The Zombie at the Finish Line

by Bill Doyle

  J.D. turned bright red. “Karl!”

  “What?” Karl asked. “What bad thing could happen now? We won!”

  “Um, I think not,” a voice said, from up on the bleachers. As the monsters turned to look, a figure stepped out from between the creatures with the purple robes. Dennis shrieked and flew straight up. The rest of the Scream Team gasped.

  It was none other than Dr. Neuron!

  Karl wished he’d never opened his mouth. Dr. Neuron was president of the JCML, and he had spent the last few sports seasons trying to destroy the Scream Team.

  Anytime something good happened to them, Dr. Neuron would show up to make it bad. And after things went bad, he would make them worse. Dr. Neuron couldn’t stand that the Scream Team was made up of different types of monsters. He thought it should all be one kind, like other JCML teams.

  Dr. Neuron cleared his throat. “The tragedy that occurred here tonight is not what the Junior Club Monster League is all about,” he said, as if talking to a crowd of a thousand monsters instead of just a handful. “Luckily, I’m here to fix the situation and give you a choice.”

  “Does fix mean ‘ruin’?” Patsy asked.

  “Does choice mean ‘kick in the head’?” Beck asked.

  “Oh, you monsters are so terribly charming,” Dr. Neuron said, through clenched teeth. “Here’s the first option. You can keep tonight’s victory and not get invited to next week’s Deadcathlon.”

  Karl said, “What’s the second choice?”

  “Or . . .” Dr. Neuron answered, sounding like the host of the game show The Lice Is Right. “Hitherto and henceforth, monsters must cross the finish line or complete an event as whole creatures, or their entire team will forfeit all meets forever, back and forward in time.”

  “I don’t get it,” Beck said.

  “It means, I can’t win the only way I can win,” Patsy said. “I can’t be in pieces.”

  “If you accept this new rule, all teams in the JCML will be invited to the world-famous Deadcathlon next week,” Dr. Neuron said. “Including the Scream Team.”

  “Whash?” Dennis asked. The Scream Team still didn’t understand his point.

  Dr. Neuron sighed. “The choice is simple. Take tonight’s victory and don’t go to the Deadcathlon. Or accept the new rule and go to the Deadcathlon.”

  In a flash, Karl howled, “We choose the Deadcathlon!”

  “Monstrous,” Dr. Neuron said, with a wicked grin.

  “No!” Patsy said. “That’s not fair! That means we didn’t win tonight!”

  Dr. Neuron ignored her. For some reason, he nodded to the five monsters in purple robes in the bleachers. Then Dr. Neuron scurried into his waiting limo, which squealed out of the parking lot.

  Karl pumped a paw in the air. This was going to be great! The winner of the Deadcathlon would receive the Conundrum Cup.

  “Patsy, I know you’re nervous about crossing the finish line without exploding,” he said, turning toward her. But she wasn’t there. “Where’s Patsy?” he asked.

  Bolt shrugged. “Patsy leave.”

  Mike said, “She ran off right after you said you’d rather be in the Deadcathlon than keep the victory today.”

  Karl couldn’t believe it. Patsy was gone. And, of course, so were the Coaches Conundrum.

  “There’s only one way to set things right and fix the Scream Team,” he said. “We have to win the Conundrum Cup and destroy the Conundrum Cup Curse!”

  Ka-klam! The stage holding the twelve-piece orchestra collapsed, creating a rattling, ringing, jangling pile of monsters and their instruments.

  “Would you PLEASE stop saying that?” J.D. said.

  Three nights after the meet against the Werewolves, Karl and the whole Scream Team met up to practice in the haunted bog.

  Well, almost the whole Scream Team, Karl thought.

  The Coaches Conundrum were still fighting in their mansion, Mr. Benedict was busy searching for new uniforms, and Patsy was nowhere to be found.

  None of the monsters was into the practice without Patsy. Instead of working on his sprints, Dennis played with his pet rotten tomato, Squishy. And Bolt’s arm, which had belonged to a gardener, was busy plucking different mutant bog plants.

  “Bolt miss Patsy,” Bolt groaned.

