The Zombie at the Finish Line

by Bill Doyle

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  “Dude, You Still Look Like a Poodle”

  CHAPTER 2

  Pop Goes the Zombie

  CHAPTER 3

  Playing the Parts

  CHAPTER 4

  Way to Pass the Gas

  CHAPTER 5

  The Tale of the Conundrums

  CHAPTER 6

  The Awful Oval

  CHAPTER 7

  Spinning Out of Control

  CHAPTER 8

  Two Day’s the Day

  CHAPTER 9

  Rules of the Shame

  CHAPTER 10

  Monster Relay

  CHAPTER 11

  The Big Spin

  CHAPTER 12

  Monster Finish

  Patsy the Zombie trading card

  Copyright

  The rusty ball spun through the foggy night air. Bits of green mold and speckles of slime flew off it. And all Karl the werewolf could think was, Chomp that ball!

  His paws thundered along the track as he raced after the shot put. Karl moved so fast that his patchy fur pressed flat against his face.

  “No, Karl!” his best friend, J.D. the ghost, shouted from the long jump. Around the swamp’s small track and field, other monsters stopped sprinting, jumping, and throwing. They all gaped at Karl.

  But he didn’t care. Karl loved to run and he was so close now! Before the shot put could hit the ground, Karl leapt into the air. He opened his mouth wide and—

  Clang!

  His jaws clamped down on the metal ball. It was heavy and weighed down his snout.

  “Umph!” he said, almost chipping a fang, but holding the ball tightly in his mouth. With his tail wagging, Karl trotted over to the shot-put circle. He spit the ball out in the mold and slime, at the paws of the big werewolf who had thrown it.

  “Dude, you still look like a poodle,” the werewolf sneered, and his voice brought Karl out of his daze.

  Wolfsbane, Karl thought.

  It was Alphonse. About twice Karl’s size, Alphonse was the star of the Werewolves track squad. And he was one of the reasons Karl had started the Scream Team with eight other monsters.

  Alphonse had made sure Karl wasn’t welcome on the Werewolves team during baseball season. And the other Junior Club Monster League teams had not wanted any of his friends, either.

  “We meet again, poodle, ” Alphonse sneered.

  “Meet again?” Karl said, wiping shot-put slime off his chin. “Wrong, Alphonse! This is the first meet of the track-and-field season!”

  Rolling his eyes, Alphonse threw the shot put again. “Fetch!” he yelled. The metal ball squeaked as it left his paws.

  Karl actually took a couple of steps, before forcing himself to stop. Alphonse always said that Karl’s patchy coat made him look like a poodle. He didn’t need to act like one, too.

  But it wasn’t easy. Karl chased squeaky things and his tail. Especially when he got nervous, like now. His team was about to go head-to-head with the Werewolves.

  J.D., Bolt the Frankenstein’s monster, and a few other Scream Team monsters rushed over to see if Karl needed help.

  “Not cool, Alphonse!” Dennis the vampire said. But the drool, dripping down his oversize fangs, made it sound like, “Nosh shool, Salfonshe!”

  “Speak it, don’t leak it, bat boy,” Alphonse said. He gave the Scream Team athletes a long look and laughed. “Wow, you’re all even bigger losers than I remembered. We’re going to crush you tonight, and then we’ll win the Deadcathlon intra-ghoul-ral meet next week!” As he strutted over to his own team, he called back, “Be sure to ask your coaches about the Conundrum Cup C-U-R-S-E!”

  For some reason, Alphonse spelled this last word. But Karl didn’t really notice. His ears had perked up at the Deadcathlon. One of the biggest meets of the season, it took place over two nights with nine different events.

  “We’ll see you there!” Karl yelled after Alphonse. “The Deadcathlon is for the best teams and we’re one of them! We’ll get invited!” But a quick look around at his teammates, who were warming up for tonight’s meet, didn’t fill Karl with confidence. Eric the blob was stuck bouncing between two hurdles like a Ping-Pong ball. Maxwell the mummy dangled from the high-jump bar like a giant yo-yo.

