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Special thanks to Colin Brake, GUNGE agent extraordinaire.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
This one.
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
Preview
Other Books By
Copyright
About the Publisher
This one.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a bunch of slimy aliens discovered the secret to clean, renewable energy……snot!
(Well, OK, clean-ish.)
There was just one problem. The best snot came from only one kind of creature.
Humans.
And humans were very rare. Within a few years, the aliens had used up all the best snot in their solar system.
That was when the Galactic Union of Nasty Killer Aliens (GUNK) was born. Its mission: to find human life and drain its snot. Rockets were sent to the four corners of the universe, each carrying representatives from the major alien races. Three of those rockets were never heard from again. But one of them landed on a planet quite simply full of humans.
CHAPTER ONE
It started like any other Saturday, but for Jack Brady this particular weekend was the beginning of an adventure he would never forget.
Jack Brady didn’t look particularly special, but he was.
Jack was nine years old, slightly less than average height for his age and had the usual number of facial features in the usual sort of arrangement. His friend Ruby said he had ‘very striking blue eyes’, but the optician had just called them lazy and so he wore glasses most of the time. This gave Jack a slightly geeky look, but he didn’t mind too much because he was, in his spare time, a genius.
Jack was an inventor, always busy creating new ideas and improving old ones. It was this – his inventing – that he was sure would, in time, be the making of him.
But for now he had an even more important role to perform. He was an agent of GUNGE – a dedicated but secret organisation that was engaged in vital work to protect Planet Earth from alien attack.
Jack had only recently been recruited into the fight – a struggle he had thought a joke at first. Until, that was, he’d met an alien face to face. Helped by his best friend Oscar and his new friend Ruby, Jack had defeated the deadly Squillibloat – a terrifying and frankly gross cross between an octopus and a jellyfish – and saved the day. Since then he had been on a constant state of alert, waiting for his next mission from the mysterious Bob, his contact at GUNGE.
But that had been nearly a week ago. Since then everything had been quiet. Only the presence of his new pet – Snivel – reminded him that the whole thing had been real and not a terrible dream. Snivel was a transforming robot created by GUNGE from alien technology. In his dog form, he helped Jack by giving useful information about the aliens he was supposed to capture. But he also helped out with the capturing bit – in a very direct way! When Jack spoke the words ‘Activate Snivel Trap’, Snivel could instantly transform from a dog into an alien trap, ready to suck up any hostile alien.
The only problem was that Snivel had to be directly underneath the alien when activated – something that had made catching the Squillibloat in the local swimming pool a bit of a task. Jack hadn’t thought his invention of a canine scuba suit would ever come in useful…
Actually, that wasn’t the only problem. The even bigger problem was that a mistake by GUNGE had caused Snivel to be built with three eyes in his dog form.
CLUNK!
For the forty-second time in the last hour Snivel fell sideways to the floor. He was trying to keep his third eye closed – Jack had told him it would help him blend in – but try as he might he couldn’t seem to manage it without losing his balance.
“Give it a rest, Snivel,” Jack said.
“I thought it was important?” replied the robot dog.
“It is, but if you keep banging the floor like that Mum’s going to go mad.”
TAP! TAP!
“Now what are you doing?” asked Jack.
“Me?” said Snivel in an offended tone. “Nothing.”
TAP! TAP! TAP!
“Is that your tail banging the floor?”
“No!”
TAP! TAP! TAP!
“Are you sure?”
Snivel span around, trying to catch sight of his tail. “I think so…”
TAP! TAP! TAP!
Jack held his finger up to his lips. “Ssh!” he said.
TAP! TAP! TAP!
The noise was coming from the window. Jack crossed the room and yanked it open.
“Oscar, go away,” he began but the figure climbing into the room was not that of his best friend. The legs were dressed in pink leg-warmers and the rest of the outfit included a leopard-print skirt. It was Ruby! She seemed to be dressed for some kind of dance lesson, except for two key elements of her appearance.
“Check this out.” she said enthusiastically, showing him her feet and her hands. The latter were chalky white and when she clapped them together a little cloud of dust rose into the air. Her shoes were some kind of specialist trainer, with a unique gripping sole. Both the shoes and the chalky hands were totally out of sync with the rest of the outfit.
Jack shrugged. “You’ve been working out in a circus?” he wondered.
