CHAPTER ONE
KABOOM!
No, that wasn’t an explosion. Sorry to get your hopes up. An explosion would have been a smashing way to open the book, but that’s not what’s happening. It was the sound of a thought arriving in the brain of Sam Saunders with such force it was almost loud enough for the people around him to hear it, too.
The thought that KABOOMED into his head as he darted across the school playing field was this:
Exercise is excellent.
Now don’t get me wrong—Sam isn’t one of those weirdos who loves going to the gym and running on treadmills until they throw up all over themselves. The sort of exercise Sam loves is the running-around-with-friends sort. The wind-in-your-face, isn’t-it-great-to-be-alive type of activity.
And it’s not like he’s forcing exercise down anyone’s throat. He isn’t wearing a T-shirt that says how excellent exercise is or anything. He’s just thinking it inside his own head, and there’s nothing wrong with that, even if he is thinking it really quite loudly indeed.
Behind him, one of his best friends, Emmie, hurried to keep up. She also enjoyed running around but not enough to make a KABOOM! noise inside her mind.
Much farther behind Emmie was Sam’s other best friend, Arty. From the way he was sweating and panting and dragging his clumping great feet across the grass, it was plain for all to see that physical effort was not really Arty’s cup of tea. He did not think exercise was excellent. He thought it was soul crushing.
“I’m … going … to die.” Arty wheezed.
Emmie glanced over her shoulder. Arty’s face was red and puffed up, like the wrong end of a baboon, so Emmie offered him some words of encouragement.
“Oh, stop it, you’re not going to die.”
“Almost there, Arty,” called Sam. “You can do it!”
Up ahead, across the playing field, he could see a group of kids gathering beside … someone else. The sun in his eyes made it impossible to figure out who it was.
Sam and Emmie slowed to a jog so as not to leave Arty trailing too far behind. They’re nice like that. And people say youngsters have no consideration these days.
“It’s not fair,” Arty gasped. “It’s bad enough we have to do PE in school, now I’m doing sports club during the holidays.”
Sports club was Arty’s idea of a living nightmare. It was supposedly started to give the young people of Sitting Duck a fun place to go during the holidays, but Arty reckoned the real reason it was started was to keep them out of trouble. Either that, or the whole thing had been devised as a very elaborate form of torture just for him.
“You’ll have a great time!” said Sam.
“I’ll have a heart attack,” Arty grumbled.
Emmie squinted into the sun as she ran. “Is that Coach Mackenzie?”
“Oh no,” Arty groaned. “He made me run until I was sick!”
“How long did that take?” Emmie asked.
“About a minute and a half,” Arty wheezed.
Sam shrugged. “He was okay. All those laps he made us do came in handy when we had to run away from the undead. If it wasn’t for him, we might have been zombie chow.”
“I’d rather be zombie chow than be running laps,” Arty said. “Please don’t let it be him.”
“I don’t think it is,” said Sam. They were getting closer now and the sun was dipping behind a cloud. “Not unless he’s a lot thinner.”
“And become a woman,” added Emmie.
“I wouldn’t put anything past that guy,” Arty muttered.
He stopped running. His body gave him no choice. He hobbled onward, Sam and Emmie slowing down to walk beside him.
“We still going to the Town Hall after this?” Arty asked.
“The Town Hall was blown to smithereens by an alien death ray,” Emmie pointed out. “Or did you forget?”
Arty sighed. It was tremendously painful and he made a mental note not to do it again. “They’re rebuilding,” he said. “And they’re announcing the candidates running for mayor today.”
“Why would anyone want to be mayor after what happened to the last one?” Emmie wondered. “Mayor Sozzle was zapped into millions of atoms.”
Arty cleared his throat and nodded in Sam’s direction. Emmie quickly realized what he was getting at.
“But I … um … I’m sure if your dad wins then he won’t be zapped to atoms,” she said to Sam. “I meant the other candidates.”
Sam shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about it. The aliens aren’t coming back here in a hurry.”
“Exactly! Anyway, it’s going to be sooooo boring,” Emmie complained. “A bunch of people just standing around talking rubbish about how much better they’ll be for Sitting Duck than the rest. How dull can you get?”
“You don’t have to come,” Sam told her.
“Are you kidding?” cried Emmie. “It’s that or I have to go back home and watch Great Aunt Doris chew off her toenails. I wouldn’t miss this Town Hall thing for the world.”
“Ooh, hello! New people!” beamed the definitely-not-Coach-Mackenzie person. She was a young woman with short blond hair and a smile that could crack walnuts across a crowded room.
Actually, I’ve got no idea what I mean by that. I was trying to say her smile was very nice. I have no clue how walnuts got involved.
Her eyes sparkled like fizzy lemonade, only blue and round and less runny. She wore gray shorts that showed off her legs, like shorts tend to do, and a white T-shirt with the word COACH written across the front.
“You’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen,” blurted Arty. Around him, the dozen or so other kids snickered behind their hands. Arty felt his face turn a worrying shade of red. “Er … by which I mean ‘hello,’” he said.
He held out a shaking hand. The coach flashed him a walnut-cracker and shook it. “Pleased to meet you,” she said, and Arty knew in that moment he’d never wash that hand again.
