Little Green Gangsters

by Steve Cole

  I stood in a vast, bright yellow room, where a bulky figure in a spacesuit stood facing away from me in the middle of a black circle, waiting beneath a massive, metal techno-funnel that hung down from the black roof. A funnel that pulsed with a hundred red lights and hummed with strange power.

  I was in the hyper-beam room – and the figure was Sergeant Katzburger, getting ready to make her transfer into space.

  “Hello!” Little G plonked down the fish bowl. The water sloshed about, but Herbert was still swooping inside, like a goldfish on an invisible rollercoaster ride. “Hello!”

  “What are you playing at?” I stared around in panic. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Little G nodded. “You got to get out of here!”

  The hum of power was rising. There couldn’t be much time left. I ran to the door, but there was no handle, only a keypad. “What’s the code, G?”

  “Don’t know!” Little G chirped. “Sorry!”

  He’s an utter alien nutter, I realised grimly, turning back to the door. “Let me out!” I pounded on it, but it barely made a sound. Terror was squeezing my bowels from the inside. Where was that camera? I had to find the camera! I stared around, wild-eyed. Surely someone must have seen me on a TV screen somewhere in this place? Surely even now they were taking steps to abort the transfer, to get me and Herbert and Little G out . . .

  Except, of course, half the staff were currently going crazy down at the medical wing. What if no one was watching? What if Ray and Kimmy were too busy working on their gadgets?

  Katzburger still hadn’t noticed a thing, standing in the circle as the power hum rose higher. I had to get her attention. Which meant running into the circle. The circle in which you stood waiting to explode, or to turn into a giant foot, or to vanish forever, never to be seen again . . .

  What happened to you outside the circle? I didn’t know what to do. I looked over at Little G to see what he was doing.

  He was eating my goldfish.

  “Mmm! Hello!” Little G dangled Herbert between finger and thumb, over his wide smiling mouth. “MMMM, I got the tongue! Hello! In you go!”

  Then – PLOP! GULP! To my disbelieving horror . . . Herbert was swallowed whole.

  “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!” I ran up to Katzburger, shock smashing at my senses yet again. “Please, Sergeant! Little G’s gone bad! He’s eating Herbert! HE’S EATING MY FIIIIIIIIIIISH!”

  But Katzburger had already seen what was going down – more accurately, what was going down Little G’s throat. And quick as lightning she tore off her space helmet and burst into action. “No you don’t, you little green punk!” she roared, lumbering forward. “No innocent pet is gonna die at alien hands on my watch!”

  Little G turned and ran, arms waving high in the air, his borrowed camouflage jacket scraping the ground. But Katzburger was a woman on a mission. She charged up behind him, threw both arms around his chest and squeezed violently – once, twice – like people do to help someone with something stuck in their throat, trying to jolt it loose. I watched, transfixed, hoping against hope . . .

  Then, over the fierce whine of the building power, Little G gave a kind of strangled, choking noise. Herbert flew out of his mouth like a surface-to-air missile, soaring through the air . . .

  I started forward to try to catch him – but couldn’t move from the big black circle.

  Uh-oh. The hyper-beam was activating!

  I saw Little G and Katzburger charge forward to catch my goldfish. “Be careful!” I yelled – or rather, I tried to. But now the hum had grown so loud it swamped everything, and the air about me felt too thick for words to penetrate. Everything was turning orange . . . more orange than Herbert himself. The haze fuzzed up further, till I could no longer see the struggling figures.

  Transfer’s underway, I realised. I’m going . . . I’M GOING . . . I had no spacesuit, no protection, no hope – and very probably no clean underwear. I started to pant like I was a deranged dog, and felt a sharp, painful buzzing through my body – like I was a massive mobile phone set to vibrate . . .

  And then blackness rushed in. Not an “oh-look-I’m-unconscious” kind of blackness. This blackness was speckled bright with dots of light. And it was everywhere, stretching out around me as if floor and sky had turned into enormous IMAX cinema screens.

  I wasn’t in the hyper-beam room any longer. Transfer was complete. I was suspended in space.

  Outer Space.

