by Susan Berran
At least nobody would see us.
We began wearily trudging our way up to the house for some fresh, dry clothes. Taking a short cut across the paddock, we climbed over the barbed wire fence and then began walking along the driveway up to …
BEEP BEEP … BEEP BEEP!
“Aahhh!” We leapt off the driveway and swivelled around all in one move. “Jam delivery!” yelled Mr Young from his clapped-out, rusty minivan as it threw up a thick cloud of dust and gravel coming to a halt right beside us.
“Just taking the church ladies into town and thought I’d drop off your mum’s jam on the way,” he continued with a dopey grin from ear-to-ear. From the back of the van we could see and hear the wrinkly old ladies gasping and tut-tutting at us.
So much for no one seeing us.
Crabby Abbey’s nana was head tea lady in the church group and the world’s biggest gossip. We knew that by lunch-time Crabby Abbey and the rest of town would be talking about how disgusting it was for two young boys to be almost skinny-dipping in the dam and running all around town almost in their birthday suits.
By the time we got to the house and put on some clothes, we were so exhausted that we really didn’t care anymore. We definitely had bigger things to worry about. The pets would be there soon and we had to stop them from getting in and getting Jared or his brothers into any more trouble. So we needed to check every window and every door, room by room. Checking their locks and checking their keys to be sure that they were strong and secure enough. We needed to …
“Hey Jared … where are the window and door locks?” I asked calmly.
“Oh … Mum reckons we don’t need to waste money on that stuff because we’re not in the city,” Jared replied.
Wow, we were in even deeper trouble. Just then I glanced out the window … they were COMING! Off in the distance we could see them heading our way. What could we do? There was no way in the world we could stop them getting into Jared’s place. Why didn’t they just go to the church? Sure, there’s no junk food there … or Wheezy Reese’s place? He’s always sick so his parents feed him heaps of vitamins and weird health food … or Miss Croonarc’s? She has plenty of boring health food. Hey, come to think of it, all the places that weren’t marked on the map had only crappy health food … including mine!
They were after the JUNK FOOD!!
And Jared’s place was an absolute gold mine. We had to hide it FAST! Grabbing anything that we could carry food in … bowls, the bin, garbage bags … anything, Jared started emptying the fridge while I began on the cupboards. We threw that food into the bags faster than a tick to a fresh blood blister. Running upstairs with the food, we hid it in the first room we came to … his mum’s. We chucked it into her drawers, wardrobe, under the bed and anywhere else we could. We were running up and down the stairs, shoving past each other with load after load of food. Every time I passed the front door, I could see the animals getting closer and closer. I finally dragged the last couple of loads upstairs. Jared was standing in the middle of the room doing some weird, freaky spinning dance holding a pile of food-filled bowls. "There’s nowhere left to hide it!” he squealed with panic in his voice.
“Quick … the bed,” I said. Ripping back the doona cover, we tossed the last of it onto the bed and pulled the cover back over … Click!
They were at the front door!
We needed a place to hide, RIGHT NOW! Just as I went to dash out of the bedroom, I smacked my hip into a table. A small fancy bottle fell to the carpet and spilled open. peewww, it stunk!
“Mum’s best perfume!” Jared cried. Creeeak!
The front door was opening. I kicked the bottle under the table. There was nowhere to run, we had to hide in his mum’s room. But there wasn’t a spare centimetre anywhere. The only places we could possibly fit were already filled with food. In complete PANIC we surveyed the room. In the far corner was a coat stand overflowing with clothes and all sorts of other bits hanging all over it … it was the only place left. Jared snatched a long gown with bright pink polka dots all over it and threw it over his head.
“Zip me up,” he said slipping on a floppy hat and some high heels. I wasn’t quite sure why he needed the shoes but he said it ‘completed’ the outfit. Jared seemed to be enjoying himself way too much. Great, that left me with a long, white, frilly nighty. Thanks a lot Jared. I tossed another coat over the top to try and camouflage myself even more. Then we squeezed together face to face in the corner behind the coat stand. That was cosy … NOT!
By now we could hear the animals rustling about in the fridge and cupboards, no doubt looking for the food they’d seen on their spy TVs. The longer they looked, the angrier it sounded like Fluff Butt was getting. I was about to peek downstairs when suddenly I heard a scary sound … sniffing. Oh no, they were trying to sniff out the food. But while they were trying to sniff out food they were bound to sniff out something far more valuable … US!!
Maybe hiding the food wasn’t such a great idea after all. But now at least we’d find out what they were really up to. The junk food was probably just the appetizer. When the kids ran away, the pets could reveal their true ALIEN form and collect their ‘owners’. Maybe the kids weren’t going to be slaves … maybe they were going to be the banquet back on their home planet.
Sniff sniff sniff … sniff sniff sniff . We didn’t breathe, we didn’t move. Through the coats we could see a nose, a big nose. It sniffed into the room across the hall. It was that fake French poodle and Fluff Butt was right behind her. We’d be sniffed out for sure, then we’d be human jerky. That was fine for Jared, after all, he was already a jerky human … but me, I deserved to be stuffed and roasted at least.
