by Susan Berran
“I got it!” I said to him happily.
“Uhh–huu,” was all that managed to slip from Jared’s wet quivering lips.
Grabbing the front of Jared’s T-shirt and pulling him over, I stretched it up to wipe away some of the dirt from the window. The room seemed to be a small office behind the store front and even though the window was really dirty and hard to see through, we could make out Fluff Butt alright. She was sitting on an old office chair and reading a newspaper, with glasses on.
Wow, at home we couldn’t get her to pee on a newspaper and here she was READING IT! Over against the far wall, Crabby Abbey’s poodle was standing up on her hind legs photocopying something. That dog was really tall. Just below our window, the guinea pigs were playing a game of chess. On a desk against another wall was Wheezy’s pet rat, Pickles, taking notes. It was watching a dozen small televisions side-by-side and stacked up on top of each other.
They’d been SPYING on us! They were watching us in our own homes with secret cameras. We could see Aunty Ree’s lounge room. Gee, I didn’t know goats could eat a computer, but there they were … there were definitely going to be goat sausages on the barbecue when my Aunty and Uncle got home. We could see Booga Boris’s place, his mum was racing around hiding junk food all over the place. Stuffing it in the back of cupboards, into muesli boxes and even into a book. Yep, she took a book the size of a cereal box off the shelf. But when she opened it, we could see that all the way through there was only the border left, the rest had been cut away to leave a hollow book. Booga’s mum squashed in at least twenty chocolate bars before putting it back on the shelf.
There was no way Booga would ever find them there, not in a book titled ‘600 Ways to Cook Porridge and other Health Recipes’. At Toffee’s place, Thomas was helping his mum pack away the groceries … what a SUCK-UP! And at everyone else’s place it was right there in front of us, each TV was switching camera views between the lounge room and the kitchen.
This was all the proof we needed. With photos, we could show that it was the animals that were up to something and not us. Being as quiet as possible, I slowly took the camera out from my utility belt and lined up a shot, focused it and … SNAP! “Aahhh …” Jared rolled to the ground. “They got me, I’m blind, I’m blind they shot me with a ray gun!” Jared started raving on. “Ssshhhh!!” I said grabbing a clump of soggy grass and shoving it into his mouth. “It was the flash.” I didn’t turn the flash off and it had bounced off the window and straight back at us. We watched and waited. They hadn’t seen it. But I needed to fix it fast.
Opening up the rear of my TOP-SECRET spy camera container, I searched for the right setting. OK this one, open, no … Ah set-up open … nah, maybe this one … yep ‘menu’ button. OK, go down … settings open … tools … no … back to settings, down to controls … open; go to manual … OK, down to light … no … maybe it’s in contrast … no … I think it’s in here, nah! OK back to settings, down to control, across to manual, hang on … maybe it’s the auto set-up … into control set-up and down … ah, here it is. Flash on … down to auto … red-eye … underwater … sunrise … indoors … macro … candlelight … portrait … sport … behind glass … outdoors … #x#!! I just want to turn the stupid thing off …
Ah ha! … ‘Flash off’, finally! Now to take another shot. Hey, where’d they all go?The lights had been turned off and we looked up just in time to see the last furry butt trotting out through the front door. From our dark hidey-hole we watched as they all headed off down the road and into town. They were gone. Crap … the only photo I had so far was a massive white flare from the flash, great. We knew what we had to do. We waited another five minutes to make sure they were really gone, then we went to work on the window. It was shut tight from years of weeds and grass and crap all over it, so were all the others. But one did have the glass missing from the top section. I told Jared that I reckon he could squeeze through it but he reckoned he couldn’t.
Wow, what do you know, he was right. His head got jammed in there sideways. It was like trying to shove a watermelon through a keyhole and it was stuck there like six-month-old dirty socks stuck to the wall. I stood up and wrapped my arms around his legs. Then leaning back, I dug in my heels and pulled. I could feel his ears stretching … “Don’t stop!” I heard him say. So I pulled on his legs harder …
“Don’t stop!” he said again. He was moving. I leaned as far back as I could and pulled even harder …
“Don’t stop,” he muffled as loudly as he possibly could. Geez give me a break, I was doing the best I could. So I gritted my teeth and gave one last almighty pull … Crack! SMACK! THUD! … I fell straight back and landed hard on my butt. When I looked at my hands, all I saw was Jared’s pants, they’d slid right off him. I looked over, and there was Jared sitting on the ground in his undies with a broken window frame hanging around his neck. His ears were flapping about and definitely way bigger, they’d turned a bright reddy-purplish colour. “Why didn’t you stop!?” he said, staring straight at me furiously.
