Then I heard a girl’s voice from far in the distance. “STOP IT!” the voice yelled.
Dad froze over me, like he was trapped in a photograph. Maison had shown me photographs, how they capture an instant. All the zombies stopped moving, photograph-still.
For a moment I was still as they were. But it was only from shock, because then I realized I was blinking, so I could move. My heart was pounding. Maison pushed out of the zombie swarm that had surrounded her, and the swarm stayed as frozen as ever. She grabbed my stone sword where it had fallen on the ground.
“Stevie!” she said. “Are you okay?”
She was next to me, grabbing me under my arms, pulling me up to my feet. I couldn’t stop looking at Dad, at his diamond sword in his hand. The moans of zombies could be heard in the distance, but not anywhere close to us. The streets around us had grown eerily silent.
“Stevie, let’s go!” Maison said.
I was looking at Dad, at his green skin and blank stare. Then my eyes wandered to the diamond sword.
I couldn’t just leave it here. He might be able to hurt other people with it. And in the mind-set he was in now, he might even accidentally nick himself. That sword was sharp.
And if I had that diamond sword, maybe I could …
My hand inched toward it. Dad didn’t respond. My hand got closer. Was he going to unfreeze the second I touched the sword handle? What if getting this close made him snap back to reality and he attacked me again?
Maison didn’t want to take any chances. “Stevie, run!” she shrilled, blaring in my ears.
I snatched the diamond sword out of Dad’s hand. He didn’t react and the sword moved easily into my grasp, letting me feel the weight of it. The responsibility of it.
I turned to Maison and the two of us bolted from the village. Behind us, we could hear the zombies, and before us, we could see only darkness.
CHAPTER 11
EVEN THOUGH WE RAN AS FAST AS WE COULD, IT was the longest trip back from the village ever. Dad’s diamond sword was glinting blue in my hand, and I kept thinking, We’re doomed, we’re trapped, it’s all over for us now. My ears were straining, trying to pick up the sound of any mobs that might be nearby. But as we got farther from the village, all I could hear was the sound of our pounding feet and the gasping of our breaths.
Then the tree house came into view, standing guard over the landscape like a fort. That meant the house wasn’t much farther. And what was I going to do there? Grab my cat Ossie and move out into Maison’s world, because that was the only option I had left? Because the Overworld was destroyed and no one could save it?
Now I got why Maison had been so scared. I thought those cyberbullies were just people typing mean things from anywhere. I didn’t realize they could actually affect anyone’s personal life.
Finally I could see the house ahead! The torches were lit out front to protect us from mobs spawning, and Maison and I basically collapsed on the floor once we got inside the house, totally out of breath. Ossie, who was unaware of the world falling apart, came over to us, purring.
I dropped Dad’s sword to the floor and covered my face with my hands, shaking and rocking to myself.
Meanwhile, Maison seized one of Dad’s thick books from off the wall and threw it down on the crafting table, turning pages as fast as she could. “Stevie!” she said. “We have to turn the zombie villagers back into humans!”
“There’s no point,” I heard myself mumble.
She looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you were right,” I said. “I should have listened to you from the beginning. I thought mean words on the computer weren’t anything compared to mobs, but look …”
“Neither one of us ever could have expected this,” she said. “But now we’re the Overworld’s only hope.”
“No, the Overworld has no hope!” I snapped. “Don’t you get it? So what if we turn the villagers back? TheVampireDragon555 will keep it night and keep making zombies. How do we fight against that?”
“There’s got to be a way,” Maison said earnestly. “What if we make enough potions to turn your dad and a few other people back? Then they can help us fight.”
I shook my head. “My dad just tried to attack me with a sword,” I said. “He’s one of them now. He’s not like people from your world who can keep their mind.”
“And that’s why we need a potion to change them back!” she insisted. “What’s it called? The Potion of …”
There were a lot of potions Dad had been trying to drill into my head. The Potion of Night Vision. The Potion of Slowness. The Potion of Swiftness. “The Potion of Weakness,” I said.
“The Potion of Weakness.” She flipped harder through the pages. “What goes into it?”
“Oh … uh … uh …” I racked my brain. “Well, first you need to … uh …” Jeez, Stevie, you should know this! “You need to make three glass bottles on the crafting table and put water in them.”
