About this Book
CREEPY IS CLOSER THAN EVER
Leo is convinced his next-door neighbor, Mr. Smith, is a zombie. But in Rotfield, things aren't always what they seem. When a terrible incident happens to Mr. Smith, Leo realizes it's his fault. He and Chad try their best to make things right. But something about Mr. Smith seems very wrong. The boys are sure he's hiding something. Will they learn his deepest, darkest secret?
Table of Contents
Cover
About this Book
Title Page
* * *
CHAPTER 1: THE ZOMBIE NEXT DOOR
CHAPTER 2: DEEP TROUBLE
CHAPTER 3: CURIOUS INDEED
CHAPTER 4: STRANGE SOUNDS
CHAPTER 5: UNLOCKING MYSTERIES
CHAPTER 6: THE ADAMS PARTY
CHAPTER 7: ZOMBIES FOR REAL
CHAPTER 8: ZOMBIES ON THE LOOSE
EPILOGUE
* * *
Note to Our Readers
Copyright
Read each title in Zombie Zappers
CHAPTER 1
THE ZOMBIE NEXT DOOR
Tap, tap, tap. Scratch. Tap. Scritch. Tap.
Sigh. Leo stopped typing for a minute and smiled to himself. He looked across the kitchen table at his friend Chad. This was one of Leo’s favorite ways to spend an afternoon—him on his laptop, Chad with his sketchbook. Two different artists, one awesome subject: zombies.
“What do you think?” Chad tipped back his chair and held out his page for Leo to see. It showed his latest T-shirt idea. “Do you think it will sell?” Chad was in charge of the merchandise section of Leo’s Zombie Zappers Web site, the one Leo was just updating.
Leo leaned in closer. The sketch showed a zombie handing a pie plate to another zombie. On the pie plate was a chopped-off hand, oozing blood at the wrist. “Welcome to the Neighborhood,” read the text.
“That’s pretty good,” Leo said. “But what if the hand was coming out of an actual pie?”
“Oh, that’s good.” Chad’s tongue poked out of the side of his mouth as he scrubbed the page with his eraser.
“Want to hear what I’ve got?” Leo didn’t even look up to see Chad’s nod before he began reading:
Z-News Update, October 12
Today’s Topic: The Zombie Next Door
ZombieZapper #1 here coming at you with an important announcement. Is your next-door neighbor a zombie? Mine is! Mr. Smith, aka Mr. Squish, is less than ten days away from eating my brains. That’s according to my most recent estimates. You thought your neighbor was creepy? Can you top this?
Zombie Clue #1: Yes, he really does go squish with every step. Dead flesh squishing inside sneaker. Definitely.
Clue #2: Gray skin, gray fingernails, gray hair, GRAY EYEBALLS.
Clue #3: Is a chunk of his face missing?
Clue #4: This dude never goes anywhere. All he does is walk around his weird yard/mini-farm, staring at the ground. One time I saw him lying on the ground smelling the grass. TRUTH.
Clue #5: Buckle up, zombie geeks, because this next clue is 100 percent proof positive. Mr. Squish doesn’t just walk around his yard doing nothing. He plays the violin. The worst, squeakiest violin ever. Way worse than my stepsister, Shelly. (No offense, Shell.) It’s seriously cover-your-ears-and-curl-up-in-a-ball bad. He’s been doing this for years. AND HE NEVER GETS BETTER. Why? Because he’s undead. Obviously!
That night, Leo couldn’t sleep. He was too hot. His pajamas were too itchy. He’d fall asleep and then wake up wondering where he was.
Finally, Leo sat up and rubbed his eyes. He reached for his laptop. Maybe his post on Zombie Zappers had gotten some comments. Leo pressed the button and the screen’s green glare made him feel normal again. He scrolled down. Thirty comments!
“ZZ #1,” Leo began reading, “What are you still doing living next door to Mr. Squish? Don’t the words sitting duck mean anything to you? Grab your survival kit and—”
WHOOOO-HOOOOOO!
What the heck was that? It sounded like it was coming from outside.
YA-YA-YA-YAAAAAA!
