The Good, the Bad and the Deadly 7

by Garth Jennings

  ‘NO! HOOT! COME BACK! WE NEED ALL THE HELP WE CAN GET!’

  It was too late. Hoot was gone. It was up to the remaining six monsters to do battle.

  Nelson grabbed his backpack, swung it over his shoulder and ran back towards the road. The monster lurched towards Nelson, but Stan, Miser and Puff leaped into the storm cloud that now almost entirely hid the monster from view.

  There was shouting and howling and a wind so wild and bitter that Spike toppled to the ground like a statue, his entire body frozen so stiff that his outstretched arms snapped off as he fell into the sand.

  ‘Spike!’ cried Nelson as he fell on his knees beside him.

  From out of the storm cloud swirling around the monster, Stan suddenly appeared – tossed out as if he were nothing more than a rubber ball. His red body slammed into the roof of a frost-covered car parked by the road, making all of the windows explode.

  A horrible scream made Nelson turn his head. The monster had Puff clamped in his beak and was shaking him savagely. Gas was leaking out of Puff and mingling with the storm cloud so that it turned purple.

  Chomp! Chomp! Chomp!

  The monster was chomping down on Puff as if it wanted to bite him in two, but the gas was so powerful and so abundant that the monster began to sway drunkenly. Miser’s tentacles were wrapped around the monster’s head, which meant he too felt the effects of Puff’s gas and fell to the ground.

  The monster’s eyes rolled back in their sockets and it dropped Puff, broken and limp, into the sand as it collapsed into a deep sleep.

  There was pain, cold, misery and disaster whichever way Nelson looked. Nosh was still pale and lying breathless in the sand. Stan had emerged from the smashed car and staggered towards him with one horn missing, cuts all over his skin and one eye swollen shut. A blue lump shifting in the sand near the sea wall suggested Miser was at least able to move. Poor Spike lay frozen and armless in the sand before Nelson, while Puff didn’t even appear to be breathing beside the sleeping monster. Where was Hoot . . . ?

  Nelson remembered Hoot had taken to the sky and he looked up. There was no sign of him. All Nelson could see were frozen clouds, lit orange by the street lights. And the clouds were doing something he had never seen before: they were crashing into each other just as they had done over Ivan’s house. If only Nelson had not been so cold, he would have moved, but all of his joints felt frozen, so he could do nothing but watch as a piece of ice the size of a haystack fell straight towards him from the sky. This was either going to hurt or kill him – either way, there was nothing Nelson could do about it.

  Meanwhile, Hoot, who had taken refuge above the freezing clouds, was currently wrapping up a conversation with some passing geese.

  ‘. . . Yes, we were all battling a monster down there. He’s the reason for all this cold weather, you know. Now I should probably check on my comrades, but my offer still stands: whenever you’re passing London Zoo, do drop in. Lovely to meet you. Safe journey onwards and all that. Toodle-oo!’ Hoot flapped his great wings so that he rose a little higher in the sky before diving towards the beach below, where he was about find a very sorry sight indeed.

  ARE YOU AWAKE?

  It was the middle of the night, but Nelson’s parents were wide awake. The sonic boom earlier had woken them, and now they were sat up in bed: Nelson’s father on the phone with the doctors tending to Uncle Pogo and Doody, and his mother watching the latest news on television. Celeste had already called them to say she was safe and staying with Ivan just in case any more ice fell, and Nelson had managed to sleep through it all, which made them both very relieved indeed. It was just as well neither parent had bothered to venture further than the doorway of the spare room when checking on Nelson, as they would have clearly seen that what they had thought was the body of their sleeping son was in fact several pillows, and the suggestion of hair merely the back of a Chewbacca mask filled with socks.

  The first TV images of ice clouds and the damage they had caused when they fell from the sky were as mesmerizing as they were frightening.

  ‘Look at the state of that pub! It’s been squashed flat as a pancake. Lucky no one was hurt. Mind you, I never did like that pub. The bloke that ran it was a right grumpy old fart,’ said Tamsin, Nelson’s mother, as his father, Stephen, finished his call with the French doctors.

  ‘It’s not good,’ said Nelson’s dad.

  ‘What do you mean, not good?’

