My Zombie Hamster

by Havelock McCreely

  “Hunter. Shoot.”

  “Uh, I was wondering … what was in the briefcase? You know, from Pulp—”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Oh.” My dad paused. “Do you still have your lightsaber?”

  Kilgore Dallas’s smile became a bit forced. He looked at all the raised hands.

  “Any questions not relating to movies I’ve been in?”

  All the hands went down.

  “Then we’re finished here. Have a good day, citizens.”

  MONDAY, JANUARY 6

  1:00 p.m. Charlie had come up with a plan regarding Anti-Snuffles.

  “We need to speak to Old Man Ebenezer,” she said. “See if he has any tips for us. You know. Like how to trap zombies and stuff.”

  Remember when I said before that Old Man Ebenezer wasn’t a Scooby-Doo villain? Well, that was true, but he does look like one.

  When we knocked on his door, he yanked it open immediately, as if he had been waiting there. His white hair stuck up from his head, looking like he’d just had an electric shock. He scanned the street behind us, then stared at us suspiciously.

  “Breathe onto this,” he ordered, thrusting a small mirror at us.

  Charlie looked at me. I shrugged and breathed on the mirror. Charlie did the same, and only after checking that our breath had misted on it did the old man relax a bit.

  “Have to be sure,” he said. “Don’t trust the new warden to keep out deadbeats. Now, what do you want?”

  We told him we were doing a school project and needed advice on hunting and trapping zombies.

  He told us to wait, then disappeared inside for about ten minutes. He came back and handed us a piece of paper, then muttered something about meddling kids and slammed the door on us.

  We headed back home, reading the paper as we walked.

  Old Man Ebenezer’s Top 10 Deadbeat Dos and Don’ts

  1. Run away. Best thing you can do. Only an idiot tries to fight a deadbeat.

  2. If you can’t run away, aim for the head. Best piece of advice I can give. Always aim for the head. If you’re too short, aim for the legs, then aim for the head.

  3. Be quiet. Seriously. Something about becoming a zombie makes the critters’ hearing better than normal. They can hear a whimper of fear at a hundred paces.

  4. Never go in blind. Always have an exit strategy, an escape route.

  5. Go up high. Ever seen a zombie climb a tree? Or a wall, or anything like that? No. ’Cause they can’t.

  6. Buy some good running shoes. And make sure whoever you’re traveling with doesn’t have as good a pair as yours, ’Cause if the zombies are coming you really want to be able to outrun everyone. I know that sounds ruthless, but it’s survival of the fittest.

  7. Deadbeats are really stupid. Seriously. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Best thing to do if you’re being chased is to lure them into a room and lock the door. They’ll eventually just fall to pieces.

  8. Never turn your back on a door. Deadbeats have a very good sense of dramatic timing, and if you turn your back on a door, that’s when a zombie will come through it. A subpoint to this is never, ever, ever, ever stand in front of a window. Just don’t.

  9. If anyone says “I think we’re safe now,” or “I think we’re going to be okay,” or “I think the worst of it is over,” or any similar-sounding phrase, run away very quickly from that person. As mentioned in point 8, zombies have a great sense of drama and will probably wait for someone to say something like that before launching an attack.

  10. Finally, if, for whatever reason, you want to trap a zombie, pick someone you don’t like, tie them up somewhere, and shout and scream as loud as you can.

  Then run.

  “I can’t help feeling he didn’t really think that last point through,” said Charlie. “There’s no mention of how we actually catch a deadbeat once it turns up.”

  “The basic idea is sound, though.”

  “What, we find someone we don’t like and tie them up in your yard?”

  My thoughts turned briefly to Aaron Miller, the class bully. But I’d probably get in trouble for that.

  Instead, I shook my head. “We adapt it. I’ve got an idea.”

  8:00 p.m. Charlie has gone home now, but not before we prepared our trap for Anti-Snuffles. It consisted of a raw steak from the freezer (Dad is not going to be happy when he finds it missing), a heavy wooden box propped up with a stick, a short length of string pushed through the steak and tied to this stick, and one really old iPhone found in Dad’s office.

