‘Tell me then,’ said Alice.
But Hamish didn’t need to. Alice was about to see it for herself.
‘Oh . . . my . . . gosh!’ said Alice, her eyes for just a moment as huge and round as monster-truck wheels.
It was true. Hamish had been right.
All over Starkley, plant shoots no bigger and wider than a ruler had started to appear from the ground, stiff and emerald green.
There was a shoot poking over the top of a bin. There were shoots in Madame Cous Cous’s gutters. There were shoots coming out of the drains. There were some shoots on the grass, and a single sturdy shoot edging over the top of old Mr Neate’s chimney.
‘All the seeds we missed,’ said Alice, in awe, stepping backwards slightly.
‘The GravityBurps pulled them up,’ Hamish said. ‘They’ve helped grow them!’
This is precisely what Hamish had been worrying about. Once, in the school library, he’d read something about how seeds grow differently in space.
Why?
Gravity.
Plant roots grow in the direction of gravity. But maybe the Superiors were using gravity to stretch the plants up quicker – to pull them up like socks – to get them to grow much faster than normal!
Hamish and Alice shot into the air for a second, then landed back where they’d started. Their shoes smacked hard on the concrete.
All over town, dinner plates had lifted off tables and smashed back down again. Hats had flown off coat racks and landed on babies’ heads.
‘Another one!’ yelled Alice. This one was stronger still, as once more they flew up into the air and slapped back down.
‘Look!’ yelled Hamish, as another short, sharp sent them skywards again.
Alice saw it too. Every time there was a short GravityBurp, the shoots got slightly taller.
It made perfect sense. These Burps were shorter for a reason.
You know how if you get your sleeve stuck in a door, you might pull at it and nothing happens? What do you do next? You don’t just keep pulling. You tug at it. You pull quickly.
‘Quick,’ said Alice, grabbing Hamish before the next sharp gravity tug.
They started to run, but another quick meant the only place they were going was up.
‘LOOK!’ said Hamish, landing and pointing at the bin. An immense shoot was now vibrating, shaking, pulsating . . . It swayed back and forth and it had grown before their very eyes.
Now it was nearly a metre tall.
‘Please say it’s just a big leek!’ said Alice, who looked so scared that she was in danger of having a big leak herself.
But this was no mere vegetable. If it had been, then Starkley would be about to win so many regional Grow-a-Big-Leek competitions that it would put Manjit Singhdaliwal’s high-jump medal to shame. And what kind of an invasion plan would that be for the Superiors to hatch? What war has ever been won by planting oversize veg in your enemy’s garden?
No – Hamish knew there must be more to it than that.
Then . . .
POP!
‘What the—’ started Alice, but now she was drowned out by another POP!
POP!
POPPOP!
POPPOPPOPPOPPOP!
The tips of the leeks were exploding like party poppers, sending sharp slivers of green streaming into the air like ribbons. They flipped and turned in the air, landing on rooftops and getting caught up in the huge net above.
POP!
Hamish looked again at the leek in the bin.
But here’s the thing, – and please do not be absolutely, totally, utterly PETRIFIED of this – but what he did not expect . . .
Was for the leek to be looking straight back at him!
‘It looks like a massive Venus flytrap!’ yelled Alice, backing away.
But these were even worse.
These were Venus spytraps! Tall and terrifying and created by the Superiors to fight against Belasko agents!
‘Run, Hamish!’ cried Alice.
But Hamish’s feet were stuck to the ground. He couldn’t move. He stared at the abominable, toothy plant, as he studied the small wisps of black smoke snortling out of its nostrils and disappearing into the air. Now it didn’t sound like a mewing kitten: it sounded like a panting horse. Even though it was quite clearly disgusting, Hamish found something about this enormous flytrap strangely beautiful.
‘Maybe they’re friendly?’ said Hamish, forgetting for a moment everything his dad had told him about the Superiors, about all his past adventures, about how he should trust his own instincts. ‘Maybe it’s peckish?’
