Read Online Zombie Bums from Uranus by Andy Griffiths - Free Book Online

before Zack could fire, there was a deafening crash.
    Despite being bum-proof, the dome shattered, spraying Zack with shards of broken glass. A group of three bums—all blueish-black in colour—fell wriggling onto the floor behind him. They were twice as big as most earth bums and twice as smelly, filling the room with the overwhelming stench of decaying flesh.
    Mittens screeched and leapt from the neck of Zack’s jacket.
    â€˜Well?’ said Gran to the trembling Zack. ‘What are you waiting for? Let them have it!’
    The bums, now recovered from their violent entry, picked themselves up and walked jerkily across the room towards Zack.
    Zack fired up the K-TEL three-six-zero PT-XR fourteen thousand and two point five HRH triple turbo automatic multi-speed bum-splitter/dicer andslicer. Despite its seeming antiquity, it came to life in his hands, filling the attic with an ear-splitting noise.
    But it had little effect on the bums. They seemed to absorb the bullets as easily as a sponge absorbs water.
    â€˜It’s not working!’ Zack said to Gran.
    â€˜You’re right,’ she said, holding her hands out in front of her like crab pincers. ‘What we need here is some good old-fashioned bum pinching!’
    Zack frowned. He shouldn’t have been surprised anymore by anything that Gran did, but he was. In his collection of bum-fighter trading cards he recalled there had been a card that featured ‘The Pincher’—a fierce-looking woman who had hands like claws and fingernails so sharp they looked like they could be classified as lethal weapons. On the back of the card it had said that the Pincher was the founder of modern bum-fighting—the leader of the very first bum-fighting team, known as ‘Mabel’s Angels’.
    Zack gulped.
    His gran’s name was Mabel.
    Zack looked at his gran and tried to match her up in his mind with the fierce image on the front of the trading card.
    Could it be? he wondered. No, it was ridiculous.
    Besides, the trading card biography had said that the Pincher had gone missing in action sometime in the ’40s.
    Whoever she was, his gran was definitely not the Pincher.
    And yet, Zack had to admit, she sure had the moves.
    Gran closed in on the bums, crouched over andbegan a virtuoso display of pinching, her forefingers and thumbs working like shears.
    In less than a minute she delivered an impressive range of eye-watering pinches: two-fingered pinches, five-fingered pinches, two-handed ten-fingered pinches. Pinches that cut. Pinches that bruised. Pinches that pulled the bums right out of shape. Pinches that, had Gran perpetrated them on any regular bums, would have caused instant death.
    Whatever these bums were, however, they were not regular bums.
    Just as they’d absorbed the punishment of the K-TEL three-six-zero PT-XR fourteen thousand and two point five HRH triple turbo automatic multi-speed bum-splitter/dicer and slicer, so they absorbed Gran’s pinches.
    Gran was red in the face as she prepared to take on the bums again—but whether it was from anger or exhaustion Zack couldn’t tell.
    â€˜All right,’ she said to the bums, ‘you asked for it!’
    Gran scooped them up, and using her arms like a vice, she squeezed the three bums together so hard they looked like they were about to burst.
    Zack cringed.
    Gran curled the fingers of her right hand around and pinched one of the bums. It exploded with such force it set off a chain reaction and the other two blew apart as well.
    â€˜Good one, Gran!’ shouted Zack, wiping large handfuls of zombie bum sludge off his body.
    â€˜Ah, you can’t beat the old atomic pinch!’ saidGran, washing her hands in a small sink. ‘It’s messy but it gets the job done.’
    â€˜But where did you learn to pinch like that, Gran?’ said Zack.
    â€˜Well,’ said Gran, ‘it’s a long story . . .’
    â€˜Zack!’ yelled