Sniff sniff … sniff sniff … they were in our doorway … sniff sniff …
Blaahhh!
What the … Miss Huge Snoz Poo Poo just threw up in the doorway … it had to be the perfume!! She couldn’t smell the food … or us, because of the perfume. The food was saved and we were saved from being food. They sniffed into every other room and then headed back downstairs. Fluff Butt sounded really annoyed and was barking in her ALIEN language all the way.
Once we were sure it was safe, we crept over to the door and snuck a look down into the lounge room. Every animal was screeching and running about acting crazy. Jared’s guinea pigs seemed to be in the biggest trouble. Every animal seemed to be blaming them for the disappearance of the food. There was fur and fluff and feathers flying everywhere. Fluff Butt kept smelling the guinea pigs’ breath and then sooking some more. They carried on like that for another fifteen or twenty minutes before finally giving up. As they headed out the door and down the driveway, we headed downstairs and watched through the window. They stomped away and then turned right to head off down the road.
“Why are they turning right?” Jared said. He was right, when they left they turned right and not left. And left when they left would’ve been right, but right when they left … something wasn’t right.
They could only be heading for the old pet store, probably to try and figure out what had happened to all of the food.
As they disappeared out of sight, Jared pressed his nose against the window and slopped out his tongue … eewww … just as he’d done on the photocopier at the store … “Hey Jared … where is the photocopy of that idiotic face you pulled back at the store?” I asked. The look on his face said it all. The pets were on their way to their headquarters. They’d be slamming open the door in anger, then as they switched everything on, the photocopier would buzz to life … and there would be Jared’s stupid face in life-size colour, giving them a raspberry. Yeah, what a great idea Jared … IDIOT!
I swear, when they were giving out brains Jared was in the toilet plucking six-month-old mould out of his belly button. There wasn’t a second to lose. We flung open the door, flew off the verandah in one humongous leap, jumped onto our bikes and peddled for our lives. If we took every short cut I knew, there was a chance. Not a great one, but a slim chance that we could be
at them there. We hit the road at WARP SPEED TEN. We were peddling so fast there was smoke coming off the tyres. As we came up to the main road, we hit the dirt and headed cross-country, off across paddocks to try and get ahead of the animals. The paddocks were full of head-high corn, dry and rough. As we rode through the thick crop, we were sliced and bloodied all over our arms and legs by the sharp leaves. The sting they left in the open wounds was really, really, ouchy! When we finally came bursting out of the other side, I yelled out to Jared,
“At least the worst is over,” but I was wrong.
Splat splat splat … splat splat splat splat … splat splat splat!
It was like gunfire. We were in a cattle paddock and the place was carpeted in cow pats. Old ones, new ones, dry ones, fresh ones … big ones and bigger ones. Of course there were definitely no small ones.
Splat splat splat … there was no time to stop or even slow down. The cow poop flicked up continually. We were being bombarded from below. Dry bits flew up into the wheel spokes and shattered into smaller, sharper bits that hit our bodies everywhere, like tiny concrete BULLETS. The fresh ones just splattered in the spokes and then rained down onto us, warm and runny. The body was bad enough … in the eyes was annoying … but up the nostrils!
We had to get to the store before the pets and get that photo! If they found it first they’d know we’d been there. They’d know we’d been there and now know what they know. They wouldn’t know that we really didn’t know what they knew, but we knew. We knew that we didn’t know what they know, but how could they know that we didn’t know what they knew? And we really do want to know what they know, but we definitely don’t want them to know that we don’t know what they know …
YOU KNOW?
Every muscle in my body was aching, screaming at my brain to stop.
Riding along at WARP SPEED and getting dry razor-blade sharp cow poop up the nostrils was more than a koala can bear. But before you could blow it out, it was followed by the warm, runny, fresh poop being shot up there as well. Of course that just gooped it all up and made it impossible to get out. It was like a mixture of raw eggs and broken shells had been shoved up there and every time I tried to blow it out, a great glob of gritty slime would stretch down almost to the bike frame and then spring back up like a yoyo, to be shoved even further up the nostrils.
I could see the road up ahead; we came to a screaming halt right beside it. We were totally exhausted but we had to keep going. “Man it’s hard to peddle in high heels,” Jared said calmly between heaving breaths. For the first time since we’d left his house I looked down. Oh no!
WE WERE STILL IN HIS MUM'S CLOTHES!
“Evening ladies,” came a familiar voice, as the minivan full of church ladies pulled up alongside us once again.
“Nice dresses,” Nick continued as he looked us up and down with a grin and scanning our poop splattered bodies. A dozen of the local little old ladies pressed their faces to the filthy windows, their mouths wide open. eewww … old Mrs Boyd’s false teeth just fell out.
The van pulled away leaving us in a cloud of dust, laughter and comments like … “It’s those two rude boys again!” … “Didn’t his mother wear that to bingo?” … “Wait till I tell Abbey about her little friends. Hooligans!” We could hear their continuing remarks as the van disappeared into the distance. All of sudden, the thought of being taken to another planet by ALIENS seemed like quite a good choice really.