“Okay, that sounds easy.”
“Next you create a brewing stand. So you get a blaze rod and some cobblestones for that. Then you have to ferment a spider eye. You ferment a spider eye with a mushroom and … and … Oh, I don’t remember!”
Maison flipped through and found the right page. As she ran her finger under the words, she said, “You ferment the spider eye with a mushroom and sugar and then you brew it. For the last piece, you need some gunpowder. Do you have supplies like that here?”
One good thing about Dad: he kept tons of things in storage.
“We’ll have at least some of all those things,” I said. “But I don’t know if we have enough to change the whole village back.”
Maison kept reading. “It says here that the Potion of Weakness by itself isn’t enough to change a zombie villager back into a villager. You also have to give them each a golden apple. For each golden apple, you need one apple and nine golden nuggets.”
I hit my hand hard against the floor. We definitely didn’t have enough gold or enough apples to make this work. We’d only be able to save a few people. And despite what Maison thought, I was convinced that even this wouldn’t do much good. As soon as we saved someone, TheVampireDragon555 would probably pop up out of nowhere and order more zombies to sic us.
“Then we’ll just need to get more gold and apples,” Maison said. “Where are the closest apple trees around here?”
“Apples don’t grow on apple trees,” I said.
“Of course they do,” she said. “That’s why they’re apple trees.”
“No,” I said. “Apples come from oak trees in the Overworld, remember?” We’d been over this before when Maison showed me the apple tree in her yard and I told her it was weird that apples grew on apple trees. She’d told me it was weird that in my world apples didn’t grow on apple trees.
“There’s one oak tree that I used to get wood for the tree house, but my dad and I already picked most of the apples from it,” I said. “And my dad has some gold, but if we want more, we’d have to go mining, and then who knows if we’d find any? Plus, if each zombie villager needs eight golden nuggets just so we can make a golden apple, then …”
I tried doing some math in my head. I didn’t like the big numbers I was coming up with.
“I think we need to go to the portal and get out of here,” I said.
“No!” Maison said. “We’ve done this before. We can do it again.”
“That was different!” I said. “We were fighting zombies in the school. Just regular zombies! Not zombies that obey orders, not human zombies that give orders! We weren’t in eternal night, and we weren’t in a world where you can make more zombies appear by coding!”
Maison watched my outburst, stunned. “You’re just going to give up?” she said in shock.
I looked at the floor because it was better than looking at the hurt in her eyes. “I don’t want to give up,” I said. “But I don’t know what choice we have.”
Right then, there was a heavy k
nocking on the door.
CHAPTER 12
MY HEAD JERKED UP. BOTH MAISON AND I stared at the door, frozen. Had TheVampireDragon555 found us?
“Please, open up!” called a weak, cracking voice. “Please!”
Maison and I looked at each other in disbelief. I picked up the diamond sword. Grabbing her stone sword, Maison inched closer to the door, her weapon poised in case she needed it. The person was still pounding at the door. Hesitantly, Maison pressed the button for the door to open, and there stood Destiny.
“You!” Maison said, eyes flashing.
“Please, I want to help you,” Destiny said. Her voice still croaked a little, like a zombie’s hiss was trying to take over her normal voice.
“Likely story,” Maison said, and began to close the door.
“Wait!” Destiny put her hand in the doorway to stop it. “Give me a chance. I can explain everything.”
Destiny looked at me as if I would defend her from Maison. But I wasn’t buying it, either. I thought Destiny had a lot of nerve showing up here after everything.
“You’re the one who helped TheVampireDragon555 break into the Overworld!” I said.
She put her head down. “Yes,” she said softly. “I did. But I didn’t know that it would go this far.”
“How far did you expect it to go?” Maison demanded. “I saw the nasty things you wrote about me online. All the threats. Saying you were going to come and get me? You can’t just show up and play innocent!”
Destiny bit at the edges of her fingers. No, actually, she was biting the nails on them, as if they were some kind of food. Did zombies from Maison’s world eat their own fingers? There were blotches of black on her nails, which must have been some other weird thing that happened to zombies from Maison’s world.
“I’m sorry,” Destiny said. “If you can just let me in …”
“Why?” Maison said. “So you can bite us and turn us into zombies?”