Emmie sneered and turned to Sam. “Can you believe the way he’s drooling over her?” she asked, but Sam was staring past her, his head cocked to one side, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
Were he a cartoon, Sam’s eyes would have been the shape of love-hearts, and he’d almost certainly have been floating several inches above the ground. Not being a cartoon, though, he merely stood there with a soppy expression on his face and dribbled very slightly down his chin.
Emmie cast her gaze across the rest of the group. Most of them were boys, and most of them were staring at the coach. Even Brendan Jenkins was staring, and he was blind!
Okay, he wasn’t strictly speaking blind, but he did have a dog (who will not be appearing in this book. Sorry, pet fans!).
“Welcome to sports club at Hetchley’s Park, everyone,” the coach smiled. “My name is Coach Priscilla, but you can call me Priscilla. Or Coach. Or Coach Priscilla. It’s entirely up to you, really. Whatever you feel comfortable with.”
Priscilla gazed around at the faces of the children watching her. “I mean, obviously Coach isn’t my actual name, that would be crazy.…” She laughed sharply, making everyone jump. “Just my little joke,” she said, cranking up her magical smile so far that somewhere in the world a unicorn spontaneously popped into existence. “Who’d like to have some fun?”
The hands of every boy in the immediate vicinity shot up.
“Great! Then let’s start with jumping jacks!”
A chorus of disappointed groans went around the group. Because no one likes jumping jacks, do they? Not even Sam, who thinks that exercise is excellent, remember?
“I love jumping jacks!” cried Jesse, one of the bigger boys gathered near the back of the group. “I love them with all my heart!”
Arty stared at his older brother in horror as Jesse launched into a frenzied fit of arm-flapping. Arty suspected his newfound enthusiasm for jumping jacks had more than a little to do with the coach. Of the two siblings, Arty was definitely the brainy one. Mind you, that’s not saying much. Brendan Jenkins’s dog (which, I remind you, will not be appearing in this story at any point) was more intelligent than Jesse.
In fact, on a good day there were probably certain types of grass with more smarts than Arty’s big brother, but what Jesse lacked in intellect he made up for in his ability to punch people hard in the face.
“That’s the spirit,” Priscilla cheered.
Priscilla Character Profile
Name: Priscilla
Job: Coach
Appearance: Aw, just lovely.
Likes: People shouting about how good Sitting Duck is, jumping jacks, freeze tag, kindness.
Dislikes: People not listening to a word she says, laziness, nasty people.
Emmie nudged Sam, snapping him out of his trance. “She’s nothing like Coach Mackenzie, is she? Jesse would never do those lame exercises for him.”
Around them everyone started flapping their arms as they launched into halfhearted jumping jacks. Sam and Emmie sprang into action, immediately competing with each other to see who could do the most. Arty let out a groan and then he did his best to join in, and that’s what counts.
“Excellent! All in unison—your town would be proud,” the coach gushed. “Now let’s do some motivational chanting! Repeat after me, ‘Sitting Duck is good.’”
The kids looked around at one another. A few of them murmured the words, but then tailed off into embarrassed silence.
“You can do better than that,” Priscilla said. “Come on, Sitting Duck is good. Sitting Duck is good!”
There was something about the panicky desperation in Priscilla’s voice that made Sam want to help her. Even though it was really weird, he drew in a deep breath, opened his mouth, and then chanted at the top of his voice.
“Sitting Duck is good! Sitting Duck is good!”
Emmie rolled her eyes, but joined in anyway, because it’s important to support your friends, even when they’re humiliating themselves. Arty would have liked to join in, but he was too focused on trying not to be sick over his own shoes.
In no time, the whole group had begun to chant along. “Sitting Duck is good. Sitting Duck is good.”
Priscilla clapped her hands in excitement. “Yes! Wonderful! You’re doing so well,” she cried. “This will be terrific practice.”
“For what?” asked Emmie.
Priscilla’s smile froze on her face. “Just … in general,” she said. She quickly brightened again. “Now, let’s play freeze tag!”
“What’s that?” Jesse asked.
“It’s really easy,” Priscilla said. “One person is ‘it.’ When they tag someone, that person then has to stay perfectly still for the rest of the game.”
Arty waved his hands. “Ooh! Ooh! Tag me! Tag me first!”
Across the field, somewhere in the distance, the tinkling of an ice cream van’s jingle came floating in on the breeze. Suddenly, Priscilla’s smile was nudged out of Sam’s thoughts by the image of a massive vanilla cone with strawberry sauce.
As the coach tried explaining the rules of freeze tag to Jesse for a second and then third and fourth time, Sam gestured to Emmie and Arty to follow him. Side by side they sneaked off across the field in search of ice cream.
“Well, she seemed nice,” said Arty when they were safely out of earshot.
“Bit weird,” said Emmie. “I mean, what was all that ‘Sitting Duck is good’ stuff about?”
Sam shrugged. “Just building town pride, I suppose.”
“Hmm, maybe,” said Emmie, rubbing her chin like someone just realizing they’d lost their beard. “But, then again, maybe not.”
Fun Holiday Games
Bored during the holidays? Why not try one or more of the fun-filled games they play in Sitting Duck? Don’t worry if you don’t know the rules—make them up. It might be fun! Although it probably won’t be.
• Touch-face
• King Neptune’s Bees
• Who’s Stick Is This?
• Duck, Duck, Moose!
• Tag
Text copyright © 2014 by Hothouse Fiction Ltd.
Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Jamie Littler.
