Monsters Unleashed Read online

  “Yes, okay, they’re jerks,” Manny said. “But your monsters are based on those three jerks. . . .”

  “I don’t know about this, Manny. . . .” Freddie shook his head uncertainly.

  “I don’t like it any more than you do,” said Manny. “But we have to face it. It takes a bully to fight a bully.”

  Freddie grumbled under his breath. Manny had a point. Maybe Jordan and Nina and Quincy could understand the monsters better than he and Manny could. Maybe if they teamed up together, they could stop the monsters before they destroyed the town. It wasn’t a sure bet, but at least five heads were better than two . . . even if those heads belonged to Jordan Cross, Nina Green, and Quincy Moorehead.

  The bullies had climbed up on the bleachers to look at the monsters through the high gym windows. Manny and Freddie shimmied up the wooden steps and stood behind them. Yapzilla was clomping through the school yard, setting the playground ablaze with her flamethrower breath. Mega-Q was coiled around a telephone pole, snipping the wires with his razor-edged front legs.

  Freddie couldn’t see Kraydon.

  “Where’d the third one go?” Jordan asked. “The big one?” He turned to Freddie. “Why isn’t it with the other two?”

  “Well, funny you should ask . . .” Freddie cleared his throat anxiously. “So, umm . . . these monsters are based on the three of you. . . .” He let that hang there for a sec.

  “What are you talking about—‘based on us’?” Jordan asked sharply.

  “Show them the drawings,” Manny said.

  Freddie dug around in his backpack and pulled out his sketchbook.

  “There are monsters on the loose!” Nina screeched. “We don’t have time for some stupid drawings!”

  Freddie did his best to ignore her and flipped through his sketchbook. With a shaky hand, he opened it up to the monstrous versions of the sixth grade’s three biggest bullies, the same bullies standing right in front of him.

  “That’s you . . . ,” Freddie mumbled to Nina, pointing out the window at the two-headed monster, then down at his drawing. “You’re Yapzilla.”

  “That’s the me monster?” she asked, perplexed. “Why am I called Yapzilla?”

  “Because you never shut your yapper,” Manny jumped in. “And also you’re two-faced.”

  Nina gasped, totally offended.

  Quincy pointed to the picture of Mega-Q. “And I suppose that nasty-looking millipede fellow is me?”

  “Uh-huh,” Freddie said.

  BOOM! The bleachers shook as the gymnasium wall split open with a giant crack. A spray of cement and plaster exploded as Kraydon’s tail came crashing through. Freddie watched in horror as the massive beast climbed through the jagged hole. Kraydon paused in the cloud of white plaster dust where the doors to the pool used to be.

  Quickly, the kids dropped from the top of the bleachers and hid underneath the wooden steps. The giant beast lumbered slowly onto the basketball court, scanning the gym with his gigantic Cyclops eyeball.

  “And that thing—?” Jordan asked, with almost a tremble in his voice.

  “I think it’s the you monster,” said Nina.

  “Yup.” Freddie squinted through the slats of the wooden bleacher seats. “That’s the you monster.”

  Quincy scratched his head in confusion as Kraydon grunted and punched a hole in the hardwood floor. “How did your monster drawings become real actual monsters?”

  Freddie took a deep breath. “You guys were being really mean, so I drew these monsters to show what you look like on the inside. . . . We tried to 3D print them for our movie, and then somehow they came to life.”

  “You’re making a movie?” said Nina.

  “We were making a monster movie,” Freddie said.

  “Oh really?” Nina asked skeptically. “Do you have an agent?”

  “No . . .”

  “What about a producer?”

  “No . . .”

  “Then it’s not a real movie,” she said.

  “It’s a real movie if we make it . . . ,” Manny said.

  Nina made a face. “I don’t think so. And I would know. I’m going to be famous.”

  “There isn’t going to be any movie,” Freddie interrupted. “Not anymore.”

  “There isn’t?” Manny said. “Why not?”

  “Because we’re about to get eaten by real monsters!”

