Alligator Action Read online

  “Lasers!” breathed Danny. “If we hit one of those . . .” He gulped. He had no idea what would happen if they hit a laser beam—but he knew it would be nasty.

  “We won’t hit one,” Josh said. “Not if we follow the cake stains!”

  It seemed Josh was right. A minute later, they were safely by the kitchen door. And that’s when they heard a chime. Two chimes. Three.

  “HOLD YOUR BREATH!” squeaked Josh, remembering Number Five—“After third strike, DO NOT BREATHE until the bird calls.” With half a second to spare, he and Danny dragged in a swift lungful of air and held it, their eyes bulging with anxiety.

  On the fourth strike, there was a loud hiss, and two plumes of purple gas suddenly punched out of the wall on either side of the door. Danny could feel it stinging his eyes. He screwed them shut, desperate to hold onto the safe air in his lungs for as long as possible. The clock chimed on from the other side of the closed kitchen door—five . . . six . . . seven . . . Danny felt as if his lungs were going to burst. Eight . . . nine . . . ten . . . . Josh was twisting around, desperate to see some kind of bird somewhere through the fading purple gas. Eleven . . . twelve . . . thirteen. THIRTEEN? Danny felt his mind flip. Had he lost count? Or was the clock really striking thirteen? Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen . . . . Josh felt faint. He must breathe soon! But no bird had called. And the air might still be poisoned! Eighteen . . . nineteen . . . .

  CUCKOO! CUCKOO! CUCKOO!

  Danny and Josh exploded with exhaled air and pushed through the kitchen door, gasping. On the wall was a cuckoo clock, from which a little wooden bird was calling.

  At last the cuckooing stopped. Josh and Danny stood, panting and shaking, ready for their next instruction.

  “Wash up,” puffed Josh. The washing-up bowl was full of cold water and crockery. Little bits of orangey grease and lumps of unidentifiable food floated across the surface, along with a semi-submerged scrubby sponge thing.

  Danny stepped over and went to pick up the scrubby sponge thing.

  “STOP!” Josh yelled. “USE GLOVES!” Danny paused. He grabbed a pair of limp yellow rubber gloves from the draining board.

  “There’s no telling what Petty put in that washing bowl,” muttered Josh. “Skin-melting acid, I bet. Or a deadly virus!”

  Danny didn’t wash up. He took all the cups and bowls and spoons and forks out of the water. He laid them down in a scummy puddle on the draining board. He looked for something hidden underneath them. “Bingo!” he said, lifting up another key.

  “I’ve seen this before,” said Josh, taking the key as Danny carefully peeled off the gloves. “It’s the key to Petty’s shed . . . and her old laboratory.” He gulped. “The next instruction is ‘Exit back on all fours.’”

  Quickly, they unbolted the back door and crawled across the threshold. Two inches above Josh’s burnt hair, three arrows shot across from one side of the doorway, embedding themselves in the wooden frame. A foul-smelling liquid oozed from the wounds they made in the paintwork. “Poison tipped,” whispered Danny with a gulp.

  It was a relief to be in the back garden. The weeds grew above their heads, so they bashed a path through to the shed without any fear of being seen from nearby houses. The key fit into the padlock on the shed. In a few seconds, they were inside. They passed the neglected old lawnmower, the pointless wheelbarrow, and the never-used rake. They stopped at the hidden door at the back of the shed.

  It felt very odd to go down into Petty’s old underground lab, knowing that she was not in it. It had always smelled pretty weird. But now it also smelled neglected and damp.

  Josh found a switch on the wall just inside the door. He switched it on. Light flooded through the room. It had once been filled with Petty’s stuff, but now it was empty apart from some trestle tables, shelves, and boxes. In a booth in the corner was a very old computer. Petty had new ones at the new lab, and this one now looked ready for the trash heap.

  “Eeerm . . . how long have we been in here?” Josh asked, suddenly sounding panicky.

  “Dunno,” Danny said, staring around at the forlorn ex-lab.

  “Because . . . Number Eight says, “‘One minute from red door.’” And I don’t like the sound of that.”

  Nor did Danny. He checked his watch. “Maybe thirty seconds?” he guessed. “What’s Number Nine?”

