Creature Keepers and the Burgled Blizzard-Bristles

by Peter Nelson

  Dedication

  To my brother Sean, who found himself

  on the mountaintop, then found the strength

  to come back down—P. N.

  To my amazing, wonderful sister-in-law, Natalia,

  thank you for keeping our family so strong

  (Oh, and tell your daughter to put down

  Percy Jackson and start reading this!)—R. R.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Jordan Grimsley dragged his feet down the empty street, passing the identical little houses baking in the midafternoon sun. It was another scorching-hot August day in South Florida, and a horrible time to be outdoors. Jordan breathed in the thick, muggy air as he trudged along, his shirt soaked with sweat. There wasn’t a single person—or creature—anywhere out here. Jordan was completely alone in the middle of a full-blown heat wave.

  Jordan enjoyed these walks. The soupy air of the Okeeyuckachokee Swamp that hung heavy over his little dead-end street helped him to think. On this day, he was imagining the work it must have taken his grandfather to transform this little sliver of swampland into a neighborhood for old folks. It had been cut back and paved over, then covered with perfect little lawns and houses. Jordan smiled. The Eternal Acres retirement community was a lovely place to live. But beneath it all was still a wild and untamed swamp. In a way, all of this was just a disguise.

  Jordan thought about the other amazing thing his Grampa Grimsley had created within this swamp. The Creature Keepers were a secret organization that kept the world’s undiscovered creatures undiscovered. Each cryptid had its own Keeper who lived with and cared for it. And each of those Keepers lived by a solemn vow: to help, hide, and hoax, in order to protect his or her creature.

  As a young man traveling the world, George Grimsley had come across his very first cryptid quite by accident. He was lucky enough to have his camera with him, and he was luckier still to snap a picture of the strange beast. Hoping for wealth and fame, young George Grimsley sold the photograph, exposing that creature to the world. The Chupacabra, as it became known, was feared and despised by the people of North America, and soon chased and hunted all over the world. George Grimsley grew to regret what he had done to this innocent creature. He realized Chupacabra would have been better left undiscovered. And so he made it his life’s work to hide and protect as many cryptids as he could find. All accepted his help but one—the Chupacabra never forgave George Grimsley.

  Standing alone on the steamy sidewalk, Jordan wondered not for the first time how his grandfather could have possibly done all of this on his own. In less than a year, Jordan and his sister had met the Loch Ness Monster, the Sasquatch, the Giant Desert Jackalope, and the Brazilian Mapinguari, just to name a few. All of these cryptids and many more had been tracked down by his Grampa Grimsley, then befriended and persuaded to accept the protection of the Creature Keepers. Jordan knew some of these creatures personally. They could be quite stubborn. So how did his grandfather do this all by himself?

  As the blazing sun scorched his face, a cold realization sank in—there was a lot Jordan didn’t know about his grandfather, and that wasn’t likely to change. His Grampa Grimsley had met a terrible fate in this very swamp, in the form of a very large and very hungry alligator. All of his research and his many journals were lost in a massive flood that destroyed the original Creature Keeper lair deep in the Okeeyuckachokee, a flood that Jordan himself had had a hand in, and still felt quite awful about. The only thing left behind was a single journal of Grampa Grimsley’s, which Jordan kept with him at all times. He’d read it backward and forward. Unfortunately, it posed more questions about his grandfather’s mysterious life than it answered.

  Jordan closed his eyes. The late summer air was like a fluffy blanket, muffling the sounds around him—the chirps of a bird overhead, the purr of a lawnmower down the block, a droning baseball game from a television inside one of the houses across the street.

  Skreeeee!

  A sound squealed inside his ear, startling him. It was followed by a voice he found equally irritating—that of his sister, Abbie.

