Little Green Gangsters

by Steve Cole

  “Stop it!” I tried to throw down the paper, but it seemed glued to my grip. “This is crazy.”

  “Sign the paper, Tim,” said Dad, who had somehow appeared behind Fist-Face. “If you do, we can move back to our old house.”

  “How can we?” I sobbed, clutching my spinning head. “Someone else is living there now.”

  Dad smiled. “Removing people from their homes is easy.”

  “Sign the paper,” said Fist-Face.

  “Sign it,” chanted Elodie and her mum – our mum – as Nanny Helen joined in. “Sign it! Sign it! OMG, sign it!”

  “Sign it!” Little G’s voice rose above the chorus. “Sign it! Hello! If you sign it I will un-eat your fish! Hello! Little G!”

  The babble was overwhelming. The mingled stinks in my nose were mangling my senses. I fell to my knees. I couldn’t bear it any longer. I needed this madness to stop. And all they needed me to do was sign . . .

  There was something like a pen in my hand.

  I put the paper back on the floor.

  I scribbled down my name.

  The smell in my nostrils suddenly vanished. Fist-Face vanished. Nanny Helen vanished. Little G, Dad, Elodie, Mum (MUM!!!) vanished.

  “They weren’t real,” I realised shakily. “It was all . . . in my head . . .”

  “Yes, Mr President,” said Sinister Whisper One. “An illusion, created by us. We knew you couldn’t resist your deepest fears. Now, let the chittersnipes retrieve the document . . .”

  At the sound of the voice, the dark, hard, spidery thing I’d glimpsed before scuttled out of the shadows. And there were more behind it. Lots more. Unlike the GETs, these were solid monsters you could see, each as big as an armchair, carried on spidery, stick-like legs. Dark blue hands, tons of them and all shapes and sizes, stuck out from the lumpy bodies, clutching and questing. And wherever an arm didn’t grow, a tusk-crammed mouth opened instead . . . Sinister Whisper One came back for a parting shot. “We’re obliged to you, Mr President,” it rasped. “Your signature makes everything nice and legal.”

  “You tricked me into signing it!” Terrified now, I stared down at the paper I’d signed. “What is this thing, anyway?”

  “Just a little permission slip in case the galactic cops come sniffing around.” There was no mistaking the whisper’s smugness. “Now the sale is nice and legal, plans for the Ova-Many nursery can continue without delay. Chittersnipes – take the paper . . . and deal with the human thing.”

  Panic rose like seawater about my nervous wreck as the whispers turned to deep, throaty laughter – and the chittersnipes bundled forwards to get me.

  The chittersnipes were moving towards me so fast, I was left with little more than a moment to stuff the piece of paper I’d signed down the back of my trousers in the hope these creatures would never find it – or that if they ate me, maybe they would eat the paper too and erase my terrible mistake.

  That left me with a nanosecond to reflect that I was about to die in a really, really horrible way. There was a soundtrack to these thoughts, but it wasn’t especially banging. It was just me screaming: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

  Until the drum of stamping footsteps cut through the clamour. I looked past the approaching chittersnipes to see . . .

  Kimmy’s yellow metal TAMASSISS – the Transcending All Matter And Sustaining Survival In Space Suit – stomping towards me!

  It’s another illusion, I thought.

  Then a yellow-clad arm snatched me up from the ground like I was no more than a Tim Gooseheart action figure (He walks! He talks! He accidentally betrays the world while pretending to be its president!) and yellow-clad legs whisked me away from the chittering chittersnipes.

  “The emo-shield is breached!” Sinister Whisper Two was crackling with outrage. “Silence them! Silence them!”

  The chittersnipes chased after us through the weird, warping darkness, all teeth, arms and legs and unearthly yowls.

  “Kimmy!” I cried. “You saved me!”

  “Saw the GETs take you on board on the deep-space scanner,” came a deep voice from the suit.

  “You’re not Kimmy!” My relief started turning to despair with spectacular speed. “Who are you?”

  “Later, OK?” came a deep, muffled voice. “OK?”

  I couldn’t put up much argument. And in fact, I didn’t have time to worry about who was saving me, as a speckled yellow light engulfed us both, and we ran STRAIGHT THROUGH a shadowy wall . . .