  ‘Pogo and Doody – they’re in a bad way. Really bad. Almost every bone they’ve got is broken. And also . . . Oh, it’s a mess, Tamsin. A horrible mess. The doctors say they might not even make it through the night.’

  Nelson’s mum put her hand to her open mouth, though she had no words to say, while his dad sat on the edge of the bed, his head hanging over his lap. The thought of losing these two fantastic, larger-than-life men was too awful.

  ‘Hold on, Pogo. Hold on, Doody. Just get through the night, lads,’ thought Nelson’s dad.

  At least he thought he’d only said the words in his head, but in fact he had felt them so strongly that he’d said them out loud.

  Nelson’s mum leaned across the bed and put her arms around him.

  ‘They’ll make it through, love. I know they will.’

  A hug was just what they both needed. Holding on to each other not only generated warmth but hope.

  THE LAND OF EYES

  Hoot’s jumbo-jet-sized wings beat the salty air, and his great silver beak sliced through the night sky. Nelson and his monsters lay clustered together, protected from supersonic winds deep beneath the feathers on the back of Hoot’s neck.

  As the saviour of the day, Hoot was now bigger than he had ever been before. He was flying at supersonic speed, singing whatever song he liked louder than a church bell, and loving every minute of it. Nelson’s monsters absolutely hated Hoot’s singing. He didn’t just have a lousy voice; he was now as big as a house, which only magnified how bad it was.

  Nelson was waking up and only just realizing where he was. It was a tight fit, but there was comfort in the softness of the giant feathers and the warmth rising from Hoot’s body. Nelson had his own additional heat source in the form of Crush, whom Nelson cuddled to his chest; and Crush was comforted in turn by hugging the rhino containing Buzzard’s soul and cooing gently into its ear.

  ‘I pulled you out of harm’s way in time, Master Nelson, though you did strike your head on a rock, which accounts for your blackout,’ said Hoot.

  Nelson rubbed the back of his head. He felt a lump, but only a dull ache to accompany it.

  ‘You were luckier than some of the others,’ said Miser, who moved back a little to allow Nelson to see Puff lying next to him.

  ‘Puff? You all right?’

  Puff lifted his head from his front paws and revealed a bright blue scar running down the left side of his face. His left eye was closed and swollen. ‘Hurts,’ said Puff, and he licked his front paws, which were also terribly scarred.

  ‘Puff is not the worst affected, Master Nelson.’ Miser was positioned near Nelson’s feet and he stretched out a tentacle to lift one of Hoot’s feathers.

  Beneath the feathers lay Spike. The water inside his body had expanded as it had frozen so that his green flesh was now swollen and grotesquely deformed, and liquid drizzled out from his needles. The same expression was fixed on his face, but his arms were missing from just below both shoulders.

  ‘’Is arms snapped off like twigs in the cold,’ said Stan, who was sharing the same feather with Spike.

  ‘They can grow back though? His arms, I mean,’ Nelson asked.

  Stan shook his head. ‘We don’t know. Same as my horn. Same as Puff’s ear. We might be like this forever.’

  Nelson’s heart broke and tears came to his eyes.

  ‘Sorry, Nelly-son.’

  Nelson looked above to see Nosh still sick and pale, nestled among the feathers closest to the base of Hoot’s neck. How could Nelson possibly be angry with Nosh? It wasn’t his
fault he couldn’t stomach the monster.

  ‘Don’t be sorry, Nosh. It wasn’t your fault. That monster was disgusting . . . Wait, where is it?’ Nelson had only just remembered the monster had grown back to full size, and the last thing he remembered seeing was it passing out on the beach from Puff’s sleeping gas.

  ‘You will have to crawl carefully to the wing if you wish to see, Master Nelson. But take care not to fall,’ warned Hoot. ‘Who knows how high we are at this moment . . .’

  Nelson placed Crush beside him and crawled across Hoot’s shoulders to the base of his left wing. Crawling wasn’t easy. The speed they were travelling at forced everything flat so that Nelson didn’t so much crawl as snake his way to the wing. And this is what he saw . . .