  The situation was so vast, so incredible, I couldn’t take it in. My poor, bruised, battered sanity almost fled my head screaming as I tried to take in the sheer scale of the universe about me.

  The view was endless and pinsharp – blackness and brightness. A distant boulder caught the starlight as it tumbled serenely past. A ball of light, dazzling but way smaller than the sun, was . . . well, the sun – only further away. Could I be out somewhere near Mars?

  Suddenly I was afraid – that vague thought of geography had given me some perspective. I’d started to think about my position. My hopeless, deathly position.

  Tim Gooseheart, first boy in space. Without a spacesuit.

  I was lost. A tiny, insignificant thing, no more than a grain of sand on a beach the size of infinity. This is why they call it space, I thought, dangling in the eerie, airless vacuum. There’s so much space . . . stretching on endless and forever . . .

  And it was cold. Freezing cold.

  As panic rose, I pushed out my last breath. I tried to breathe in some more. I couldn’t. No air! Duh! That’s why it was an airless vacuum. I was suffocating!

  My ears hurt, like they wanted to pop only a hundred times worse. Was I going to explode? My arms and legs were already tingling. My eyes were stinging. A terrible chill was spreading through me, but my tongue felt weirdly hot.

  Little G called me spaceboy. Was he planning this whole thing all along?

  I tried to turn, but it was difficult, floating gravity-free in the emptiness. I didn’t know which way up I was. Then I saw it – a huge, extravagant blur of light behind me. A structure that shimmered and trembled, stretching up into the infinite like a cliff with no top. It could only be the GETs’ spaceship.

  I still couldn’t breathe. Panic was shaking me. My ears were hurting more. I’d only been out here maybe ten seconds, and it felt like I was going to burst out of my skin. There was a metal taste in my mouth. My eyes were stinging worse. I felt the water on my tongue begin to bubble.

  The last thing I saw was the weird, alien ship, pulsing, flickering . . .

  Then my brain must’ve used up the last of the oxygen in my blood. There was no more to be had, and no time to think of any brave final thoughts, no breath to say bye to Dad and the mum and sister I’d barely met, or the fish I’d left behind with an alien goofball and the woman who should’ve perished here in my place . . .

  I made like the rest of space – and blacked out.

  I wasn’t expecting to ever open my eyes again. But somehow, there I was, Tim the spaceboy, alive – ALIIIIIIVEEEEEEEE, I tell you! – and in a different kind of darkness now. An inside darkness. Some kind of room.

  They got me back! I thought. The hyper-beam worked after all!

  I tried to move. Everything ached. My face felt sunburned, my eyes were sore and my tongue was numb, but otherwise I seemed OK.

  But how long had I been gone? Where was I? Back in the base? The sick bay, maybe?

  My surroundings were blurred and vast, stretching up into pulsing shadows the colour of dried blood. I rubbed my eyes. If I wasn’t back at the base, the only other place I could be was on board the spaceship.

  The GETs’ super-massive ALIEN spaceship.

  Yeah. That was a happy thought.

  My howl of anguish and terror echoed around the nightmarishly ma-hoosive dimensions of this strange, unknowable domain.

  As it died away, I heard a scuttling sound. Something dark stirred in the crimson gloom – huge and crooked and twitching, l
ike giant spider legs. The shadows shifted, and with a clacking, clattering noise, the thing was gone. I held absolutely still as whispering voices came hissing out of nowhere – more in my head than in my ears, if that makes any sense.

  “Silence!”

  “Be hushed at once! We have saved you!”

  I shut up as they said. Best to be polite when you find yourself on board a sinister alien spacecraft belonging to Giant Extra-Terrestrial beings, millions of miles from your home.

  “You saved me?” I breathed, still terrified.

  “Yes. Your crude hyper-beam projected you only close by to the coordinates we supplied,” came the sinister whisper. “Now, silence we say!”

  “You are very late,” said the second sinister whisper. “Your protection under galactic law has almost expired.” There was a pause. “Shall we send the trigger pulse to the great machines as planned?”

  “Yes,” crowed Sinister Whisper One. “This ambassador’s agreement is a certainty in any case.”

  “Er . . . What does ‘send the trigger pulse to the great machines’ mean?” I asked.