Ruby shook her head. “No, silly. These are climber’s shoes.”
“You’ve been to climbing lessons in that gear?” He looked at her leopard-print skirt. It clashed quite badly with the pink leg-warmers – even Jack could see that, and he was a boy.
“Mum thinks I’m doing something called modern jazz dance,” explained Ruby.
That made more sense. Jack hadn’t known Ruby that long but one thing he did know about the pretty dark-skinned girl was that she loved dangerous sports but her mum would never let her do anything but safe, girly activities. So Ruby maintained a complicated scheme of little white lies: her ballet classes were really a cover for surfing lessons, and now “modern jazz dance” was obviously a disguise for…
“Climbing lessons. I’ve only been going for a couple of weeks.”
“And you just climbed up here?” Jack asked. Ruby nodded proudly.
“But this is two floors up!” said Jack.
“Yeah…” Ruby shrugged and grinned. “But you have to start small, don’t you?”
Jack rolled his eyes and then a thought occurred to him.
“Isn’t it unsafe to climb alone? Shouldn’t you have a partner with you?”
“I do…” Ruby began but she was unable to finish her sentence as there was a loud crash from outside.
Jack rushed over to the window and looked out. Sprawled on the bins below his window was Oscar. He waved a cheery hand.
Ruby joined Jack at the window. “He has a way to go,” she conceded.
“Yes,” said Jack. “Up the stairs, it looks like.”
Oscar started to get to his feet.
“I’ll get the hang of it in a minute,” he insisted.
Jack shook his head. “Wait there,” he told his friend. “Snivel needs a walk, we’ll come down to you.”
Ruby began to climb out of the window. Jack grabbed her arm. “Not that way!”
A few moments later the three of them, along with Snivel, were heading for the park. They didn’t need to discuss where they were going, as each of them knew exactly where they wanted to go – and why. They were hoping to meet Bob – the mysterious GUNGE agent who would have the details of the next mission for them.
Once inside the park they headed for the area where they had last had contact with Bob. Previously Bob had talked to them from within a rubbish bin. Exactly how a grown man had managed to fit inside a park rubbish bin they had never asked.
But now it looked as if it was too late to ask any such questions. The bin – Bob’s bin – was no longer there. Bob had disappeared!
CHAPTER TWO
The three children stood in stunned silence around the space where Bob’s bin had been. Finally Oscar spoke.
“It’s gone!”
“Yeah, we noticed, Einstein!” said Ruby a little unkindly.
“But how are we going to find out about out next mission now?” Oscar continued, oblivious to Ruby’s comment.
Jack bit his lip. Bob had promised that he’d be in touch – and soon. Although they had successfully captured the Squillibloat and retrieved its segment of the Blower, the intergalactic phone that would summon a full scale invasion, there were still three different aliens, with three different bits of the Blower still at large.
“I guess it’s not so urgent now,” Ruby decided. “I mean, Bob’s got the first bit of the Blower safely locked away so the others can’t put their bits together and make it work, can they?”
“I don’t know,” answered Jack honestly. “Snivel?”
Snivel scratched his head with a back paw. “If the aliens get together with the other bits of the Blower they might be able to rig up a makeshift component to make it work. They may well be very stupid, and they definitely hate each other, but if they thought they could get hold of all the snot you humans make they might just find a way.”
Snot was what the aliens were all about. It was the key to their technology, the energy source they needed to power everything. There were four alien races in the alliance known as GUNK. Together they were the Galactic Union of Nasty Killer Aliens and they were on a mission – to seek out snot! If GUNK were able to mount a full-scale invasion of Earth, then pretty soon every single human being on the planet would be hooked up to a revolting milking machine, to suck the snot out of their heads.
Unluckily, a GUNK scout ship had recently discovered Earth – and had landed right on Jack’s town!
Luckily, it hadn’t really landed so much as crashed. The four aliens on board had been scattered by the explosion. And, because they didn’t trust each other, they each had one part of the Blower – the device that would allow them to tell their friends back home that they’d found a whole planet full of snot. Bob had explained to Jack and his friends that, as agents of GUNGE (the General Under-Committee for the Neutralisation of Gruesome Extraterrestrials), they needed to find the aliens, trap them using Snivel and capture the components of the Blower before they could be united to send that message back to their home planets.
But now Bob was gone.
Snivel’s third eye snapped wide open and began to glow red.
