Einstein's Underpants--And How They Saved the World (15 page)

Jamie nodded.

Then Alexander reached into his school bag and dragged out Einstein's underpants. He thought about wearing them over his trousers, Superman-style. But then he thought that if ever he needed their help it was now, and so on his head they went, pulled firmly down over his ears. Sometimes to fight hard you have to think hard.

Melvyn didn't even smile when he saw the pants.

‘You ready?' asked Alexander.

‘As ready as I'll ever be.'

‘Great. Let's do this. And keep it quiet.'

The steps of the spiral staircase were worn and slippery and narrow, and Alexander stumbled three times on the way down. There was a thick rope along the wall to act as a handrail, but it sagged when you grabbed it, and was hardly any use at all. But soon he saw below them another low arch, where the stairway opened into the crypt. An eerie green light seeped from the opening, like pus from a septic toe.

There was just enough room at the bottom of the stairs to stand beside the arch without being seen. Sensing Melvyn close behind him, Alexander peeked out. It took a few seconds for him to get used to the strange light, and a few more for him to even begin to understand what he was looking at.

The crypt was about a quarter of the size of the church above it, and it was full of old church junk: splintered pews and headless statues and sections of broken stained glass. But there were things in that crypt that did
not belong in a church. There were what looked like complicated electronic devices, but their forms were curiously curved and organic, and they pulsed as though alive. Coiling snakes of plasma tubing ran between rippling screens, and those screens showed kaleidoscopic images and shapes, beautiful and terrible to behold. Alexander was most disturbed, however, by the walls. The stone and brick had been coated with a layer of gently pulsing green slime, like the secretions of some grotesque mollusc.

Nothing moved in the crypt, and yet everything seemed alive.

And then Alexander's horrified and fascinated eye reached the far end of the crypt. A row of greenish shapes, fat and rubbery, glistening like the insides of some dead beast, were arranged against the wall.

Alexander stepped out into the crypt. Without looking, he knew that Melvyn was still with him: neither of them wanted to be alone in this place.

As he approached the shapes, he was gripped by a horror such as he had never known before. They were semi-transparent, and Alexander thought he could see through them to the wall behind, which seemed to be hung with paintings: religious scenes, perhaps. The Good Shepherd; a Nativity; a Crucifixion.

And then Alexander realized that these things were not
behind
the shapes. They were
inside
them. He moved so that his face was close enough to the glistening, waxy surface for him to be able to feel the brush of his own breath as it bounced back; close enough to see his own reflection in the surface, strangely superimposed onto what lay beneath.

And then the shape within the shape moved. A shudder. And then the shape within the shape opened an eye.

Alexander recoiled, as if slapped.

‘Felicity!'

CHAPTER 35

THE FIREFIGHT

IT WAS HER
. Felicity. It was her face
inside that thing
. Not just her face, but all of her. And that eye was now staring at him. He fought the urge to flee, screaming, from this hellish place.

He heard Melvyn's tremulous voice beside him. Until he spoke he'd forgotten he was there.

‘It's them,' Melvyn murmured. ‘All of them. What's happened?'

Alexander glanced at him. Melvyn's face was ghastly in the green light. Then he looked at Felicity again. Both her eyes were now open and staring at him. And her face showed so much pain, so much horror. Her mouth moved in a silent scream.

And then he saw that her eyes were not looking
at
him, but
beyond
him.

Her scream was not a scream of pain, but of warning.

And at the same moment he became aware of a noise: the sickening slow squelch of something soft moving over the dry ground. And now he saw something else besides his face reflected in the surface of the green pods.

Behind him.

Something looming and monstrous.

Something, in its slow, slippery movement, unfathomably sly.

‘
Melvyn
,' he hissed.

Melvyn looked at him, his face still drained of life, of light, of colour, of hope.

‘Your gun. Get it ready. On three, we turn and shoot.'

Melvyn's eyes opened wide, and he nodded, although it may have been nothing more than a tremble.

Alexander mouthed the words
one
and
two
, and then screamed, ‘
THREE!
'

Melvyn joined in on the scream, simultaneously a sudden release of pent-up tension, an animal yell, a savage war cry.

