Slime Squad Vs the Last Chance Chicken Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map of Trashland

  Once Upon a Slime . . .

  Chapter One: Surprise!

  Chapter Two: Maggots in the Mist

  Chapter Three: Deadly Chicken

  Chapter Four: Weapons of Mass Dis-Klukk-Shun

  Chapter Five: “You Are What I Say You Are!”

  Chapter Six: Polystyrene Power

  Chapter Seven: Nit!

  Chapter Eight: Fan-Tastic

  Chapter Nine: The Wind of Change

  Chapter Ten: Glorious Defeat

  Also by Steve Cole

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Plog, Furp, Zill and Danjo aren’t just monsters in a rubbish dump. Together, they are the SLIME SQUAD - crime-busting super-monsters here to save their whiffy world!

  Urgh! Ghastly gas is seeping across Trashland - and evil Lord Klukk is to blame. The Squaddies aren’t chicken - but can they outwit their arch-enemy before his stinky smog smothers the world?

  For Julian and Oliver Barnes

  ONCE UPON A SLIME . . .

  The old rubbish dump was far from anywhere. An enormous, mucky, rusty landscape of thousands of thrown-away things.

  It had been closed for years. Abandoned. Forgotten.

  And then Godfrey Gunk came along.

  Godfrey wasn’t just a mad scientist. He was a SUPER-BONKERS scientist! And he was very worried about the amount of pollution and rubbish in the world. His dream was to create marvellous mutant mini-monsters out of chemical goo – monsters who would clean up the planet by eating, drinking and generally devouring all types of trash. So Godfrey bought the old rubbish dump as the perfect testing-ground and got to work.

  Of course, he wanted to make good, friendly, peaceful monsters, so he was careful to keep the nastiest, most toxic chemicals separate from the rest. He worked for years and years . . .

  And got nowhere.

  In the end, penniless and miserable, Godfrey wrecked his lab, scattered his experiments all over the dump, and moved away, never to return.

  But what Godfrey didn’t know was that long ago, tons of radioactive sludge had been accidentally dumped here. And soon, its potent powers kick-started the monster chemistry the mad scientist had tried so hard to create!

  Life began to form. Amazing mini-monsters sprang up with incredible speed. Bold, inventive monsters, who made a wonderful, whiffy world for themselves from the rubbish around them – a world they named Trashland.

  For many years, they lived and grew in peace. But then the radiation reached a lead-lined box in the darkest corner of the rubbish dump – the place where Godfrey had chucked the most toxic, dangerous gunk of all.

  Slowly, very slowly, monsters began to grow here too.

  Different monsters.

  Evil monsters that now threaten the whole of Trashland.

  Only one force for good stands against them. A small band of slightly sticky superheroes . . .

  The Slime Squad!

  Chapter One

  SURPRISE!

  Plog the monster stepped warily into the darkness of the massive cellar. Just one hour ago he had left his friends here while he popped out to the shops for some curdled flea-milk. Now, the lights had stopped working and the whole place seemed deserted.

  “Hello!” Plog called, his long ears pricked for the slightest sound in reply, furry snout twitching for strange smells. Yes – he could smell something. Something sour and rotten and awful . . .

  Tensing his tail and bunching his muscles ready for action, Plog crept forward. He was no ordinary monster – he was leader of the Slime Squad: the bravest, toughest, slimiest heroes in all Trashland. They had devoted their lives to defending their rubbish dump world from evil monsters that wanted to rule over it. And so if the base’s power had shut down and all three of his fellow Squaddies – froggy Furp, crabby Danjo and skunky-poodle Zill – had suddenly gone missing, it might mean something bad had happened.

  Something very bad.

  Plog crept towards the office at the end of the passage, his orange fur wet with sweat. “PIE will know where the others are,” he murmured.

  The All-Seeing PIE was the Squad’s super-computer boss – ever-alert to the slightest danger to innocent monsters, he watched over Trashland. Or at least, he usually did. But right now the office was thick with shadows and PIE’s screen was dark.

  “PIE?” Plog whispered fearfully. “You never normally switch off. What’s happening around here?”

