The Watchers Read Online Free Page B

managed to tell everyone from school?”
    Suzi chuckled once more. “What’s going on here is no secret, love.”
    Mia wanted to slap her face. She may still do that. “No, but my theory of the Watchers turning up is.”
    “Oh, chill, babe. You’ve gotta lighten up.”
    “Lighten up? You know what it means to me to see the Watchers. Tom and I have made it our life’s work.”
    “Life’s work!” Suzi guffawed. “Now you’ve seriously lost it.”
    Mia felt her face redden. Okay, the statement about it being her life’s work was a bit over the top, but honestly, Suzi knew how important it was to her. Only the other night she’d confided in her friend about her constant inexplicable yearning to see the Angels. She couldn’t explain it, but the feeling of wanting to know everything about them was so overwhelming it was like living with a drug addiction. She told Suzi she’d never been so serious about anything before in her life.
    That was when she’d formulated her plan; to stay at the drilling site all night until the Watchers showed up. Once again man was stripping the planet of its resources and her guess was, the Watchers would take that very seriously. Only a few years ago, Blackpool, in the north of England, suffered an earth tremor as a result of fracking. The week previous, drilling had begun, starting the process of fracturing the rock thousands of feet below ground to release gas trapped in a seam of shale running from Clitheroe to the coast. A week later, when the tremor came, the company denied accountability, claiming fracking was a safe process. The word on the street claimed the Angels had turned up, but that had been denied too.
    Mia turned her back on Suzi and went once more to the fence. She cast a quick glance at her friend who was now chatting to the boys as they lit a cigarette and passed it around. Mia peered through the gap in the railings so that she could get another glimpse of the site.
    Over the far side, near the entrance, crowds of demonstrators chanted and shouted their objections to the drilling. In the centre, a huge rig, like a giant mast, took prime position, surrounded by containers, porta cabins and vehicles parked randomly within the grounds. Men were wandering around doing their jobs, and behind a partition, hidden from the frantic crowds at the gate, two men with rifles paraded back and forth.
    The sound of the drill starting up made Mia stop breathing. It sounded like a high pitched scream. “Why don’t you come?” she whispered, praying for the Watchers to prevent yet another assault on the earth. “Where are you?”

Chapter 5
    New York
     
    Tom kept his finge r pressed hard on the intercom to Jay Pullman’s apartment. His loft wasn’t far from Tom’s place where he lived with his mom, four blocks away on the Lower East Side.
    He heard a voice come through the intercom. “Get your finger off that bell before I come down there and break every stupid bone in your body.”
    “It’s only me!” Tom responded as his fringe fell across his face. Long hair for men was the fashion, which made Tom, just by accident, very fashionable indeed.
    “Who’s me?”
    “Tom. Tom Stone. We met last night.”
    “Oh god!”
    A buzzer sounded and the front door clicked open. Tom pushed his way in. He checked the mail boxes in the public area and saw J. Pullman. Apt. 5, a fifth box from the left. When he alighted from the elevator on the fifth floor, the door to Jay's loft was already ajar. It was the only apartment on that floor, so Tom had no reservations about walking straight in. He closed it behind him and wondered whether to fix all the locks into place. There were at least six. He made the decision to leave the door unguarded. Jay could put them back on if he felt the need, although no one kept their apartments unlocked anymore. Most of the places, from the tenements downtown, to the elite residences of Manhattan were as impenetrable as Fort Knox.
    Unlike Tom's mother's