  And out into space.

  Kimmy said the suit could pass through solid objects, I remembered, and that anything caught up in its energy field would travel with it. Once again I was left gazing at the terrible, pitiless enormity of the universe. Once again I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, couldn’t shout, “YOU CRAZY MANIAC, WHY DID YOU SAVE ME FROM THE CHITTERSNIPES JUST TO KILL ME IN OUTER SPACE?”

  Then I thought – how can we be out in space? I thought the GETs’ spaceship was thousands of miles long?

  As the TAMASSISS powered on through the blackness, I twisted in its grip and suddenly saw that we were headed straight for another ship, hidden behind the first. It had to be the Ova-Many ship.

  It played games with my eyesight, towering, shimmering, barely there one moment and hard as glass the next. What if we didn’t pass through it? What if we slammed right into it and exploded?

  My body yanked up hard on the handbrake of fear.

  The TAMASSISS finally glowed yellow again and we were inside – I could breathe again. The suit allowed us to pass through the hull of the Ova-Many ship, into shadows that were somehow softer, warmer.

  The whispering GETs had said that the Ova-Many were a sister race; did that mean they were just as scary? I didn’t want to find out – I wanted to get out.

  Then a sound started up, or something like a sound. I didn’t really hear it as such. I felt it: a hideous cacophony of shrieks and wails, a billion daggers of noise thrown at my senses to tear them apart.

  “What is it?” I yelled, clutching my ears. “Burglar alarm?”

  “No,” said the TAMASSISS. It was still running with me, and another wall threatened. We glowed golden bright once again, and then . . .

  Through. Our surroundings changed. The light was pink. The space seemed infinite. The stink was dreadful, a stronger version of the alien stink back on Earth.

  And the roaring tidal wave of noise seemed to build, a hundred times louder.

  “This suit now incorporates the special see-anything visor, OK?” The TAMASSISS was still running relentlessly forward. “Share my view. OK!”

  The gold prickles in the energy field around me grew greater. Trying desperately to cling to my reason, my eyes made sense of the scene around me.

  It was as if we were running along a path at the bottom of some vast valley – except instead of steep hills, on either side there were gargantuan aliens: huge, skinny and grey, with oversized heads and faces like plasticine poked about by a bear with a headache. They were wriggling beneath giant blankets . . .

  Like the Big Blanket down at the base, I thought, numbly. The Big Blanket that dropped out of the sky and crushed Luxembourg.

  The whopping great creatures were kicking strange limbs, squashed up beneath their blankets in their own individual metal trays; each construction was angled to the ground like a playground slide. It was hard to make out features, but the colossal pits quivering in each monstrous face looked like mouths. Wide-open, wailing mouths, screaming like . . .

  Like babies, I thought. This place is crammed full of hyper-humongous, Ova-Many BABIES swaddled in giant, huggy-sucky blankets!

  “OMG,” I said, channelling Nanny Helen in my time of crisis. “The nursery those GETs were whispering about . . . it’s meant for these things! No wonder they didn’t want any noise disturbing the Ova-Many babies if they make THIS racket when they wake up!”

  One of the monstrous babies screamed even louder – and a river of yellow filt
h burst from its mouth hole, like a million-dollar, oddly-coloured oil-strike erupting from a well.

  With a thrill of horror, I remembered the Russian village destroyed by the Yellow Downpour. And now I knew it wasn’t space fuel spillage like Elodie had suggested.

  It was projectile alien baby-sick. And I was right in its steaming path.

  “Keep running!” I yelled to the TAMASSISS, but it was no good – we were like tiny bugs in a bath running from the hot tap. Except if this flood touched us, we wouldn’t just be swept down a plughole. We’d disintegrate or burst into flames or . . .

  Suddenly, even as we ran, a red haze enveloped us. The whole spaceship seemed to be shaking. I heard rasping, hissing voices carry angrily over the din – the GETs still in pursuit, or the Ova-Many wanting a piece of us . . . ?

  Then the TAMASSISS and I weren’t there any more. We were back in the centre of the hyper-beam room running out of the black circle and—

  KRANNG! Into the wall.