  “You will know in time.”

  “And . . .” I gulped. “When you said ‘ambassador’, were you talking about me?”

  Sinister Whisper Two came back to answer. “Who else . . . Mr President.”

  My heart banged like typewriter keys being whumped by a gorilla with anger issues. Mr President? Was that who they’d been expecting?

  Of course it was. An ambassador – someone important who could represent his planet in talks with enormously powerful alien beings. The President of Planet Earth. And instead, who had they got? Tim Gooseheart, the most ordinary, average twelve-year-old boy in the world.

  Have you ever felt out of your depth? Magnify that feeling one hundred squillion times . . . two hundred squillion times . . .

  “Silence!” Whisper Two rasped suddenly. “Our business partners require full tranquillity. They must not be disturbed.”

  “But, I . . . I didn’t say anything,” I protested.

  “Activate the emo-shield,” Whisper One instructed. “It should’ve been raised the moment we took this Earth thing on board.”

  I didn’t like the sound of an emo-shield, but I kept quiet, my mind racing. I could hear the sinister whispers having a private chat, but only caught the odd word or phrase: “Switch on . . . transformation of the air . . . prepare . . . silent world . . .” The sound of scuttling in the blur of dark red shadows all around me was growing louder, I was sure.

  “Please,” I squeaked, “send me back. I shouldn’t be here. There’s been a mistake!”

  “A mistake?” Whisper Two didn’t sound impressed. “You are NOT entitled to speak and act for the human race?”

  “Um . . .”

  “No matter,” said similarly unimpressed Whisper One. “The time for appeal has nearly lapsed in any case. We can give this human thing to the chittersnipes.”

  I didn’t know what a chittersnipe was. I didn’t want to find out.

  “Wait! Uh . . . Sorry, of course I’m the President. How do you do.” If these whispery things were too alien to realise I was just a kid, I wasn’t about to commit suicide after all I’d been through by telling them the truth. “We, uh, welcome you to our planet and . . .”

  “YOUR planet?” Whisper One was growing louder, raspier, scarier. “This world is OURS! It has been in our family for two billion years . . .”

  “It is our holiday home,” Whisper Two added. “We had a lovely thousand-year vacation here, three hundred and fifty million Earth years ago. It was a peaceful world with only primitive plants, fish and insects under our feet. Imagine our horror when we returned to find creatures like YOU had evolved and multiplied and INFESTED the whole place!”

  My stomach juices turned to lava and started bubbling. Dad was right, I realised. Humans are like dung beetles. Our dungball belongs to bigger beetles and now they’re taking it back.

  “We . . . we didn’t know it was your planet,” I said feebly. “Er . . . Sorry for evolving and stuff, but we’re kind of living on it now.”

  “Wrecking it, you mean,” Whisper Two said indignantly. “The atmosphere was a polluted mess. We had to get the decorators in.”

  “Decorators? So THAT’s how all the pollution just disappeared?” My brain felt ready to break the boggle barrier. “You kind of . . . painted over it?”

  “Well, we couldn’t sell the planet in that condition, could we?” said waspish Whisper One.

  “Let me get this straight,” I murmured. “You’re going to SELL the planet like it’s just a house or something?”

  “Yes,” said still-sinister-overall-but-quite-chatty Whisper Two. “It was the cosmic rays in this part of space that used to make it so attractive – but they have dissipated now. And the planet is too far from the galactic trade routes to sell to a business. Happily, we have found buyers – a family from our sister race, the Ova-Many. And once the nursery is prepared—”

  “Enough talk,” Whisper One broke in.

  I frowned. “Nursery?”

  “The information is irrelevant to your future.”

  A long, long silence followed. And through the fog of my helplessness, a thought broke into daylight – how can I understand these GETs? I thought they only spoke in smells or whatever? Are they translating their smells? If so, they pong excellent English. In which case, why didn’t they just transmit their weirdo message in a human language?

  Didn’t they want us to understand the message . . . ?

  “Let us conclude this business properly.” Whisper One wafted back in my ears. “There is something you must understand, Mr President . . .”