  “Me, too,” Karl said. “We need her to win the Deadcathlon and break the Conundrum Cup Cu—”

  J.D. flew into Karl’s mouth to stop him from finishing that last word, and then popped back out.

  “Blach!” Karl said, rubbing ghost off his tongue. “What’s the big deal with this C-U-R-S-E?”

  “Like I said, no one knows!” J.D. answered, wiping werewolf spit off his neck.

  “The Conundrums must know,” Karl said. “Let’s convince Patsy to meet us at their mansion.”

  “I’ll call her,” Maxwell said. “Patsy and I are best friends.” He started talking into a Venus elephant-trap plant, thinking it was a cell phone.

  In a second, the plant had Maxwell’s head in its mouth. After prying Maxwell free, Karl left Patsy a message, telling her it was an emergency and to meet them at the Conundrums’. Then Karl led the team out of the bog toward the coaches’ mansion.

  Halfway there, Karl spotted Patsy alone in a field of angry grass. She hadn’t seen Karl and the other monsters yet. They watched as she created a line out of snot snakes on the grass. She stepped back and she started sprinting toward the line, moving faster than the wind!

  Go, Patsy, go! Karl thought.

  Then, just an inch before the finish line . . . Patsy exploded. Her body parts burst apart like fireworks during the annual Night of Decay Celebration.

  “Come on, guys,” Karl said. The Scream Team scattered, each monster grabbing one of her parts. Bolt found her head in a pus-bag tree. When they all met in the middle of the field, Patsy’s face looked embarrassed and angry.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “You don’t need to do this on your own, Patsy,” Karl said as they fitted her back together. “Let’s work on it as a team.”

  “Work on what?” Patsy asked stubbornly.

  “Remember when we started the Scream Team?” he asked. “It was because we were done being afraid. Right?”

  “I’m not scared!” Patsy said, but didn’t sound convincing. When they had her back in one piece, she finally said, “Okay, I’m not the kind of zombie who gives up without a fight. I got your message. You’re right. I think we need the Conundrums to help us. Let’s go!”

  She stomped off. Karl and the other monsters hurried to catch up. When they arrived at the haunted mansion, the drawbridge was already down. They crossed over the moat of bubbling, burping pond scum.

  Karl gave the towering front door a push. It creaked open and the Scream Team stepped into the dark hallway.

  “Hello?” Beck asked nervously.

  As the monsters’ eyes adjusted to the darkness, they could see that a thick strip of orange duck tape ran through the middle of everything. It cut the floor in half and then ran up the walls. Even the chandelier had tape on it.

  “It looks like the Conundrums split the mansion in two,” Karl said. “Virgil must have taken one side and Wyatt the other.”

  With his teammates following, Karl crept down a long hallway. Nozzles along one wall tracked their movement and shot bursts of gas. Lsst! Lsst!

  “Watch out for the passing gas!” Karl warned.

  Too late. Bolt took a whiff, and his ballet-dancer foot went up on tiptoes, as if trying to escape the stench. “Ugh,” he groaned.

  Karl nodded. “That must be Wyatt’s side.”

  “And this must be Virgil’s,” Beck said, pointing to small pits and gurgling pools of acid that ran along the other side of the hallway.

  The Scre
am Team finally made it to the living room. It looked like it had once been a torture chamber. Next to a three-story-high fireplace, a large high-backed chair was turned away from them. Karl spotted the coaches in one corner, wearing their footy pajamas. They were both scribbling all over a chalkboard and, of course, fighting.

  “With this hurdling technique, we’ll score for sure,” Virgil said.

  “No!” Wyatt cried. “This new technique will get rid of the chance that we won’t score.”

  Karl rolled his eyes. They were making the same argument. All this fighting over track or field must be why they didn’t come to practice.

  “Hi, Coaches,” Patsy said.

  Virgil’s face lit up when he saw the Scream Team. “What’s up, dudes? I don’t see my brother around. Feel free to rap with me about anything.”

  “I’m right here!” Wyatt snapped.

  Virgil’s half of the body jumped. “Stop sneaking up on me!” he said with a laugh.

