Chomp'd Read online

  This exciting series is about a boy just like you! What makes Sam just a little bit different sometimes, is that he escapes his mum and baby sister on the sort of escapades you have only dreamt of! Don’t you wish you could escape too at times? Well, when you join Sam on his amazing adventures, you’ll be there right alongside him. What are you waiting for? Join Sam on the adventure of a lifetime! Just make sure that you’re as brave and daring as he is, before you turn the first page …

  Chomp’d

  Published by JoJo Publishing

  ‘Yarra’s Edge’

  2203/80 Lorimer Street

  Docklands VIC 3008

  Australia

  Email: [email protected]

  or visit www.jojopublishing.com

  © 2013 JoJo Publishing

  This edition published 2014

  Text Copyright © Susan Berran 2013

  Illustrations Copyright © Susan Berran 2013

  www.susanberran.com

  No part of this printed or video publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Berran, Susan, 1962-

  Chomp’d / author and illustrator Susan Berran.

  ISBN: 9780987607676 (eBook)

  For primary school age.

  A823.4

  Design by Madacin Creative

  Edited by Riima Daher

  Digital edition distributed by

  Port Campbell Press

  www.portcampbellpress.com.au

  Conversion by Warren Broom

  This was going to be the best holiday ever! I’d been saving-up my for ages. Getting stuck with the smelliest, crappiest jobs. Like cleaning the thick, muddy sludge and yellowing from the roof gutters, shovelling the mountains of dog crap from all around the yard, scraping away the green mouldy build-up of food scraps on top of the compost pile and mixing it all in together. Even emptying little miss nappy bucket. Yep … the absolutely, positively, crappiest jobs ever invented by parents.

  But it was all going to be worth it. Anything to get out of this ‘wart on a Pig’s butt’ town called Agnath. Even if it was only going to be for the shortest amount of time, it was going to be better than nothing at all.

  Of course, I needed to make sure that I had plenty of money to spend on lollies and junk and stuff. So for the last six months or so, I’d been conning Mum out of pocket money twice a week. Firstly Sunday night just before bed, when she was running around like a mental chook, getting school uniforms and work clothes and stuff ready for the week, I’d quietly mention that I was Just grabbing my pocket money out of the ‘change tin’ because you’re so busy and I don’t want to disturb you.

  Then, about Thursday, or Friday, when she was really busy with the usual mountain of paperwork from school and work, or trying to figure out all the bills, I’d zip in quick and ask for my pocket money again. Mum’s so busy trying to concentrate on her counting that she just holds up some cash in the air for me without saying a word. A couple of times I even managed to convince her that she definitely had not paid me the week before either. So I got TWO lots of money, plus Sunday’s ‘change tin’, which made it three for the week.

  Anyway, I wanted to collect every single cent possible. Whatever it took, I was desperate. I mean Agnath isn’t that bad really … OOOH BULLCRAP! It’s the BUTT-CRACK of the universe … the S-BEND in the Earth’s toilet … the snotty green booger of the country. Mum loves it … of course she does. She reckons it’s "quaint, charming" and has a certain air about it Yeah, the trouble is that 'air' is from all the stupid cows and sheep dumping their disgustingly sloppy dung absolutely everywhere and when they’re not pooping all over the place, they’re farting all of the time. The whole town smells like my feet, after they’ve soaked in sweaty sandshoes without any socks on, after I’ve been running a marathon on the hottest day ever, in the middle of summer. You know how your feet sweat so much that the skin goes all white and wrinkly. Talk about stink! PeeeYewww!

  You know what really peeves me off though? If you live in the city, there’s a law that when you take your dog, or cat, or ferret, or any animal for a walk and it ‘dumps a load’, then you have to pick up the poop, chuck it into a bag and take it away.

  It’s totally gross!

  You put your hand into a plastic bag, so it’s like a glove, then pick up the fresh, warm poop… with your hand! THEN hold the poop up and pull the plastic bag back over it so that it’s then inside the bag, tie it up and carry it with you until you find a bin. So then you’re walking down the street and everyone can see you’re carrying a bag of dog poop. Or if you don’t want anyone to see that you have a bag of dog poop, you put it in your pocket. Eeeeeewww!