  Charlie and I recorded ourselves talking on the iPhone, and I pushed play and turned the volume up just loud enough for Anti-Snuffles to hear. Then we put it beneath the crate. Hopefully he’ll come before the battery runs out.

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 7

  7:00 a.m. Anti-Snuffles is toying with me. I know that now.

  I went down to check on my trap and saw that it had been sprung. The stick had been yanked, and the box was down. I threw my sack over the whole lot, then yanked it up.

  I heard the iPhone knocking on the wood, but that was about it. No enraged squeaks and squeals.

  I carefully opened the sack to check and saw that Anti-Snuffles wasn’t there.

  But the steak was gone.

  And, even stranger, the iPhone wasn’t playing anymore. It was recording instead. I moved the slider back to the beginning and pressed play.

  I expected to hear Charlie’s voice and mine coming out of the tiny speaker, but I didn’t. I heard something much worse.

  The zombified squeaks of Anti-Snuffles.

  A cold chill ran through me. What was he saying? Was it some kind of zombie rodent warning?

  I looked around warily, and as I did so, I caught a glimpse of beady eyes in the flower bed. Then there was a rustle of leaves and they were gone. I went to check and saw tiny footprints in the snow.

  The problem was, there wasn’t just one pair of footprints, but quite a few. And of different sizes.

  I swallowed nervously and retreated inside.

  Anti-Snuffles had made this personal.

  7:30 a.m. A letter came for me. I don’t often get snail mail, so I was really excited. Perhaps a distant relative had died and left me a massive fortune.

  I looked around the cluttered kitchen, at Mom glaring as she sipped her second cup of coffee (it takes a while for Mom to warm up in the morning), at Dad muttering under his breath while he practiced his villain speech for the chapter he was going to write today, at Katie staring at me and not blinking. (She’s like a snake.)

  “So long, suckers,” I muttered, ripping my letter open. As soon as I laid my hands on my newfound wealth I’d be out of here, living it up in a mansion. I’d have twenty butlers, ten for me and the other ten to buttle for the butlers. That’s how cool a boss I’d be.

  List of Amazing Things I’ll Buy with My Money

  1. Swimming pool filled with Jell-O. Obviously, it would have to be changed every few days, but I’ll be rich, so that’s fine.

  2. Finance my own movie. I’ll hire Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson to be an assistant director. That way I can watch them and learn without their thinking I don’t know what I’m doing.

  3. A movie theater in my bedroom. Or maybe a bedroom inside a movie theater. I’ll decide later.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t a letter informing me of my newfound wealth. It was from the head warden’s office. The seventh grade is going to be the first to take part in the Outdoor Acclimatization Program with Kilgore Dallas. I’m instructed to pack my tent, buy some supplies, and report to the city gates on January 18.

  So I’m not a millionaire.

  But hunting zombies in the wild should be interesting.

  Plus, it means I’ll get away from Anti-Snuffles for a few days.

  2:00 p.m. Tricked! What a cop-out. When Mom read the letter, the first thing she did was phone the warden’s office to protest what she saw as a dangerous and pointless exercise.

  Trust Mom to try to ruin
all our fun.

  Except it turns out it wasn’t going to be that much fun anyway. It was all a trick.

  We were never going to be in real danger. Dallas was taking us out into an area of the forest that was fenced off. (Although we weren’t supposed to know that.) Plus, he had guards stationed in trees all around the perimeter, just in case any deadbeats came too close.

  Apparently, he was going to get a few of his men to dress up as zombies and give us a fright. Then he was going to demonstrate the correct way of taking out a zombie. The fear and danger of this event was supposed to sear itself into our brain and, Dallas’s theory went, from that moment on we would instinctively know how to act if we were ever attacked.

  Adults are weird.

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8

  3:00 p.m. Scandal in Edenvale! (If I don’t make it as a movie screenwriter/director then I should become a journalist. I’m always interested in what’s going on in the world around us. I told this to Charlie and she just snorted and said there was a difference between sniffing out a good story and being nosy. Whatever.)

