Czytaj książkę: «The Dog’s Dinner»

CHAPTER ONE

Jack Brady was hungry.

Actually he was more than hungry – he was very hungry. Very, very hungry indeed. Hungry enough that he might even have said he was starving, only his mum had once shown him some people in Africa on the news who really didn’t have anything to eat, and had explained to him exactly what starving meant. So now he tried not to use the word ‘starving’ if he could help it.

But he was very hungry.

Jack was on his way home from school. Not for the first time, he hadn’t managed to eat any of his school dinner. He didn’t dare tell his mum. He knew she paid good money for him to have a hot meal at lunchtime – she told him often enough – but the food was just too disgusting. And Jack knew a lot about disgusting things. He was, after all, an agent of GUNGE, the ultra-secret organisation that protected the whole planet from the threat of hordes of horrendous aliens.

Jack – and his friends Oscar and Ruby – had already had two close encounters with extraterrestrials working for GUNK – the Galactic Union of Nasty Killer Aliens. With the help of Snivel (a robot dog who doubled as an alien trap and had an extra eye due to a design mistake) and Bob, their unseen contact at GUNGE, they had outwitted and defeated the Squillibloat and the Burrapong and now Jack was awaiting his next mission briefing. What he really wanted right now, however, was a burger and fries. Or a slice of pizza. Or anything at all that he could eat!

“Hey, Jack!” said a familiar voice suddenly, dragging Jack’s thoughts away from food. It was Bob! Jack looked around him, but there was no sign of the GUNGE agent. Previously Bob had spoken to Jack from a rubbish bin and a postbox but the street that Jack was walking along had neither. Jack didn’t know how Bob did it, but somehow the GUNGE controller had the ability to hide his base inside tiny spaces. Jack assumed it was some kind of alien technology that GUNGE had managed to get their hands on. The question was: where was Bob today?

Jack looked around again. He was on the parade of shops between school and home. There was a small supermarket, a newsagent, a florist’s shop and a bank. Where could Bob be?

“Over here” said Bob more urgently. “The cash point”

Jack hurried over to the hole-in-the-wall cash point at the front of the bank. Luckily there weren’t many people about.

“Is that you, Bob?” he whispered.

“Of course it is,” said the voice of Bob from within the cash point machine.

Jack stepped closer to the machine and put his hands over the keypad as if he was about to tap in his secret code, just like he’d seen Mum do loads of times.

“I guess you want us to go after alien number three,” said Jack.

“Absolutely,” replied Bob in a serious tone, “and there’s not a moment to be lost. We must get the rest of the Blower”.

The Blower was a sort of intergalactic phone that the aliens needed – if they got hold of it, it would allow them to summon their armies to come and steal all the human race’s snot.

For the aliens of the GUNK alliance, snot was the key to everything – the energy source they needed to power all of their technology. There were four alien races in the Galactic Union of Nasty Killer Aliens, a union forged with one purpose only: to seek out new sources of that most precious resource – snot.

GUNK had dispatched scout ships to every corner of the known universe. Every ship carried a representative from each of the four races.

And each individual alien carried one part of the Blower. The four alien races really didn’t trust each other so this was the only way to secure the union.

Not long ago, one of the alien scout ships had discovered Earth, where they found the human race to be a natural source of the snot they craved.

Luckily, the ship had malfunctioned and crashed, separating the four aliens and, of course, their four separate parts of the Blower.

Jack and his friends had captured two of the aliens and delivered them and their parts of the Blower to Bob already.

“But you’ve got half the Blower now,” Jack reminded Bob, “surely the other two can’t work on their own?”

“It’s not as simple as that” Bob explained. “If the Blower parts aren’t linked on a regular basis each can issue a distress signal. That signal isn’t as powerful as the one that the whole Blower can send but it would be strong enough to reach the GUNK home planets. The only way to keep the existence of Planet Earth a secret is to capture all four parts of the Blower”.

“All right,” said Jack. “So who are we after now?”

“The creature with the third part of the Blower is called a Flartibug,” said Bob.

Jack couldn’t help but giggle at the name.

“It’s not funny”, insisted Bob, sternly.

“Of course not,” replied Jack, giggling again.

“Snivel’s been uploaded with everything you need to know about the creature and its disgusting habits. I hope you have a strong stomach, Jack, you’ll need it for this one.”

As if in response to Bob’s words Jack’s tummy rumbled loudly.

“As a matter of fact right now I’ve got an empty stomach,” Jack confessed. “I don’t suppose you could make this machine give me some money, could you? If you did I could get myself something to eat on the way home”.

“Nice try” said Bob, “but no can do. If I start giving away money I might blow my cover. Off you go.”

With his stomach still rumbling with hunger Jack headed for home. He’d need to summon the others.

As well as being a GUNGE agent, Jack was also an inventor. He loved nothing more than fiddling around with bits and pieces to make prototypes of his latest ideas. Recently he had been working on remote-control flying machines. After spending some time on a remote-control Frisbee he was currently developing a new and improved helicopter.

When he got home Jack made himself a quick toasted-cheese sandwich to deal with his hunger and then ran up the stairs to his room. He pulled out his latest experiment from its storage place under his bed. It was a magnificent model helicopter, built from bits and pieces scavenged from a dozen different kits. Jack’s hybrid helicopter was designed to fly higher and carry a greater weight than any of the ones you could buy off the shelf in the model shop.

Jack opened his bedroom window and placed the chopper on the windowsill. He then fixed the payload carrier – an old hamster exercise ball – to its landing gear. He ripped a piece of paper from the back of his school rough book and wrote a quick note to his friend Oscar – Meet me in the tree house ASAP – and then stuffed the note inside the ball. Now he was ready.

Jack picked up the remote control and started up the little helicopter’s engine. It lifted into the air and flew perfectly, under Jack’s careful piloting, towards the house that backed on to Jack’s back garden. This was where Oscar lived. Jack carefully negotiated his flying machine through the branches of the tree at the bottom of Oscar’s garden and around the shed suspended in the tree, which was their base of operations. Finally the chopper approached Oscar’s bedroom window.

Jack bit his lip. Now for precision flying – one mistake and his precious experiment would be smashed to pieces.

Carefully Jack made the helicopter bump gently into the window. Back and forth, back and forth; the chopper tapped quietly on the glass. Would it be loud enough for Oscar to hear? Suddenly the window opened and Jack wrestled with the controls to back the aircraft out of the way of the glass. Oscar appeared at the window and saw the helicopter hovering there, with the ball hanging underneath it.

Pressing the joystick, Jack flew the helicopter forwards so that Oscar could reach out and take the message. He read it and then gave a big thumbs-up sign to Jack. Mission accomplished.

A few minutes later the pair of them were in the tree house. Oscar held up the helicopter.

“Your latest invention?” he asked.

“Yep,” said Jack.

“What’s so special about it?”

“It can lift really heavy weights,” said Jack.

Oscar pulled a face. “Wow. That’ll come in really useful”, he said sarcastically.

Jack ignored him, pulling another gadget out of his pocket. “Now to get Ruby over here”, he announced.

Oscar was peered at the small black object in Jack’s hand. “What’s that then?” he asked. “Modified GPS? A radio transmitter?”

Jack waved it under Oscar’s nose.

“Mobile phone,” he said and, laughing, began to dial Ruby’s number.