  A strange smell tickled the back of my nose – a smell I had no words for. And then, I heard footsteps – someone approaching with a heavy, confident stride. A familiar figure stepped out from the shadows ahead of me – and my eyes almost exploded with shock.

  “Y-y-y-y-y-YOU?”

  Darren “Fist-Face” Gilbert.

  There he was, standing just a metre away, looking scarier and meaner than ever I’d seen him.

  HUH?!

  Fist-Face. On a spaceship. In space. Dressed in his ragged school uniform.

  “What you looking at, Goosefart?” he growled.

  “That’s President Goosefart to you,” I should have replied. Or maybe, “Er? HELLO? I think I’m allowed to look a bit weirdly at you, Darren, seeing as you’ve just turned up out of nowhere on a Giant Extra-Terrestrial spaceship!”

  But of course I was scared to death and could only manage to say: “Errrrrrughhhhhhh . . .”

  Fist-Face pointed to a piece of old, yellowed paper on the floor in front of me. Where had that come from?

  “Sign this,” he snarled, “or I’ll pummel you into juice.”

  I stared at the paper, unsure and unwilling to accept any of what was now happening. “Fist-Face,” I managed at last, “how did you get here?”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions,” he retorted.

  Again, I should’ve said, “I think you’ll find it’s quite an intelligent question to be asking, actually, considering you’re a fourteen-year-old homicidal maniac who can barely travel into school on the bus, let alone zip tens of millions of miles across space to threaten me with a pummelling.” But a new smell now whistled about the back of my senses. A distracting scent . . .

  Of course it made sense that Fist-Face should be here. And if I didn’t sign the paper as he wanted, I would get pummelled into juice. Obviously, I didn’t want to be pummelled into juice. I MUST SIGN IT, I thought.

  But I hesitated.

  “Sign the paper,” said Fist-Face impatiently. “Or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else . . .” A nasty smile spread over his already very nasty face. “Or else Nanny Helen will love her new family more than she ever loved you.”

  I could feel my face clouding over like a day at Wimble
don. “Huh? What would you know about . . . ?” A fresh scent skulked in my nostrils as the shadows shivered again. And suddenly, Nanny Helen was walking forward, just as she’d looked the last time she’d called round.

  “OMGeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” she cried, standing beside Fist-Face. “My new family are SOOOO lovely! I think I will definitely love them all more than I ever loved you, Tim, just as you feared!” She looked at me with dark eyes. “Unless, of course, you sign that paper on the floor in front of you, Tim. Then I will love you best and be your nanny for always! OMG, isn’t that cool?”

  She sounded so reasonable. Not the words, so much – they sounded as ridiculous then as they do writing them down now – but something about the way she spoke was so reassuring.

  I stooped and picked up the paper and tried to read what it said. It seemed blurry, hazy, flecked with half-formed shapes and colours. I looked at Nanny Helen, standing there with her arms outstretched ready to hug me. But as I walked forward to hug her back, she lowered her arms and shook her head.

  “Not until you sign, Tim!” she said sadly.

  “You wouldn’t be like that,” I muttered. “If you were real, you wouldn’t act this way . . .”

  Fresh smells. I was feeling sick.

  “Well, I’m deffo real, Tim,” said Elodie, walking out of the shadows behind Fist-Face. “You know I’m real, however much you wish I wasn’t. And you also know that Dad’s spent the last eleven years wishing Mum had taken you with her when she left instead of taking clever old me . . .”

  “No,” I breathed.

  “Dad’s always been disappointed with you,” Elodie persisted. “He thinks you’re stupid and rubbish and a waste of time.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “It is true, brother of mine,” said Elodie, and both Fist-Face and Nanny Helen nodded. “Unless you sign the paper of course, eh? Then it won’t be true at all.”

  “Huh?” I shook my head, trying to clear it. There were so many fumes in my nostrils: my nose felt like a factory’s smokestack. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “It does so too make sense,” said Hannah-Anna Hongananner – MUM – coming into the hazy light. “Come on, Tim. It’s just a piece of paper. Sign it and I will be the mother you never had. If you don’t sign it I will hate you and call you names like ‘plop-muncher’ . . .”