards her: the fact that the