  Suddenly he heard stealthy footsteps coming from the back of the office. “Hold it,” he snarled, raising his fists. “Who’s there?”

  The lights switched on. Blinded for a moment, Plog gasped and dropped his flea-milk on the floor as a huge chorus went up: “SURPRISE!”

  PIE’s screen flicked on to show a huge smiley face – and there were Furp, Zill and Danjo standing at the back of the room. Danjo held a big cake in his powerful pincers. Zill held a large book in three of her six paws, and Furp was balancing a huge silver serving dish on top of his high-tech helmet.

  “Thank goodness it’s only you!” said Plog.

  “Sorry to worry you,” boomed PIE. “But our deception was necessary.”

  “Why?” Plog complained. “What’s going on?” Furp pointed to a large banner hanging down from the ceiling. It said: “HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!” Zill nodded.

  “You’ve been leading the Slime Squad for six whole months, Fur-boy.”

  “Six months?” Plog blinked. “Then . . . that means it’s also been six months since the first evil monsters turned up in Trashland.”

  “Correct – and it’s only thanks to you that we stopped them,” Furp said. “So we thought we’d hold a surprise party!”

  “Right.” With a dainty cough, Zill spat out a strand of slime at the ceiling, grabbed the sticky rope with her spare paws and swung across to join him. “To help celebrate, I’ve made you a special scrapbook of our adventures.”

  “And I baked you a cake,” Danjo said proudly. “It’s a dead-fly-and-fishbone sponge – your favourite!”

  Overcome with emotion, Plog sniffed noisily – then wished he hadn’t as the rotten smell invaded his nostrils again. “Urph! What’s that weird whiff?”

  “That is my contribution to the party,” Furp announced, bouncing over with his silver platter. “Roast Cockroach à la Slime!”

  He whipped away the silver cover – and the nuclear-strength niff nearly knocked Plog’s nose off. “Urgh . . . I mean, er – what a lovely treat!” He looked at the massive squashed cockroach lying in a pool of pinky-yellow goo. “That looks—”

  “Rubbish,” said Danjo cheerily.

  “Oh!” Furp looked hurt. “I know it smells a bit funny, but I’m sure it tastes delicious.”

  “And if it doesn’t,” said PIE, “you will find sick buckets in the storeroom.”

  “Now, let’s get this party started,” Zill declared. She spat out another slime-line, snagged the leg of a table laid for four and dragged it out into the centre of the room.

  Danjo put down his cake, raised his left pincer and squirted steaming-hot slime into a bowl in the middle of the table. “Put your platter down on top of that, Furp. If we have to eat your tum-curdling cockroach, at least we can have it warm!”

  “Good idea.” Furp placed his feast over the boiling bowl and hopped away. “I’ll fetch some fresh mould to sprinkle on top . . .” He climbed the wall using only his slimy palms and foot soles and started scraping black sludge from the ceiling into his metal pants. “Yum!”

  But Plog barely noticed these prepa
rations. His snout was stuck in Zill’s scrapbook, which was stuffed full of newspooper clippings showing the Slime Squad in action. Plog saw himself fighting Fearsome Fists, tackling Toxic Teeth, scrapping with Cyber-Poos and Supernatural Squid and socking it to Killer Socks.

  “All these monsters have one thing in common,” Plog muttered.

  Zill nodded. “Lord Klukk!”

  “That evil mastermind is Trashland’s public enemy number one,” PIE declared. “And yet even with my all-seeing sensors, I know next to nothing about him.”

  “We’ve only ever seen him in shadow,” Furp reflected. “Or spouting threats and bragging over a two-way smellyvision set.”

  “I wonder why he wants to take over Trashland,” said Zill. “And why he’s been so quiet lately. We haven’t had any bad monsters to fight in weeks.”

  “Pity,” said Danjo, eyeing the steaming cockroach with a grimace. “Fighting Klukk’s pet monsters has got to be less dangerous than Furp’s cooking!”

  “Don’t be rotten,” said Zill.

  “Why not?” Danjo chuckled. “The cockroach is!”

