Little Green Gangsters Read online

  “I had a whole thing going against you, Goosefart!” Fist-Face shouted. “Then you pushed off before we got to the best part – where I hammer you in front of the whole school. So now I’ve brought the show to you . . .”

  He was banging on the door, and I knew that if I opened it I would be pulverised.

  Which left the back door as my only option. Maybe I could sneak out through the kitchen, climb over next door’s fence and give Fist-Face and Lardy the slip? Although with all the noise we’d been making, if the neighbours caught me they’d probably hand me over.

  Fraught with danger though it was, it was the only plan I had.

  It might even have worked.

  Except that as I sprinted into the kitchen, I found the door was already open – and blocked by a burly guy in a hazard suit and gas mask, pointing a gun straight at me.

  Not, like, a cop’s popgun or something.

  This looked like a space gun.

  Nothing I can write now could capture the terror I felt at that moment. But my feet gave a fair impression by spinning me round and propelling me back to the front door at about a million miles per hour.

  My fingers tore at the front latch – and Fist-Face kicked the door open. It slammed into me, knocking me sideways against the hall wall. I sank down, stunned.

  “Got you!” Fist-Face bellowed, stomping inside – where he almost collided with Hazard-Suit Man. And suddenly, Fist-Face was the one staring down the barrel of a gun.

  He gave a high-pitched cheep! like a baby bird, wet himself dramatically and threw a wild punch at the intruder – all at the same time. Whatever else you might say about Fist-Face, he can multitask.

  The intruder took the blow to the face – or rather, to the extremely solid gas mask – and went down.

  Fist-Face yelled and shook his knuckles – which had most likely broken on the mask’s hard plastic. Sobbing, he staggered outside. After staring in mystified horror at the intruder on the floor, I hauled myself up and followed Fist-Face out into sunlight.

  In my fright I’d forgotten the watching crowd from school – and wow, were they ever watching now. They’d come to see me get slaughtered by the school bully; what they wound up seeing was the school bully bursting out of my house in soaked trousers, holding his swollen fist and racing from sight like a cat with a firework up its bum.

  “Huh?” Lardy pointed in consternation. “Goosefart made Fist-Face wet himself?” The stunned crowd burst into gales of laughter.

  “Get away!” I shouted at them, checking behind me that the intruder was still down. “Get out of here! Just go!”

  Spotting, I guess, that I had left Fist-Face wee-soaked, wee-ping and running for his life, Lardy scarpered and the crowd followed him, shaking their heads, excited, well-entertained. “Who’d have thought Goosefart was so tough?” one girl said.

  You have no idea, I thought.

  I wanted to sprint after them, as shock gave way to panic. What had the intruder been up to in the house? Why the gas mask as well as the gun? What did he want? What was I doing even hanging around here when the intruder could get up any moment and shoot me in two seconds flat?

  I was about to bolt for it when I realised a distant, whirring drone had been slowly getting louder. What was the cause? Like a celestial “DUH!” aimed squarely at me, a shadow swooped overhead with a deafening din. The savage rush of the rotor rhythm whirled hard through my head, and turned the air into a solid thing that knocked me to the ground.

  I rolled over, shielded my eyes and ears from the maelstrom of wind and grit and noise and found myself staring up at a helicopter coming in to land.

  A. Hell. Eee. Cop. Ter. Touching down in my front garden!

  Our noise-hating neighbours would be running for the hills (or at least the nearest estate agents).

  The copter had a big glass dome around the cockpit, like Herbert’s bowl. But there was no busy little fish to be seen here. Only a pilot wearing a mask and hazard suit like the intruder’s identical twin . . .

  And my father, seated beside him.

  “Dad!” I yelled, scrambling up as the crescendo of wind and rotors finally began to wind down. But Dad didn’t hear. His eyes were closed.

  There was movement behind me. I saw the intruder, waving his sci-fi gun, back on his feet. He knocked me off mine with a squeeze of his trigger. PHUT! I felt cold for a second. A little fluffy dart was suddenly sticking out of my arm.

