Joan gripped him by the arm. ‘Can’t we communicate with the school in some way, let them know?’

‘No. They’ve been cut off from the outside world. I have to go back. I’ll be careful. The rest of you must search for this Pod thing. Bernice, what did the boy who had it look like?’

‘He was quite old, but still a bit small. Fair hair. Looked like he’d been dragged across a field.’

‘Tim!’ Anand said. ‘You saw Tim!’

‘Dean?’ Smith asked, putting a hand on Anand’s shoulder. ‘Yes, he fits the description. And he’s been very secretive lately. Who saw him last?’

‘I saw him running out of school,’ Alton murmured. ‘He seemed intent on getting away. That was near teatime.’

‘We saw him afterwards,’ Benny told Smith. ‘He’s out there in the forest.’

Joan squatted down beside Anand. ‘Where does he like to go? What are his favourite hiding-places?’

‘There are several. He used to walk on his own quite a lot. He liked going to the teashop, and looking around the library in town. They have better books there than at school. And he always liked the orchard. We used to go picking apples there.’

Alexander nodded. ‘As I said. We should send out people in all⁠ —’

The skyline suddenly went white.

The shadows stretched negative black and long.

‘Oh my God!’ Benny shouted, the only one of them that understood it. ‘Get⁠ —’

The sound cut her off, hitting like an enormous clap of thunder.

The blast knocked Smith’s party off their feet, blasting the wooden pub tables into the field beyond the garden.

Benny, Joan and Smith grabbed the children and fell in a sprawling mass.

Alexander wasn’t so lucky, rolling over and over down to the bottom of the garden, finally flattening against the hedge. He looked up and yelled, astonished at what was coming towards him.

Through the blazing sky, a tree trunk was spinning straight at him.

It shot over his head, just clearing the hedge and bouncing off down the field. Splinters flew from it as it hit.

The wind roared past, thousands of tiny objects battering across the humans as they lay there. The hedge became a mass of glasses, foliage and stones. Alexander shielded his face with his arms.

The blast thundered through the town, signs flying from buildings, shop windows disintegrating, the cockerel being torn from the top of the church spire. The market traders, turned back from the roads by the frantic shouts and gestures of the army, had reassembled in the square, and their carts were hurled all over, skidding and smashing across the cobbles.

People ran out of their houses, crying about the end of the world, and were blown off their feet in the wind, wailing as they skidded down the streets.

Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the sound ceased.

A fine grey dust began to descend.