  The rope ladder they had ‘borrowed’ earlier that night from an adventure playground in Regent’s Park was now dangling from Hoot’s left claw, and the monster was attached to the end of it. It was still very large, and comatose from the overdose of Puff’s sleeping gas it had inhaled earlier. Around the monster, a purple storm cloud swirled, leaving a trail of purple ice in the air.

  Beneath the monster was blackness. No sign of a road or village to be seen.

  ‘I strapped the monster on, but this was all Miser’s idea,’ said Stan as Nelson crawled back towards them.

  ‘But why are we carrying it? What are we gonna do with it when it wakes up?’

  ‘Hopefully, it’ll be dead before it wakes up.’

  ‘But we can’t kill it. You already said – monsters can be injured, but unless you have a fire as hot the sun, they can’t be killed.’

  ‘Master Nelson. There is another way,’ said Miser.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Miser didn’t answer.

  ‘Miser, what do you mean, there’s another way? Where are we going?’

  ‘We goin’ to da Land of Eyes,’ whispered Nosh.

  ‘Land of Eyes?’

  ‘Not the Land of Eyes, ya tiny twit,’ snapped Stan. ‘It’s Ice Land. Not Land of Eyes!’

  ‘Iceland? Why are we going to Iceland?’

  ‘You explain it,’ said Stan to Miser. ‘I was all for telling Nelson from the start, but you lot were too scared about ’im finding out.’

  Nelson looked to Miser, who refused to meet his eye as he spoke.

  ‘At this very moment, we are flying towards Iceland because it is there that we will find an Earth Fire, or as you would call it, a volcano.’ Miser dared to look up and found Nelson staring right at him, desperate for understanding.

  ‘A volcano is another doorway out of this world for a monster. A doorway that once passed, is closed to us forever.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before? We could have gone straight to a volcano instead of trying to set Nosh up with a disgusting dinner on a beach!’

  ‘Forgive us, Master Nelson, but many of us were worried that if you knew how to get rid of us, you would ask us to leave you.’

  ‘What? Seriously, Miser, why would I do that?!’

  ‘I knew this was going to happen,’ groaned Puff.

  ‘You have been most distressed of late, and we feel how much of a burden we have become for you, especially concerning your school life.’

  ‘No! You’re not a burden, and there is no way I would ever ask you to jump into a volcano.’

  ‘You have a kind soul and you are our dear friend, but one day you may feel differently about having monsters in your life, Master Nelson. And when that day comes, and we all know it will, you will want to be rid of us.’

  What Miser said rang true for Nelson, but there was no way he was going to accept that truth.

  ‘Rubbish. I will never want you to go.’

  ‘We had hoped, selfishly I know, that if the plan with Nosh had worked tonight, you need never know of this other way.’

  If it wasn’t for Hoot’s singing, this would have been the most miserable Nelson had ever been.

  ‘OK, well . . . So, we’re gonna throw this monster into the volcano?’

  Miser nodded.

  ‘What if it wakes up before we get there?’

  ‘We’re almost there,’ wheezed Miser.

  ‘OK. And if we are cut short, we can always toss Buzzard into the volcano, and his monster will have no choice but to follow.’

  ‘NO!’ screamed a little voice, and looking down, Nelson saw the fluffy rhino that was Master Buzzard, wriggling in Crush’s arms.

  ‘Oh, you could’ve told me he was awake, Crush!’

  ‘HONK! HONK!’

  ‘No! I will not be used as bait for your devilish schemes! And tossed into a volcano? No! Not I!’ cried Buzzard. ‘I am a nobleman! I am William Buzzard! And I don’t want any part of this! All I want is some cake! Giant boy! Please! I beg of you! Show mercy! Have I not been through enough?’

  Time for the hard truth, thought Nelson, but he never had the chance to speak, for at that very moment Hoot let out a terrible cry, and the next thing Nelson knew, he and his monsters were falling through the ice-cold air.

  AIR FORCE

  The two fighter jets had fired their missiles at the same time.

  They had both been aiming for the mysterious purple ice storm cloud that hurtled like a comet at the speed of sound through the night sky, but only one of the missiles had struck the sleeping monster. The other missile had struck Hoot’s right wing. Neither pilot could see Hoot or the other monsters or even the twelve-year-old boy falling out of the sky, but they could see the storm cloud falling towards the ocean.