‘Hamish!’ cried Alice. ‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s come such a long way,’ said Hamish, his eyes wide, feeling in his pockets for a Chomp, his feet slowly starting to move towards the snarling green beast. ‘I think it’s just hungry.’
‘Oh, it’s hungry all right,’ said Alice, pointing at the foamy slather that was now pouring from the plant’s mouth . . . because that was a mouth, wasn’t it? When she was younger, her cousin had given her a tiny Venus flytrap, and she’d watched it on the kitchen table as it opened its whole head to see what it could catch. These nasty nibblers moved slowly, deliberately, enticing their prey in. They were awful, evil, murderous things! No good could come from feeding one!
‘Hamish, it’s trying to tempt you closer!’ she said, as another POP! sounded from a rooftop somewhere behind her and another ghastly, grizzly plant burst to life. ‘Your dad was right! This is an invasion!’
Somewhere, someone opened a door, took one look at what was outside, screamed and slammed it shut again.
Alice looked across town. There were dozens of these dreadful things shaking their heads and opening their eyes and testing out their gnarly gnashers.
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK went one, straining at its roots as it snapped its teeth at the world, sniffing around, trying to find its lunch. CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!
Hamish was close now. He’d found a Chomp. He unwrapped it and held it out, with great uncertainty.
The plant seemed almost to smile at Hamish.
He could see all its teeth. He could count them. So many. So white, and so shiny, and so sharp in that smile that seemed to keep broadening . . .
And broadening. Widening.
Revealing more teeth.
And then more!
Clack Attack!
Hamish’s hand was trembling as he held up his Chomp.
The great green monster-plant was staring at him, curiously, moving its head side to side as if weighing him up. Black smoke wisped thick from its nostrils as it panted and growled. Its stalk seemed to crack and harden in front of him, turning from soft light green to something more like scales.
‘HAMISH!’ cried Alice again, who’d been backing away, but keeping an eye on her friend. What had come over him? Had he been hypnotised? Or was he just trying to see good where there definitely wasn’t any?
All these thoughts raced through Alice’s mind as she stepped backwards. So much so that she didn’t realise she had just come extremely close to a spytrap in a drain!
‘HAAAAAMIIIIIIISSSH!’ she yelled, rising into the air.
But this time she wasn’t rising because of a GravityBurp. The spytrap had CLAMPED onto her backpack with a CHAMP and was now shaking her around like a ragdoll.
Up she went!
Down she went!
Side to side she went, her boots clipping the branches of trees as she flew about.
And still Hamish stared at the beast in the bin.
‘I AM NOT ENJOYING THIS ONE BIT!’ yelled Alice, trying to kick at the spytrap behind her. ‘HAMISH! SNAP OUT OF IT!’
But Hamish didn’t respond, innocently holding out his Chomp, moving closer and closer to the spytrap. It bowed its head, willing him, enticing him.
Thinking fast, Alice held both arms out straight above her head, and the next time the putrid plant yanked her angrily upwards she slid out of her backpack straps and landed hard on the ground. The spytrap
started to gobble and chunk her backpack down, hungrily ripping it to shreds as she stumbled into the road and very nearly into the path of . . .
VROOOOOOOOOM!
‘Get in!’ yelled Buster, skidding to a halt in front of them in his mum’s souped-up ice-cream van – the official vehicle of the PDF. As soon as he’d noticed these crazed carnivores, he’d known he’d better take a quick sweep around town in case anyone was in trouble. He beeped his horn and kept beeping it.
The noise seemed to break whatever spell Hamish was under.
Now he saw the spytrap for what it was.
ENORMOUS.
SWEATY.
FEARSOME.
TOOTHSOME.
And
HUNGRY!
Hamish yelped and tossed his chocolate bar into the air. The oversized olive ogre swooped its neck and snapped the Chomp to pieces with its teeth as it fell.
