Hamish nodded, sadly. He knew she was right.
‘Right, so this is how it works,’ said Buster, interrupting things. ‘I’m in charge of the PDF’s van and general transport needs,’ he said. ‘When a Pause hits, you want to make sure you use every second and have a speedy vehicle!’
Buster had an Afro which almost doubled the size of his head, thick black glasses, some pretty impressive muscles for an eleven-year-old and a little pot belly he nicknamed ‘The Beast’.
‘The Beast needs feeding!’ he’d often yell, apparently.
Lucky he had access to his uncle’s old ice-cream van then, eh?
‘But it’s not just the van, Hamface,’ said Buster, who kept getting Hamish’s name wrong. In just a few minutes, he’d called him ‘Hamface’, ‘Hedgehog’ and ‘Hilda’.
Buster pointed behind him. The PDF had had the same idea as Hamish: Mr Slackjaw’s beautiful Vespas. ‘Check out The Fleet!’
‘Mr Slackjaw’s missing mopeds!’ said Hamish. ‘You . . . stole them?’
Buster looked horrified.
‘Borrowed, Harold,’ he said, before adding, rather guiltily. ‘And . . . modified. Enhanced. Improved.’
Hamish took them all in. There was a scooter for each of the team, parked in a line, each on its own stand.
One was jet-black with a bright blues streak down the side. He reckoned he know whose that was.
Next to it was a muddy old scooter that had been painted olive green. It had giant tyres and what looked like an enormous peashooter stuck on the front. That had to be Buster’s.
Behind it was another one that was brand new – yellow and red, and covered in big silver stars and lights and bell and whistles.
‘That one’s mine,’ said a blonde-haired girl in a stripy jumper. ‘I’m Clover. I’m in charge of reconnaissance.’
‘What – spying?’ said Hamish, a little shocked. ‘Doesn’t that moped rather . . . stand out?’
‘I’m a master of disguise,’ she said. ‘Watch this. I’m a girl, right?’
Hamish nodded. Clover whipped out a fake moustache from one of her many pockets and stuck it to her upper lip.
‘Now I’m a middle-aged bank manager.’
Then she tore the moustache off, turned it on its side and hung it from her chin.
‘Now I’m a two-thousand-year-old Japanese emperor.’
Then she very quickly stuck it between the top of her nose and her forehead.
‘Now I’m an old lady with a monobrow.’
Everybody applauded.
‘Cool,’ said Hamish. ‘But how come you want to disguise yourself as grown-ups when grown-ups are the very thing the Terribles are after?’
Clover’s face fell.
‘Yeah, good point,’ she said, taking the fake moustache off and screwing it up in her hand.
‘I’m Elliot,’ said a boy with the biggest brown eyes, framed by two very expressive eyebrows. ‘Strategies and Operations.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Hamish.
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ said Elliot, one eyebrow raised quizzically. ‘But basically I keep a note of everything we’re doing. I help us work out when the next Pause might be and how long it will last. But it’s not what I really want to do.’
‘What do you really want to do?’ asked Hamish.
‘I just want to dance,’ said Elliot, and he did a little jig. ‘But apparently that’s not very useful in a war.’
Hamish nodded his understanding.
‘Because that’s what this is,’ said the last of the kids, stepping out from the shadows. ‘It’s a war.’
This kid was quite tall. He had skinny jeans, sunglasses propped up on his forehead, a T-shirt with a skull on it and the look of someone who didn’t scare easily.
‘I’m Venk,’ he said, dramatically. ‘Short for Venkatesh. I’ve seen you around school. You hang out with that nervous kid a lot.’
‘Robin,’ said Hamish.
‘What does he make of all this?’
‘I’ll be honest: I haven’t really told him. He once fainted because I told him a friend of mine’s cousin’s friend’s brother’s cousin once thought he saw a ghost. I’m not sure what hearing about actual, real-life Terribles would do to him.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Venk. ‘That one’s mine, by the way.’