Jack bent down to take a closer look.
“Are you all right?” he asked. But something peculiar was happening to Snivel. He seemed entranced and his gaze was fixed on some point across the path, behind them. Jack turned around to see what it was that his robot dog was looking at. At first he couldn’t see anything but then he looked down. There – standing on the grass – was a squirrel. There was something very odd about this particular squirrel. For one thing it was not afraid of the humans. And beyond that, it was looking, really looking, at each of them in turn. As Jack watched, the squirrel turned its gaze first on Ruby, then Oscar and finally himself before looking back towards Snivel. And now the squirrel seemed to be making some kind of gesture with his little paws, almost as if he was…beckoning?
Suddenly the squirrel took off, running away at speed and before Jack could say or do anything Snivel sped off in pursuit. Jack, taken by surprise, was jerked along by the lead and, like an anchor being pulled behind a ship, he collided with his friends, knocking them all to the ground. He lost his grip on the handle of his dog lead and could only watch as Snivel disappeared around a hedge.
Quickly, the three children got to their feet and set off to follow the squirrel-chasing robot dog. The chase took them in and out of the hedge maze, through the ornamental garden and around the boating lake. At one point they nearly ran into the park keeper, but when he saw that the children running towards him included Jack and Oscar, the uniformed man turned tail and hid in his equipment shed.
Finally the trail led out of the park completely. Jack was beginning to run out of breath. Oscar ran ahead and called back, “He’s heading for the canal!”
Ruby had stopped to make sure Jack was all right. “Come on,” she said encouragingly, “he can’t get too far.” Jack instantly realised that she was right. The canal disappeared into an industrial park a few hundred metres from the park, and the public access towpath terminated in a dead end. Gathering himself for one last effort he started jogging again. Oscar was already on the towpath when he got there.
“Where…where’d he go?” gasped Jack, feeling very unfit and not at all like a top agent of GUNGE. First he’d lost his contact and now it looked like he was going to lose his robot dog. Things were not going well.
Oscar shrugged, and looked embarrassed.
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “He went that way…” Oscar pointed off towards the dead end of the towpath. “…but now I can’t see him!”
Ruby joined them. “What about up there?” She was looking towards a footbridge which led over the canal and into a housing estate. “He must have gone that way.”
She led the way up the metal steps and across the bridge and on the other side they found themselves in a narrow alley. The alley twisted and turned and eventually they exited into a street of modern houses. And there, sitting beneath a red pillar box, was Snivel.
His exhaustion forgotten in his relief, Jack ran up to Snivel and gave him a hug.
“At last,” boomed a familiar voice. “I was beginning to think you’d never get here.”
The voice was coming from the postbox. And it belonged to Bob! After greeting the three young agents, Bob explained that for security reasons he had to move his base of operations around.
“Are you really inside there?” asked Ruby. She hadn’t spoken to Bob last time around – she’d only ended up joining Jack and Oscar because she followed them at the pool, and helped them to catch the Squillibloat.
“Of course I am,” replied Bob, “and I keep getting letters landing on my head to prove it. But it’s an improvement on being hidden in a rubbish bin, I can tell you.”
showered with empty crisp packets and cans of pop all the time in his last base.
“What was wrong with Snivel just then?” asked Jack, remembering the strange look that had been in the robot dog’s eyes back in the park. “He saw this weird squirrel thing and then he went running off.”
“Nothing’s wrong with him,” Bob told them,”he’s just been downloaded with all the necessary data for your next mission.”
“You’ve got another alien for us to find?” asked Oscar keenly.
“Yes,” said Bob. “Your next target has been identified. And you must remember to get hold of the Blower segment that the alien is carrying. The three remaining bits can still be made to work together if the aliens manage to meet up.”
“So who are we after?” asked Jack, adjusting his glasses.
“Snivel has all the material for a full briefing,” Bob told them, “he’ll tell you everything you need to knoW.”
Half an hour later Jack and his friends were in the tree house that he and Oscar shared. It was a magnificent tree house, basically a converted shed that Oscar’s dad had won and had then installed in the massive oak tree that grew at the end of their garden. Oscar’s garden backed onto Jack’s, making the tree house a great meeting place between their homes. It was used as a base for all their adventures and housed Jack’s workshop, where he developed and made many of his brilliant inventions.
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