  But anyway … so then, why isn’t it the same in the countryside? Why don’t the farmers have to go and pick up the cow and sheep poop and take it away when the animals dump their load everywhere? IT’S DISGUSTING! You can actually see the ‘poop stink’ cloud floating around in the air because it’s so thick and disgustingly gross.

  There you are, innocently taking a nice little drive in the picturesque countryside, getting all that great fresh air that your mum keeps waffling on and on about. Then it hits you! Like a fresh bag of snot hits a swinging baseball bat. The smelly brick wall, the strong solid stench of animal poop completely drenches you. It’s everywhere, creeping up your nostrils and crawling across your tongue … yep, you can definitely taste it as well. And for the three and a half seconds that you’re passing through Agnath, you could easily fill up a couple of barf bags.

  And the locals wonder why no-one ever stops in. “Oh look kids here’s a quaint little town store. Let’s stop in for a milkshake and a bite to eat … sniff sniff … eewwwww!!”

  VRRROOMMM… and off they go at the speed of light, disappearing through a massive cloud of dust.

  Obviously the day we moved to Agnath, the wind was blowing in another direction so Mum and Dad didn’t notice it. I could smell it though! But no-one ever listens to me! And you didn’t have to look very hard to see that this was no ‘quaint’ little town either. But of course we still moved here. I reckon Mum and Dad must’ve been totally blind and … and …

  … Mum and Dad must’ve been totally blind AND anosmic!

  Maybe they couldn’t smell it because they’d already had their nostrils totally burnt out by the smell of little Miss ‘Bugle-Butt’ Melly .

  But yep, we still moved into our tiny little crap shack! Which was like a stale loaf of bread … REALLY crumby. And the rest of town isn’t much better either. When Mum and Dad first said there was a general store and a pub in Agnath, I thought, ‘oh thank you, at least there’s a real town hiding somewhere around here’. But I was sooooo wrong. There wasn’t some grand, huge mall hidden just over the next hill, not some large shopping centre a few kilometres away, not even a small shop down the road. No, no. They looked like they were the most ANCIENT two buildings in the southern hemisphere. Possibly even the entire world. They had to be kidding. But they weren’t. Unfortunately the store and pub were it: the whole town! Nothing more, nil, nada, nought, zip, ZERO, ZILCH!

  So, of course when I first saw it I just figured the outside of the shop was so incredibly crappy, because the owner was so incredibly cheap and only wanted to spend money on the inside of his shop. Yeah that had to be it. He probably just didn’t want to waste his money on the outside, so that he could spend every cent on all the best ‘modern stuff’ on the inside of the shop.

  I was betting that just on the other side of that worn, rotting, scraped and scrat
ched ugly door, there was a shiny new counter that ran all the way around the wall. Lollies - every colour of the rainbow - flowing from a giant tap in the centre of the store. Barrels of every flavour ever made of chewing gum and fountains of rich, yummy chocolate, squirting into the air and flowing into tall cups for kids to drink … for FREE!

  AND I WAS RIGHT! Nah, just kidding. I’ve obviously seen a certain film way too many times.

  He didn’t care about the outside, or the inside. The outside had its peeling paint, cracked windows and termite-infested posts that seemed to say, ‘WORLD’S CRAPPIEST SHOP HERE – COME ON IN’. But inside … well, inside seemed to say ‘LUXURY COCKROACH AND BLOWFLY ACCOMMODATION AVAILABLE. ENQUIRE WITHIN.’

  I was just hoping for a nice cold ice-cream on our first day in Agnath.

  It was a stinking hot day and the air-conditioner wasn’t working, of course. So when Dad pulled up out the front of the store we all leapt straight out of the car and slammed the doors behind us.

  SLAM! CRACK … CRASH!