It lunged for Hamish, SNAP-SNAP-SNAPPING its massive mouth mere centimetres from his face. Hamish panicked, jogging backwards. Buster had already turned the van around and was keeping an eye on his friend in the rear-view mirror. Alice had scrambled up through the window normally used for selling choc ices and kicked the back door open, now grabbing Hamish by his bag and dragging him on board.
‘GO!’ she shouted, and Buster needed no more encouragement than that. He jammed down the accelerator, the wheels spun on the concrete and off they sped!
‘What has HAPPENED to Starkley?’ said Hamish, red and sweaty and pressed up against the window as the van roared off. ‘Why are these things here?’
Hamish knew he had to get to the bottom of this. If the Superiors were planning on sucking everybody straight into space, why even bother sending these awful attack-plants?
Everywhere he looked, more had stretched out from their seeds. POP! went one in a garden, and soil and gunk spattered everywhere. All these things needed was somewhere to grow. Somewhere their awful sharp roots could latch onto, like staples in paper. In shops. On concrete. Outside houses. Hamish caught sight of Frau Fussbundler standing on her front lawn, using a rolling pin to thoroughly whack a spytrap in the head. It had grown out of her trouser turn-up! There’s a turn-up for the book!
As they sped further down the road, Buster wrenched a sharp left down Alumroot Alley.
Up ahead, Grenville Bile was trapped! Cornered by a couple of spytraps who seemed to be fighting over who’d get first bite of his tasty-looking, cheeseburger-filled belly!
Thank goodness they’d managed to get rid of all those other seeds after they’d rained down. Can you imagine what they’d be up against if they hadn’t sucked them all up and dumped them in the sea?
‘Alice!’ yelled Hamish, as a thought struck him. ‘What’s in the freezer?’
Alice knew exactly what he was thinking. It was a classic Hamish Ellerby move! She slid open the freezer and began flinging ice creams out of the window.
Grenville immediately picked one up and shouted, ‘Thanks for the ice cream, but I think it might be more important to deal with these monsters!’
‘They’re not for you, Grenville!’ yelled Hamish.
The spytraps began to sniff and salivate, with great gobby foam spilling from their slathery mouths. A flume of spittle arced through the air as one of them stretched towards the ice creams on the ground. It landed on poor Grenville, thoroughly sliming him. He tried to run for the van, but could only manage a slow, gooey jog before clambering in.
Buster hit reverse, spinning the van around and heading in a different direction. The late afternoon sun spread long shadows all over the streets – awful, snapping shadows. Some of the spytraps had grown giant leaves that now rose upwards and made them seem bigger and more monstrous still.
‘What do we do, Hamish?’ said Buster, skidding round another corner and narrowly avoiding the SNAP-SNAP-SNAP of another spytrap.
Hamish stared out of the window.
Old Mr Neate was wrestling with a spytrap.
A spytrap outside Slackjaw’s Motors was tossing Vespas around.
Spytraps on roofs howled at the skies.
Buster had a point.
What do they do?
What should they do?
What could they do?
The Sweet Shop Siege
Hamish had a plan.
‘Buster – we need Madame Cous Cous!’ he shouted, and Grenville, sliding the slippery, slurpery slime from his face, frowned.
‘What’s she going to do?’ he said. ‘Tell them off?’
But Alice understood. In their two close encounters with spytraps so far, there had been one thing that had helped.
‘Hamish is right!’ she said. ‘Get us to International World of Treats!’
Buster span the van around and headed back towards the high street. He turned on his siren and flashing lights because this really felt like an emergency but also he just loved doing that.
They could see even more spytraps now, stretching and straining to munch on whatever they could – trees, bushes, benches, Belgians. One spytrap had found a plank of old wood, and swallowed it whole, then burped and spat out a thousand tiny splinters.
And, to make things worse, even more of the thick green leeks had burst through soil or concrete, preparing to pop. A fresh wave! A second generation!
CLACK CLACK CLACK! went the spytraps as the ice-cream van rocketed past, each of them straining to reach into the road to stop them.