  Then the world went dark, like I was lost in space. Stars were spinning round my head. I couldn’t help but wonder which planets circled them, and if those bloated, spidery creatures the UFO nuts said they’d seen might live there.

  So much for my last thoughts before I blacked out completely.

  I woke up and I was on a plane.

  A big flashy plane, full of gorillas with guns. Not real gorillas. Men who looked quite like gorillas. (Only they had shaved. Or someone had shaved for them. More gorillas, with shaving kits, maybe? I don’t know.)

  I turned to find Dad seated opposite. An American man in a smart grey suit – he didn’t have a gun, but looked to be bossing round the ones who did – was quietly explaining that Dad was NEEDED. Lots of experts from around the world were NEEDED to work on the big problems that faced our little planet.

  “So you were right, Dad,” I whispered. “The Earth is in trouble.”

  “And then some,” said The Suit.

  Through the window there was nothing to see but endless grey ocean. “Where are we going?” Dad demanded.

  The Suit’s lips twitched. “You’ll see.”

  “Why couldn’t you just ask me if I’d come with you?” Dad was shaking, but I think more with anger than fear. “Why resort to violence? Why shoot us both with tranquilliser darts? Why kidnap us?”

  “We also blew up your house,” The Suit said calmly.

  Dad and I chorused beautifully: “WHAT?!”

  “That’s our cover story for your disappearance. Locals will believe our helicopter was an air ambulance—”

  “Herbert!” I shouted.

  The Suit gestured that I should stay calm. “Your fish is OK – he’s stowed in the cargo hold with some of your stuff. Relax.”

  “Relax?” Dad’s voice had dropped to its iciest whisper. “You BLEW UP OUR HOME?”

  “The way things are, we can’t afford to do things nicey-nicey,” said The Suit. “The future of the world needs your mind working on the problem in our way, in our space, and to our schedule.”

  Me and Dad just stared at each other, shocked and scared. The Rubbish House . . . blown apart . . .

  “Sorry you had to be brought into this, kid.” The Suit was looking at me. “It’s your dad we need, but we couldn’t just leave you behind.”

  “I can look after myself,” I lied, rubbishly.

  “We didn’t bring you along out of the kindness of our hearts. You’ll be joining the other child hostages.”

  Me and Dad swapped incredulous looks. I think mine was slightly better than his; I was the child-hostage-in-training after all. Before we could properly kick off with the scandalised protests, The Suit jumped in:

  “Yes, I said ‘hostages’. As in, someone held prisoner by a powerful captor until the captor’s demands are met.” He patted me on the head. “You see, your dad really has to cooperate with us one hundred per cent. On the time scale we think we’ve got, there’s no other way.” The Suit looked straight at Dad. “You get me, Professor Gooseheart?”

  Dad looked away and nodded. “I get you.”

  I said nothing, frozen solid with sheer ULP.

  The Suit shut his eyes and pretended to go to sleep. Hours rolled resentfully by. Somebody brought pieces of pizza, which no one ate. I looked out of the window, but now we were flying over a bare expanse of snow. There was nothing but bright icy wilderness to look at.

  Dad stared out the window then slumped into the empty seat beside me, ashen-faced. “Dungballs,” he sa
id.

  I groaned. “Not this again!”

  “A dung beetle believes he owns his dungball,” Dad went on. “He crawls all over it, fights for it, consumes it, steers it wherever he likes. But the beetle doesn’t really own a thing. He just came along, found the dung and pinched it.”

  I felt a prickling shiver blizzard through me as I finally got what he was driving at. “You mean . . . planet Earth is like the dungball, and humans are like the beetles?”

  “We’re top of the food chain, so we think we own the lot.” Dad shook his head. “But what if somebody else was here first . . . ?”