  “Working lunch,” whispered Josh, his eyes wide and fearful as he checked his own watch. “Ten seconds to work that out, I think!”

  “There’s no work going on here!” whimpered Danny. “Nothing! Except . . . wait!” He ran toward the little booth with its ancient computer.

  “Danny—we’ve got to get out!” said Josh. He could feel something rumbling under his feet.

  “I think this could be it!” Danny had found a lunchbox by the computer in the booth—which was shaking. Quite a lot.

  “DANNY! COME OUT NOW!” yelled Josh. “Something’s happening! Something BAD!”

  Danny could feel that for himself. The rumbling was getting louder. And there was a hissing and screeching noise joining it. The ground was trembling under his feet.

  “COME ON! RUN!” shrieked Josh, hanging on to the doorway as the whole room began to sway.

  Danny wanted to run. But it wasn’t easy. A huge crack had just opened up across the center of the floor.

  The crack tore itself open right in front of Danny’s eyes. The earth beneath it seemed to dissolve away. A red glow and a gassy smell rose up from it. Then suddenly—flames leapt up! Danny shrieked. Josh bellowed, “JUUUUUMP! Jump NOW! Before it’s TOO LATE!!”

  Danny was on a little shelf of ground with the computer booth just behind him. The shelf was beginning to crumble away. Incredibly, Petty had built some kind of collapsing pit over a gas fire trap! He had to jump now, or there would be nothing left to jump from. Below him, in the widening chasm, there were hissing and grinding and whining noises. Flames were shooting up higher. He shoved the lunchbox down his shirt, coughing as the gas caught in his throat. It was now or never. Danny jumped.

  He leapt across the fire pit, his arms waving frantically through the air. He crashed into the rough edge of the crumbling floor. He would have slipped into the pit if Josh hadn’t grabbed his wrists and pulled him up. “Come on!” screamed Josh. He looked terrified. And he had every reason to be. The whole room was breaking apart. The old corrugated iron ceiling was shaking and buckling. Dirt and grit cascaded down. As Josh and Danny scrambled back up the tunnel toward the shed, there was a huge WHUMP behind them. Glancing back, they saw the roof fall in. Dirt, grit, roots, and old brick tumbled into the flaming pit. Josh and Danny flung themselves through the metal door to the shed, across the wooden floor, and out into the garden. They landed in the tall weeds just as the shed collapsed. It tilted over toward the back and then just fell apart as if it were made of playing cards. The mower and the wheelbarrow stayed put on the floor. The wooden walls and the roof slithered to the ground. Rakes, hoes, and spades tumbled with it. Plastic plant pots bounced across the wreckage.

  Then . . . silence. In the garden, all evidence of what had just happened seemed to evaporate along with a cloud of dust. After a minute, the birds started singing again. Josh and Danny walked carefully across to the shed and peered at the back, where the doorway and the tunnel had once been. Tugging up the collapsed wooden panels, they found the back wall and the red door lying flat. And when they pulled the door up, they found nothing but dirt and grit and rubble beneath it. No sign of any secret passage to an underground lab. Nothing.

  “Petty set it to self-destruct,” marveled Josh. “So if anyone went in for longer than a minute . . . boom! Everything gone.”

  “Not everything,” Danny said. And he pulled a small metal lunchbox out of his shirt. Sitting down in the tall weeds, they carefully opened it. Inside, set tightly into black foam, were twenty-one small plastic spray bottles, each about the size of a cotton reel. There was a label on each. The first label read “SPIDER.” The seventh label read �
��FROG.” The twenty-first label read “ALLIGATOR.”

  “Wow!” Danny stared at Josh in amazement. “It’s the complete set of Petty’s S.W.I.T.C.H. sprays! Every single one!”

  “And you think she left them for us?” queried Josh.

  “Well—let’s find out!” Danny said, and he pulled out a slim, silver gadget from the box. There was a label on it that read “PLAY ME.” It was a digital recording device. Danny pressed PLAY, and a familiar voice rang out.

  “Aaahh! If that’s Josh and Danny listening—well done! And if it’s not Josh and Danny, bad luck. This device is set to explode if it picks up traces of DNA from anyone else. So . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . BYEEEEEE.”