  The TAMASSISS dropped me and collapsed. I fell with it to the floor – where I showered the tiles with little kisses, so grateful to be back in my own, ordinary world.

  I felt something scratchy around my bum area. With a thrill, I realised it was the paper! I might have been tricked into signing whatever it was, but the GETs didn’t have the evidence! YESSS!

  Then I noticed a body. A big silvery form – someone in a spacesuit. They were lying slumped beside the heavy door, the space helmet removed to reveal the face of—

  “Sergeant Katzburger!” I struggled up and staggered over to check she was OK. Her eyes were closed but she was still breathing.

  Then I realised that Little G and Herbert were nowhere to be seen; Herbert’s bowl stood empty, save for one of Little G’s flip-flops floating in the water. With all I’d been through, I’d forgotten my poor little fish, eaten by the bonkers little alien. Where could they be? Surely they had to be somewhere . . .

  “Sergeant Katzburger is sleeping. OK?” The TAMASSISS had recovered and was standing up, facing me across the room. “Everyone in the world now sleep. Except you.”

  “Huh?” I stared at the blank-faced yellow suit. “What did you say?”

  “The adults finally translated the smell code,” the TAMMASSISS went on its deep, husky voice. “The GET stink-machines have transformed this planet’s atmosphere into lullaby gas. Made all animals go to sleep!”

  I groaned. Our clients require full tranquillity, the GET had said. They must not be disturbed. And then it had triggered the pulse thingy, to set the lullaby going. “Dad! My . . . mum. Everyone! ASLEEP?!”

  “You and me, the only two awake in the whole world.” The suit continued its lament: “The Ova-Many children raised here will be soothed by the lullaby. But no Earth land animal will ever reawaken from its spell . . . spaceboy.”

  I froze. “What did you call me?”

  The TAMASSISS reached up and pulled off its yellow helmet . . .

  To reveal the crazy face of Little G!

  Except Little G was no longer little. He wriggled out of the heavy protective suit, taller than me now. His camouflage jacket was the only thing that fitted him, and his voice had grown bigger to match.

  “Hello,” he said, looking as serious as a big alien with two noses, an ear in the middle of his face, three eyes and a camouflage jacket can get. “I am BIG G, OK? Guess what, spaceboy – it’s us against the aliens!”

  “Big G?” My mind throbbed like it was about to explode. I backed away until I came up against the door. “Us against the aliens? But . . . you ARE alien! And you’ve changed . . .”

  “Different alien,” Big G agreed. “Not like GETs or Ova-Many. Hello.”

  “Don’t just hello me! We’ve got to do something! What if the GETs send their chittersnipes here to get us—?”

  “They will most likely scan planet to find where we are.”

  “And the Ova-Many will be really mad at us!”

  “True. We in massive trouble.”

  “Stop agreeing with me!” I was ready to tear my hair out. “I can’t do anything. Nobody can – they’re all asleep. We’re doomed. The whole planet is doomed!”

  “Don’t say that, spaceboy,” Big G chided.

  “You mean . . . there’s hope?”

  “No, it’s just so depressing!” Something of Big G’s old, cheeky self showed in his sudden smile. “Listen. I am on your side. Can Big G hug big invisible aliens? NO WAY!”

  “I guess you did save me back there . . . Thanks.” I shook my head, utterly astounded. “You’re so different now.”

  “I will try to explain.” Big G pressed some buttons on the keypad beside the door, and the door hissed open. “But while we talk, we must send Kimmy, Ray and Elodie out into the airless vacuum of space.”

  “HUH!?”

  “Just like happened to you,” Big G went on quickly. “Hyper-beam will remove effect of stink particles from their bodies. You been breathing the lullaby air for months, just like everyone else, spaceboy. Now you are the only human in the world still awake cos hyper-beam took you apart and put you back together, scrambling the alien code in your blood. OK?”

  As I tried to take this in, I saw base staff sprawled and snoring in the corridor outside. “I’m breathing the air again now. How long before the particles build up again and I DO fall asleep?”

  Big G looked grim as he set off down the corridor. “Don’t know.”

  I followed him, dodging sleeping scientists. “How did you get so . . . well, big, just like that?”

  “Just the way of things for my people. Little G was the child. Now Big G is the grown-up.”