  Just at that moment, I realised that I could see something in that never-ending whiteness far below: a gigantic sunken shape in the snow, roughly circular, with smaller ovals scattered all around it. A long way ahead, I could see a similar marking. And another beyond that. The quiet plane erupted into panicked chatter as others saw what I had seen.

  Those markings in the snow were like footprints. Not human footprints.

  Giant. ALIEN. FOOTPRINTS.

  Dad stared past me, out of the window, and as he spoke again my blood ran cold: “Yes, what if someone owned our planet, way before humans even existed? And . . . what if they’ve come back?”

  Please,

  please,

  please,

  please,

  please,

  please,

  please,

  please,

  please,

  please,

  please,

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  please,

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  please,

  please,

  PLEASE

  let us all live long enough

  for there to be a PART THREE

  (please?)

  (What a happy number to kick off PART TWO)

  So. That was then, this is now. And now, I’m here.

  Where is here, you might ask? (I only said might. I’m not accusing you.) “Here” is a top-secret scientific base dug into the permafrost of the north polar ice cap – a massive underground complex where tons of weird, unbelievable and highly dangerous research is carried out.

  I’ve decided that, if the planet ever gets through this, I am definitely going to make a book about it. If anything happens to me, the proof will all be here, written down.

  Mind you, I’m fairly convinced that secret-agent types will know I’ve written it down and if I try to tell you too much about it I’ll probably be censored by the CENSORED THIS IS SECRET particularly if it’s read by the guy in charge, General NO-WAY-NOT ON-YOUR-NELLY of the United States NO-NO who is currently commander-in-chief of the STOP THAT organisation, set up to protect Earth from aliens – an organisation apparently known as the THIS IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS

  So if I just call it the Super-Secret Base For Protecting Earth That Doesn’t Really Exist, I’m Making It All Up Honestly So Don’t Worry About It, that will do for now.

  Anyway, soon after our plane flew past the freaky footprints, we looked set to fly straight into the side of a mountain.

  That was nice.

  There was me, hair on end, gripping the seat in front and shouting, “NOOOOOO­OOOOOO­OOOO­OOOOO­OOOO­OOOO­OOOO!!!! HELPME­SOMEONE­­IDON’TWANTTO­DIE­EE­EE­EE­EE­EE­EE­EE­EE­E!!!!!” when suddenly a secret heated airstrip rose up from the snowy wastes all around and we landed with barely a bump.

  Which was good from a staying alive point of view, but kind of embarrassing after all the fuss I’d made.

  Once we landed, the airstrip dropped slowly down into the snow, taking us into some kind of incredible Super-Secret Base For Protecting Earth That Doesn’t Really Exist, I’m Making It All Up Honestly So Don’t Worry About It. I stared out of the window at the new, subterranean world around me. A huge hangar had been carved out of the well-lit rock. Military men and women bustled about small aircraft, rockets and satellites, like visitors to an underground museum.

  The Suit and his gorillas bundled me and Dad outside and into the noise and kerfuffle. The yukky smell was just the same down here – the alien whiff-code, or whatever it was, was truly global.

  “Have our new guests shown to their rooms,” said The Suit. “Then escort Dr Gooseheart to Meeting Room One.”

  “What about Tim?” asked Dad.

  “He’ll be taken care of,” said The Suit.

  Did he mean “taken care of” as in “we’ll give him a nice warm drink and a comic and then tuck him into bed so he can have a lovely snooze”? Or as in, “we’ll stick him in a sack, kick him about a bit, fire machineguns at him, sling his body in a furnace and bury his ashes outside in the ice so you’ll never see him again”?

  At that time, I almost didn’t mind which. I was so scared and, like, WHOA! after all that had happened and was continuing to happen, I just wanted to close my eyes and hide.

  In a daunted daze, I took in my surroundings: big tunnels chewed out of the rock by machines, big metal slabs for doors with big KEEP OUT signs daubed in scary red paint, big rooms for big meetings with big scientists guarded by big soldiers. And little me feeling as small as a dung beetle.