The two boys leaped in the air as they spun, their fingers already beginning to squeeze the triggers of their modified ray guns.

It was lucky that they were. The sight that confronted them was so appalling, so astonishing, so hideous that they might never have found the triggers if their fingers were not already in place.

It was, of course, the Borgia assault team. Eight undulating, throbbing sacs of viscous malevolence, oozing their way towards them.

VEEEEUUUUMMMMSPPPPPUTTTTTZZZZZZZXITTTTTTOUEEEEOUE EEOUEEE!

The wall of noise from the ray guns was deafening in the confined space of the crypt.

The Borgia warriors froze, then seemed to stagger back for a moment. A tiny fragment of hope cut through the horror in Alexander's soul. The guns were working,
they were really working. Uncle Otto wasn't just sane, but, like Einstein, he was a genius!

Alexander fired three more blasts –
UMMMMSPPPPPUTTT UMMMMSPPPPPUTTT UMMMMSPPPPPUTTT
– going for the centre and either flank of the assault.

But something had changed. The shots did not have the same staggering impact. The creatures were not thrown back, not so much as a centimetre. They came on.

The guns were useless. Alexander hurled the worthless piece of junk at the nearest creature. It was no more effective as a projectile than it had been as a ray gun. The hard plastic was absorbed into the soft body, sucked and gnawed, and then spat out.

This was it. The last of the FREAKs were about to end up inside these monsters.

And then, from behind the line of giant slugs there came a roar.

‘SUPERSTRONG!'

‘No, Jamie, stop!' yelled Alexander. ‘Run for it! Run for your life!'

But Jamie was already throwing himself forward, and he could no more stop than an army of rampaging medieval knights could pause in the middle of a charge and decide to have a cup of tea.

The Borgia had time only to shuffle half round to meet the new challenge. Jamie reached the enemy line, drew back his meaty fist and punched the first soft body with all his might. His fist plunged through the flesh of the Borgia like a hammer hitting a plate of jelly.

For a second Jamie's face registered satisfaction – joy, almost. Then it changed. He tried to withdraw his arm – which had disappeared up to the elbow – like a bear taking its paw out of a honey pot. But it wouldn't move. He tried to push against the Borgia with his other hand. But that also sank into the jelly. Jamie was stuck. A second Borgia now slithered over and began to engulf the parts of Jamie not already swallowed by the first.

‘Hurts,' Jamie cried out. ‘Hurts a lot.'

Alexander tried to reach him, his soul aching with the knowledge that he'd let his friends down – not just Jamie, but all of them; the knowledge that he had led them to their doom.

And then he felt nothing, as a blast of gas from the Borgia leader hit him in the face and knocked him clean out.

BORGIA REPORT, SENT IN TRANSIT FROM EARTH TO THE BORGIA FLAGSHIP:

Muffins, celery, newt poo, newt poo, athletes' foot powder, chicken grease, sausage roll, chemical toilet on a badly maintained campsite.

Or: ‘As anticipated, the remaining Earth warriors attempted to free their captured comrades. It was a simple matter to surround them, as their attention was focused on the storage drones. There was one major surprise, which could have resulted in a serious setback. The Earthlings were armed with sonic disruptor weapons of the kind we had not expected in such a backward civilization.
The modulator was set very close to the frequency most fatal to the Borgia. Had the oscillations been increased by two microns, then our mission would have ended there, with our protoplasm splattered over the walls. However, although the frequency was unpleasant, it was not disabling, and we were able to resume our attack. To give the Earth warriors credit, one of them did manage to launch a surprise rear assault, but that was soon repulsed and the last of the Earthlings made captive. We return immediately.

‘I, Under-general Tuuuuurdo Slm, sign out with fidelity.

‘Death to all enemies and potential light suppers of the Borgia!'

Now probably isn't the best time to tell you about the progress of Asteroid c4098. But it's still coming, still on its way, still ready to wipe out millions of years of evolution.

The only question is: will life be annihilated by the asteroid or by the Borgia?

