S*W*A*G*G 1, Spook

by Jill Marshall

  Janey proceeded with caution. She’d found hideous things in the Wower before now, and she didn’t want to just assume she’d left the door open herself and that Trouble was in there having a snooze. She searched around quickly for a suitable spy-buy to defend herself with and seized upon an old ASPIC - an Aeronautical SPI Conveyor. If it came to it, she could jump on it and fly off, not as impressively as Tilly P had done the night before, but enough to stay ahead of her enemies. Or if it was really a crisis, she could thwack someone round the head with it.

  Stealing forward on tiptoe, Janey peered past the Wower, towards the glass doors of the nearby storage cabinets, checking the reflection to give her a heads-up. There was somebody – or something – in there, pooled on the floor of the shower cabinet and spilling out across the Spy-lab floor. On hearing her approach, the rasping sound became quicker, more feverish, and suddenly Janey saw the thing she had feared the most.

  G-Mamma was half-propped up against the wall of the Wower. The robotic hands were slightly extended as if she’d fallen before they got chance to work their magic, and a small pool of red liquid lapped against the side of her prone body.

  ‘Blood! G-Mamma!’

  She’d been shot or something, or stabbed or scratched or … Janey ran to her SPI:KE’s side, where she lay with the top half of her body spooling out onto the floor of the lab, and her legs still trapped inside the Wower. She didn’t move as Janey touched her, but the hoarse breathing became louder, more pronounced.

  ‘Who did this? Where are you hurt?’

  Janey scanned G-Mamma’s body, wishing for her Ultra-Gogs, but there was no obvious reason for the puddle of blood in the shower tray, and the woman wasn’t moving to point towards anything. She wasn’t responding at all, in fact. She was just breathing in an increasingly laboured and terrified way as her round, blue eyes opened and closed in random, twitchy movements.

  ‘What, G-Mamma? Can you tell me? What’s wrong?’

  The eyes flickered again, and this time Janey was sure they’d switched to her right, into the Wower cubicle. Maybe the Wower itself had been interfered with. Perhaps it had gone mad and attacked her mentor. Janey straddled G-Mamma to inspect the robotic hands, spattering the blood slick - which was when she noticed that the liquid that sprayed up the side of the Wower cubicle on contact with her feet was not red. It was clear. It was not blood. It was water. Just water.

  And then she saw it.

  The ring was on G-Mamma’s right hand – the hand that now lay in a pool of water that had gathered as she’d struggled into it, trying to Wow up to combat whatever misfortune had befallen her. The ruby centre was reflected in the puddle, and that was the cause of the scarlet streak that looked like blood.

  So if she wasn’t stabbed or shot, what could have happened to her?

  ‘Who did this to you? What’s wrong?’

  G-Mamma’s eyes flicked towards her hand again, and with that flash in her brain that accompanied her best spying instincts, Janey knew that it was the ring itself that had harmed her mentor. G-Mamma appeared to be paralysed, and her breathing was coming in sharper and sharper rasps, more laboured with every passing second.

  Janey was just about to reach out to grab the ring when she thought of Gideon the night before. Maybe it was cursed. G-Mamma had spotted it among her jewellery and decided to wear it; Janey should have warned her that she’d hidden it in plain sight but it still wasn’t to be worn.

  Moving G-Mamma’s head out of the way of the spray, Janey stuck her hand under the shower head and barked: ‘Wow me, now!’ The multi-coloured droplets shimmered down from the ceiling and encased her hand and arm. She withdrew them instantly, and in the same moment as the shower stopped raining down on them, her Girl Gauntlet and part of her spy-suit sleeve shimmered into life.

  Janey swallowed hard. She had no idea how the ring was harming G-Mamma – removing it might slice her finger off or something – but she knew that leaving it on wasn’t an option.

  ‘I’m sorry, GM,’ she whispered, using her spy master’s new title for the first time and noticing how easily it rolled off her tongue. ‘This may hurt or make things worse, but the ring has to come off.’

  She lifted G-Mamma’s arm with her bare right hand, then eased the ring between the several other rings that the woman was wearing until it popped off the end of her finger and onto the palm of Janey’s glove. Quickly, she inspected G-Mamma’s hand. It wasn’t severed or anything, which was what she’d feared, but there was definitely a vivid red wheal like a deep scratch along the top of G-Mamma’s finger.