It was somebody—some people—yelling. It was coming from next door. Leo pushed the curtains aside and looked out his window. Flashlights were crisscrossing everywhere in Mr. Squish’s yard. And dark figures were running—two, three. No, at least four.
Leo opened the window. He heard feet pounding on the dry grass. Glass shattering. A crash. Then, Splat! Splat, splat, splat! And the knocking sound of someone shaking a can of spray paint. Closer to his yard was a flash of something white. It unraveled, growing longer, loopier, like streamers at a party.
Then all the lights were on in Mr. Squish’s big old house at once. The old man was standing on his porch in a flapping bathrobe. He was shaking a fist over his head.
Splat, splat, splat!
All the dark figures slid into a car. Doors slammed. The engine revved. With a squeal, the car was gone in a haze of smoke.
Leo leaned against the window. What should he do? Should he go over there? Should he wake up his parents? Should he help? Could he? No, no. He was just a seventh grader, right? He didn’t have to do anything.
He kept watching, frozen in place. Mr. Squish pulled his bathrobe tight around him. He shuffled back into his house.
A moment later, Mr. Squish came back out of the house carrying his violin. The terrible squeaky noises filled the night. Leo closed the window. Weird was the last thought in Leo’s head as he slumped onto the floor and fell asleep at last.
CHAPTER 2
DEEP TROUBLE
Leo woke up with a feeling that something was wrong. What was it? Then he remembered about last night. Leo forced himself to look out his window. He took in the scene with one amazed gasp.
Mr. Squish’s house was splattered with gobs of rotten vegetables and streams of yellow egg. At least one window was broken. A porch railing was ripped off.
The yard was all torn up. The vandals had rolled the giant boulders from Mr. Squish’s stone wall across it. That left long, muddy streaks across the grass.
The gardens were destroyed too. The vandals must have ripped out the plants in big handfuls. Vines lay in withered clumps like dead bodies on a battlefield.
There was a mess of junk scattered everywhere: toilet paper rolls, empty spray cans, pieces of broken glass, eggshells, rotten fruit, and someone’s lost boot.
Leo looked over to Mr. Squish’s apple orchard on the other side of the house. That explained the white stuff. Toilet paper streamed from the branches.
Poor Mr. Squish, Leo thought. Why would anybody do this? What jerks!
Then Leo scanned over to the chicken coop. The little white house with its green roof gave off faint clucking sounds that Leo liked to listen to on quiet summer nights.
Oh no. Oh no, no, no.
The vandals had spray-painted a message across the side of the white coop. Even from this distance, Leo could make out the angry red letters: “GO AWAY, ZOMBIE!”
“Leo! Leeee-ooooooh!” Leo’s mother was calling from downstairs. “Leo, can you come down here, please?”
“Leonard Francis Wiley!” That was the angry voice of Leo’s father. “Get down here . . . NOW!”
Was it possible? No doubt, his parents knew what had happened to Mr. Squish. Had they somehow found out about his Zombie Zappers post? Did they think this was all his fault?
Leo’s feet were actually shaking as he tried to make them land on each stair. He grabbed the railing and half-slid down to the first floor.
The first thing he noticed was that the front door was slightly open. Then he saw a long, mud-splattered jacket hanging on the coat rack. A gray jacket.
Leo grabbed his stomach. Something deep inside his intes
tines gurgled up into his throat.
“Leo!” his father barked.
Leo forced himself to push open the kitchen door. His father was standing there, legs spread, arms crossed over his chest. He peered down at his son.
Leo’s mother was sitting at the table with a laptop open in front of her. The screen glowed green. My Z-News update, Leo realized. His mother reached out to him with both arms.
“Why, Leo?” she asked.
Shelly was there too, behind them at the counter. She wasn’t even bothering to pretend to butter her toast. She just stared open-mouthed at the unfolding spectacle.
Sitting across the table from Leo’s mother, hands folded in his lap, was Mr. Squish. He looked weirdly different. The old man’s gray hair was usually a mess of spikes on his head. But now it was combed in neat lines over his scalp.
Leo had never looked so closely at his neighbor before. He saw that Mr. Squish’s eyes weren’t gray. They were light green, but sunken in shadows. Mr. Squish’s cheeks were dangling flaps of skin. They caved in around his bones. His gray whiskers looked like dirt growing from his neck.