He pointed at a dark purple Vespa with polished chrome spikes all over it. It had been modified so the handles were really high and the seat was really low. On the back was a long springy flagpole supporting a flag that read ‘PAUSEWALKERS FOREVER’.
Hamish was impressed.
‘I bet that—’
‘The girls dig me, yeah,’ said Venk. ‘You’re right.’
‘That’s not actually what I was going to—’
‘It’s kind of you to point that out. Cheers, man.’
Alice wrinkled her nose. She didn’t seem particularly impressed.
‘And what about you, Hamish Ellerby?’ said Venk, letting his sunglasses drop from his forehead to his eyes. ‘What do you bring to the team? What makes you special?’
Hamish thought about it, then held his watch out for them to see.
‘I guess you can call me The TimeKeeper.’
Venk smiled.
‘Hamish,’ said Alice. ‘Did you bring your mum’s graph like I asked you?’
Hamish pulled out a neatly-folded sheet of A4 paper.
‘I found a copy in the wastepaper basket at home,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’ asked Elliot, perking up. ‘Is that . . .?’
He took it and read it.
‘This is gold dust!’ he said, delighted.
‘And now,’ said Alice, as the gang fell silent, ‘I can tell you why I brought you all here.’
The End is Nigh . . .
So it was true.
The Pauses were not just getting longer, and not just getting more and more frequent, but the Pauses were also getting more dangerous.
At school the next morning, Hamish couldn’t stop thinking about the Terribles.
The more they come, the more people they take.
The more people they take, the longer they can stay.
The longer they stay, the more people they can grab.
The more they grab, the less careful they are.
The less careful they are, the quicker they come back.
All of which means they’re faster, they’re meaner, they’re hungrier . . . and they’re here.
‘So!’ said Mr Longblather, eyeing Class 4E, and jolting Hamish from his thoughts. ‘I thought today we would talk some more about the wonders of soil erosion!’
Hamish sat in his classroom and put his head in his hands, remembering the night before, his mind was still spinning from all the things the PDF had told him . . .
‘Look at your mum’s graph!’ Elliot had said, holding it up.
‘It’s just a graph,’ Hamish had replied, not sure what the fuss was about.
‘No, no!’ said Elliot, excited. ‘Look at the way the line rises! Very slowly at first, since just before Christmas. Just one or two here or there, but then you start to see it get higher and higher. That means more anger in town! Which means the Terribles must have struck!’
‘If we add that information to what we already know,’ Alice had added, ‘we can see the Terribles are speeding up.’
‘And not just speeding up!’ Elliot had exclaimed, pointing one finger in the air to look more dramatic. ‘But racing towards something!’
Hamish looked blank.
‘Everything points,’ Elliot had said, ‘to there being some kind of Final Event.’
‘A Final Event?’ Hamish had replied. ‘What do you mean, a Final Event?’
‘Something cataclysmic,’ Elliot said, his eyes burning bright with fear and excitement. ‘Something apocalyptic. An event so heinous and awful that it doesn’t bear thinking about. Look at the graph!’
He held it up over the campfire they’d built, so they could
see a little better.
‘When this red “complaints” line goes straight up in the air – when it’s vertical – that’s when we can expect something really bad.’
‘Why?’ asked Buster.
‘Because that’s the moment when things can’t get any worse,’ replied Elliot.
‘What will happen?’ asked Clover, shaken. ‘What is this event?’
‘The Final Event is when they’ll take everybody else,’ Elliot had said, grabbing her by the shoulders. ‘Men, women, children, teenagers, the lot.’
‘Teenagers!’ said Clover. ‘But how do you know when they’ve been turned mean? They’re always mean!’
‘That’s the genius of it,’ said Elliot. ‘They could have been taking teenagers this whole time. No one would know!’
The more they thought about it, the more it made sense. All over Starkley, grown-ups were disappearing at an alarming rate, but no one was doing anything. After all – most people returned after a couple of days and, when someone vanished for longer, everyone just made excuses.
‘Oh, he must have gone on holiday,’ you’d hear, about the man in the sailor’s cap who runs the supermarket, even though he’d never taken a holiday in fifty years.