  Kraydon’s tail swatted the floor dangerously close to their hiding place under the bleachers. They waited in terrified silence as Kraydon sniffed the air and grunted. The monster’s mouth opened wide and he let out a deep bellowing roar. Kraydon turned around and dug his claws into the floorboards, splintering the gym floor.

  “So now what?” Jordan whispered.

  “We have to work together and stop the monsters,” Freddie said. “Because the monsters are based on you, only you can help stop them . . . we think.”

  “That’s a terrible hypothesis,” Quincy said.

  “You got a better one?” Manny asked. “We created those things, but you’re the only ones who really know them.”

  Nina crossed her arms. “Why should we help you?”

  Manny rolled his eyes and threw up his arms. Only the meanest kids on the planet wouldn’t want to help save the world, Freddie thought. But that was no surprise—that’s how this whole mess had started in the first place.

  “The only reason I drew those pictures was because you guys never stopped picking on me,” Freddie said. “This is on all of us, not just me and Manny.”

  “Oh, that’s so typical,” Quincy said. “Blaming everyone else for your problems.”

  “All I’m saying is I really wasn’t planning on getting killed today,” Nina said.

  “Yeah, no duh,” said Manny. “None of us were.”

  “Well, maybe you should have thought about that before you whipped up a bunch of monsters,” Quincy snapped.

  “How were we supposed to know that weird printer was going to print out real monsters?” Freddie asked, staring down at his three archenemies.

  “And now you want to be monster hunters . . . ,” Nina said.

  “Yes,” Manny said. “And we need your guys’ help. . . .”

  “I got news for you little nerd bombers,” Jordan jumped in. “You’re not monster hunters!”

  Freddie didn’t appreciate being called names, but Jordan was right. Just looking through the wooden bleacher seats at the monster in the middle of the gymnasium, he knew they weren’t the ones hunting the monster.

  They were the hunted.

  8

  Kraydon’s bloodcurdling howl tore through the air as the monster prowled around the gym. There was no way they could escape. They had to stay put. From their bleacher hideout they listened to the sound of the buses revving up and vrooming off. The rest of the school had gotten away. Now it was just them against the monster.

  Gulp. Freddie tried to swallow his fear.

  “Great, we missed our chance to get away,” Nina said quietly. “I just want to say that if I die, and don’t win an Oscar, that it’s one hundred percent all your faults. . . .”

  “Shhhh!” Manny shushed her with a finger to his lips, and she shot him a death stare.

  “Freddie, you’re the one who designed this thing,” Quincy whispered. “Does it have any weaknesses?”

  “Probably not,” Jordan chimed in. “If it was designed after me.”

  Manny rolled his eyes at the jock.

  “He’s right,” Freddie conceded. “It’s nothing but a big ball of superstrength.”

  “So, basically indestructible,” Quincy said.

  “And pretty destructive . . . ,” Freddie added.

  Kraydon was now at the top of the three-point line. The monster’s eye swirled clockwise and pulsated.

  “Wait, look . . . ,” Nina interrupted. “It’s doing something weird with its eye.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s one of his powers, too,” Freddie said sheepishly. “His eyeball can turn stuff to stone.”


  “Great,” Nina replied. “This keeps getting better!”

  Kraydon aimed his gaze at one of the basketball hoops. His eye swirled and shot out a blinding beam of energy, turning the whole thing—backboard, rim, and net—to stone. The monster leaped off his hind legs and smashed the backboard to bits in a violent slam dunk. It seemed like all the monster wanted to do was destroy every single thing in sight.

  Jordan sneaked out from under the bleachers and squatted behind a blue metal ball bin. “I have an idea!” He picked up a few balls from the metal bin. “Dodgeball!” he whisper shouted as if this were the greatest idea of all time.

  “Dodgeball?” Manny said. “We need a wrecking ball for this dude.”

  “Shhhhh!” Nina quieted them a little too loudly.

  “You got a better idea, Chump?” Jordan said to Manny.

  “Who’re you calling a chump, Chump?” Manny retorted.

  “I call them like I see them, Chump,” Jordan muttered.

  “Chumps! I mean, guys!” Freddie said. “Chill out! He’s gonna hear us!”

