Hercufleas (22 page)

At one point, the words in this book grew into an enormous swarm that I just didn't know what to do with.

Lucky for me, I've got a crack team of Pest Control.

Charlie Sheppard, Eloise Wilson and Chloe Sackur at Andersen – thank you for your wisdom and imagination. You make my books the best they can be! Eve Warlow and Sarah Kimmelman – thank you for your invites and organising. Small books get overlooked sometimes. You make sure mine get noticed.

Talya Baker, my copy-editor – thank you for your keen eye and clarity. Peter Cottrill – thank you for bringing the world of the story to life. Kate Grove – thank you for your direction, design and mad Photoshopping skillz.

Claire Lawrence – thanks for entering and winning my Really Tiny Story Competition. I hope you like your characters!

Becky Bagnell, my agent – thank you for your belief and judgement. You are my champion!

And Mum – as ever, you're the best.

In 1938, a comic book was published about a superhero with a red cape and a big S on his chest. This superhero could leap over twenty-storey buildings. He was super strong. Bullets bounced off his skin.

You know the guy I'm talking about, right?

Thing is, I could never figure why there's still so much fuss about him. You see, he's not that special. There are super-strong, mega-leaping, tough-as-nails superheroes everywhere. It's just that nobody notices them. Because they're also teeny-tiny.

You know the bugs I'm talking about, right?

At first, I couldn't believe fleas were such powerful parasites. But the more I researched them, the more amazed I was…

Fleas are so difficult to squash because their skin is made of a hard material called chitin. It's like wearing a natural suit of armour.

We humans have a guy called Zsolt Sinka, from Hungary, who can pull aeroplanes with his teeth. Pretty impressive, right? Wrong – because a flea his size could pull the equivalent of 218 jumbo jets. Sorry, Mr Sinka.

When fleas jump, their legs accelerate them at 150g – that's 150 times the force of gravity, and over 23 times that of the world's most extreme roller coaster. And they can do that 30,000 times without taking a break. (I wonder who measured that, by the way? Did they use tally marks?)

If fleas were human-sized, we might find ourselves in a lot of trouble. Especially since they can drink 15 times their bodyweight in blood.

Don't worry too much, though – because of how gravity works, fleas only have such incredible abilities because they are so small. If they grew much bigger, they'd lose all their powers.

Size, you see, is sort of like a flea's Kryptonite.

And sadly, fleas tend to be more villainous than heroic. They've even been used by criminals like Lydia Banot, who in 1996 was jailed for eight years after trying to blackmail Harrods, the famous department store. Banot threatened to release a plague of fleas in the designer-clothing department unless the shop gave her millions of pounds.

Unbe
flea
vable!

Sam Gayton
grew up in Kent with a cat called Archibald, a dog called Ruby, a bunch of humans, and a ghost called Kevin. He spent his days playing with Lego, designing new and extremely complicated board games, and making comics with his friend Loo Loo.

When he had a spare moment, he wrote stories.

They usually contained lots of dinosaurs and explosions (as all good stories should). He started thousands over the years, but he never finished any of them. He gave up, and his stories ended up stuffed into boxes and dumped in the attic.

Poor old stories! There they sat, year after year, heaped with the dust and the spiders and Kevin the ghost, waiting for their endings. Probably they ended up haunting Sam, because a long time later, when he had grown up and decided to be a teacher, he somehow found himself writing stories again.

And this time, he didn't give up on them.

Sam still loves Lego, board games and comics. But now he also loves drinking tea (milk, no sugar), eating pizza (pepperoni, extra cheese), and wondering how long he would survive a zombie apocalypse (probably about 14 minutes).

@sam_gayton

www.samgayton.com

I
LLUSTRATED BY
C
HRIS
R
IDDELL

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