We sped off down the road with no idea if the animals were in front or behind us. Finally … there it was, the store. Riding flat out we headed for the roadside drainage ditch that we’d hidden in before. Jared raced ahead going FASTER and FASTER the closer he got! WAS HE NUTS?! Surely he was going to stop … especially after last time.
Aaaaahhhhh!!! Nope … I guess not. I stopped at the top edge and peered through the trampled grass to where I could just see him laying at the bottom.
“Are you alive Jared?”
“Just.”
“Are you an idiot?”
“ I think so. ”
“Why didn’t you stop?”
“The dress got caught on my high heel and then into the chain … I wasn’t peddling. I was trying to get them untangled!” I made my way down to him. It was really hard not to laugh as he lay there, still on his bike with the dress up around his head and high heels dangling from his toes.
Tossing some grass over the bikes, we got ready to go in. The others weren’t here yet, we’d made it! I pulled up my dress, tucked it into my undies and we were off, dashing across the open ground. We headed straight for the missing window and made our way into the store. There was no way of knowing how far behind us they were … we just knew that we definitely weren’t safe yet.
I was trying to work out how long it would take us to get back to the bikes as I clambered up the stairs towards the office. “Jared grab the … Jared, Jared … ”
“Hang on I’m just grabbing a snack … want anything?” Jared called out.
“Are you crazy? They could be here any tick of the clock! Actually, are there any plain chips down there?”
“Yep,” he replied.
A few minutes later, Jared appeared at the top of the stairs, shoving a chocolate bar down his throat. Followed by a can of nice cold soft drink.
“Thanks mate … ” I said putting my hand out, “I’m starving!”
“What for?” Jared replied spitting soggy chocolate bits all over me.
“The chips.”
“Oops … I forgot.”
“Ohh, great!! A drink’ll have to do … ” I said as he lowered the can from his lips and crushed it. Yeah, WHAT A PALLl!!! Those ALIENS were looking better and better.
“Oh yeah, when I was flicking through one of their magazines, I glanced out the window and I could see them coming,” Jared casually remarked.
“We’re about to be a human buffet and you stop to read a magazine, have a drink and eat chocolate … ”
“I wasn’t eating chocolate then …” he interrupted. “I was eating a packet of biscuits, but don’t stress, the animals were way off.”
I could feel the veins in my head THROBBING. I was sure that at any second now steam was going to burst forth from my ears. I desperately wanted to rip the top of Jared’s head off and find out once and for all if it’s stuffed with nothing but cotton wool and cobwebs. Maybe when he was born the doctor realised there was no brain, so he used a bicycle pump to inflate his head. Anyway, I flew over to the front window and peered out to see how far away they were. That way, I’d know how much time we had to get the photocopy, go back downstairs, climb out the window and get back to the ditch and make our getaway.“Jared,” I said. “We have less than thirty seconds to live.” It was like he’d just had an electric shock to the brain … well, where the brain should be. Together we leapt the front counter and shot into the back office, under the desk … no, into a cupboard … there wasn’t one. We couldn’t get back downstairs, the pets were already coming in the front door.
“Here,” Jared whispered. And for the first time since I’d known him, I saw a faint flicker of hope. That somewhere deep, very deep in that skull, a brain seed had sprouted and might just grow. But let’s not get our hopes up.
He’d lifted the sheet that was covering the photocopier and found the steel storage cupboard it was sitting on was empty. But there was only room for one.
The front door SLAMMED shut!
“Move over Jared!”
We were like Siamese twins before birth … way overcrowded and face to face. Jared’s knees were up around his chin, and his feet were in my lap. I had my feet on his shoulders around his ears. If we both weren’t wearing a dress, we might have had some space left for air to breathe. I was just really glad Jared wasn’t still wearing the high heels. I held the door latch with my pinkie finger, leaving only a crack open to breath. But with the sheet over us there wasn’t much air getting in at all.
The pets all came storming into the room, barking an
d meowing, clicking and yapping. It was deafening.
I thought Jared was starting to have some sort of fit as he stared straight at me and started to do this WEIRD eye thing. They were darting all over the place. First he’d look at me so hard that I thought they’d pop right out of his head … then straight up in the air. Then he’d go cross-eyed looking at himself and finally, they went around and around in circles. He kept repeating the same pattern over and over. If I could’ve slapped him I would have. I figured it must’ve been the heat, it was like an oven in there. After all … we were sitting in a steel box and sweating so much that we could cook in our own juices. Suddenly I felt like I was seeing a vision of the future, how we’d be cooked. Great … now Jared wanted to play charades. He was obviously getting heatstroke. I couldn’t risk him going crazy … crazier … I had to play along. His arms were squashed together and bent up to his face but he still managed to tap two fingers to his other arm.
“Two words,” I carefully mouthed back. He nodded dopily, splashing me with the sweat from his brow. Then he stuck one finger up and bent it up and down. I shot him an angry look straight back …
“Same to you!!” I mouthed angrily. He shook his head side to side and stuck the finger up closer to his eye and bent it down over and over. I began mouthing anything that I could think of.