“Have a seat.” Leo’s dad practically shoved a chair underneath him. “Mr. Smith has something he’d like to ask you.”
Leo met the old man’s eyes. All of a sudden, it felt like something was squeezing his heart. “I’m sorry about your yard,” Leo managed to squeak out.
Mr. Smith just nodded. “Me too,” he said evenly.
For the first time ever, Leo heard his neighbor’s voice. A scratchy, whispery voice. The sad voice of a living person—not a zombie.
Mr. Smith sat silently for a long time. “Son,” he said at last, “would you mind taking down that post about me on your Web site?”
Leo felt all the blood in his body rush to his face. His ears burned like glowing coals on the sides of his head. He nodded. “Um, yes. Yes, Mr. Squi—.” He looked up at his father, who was maybe even redder than he was. “Yes, sir. Yes, Mr. Smith.”
CHAPTER 3
CURIOUS INDEED
Back in his room, Leo flung open his closet door. He stepped over a pile of fake dinosaur fossils and kicked away some dried-up markers. Leo found the familiar button hidden behind his bathrobe. Swoosh. The back wall of his closet slid open.
“Are you kidding me?” Leo couldn’t help yelling a little bit. He looked around the familiar room. It was the secret laboratory he shared with his good friend Roger. Like Leo, Roger was a twelve-year-old zombie scientist. Roger also happened to be half-zombie. Which was why Leo was so disappointed at what he saw.
Roger was asleep, curled up on a pile of lab coats. He was dreaming about a zombie antidote, most likely, because his greenish face was smiling a little.
Leo plopped down on top of a crate of beakers and waited. Roger only slept about an hour a week. But when he did, it was impossible to wake him up. “Like rousing the dead,” Roger would joke in his fake British accent.
Roger would know what to do about Mr. Smith, Leo thought. Or about how rotten Leo felt about Mr. Smith. Was it really his fault those vandals came? His parents said his “actions had played a role.” They called him “insensitive.” Then, for some reason, his mother called Chad’s mother and told her everything. Leo’s mother kept saying, “Un-huh, un-huh, un-huh.” Then she agreed that “those boys bring out the worst in each other” and hung up.
“No screens for two weeks,” Leo’s father said. His mother kept saying, “How could you? How could you?” That made Leo cringe.
Roger would help, though. Roger was so cool. Not cool-kid cool. But cool-as-a-cucumber cool. Roger had faced so many of his own problems that he wasn’t fazed by most things anymore. For one thing, Roger’s whole family had been wiped out by a zombie attack four years ago. And Roger became half-infected himself when one of the zombies licked him. Problems like that put things in perspective.
Leo remembered when he’d met Roger the summer after second grade. It was during a T-ball game outside the Rotfield Rec Center. Leo could sense there was something different about Roger, especially when his ear fell off with a big gust of wind. The floppy thing had fluttered through the air like a zombie butterfly. It landed practically right on top of Leo’s sneaker.
Leo didn’t know anything about zombies at the time. But he didn’t freak out. Even then, he was a zombie scientist at heart. That day, he brought Roger home and glued his ear back on. That was also the day they broke ground on their secret lab, and Roger moved in.
Roger felt safe in the lab. He and Leo both worried about what would happen if the wrong people found out about him. He could be locked away—or worse. So Roger barely ever left his cozy home. He spent ninety percent of his time doing experiments, anyway. He was “this close” to finding the cure to his own half-zombiehood, he said. “Any day,” he’d been saying for the past four years. Talk about problems, Leo thought.
“Why hello, old sport.” Roger must have woken up while Leo was deep in thought. Roger looked as refreshed as a half-zombie could. “Ahhhh,” he sighed, stretching and making all kinds of cracking noises. “Ooops,” he said as one of his fingers thudded on the floor. “Will you give me a hand with my hand?” Roger asked, waving a pinky in Leo’s face.
“Leo!” Roger’s grin faded as he looked at his friend. “My word, you look terrible. What’s wrong?”
And just like that, something snapped inside Leo. He started crying like a little kid, with gasping sobs and snot running into his mouth. In between sobs, Leo told Roger everything.