  Karl had to get them to focus. “Coaches Conundrum, Patsy needs your help—”

  “Not just me!” Patsy insisted.

  Karl started again. “We need your help to win the Deadcathlon and the Conundrum Cup.”

  Virgil nodded. “Dude, that’s why I was just going to invite you all over.”

  “That was my idea!” Wyatt said. “Even though you might all be spies!”

  Before Karl could respond, the high-backed chair next to the fire spun around. “Hee-hoo-hee!” the monster in the chair said.

  Karl was stunned. “Happy, is that you?”

  “Abso-tootly!” Happy cried, with a huge grin.

  Happy was Dr. Neuron’s nephew. He had tried to destroy the Scream Team during football season . . . at least in the beginning. He looked like a smaller Dr. Neuron, and he was a crunch-bug puppeteer.

  “What are you doing here, Happy?” Beck asked.

  “I hired him,” Virgil said.

  “No, I hired him!” Wyatt said.

  “Hired him for what?” Patsy interrupted.

  “I have started Happy’s Crunch-Bug Puppet Theater Dramatic Reenactments,” Happy said, pointing to the corner. There sat a small puppet stage on a toy wagon. “I’m taking my traveling puppet show on the road tomorrow. Before I go, the coaches wanted me to show you what happened all those years ago at the first Deadcathlon.”

  As the other monsters took their seats, Happy dimmed the lights and plopped a flashlight into Eric so it pointed at the stage like a spotlight.

  Happy stepped behind the stage and said in a deep voice, “I give you the Tale of the Conundrums!” Using little paddles, he pushed two crunch bugs out onto the stage. The bugs were tied together by a loose piece of thread and meandered here and there.

  “We’re the Conundrums!” Happy said, throwing his voice to sound like the bugs were talking.

  “No, we’re the Conundrums!” Wyatt yelled from the audience, and Virgil chirped, “Yes, we’re us.”

  “This is a play,” Karl explained. “Happy’s acting like the crunch bugs are you two.”

  “That’s easy to believe.” Virgil laughed. “That actor looks just like you, Wyatt.”

  “Stop bugging me!” Wyatt snapped.

  Happy continued with his show. He made his voice sound chipper like Virgil’s and moved one of the bugs. “I sure am glad we’ve brought our team here to the very first Deadcathlon! Aren’t you, my dear brother and my best friend, Wyatt?”

  “You betcha!” Happy switched to using Wyatt’s voice. “We’re such good coaches and buddies they even named the Conundrum Cup after us! Isn’t it super fun to be brothers?”

  J.D. shook his head. “You betcha? Super fun? That’s not how Coach Wyatt talks. This is all wrong!”

  But Karl noticed that for once the Conundrums weren’t arguing about a part of the play. Karl wondered if it was possible that, before that first Deadcathlon, the Conundrums might have actually agreed on things.

  Happy put some curdled mayonnaise on the stage as bait, and the largest crunch bug Karl had ever seen lumbered out onto the stage.

  “I am Wolfenstein!” Happy said in an even deeper voice. “I run track and field for the Conundrums.”

  “Wolfenstein!” Karl’s tail started wagging. Wolfenstein was his all-time sports hero. Karl had forgotten that the Conundrums had been his first coaches and taught him everything he knew.

  “I am not yet a star,” Happy said, as Wolfenstein. “But I’m all set to run and participate in every single track-and-field event if you would like, Coaches Conundrum!”

  “No,” the Virgil bug said. “Wolfenstein, you must share the glory, just as my brother and I share everything, including ideas and views on life.”

  The Wyatt bug cried, “I agree!”

  The Scream Team gasped. Karl had been right! The Conundrums used to agree with each other!

  Happy pressed a button on a speaker. A short burst of music played, like when a movie bad guy pops up on the screen. A new crunch bug skittered onstage.

  “I’m the water boy for the Conundrums’ team,” Happy said in a voice that sounded familiar to Karl but he couldn’t quite place. “The rest of the team wanted me to tell you that they don’t want to participate. You are making a mistake if you don’t let Wolfenstein run and play in every event. He will make the JCML great!”