  Josh and Danny edged back from the box.

  “But if I’m still talking, it is you, Josh and Danny. Good work, boys! Good work. I hope you didn’t find the self-destruct system in the lab too troublesome. Rest assured that there is nothing left down there now except rubble and mud. No possible way for Victor Crouch to find any trace of my S.W.I.T.C.H. project. Now—in the box is a complete set of all the sprays I have made so far. And if you’ve got them, it must mean that I have gone missing, presumed dead. Yes . . . I’m most likely dead.”

  Josh and Danny grimaced at each other.

  “And oh—what a loss to science!” lamented the voice. “How utterly, utterly terrible! But you—Josh and Danny—you must carry on my work!”

  “Us?” Danny looked appalled. “We’re not genius scientists! We’re eight!”

  “Now don’t start getting all spluttery, Danny,” went on Petty, as if she was right there with them. “And Josh—you will need your sensible head on. Contact the editor of New Scientist magazine and tell him everything! I want the whole world to know what a genius I am. Or was. Oh . . . .” Petty had a little sniff. “What a loss . . . what a terrible loss....”

  There was a click and the recording ended.

  Danny and Josh sat in silence for a few seconds.

  “Do you think she’s really dead?” asked Danny, after a while.

  Josh shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. Someone kidnapped her. And we still have to find her.”

  “But now,” Danny said, a grin spreading across his grimy face, “we’ve got something to help!” He tapped the box of S.W.I.T.C.H. sprays. “We can be anything from a bluebottle to an alligator!”

  “Yes,” Josh said. “And how does that help, exactly?”

  “Erm . . .” Danny said.

  It was one thing to have Petty’s complete set of S.W.I.T.C.H. sprays. It was quite another to know what to do with them.

  They got up and trudged down the garden, to the loose plank in the fence at the far end. They did not plan to retrace their steps through the deadly house. Back in their own garden they headed indoors and hid the lunchbox of S.W.I.T.C.H. sprays under the bunk bed. Mom was appalled when she saw the state of them. And Josh’s singed hair took some explaining. Josh had to say he’d been playing with matches. He lost a week’s worth of allowance.

  After a bath, they really could not think of anything else to do except watch TV in a daze . . . which wasn’t a great idea, because that dreadful Destiny Darcy show was on. “Don’t forget, people!” she was simpering into the camera. “We’re on tour! Coming to a town near you! Come and meet Destiny!”

  Josh and Danny groaned and went to bed.

  Petty Potts sat back in the chair. A young lady was patting something slightly damp on her face. Petty hadn’t a clue what . . . or why . . . or where she was.

  “Hmmmm,” pondered the young lady. “You’re an Extra Fair foundation. Don’t want to make you too orange. It doesn’t look good on camera. Now . . . Mulberry lipstick, I think. Just relax your mouth . . . there! Lovely!”

  Petty stared blearily into the mirror with light bulbs all round it. She was wearing makeup. Makeup! She never wore makeup!

  “Hair looks great!” said the young lady, who wore an apron and a great deal of purple lip gloss. She had many palettes of color spread out on the table under the mirror, along with pots and brushes and pencils.

  Petty squinted at her hair.

  “Here—put your glasses back on,” said the young lady. She handed Petty a pair of unusually clean glasses. Petty put them on and stared into the mirror. Her hair was still gray but no longer straggly and wild. It was neatly trimmed and styled—and she appeared to be wearing a dress.

  “Good grief!” muttered Petty.

  “Well—we all have to make an effort for Destiny Darcy, don’t we?” said the young lady chirpily. “OK—if you can go back to the green room now, I can get on and do KettleMan.”

  “The green room?” queried Petty. She glanced across at the man seated next to her, who had a silver kettle fixed firmly to his head.

  “Yes—where you’ll be waiting,” said the young lady. “You know . . . before you go on?”

  “Go on what?!” demanded Petty.

  “On TV, of course!”

  Danny stared at the little white spray bottle in his hand. There was no doubt about it. The label read “Alligator.” He was one squirt away from turning into one of the world’s most powerful, terrifying reptiles.

  Josh stared at it too. His eyes shone. Danny knew Josh was thinking exactly what he was thinking.