“Because you said, “Don’t stop!” I replied. Jared looked really annoyed now.
“I said DON’T! … STOP! You nearly ripped my ears off you turkey!” Oops, my bad call.
Well, how was I to know?
Anyway Jared’s head had ripped out the whole frame. So now at least we could get into the building.
We dropped into the dark basement . . . crunch! The pets obviously didn’t bother to clean up their spilt chips or rubbish like they did at the other houses. With every step, we crushed and mooshed the rubbish that was under our feet, into the floor …
… crunch , crunch , crunch! Jared felt along the wall for the light switch as I searched my utility belt for my torch . . . crunch , crunch , crunch! If we could just find a doorway …
… crunch , crunch , crunch! Wow the animals were worse than pigs acting like bigger pigs in the ‘Biggest Pig’ section of the ‘World’s Piggest Pig’ competition …
… crunch , crunch , crunch! Then, just as I found the torch, Jared screamed, “Something’s running up my leg!” and he instantly began jumping up and down …
crunch , crunch , crunch … crunch , crunch , crunch!
I flicked on the torch and shone it straight down at the floor. A GAZILLION cockroaches scattered. Running to hide anywhere they could and within seconds they were all gone. The only sign of them left was the trail of yellowy squished guts in every spot where we’d trodden on them.
And Jared was still slapping at his trousers as the cockroaches used his legs as a tunnel freeway.
… crunch , crunch , crunch … crunch , crunch , crunch!
CLICK … I finally found the light switch. The sofa was still warm where the pets had been sitting. The junk food was all gone from the coffee table. There wasn’t a sign that anyone, or anything, had been there at all. Only one cupboard stood in the room. We looked at each other as if trying to decide who should open it. It was probably the dry shrivelled remains of the pet shop owner, or extra rubbery skin suits to hide their true ALIEN identity. We both reached out and took hold of a handle. A shiver ran up my back as if a millipede had just run up my nostril. Then together we cautiously opened it … food! It was food. Inside were all the chockies and chips left over from the junk food we’d seen earlier. We figured it had to be from the houses they’d been to. Obviously whatever they hadn’t eaten at the time they’d brought back here. We closed the cupboard and made our way upstairs to the front of the old store. Apart from a dirty old counter and some scattered cardboard boxes, it was completely empty. Behind the counter a door led out to a little office. I flicked on the light. The guinea pigs’ chess was still set up and halfway through a game. On the floor beside the desk was a pile of newspapers and a couple of sheets covering their spy TVs and the photocopier. We ripped off the sheets and flicked on every switch we could see. The televisions flickered and the photocopier buzzed into life. Jared immediately opened the top, shoved his face down hard against th
e glass with his tongue slopped out and then pulled the lid down onto his head hard before pressing ‘print’.
“I’ve always wanted to do that,” he said as he raised his head and closed the lid.
For the next couple of minutes, he kept smashing into the corner of the desk and his face into the wall a heap of times because he was just about blinded by the light from the photocopier. Idiot! I chucked the sheet back over the photocopier so he wouldn’t be tempted to do something even cheekier, if you know what I mean. But just then there was something far scarier on one of the spying televisions.
Crabby Abbey … she was in her kitchen making a snack … in pink frilly pyjamas with big yellow flowers all over them, her hair in a shower cap and she was singing …Aaaaaahhhhhhh!! It was TORTURE! Now I was blind … and DEAF! It was worse than being hung by your toenails and used as a piñata at a baseball player’s party. We covered our ears and looked away, but it was too late. Her pj’s and her earthquake-causing voice were making us want to hurl. We had to concentrate, we had to focus, we had to hold our guts in. But her screeching was worse than the smell of a thousand camel’s armpits wearing sheepskin coats in the summer desert. Jared was getting greener by the second. He was desperately looking around for a bucket to hurl when … pheewww, Crabby Abbey left the kitchen. Thank goodness. Jared was seconds away from revisiting a past lunch and I could feel mine rising as well. Jared fell to the ground … “Yellow flowers, yellow flowers,” he kept saying and I knew she’d be in his nightmares for a very long time.