  And on the far side of the track, Patsy the zombie was acting nutty as she practiced her sprints. She was lightning fast, but whenever she got close to the finish line, she backed off like it was electrified.

  “You have to cross the finish line!” Karl shouted. “Come on, Patsy, you can do it!”

  “I know . . . I can do anything!” the zombie called back, but for once she didn’t sound sure of herself. She still wouldn’t cross the line.

  “Where are the coaches?” J.D. the ghost asked. “Patsy will listen to them.”

  “Coaches fight,” Bolt grunted. “There.”

  He pointed to the parking lot where Karl could see Virgil and Wyatt Conundrum. With two heads on the same monster, they shared a pair of arms and legs, but that was all they shared. They couldn’t agree on anything, and Karl could hear them arguing . . . yet again.

  “It’s track and field, not field and track,” Wyatt snapped at Virgil. “So clearly, track is better.”

  “Field sounds like feelings,” Virgil chirped, his ponytail bouncing up and down. “And those are so super important.”

  “In track and field, track is the older part,” Wyatt fired back. “And that’s more important. Just like me.”

  Virgil chuckled. “Bro, we share the same birthday.”

  “Says who? Who’s been talking about me?” Wyatt looked around suspiciously. “Them?” he demanded, pointing up at the stands. The spectators were mostly werewolves. But there was also a group of five monsters dressed in purple robes with hoods. Wyatt always thought spies were watching him.

  “Your energy is bringing me down,” Virgil said. “I’m going to meditate!”

  “And I’m going to the van!” Wyatt said.

  They pulled in different directions, spinning their body round and round.

  “Where are they going?” Karl wondered out loud. The Scream Team watched the Conundrums twirl across the parking lot and down the street. Soon the bickering pair disappeared over a hill and was gone.

  Ugh. The Conundrums were always having fights, but this was a bad one even for them. He had to find a way to make them get along. He thought about something Alphonse had said.

  “What’s the Conundrum Cup C-U-R-S-E?” he asked Beck the bigfoot, spelling the last word.

  J.D. overheard him and shouted, “Don’t say that name!”

  “What name?” Karl said. “Conundrum Cup Curse?”

  Just as Karl said it, Patsy tried crossing the finish line and exploded.

  KABLAM!

  Patsy’s body burst apart just before the finish line, like a favor at a birthday party. As if rocket- propelled, every piece shot off into the distance.

  “This is not going as planned!” her head yelled as it sailed over a fence and into a nearby slug farm. Her knee flew into a tongue-tickler nest in a pus-bag tree. Her heel landed in the stadium’s snot fountain.

  Karl had seen Patsy fall to pieces hundreds of times. Getting tackled in football, walking while chewing gum, laughing at a monstrously bad joke. But this was different. Like the Conundrums, Patsy was already having trouble with track season—especially around finish lines.

  “Do
n’t worry, Patsy!” Karl shouted. “We’ll get you back together!” He and the rest of the Scream Team split up around the stadium to find her pieces.

  “No, I’ll do it!” Mr. Benedict, the team sponsor, told them. Without the coaches there, the shy mole man was in charge. “The first event starts in five minutes, and you have to get ready.” As Mr. Benedict rushed off, he called over his shoulder, “I put your new track uniforms in the crate by the wrong jump!”

  The Scream Team took turns going inside the crate to put on the track shorts and shirts. While they waited in line, Karl turned to J.D. and said, “Why did you tell me not to say Conundrum Cup Cur—”

  Before he could say curse, J.D.’s body turned bright red. “Don’t say it!” he yelled. “Or the C-U-R-S-E will strike!” he warned, spelling the word instead of saying it.

  “What is the . . .” Karl paused, then said, “What is the thing that rhymes with hearse?”

  “I’m not sure,” J.D. said. “But it’s bad enough that even saying it can cause catastrophe! I heard that the Coaches Conundrum were involved in a tragic track-and-field mystery at the first Deadcathlon. Something went horribly wrong and they haven’t been back since.”

