Guinea Pigs Online Read online

  By Jennifer Gray and Amanda Swift

  Guinea Pigs Online

  Furry Towers

  Jennifer Gray & Amanda Swift

  Illustrations by Sarah Horne

  New York • London

  New York • London

  © 2013 by Jennifer Gray and Amanda Swift

  Illustrations © 2013 by Sarah Horne

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to [email protected].

  e-ISBN: 978-1-62365-348-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead— events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  For Philippa and Rhea

  J.G.

  For Dan and Tom

  A.S.

  For my brother Oliver, with love

  S.H.

  Contents

  1. The Monster Machine

  2. Blogging On

  3. Ping!

  4. Guinea Pigs United

  5. Digging In

  6. Olaf the Viking

  7. The Battle of the Thicket

  8. All Scooped Up

  9. Baked Beans Bite Back

  10. Shovel Off!

  Be Safe Online!

  About the Authors and Illustrator

  1

  The Monster Machine

  Some days are exciting. Some days are boring. And some days are exciting, boring, funny, scary, tiring, and—if they involve juicy green grass—delicious, especially if you’re a guinea pig. For Fuzzy, Coco, and Eduardo, this day started out boring. Well, it was boring for Coco, because Terry, the techno-whiz-kid from next door, was teaching Fuzzy how to fix the TV remote control. And all Coco wanted to do was talk about the new bow she’d gotten for her hair.

  “First you need to check if the batteries have run out,” instructed Terry.

  “OK,” said Fuzzy.

  “Then you need to check if the signal is broken,” Terry continued.

  “OK,” said Fuzzy.

  “It also helps if it’s the right remote control,” added Coco. “That’s the one for the CD player.”

  “I can make any remote control work anything,” said Terry proudly.

  “Well, excuse me for trying to be helpful,” said Coco, looking out the window. She suddenly flung herself onto the pile of cushions the guinea pigs had used to bounce onto the sofa. Then she raced across the living room carpet, along the landing, wriggled backward down the stairs into the kitchen, scuttled across the floor, and was just about to leap out of the cat flap when it was shoved open from the outside. A red scooter ridden by a handsome silver-and-black guinea pig landed on the doormat, on top of Coco.

  “You could have knocked,” said Coco, picking herself up.

  “Señor-ita,” panted Eduardo. “I—no—time—have—for—the—knocking.” He gasped between each word.

  “Could you breathe or talk, instead of doing both quite badly at the same time,” she chattered impatiently. Eduardo didn’t seem to have noticed her new bow either.

  Coco had a bad habit of sometimes being mean to people she really loved. She was mean to Fuzzy, her hutch-mate, she was mean to Eduardo, whom she secretly liked, and sometimes she was even mean to the Queen, with whom she used to live at Buckingham Palace.

  Eduardo started babbling in Spanish because he didn’t have time to figure out what he wanted to say in English. (Eduardo spoke Spanish because he was from Peru.)

  “Whoa, slow down!” Fuzzy had come down to the kitchen with Terry to find out what was going on. Eduardo repeated what he had just said, this time in English.

  “In the thicket there is a huge monster!” Eduardo lived in a cozy burrow in the thicket at the bottom of Fuzzy and Coco’s garden.

  “It is eating my house!” Eduardo started to say that the monster was yellow and black, but the other guinea pigs didn’t hear because they had dived out of the cat flap almost as fast as Eduardo and his scooter had dived in.

  “That’s not a monster, it’s a digger!” said Fuzzy when the guinea pigs arrived at the thicket. “Haven’t you ever watched the Digger Channel?”

  What Fuzzy hadn’t expected, though, was to see a digger crashing over the flowers and ferns of their beloved thicket. This shouldn’t happen! The thicket was a quiet place. The loudest noise they’d ever heard out there apart from Eduardo singing was a butterfly’s burp.

  Now there came a noise even louder than the digger’s engine: “Right, dude. I’ll make a start tomorrow. I’ll have this place cleared before you can say sausage sandwich.”

  It was a human voice. The guinea pigs looked up. Just above the giant rubber wheels of the digger, in the cab of the monster machine, sat a little round man with red cheeks, shouting into his cellphone:

  “I reckon I could fit half a dozen houses on here.”

  “Half a dozen!” exclaimed Fuzzy. “There’s not even room for ten.”

  Math was not Fuzzy’s strong point.

  “Half a dozen is six,” said Coco kindly, because she was kind most of the time.

  “Even one house is too many,” said Eduardo sadly, scooting up to join them.

  “Too right,” said Fuzzy, stamping his paw.

  “Ow,” said Coco, because he had accidentally stamped on her paw.

  “Sorry! We need to do something about this,” said Fuzzy.

  “We’re too small,” said Eduardo. “Even I, Eduardo Julio Antonio del Monte, freedom fighter from the mighty mountains of Peru, cannot fight the giant metal machine.”

  “Maybe not,” said Fuzzy. “But we can tell others. We can get help.”

