The Verruca Bazooka by Jonny Moon Page A

interesting.
    “What’s the plan then?” asked Jack, sitting down in the other beanbag.
    “Mum got me this,” said Oscar, holding up the skateboard. “But it doesn’t go fast enough.” He sat up with a wild look in his eyes. “So Ithought…you could maybe fit it with some rockets. Or, you know, something…”
    Jack stared. “You want me to put rockets on your skateboard? Why? So you can do an ollie into orbit?”
    Oscar stopped to consider this – for half a second. “Could you?” he asked.
    “No,” said Jack firmly. “Hurtling at high speed into brick walls might be your idea of fun, but I prefer to spend my time working on my gadgets.”
    He got up and went over to his workbench, where a number of projects were underway. He picked up a dog-shaped rubber suit which had twin silver tubes running down its back. “See this,” he announced proudly, “it’s a scuba kit for a dog. Now man’s best frienddoesn’t have to sit by and wait when you go for a scuba dive.”
    “You don’t have a dog,” Oscar pointed out.
    “Well, no,” agreed Jack, “but I’d like to.”
    “And you don’t scuba dive,” continued Oscar.
    “Er…no. But—”
    “You’d like to?”
    Jack shot Oscar a dirty look. “Not really,” he confessed. “It looks a bit dangerous.”
    Oscar sighed again. If it wasn’t a bit dangerous then what was the point?
    “What else have you got then? There must be something we can have fun with.”
    “There’s the heli-frisbee,” offered Jack. “I was thinking that it’s really annoying that I can’t ever throw a Frisbee properly so I designed a Frisbee that even I can use.”
    Jack showed his friend his prototype: it was a normal Frisbee, but attached to themiddle of the disc was a pair of model helicopter blades.
    “It’s remote-controlled,” he explained.
    Oscar jumped to his feet. “Brilliant. Let’s go to the park. You can fix up my skateboard and then we can test drive your remote-control Frisbee. OK?”
    Jack nodded and then looked concerned as Oscar started to climb out of the window.
    “Where are you going?” he asked.
    Oscar turned and grinned. “You’re not the only one who can come up with brilliant ideas you know. I thought we should have an emergency exit, so I fixed up this zip line.” Now Oscar could see there was a cable running from the tree house to Oscar’s house. Jack watched in fascination as Oscar clipped a karabiner to the line, grabbed the roperunning through it and slid off down the zip wire.
    Jack looked at where the zip wire was connected and made a rapid mental calculation. He started to call out a warning but it was too late.
    SPLAT! Oscar slammed into the side of his house and dropped into the muddy flowerbed below.
    “Just a few technical hitches to iron out” Oscar croaked weakly, before falling back into the squelchy mud.

CHAPTER TWO
    Jack made some final adjustments to the makeshift ramp and stood up, brushing his hands together with satisfaction. He’d found a couple of bits of wood and some bricks in a skip on the way and had put them together to form a jump at the bottom of the largest slope in the park.
    Jack looked up at the top of the hill where Oscar was waiting. Oscar waved his hand, enthusiastically.
    This isn’t going to go well, thought Jack.
    He had insisted that Oscar put on some protective gear. Oscar, of course, didn’t have any. So Jack had produced some of his own design that he had been working on. Adapted from swimming floats, the knee and elbow protectors were inflatable and as Oscar stood at the top of the hill, wearing the gear and the foam-lined strap-on yellow hard-hat that Jack had also made, he looked like a badly-dressed superhero from an old TV programme.
    At Oscar’s feet was the now-rocket-powered skateboard. Before they had left home Jack had found two old lemonade bottles in one of his ‘Useful Materials’ boxes and these were now firmly taped to the sides of the skateboard. Fixed to the centre of