  There’s nothing like being struck by a missile followed by a dip in the North Atlantic to wake up a dozing monster, and Buzzard’s monster woke beneath the waves in a most terrible rage.

  ‘BUZZAAAAAARD!’ screamed the monster as it broke the water’s surface and flew back into the sky.

  The pilots had already begun their return, having watched the storm cloud fall into the ocean below, but once again their radars lit up with the same target as before, this time flying directly towards them.

  Both pilots turned their jets around, levelled their sights with the rising ice cloud and fired their missiles. The monster screeched, and the ice storm that issued from its mouth was so powerful, it froze the missiles solid, and they shattered like glass against its body. The pilots’ hail of armour-piercing bullets hit the monster before it had time to take a breath, but no sooner had the wounds appeared than they were gone again. Unlike Nelson’s monsters, this one could heal itself instantly. It was indestructible.

  The first pilot had no intention of giving up and continued to shoot as he flew straight past the cloud. BOOM! The brave pilot never saw the monster lash out with its wing as he flew by, his jet breaking into pieces as if it were just a big toy made of plastic. Before the pilot knew what had happened, his parachute was open above his head and he was floating in complete darkness.

  ‘Jet down! Repeat! Jet down! Abort, abort, abort!’ the second pilot yelled into his radio microphone. He yanked the steering column back and flew the jet directly into the sky to escape the rising storm cloud. As his jet shot towards the stars, the pilot felt two very strong sensations. The first was the powerful gravitational pull that he was used to experiencing whenever he made such a steep ascent. But the second sensation was something he had never felt before. Though he was dressed from head to toe in the warmest of uniforms, he felt the freezing temperature outside creeping through his skin and into his bones. Before he knew it, the entire cockpit, the flight instruments, steering column and even his visor had frozen up. He could feel the powerful vibration of the jet engines stutter and fail, and as he looked out of the left side of his cockpit, he saw the storm cloud rising on a fountain of hail and snow. The pilot’s thumb felt around for the eject button, flipped the protective lid and pressed. As his parachute opened, he never saw the giant featherless wing lash out and smash the frozen jet to smithereens.

  THE MERCY OF THE SEA

  Their mouths were too full of rushing wind to scream, although an awful cry
was coming from Hoot. He was spiralling nose-first towards the ground, shrinking and shedding feathers as he fell.

  It had all happened so quickly that there was nothing Nelson could to do but claw hopelessly at the rushing wind and wish that he was wearing a parachute instead of a backpack.

  A hand was around his throat. It was Stan. His arms were suddenly wrapped around Nelson, squeezing him tightly.

  SMASH! was the sound of Stan and Nelson hitting the water, Stan’s body taking the full force of the blow. You might think the word ‘splash’ would be more appropriate to describe the sound of someone falling into the sea, but Nelson and Stan had fallen from a such a great height that it really was more like breaking through a glass wall than hitting water.

  Their bodies plummeted through the darkness as quickly as a ship’s anchor.

  The pressure of the water was tremendous and it crushed Nelson’s ears and chest as if King Kong were using him as a stress reliever. It wasn’t just air that was taken out of him. All thought and reason was wiped from his mind as if he were being squeezed out of existence. Nelson did not think of his monsters or of his family or of the fact they had failed to reach the volcano in time. Nelson was unable to think of anything. And even if he had managed to think to kick out or try and swim upwards, there wasn’t enough air in his lungs to bring him back to the surface now. He was at the mercy of the ocean, but lucky for Nelson, the ocean was about to show him a great deal of mercy.

  It began with a tugging sensation under Nelson’s right arm. The next thing he knew, both shoulders were being pushed upwards, and then the rushing sensation came. He wasn’t going down any more. He was going up. Up and up and up. So fast, in fact, that his ears popped. And then SPLASH. Yes, this time ‘splash’ was just the right word to describe the sound of Nelson’s body shooting up and out of the water.

  Nelson had no idea what was happening at this point; he only knew that suddenly he could breathe again, and he sucked in great gulping gasps. After he had taken a dozen or so lungfuls of Icelandic sea air and blinked away the salty water, Nelson realized he was once again above the ocean. Only a few metres high this time, but he was not going up or falling into the waves any more. He was being held aloft on a tower of fish.