  Furp looked a bit sad, so Plog took a deep breath, grabbed a big bit of cockroach and crunched it up.

  It was revolting.

  “Mmm,” Plog said through a forced smile as he swallowed. “Delicious!”

  Zill and Danjo ate a little too, holding their noses as they chewed.

  Suddenly an alarm went off and PIE’s screen flashed red and yellow. “Warning!” he boomed.

  “I knew it,” spluttered Danjo. “This stuff is poison, right?”

  “Worse than that,” said PIE. “My sensors are picking up something strange in the area of the Murky Badlands – the sinister squelch zone that borders Trashland’s Darkest Corner . . .”

  Zill swallowed hard – and not just because her mouth was full of slimy, smelly cockroach. “That’s the lair of Lord Klukk!”

  “Indeed it is,” PIE agreed. “Look at this.” His screen faded to show blank whiteness.

  Danjo stared uneasily. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Precisely,” said PIE. “Right now this is the only thing you can see in the Badlands – thick white smoke, rolling out of the Darkest Corner like an ocean of fog.”

  “Extraordinary.” Furp hopped closer to PIE’s screen. “What is it?”

  “Maybe Klukk’s pumping out gas,” said Plog. “Poison gas!”

  Zill turned to PIE in alarm. “Is that possible?”

  “My sensors can’t tell in such a toxic area,” PIE grumbled.

  “Attention!” A loud, squawky and strangely muffled voice boomed out of the smoke on the screen. “Calling all slime-slinging fools! I am quite sure you are watching and listening buk-buk-by now . . .”

  “That’s Klukk’s voice!” Zill whispered.

  “Shortly I shall take over the whole of Trashland,” the voice went on. “I expect you will want to try and stop me – so face me now! Come to the Murky buk-buk-Badlands if you dare . . . where I shall crush you once and for all!”

  Chapter Two

  MAGGOTS IN THE MIST

  “I’m afraid your celebration must wait, Squaddies,” said PIE. “You must drive out to the Badlands and investigate that sinister smog before it spreads too far into Trashland. We must learn what it is, what it does – and how to stop it!”

  Plog stood up and stared around at his friends. “All of this started six months ago – it’s time we ended it today.”

  Zill stood up too. “We’ll make the anniversary celebrations into victory celebrations when we get back.”

  “If we get back,” Furp said worriedly. “But don’t worry.” He pulled a plastic box from his circular pants and packed the leftover cockroach inside. “We can take dinner with us!”

  “Great,” said Plog as his tum gurgled. “Well, we’d better change into our costumes and split – we’ve got a mad, bad chicken-monster to smoke out!”

  The sun was sinking as the Squaddies raced across Trashland in their supersonic invisible monster-truck, the Slime-mobile. Each of them was now dressed in their fighting outfits – a gold leotard for Zill, glittering shorts for Danjo and Plog (though Plog wore his on his head as a kind of mask) and a golden crash-helmet-and-pants combo for Furp.

  While Zill drove at top speed and Plog and Danjo waited tensely, Furp was busy in the lav-lab – his special space at the back of the Slime-mobile that was part laboratory, part toilet. Normally the toilet was used as a large, slimy mixing bowl for whatever incredible ingredients Furp was combining. But right now, Plog was so nervous he felt like using it in a different way . . .

  Danjo eyed Furp curiously. “What are you up to?”

  “Making gas masks for us all,” Furp explained. “I don’t know what that white smoke is, but I’m not in any hurry to breathe it in.”

  “Good thinking,” said Plog.

  “Meantime, we must finish off my Roast Cockroach à la Slime,” Furp insisted, tossing over the box. “A good meal will set us up for the battle ahead.”

  Danjo groaned. “But what will a bad meal do?”

  “Don’t hurt his feelings,” hissed Zill. “Thank you, Furp,” she said more loudly, and politely nibbled a leg as she drove.

  The journey continued in anxious silence. It was a long way to the Murky Badlands. Furp plugged his crash helmet into one of the Slime-mobile’s control panels to keep in contact with PIE.