  “Yo, dorkface. Where are you? They’re ready for us. Get back here.” The tiny transmitter inside Jordan’s ear squealed again, then went silent. Jordan looked down the dead-end street. Sitting grandly where the perfect little lawns of Eternal Acres ended and the wild Okeeyuckachokee Swamp began, the beautifully restored retirement home looked like a great dam holding back the vast, tangled wildness that stretched out for miles and miles beyond it. Jordan took another deep, cottony breath of the muggy air, then headed toward his Grampa Grimsley’s enormous house.

  An air-conditioned blast sent a raw chill straight through Jordan’s damp shirt as he stepped inside. He passed the living room, nodding to the wrinkly old residents—all current or former Creature Keepers—sitting around sipping lemonade, playing cards, and watching television. Each one of them wore hearing aids very similar to the transmitter in Jordan’s ear, and they all returned his nods with disapproving glares. Jordan kept moving but spoke softly out of the side of his mouth.

  “Okay, okay, I’m heading down now.” His voice crackled inside the ear of each of the old-timers staring at him. “You can all stop giving me the stink eye and instead maybe give me a position on Poppa Bear and Momma Bea—”

  “Well, there you are!” Jordan’s mother bellowed with delight as she stepped out in front of him. Throughout the living room, the elderly retired Keepers all yanked out their transmitters as Mrs. Grimsley’s voice squealed in their ears. She’d emerged from one of the many bedrooms that lined the long hallway with a big grin on her face. Jordan heard an old man’s voice whisper in his earpiece, “Momma Bear, twelve o’clock.”

  “Yes, I can see that!” Jordan hollered back toward the living room.

  Mrs. Grimsley glanced around. “See what, sweetie? Are you feeling all right?”

  Jordan’s mother was a slightly messy woman, especially when she was in her fixer-upper mode, which was nearly always. Today she wore an apron and a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves. She pulled one glove off with a snap and felt Jordan’s sweaty brow. “You must be delirious. You’ve been walking around in this beastly weather again, haven’t you? Your father’s looking for you with his clipboard of to-do’s. Did you replace the batteries in Mrs. Rooney’s hearing aid like he asked?”

  “Did it this morning, Mom.”

  “Thank you.” She smiled at him. “It’s so wonderful how my adorable little Einstein invented those clever hearing aids for all of our residents!” She thought for a second. “Although it was strange how everyone’s hearing seemed to go at t
he same time. . . .”

  “Yeah, well. You know old people. Stuff just starts going wrong all over the place. Probably why they get so grumpy—and impatient.”

  Skreeee! Jordan’s earpiece suddenly rang in his ear, followed by whispers and grunts of disapproval. “Speak for yourself, sonny!” “I’ll show you what grumpy looks like, you whippersnapper!”

  Jordan smirked back at the scowling old folk, then peered down the long hallway. At the opposite end, his sister, Abbie, stood just inside the kitchen. She looked angry with him, which was nothing new. Jordan turned his attention back to his mother. “Mom, I need to do something now. In the kitchen. So—”

  “Good!” She began following him. “I’ll get you a cold pack for your head. I can’t have my adorable little Einstein frying that cute little brain of his!”

  An elderly woman suddenly leaped out of the next room and threw her arms up dramatically as she flopped at Mrs. Grimsley’s feet. “Goodness gracious!” she cried. “I seem to have fallen and I don’t even know why!”

  Mrs. Grimsley bent down to help. “Mrs. Rooney! Are you all right?”

  The old woman rolled around on the floor, but winked at Jordan as she gestured for him to keep moving down the hall. Jordan moved quickly away from his mother, straight for his sister, who was still waiting by the kitchen door.

  “Nice of you to finally show up,” Abbie said.

  Even though Jordan was twelve and Abbie just two years older, she somehow always knew exactly the right thing to say to make him feel like a preschooler. “Go on,” she said, opening the basement door and following him down the dark staircase. “You’ve made us late enough.”