  A rust-eaten, weathered length of gutter from the store’s verandah-roof, directly above me, suddenly flashed past my eyes and slid down my arm. I just about peed myself on the spot. The jagged edge of the gutter scraped a four-centimetre path, straight down the length of my arm, shaving off every single little hair. It looked like someone had tried to MOW my arm. I staggered and fell backwards, throwing out both arms to grab at one of the four verandah posts and save myself from slamming into the ground. But it was like grabbing a snotty tissue. Either that, or I was suddenly Superman. The post just disintegrated in my hand until there was hardly anything left of it. I opened my hand to let the dust and splinters of wood fall to the ground and blow away in the town’s stinky breeze. I looked up to see that where I’d grabbed at the post, there was now only about a toothpick-worth of wood left holding it up.

  Oops!

  Well it wasn’t my fault.

  At the same time, Dad stepped up onto the weathered, crappy, old wooden verandah, but just as he reached out to push open the shop door … CRACK, CRASH! His foot smashed straight through one of the rotten floorboards, throwing up a huge cloud of dirt and dust from below. He just about tore his leg to shreds going through the stupid thing.

  THUD! And his foot slammed through the gaping hole. He fell forward, sending his face straight into the middle of the thick dust cloud… COUGH , COUGH , COUGH , SPLUTTER , SPLUTTER … Dad’s whole head completely disappeared, as he hacked and coughed, and choked on the thousand-year-old dirt that had been released from under the verandah. A split second later, his face reappeared through the other side of the cloud and continued falling forward, fast, coming to a dead halt on the only solid thing in his way; the store door. His face smashed into that door like a wrecking-ball smashing into a marshmallow… SMACK! BOING!

  Instantly, a whole heap of swear-words came flying out of Dad’s mouth at the top of his lungs … Mum, straight away, turned to cup her hands over little Miss ‘pain-in-the-butt’s ears, but twisted on her ankle and accidentally shoved her fingers right up Mel’s nose instead …

  ##*#!! Mel yelled in her squeaky little voice. Wow … that shut everyone up! Mum then spent the next hour whinging at Dad that “Melly’s language was one of the reasons that we left the city.” Rant, rant, blah, blah, blah, blah …

  What I want to know is … how come if I swear, I get into trouble? Melly swears and Dad gets into trouble? Not fair. That sucks!

  Anyway, as Dad started bleeding and moaning, the store door groaned and slowly crept its way open. Dad stood there with one leg down the hole and both eyes still spinning, in different directions, with squiggly lines of bright red blood, winding their way down his leg like a roadmap. He had the most awesomely massive, purpley, blueish lump coming up right SMACK in the middle of his forehead like an enormous third eye. Cool!

  Inside the store it was dull and quiet with the smell of mildew and mould hanging over it. The windows were so grotty that there was barely any light able to come through them at all. I scanned the store, starting to wonder if it really was open for business, or whether the sign was still just hanging there from a hundred and fifty years ago. Cobwebs hung all about the room, like delicate silk chandeliers, heavy with dust and the sucked-out hollow corpses of moths and blowflies, decorating them like disgusting Christmas ornaments. On the few shelves that were still unbroken, stood cans of food with really faded, worn and tatty labels in some weird foreign language. So I kinda figured that if we went by the faded pictures on the cans, then it seemed that the shop probably had plenty of ‘Camel Stomach Casserole’ and ‘Goat Buttocks Soup’ and a few tins of ‘Fish-Eye Chocolate Pudding’.

  Dad was just about to order some fish and chips for lunch … until he saw the dead rat frozen in the brick of yellowy fat in the deep fry basket . . . and I could swear I saw it blink. Freaky!

  That’s when Mum suddenly piped up and told the shop guy that “We’re just looking” and “a pub meal with meat and veggies was what we really needed.”

  Yeah … that was until she saw the pub!

  Man, I thought our place was a crap shack, but this place made our place look like the Queen’s palace. WOW! It was like someone had actually taken the world’s largest port-a-loo, shook it like a milkshake and dropped it into the middle of a dry, dead paddock and then shoved a sign on it saying … ‘PUB’.

  The owners were even admitting how crappy it was! They’d whacked this great big sign right in the front window that said: ‘TOILET INSIDE - CLEAN’ and they were absolutely right. It did look like the inside of a toilet that needed cleaning. Yep, the pub was definitely the worlds largest port-a-loo.