  A burly black soldier named Sergeant Katzburger showed us to our adjoining rooms. She might be the most miserable person I have ever met. She has a mohawk like Mr T with longer bits at the back, and her face always has this kind of hangdog expression. Which is a bit weird when your name sounds like “cat burger”. You’d think it would be a dog’s favourite thing.

  Anyway, our rooms were more like prison cells, with bare breeze-block walls, grey floor tiles, camp beds, a toilet and a sink.

  “There,” she said, in the deepest American accent I’ve ever heard. “Your home from home.”

  In normal circumstances, if you were on holiday and you’d travelled about 2500 miles only to find yourself in a room like ours, you’d probably complain to the manager. Unfortunately, the manager had already drugged us and kidnapped us so he/she probably figured complaints about accommodation would come some way down the list – and he/she was right. That first day I arrived I was just glad I had any sort of a bed, mainly as I planned to hide under it.

  At least it was ready-built, unlike the Rubbish House the first day I arrived there.

  I really couldn’t believe it.

  I’d never much liked that place (remember page 10?), but to think of it in flames and pieces . . . What would the guys at school make of that? Would Fist-Face become prime suspect in the case of our violent exit from the community, and go to prison for years? That would be something, anyway . . .


  A young soldier stuck his head round the door while squinting at a blue clipboard. “Time to go, Doc Gooseheart. You got a meeting in Weird Science Group Two.”

  Dad looked at me forlornly. “Take care, Tim. I’m sure I won’t be long.”

  “Round here you can’t be sure about anything,” said Sergeant Katzburger gruffly. “You’ll probably be ages. Hours. Days, even.” As Dad was escorted away by the clipboard guy, I waved as best I could with my hand shaking.

  “Where’s Herbert?” I asked Katzburger.

  “The goldfish will follow on shortly,” she said, and I imagined Herbert pursuing us mysteriously through the air (after his many mega-moves lately, it wouldn’t have surprised me that much). “Meantime, I’ll get someone to take you to the Crèche.”

  I frowned. “Huh? Crèche as in, for little kids?”

  “No,” she said flatly. “Round here, nothing’s as it should be. You’ll see.” Then she looked at my jumble-sale clothes disapprovingly and nodded to a holdall. “We brought some of your clothes here, if you want to change.”

  “How thoughtful of you to shoot me with a tranquilliser dart so I didn’t have to pack them myself,” I should’ve said – but of course I just nodded dumbly.

  “You’ll be all right, kid,” Katzburger went on. “Well, probably . . . possibly . . .” She sucked in her cheeks. “You might be all right. If you watch out for those other weirdo kids, and if you . . . well . . .” She sighed. “Look, you probably won’t be all right, to be honest. But try not to think about it. That’s what I do.” She walked out the door and shot one last, hangdog look back at me. “It doesn’t work, but I keep trying. So long, kid.”

  Yeah, so long, I thought. As she closed the door, I felt suddenly and horribly alone.

  I banged on the door. No reply. I opened it, but Sergeant Katzburger wasn’t there. Of course, she’d gone – I didn’t need a guard or anything. It wasn’t like I could escape anywhere, was it? Where would I go?

  No, this Super-Secret Base For Protecting Earth That Doesn’t Really Exist, I’m Making It All Up Honestly So Don’t Worry About It was home for the foreseeable future.

  How long would that be?

  Did the world even HAVE a future?

  I closed the door and sat on the camp bed. I didn’t know whether to shout or scream or cry or go OO-OO-AH-AHHHH like a chimp or bang my head against the wall or use the toilet or stare at the battered holdall in the corner of the room which had started moving like there was something inside it or shout “HELP, HELP, I AM A PRISONER IN A SUPER-SECRET BASE FOR PROTECTING EARTH THAT DOESN’T REALLY EXIST, I’M MAKING IT ALL UP HONESTLY SO DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT” or start running in a circle or . . .