Newt Nemesis (6 page)

“Bleeuch! Dog breath!” gurgled Danny as he was jogged up and down on his pet's tongue. He wrapped his froggy fingers tightly around the two yellowy-white lower canine teeth that rose up from the front corners of Piddle's mouth like ivory posts. Luckily, they weren't too clean and the sticky pads on his fingers were able to grip onto the gunge. If he held on tightly enough, he might not get swallowed.

“PIDDLE! SPIT ME OUT!” bawled Danny.

Piddle felt some tickly vibrations through the top of his mouth. He coughed and Danny was jerked forward and then backward toward the dark red cavern at the back of Piddle's mouth.

“NOOOOOOO!” shrieked Danny as his hands lost their grip on Piddle's teeth. He pushed hard against Piddle's blunt back molars with his powerful feet and legs and managed to shoot forward again until his head was poking out between Piddle's fangy front canines, the small sharp incisors in between digging into his soft belly.

The outside air rushed against his face, and Danny realized that Piddle was galloping about excitedly, the way he always did when he'd caught something. The ground and the sky and the cabins and the car were all blurring into one another as Danny was swung up and down violently. His legs and feet were still held tight between the slurpy tongue and the hard ridges of skin on the roof of Piddle's mouth. Piddle was sucking a frog!

“PIDDLE!” Danny yelled again. “That is DISGUSTING!”

Mind you, chewing a frog would be even more disgusting. And Piddle did LOVE
chewing
stuff. Danny realized it was quite likely that his eight years on the earth might end in being munched to
death by his own lovable pet terrier.

He dragged in a HUGE breath of air and bellowed, “PIDDLE! PIDDLE! DROP! DROP IT! DROP IT!”

Piddle suddenly stopped leaping about and came to a surprised halt. He wasn't the most obedient dog, but he usually did as he was told by his family . . . eventually. And it really DID sound as if one of them had just told him to DROP IT.

Piddle put his innocent face on and tilted his head in a winning way. Sometimes this won him a few extra seconds of playtime with whatever it was he had got.

“Piiiiiddle!” came the voice again. Confusingly, from INSIDE his head.

Well . . . he
would
put the jumpy green thing down. Like a good dog. Very soon. But first . . . he wanted just a
little
chew.

Danny let out a froggy scream as Piddle sat back on his haunches and released the sucky grip on his back legs, only to flip his tongue sideways and swiftly shove them between a set of powerful top and bottom grinding teeth.

At this point, another jumpy thing suddenly landed with a splat on Piddle's nose and punched him in the eye. He let out an affronted bark, and the two jumpy things spun out from his shaking snout and landed in the grass. Piddle sneezed twice, and when he next looked, to his great disappointment, his funny, jumpy chew toys had vanished.

“Thank you! Thank you SO much!” spluttered Danny. He and Charlie were crouching in the gap under the cabin, out of sight of Piddle. He felt his legs, gingerly, and was relieved to find he still had both—although there was a line of dents across his soft green belly, left by Piddle's incisors. “I was just about to be frog crunch!” he whimpered.

“I know! It would have been soooo icky!” said Charlie.

“Icky? Icky?” squawked Danny.

“We haven't got time to wait here much longer!” hissed Charlie. “Petty's puffing up by the second, remember! We HAVE to get into the cabin and get her EpiPen.”

Danny peered out nervously between the tufts of weed that screened them from the outside world. Piddle was now running away toward the tepee where the show was on. He could make out his mom and dad now too. Dad had called Piddle away and was putting him on the leash.

“OK—it's now or never!” he gulped, and they sprang back out into the hot sun and turned to look up at the window.

“Top window's open,” said Charlie and leapt up to the sill. “I think I can make it. Can you?”

“Yes, of course!” said Danny. He wasn't having a girl showing him up—even if she had just rescued him from the jaws of death.

They both leapt again up to the open top window.

“I can see the EpiPen! I can see it!” said Charlie and hopped straight onto Petty's bedside table.

The pen, containing Petty's medicine in a syringe, was big. It lay next to the lens wipe cloth for her spectacles. Although not very heavy, it was awkward. “How are we going to get it back?” wondered Danny. “It's too long to hold in our mouths. And how are we ever going to inject her?”

Charlie gazed around, and then her eyes fell on something interesting next to the lens wipe. “I think I have an idea,” she said.

Rustle. Rustle-rustle. Click. Rustle . . .

It wasn't the scariest of noises really. And above Petty's whistly breathing, he could hardly hear it. But Josh
was
scared as he perched on Petty's arm. Very scared. Something was coming out of the compost bin . . .

“Ooooh! Hurry up, Danny! Get a move on, Charlie!” wailed Josh. How he wished he'd been S.W.I.T.C.H.ed into a frog. At least he would have had a fighting chance then. A frog could leap away from danger in a heartbeat, but not a slow, lumbering newt.

Newts, he realized glumly, were rubbish.

Rustle. Rustle-rustle. Click . . . click . . .

“Oh, PETTY! Wake UP!” he yelled, but Petty, who was now inflated like a rather unattractive
bouncy castle, wasn't going anywhere. What was even more scary was the thought that at any time, the whistly breathing could just stop altogether. He and Danny had never been that fond of Petty—and often quite angry with her. She had played with their health and safety far too often!

But he realized he would truly miss her if she was no longer messing about in her under-garden lab next door. She was amazing, really. Whacky. Eccentric. Brilliant. Very possibly insane. There would never be another next-door neighbor like her.

Rustle. Scrape. Suddenly the thing came out of the compost bin at a run. It was brown, spiky, with shoe-button eyes, a twitching sharp snout, and a hungry expression. And it was running straight for him.

Josh tried to scuttle around into Petty's armpit, but all he did was fall over, with a damp plop, right in the path of the oncoming beast. Two seconds later, he was in its jaws.

Hedgehogs. Such cute things. He'd always found them SO endearing. This one wasn't
endearing at all. Its teeth were stabbing into his orange belly as his little arms and legs and tail waved frantically in the air. Once again, Josh prepared to exit from the world as a crunchy snack.

But then he felt an odd coolness pass across his back and a chemical smell wafted around him.

A second later, the hedgehog gave an explosive shudder and spat him out in a spray of foam. It gasped and sneezed and snapped, “Newts! Why DO I bother? Yeeeuch!”

Josh rolled over in the grass and gaped up at the predator, which was now wiping furiously at its snout. Foamy, dribbly snot stuff was flying in all directions. Then Josh remembered. “HA! HA!” he chortled. “I squeezed out toxin through my skin! You got a mouthful of yuck! YAY! Newts ROCK!”