Roger whistled a little as Leo got to the end. “I can see why you feel bad,” he said. “I would too.”
With those few words, Leo officially felt a whole lot better. He straightened up and wiped off his face. Then he helped Roger put his finger back on. Once the glue started to set, he knew what he was going to do.
“I’m going to help clean up Mr. Smith’s yard,” Leo said. “I’ll get Chad to help too. We’ll make up for everything those vandals did.”
“What a grand idea,” Roger said. He sat still for a moment as he let the glue dry on his pinky. “There’s still one thing that’s odd though,” Roger said. “How did Mr. Smith know about your Z-News update in the first place?”
Hmmm. Leo hadn’t thought of that.
“Curious,” Roger said, shaking his hand to dry the glue faster. “Indeed.”
CHAPTER 4
STRANGE SOUNDS
When Leo told his parents about his plan, both of them got all teary eyed. “What did I do to deserve such a wonderful son?” Leo’s mom said. It made him cringe, but in a good way this time.
Chad had been grounded from screens and dessert for one week. But his parents gave in on dessert when Chad told them about Leo’s plan. Even Mr. Smith smiled when they knocked on his door and told him the news.
The boys showed up in Mr. Smith’s yard first thing after school on Monday. Their first job was to un-TP the orchard. Mr. Smith showed them where the ladder was leaning against the porch. Chad hoisted it on his shoulder and swung it around, just missing Leo’s face.
“Whoa, let’s not have any Three Stooges injuries today, okay?” Leo said. Just the mention of Chad’s favorite movies made him laugh so hard his whole body shook. The ladder bounced up and down on his shoulders. That made Leo crack up.
It turned out that doing chores with Chad was a lot like doing zombie stuff with Chad—at least in one way. It was a total blast. That first afternoon, the two boys managed to unwind almost all the toilet paper from the apple trees. When they were done, Chad held out the giant white clump in his hand. “Need a wipe?” he asked Leo, grinning.
Chad and Leo started walking toward the alley to throw away the toilet paper in Mr. Smith’s garbage bin. They were on the far side of the chicken coop when Chad stopped short.
HHhhhhhhhnnnnnn.
“What was that?” Chad whispered. He put his arm in front of Leo to stop him. “Listen,” he hissed.
MMMMMmmmmmmmm.
“Mr. Smith?” Leo ca
lled, but the old man was nowhere in sight. Leo caught Chad’s eyes. They both raised their eyebrows as they thought the same question: Zombies? Leo didn’t want to say the word out loud, not here. But that sure sounded like zombie moaning, only quieter. Muffled.
SCCCCrrrrrrritch. Scccraaaaatch.
Now there were scratching sounds too. It has to be mice or bugs, Leo tried to tell himself. But another thought was interrupting this nice ordinary one. Like fingernails scraping against the inside of a coffin.
Then there was a bump . . . or was it knocking?
Hnnnnnnnnnnnnn.
Leo and Chad exchanged another look as Chad pointed down. The sounds were all coming from under their feet. Leo could feel them vibrating up through the dry grass. He felt them go through the rubber soles of his sneakers and into his skin, then his bones. Those sounds went through his pounding heart, all the way inside his head.
“That’ll be it for today, boys.”
Leo jumped. Mr. Smith was standing behind them. He was just a silhouette against the gray sky. His violin dangled from one hand, the bow from the other. “Run along,” he said in his even way.
The boys waved slightly and took off for the alley. Leo looked back to see Mr. Smith raise the violin to his chin.
Squuuaaaaak-squeeeaaaaaakeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!
Mr. Smith’s awful violin music was worse than ever. The ear-splitting sounds rang out as the last streaks of sun faded behind the black horizon.
CHAPTER 5
UNLOCKING MYSTERIES
Leo was dying to talk to Chad about what they’d heard. He was dying to write about it on his Web site too. Were those zombie sounds? Where had they come from? But Leo pretended nothing had happened. He wasn’t going to spread any more rumors about Mr. Smith.
When the boys returned for work the next day, there was still plenty to do. In fact, it seemed as if Mr. Smith hadn’t made any progress at all without them. The old man was dozing on his porch when they showed up.
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