  “Leave it to me,” said Coco. “I’ll go next door and have a word with your mom, Terry.” Terry’s mom, Banoffee, lived next door with Terry and her thirteen other kids. Coco and Banoffee were friends. Banoffee was also great at doing Coco’s hair and was bound to notice her new bow. “She can tell your brothers and sisters, and they’ll tell their friends, and they’ll tell their parents, and before long you’ll have reached all the guinea pigs in Strawberry Park.”

  “Good idea—not!” said Terry. He pulled his woolly hat down over his ears. “We could just put something about it on the Internet and reach about six billion guinea pigs instead. That’s it!” he cried. “We can organize a protest. It’ll be mega!”

  Coco glared at him. She wasn’t very keen on computers. She preferred talking.

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Fuzzy, who didn’t want to upset either of them. “Let’s try both!”

  2

  Blogging On

  “We need to start a blog,” said Terry.

  Back at number 7 Middleton Crescent the guinea pigs sat on a purple yoga mat in front of a laptop. The yoga mat belonged to Henrietta, who was Coco’s owner; the laptop belonged to Ben, who was Fuzzy’s owner. Henrietta had bought the yoga mat thinking she would be good at yoga, and Ben had bought the laptop thinking he would
be good at computer games. But usually it was Henrietta who played games on the laptop while Ben lay on the mat waving his legs in the air.

  “What’s a bog?” Coco asked, getting up and practicing her yoga stretches. “I thought it was a toilet?”

  “Not a bog, a blog!” Fuzzy said kindly. Coco really didn’t know much about computers.

  “It’s an online diary,” Terry explained. “You tell guinea pigs what’s really happening in the world so they can get together and help stop bad things. It’s like tweeting,” he added, “but longer.”

  “Tweeting?” Eduardo’s bushy eyebrows knitted together in a frown. “Like my amigos the Peruvian songbirds?” He laughed. “Next, my friend, you will be telling me this computer can fly.”

  Terry and Fuzzy looked at each other.

  “Never mind,” Terry said, tapping away at the keys. “Check this out.” He pointed at the screen:

  “One likes the title,” Coco puffed, forgetting for a moment she wasn’t at Buckingham Palace, where she had learned to say “one” instead of “you” or “I.” “But one doesn’t want any guinea pigs being sick on one’s new bow.” She twiddled it, hoping someone would notice.

  “It’s not that sort of sick,” Fuzzy explained. “It means ‘fantastic’!”

  “Well, why doesn’t it say so then?” Coco grumbled. She got up and tried to stand on one leg like she’d seen Ben do, which is hard if you’re a guinea pig, because you need at least two to balance. “And who’s Tez?”

  “Me!” Terry explained. “It’s kids’ slang: like ‘sick.’” He sniggered. “You need to lighten up, Co.”

  “It’s Coco, actually!” Coco was so upset he’d made her name sound less fancy that she fell over.

  “Wait, I have something even more sicker, Señor Tez!” Eduardo cried. He jumped onto the laptop and clattered up and down the keys; then hopped off with a low bow. “My latest song,” he said modestly. “I just made it up.”

  “OK, now I’ve got one.” Coco picked herself up and nipped onto the keyboard.

  “Let’s try all three,” sighed Fuzzy. He put on his chef’s hat. (Fuzzy liked to cook.) “I’ll rustle up a little something in the kitchen while we wait to see who’s going to join the protest.”

  3

  Ping!

  Ping!

  “That’s one reply.” Coco munched on some broccoli.

  Ping!

  “That’s two.” Eduardo crunched on some carrots.

  Ping!

  “That’s three.” Fuzzy burped through a mouthful of avocado.

  “And that’s a whole lot more!” Terry finished his celery and approached the screen. “I told you it would work.”

  “One’s bogspog was obviously a big hit!” Coco said, taking the credit.

  “Uh-uh,” Eduardo jumped in, “my songblong was an international sensation.”

  “No, bros,” Terry complained. “My blog was totally out there.”

  “You all did very well,” Fuzzy said.

  “I did the best,” Coco insisted.

  “No, señorita,” said Eduardo, “I think you’ll find I did.”

  “No way!” Terry said. “I’m the coolest.”

  Fuzzy sighed.

  “We’ll see about that!” Coco cried.

  “You’re on!” Terry yelled.

  PING!

  “Who’s that from?” Eduardo demanded. “Let’s ask them who they think is the best blonger.”

  The guinea pigs peered at the screen.

  “Hello, little pigs, it’s Renard the guinea pig. I’d like to join your protest. I live in the thicket too and I want to save it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Coco cried. “Last time I got an e-mail from a guinea pig named Renard, he turned out to be the fox!”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Fuzzy said. “Let’s see if we can find out who it really is.”

  “What do you look like?” he typed. He winked at Eduardo. “So we can recognize you and say hello.”

  “Ah, amigo, that is very cunning,” Eduardo said admiringly.

  Another message appeared on the screen.

  “I am orange and have big pointy ears.”