There were stories about people winning the lottery and suddenly buying a castle in Scotland and getting butlers and a sofa made of gold.
Or that they’d been spotted walking down Starkley High Street and suddenly offered a modelling contract by Lovely Big Nose magazine and whisked off to Milan to be the Next Big Nose.
Or that they’d gone swimming and were enjoying it so much they’d ended up in Calais and just decided to stay.
No one seemed to question anything. It was like the grown-ups who hadn’t been taken just didn’t know how to deal with how the town was changing.
Hamish snapped out of it and stared out of the classroom window.
Two fat men were arguing over a cat.
A car stopped and a woman rolled her window down and started shouting at the men, using words I just cannot repeat to ears as pure and angelic as yours.
Someone else whizzed by on a bike and knocked the woman’s wing mirror off, and the two men started laughing.
So she got out and started chasing them around with a stale baguette she happened to have in her boot.
The world was noisier. Shoutier. More argument-ier. Angrier. Snidier. Snippier. Chippier. And really quite horrible-r.
It. Was. All. Too. Much.
Hamish was going to meet up with the PDF again after school. Elliot had calculated there was a Pause due tonight. And now they had to prepare for whenever this terrifying Final Event might take place too.
Hamish sighed.
Mr Longblather was striding up and down the centre of the classroom, clipping the ear of the odd child here or there if he didn’t like the sound of their breathing or thought their posture could be better.
Hamish straightened his back.
Who would be next to go?
He cast a quiet glance around the classroom. It was not quite the usual scene. No one was misbehaving. No one was chatting or passing notes.
‘My mum says I should probably stay at home for a while,’ whispered Robin suddenly, and this really wasn’t like him, taking a risk by talking in class. ‘You know how nervous she gets.’
He rolled his eyes, as if he wasn’t just as nervous as she was.
‘Anyway, she seems to think something really weird is going on. She says she can sense the anger.’
‘There is something really weird going on,’ said Hamish. ‘But I just don’t know whether to say what it—’
‘ELLERBY! YOU ARE TALKING! WHY IS THIS?’ was the next thing Hamish heard, followed by a thunk on the side of his head and the smell of chalk in the air once more.
Oh, great. Wednesday detention it was.
Hamish had been given a shopping list of vital items he was told he would need. The kids of the PDF had been working hard these last few weeks.
Wherever they could, and however they could, they were all about scuppering the Terribles and their evil masters, the WorldStoppers.
As he sat in Mr Longblather’s detention, he thought again about his new pals in the PDF . . .
‘Alice found me about six weeks ago,’ Buster had told him. ‘She followed my ice-cream van one day. Then together we found the others. We almost didn’t find Clover, to be honest.’
‘Why?’
‘She’d disguised herself as a bush,’ he said. ‘That’s one of her best disguises. Actually, it’s her only really good one.’
‘And what did you do?’ Hamish asked.
‘We tried to come up with ways of stopping the Terribles. Elliot tried mixing all sorts of concoctions which he hoped might dissolve them. He’d mix washing-up liquid with battery acid, things like that.’
‘And it didn’t work?’
‘No,’ Buster had told him. ‘If anything, it just made them look a bit cleaner. And they find battery acid absolutely delicious.’
‘What else?’
‘We tried trapping them in holes. We tried swatting them with garage doors I’d rigged up to big springs. We tried writing them a convincing note telling them to go home.’
‘But they just kept coming,’ Venk had added. ‘More and more of them were swarming into town. The stink rising over Starkley. Taking more grown-ups every single time.’
‘Ideally,’ Clover had told him, ‘we’d catch one. That way we can prove they exist. If we could catch one and show it to the police or the army or the mayor then maybe they’d do something.’
‘What about taking a picture of one?’ Hamish had suggested.
‘Tried it,’ Alice replied. ‘The only thing that comes out is whatever was Paused. On every CCTV camera and on every phone.’