  Anyway, here’s the news. Our teacher, Mr. Craston, has run off into the wild.

  I heard Mom and Dad talking about it in the kitchen. Apparently, he went a bit crazy in the head, talking about how aliens were trying to control his mind and how he needed to be one with nature. He ran through the streets with a tinfoil hat on his head and used a homemade grappling hook to climb the wall, shouting that he was Batman. Then he ran off into the forest saying he was going to bring justice to the wild.

  I knew we were a tough class to teach, but that’s a bit extreme!

  2:00 a.m. Right. Am back in bed. That was … well, it was terrifying, frankly. That’s what it was.

  I’ll explain. I was playing some Runespell earlier tonight. (With my headphones on. It was way past lights-out, and if Mom knew she’d kill me.)

  Charlie, Calvin, and Aren were playing as well. We’d formed an adventurers’ guild in the game, and we were currently trying to raise money to buy an inn.

  I had my back to the window. The moon was bright, and I hadn’t closed my curtains.

  I sensed something moving on the wall above my computer. I glanced up and saw a huge shadow, a ravening beast with jaws wide open and clawed hands ready to strike.

  Look, I’m not ashamed to say it—well, I am, really, but you would do the same—I shrieked.

  I whirled around, but there was no ten-foot-tall monster standing on my windowsill. In fact, there was nothing.

  I moved slowly over to the window and peered out. The moon was high in the night sky, shining through the huge birch tree in our front yard. I squinted until I finally spotted what had caused the shadow.

  Anti-Snuffles.

  He was moving slowly along the tree branches, arms out in front of him like a human deadbeat. It was his shadow that played across my wall, stretched out and grotesque.

  I looked farther along the branch and saw an owl perched in the tree. It hadn’t heard Anti-Snuffles, and the zombie hamster was only a few feet away.

  I opened the window, and the noise startled the owl. It looked quickly around, saw Anti-Snuffles, gave an angry hoot, then took quickly to the air.

  Anti-Snuffles whirled around to face me.

  If this was an old ’70s movie, the camera would do a fast zoom toward his face at this point, taking in his angry glare, his snarling mouth, his evil eyes.

  He chattered at me, and it sounded like he was telling me off.

  Then he jumped from the high tree branch and did a belly flop in the snow. He lay there for a few long moments, then got to his feet, gave himself a little shake, and headed off along the sidewalk.

  But he wasn’t getting away again.

  I dashed back to my computer, pulled up a chat window, and typed, “Snuffles sighted. Get bikes and meet me on the corner.” I’d already told Calvin and Aren what had happened with Snuffles, so they knew what I was talking about.

  I pulled on my clothes and slipped out into the hallway. I could hear Dad mumbling away to himself in his office along the hall. (I say office, but it’s a converted laundry room. Tiny.)

  I snuck downstairs, then went through the kitchen, and out the side door into the garage. I grabbed my BMX and headed toward the street. As I got to the sidewalk, Charlie shot out of her drive, almost crashing into me. Up ahead, I saw Aren and Calvin pulling out of their driveways as well. It’s handy, all of us living on the same street, especially when we need to meet in the middle of the night to chase zombie hamsters.

  Charlie and I veered out onto the road and pedaled hard. We lived in a quiet neighborhood, so there was no danger of cars. Aren and Calvin rode out to join us.

  “Where is he?” asked Aren, moving close so I could hear him.

  I had been wondering that very thing. Finally, I saw a flash of movement off to our left. Sure enough, Anti-Snuffles was running into a side street.

  “There!”

  We swerved into the street to follow. Anti-Snuffles glanced back and chirped angrily at us. He was really fast for a dead hamster. He darted around the side of a house, forcing us to pedal faster and come back onto the street from the other side.

  We caught sight of him dashing across the road.

  “He’s heading for the park!” shouted Charlie.

  We put as much speed into it as we could. The cold wind buffeted my face as we flashed past the metal gates and pedaled along the empty sidewalks.

