The Dog’s Dinner. Jonny Moon

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       CHAPTER ONE

      Jack Brady was hungry.

      Actually he was more than hungry – he was very hungry. Very, very hungry indeed. Hungry enough that he might even have said he was starving, only his mum had once shown him some people in Africa on the news who really didn’t have anything to eat, and had explained to him exactly what starving meant. So now he tried not to use the word ‘starving’ if he could help it.

      But he was very hungry.

      Jack was on his way home from school. Not for the first time, he hadn’t managed to eat any of his school dinner. He didn’t dare tell his mum. He knew she paid good money for him to have a hot meal at lunchtime – she told him often enough – but the food was just too disgusting. And Jack knew a lot about disgusting things. He was, after all, an agent of GUNGE, the ultra-secret organisation that protected the whole planet from the threat of hordes of horrendous aliens.

      Jack – and his friends Oscar and Ruby – had already had two close encounters with extraterrestrials working for GUNK – the Galactic Union of Nasty Killer Aliens. With the help of Snivel (a robot dog who doubled as an alien trap and had an extra eye due to a design mistake) and Bob, their unseen contact at GUNGE, they had outwitted and defeated the Squillibloat and the Burrapong and now Jack was awaiting his next mission briefing. What he really wanted right now, however, was a burger and fries. Or a slice of pizza. Or anything at all that he could eat!

      “Hey, Jack!” said a familiar voice suddenly, dragging Jack’s thoughts away from food. It was Bob! Jack looked around him, but there was no sign of the GUNGE agent. Previously Bob had spoken to Jack from a rubbish bin and a postbox but the street that Jack was walking along had neither. Jack didn’t know how Bob did it, but somehow the GUNGE controller had the ability to hide his base inside tiny spaces. Jack assumed it was some kind of alien technology that GUNGE had managed to get their hands on. The question was: where was Bob today?

      Jack looked around again. He was on the parade of shops between school and home. There was a small supermarket, a newsagent, a florist’s shop and a bank. Where could Bob be?

      “Over here” said Bob more urgently. “The cash point”

      Jack hurried over to the hole-in-the-wall cash point at the front of the bank. Luckily there weren’t many people about.

      “Is that you, Bob?” he whispered.

      “Of course it is,” said the voice of Bob from within the cash point machine.

      Jack stepped closer to the machine and put his hands over the keypad as if he was about to tap in his secret code, just like he’d seen Mum do loads of times.

      “I guess you want us to go after alien number three,” said Jack.

      “Absolutely,” replied Bob in a serious tone, “and there’s not a moment to be lost. We must get the rest of the Blower”.

      The Blower was a sort of intergalactic phone that the aliens needed – if they got hold of it, it would allow them to summon their armies to come and steal all the human race’s snot.

      For the aliens of the GUNK alliance, snot was the key to everything – the energy source they needed to power all of their technology. There were four alien races in the Galactic Union of Nasty Killer Aliens, a union forged with one purpose only: to seek out new sources of that most precious resource – snot.

      GUNK had dispatched scout ships to every corner of the known universe. Every ship carried a representative from each of the four races.

      And each individual alien carried one part of the Blower. The four alien races really didn’t trust each other so this was the only way to secure the union.

      Not long ago, one of the alien scout ships had discovered Earth, where they found the human race to be a natural source of the snot they craved.

      Luckily, the ship had malfunctioned and crashed, separating the four aliens and, of course, their four separate parts of the Blower.

      Jack and his friends had captured two of the aliens and delivered them and their parts of the Blower to Bob already.

      “But you’ve got half the Blower now,” Jack reminded Bob, “surely the other two can’t work on their own?”

      “It’s not as simple as that” Bob explained. “If the Blower parts aren’t linked on a regular basis each can issue a distress signal. That signal isn’t as powerful as the one that the whole Blower can send but it would be strong enough to reach the GUNK home planets. The only way to keep the existence of Planet Earth a secret is to capture all four parts of the Blower”.

      “All right,” said Jack. “So who are we after now?”

      “The СКАЧАТЬ