  “No, water boy,” the Virgil bug said. “It’s never a mistake to include everyone on the team. Let’s keep warming up!”

  A group of crunch bugs dressed in track uniforms crawled onstage. Happy had tied miniprops, like fake hurdles and pole-vault bars, to his tentacles. He dangled the props and pushed the team of crunch bugs into them.

  The crunch bugs crashed into the props and each other, and flipped over. Happy kept talking as the water boy. “Coaches Conundrum, the decision you made to use the other athletes has gone horribly wrong! Now they’re all injured. Pervis thought the javelin toss was a javelin-eating contest. Mervis accidentally put a sock on his head and ran into every single hurdle. And Alexis’s braids got so twisted in the pole-vault poles that she looks like a porcupine. Those players will never be heard from again. And you, Coaches Conundrum, will be cursed and must never set foot on the track at the Deadcathlon again!”

  Happy finally stopped here, waiting for a big reaction. But the Scream Team just looked confused.

  “That water-boy character has too many lines,” Maxwell said. “The whole dramatic structure is flawed.”

  Karl didn’t know about that. The play wasn’t so great, but the real Conundrums in the audience weren’t helping things. They started acting even more strangely than usual.

  Virgil said, “The water boy was definitely taller in real life, Happy dude!”

  “All wrong, Happy!” Wyatt instructed. “There was more smog that night!”

  Happy tried to change the action on the stage, and accidentally smeared curdled mayonnaise everywhere. The crunch-bug actors went berserk and started chomping on the set. It collapsed around Happy, and soon he was buried in the wreckage. At last, he announced, “The end!”

  Patsy exploded.

  “Come on!” she said, as her head sailed toward the acne aquarium. “Now I’m even exploding at the finish of a bad play? No offense, Happy!”

  But Happy didn’t seem to care. “Hee-ho-hee!” he said. The team got to work gathering up Patsy’s parts from around the room.

  “That’s it?” J.D. said. “I still don’t understand what the Conundrum Cup C-U-R-S-E is!”

  Karl shook his head. “Neither do I.”

  “The message is totally clear,” Coach Wyatt said. “I’m not going to the Deadcathlon this weekend.”

  “Wrong-o!” Coach Virgil said. “The Deadcathlon is not a place I’ll be going to this weekend, either.”

  “But you have to!” K
arl said, thinking about Alphonse, Dr. Neuron, and everyone else who didn’t believe in the team. “We need to win the Conundrum Cup to prove we’re not losers!”

  “Too many monsters could get hurt,” Virgil said, and looked at Patsy. “That’s why I can’t tell you to run if you don’t want to.”

  “No,” Wyatt snapped. “That’s why if you want to not run I can’t tell you to, Patsy.”

  Once again, the Conundrums didn’t realize they were saying the same thing. But Patsy seemed to hear them loud and clear.

  “They’re right, Karl,” Patsy said. “I’m not going, either. I wanted the coaches to teach me a lesson, and they did. I shouldn’t even try to cross the finish line anymore. It’s not worth it!” Patsy ran out of the room.

  “Wow, she’s fast,” Mike said.

  It was true, Karl thought, looking around at the mess. Patsy could help them win the Deadcathlon.

  But with her gone and the Conundrums refusing to coach, was the show over for the Scream Team?

  “Welcome, fiends and ghouls, to the annual JCML Deadcathlon!”

  The shout made Karl jump. He’d been giving the Scream Team a pre-meet pep talk near the pole vault and turned around to find the meet announcer, Hairy Hairwell. Usually, Hairy would be in a skybox above the stands. But this year he was walking around the track, with an assistant lugging his sound equipment behind him. Karl figured Hairy must have wanted to get a closer look at the events.

  “I’m coming to you live from the Awful Oval on the floor of Putridge Stadium!” Hairy’s voice echoed around the stadium. “We’re just five minutes from the start of the biggest, most spectacular sporting event of the year! It’s a two-day meet, with all the teams of the JCML competing in four events one day and five the second day . . . ending, of course, with the big Monster Relay Race!”