  ‘Better?’ Clambering into the Wower completely, Janey lifted G-Mamma’s head onto her lap, waiting for her breathing to improve. She was huffing in hoarse little gasps now, and still seemed unable to move. ‘No. You’re not better. Worse, if anything. What shall I do?’

  As soon as she spoke she realised it was hopeless to ask G-Mamma for advice. The woman could hardly fill her lungs with enough air to stay alive, let alone indicate how Janey should deal with it. The eye twitch had been a last attempt to save herself.

  Grabbing the torch-taser from the edge of the Wower, she tried to prise open G-Mamma’s eyelids and get a reaction. Her eyes barely twitched. Janey’s heart fluttered as she wedged the torch in her pocket. This was literally a life and death situation, and she didn’t have a clue how to handle it.

  What would Gideon do? What would Jack do, or Tilly or any of them? What would G-Mamma herself do if she could speak, or even breathe?

  ‘You’d call for help,’ she told G-Mamma.

  Only help was harder to come by these days. They no longer had the luxury of an entire SPI organisation behind them, or a SPI medical unit to swoop in and see to G-Mamma without anyone knowing. She couldn’t even run to the garden and ask her parents, now that they were … ordinary.

  Even worse, G-Mamma was blocking the Wower which would enable Janey to suit up and use her gadgets to call for assistance, or run to find it.

  ‘Think, Janey, think!’

  She peered around the laboratory from her awkward position on the Wower floor, still cradling G-Mamma’s head and holding out the ring with the other hand, at a safe distance from anyone’s flesh. Her eyes fell on the ring tree and the equipment beside it.

  Of course. She’d just have to communicate like everyone else.

  Placing G-Mamma’s head gently on the floor, she tried not to notice that her SPI:KE’s breathing was shorter and harsher than ever, and ran to the computer. She placed the ring back on the ring tree and located the email from Gideon, typing as fast as she could.

  G-MAMMA PARALYSED, CAN’T BREATHE. HELP! JB

  Then she texted Jack. ‘Problem with GM, need to get hold of Gideon Flynn. Can you do anything?’

  ‘On it,’ came the reply within seconds.

  For a long, tortuous minute, there was no response to her email. In case anyone else had the bright idea of putting on the ring, Janey quickly grabbed it from the jewellery stand and dropped into a beaker. Trouble was watching her with his hypnotic green eyes from beneath the bench, growling quietly as he did when either she or G-Mamma were in danger. ‘Don’t touch that, Twubs,’ she warned him, and then just in case he couldn’t resist, she snapped the beaker inside a cake tin, wrapped it in a sleeve of Invisibubble fabric that erased it from sight, and stacked it behind the computers.

  The screen was flashing with a message from Gideon.

  Call an ambulance immediately. She needs artificial respiration or she’ll die, and we don’t have the equipment. She’ll have to go straight to a hospital. Do it now!

  Janey’s heart tremored as she bashed out a response.

  But we can’t use a normal hospital! They might expose us.

  The answer came back almost immediately.

  Okay. I know somewhere. Call the ambulance, get her on oxygen, then hijack it and meet me at this address.

  Hijack it?!

  If you want her to live.

  This was nuts, completely nuts, b
ut Janey knew she had no choice. G-Mamma’s gasps were fainter, further and further apart. Even her fake eyelashes had stopped twitching.

  There was nothing for it. With a shaky finger, Janey tapped out 999 on her phone and demanded an ambulance immediately.

  To her relief, Jack ran up G-Mamma’s stairs a moment later, transforming quickly back into Boy Jack and with Matilda Peppercorn hot on his heels.

  ‘What’s going on?’ cried Jack. He looked over to where G-Mamma lay stretched out, half inside the Wower. ‘Oh no. That’s not good.’

  ‘I know! That’s why I texted. She was wearing the ring from last night and I found her like this – and now Gideon says we have to get her to a hospital.’

  Jack shook his head, which was rapidly growing canine ears.

  ‘I don’t mean she looks sick. I mean … um, you know the processing stuff that I told you about? Well, I can see G-Mamma’s ba – her spirit – trying to climb out of her body.’