  The Grimsley siblings walked straight past all the usual basementy stuff, up to a large, rusty old water heater in the corner. There was a keypad on it, and Jordan punched in a code. The metal shell of the water heater spun around, sliding open to reveal an empty chamber, just like an elevator car. In fact, it was an elevator car. Jordan and his sister stepped inside and the door slid closed behind them. They whooshed down, deep beneath the house, until the secret elevator came to a stop and the door slid open again.

  Jordan and Abbie stepped into a large, bright, cavernous room buzzing with activity. Elderly people everywhere were busily manning computer terminals, studying charts, and reading digital maps. Every one of them wore an ill-fitting uniform and seemed to be doing very important work. A large screen on the far wall showed a map of the world with various dots at points around the globe. A group of elderly technicians stared intently at the dots on the map, discussing their movement and positions.

  “Well, well,” a voice boomed from the center of the floor. A plump old woman stepped forwarded holding a #1 Boss coffee mug in one hand and a stopwatch in the other. “Look who finally found his way to the Creature Keepers central command—our own adorable little Einstein!”

  The technicians giggled and snickered. They all wore the same earpieces as the undercover Keeper crew upstairs.

  “Y’know,” Jordan said, pulling the tiny transmitter out of his ear, “sometimes I wish I hadn’t invented these things.”

  2

  Doris was anything but the typical little old lady in charge of an underground global command-and-support creature-protection center. She had a history with Grampa Grimsley and was probably the last person to see him alive. Because of this, she shared a special bond with Jordan. Of course, that bond didn’t keep her from letting Jordan know when she wasn’t pleased with him.

  “You must have a load of bricks in your britches!” Doris shoved her stopwatch in Jordan’s face. “You call that a response time? I’ve seen Ed move faster—and he’s got seriously swollen bunions!”

  Ed, a balding man with a #2 Boss coffee mug, leaned over and whispered to her. “Doris, I told you about my bunions in confidence.”

  Like the Keepers out in the field all over the world who lived with their creatures, Doris, Ed, and the rest of the Creature Keeper Command Center support crew were, until recently, very young—kept at Jordan’s age by drinking an elixir derived from the Fountain of Youth. But that all came to a sudden and frightening halt when an enemy of the Creature Keepers, Señor Areck Gusto, cruelly exposed them to the Puddle of Ripeness—a particularly nasty swamp substance that immediately reversed the elixir’s effects, painfully returning them to their proper ages. This unfortunate event was also partly Jordan’s fault. Which was another thing he still felt awful about.

  “Blame Jordan,” Abbie said, nodding toward her brother. “He’s the reason we were late getting down here. He was on one of his heat-wave walkabouts again.”

  Jordan ignored them both and pointed at the great blinking map on the back wall. “How’s the search going, Doris? Any sign of that slimy goatsucker?”

  Jordan was referring to Chupacabra, his long lost grandfather’s archenemy. Not only had the evil cryptid recently resurfaced, but Jordan had made a shocking discovery the last time they met, when it was revealed that Chupacabra and Señor Areck Gusto were one and the same.

  Disguised as Gusto, Chupacabra had been able to maneuver back and forth between the cryptid and human worlds. He was responsible for flooding the Creature Keepers’ underground lair and destroying the Fountain of Youth elixir that kept the Keepers young. But worst of all, he’d managed to steal the powers from two of the three most special cryptids under the Creature Keepers’ protection.

  Of all the cryptids known to the Creature Keepers, there were three who each possessed a sacred, elemental power—and Chupacabra had found a way to tap into not just one, but two of them. First he hatched a successful plot to kidnap the Loch Ness Monster. Once she was captured, he cruelly hijacked her water-controlling Hydro-Hide. Soon after, he pulled off an equally diabolical scheme to steal Syd the Sasquatch’s Soil-Soles, snatching for himself the power to manipulate earth and split solid rock.