  It didn’t matter how many times or how hard I pinched myself, I wasn’t dreaming. We’d definitely moved from the city to Agnath; from the gazillions of bright city lights, to the blue bug-ZAPPER lights.

  ZZAPP . . . ZZAPP! We’ve got them hanging all over the place, like GIANT, blue Christmas lights, because the mozzies around here are the size of chooks … and that’s inside the house! Yep, from awesome skateboard parks to dirt piles, from wicked water slides to cow pat slides, from concerts in the park to karaoke in the paddock. Agnath SUCKED!

  Of course Mum reckoned I just needed to settle in, get to know some kids and explore the countryside. FINE MUM! Hmmmmm, should I explore the dirt paddock covered in cow poop, or the dirt paddock covered in sheep poop? Orrr, maybe I should check out the dead grass hill with just one live tree, or the live grass hill with one dead tree. No. No, I think I’ll explore the rock-covered hill, because it has THREE trees on it and that would be waayyy more exciting.

  And get to know some of the local kids …

  let’s see. There’s RATTY HARRY, his hair is this yucky grey colour and sticks up like bits of tangled barbed wire. It looks like someone has taken a few dead rats and beat the living snot out of them and then glued them all over his head. Then there’s TOFFEE THOMAS, the sookiest and most spoilt kid around. He bullies the smaller kids and then sooks when they tell on him. Mum reckons bullies and sooks have been running in his family for generations anyway.

  The other couple of kids that actually live around here don’t talk much, they just GRUNT. Unless you want to talk about cows or sheep, then they won’t shut up. All they ever seem to do is go cow racing, or horse shearing, or sheep tackling. They’re totally WEIRD.

  And just as my brain was beginning to go mouldy with boredom and turn into a sludge pit of useless information - like the correct shade of yellowy-green for healthy cow pee and the correct shape and amount of moisture in sheep poop for really shiny wool - Jared and his family moved in up the road.

  Jared was forced to move all the way out to Agnath, because his mum was all gooey and crazy about the countryside as well!

  What is it with parents … are they all NUTS? YES! Or, are they just secretly trying to totally bore us to death? YES!

  At least Agnath was almost bearable after Jared arrived.

  Jared and me did just
about everything together. His family didn’t go to too many places, or on any sort of good holidays, so when Mum said we were heading to the coast, up near the top of Australia for a holiday, I decided to ask her if maybe Jared could come with us. It took a fair bit of sucking up and I had to promise that we’d help out with Little Miss ‘dung-daks’ Melly, but I finally got Mum to say it was ok. Wicked! At least I wouldn’t have to put up with Miss Pussy-poopy-Pants, Smelly-Melly all on my own.

  WE COULDN’T WAIT! City, sand, surfing and swimming. Cairns was definitely going to be the most AWESOME wicked holiday EVER! We knew it’d be pretty hot up there, because it’s really close to the equator, but me and Jared just kinda figured that meant we’d get in heaps more surfing and swimming and stuff.

  Soon as we knew we were going, from then on, the days seemed to drag by PAINFULLY. Every minute seemed like an hour, every day seemed like a week. Time was going slower than a DEAD SLOTH on a backwards treadmill. It was taking forever as we counted down the days until it was finally time to rinse the red dust out of our lungs and get out of this flea-infested, butt-scratching, dung-smelling town.

  Me and Jared had never been on an aeroplane before. It was sooo AWESOME. On take-off, I felt like a raw egg being fired from a giant slingshot. We figured that’s what it must feel like for astronauts every time they take-off for outer space. The massively loud roar of the engines started up and earth-shattering vibrations made the whole aircraft tremble and shake… almost like the plane itself was really nervous. Then the vibrations got stronger and stronger with every second as if the plane was about to shake apart into a zillion teensy weensy pieces. The feeling of being held back by some invisible force holding tighter and tighter until … WHOOSH! The plane was suddenly being flung into the wild blue yonder at SUPERSONIC SPEED. It was climbing so steeply, that we were sure we’d just pass right through the clouds, past the sky and shoot off into outer space to float around in orbit forever … or, until we ran out of air and our heads EXPLODED!!.