  ‘She’s nearly gone?’ said Matilda Peppercorn before Janey could say anything – or work out how Tilly had found out about it at all.

  Jack nodded, completely dog-headed by now. ‘Lie down,’ he said sharply to the space above G-Mamma’s body, and then he looked around at the girls. ‘Her heart’s about to give out, I think. She needs to be on artificial respiration, now.’

  ‘There’s an ambulance on the way,’ said Janey, hardly able to breathe herself any more. ‘Gideon said we’re to take control of it and meet him at this address in Hertfordshire.’

  ‘We’ve got to steal an ambulance?’ Jack sounded incredulous, but then he raced over to G-Mamma and wafted both hands over her prone body. ‘We’ve got to steal an ambulance!’ he ordered. ‘Now!’

  ‘How do we do that? I’m not even in my spy-suit.’ Janey felt as helpless as she’d ever felt in her life.

  But Matilda Peppercorn rubbed her hands together. ‘Leave that to me,’ she said, rather more cheerfully than Janey would have expected. She’d mentioned kick-boxing – was Tilly going to take the ambulance drivers by force? It didn’t seem very fair, somehow, when they were just doing their jobs and trying to save someone.

  She didn’t have much choice but to put her faith in Tilly despite her considerable misgivings about her, however, since the blare of the sirens was screeching ever nearer. As someone hammered on the door, Janey ran down the SPIral staircase and flung it open.

  ‘Upstairs,’ she cried to the man and woman on the doorstep, wondering how she would explain the Spylab to them.

  But there was no need, as Jack was carrying G-Mamma down the stairs, his muzzle wrinkled with concern, or possibly effort.

  Forget the Spylab. How would she explain Jack to them?

  ‘Which one needs treatment?’ said the male paramedic nervously.

  ‘I … I think it’s both of them. Possibly all of us,’ said Janey quickly. ‘It’s very catching.’

  The female frowned. ‘Have you all got a virus? We were only told about one patient.’

  Then she caught sight of Matilda with her shock of blue-silver hair. Matilda slid the length of the banister down the staircase, then bounded to her feet with a whoop at the bottom.

  ‘You too?’ said the paramedics together.

  ‘Noooooo,’ replied Matilda, giving Janey and Jack a shove in the back. ‘NOT meeeeee.’

  Janey recognised the same creamy voice with which Tilly had persuaded Mrs Varley to give them the ring. In fact, yes, Tilly had taken the ring – the very ring that had now caused G-Mamma’s paralysis. What was she up to? Could she even be trusted?

  But then Tilly continued in her mellifluous purring: ‘But YOUUUU look like you’ve had a shOCK. WOULD you like to sit … on the stairs here … and wait for … oooo, THREE hours, un-TIL we’re BACK?’

  There it was - that same shift in the atmosphere that had taken place in Holland Park, as Tilly’s voice soared and swooped and her luminous eyes fixed on the pair’s faces.

  ‘That sounds nice,’ said the male medic.

  ‘Nice? I’ve not had a day off in three weeks. It sounds fantastic!’ The woman smiled hopefully at Tilly. ‘Are there snacks?’

  And before they knew what they were doing, the two paramedics parked themselves willingly on separate steps of the SPIral staircase, sandwiched a metre-long box of G-Mamma’s doughnuts between them, and took absolutely no notice as three teenagers - two with wild heads and one carrying a large poisoned woman - made off with their ambulance.

  Silently, the three teenagers carried the patient into the back as Janey located the oxygen mask and snapped it over G-Mamma’s nose. Her breathing seemed to ease, but only for a second, as Jack stared in alarm at the inside wall of the vehicle.

  ‘I told you,’ he said firmly, in the kind of tone that G-Mamma herself might have used, ‘you’re not going anywhere. Lie the heck down in that body of yours.’ He held up a hand. ‘Nope. I’m not arguing, especially not in rap. It’s not your time.’ Then he rolled his eyes. ‘Okay. Err … It isn’t your time and you’re going to be fine or it’s no fault of mine, so … um … get back in the line.’

  He shifted uncomfortably as both girls stared at him, but Janey understood. G-Mamma could be bossy – and rapping - even when she was close to death’s door.

  ‘I’ll watch her,’ said Matilda.

  ‘I want to watch her,’ Janey retorted.