  Jordan and Manny stared at each other, sneering. Jordan made a move toward Manny like he wanted to throw down. Manny backed away and Jordan knocked the metal bin with a clang in the quiet gym.

  The monster whirled around with a thunderous stomp.

  “I’ll make a distraction to cover you while you guys make a run for it,” Jordan said bravely, grabbing a few more balls out of the bin.

  “On your mark,” Freddie said. “Get set . . .”

  “Go!” Nina shouted, and the four of them sprinted out from under the bleachers as Jordan hurled a red bouncy ball at Kraydon’s face. Kraydon galloped toward the bleachers and charged at Jordan, who dove out of the way, firing another ball.

  The monster roared angrily as another ball nailed him in the chest.

  “You’re out, bro!” Jordan cried, but it was clear that this monster didn’t follow rules.

  Kraydon whipped around at the four others trying to escape. Freddie, the biggest and slowest of the bunch, jumped over a heap of rubble from the smashed-in wall. He huffed and puffed, running with everything he had. Manny high-stepped around a hole that was circled by the thick, sharp shards of the floorboards, next to Nina and Quincy. The monster’s eyeball swirled at them again, and a pulse of blue light zinged across the basketball court.

  Jordan launched another ball. It sailed through the air and struck Kraydon square in the eyeball. BOING!

  As the ball blasted the monstrous creature, Freddie, Manny, Nina, and Quincy hustled through the doors of the gym, spilling and toppling over one another into the hallway. Kraydon shook his head and blinked his eye a few times, dazed from the hit.

  Jordan sprinted after the rest of the group. “Woo-hoo!” he yelped. “You see that? Got ’im good!”

  “Got him nice and angry is what you did . . . ,” Manny said. “Look!”

  Freddie peered back over his shoulder. Kraydon was charging at them, ripping up the hardwood floor with every giant step. His claw pierced the red skin of a ball and popped it as he galloped across the court.

  The kids scrambled out of the monster’s path, pawing at one another, desperate to get away. Behind them, there was a door at the end of the hall. At the other end, daylight spilled through the glass of an emergency-exit door.

  Kraydon skidded to a stop on the sideline. The wood floor rippled up like a wave, shooting splinters in every direction as the monster barreled into the double doors. WHAM! Kraydon’s arm smashed through the hallway wall. The monster’s head and shoulders were in front of them, blocking their escape route to the exit.

  Kraydon let out a bellowing snarl, his stinky breath hitting the kids as they backed away from him, toward the door at the end of the hall. The monster tried to squeeze himself fully into the hallway but couldn’t get through. He was wedged in the doorframe!

  Freddie exhaled a sigh of relief. They were safe—at least for the next ten seconds.

  Kraydon jerked and wriggled, fighting to jam his too-big body through the door. His mouth slime streaked through the air, splattering across the front of Nina’s shirt.

  “Are you kidding me right now?” Nina scowled and paused to inspect her clothes. “I got this at Val’s Vintage. It’s one of a kind. . . .”

  “Why? Because it’s been worn by a previous owner?” Quincy said snootily.

  “If you knew anything about fashion, your opinion might actually matter to me,” she said. “Have you even looked in a mirror lately?”

  “Oh yeah? Well I’m rubber and you’re glue—whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you,” Quincy said.

  Freddie surveyed the hallway as Quincy and Nina argued. Jordan had stopped paying attention and was looking at his reflection in the glass of the trophy case. Jordan had more than a dozen supershiny trophies in Gallup Middle School’s Hall of Fame already. The monster was less than ten feet away, blocking the hallway and their escape to the front of the school, and Jordan was fixing his hair and flexing his muscles.

  Is he really that vain? Freddie wondered, when all of a sudden, Kraydon’s arm broke through the rubble of the demolished wall.

  SNAP! KACHUNK!

  “Jordan, look out!” Freddie cried as Kraydon’s claw shot into the hallway, swiping back and forth like a giant cat pawing at a mouse in a mousehole.

  Kraydon’s arm crashed into the trophy case, shattering the glass and knocking the awards to the floor.

  Jordan’s eyes crossed in anger. “No one hurts my trophies!” the jock yelled in a fit of rage. As he charged at Kraydon, the monster flung out his arm and threw Jordan against the wall. With a thunk, Jordan hit the wall and went limp, sliding down to the floor in a slumped heap.