  I scowled. “Because you ate my goldfish?”

  “Did not EAT Herbert.” Big G paused in the corridor, and I looked at him expectantly. “I LINKED to Herbert. He is alive and well, OK? Look, here on the TONGUE!”

  Suddenly a long, rolled-up tongue unwound at speed from Big G’s mouth, like a bright green party blower. But instead of a feather taped to the end, there was . . .

  “Herbert?!” I cried.

  “Greetings, Timothy,” came a small, cheery voice, as the saliva around the goldfish bubbled. “This is all a bit of a surprise, isn’t it?”

  “Stop that!” I told Big G.

  “Not me!” Big G insisted, speaking with his mouth open. “Your fish! He has learned to speak through Big G’s tongue. OK? I knew tongue was ready for the linking because its smell had changed.”

  I had dissolved into a weirded-out bundle of disbelief. “That’s why you kept saying ‘I smell the tongue’?”

  “Yes.” Speaking with his tongue sticking out made Big G sound like a patient at the dentist’s. “Tongue was ripe for the linking.”

  “It’s wondrous!” I saw Herbert was actually attached to Big G’s slobbery tongue. “This linking of our different forms is my destiny. Do you know what the G in Little G stood for, Timothy? GOLDFISH! Yes, this upstanding alien knew, deep down, that one day we would come together. He could sense certain future events – such as the hyper-beam sending you into space. That is why he always called you spaceboy. Now, you must hurry in your task – and I must go and meditate on my ever-growing intelligence. Cheerio!”

  Big G’s tongue rolled up like a roller blind, and he gulped my fish back down. Then he headed back off along the corridor.

  “This is beyond freaky,” I said bitterly, trailing after Big G. “How come the hyper-beam worked for me at all?”

  “It is meant for children,” Big G explained. “Hyper-beam adapted from Little G’s personal travel-system. Big Suits thought Little G was dim, but Little G just a child! Not know so much. That’s why it worked for you but not adults.” He sighed, head drooping. “Tried to tell boss humans. Not OK. Did not know right words.”

  “Um . . . never mind.” I gave him an awkward pat on the arm. “Can you make the beam work for adults, so we can wake up the Suits?”

  “Already does!” Big G
bobbed his head. “Now I’m smart, I fixed it easy – so grown-up G could come and get you! But we are not waking human adults. No way.” He wrinkled his two noses like he’d smelled something bad. “They would not listen to Big G. They would mess things up worse.”

  “You mean things can get more messed up?”

  Big G nodded gravely. “MUST wake Elodie, Ray and Kimmy. They built TAMASSISS suit. They must build it even better – and fast.”

  As we set off at a speedy walk/waddle, the thought struck me – like a hammer behind the ear – that right now, no one in the entire world was doing ANYTHING. Every person and animal on the planet would slowly starve in their sleep. How many homes and restaurants had burned down from cookers left on? What about all the drivers conking out at the wheel? What about the planes in the sky? How many billions of birds and flies had come down like a battering rain on the silent landscape?

  And to think I’d thought that moving into the Rubbish House was the end of the world!

  The Earth I knew now lay at perfect peace, waiting for its new owners to settle in. What fate awaited the creatures in the rivers and oceans? Would they be gulped down when the Ova-Many babies got thirsty? Or would Earth’s waterways become vast alien bathrooms, filling steadily with indescribable wees and poos and sick-up?

  As we reached the door to the Crèche, I looked at Big G and he seemed to know what I was thinking.

  “Little hug now?” he murmured. “Hug, OK?”

  It says something about my craving for comfort that I wrapped my arms around his alien neck and held on tight.

  Then we went inside. Elodie, Kimmy and Ray were snoring softly, sprawled over their desks. I wondered numbly where Dad had fallen asleep – and my unexpected mum too. My instinct was to search them out – but what if they had blanked out on the toilet or something? Or naked in the shower? That would be seriously embarrassing.

  In any case – all that would have to wait. Big G helped me drag Ray, Kimmy and Elodie to the hyper-beam room one by one. Then he set up a scanner so I could keep a filtered-eye on the alien spaceships hovering out past Mars. Were they tracking us down even now – the last two wakeful animals on the planet . . . ?