  The guinea pigs looked at one another. They knew a few guinea pigs with orange splotches on their fur but none with big pointy ears.

  “That’s unusual for a guinea pig,” Fuzzy wrote.

  There was a pause.

  “Yes, that is because I am a very rare type of guinea pig.”

  “I bet it’s him,” Coco whispered, although she didn’t need to because whoever it was couldn’t hear her down the computer.

  “What type are you?” Fuzzy wrote.

  “Er . . . the big-eared bushy-tailed variety.”

  “Gotcha!” Fuzzy cried.

  Eduardo fell over laughing. “Caramba, that fox is stupid. Everyone knows guinea pigs don’t have tails!”

  “What if he comes tomorrow, though?” Coco sounded worried. “He’ll eat us all!” Coco had nearly been eaten by the fox on two occasions.

  “I’ll biff him in the snout,” Eduardo boasted.

  “Maybe he’s changed,” Fuzzy suggested. “I mean, the fox lives in the thicket too. Maybe he really wants to help so he can save his home, like Eduardo.”

  The other guinea pigs hadn’t thought of that.

  “Let’s ask him,” Terry said. He got on to the keyboard.

  “Look, pal, we know who you are so stop trying to be clever. Do you want to help us or not? Because if you only want to eat us, then we’ll have to call the whole thing off. And then the builder will move in and you’ll get thrown out on your tail.”

  “Nicely put, Señor Tez,” Eduardo said.

  It took only a few seconds for the reply to come back.

  “OK, you got me. I am the fox, but I promise I won’t eat you. All I want to do is save the thicket! Otherwise I’ll have to live on the railway line and eat nettles.”

  “Should we give him another chance?” Fuzzy wondered.

  “We could do with his help,” Terry said.

  “Poor thing,” Coco sighed, trying to think what the Queen would do. “One hates to think of one’s subjects living on railway lines.” She gave a little royal wave, then frowned. “What’s the matter, Eduardo?”

  Eduardo was staring at them, amazed. “You really trust that sneaky lowlife fox?” He whistled. “Man, you pet cavies are crazy! It’s lucky you have me to look after you at the protest.”

  “We can look after ourselves, thank you very much!” Coco shouted.

  “Sure, señorita.” Eduardo jumped back on the scooter. “But if you don’t mind, I think I’ll go and get my bolas ready just in case.”

  “What are they?”

  “Traditional Peruvian weapons, señorita. Wait and see.”

  Coco sighed. Eduardo could be annoying, but at least the day hadn’t turned out boring after all. And tomorrow promised to be even more exciting!

  4

  Guinea Pigs United

  The next morning Coco woke up early. She was feeling excited. Today was the day of the protest! Fuzzy was still snoozing in his corner of the hutch, so Coco decided to go out to the thicket on her own. She was looking forward to seeing lots of guinea pigs there. On the way out, she looked in the mirror. She pinched the ends of her fur to make it look spikier and maybe even a bit scary. That builder would get a fright when he saw hundreds of guinea pigs chattering at him! He’d soon change his plans . . .

  When Coco arrived in the thicket the first thing she saw was a pinecone flying through the air and smashing into a tree.

  “Who threw that?” asked Coco testily. “It’s dangerous to throw things around. It could have hit me on the head, or even knocked my bow out of my fur,” she said, checking it was still in place.

  “It was Eduardo,” said a girl guinea pig’s voice that Coco didn’t recognize. “Hello, I’m Sunbeam.” The owner of the voice popped her head out from behind the tree. Well, it might have been her head: Coco wasn’t sure. It m
ight just as well have been her bottom! She had lots of very long black fur, and it was difficult to tell one end from the other.

  “You don’t look like a sunbeam, more like a moon crater,” Coco muttered rudely.

  But then a paw appeared and the guinea pig pushed back her fur to reveal a very pretty yellow face. “Eduardo’s brilliant, isn’t he?” said Sunbeam.

  “Not really,” said Coco. She knew that wasn’t a very nice thing to say, but there was something about this new girl that made her feel grumpy.

  “Hombre, hombre,” Eduardo muttered as he appeared from behind the tree and picked up the smashed pinecone from the ground. “These are useless.”

  “Is that your weapon?” asked Coco, gazing at the bits of string and the pinecones Eduardo held in his paw.

  “That was my weapon,” said Eduardo sadly. “I did not bring the real bolas with me from Peru. They are meant to be made of wood and tied together with braided leather. There was not room in my satchel. So I made the bolas here in the thicket. But they are not strong enough. The bolas back home can stop a runaway horse at fifty meters. This bolas could not even stop a mouse at fifty centimeters.”

  He flung the bits of string with the remaining couple of pinecones on the end around his head, like a lasso. Then he threw them at a holly bush, where they immediately got stuck. He tried to pull them out but the string fell off.

  “Maybe if you used something heavier than pinecones . . .” said Coco, going over to look more closely at the broken weapon.

  As soon as her back was turned, Eduardo suddenly burst into song.