  Beck the bigfoot came out of the crate wearing the new shorts and T-shirt. Karl was surprised that the blue, shiny uniforms actually looked really good.

  Karl was the last one waiting to change. As J.D. came out, he went in. “Is the thing that rhymes with worse the reason the Conundrums never won the Conundrum Cup?” The Cup was the trophy given to the top team at the Deadcathlon.

  “No one knows!” J.D. said.

  “Hmmm,” Karl said. “I’ve got it! We just need to win the Cup for the Conundrums at the Deadcathlon next week. That’d finally make them happy and stop fighting!”

  “The Scream Team wins the Deadcathlon?” J.D. laughed. “Good one, Karl.”

  Karl didn’t laugh. He didn’t want to think like Alphonse. He knew the Scream Team athletes weren’t losers. They just needed a chance.

  Karl couldn’t wait to put his plan into action. He forgot all about spelling or rhyming as he burst out of the crate. “Winning the Conundrum Cup could break the Conundrum Cup Curse!” he cried.

  Phlurrp! Just then, the moon came out from behind a cloud. And the team’s shorts and shirts instantly shrank about three sizes.

  “What’s happening?” Karl gasped, as the uniforms kept shrinking. He felt like a bag of slime with a tightening string around the middle. And Eric looked exactly like that.

  “I told you not to say C-U-R-S-E,” J.D. said. His voice sounded strangely high, like a mite mouse’s. “It has struck again!”

  The team tried stripping off the uniforms, but they were too snug. Mike the swamp thing’s shorts squeezed even tighter, turning his tail into a balloon. Dennis’s tiny bat wings popped out and he zipped in circles like a three-winged gnat. Bolt the Frankenstein’s monster groaned and toppled over. “Monster wedgie,” he groaned.

  Maxwell the mummy’s T-shirt had shrunk, pushing more of his sweaty wrapping up around his head. It blocked even more of his vision than usual. “Be honest,” he moaned. “Is this a good look for me?”

  Mr. Benedict finally came back, his arms filled with Patsy’s body parts. By then the Scream Team was rolling in the muck while the clothing squished them even more.

  Patsy’s head was tucked under Mr. Benedict’s chin. Her eyes went wide when she saw her teammates. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Shrinking uniforms!” Karl grunted.

  “Oh my!” Mr. Benedict mumbled, throwing his hands in the air in surprise. All of Patsy’s parts fell to his feet.

  “The uniforms are woven with live boa worms that shrink in moonlight,” Mr. Benedict explained. “I thought they’d make great skintight uniforms. You know, aerodynamic.”

  Dennis flew face-first into the ground. “Not really,” he said, his voice muffled by muck.

  “The worms are going berserk,” J.D. said. “How can we get the uniforms off?”

  Mr. Benedict thought for a second. “Boa worms love to eat fried fungi. I’ll just whip up a batch in the kitchen crate I brought. That will distract them and they’ll let go.”

  “Great!” Karl said.

  “Shouldn’t take me more than ten minutes,” Mr. Benedict said, and then added, “Maybe an hour.”

  “The meet is about to start!” Karl shouted. He looked at the starting line, where the Werewolves were already gathering for the 100-meter hurdle.

  “If we don’t get our runner to the first event in forty-five seconds,” Beck said, “we’ll have to forfeit!”

  “No!” Karl shouted, as his shorts twisted and he fell over. The Scream Team athletes couldn’t lose tonight. If they did, they’d never get invited to the Deadcathlon, and his plan to help the Conundrums would fail. Plus, Alphonse would think he was right to call them losers.

  Karl’s mind raced. “Patsy can do it!”

  “Uh, I don’t know if you noticed, Karl,” Patsy said. “I’m kind of a pile of zombie over here.”

  “I’ll have her back together in no time,” Maxwell said. He shuffled over and screwed one of her hands into her leg just above the knee.

  Karl wiggled over to Patsy’s head. “You can do this,” he told her. “You’re the only one who isn’t wearing a boa-worm uniform.”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered, and blushed. That was something that Karl had never seen her do. “I haven’t been able to cross the finish line once, not even in practice, without exploding.”