  He led us on a good chase, I’ll give him that, drawing us beyond the park and into the woods. He was using the trees now, leaping from trunk to trunk, branch to branch, a little shadow that vanished briefly only to reappear farther ahead.

  The moon shone down through the spindly branches, so bright it cast shadows.

  We lost sight of Anti-Snuffles about five minutes later.

  We skidded to a halt in a small clearing. The trees hemmed us in on all sides.

  “Any sign of him?” asked Aren.

  “You’ll know when I see him,” said Calvin. “Because I’ll definitely be screaming.”

  I swallowed nervously. In the infamous words of Han Solo, I had a bad feeling about this.

  Charlie spotted the squirrel first. It popped its head around a tree trunk and stared at us. At least, I think it stared at us. It was in shadow, so it was kind of hard to see. But a second later another head appeared, then another, and another.

  I looked slowly around to see hundreds of squirrels staring down at us, still and silent.

  “Are they—are they all deadbeats?” whispered Charlie.

  I studied the squirrels with growing horror. The stillness, the glinting of moonlight on tiny eyes. Were they? Were we about to be attacked by a horde of deadbeat squirrels? What an embarrassing way to go.

  There was a scuffling of leaves. We all turned to see Anti-Snuffles approaching along the path, his shadow stretching ahead of him as he came closer.

  “Guys?” whispered Calvin. “Shouldn’t we leave? Like, really quickly?”

  “I think Calvin has a point,” said Aren, his voice shaking slightly. “A very good point, actually.”

  I looked at Charlie. She looked back.

  Then we screamed and yanked our bikes around, pedaling faster than any of us had ever pedaled in our lives.

  Everyone peeled off into their driveways as we drew level with their houses. I was the last, riding on my own along the street. I stashed my bike, ran as quietly as I could up the stairs, and jumped beneath the covers of my bed, making sure not a single piece of my body was exposed.

  Scary.

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 9

  It’s been eleven days since the creation of Anti-Snuffles, and after the events of last night I realized that things are escalating. Anti-Snuffles isn’t content to just live out his life as a deadbeat hamster. No, he’s turning other creatures. And not just squirrels, it seems. (As if hordes of deadbeat squirrels isn’t terrifying enough.)

  I saw this newspaper article today.
>
  MISSING PETS MYSTERY

  Residents of Edenvale are growing more and more concerned about household pets mysteriously vanishing.

  “My little Snookums was only out in the yard for two minutes,” said Mrs. Wilson, 64, “and when I went outside again he was gone. Vamoosed.”

  Many pets have disappeared. Anonymous police sources say tiny footprints have been found in the snow at the scenes of the incidents.

  There was more, but I had read enough. It’s pretty clear what’s happening: Anti-Snuffles! He has become my nemesis. My Lex Luthor. My Joker. And it’s getting serious. If he’s recruiting other pets to his little army, we’re going to have an outbreak of animal zombieitis inside the walls of Edenvale.

  And guess who’ll get the blame for that?

  I have to put a stop to it.

  But how? I have no idea where Anti-Snuffles is. In the park somewhere? I don’t think so, because people walk through the woods during the day. He’d be spotted. No, he has to be somewhere else.

  I needed to get the gang together, because these types of things are best done in groups. The Hardy Boys. Harry Potter and his friends. The Famous Five.

  What can we call ourselves? The Famous Four? No. Too similar. The Furious Four? Sounds a bit angry. The Fantastic Four? No. Don’t want to get sued.

  The Four Stooges? (No.) The Four Musketeers? The Four Amigos? The Magnificent Four? What about losing the number altogether?

  The Eradicators. Hmm. That’s not bad. I’m sure Charlie will have a problem with it, though. She’ll say it’s too violent or something, which is a bit rich coming from someone so handy with her fists.

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 10

  Got the gang to come around. Spent an hour arguing over names. Charlie has made a list of possibles. Her number one choice is the Liberators. She also suggested the Fabulous Four and the Illuminators.

  Terrible, all of them.

  Calvin suggested Mystery Inc. But again, we had to explain to him about being sued.