And that, Buster had explained, was why Hamish’s watch would come in so handy. With The Explorer, the PDF would be able to time the Pauses no matter where in Starkley they were – not just if they were near the town clock. They would be able to see how far into a Pause they were – and work out how long they had left before the world started up again.
This, Elliot determined, would be very handy indeed.
Because it was down to them to stop the Terribles from reaching the Final Event.
As he walked away from school, Hamish studied the blue canvas satchel Venk had given him the night before.
It was a PPP – a Pause Protection Pack. It made Hamish’s PDK look a little amateur.
It had the international symbol for ‘pause’ and ‘PPP’ sprayed on it.
And now Hamish had a list of things he needed to fill it.
TABASCO HOT SAUCE and AFTERSHAVE SPRAYER
‘To the Terribles, humans absolutely stink,’ said Venk. ‘But they love our stink. That’s why they lick us and paw at us, and put their little sucker cups all over us. A few sprays of extra-strength Tabasco hot sauce from an old perfume or aftershave bottle and they’re not going to do it again in a hurry!’
ONE PAIR OF MARMITE GLOVES
‘You don’t want to leave your stink anywhere,’ said Clover. ‘It’s always best to cover our tracks, especially if you’re on spying duty. Marmite gloves keep them from sniffing our handprints!’
ONE PACK MIXED SWEETS FROM MADAME COUS COUS’S INTERNATIONAL WORLD OF TREATS
‘For vital sustenance during the Pause!’ said Buster. ‘You like sweets, don’t you, Hotdog?’ ‘It’s Hamish,’ said Hamish. ‘Of course it is,’ said Buster. ‘Sorry, Hellfish.’
ONE SMALL BOTTLE OF HYGIENE GEL
‘For immediate application following contact with a Terrible!’ said Alice, pulling a face.
And finally . . .
ONE MAP OF STARKLEY
‘For obvious reasons!’ said Venk. (And if you can’t work out why they’d need a map, maybe you don’t belong in the PDF! If so, put this book down before someone calls the authorities.)
Looking at the list, the only thing that would be tricky was the bag of sweets,
considering Hamish was still banned from Madame Cous Cous’s International World of Treats. And just as he was working out if a bag of sweets from somewhere else might do, Hamish noticed something unusual happening down an alleyway to his right.
It was Grenville Bile.
He was being pushed up against a wall by two much bigger kids.
And for once Grenville looked afraid.
Was it possible? Was the bully being bullied?
‘I thought you wanted to show us your new watch!’ Hamish heard the bigger of the two big kids growl.
‘Oh,’ said Grenville, quaking. ‘Yeah, I do. It’s just—’
‘What?’ said the boy. ‘It’s just that you were lying about it?’
Hamish felt in his pocket to make sure The Explorer was still there.
‘No!’ said Grenville. ‘I wasn’t lying! I had a new watch! It was really cool, like I said! It’s just I, um, well . . .’
‘Sure,’ said the second big boy. ‘We believe you. This must be totally different from all those other times you said you had something and then didn’t.’
‘Yeah! Like the time you said David Beckham might be picking you up from school.’
‘Yeah!’ said the second big boy. ‘We waited hours!’
The boys picked Grenville up by the scruff of his neck, which was no mean feat given the size of it.
‘I told you, he missed his bus!’ said Grenville, lying desperately.
‘And I honestly have all that other stuff I told you about.’
‘Of course you do,’ said the second bigger boy, grinning, sickeningly. ‘You know what, Grenville Bile? You’re just a worthless little groat. Prepare for this week’s punishment.’ He raised one huge, meaty fist. Grenville shut his eyes and whimpered.
This week’s punishment? thought Hamish. Did this happen every week? Hamish had never heard Grenville whimper before. And now he was about to get beaten up!
Part of him wanted to watch the little bully get his just desserts. But, after the underpants prank, Hamish had already had his revenge. And what was happening here just seemed unfair.
‘Oh, hello, Grenville!’ said Hamish, waving confidently and striding forward.
Hamish and the WorldStoppers Page 11