Floods 9 Read Online Free Page A

textas?’
    â€˜You know my magic sort of doesn’t always come out exactly how I plan,’ Betty explained. ‘When I was little I tried to make a Hello Kitty mask appear on my face and I ended up with a bright ginger beard. Which I can tell you is not a good look for a five-year-old, boy or girl. Mum was furious and made me keep it for a month before she magicked it away. Dad was even more cross because I kept using his razor and made it go all blunt.’
    â€˜You don’t think all the children in New York will get ginger beards, do you?’ said Ffiona.
    â€˜Who knows?’ said Betty. ‘Be a bit of a laugh if they did, wouldn’t it?’
    Although Betty was a witch and could do magic, most of her spells didn’t come out exactly as she planned. 20 She had once turned a small boy into a big fridge when all she had intended to do was give him a fright. On that occasion the result had been a good one. The boy had been vile and made a far better contribution to society as a fridge than he ever would have done as a human.
    This time, however, no one was delighted at the outcome.
    The next morning, every single child in New York woke up with a mask. The masks were not black but bright red like super-neon luminous tomatoes. That alone wouldn’t have been a problem. The two girls could simply have repainted their mask to match. No, the problem was where the mask had appeared. They were not covering the top half of their faces, but splashed across every child’s bottom.
    â€˜I don’t know what all the fuss is about,’ said Betty after she had Ffiona had re-coloured theirown masks red. ‘At least they’re not all hairy.’
    Mothers across New York panicked and traffic came to a total stop as they tried to drive their much-too-big cars with their screaming children in the back to the nearest hospital. The city was thrown into complete chaos.
    The children were not in any pain, but it did appear that the red mask-shaped patches on their bottoms were growing bigger and bigger and a rumour ran round the city that once the two halves of mask met and joined up, you would die. This, of course, was complete rubbish and all everyone would have had to do was wait for a few days until the marks began to fade away. But at the time, no one, not even Betty, knew that and panic spreads very quickly nowadays with newspapers and television all desperate to grab the headlines by turning a simple cold into a plague that is threatening to wipe out the whole world in fourteen minutes.
    Â 
    Nobody can get a simple cold or a dose of the flu any more. People get struck down with Goldfish-fluor the terrible vegetarian illness called Toflu. If you catch Vegetarian Toflu, you become terminally smug and everyone near you is at risk of dying of boredom. One sneeze these days and everyone expects tens of thousands of people to drop dead from a new and much-deadlier-than-the-last-outbreak-which-was-actually-fairly-harmless virus. If you cough while you’re bending down to tie your shoelace and get run over by a car, the newspapers are guaranteed to scream, ‘Pandemic Claims Another Victim!!!!’
    Â 
    Schools closed, in case the new mystery disease was catching. Shops and streets were deserted. All the goldfish were flushed down toilets because some idiot said the outbreak was being transferred by them.
    â€˜Stands to reason, doesn’t it?’ said a leading doctor. ‘The outbreak manifests itself in bright red weals and goldfish are orange, which is nearly red.’
    â€˜Maybe it’s being spread by mailboxes,’ said a professor of rubbish from some learned institution. ‘They’re red.’
    So everyone panicked for no sensible reason at all and stopped posting letters.
    â€˜Oops,’ said Betty.
    She felt rather guilty so at the Summer School meeting that evening, she admitted what had happened. Instead of getting into trouble, most of the other