Czytaj książkę: «The Sewers Crisis»

CHAPTER ONE

Jack Brady was worried.

By rights he should have been as happy as Larry – whoever Larry was. It was the first day of the summer holidays. No more school for six weeks! Jack should have been full of joy and excitement but instead he was anxious. He had unfinished business to deal with before he could enjoy the holiday.

For months now Jack had been engaged in a top-secret mission as an operative of GUNGE – a covert group of agents engaged in the fight to protect the planet from aliens. Along with his friends Oscar and Ruby, Jack and his robot dog Snivel (in reality a shape-changing alien-trap) had already captured three dangerous aliens but his GUNGE contact – a man known only as Bob – had told him that there were four aliens at large on Earth. Jack knew that it would soon be time to go after Number Four.

He just hoped he and his friends would be ready.

After three exciting alien-hunting adventures, Jack was still amazed at how lucky he had been to be chosen for this special work. After all, Jack was just an ordinary boy. Well, OK, he was a genius and an inventor as well but he was still pretty ordinary at heart. He went to school, had to clean his room when his mum told him to and loved hanging out with his friends – all pretty normal activities for a ten-year-old.

Jack’s best mate Oscar lived in the house whose garden backed onto his own, and they shared the tree house at the bottom of both their gardens. Oscar was completely different to Jack. Where Jack was a thinker Oscar was definitely more of a do-er. If anything involved going very fast, or very high, or if it was in any way dangerous or risky then Oscar was always first in line.

When Jack had first been contacted by the mysterious Bob he had soon told Oscar all about the threat of the GUNK Aliens and why they wanted humankind’s snot.

At first Oscar had laughed. Snot? But Jack had been entirely serious. Snot was like gold to the GUNK Aliens. It was the most precious resource of all: the raw material from which they could create endless energy. All of the aliens’ technology was powered by snot – but they had exhausted the natural supplies in their own galaxies, and now they needed a new source…

Four alien races, deeply suspicious of each other, had formed an alliance to search far and wide into the depths of space to find the energy source they all needed. The alliance was called the Galactic Union of Nasty Killer Aliens and their mission was simple: to boldly go to the four corners of the universe to seek out snot wherever it could be found.

The four alien races all really hated and distrusted each other so they made sure each scout ship had just one crew member from each race. In addition each crew member had a separate piece of the Blower – a pan-dimensional signalling device that could summon the mass invasion fleets of all four species. Only with all four parts of the Blower could such a signal be sent. It was a kind of insurance policy, forcing the four aliens to work together and ensuring that none of them tried to betray the alliance and keep any snot they found for their own kind alone.

Bob – and now Jack – worked for GUNGE (the General Under-Committee for the Neutralisation of Gruesome Extra-terrestrials). This was a human organisation with one mission: to prevent alien invasion of Earth. Bob had explained to Jack that one of the alien scout ships had discovered Earth and found it populated with millions of little snot-factories: the human race.

Luckily, before they could act on their discovery, the aliens had managed to crash their ship. The four aliens – and their respective parts of the Blower – had been scattered in all directions. Jack’s job, as an agent of GUNGE, was to find the aliens, trap them using Snivel and secure the components of the Blower.

Jack and his friends had already captured three aliens: a Squillibloat, a Burrapong and a Flartibug, but there was one more to complete the set. Jack just knew that this last one would be the grossest, most disgusting of all. But why hadn’t Bob made contact yet? It had been weeks now since Jack had last heard from the GUNGE controller. Every day of the last agonising week of the summer term – which seemed to drag on for ever – Jack had walked home from school hoping to hear Bob’s voice from each postbox, cash point and rubbish bin he passed but it never came. Even Snivel didn’t seem to know where Bob was.

In actual fact Bob was exactly where Jack might have expected him to be – in his top secret base. The problem was that the base was both mobile and transdimensional—which was why it had on previous occasions been located in a park bin, a postbox and a cash point. The energy needed to maintain such a blatant attack on the laws of physics was enormous, however, and so Bob’s base spent most of the time at normal size, hidden within an anonymous grey warehouse in an industrial estate on the edge of town.

Although boring and featureless from the outside, the inside of the base was dark, mysterious and full of alien technology. It also contained a long dark corridor of glass-walled cells. In three of these cells, the captured aliens were being held in suspended animation. At the far end of the corridor was a glass shelved trophy cabinet with four display spaces. The Blower parts that the children had obtained from the Squillibloat, the Burrapong and the Flartibug were illuminated on three of the platforms. Just one platform remained dark and unoccupied.