  Thanks to Jordan and Abbie, the CKCC was able to rescue Nessie. And while she had lost her Hydro-Hide to Chupacabra, she had begun to grow back her coat of extraordinary scales—and with it, her control over the world’s lakes and oceans. Jordan and Abbie were also successful in reclaiming one of Syd’s two Soil-Soles. This was shortly before they torched Chupacabra with a massive jet thruster, blasting his charred body clear across the Great White North—which Jordan did not feel awful about in the least.

  Doris turned back to the big map on the wall. The Global Cryptid Positioning System, or GCPS, was Jordan’s greatest contribution to the command center. Electronic devices were distributed to each and every cryptid under Creature Keeper protection. These tracking bracelets were worn on ankles, tails, claws, fins—wherever they could be attached. Once installed and activated, each one emitted a signal that showed up on the big map. From inside the secret bunker beneath Eternal Acres, Doris and her crew could track any cryptid’s whereabouts, anywhere in the world.

  Chupacabra had unknowingly swallowed one of the tracking bracelets before being blasted across the sky. But mysteriously, almost immediately after being violently jettisoned toward the Arctic Circle, the signal had gone dead.

  Doris pointed to a dim light on the map, near the center of Asia. “This can’t be right, but we have picked up a very faint signal coming from the barren Xinjiang territory of China, just south of the Gobi Desert.”

  “No way Chupacabra is still alive,” Abbie said. “We flash-fried that corn dog. Must be a glitch in your software, Einstein.”

  Jordan peered up at the dim light on the map. He knew his tracking technology was glitch-free. But Abbie and Doris were right. Even Chupacabra couldn’t have survived a blast like that. Even if he had, Jordan found it hard to believe that Chupacabra could then make his way from wherever he crash-landed in northern Canada all the way to the no-man’s-land of central China.

  SMASH! A far wall suddenly crumbled as a pair of gigantic antlers broke through from the other side. A large, dazed-looking Desert Jackalope poked its fluffy bunny head into the chamber and stood there panting like an over
sized Labradoodle.

  Then again, Jordan suddenly remembered, next to impossible seemed to happen a lot since he’d become an honorary Creature Keeper.

  Riding atop Peggy was a kid in a crisp uniform that included a well-ironed sash festooned with tiny, sewn-on merit patches. “Great job, Peggy,” he said, sliding off her back. “That new addition will make a great snack lounge. Maybe my alter ego, C. E. Noodlepen, can release a little more of George Grimsley’s savings to spring for a Ping-Pong table!” He patted Peggy on the nose. “Take a carrot break, girl. You earned it.”

  Peggy curled up in a corner as the boy approached the others. “Sorry I’m late, everyone,” he said, straightening his bolo tie and adjusting his hat.

  Eldon Pecone was a First-Class Badger Ranger and Chief Creature Keeper. Jordan’s grandfather had left him in charge, along with a small inheritance that he could access under the guise of fake-lawyer C. E. Noodlepen. With Mr. Noodlepen’s financial help, Jordan’s technological know-how, and Doris overseeing every detail, Creature Keeper Command Center was finally operating as if it were in the twenty-first century. Eldon was happy for all the changes, but didn’t understand any of it. He’d earned Badger Badges for everything from Aardvark Trapping to Zinc Mining. But he couldn’t tell a hard drive from a hatbox.

  Eldon pointed to the digital map on the wall. “So if I’m to understand correctly, that blinky thingy on that electrical wall map represents one of Jordan’s tracking doohickeys, which was last known to be inside of Chupacabra’s belly.”

  “That’s right, dearie,” Doris said. “More or less.”

  “So since it’s popped up again, that means Jordan’s whatchamajiggy survived.”

  “And moved,” Abbie added. “About three thousand miles.”

  “Not by itself,” Jordan said. They all exchanged worried glances. “Doris, has the signal moved since it popped up in China?”

  Ed spoke up. “Negative. We’ve been watching it very closely. It reappeared and hasn’t moved an inch.”