  Karl smiled. “That’s not a problem. You’ve already exploded.”

  Before Patsy could respond, Alphonse shouted from the track, “Come on, losers! Get over here so we can beat you!”

  When Patsy hesitated, Karl said, “Everyone has a part to play on a team . . . only this time you’ll have to use every part to play.”

  This made Patsy laugh. “Okay, Karl,” she finally said. “I’ll give it a shot.”

  While the rest of her body stayed with the Scream Team, Patsy sent her leg with the hand on top out to the starting line. The Werewolves were waiting there for Frank the Cyclops, the referee, to signal the start to the 100-meter dash.

  “What’s this mess all about?” Alphonse said, laughing when he saw Patsy’s hand and leg bouncing toward them. “This has to be against the rules!”

  Frank the ref flipped through the rule book. His one giant eye scanned the pages, but he didn’t see anything that said monsters couldn’t compete in pieces.

  “Fine,” Alphonse said. “If this is how Karl and his friends want to lose today, that works for us.”

  Next week, the Deadcathlon would have Spins, or surprise twists, on each event. That was what made it special. But tonight’s meet against the Werewolves was like others during the regular season. It just had regular races and events.

  Alphonse, two other Werewolves, and Patsy’s leg lined up in the starting blocks. Frank fired the starting cannon and off they went!

  The hand on top made Patsy’s leg sound like a spring. Boing! Boing! Boing! The leg bounded over the ten hurdles, easily clearing them all, and finished way ahead of the Werewolves.

  “First place!” Karl yelled. “Way to go, Patsy!”

  In the high jump, Patsy used her calf and wrist to spring into her approach. She took off, soared over the bar, and landed calf-first on the mat.

  For the discus throw, she anchored the toes of one foot into the ground and put her arm on the foot’s heel. Then she picked up the discus and spun her arm around like a sprinkler. She released the discus at just the right second. It flew down the field and put her in first place.

  Patsy’s parts were like customized machines, made especially to win the events.

  But then she started running out of parts. Her shoulder couldn’t do muc
h with the javelin, and her left hip wasn’t too great at the shot put. The Werewolves easily took those events.

  The pole vault was the last event. And the Scream Team and the Werewolves were tied. The only thing Patsy had left to use was her head.

  Just as Patsy rolled her noggin out to the pole-vault runway, Mr. Benedict announced, “The fried fungi is ready!”

  He smeared the Scream Team’s uniforms with a goopy reddish mess. The boa worms stopped squishing the team, and instantly the clothes loosened. Karl could breathe again.

  “Patsy, it’s okay!” he called. “The rest of the team can help now!”

  “Too late!” Alphonse yelled. “She’s not allowed to stop after she starts her turn! Looks like the Scream Team will lose . . . again!”

  Karl thought Alphonse might be right. Patsy was pushing her head down the pole-vault runway with her tongue. Her head rolled and smacked into one end of the pole. She grabbed on to it with her teeth. The pole slid for an inch before catching in the ground and tilting up. Her head was catapulted through the air.

  As Patsy soared across the night sky, she glanced down at the Werewolves. “Sorry, Alphonse, did you say something? Looks like the Scream Team is a little ahead of you now, doesn’t it?”

  Patsy easily cleared the bar. Her head bounced onto the mattress stuffed with dried pus bags—and the Scream Team won the meet!

  At first, Karl and the rest of the team were too shocked to move. They were so used to losing and disappointment.

  Then blam! They all rushed out to the field. They grabbed Patsy’s laughing head and tossed it in the air. Even after they put her pieces back together, she was still laughing. “I just wish the Coaches Conundrum were around to join in the celebration!” she said.

  After hurrying through the handshake line, Alphonse and the Werewolves hustled onto their bus. As he watched them drive off, Karl got excited again. “We might actually win the Deadcathlon and the Conundrum Cup,” he said. “We’re going to break the Conundrum Cup Curse!”