  “The white smoke is continuing to roll out from the Darkest Corner,” the computer warned them. “At its current rate of advance it should reach the Mucky Mattress Marshes in a matter of hours.”

  Plog frowned. “The Marshes are full of mite-monsters. What will this white smoke do to them?”

  “We must collect some for study,” Furp called, hammering frantically at a white plastic faceplate. “There! That’s my gas mask ready. I’ll work on yours next, Plog.”

  Plog and Danjo chewed more gooey cockroach to pass the time. Furp finished it off as he completed Plog’s mask and made a start on Zill and Danjo’s.

  Finally, after an hour or more, Zill braked sharply. “Look!”

  Plog, Furp and Danjo gathered behind her and stared out through the windscreen. The Badlands were beige and bare, a muck-strewn wilderness. And in the distance, a huge wall of white smoke was blotting out the horizon, as though every kettle in Trashland had boiled all together. As tall as a cliff, the misty barrier whirled and seethed.

  “I don’t like the look of that,” said Plog.

  “I must have a sample for testing,” said PIE over the Slime-mobile’s screen.

  Furp held up a dirty jar. “I’ll go out and collect some.”

  “Sounds like a good time to test out this gasproof gizmo of yours,” said Plog, picking up his gas mask.

  “I wish you’d finished ours too,” said Danjo. “I don’t like to grumble – but I’m ready to rumble!”

  “I’ll finish them off as soon as I get back,” Furp assured him.

  Plog looked at Danjo and Zill. “Guys, if anything happens to us—”

  “We’ll drive in and rescue you,” Zill said firmly. “Don’t you worry.”

  “I won’t.” Plog smiled. “See you soon.”

  Putting their gas masks in place, Furp and Plog jumped down from the Slime-mobile and walked warily towards the swirling smoke, which was advancing like a rising tide. Plog was glad his feet were safely contained in heavy, water-filled, metal boots. If he ever took them off, his feet would leak outrageously stinky slime, so he imagined Furp was quite glad too – even if he was wearing a gas mask.

  Suddenly Plog glimpsed movement deep inside the smog - a huge, dark shadow as big as a building. “Did you see that?”

  “See what?” asked Furp. He checked his gas mask, pulled out his jar and unscrewed the lid. But as he neared the very edge of the whirling whiteness, a deep, throaty chuckle sounded from within – and suddenly four burly maggoty monsters in glass helmets came racing out. Each held a large gun in their bony little hands – aime
d at Plog and Furp.

  “Maggot-men,” Plog sneered. “Lord Klukk’s pet hench-monsters. What’s going on here? What’s all the smoke?”

  “Find out for yourself,” said one of the maggot-men. “Pull off those masks and take a deep breath . . .”

  “I recognize you.” Plog glared at the maggoty monster. “Maynard, isn’t it? You and your friend Marvin helped Lord Klukk with his plan to flood half of Trashland with the Supernatural Squid.”

  Maynard nodded. “You won’t believe his latest plan. Will they, Marvin?”

  The maggot-man beside him nodded. “Indeed they won’t, Maynard. It just can’t fail.”

  “Unlike you, maggot-mush,” Furp cried – and suddenly hopped forward at top speed, butting Marvin in the stomach and knocking him into two of his friends.

  “Hold it, frog,” snarled Maynard, turning his gun on Furp.

  “Hold this,” Plog shouted, and kicked out a foot so fast that his heavy boot flew off and smashed into Maynard’s face – cracking the glass helmet open like a rotten egg.

  “Splendid effort, Plog!” Furp brained both Marvin’s friends with his metal pants and then snatched Maynard’s gun away. At the same time, Plog’s bare, drying foot started to drip toxic, super-stinky slime.

  “Ugh!” Maynard screeched. Horrified, he covered his nose and ran off in a blind panic – too desperate to escape the pong to realize he was heading straight for the curling, whirling curtain of white smoke . . .

  “Come back here,” Plog roared, starting after him.

  “No, Plog!” Furp warned him. “We don’t know what that smoke can do—”

  But it was too late. Determined to catch the maggot-monster, Plog had already charged into the eerie, overwhelming gas cloud and vanished from sight . . .