Bob walked down the corridor checking that the correct nutrients were being fed to the three aliens. He stopped and looked into the fourth, empty cell.

Room for one more, Bob thought to himself, and then it’s all over.

He began to laugh, amused at some private joke. He laughed and laughed and laughed, until he was bent double and was wheezing from uncontrollable laughter. Abruptly he stopped and pulled himself together. Wiping a tear from his eye he headed out of the dark corridor and back to his control room. It was time for the final act of the drama to begin. He had to get the kids involved for one last mission.

In the control room he activated a screen and tuned into a local news broadcast. Zana Perkins smiled sweetly at the camera and concluded her report.

“Let’s hope that Trixie the poodle finds her way home very soon. This is Zana Perkins from Greenwick Parkway, back to you in the studio, Lorna,” she trilled in her most excited voice.

The cameraman waved a hand to indicate that they were off-air. Instantly Zona’s smile disappeared.

News items about missing dogs. That was what her life had come to. As if she cared that five dogs had vanished from the same estate in a single week. Big deal.

And having to hand back to Lorna in the studio left a sour taste in her mouth. That job – anchoring the news in the studio – should have been hers, instead she was back on the road, doing silly local news stories of minor importance. Zona’s career was going into a nose dive and she had to do something to stop it. A few months ago she had been the host of a popular zoo-based programme Animal Ark and when she got the chance to move to news she had jumped at the opportunity.

Unfortunately things had not worked out. Twice she had encountered Jack and his friends and, in doing so, she had stumbled on an amazing story of alien invaders but, despite her best efforts, she kept failing to get any proof on camera. Zana knew better than anyone else that if it wasn’t on telly, no one would pay any attention.

Zana handed the microphone back to the cameraman. “I’m off then,” she told him, “give me a call if any more dogs go missing.”

Zana stalked off, walking past a newspaper stand on which was displayed the heading, ‘FIFTH PET DISAPPEARS!’

The cameraman watched her go and shook his head. He couldn’t work out Zana at all. He was used to the peculiar behaviour of on-screen talent but this was something else. Every spare moment, whenever she wasn’t actually on camera, Zana was off working on some secret project of her own. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to talk about it. He had asked her about it once but she’d just changed the subject.

He watched as Zana walked off into the distance, wondering where she was going.

Jack put down the remote-controlled car he had been taking apart (with the intention of using its frame for the base of a new automated shopping trolley he had designed) and looked over at Snivel, who was sitting on the carpet in his room. A mistake in the manufacturing of Snivel had left him with three eyes, which got him a lot of strange looks when they were out. Snivel was always trying to find ways to keep the third eye closed so that people wouldn’t notice it. Unfortunately the effort to do this caused other malfunctions.

PARP!

“Snivel!”

“Sorry,” said Snivel, waving a paw in a desperate effort to make the smell he had just produced disappear again. “Just trying to close this eye.” He closed his third eye, then fell over.

PARP! He farted again.

“Come on” sighed Jack, getting to his feet, “let’s get some air, and while we’re at it we can try and find Bob”

“The park?” said Snivel.

Jack nodded. The park. The place he had first encountered Bob. Where better to start the search?

Zana had one thought in her head. Whatever was going on with the alien monsters it was all connected to the three kids that she’d met previously – Jack, Oscar and Ruby. With the school holidays underway there was just one obvious place that they might be found – the park.

The park was a big open space in the middle of the town. It had a boating pond, tennis courts, a maze and even a little cafe. It was to this last feature that Zana headed. She took a seat on the terrace, ordered a large coffee and settled down to wait.

Nearby, unseen by Zana, a squirrel climbed down a tree trunk and sat on its haunches on the ground. With unnatural smoothness it then turned its head – all the way round! It looked uncannily like a security camera sweeping the area. Which wasn’t surprising, because that was basically what it was. The squirrel was really a robot—one of Bob’s many agents in the field. With a low whirring sound, its mechanical eyes zoomed in on Zana.

Back in his base, Bob frowned as the feed from Squirrel-Cam showed him the young TV reporter sipping her coffee. This was a complication. He recognised the young woman from previous missions. Whether by luck or by judgement she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was clear that she was beginning to put two and two together and getting perilously close to four. Bob issued orders to the squirrel to keep a close robotic eye on Zana. If it looked as if she was going to be a problem, then they would have to deal with her. The plan was about to come to fruition and nothing could be allowed to get in the way.