They said all the stuff you're supposed to say to your kid when you split up. Not exactly the greatest self-esteem boost for the son they'd had two years in. Now they had the documentation to prove that the last seventeen years were just a sorry mistake. Dad had moved out a while before then, but now it was all official.
Two months back, the divorce papers had finally gone through. They both had high-powered jobs that meant we never stayed in one place for more than a year or two.īut this time I was leaving more behind than just a rental house and a school. Mum and Dad had always made sure I had plenty of practice. As if my attitude had caused all this in the first place. She'd been accusing me for weeks of having a bad attitude about moving to Phoenix, and in her head, this would just prove her right. I thought the whole thing was more than a little weird, but Mum didn't have a problem with it, and I wasn't about to argue. The windows had all been painted over, blocking our view of outside. They'd ripped everything out of the back cabin and crammed in some aeroplane-style passenger seats. There was a helicopter waiting for us, this big ex-military thing. He took us an hour out of the city to a private airstrip in the middle of a field. But when the car from Mum's new company came to pick us up, our driver said there'd been a change of plans. We were supposed to be taking off from Sydney Airport at 2 p.m. So when we flew out to Phoenix a couple of weeks ago, it never really entered my head that I might be triggering a countdown to the destruction of the human race, or that I'd be the one who had to try to stop it. But if I had, I would've thought it was pretty safe to assume that saving the planet would be someone else's job. Not that I used to spend much time thinking about that kind of stuff.
The end of the world is one of those things that you never really expect to end up being your problem.
Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group Illustration and design by Sandra Nobes Typesetting by Ektavo Text copyright © 2009 Chris Morphew The moral rights of the author have been asserted Illustration and design copyright © 2009 Hardie Grant Egmont
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.Ī CiP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia The Phoenix Files: Arrival published in 2009 by Hardie Grant Egmont 85 High Street Prahran, Victoria 3181, Australia All rights reserved.
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