‘Here we are!’ yelled Buster, and they could see Madame Cous Cous outside her shop, wielding her big stick and trying to fend off a couple of snappity spytraps in the road.
‘GET LOST!’ she was yelling. Behind her, in the window of her shop, a dozen scared kids pressed their faces up against the glass. There was Venk and Elliot and Clover. There was Lola and Darcy, the twins from down the road. There was Finch Swift, Abigail Mess and Puny Curdle!
Buster skidded the van to a halt and Alice threw a couple of Vanilla Icebergs and a Peanut Mivvi into the road. The spytraps were distracted and angrily fought over them, while Hamish and the others jumped out and ran into the shop.
Madame Cous Cous followed, slamming the door shut behind them. She leaned against it, huffing and puffing, then realised something.
‘There are only supposed to be ONE-AND-A-QUARTER SCHOOLCHILDREN in here at a time!’ she bellowed.
‘Madame Cous Cous,’ said Hamish, politely, but meaning business. ‘The only way to distract a violent beast is through food.’
‘How DARE you!’ said Grenville Bile, before realising Hamish didn’t mean him.
‘I gave one a Chomp and it went crazy. We rescued Grenville with a Lemonade Lick-me-up. We only managed to get in here thanks to a Peanut Mivvi and a couple of Vanilla Icebergs!’
‘I think we need to feed them sweets,’ said Hamish. ‘Maybe they’ll get tired and fall asleep.’
‘Yes,’ said Grenville, sarcastically. ‘I find lots of sugar makes me sleepy too.’
‘Okay,’ said Hamish, as outside another spytrap POPPED into life and the shelves in the shop rattled and clattered. ‘Maybe not sleepy, but distracted. And if they’re distracted we can work out what to do. Maybe we need to . . .’
He couldn’t believe what he was about to say.
‘Maybe we need to evacuate Starkley. Abandon it.’
Alice looked shocked.
‘WHAT? Leave Starkley?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to say . . . that we should fight? You’re Hamish Ellerby!’
Hamish’s face fell.
‘That woman Goonhilda Swag wants to shut the whole town down anyway,’ he said, sadly, as outside more POP!s thundered and rolled. ‘She wants to take it off the maps and Mum seems to think she’ll do it. Maybe we need to cut our losses.’
‘Just because your dad’s not here doesn’t mean you can’t do this, Hamish,’ Alice said, gently. Hamish took a deep breath, how did Alice always know what he was thinking? ‘Look at what we’ve already done, you and me and the rest of the PDF,’ Alice went on. ‘We don?
??t need grown-ups to help us save the world! And we don’t need their permission to either!’
While they’d been talking, they hadn’t noticed Madame Cous Cous walking over to a doorway near the back of the room.
It was marked
‘But we don’t know how to get rid of these things,’ said Hamish, shaking his head and looking at his shoes. ‘They’re everywhere.’
‘Hamish,’ said Madame Cous Cous, thoughtfully. ‘Did your dad ever mention “THE BUTTON”?’
‘Yes,’ said Hamish, frowning in confusion. How did she know about that?
‘What exactly did he say?’ Madame Cous Cous asked.
‘He said something about talking to—’ Alice began, stopping abruptly when Hamish elbowed her in the ribs. They were supposed to keep his dad’s mission a secret.
‘Has he gone to talk to Belasko?’ suggested Madame Cous Cous.
The PDF all stared at the little old lady. What did she know about Belasko? As far as most people were concerned, Belasko was just a company that made all sorts of things. Matches. Bricks. Books that can identify the reader by touch alone.
‘So the fight is on,’ she said, mysteriously, and Hamish noticed something about her had changed. She seemed taller somehow. More in control. Was there more to Madame Cous Cous than met the eye?
She straightened herself up, tossed her stick on the floor and pushed the door marked
It slid to one side, revealing another door behind it, marked
She pushed open that door too and it also slid to one side, revealing yet another door marked