The Nit Picker

Special thanks to Colin Brake,

GUNGE agent extraordinaire.

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Gunk Aliens Series!

Copyright

About the Publisher

“Right, this is it,” announced Jack Brady in an excited whisper. His hand was trembling slightly as he reached out towards the new invention sitting on the workbench. In his hand he held the final component – the tiny data chip on to which he had loaded the voice command program. Using tweezers, Jack carefully slipped the memory card into position and then he closed the cover.

“Oscar, it’s ready!” he announced.

Slipping his magnifying goggles from his face, Jack glanced over at his best friend Oscar, who was lounging on a beanbag and staring into space.

“Oscar!”

As if moving through treacle, Oscar slowly turned his head to look at Jack with half-asleep eyes. “Yeah?”

Jack peered at Oscar curiously. What was wrong with him? Jack was a thinker, a genius inventor who was always developing great new toys to play with, and Oscar, his best friend, was the man of action – Jack’s first and most loyal crash-test dummy. Usually Oscar couldn’t wait to have a go with whatever new invention Jack had come up with, but today he just didn’t seem interested. It was like he was ill or something.

“It’s a voice-recognition remote-control chopper,” said Jack. “Don’t you want to see what it can do?”

Oscar just shrugged. “Yeah, whatever. Maybe after school.”

Jack sighed and looked over at his dog, Snivel. “Can you believe this, Snivel?”

Snivel shook his head. “No, but it is nearly time for you to go to school,” he replied.

Snivel was not an ordinary dog. For a start he had three eyes.

“You need to keep that third eye of yours closed,” Jack reminded him.

Snivel nodded and his face creased up with the effort, but finally he managed to close his third eye which was in the middle of his forehead. CLUNK! He fell over – the level of concentration causing him to lose his balance. Snivel was a robot dog. In fact, he was a Snot-Bot. Powered by alien technology that used human snot as an energy source, Snivel’s function was to assist Jack in locating and capturing aliens. Jack had been given Snivel by a secret organisation called GUNGE – the General Under-Committee for the Neutralisation of Gruesome Extraterrestrials – and together they had captured five aliens over the last few months.

Jack blew his nose, then checked his tissue and tossed it over to his unusual dog. “There you go,” he said. “I’ve got a bit of a cold again so you’re in luck. Plenty of extra treats for you!”

Gratefully Snivel sucked up the snot and immediately bounced back on to his feet. Jack picked up the now totally dry tissue and put it back in his pocket. That snack would keep Snivel’s batteries powered for the rest of the day. But he didn’t think he’d ever get used to the way the little robot dog hoovered up his snot …

“You coming?” he said to Oscar as he headed for the door of their tree house. But the only reply he received was another shrug of the shoulders. He stared at Oscar who eventually let out a long, deep sigh. He rose wearily to his feet and followed Jack slowly down the ladder.

The tree house which the boys shared was actually a large garden shed that Oscar’s dad had won in a newspaper competition. The boys had houses that backed on to each other, and the large tree at the end of Oscar’s garden was the perfect place for a tree house – so Oscar’s dad had hired a crane to locate the shed safely in its branches.

Jack had been so keen to complete his latest invention that he had called Oscar over to the tree house early, before school, but now he was beginning to wonder why he had bothered. Oscar just didn’t seem himself recently. As they walked to school, in unusual silence, Jack applied his genius brain to the problem. What’s wrong with Oscar?

It didn’t take Jack long to come up with an answer. It was obvious really. Oscar was clearly missing the excitement of their work with GUNGE fighting against the GUNK Aliens.

It had all started with a bin at the local park. Except it wasn’t a bin, of course, it was really a pan-dimensional secret base from which the mysterious GUNGE agent named Bob had given instructions to Jack, Oscar and their friend Ruby. The base was bigger on the inside and able to move around to different hidden locations. The problem was that Bob had turned out to be a traitor and he had now stolen the base and moved it. The new Bob (who seemed to be a woman this time) had contacted the kids and given them a new mission. They had to locate the base – which was where the aliens they had caught were being held – before any other members of the GUNK Alien alliance could find and rescue the captured aliens. Back in the summer holidays they had successfully managed to find it once, hidden in an off-shore wind farm, but before they could secure it, Bad Bob had managed to move the base again, leaving them back at square one. Since then there had been no contact from New Bob, and no sign of any alien activity. It had all gone very quiet. No wonder Oscar was a bit fed up.