  ‘Okay, but I can’t drive. Good with a broomstick, not so much with the brum-brums.’ The other girl shrugged. ‘Happy to risk it though?’

  ‘Come on, Janey,’ said Jack, and Janey sighed. She wasn’t old enough to drive either, but it had been part of her SPI training, and she’d never forgotten how to do it. ‘You drive and I’ll super-speed us,’ Jack continued.

  So that was how they travelled, with Tilly and Jack bickering over whether they should use the siren or not (Tilly was for, Jack against), Jack occasionally yelling, ‘No! Back in your body,’ over his shoulder towards the innocently sleeping body of G-Mamma, and Janey hanging onto the steering wheel with all her might, heading in the direction of the map points that Gideon had sent through. Between arguments, Jack assisted by clutching the dashboard so that they suddenly slid through entire housing estates and across motorways without so much as a bump. Janey learned quickly how to compensate by taking her foot off the accelerator and focussing instead on the pinprick of light in the distance that showed where they were headed.

  It would actually have been a giggle if her closest and greatest ally in the whole world wasn’t lying inert in the back of the ambulance, fighting for her life, so stiff and white and cold that it was as if she’d already died.

  Chapter 12 - The Host with the Most

  ‘We’re here.’ Janey checked the sat-nav details against the numbers on the building in front of her, hardly able to believe that this was what Gideon had intended. ‘This is definitely it, but I don’t understand.’

  The ambulance came to a barely controlled, slithering halt beside a large semi-circular forecourt on which stood a vast and impressive glass building. As Janey and Jack peered at it through the windscreen, the glass panels changed from transparent to a deep rose pink, as the whole building reflected the setting sun and the beautiful fuchsia clouds that rolled away across the hills.

  ‘What is this place?’ said Jack, switching back into his teen persona. ‘It’s superb!’

  Matilda’s voice interrupted them from the back of the van. ‘Dying woman here! Where did Flynn say to meet him? Shall I march into Reception or whatever they call it in hospitals?’

  ‘No,’ said Janey quickly. ‘We don’t know it actually is a hospital. There are people walking around it in civilian clothes, for a start.’

  ‘Patients? Visitors?’ suggested Tilly.

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.’

  Janey looked around anxiously, wishing again for her spy-buys. Her Gogs would have told her far more about what was going on inside and exactly where to take G-Mamma, whose breathing was barely steadier th
an before.

  Then she spotted him in the shadows at the edge of the forecourt, where the flax-filled flower beds ended and the angular, Japanese trees began.

  With a finger to his lips, Gideon was waving them over.

  ‘Over there,’ she told Jack, pointing to Gideon.

  Jack’s eyes seemed to widen slightly, but then he nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, checking out G-Mamma’s status. ‘Let’s take GM on the gurney and get her straightened out. Her ba is practically standing up and jumping out now; there’s no time to lose.’

  Thrusting the ambulance into position beyond the flowerbeds, Janey hid it as best she could among the trees and then leapt out along with Matilda and Jack. Between them they lifted the stretcher on which G-Mamma had been placed and kicked the legs beneath it to turn it into a gurney. Then she turned to Gideon Flynn.

  ‘This way,’ he whispered, and they followed him around the thicket to a large ramp that led to the underground car park, sticking to the treeline so that they wouldn’t be seen by the people inside the building. They’d have to be quick, though. Janey calculated that at this point between five and six pm, staff would soon start leaving for home, collecting their cars from the basement and wondering why four shifty-looking teenagers were wheeling a large, prone woman into the lift.

  Because that was where they headed – or at least, that was what Janey assumed. However, as soon as they reached the shaft where the metal doors gleamed, looking for all the world like a Wower, Gideon peeled off to the left and nodded towards a slender doorway behind the lift shaft, almost invisible in the light-deprived corners of the building.

  He reached out a hand to touch the keypad, then withdrew it quickly.

  ‘I shouldn’t with my condition,’ he explained, turning to the others. ‘Janey, would you mind?’

  ‘No problem. What’s the number?’

  Gideon reeled off a string of digits. ‘0708 151 920.’

  It sounded like a telephone number. Janey half-expected to hear a voice answering the call asking them what they were up to, but instead the door slid silently to the right and they found themselves in a long, narrow corridor.