CHAPTER 36

AMONG THE BORGIA

ALEXANDER EMERGED BACK
into consciousness at the precise moment he was being expelled by the Borgia storage drone. He felt like toothpaste being squeezed out of the tube. He landed on the floor with a thump, and squirmed. He was covered in a thick grey-green slime, which looked and smelled like the combination of duck poo, mud, dead frogspawn and decaying weed you'd find at the bottom of a neglected village pond.

He tried to stand, but his legs were jelly. He strained to see, but his eyes were dim. He could hear a sound like gas bubbling through water, and a complicated series of smells filled his nose, one after the other, some foul, some sickly sweet.

He could not see because his eyes were full of slime. He wiped them as best he could, but his vision was still blurred, and he could only make out hulking and distorted shapes and a luminous throbbing green coming from the darkness around him.

If he could not see or walk, he could still think. Was this another of his dreams? Would he soon wake to the sound of his duck clock quacking? Or would his mother touch him on the arm and put a nice cup of tea on his bedside table?

But this was no dream. He remembered Felicity's horrified face. He remembered Jamie and Melvyn, succumbing to the brute force of the
. . .
the
things
. The things his uncle had warned him about.

So everything Otto had said was true. For the first time ever, Alexander wished his uncle really had been a lunatic.

His mind came back to Felicity's face. Where was she now? Where were Jamie, and Melvyn
. . .
all of them?

He felt sick. He
was
sick. And once he had finished being sick, he wept. The tears washed his eyes clean. He blinked and he saw.

The place was dark, lit only by flickering red lights and that sickly green glow that penetrated Alexander's skull like a migraine. There were intricate banks of equipment, with jagging spikes and jawlike gripping structures. The skeleton of a creature, species unknown, hung from chains. Other bodies, at various stages of decay, dangled from the ceiling and walls, gripped by tentacles that seemed to occupy an intermediate stage of existence somewhere between machine and beast.

Towards one side of the room there was a curious device, about the size of an armchair, with a number of funnel-shaped projections at one end and a metal grille at the other.

But neither the strange mechanical objects nor the mutilated remains in the
room held Alexander's attention. For Alexander was not alone. Now that his eyes had cleared he could see the vile, shuffling forms of the Borgia, who had gathered to observe their captive, their victim, their supper. But even these ogres were dwarfed by the grotesque and monstrous figure before him.

Alexander was in the private torture chamber of Thlugg, and the admiral was there to undertake the interrogation personally.

As terrifying as the other Borgia were, nothing could have prepared Alexander for the horror of being in the presence of the enemy leader (although of course, at this point, he had no inkling that this was what confronted him).

First there was the stench. It was like being trapped inside the decomposing body of a whale found rotting on the beach. The odour was thick enough to coat his tongue with an oily film. The looks went with the
smell: Thlugg's vast, distended body looked like a green, pus-filled bin-liner. The cosmonaut body parts had by now been almost completely digested by the admiral, leaving only a trace on the wattled skin. But Alexander could still just make out the poignant shape of the fingers, the melancholy curve of a buttock, the horrific suggestion of a blind human eye.

Yet it was neither the smell nor the appearance of the giant Borgia that so dismayed Alexander. It was the pervasive sense of evil that emanated from the monster. This was a creature, Alexander sensed, that took immense pleasure not just from defeating its enemies, but from the suffering this caused; a creature that relished mental and physical anguish in the way others might enjoy a good book or a stroll in the park.

And then there were the terrible table manners.

Thlugg was sitting in his dinner. The dinner was in a large metallic bowl the size
of a double bed, and the Borgia was squatting on the top. With dismay Alexander saw that the dinner was moving.

And it was furry.

Oh yes, Admiral Thlugg was squatting in a giant bowl of rabbits, squirrels, puppies and kittens, brought back for him by the assault squad that had captured the FREAKs. They writhed and squirmed, they mewled, they squealed, but they could not escape. They were hoovered up, engulfed, slurped, dissolved. When there was nothing left, Thlugg flopped out of the bowl like a morbidly obese man getting out of a bath.