We needed to pull ourselves together.Then just as we looked back to the TV screens, something weird happened. Well actually two weird things happened but there was no time to watch Toffee Thomas knitting doilies from socks and undies now. Just after Crabby Abbey left the kitchen, Mademoiselle Poo Poo poodle peeked around the corner. As we watched, she began searching through the cupboards and checking out where all the junk food was.
“Hey look at this,” Jared suddenly said. There was Booga’s cat sniffing all around their kitchen. She was creeping along each shelf, past the books. She stopped, went back and opened up the ‘hollow book’ full of chocolates. She counted them, then closed it and went on searching. On another screen we watched as Moon’s budgies opened their cage, flew out of view and then a few minutes later, came back with a really flash looking watch and hid it in her cage closing the door behind them. All of a sudden, Jared leapt high in the air and yelled out …
“I knew it!!” There on the screen was the kitchen at his place and the guinea pigs had the fridge door open. One was tossing down his mother’s special ‘just-for-her’ chocolates, whilst the other was unwrapping them and carefully collecting the wrappers. No doubt to plant in Jared’s room later.
I looked for the screen showing my place, even though there was no one was home. There it was, the kitchen was dark and I couldn’t see any wandering animals in there searching for anything. It was like Fluff Butt somehow knew that there was nothing decent or junk-like to eat in our house. All because of Miss ‘I-can’t-eat-human-food’ Jelly Belly Melly. Suddenly I saw something. A flash of movement in the corner of the screen. It was Fluff Butt, I could only just make her out. She’d come in through her doggie-door to sleep … but what’s she … oh no … NO, don’t do it … you dirty dog! She did do it, she did it on PURPOSE! Right in the middle of the lounge room. Great, now I had to get home before Mum to clean that up … and it wasn’t the only one. There were dark sloppy mounds all over the place. It looked like a poopy minefield in there.
On every screen we saw the pets searching out junk food or planting stuff to get their owners into trouble. They definitely wanted us out of the picture … and they obviously had a sweet tooth as well.
“What’s that?” Jared suddenly yelled, pointing at a box under the desk. There was something white and furry peeking out at us … one of the animals was still in there! WITH US!
Whack!! I kicked the box hard, sending it flying straight towards Jared. “Aaaahhhh!!!” he screamed as he leapt up onto the desk, grabbing a broom along the way. At the same time, I leapt onto the table full of televisions in a single bound. WHAM WHAM WHAM!! Jared slammed the end of the broom into the furry creature, over and over, as hard as he possibly could. Crack … ffSSSSS ffSSSSS ffSSSSS … the creatures yellowy-green blood squirted out in every direction, covering us and the entire room. It ran down the walls and splattered the television screens, creating pools all over the desk and floor. I KNEW IT! They were ALIENS and Jared must have cracked straight through its hard cockroach-like shell body and mooshed it into total smoosh. I looked down at the ‘BLOOD’. It was all over me. Just then we noticed it was making a weird fizzling sound. We stared at each other for a split second then …
“Acid blood!!” we screamed together. Ripping off our shirts and trousers at the speed of light and throwing them to the floor, we could finally take a breath, we were safe. Using the tip of the broom, Jared lifted the limp lifeless creature from the box. It was saturated in its own blood, its hairy body small and round. splatt!! It slopped onto the floor as Jared dropped it, poking it and moving it about. It was … it was a … a wig?? It was a WIG!!
Jared poked the broom back into the box and lifted out a pair of very wet overalls. And under them were half a dozen cans of squashed, dribbling, soft drinks … lime-flavoured soft drinks.
There was nothing more to say … there we were both standing on a table, shivering and in nothing but our undies and socks. Our clothes were lying on the floor in pools of wet, cold, sticky soft drink. Neither of us spoke as we pulled on our drink-soaked clothes and looked about for more clues. But I knew we were both thinking the same thing … why was Jared wearing bright pink undies?