  Just then something clicked in Freddie’s mind. His thoughts flashed back to when Mr. Snoozer’s apple had turned to stone, and then to Nina and Quincy’s bickering: “Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” And finally he looked at the jock sprawled on the floor with his beloved trophies.

  Freddie sprang into action, hurrying over to the shattered case. He grabbed a shiny trophy off the shelf and wielded it with both hands.

  He gripped the trophy and shielded Jordan from the monster’s gaze just as Kraydon’s eyes spun. The monster’s eye beam bounced right back at Kraydon and hit him square in the face. Freddie held the deflected beam on the monster.

  But nothing happened.

  Kraydon just snarled and growled, still stuck in the doorway. The ferocious brute shifted his weight back onto one foot then lunged forward. His claws tore away the walls, and Kraydon wriggled his whole body down the hall, his back scrunched down but still scraping the ceiling.

  Nina and Quincy rushed over to Jordan and dragged him out of Kraydon’s reach.

  “Come on!” Manny shouted from their end of the hallway. “Down here!”

  “Come on, come on!” Quincy yelled, holding the basement door open.

  Kraydon crawled toward them, snarling and snapping his ugly teeth. Jordan rose to his feet and shook the cobwebs out of his head. He followed the rest of them down into the basement. The monster’s chomping mouth filled the entire hallway as Freddie slammed the door shut at the top of the staircase.

  9

  At the bottom of the narrow basement stairwell, Freddie breathed a quick sigh of relief: the monster was way too big to cram itself down the staircase. But from the thunderous boom rumbling the ceiling it sounded like Kraydon was trying to pound his way through the floor above them.

  “Do you think if we stay down here, he’ll go away?” Manny asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Jordan said, while stretching his back. “If this monster’s anything like me, he’s going to keep coming at us until he gets what he wants.”

  “What’s that?” Nina asked.

  “To turn us into statues and then smash the statues to smithereens,” Freddie said.

  “Ugh, why’d you have to make him such a psycho?” she said.

  “Because h
e is a psycho . . . ,” Freddie replied, pointing to Jordan.

  “Watch it.” Jordan glared at Freddie.

  “So what’s the plan? How do we stop him?” Quincy asked. “Now that Manny has so brilliantly trapped us in the basement.”

  “I do have a plan, thank you very much,” Manny replied. “Watching Freddie fight Kraydon gave me an idea, but we gotta gear up.”

  “What do we need?” Nina asked.

  “Anything with a mirror,” Freddie told them, knowing exactly what his little buddy was thinking. “‘I’m rubber and you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you!’”

  “Exactly.” Manny nodded and ripped the mirrored door off a medicine cabinet in the janitor’s bathroom.

  “I get it,” Quincy said slowly. “That’s smart, actually. We’re going to use Kraydon’s power against him. When he shoots his eye laser at us, we’ll use the mirror to reflect it back at him.”

  “And if he’s anything like Jordan, he’s going to love looking at himself in the mirror,” Manny finished.

  “Exactly,” Freddie confirmed. “But he can’t turn himself into stone. I already tried that.”

  “We’re going to have to lure him and get him stuck somewhere . . . ,” Quincy said, thinking out loud.

  “What about the flooded soccer field!” Freddie said.

  “Not bad,” said Quincy. “When he shoots out his eye beam, we can bounce it right back at the mud. The mud will turn into cement and he’ll be stuck good.”

  Nina, Quincy, and Jordan all started rummaging around the cluttered equipment room.

  “Look at this!” Nina ran over to a storage bin and started pulling out a tangled mass of orange soccer nets. “We could use these,” she said. “Lay them on top of the mud. Tangle him all up.”

  “Yeah!” Manny said. “I always get snaggled up in those things.”

  “We’ll need a diversion to get him in position,” Quincy added.

  Jordan rummaged in the equipment bin and found a megaphone. ”That’ll be me,” he said. “Everybody get in position,” he said into the megaphone. It screeched loudly, and they heard Kraydon stomp around upstairs.