  “Mom and Dad are out,” he said. “Jenny’s upstairs watching that stupid Darcy show in her bedroom. She never comes into the garden anyway. Nobody will ever know.”

  Josh nodded slowly. In the shady bush den, he shivered with excitement. They’d spent most of the morning wondering what to do about Petty and coming up with exactly nothing. There was no way they were going to get the police—or, worse, their parents—to start searching for Petty. Because they knew the very first thing anyone would do would be to break into her house . . . and then they’d probably end up flash-fried or gassed or poisoned by arrows or deadly dishwater. They should be able to come up with a master plan, but so far they hadn’t come up with one.

  And in the meantime . . .

  “Come on!” Danny said. “You know you want to!”

  “OK,” said Josh. “A tiny squirt—so we can S.W.I.T.C.H. for just a few minutes. See what it’s like. We can stay down at the end of the garden where we won’t be seen.”

  Danny lost no time. He squirted Josh first, and then himself. He shoved the bottle quickly back into his jeans pocket before he could S.W.I.T.C.H.

  Josh felt peculiar for just a few seconds, and then—WHOOOMP! All of a sudden, he was flat on his belly, crouching low to the ground. He could feel the weight and strength of his new body. And he could see his broad snout stretching out and tapering to a blunted end with two high nostrils. He gave a hiss of delight. This was the most amazing thing he had ever been. He turned around on his thick, muscular legs, noticing the way the five-clawed toes on his forelegs dug deep into the soil under the bushes. His tail—three feet long—swished around behind him and hit some of the straggly trunks of the rhododendron with a crack. He grinned. He could feel the immense power in his muscles—it tingled along his tail and up the five rows of dark brown, spiny ridges running up his back to his neck.

  Another alligator was grinning back at him. “This is the best ever!” Danny said, his voice coming out as a low grunt.

  “American Alligator!” grunted back Josh, with glee. “Mississippiensis!”

  “You what?” Danny said, leaving his enormous snaggle-toothed jaws open and tilting his heavy head to one side.

  “It’s the Latin name,” Josh said. “For some reason, I remember it. Mississippiensis! I guess they must be found in the Mississippi River.”

  “Look at my tail!” marveled Danny, turning his dark brown, scaly head to stare down the length of his body. “We’re huge! How long, do you reckon?”

  “About ten feet,” guessed Josh. “Alligators can be nearly twice as big this! We’re small fry!”

  “And what do we eat?” asked Danny.

  “Anything we like!” Josh let out a chuckle, wh
ich came out as a series of grunts and hisses.

  “How are we talking?” asked Danny.

  “Not the usual way,” Josh said. “We don’t have any vocal cords. We just use the air in our bodies to sort of grunt and hiss and bellow. But it’s the other ways too—you know, scent, body language, animal telepathy—that kind of thing.”

  “Come on!” hissed Danny. “Let’s take a walk!” He rose up a little on his stumpy legs and walked across the lawn to the jungle gym and back again. His body and tail swung from side to side, low to the ground. “I feel heavy!” he said.

  “You are heavy!” Josh said. “You’re designed to be in water. We must get down to the lake in the park and S.W.I.T.C.H. there. That would be amazing!”

  “I’m hungry,” Danny said. “Really hungry!” He could hear lively yapping. Piddle was scratching at the kitchen door. “Hey—check out my teeth!” He opened his jaws, revealing about eighty sharp teeth.

  “When they fall out, new ones grow in in their place,” Josh said. “Alligators can go through three thousand teeth in a lifetime. Imagine that!”

  There was a sudden rattle down inside the passage—the sound of the kitchen door being opened. Josh and Danny stared at each other, alarmed. They heard the voice of their big sister.

  “Get out, you disgusting little pee bag!” Jenny was shoving their dog outside. “Go and do your business outside! All I want to do is watch Destiny Darcy and you have to come along and pee on my feet!”

  And then Piddle came trotting into the back garden. When he saw Josh and Danny, he froze, and all the hair on his body stood up.

  “Piddle! It’s OK!” hissed Danny. “It’s us!”

  Piddle whimpered and backed away, terrified.

  “Really—it’s just us,” went on Danny, lumbering toward Piddle. “Danny and Josh!”