“Overalls!” said Jared suddenly, breaking the silence. “Remember how the pet store guy was …” he tried to continue.
“Ssshhhh,” I butted in. I’d figured it out! Well, sort of. “The pet store guy wore overalls,” I told Jared, feeling very pleased with myself, “And he was blonde!”
“ And Fre … ” whispered Jared.
“And French!!” I beamed proudly. Wow I’m good. We knew the overalls had to belong to the French pet store owner. Because it had the same dumb picture on the back, a poodle, and underneath it said … ‘PERFECT POODLE’
It couldn’t be … could it? But it had to be … the pet shop owner was Mademoiselle stinky-britches Poo Poo. We’d seen her standing there photocopying. She was tall, had a big ugly nose, the wig and the ‘ruff’ French accent. It all fitted. That was why she couldn’t speak English … or French really. She was an ALIEN, they were all ALIENS! While Jared began tidying things up so they wouldn’t know we’d been there, I checked the desk drawers. It was the only place left that their master plans for slavery and how to contact the mother ship could be hidden. I slowly slid open the bottom one … nothing but cobwebs and a fresh four-metre-long snake skin. I slid open the middle one … seventeen baby rats and a mother the size of a football staring straight up at me and hissing with her sharp yellow fangs. I cautiously slid open the last drawer … ah ha, MAPS! Damn, they were the same ones we’d picked up earlier, with the same houses marked and the same houses crossed out. But there was one house marked for the very next day … Jared’s. What could they possibly want there? Maybe with all their spying they knew the house was overflowing with junk food. So of course they’d also know the house was overflowing with kids. That’s a lot of slaves if they could get them into enough trouble. They were planning something big and we had to stop it, it was the only day of the week that Jared’s mum and brothers went into town for footy. So we had to get back there and stop them from getting inside.
It was after midnight by the time we crawled into our sleeping bags, still damp but exhausted. We knew that we only had a few hours before we would have to save Jared’s house from the onslaught of the ravenous ALIEN pets. But not now, we desperately needed some sleep.
“Oowww ow oww ow oowww!”
I flicked on my tor
ch and there was Jared, yelling and doing a moonlight disco dance. I’d heard of sleep-walking, but sleep-dancing? Jared was leaping about from side to side as if he was standing in a raging fire and slapping all around his legs and chest like some crazed gorilla.
“Ooww ow oww ow oowww!” he continued to squeal. But now he was slapping his face as well.
I followed his slapping with the torch. There was something there, on his leg … a centipede, no … a millipede, a millipede parade. No … ANTS! A massive black sea of ants. Millions of them in dozens of swerving lines, climbing up into his trouser legs and then under his shirt. Only to emerge from the neck area and then disappear into his hair. “Ow ow oowww!” I joined in as I leapt from my sleeping bag. Flashing the torch down to my own legs, I saw another army of ants and they were all heading up into my trouser legs. They were everywhere; the ground was a complete ocean of ants. But why were they … the soft drink … the sweet sticky soft drink. We were delicious!
“Ow ooww aahhh!!!” We were both dancing around, slapping ourselves and for the second time in twenty-four hours, ripping our gear off. We stumbled over the top of each other as we pushed and shoved, trying to get past each other to get out of there. The zipper of the tent RIPPED open as we fell through it and out into the freezing cold night air, wearing nothing but our undies. As we fumbled and rolled about in the dark and dirt, with ants now biting us in every possible place, we sprinted for the dam. The water was only knee-deep, but it was the closest option. By the time we hit the water, Jared looked like a BAMBOO STICK with the measles from all the bites. We rolled and splashed about in the mud, desperately brushing away at the biting insects. Then we lay around in the water for what seemed like hours, too cold and afraid of the ants to get out. We were like little snap-frozen fish sticks in a puddle. As the sun began to rise over the hill, we looked at the water around us; it was completely black. We were surrounded by the floating carcasses of zillions of ants. Our bodies were covered with red lumps, there wasn’t a centimetre that had not been bitten. As we dragged ourselves through the cow pats and up to the top edge of the dam, we were just in time to see Jared’s mum driving off. She drove off down the mile-long driveway with his brothers. They’d be gone all day.