The room was so tense you could have cut the air with a knife. That’s when Ossie, who Dad always said was an excellent judge of character, strolled over to Destiny and began to rub against her legs, purring. I couldn’t believe it. Maison couldn’t believe it, either.
“Ossie, no!” I said, wanting the silly cat to back away. I’d already lost my world and my dad; I didn’t need Destiny hurting my cat, too. I winced when Destiny reached down, but all she did was pick Ossie up and cradle her, rubbing the cat under the chin so that she purred extra, extra hard.
“I want to help you turn the villagers back and stop TheVampireDragon555,” Destiny said. “He’s not the only one who can order the zombies around. I was the one who ordered them off you so you could escape from the village.”
CHAPTER 13
THE ONLY SOUND IN THE ROOM WAS OSSIE’S LOUD purring. Maison and I were gaping.
Of course! I thought. The girl’s voice in the distance. The way the zombies all froze. Dad had had his sword mid-air, ready to use it, so there had to have been a logical reason for why he had stopped. It wasn’t because he’d recognized me—he was too far gone to recognize me.
However, Maison wasn’t won over so quickly.
“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” she wanted to know.
“I did hear a voice,” I told Maison.
“Do you know for sure it was her voice?” Maison asked.
I shook my head. It had been too far away for me to tell if it had that distinctive crack to it. But who else would have been able to order zombies around? What Destiny said made sense.
“Look, I’ll come clean, I’ll tell you everything,” Destiny said.
“All right,” Maison said, testy. “For starters, why do you hate me?”
Destiny sucked in air as if those words had knocked the wind out of her. I could tell she wasn’t ready for that question, though I thought it was a pretty reasonable question for Maison to ask.
“I don’t … I don’t hate you,” Destiny said, looking at Ossie instead of Maison.
Maison snorted.
“I wanted to be you,” Destiny said. “I saw how much the other kids picked on you at the beginning of the school year. They picked on me, too. I always eat alone at lunch. No one wants to pick me to be their partner for class projects. Someone wrote nasty things about me on the walls in the girls’ bathroom and the school didn’t care. They just told me it could have been about the word ‘destiny’ and I shouldn’t point fingers at people.”
Destiny sighed. “It probably sounds dumb, but I almost felt like we had an invisible friendship because we were both alone. I saw the boys bugging you, and it was a relief because it got them off my back. I’d look at you alone in the cafeteria and you’d always be working on something, like a little house or a science project. I knew you must have felt lonely, but you were doing the best you could in a bad situation. I kept promising myself one day I would talk to you, though I was too scared and it never happened. I even wrote some notes to pass over to you, but I couldn’t even get up the courage to pass them.”
I looked over at Maison. Her dark eyes were unreadable, yet she wasn’t clutching her sword as hard.
“I noticed you were into Minecraft,” Destiny went on. “I am, too. Then one day I was in the auditorium for an assembly on safety, and all these zombies and large spiders showed up. They looked just like the mobs in Minecraft! You were there, too, Stevie. Then you two led the school in a fight against the mobs, and the next thing I knew, Maison was a hero. She was all over the news. People wanted to interview her. She won awards from the city. Bullies stopped teasing her. She was the hero of the school, and I was still … forgotten.”
“I don’t see what this—” Maison began.
“No, you wouldn’t,” Destiny interrupted. “I was thinking that you must have noticed that I was alone, too, so now that you were popular, you’d let me hang out and I wouldn’t have to be a loner anymore. Because you know what it feels like to be pushed around and ignored. But you never even glanced at me. Ever.
“I went home one night and cried,” she continued. “My cousin was over visiting and when I told him what happened, he wanted to know more. He was already obsessed with you, Maison. He knew about you from the news and he was excited to learn my connection to you. He’s been trolling people for years, and he got stuck on you because he thought you were the key to finding out where all the zombies had come from—”
“Wait,” I interrupted her. “What’s trolling?” That was a word I kept hearing and I didn’t know what it meant.
“It’s when you say and do things on purpose to hurt people’s feelings online,” Destiny said. “My cousin has made a real, uh, hobby out of it. He started showing me how to do it. You just make up an online name and you can say or do whatever you want. At first I really enjoyed it! I shouldn’t have said those things about you, Maison, but they felt good to say at the time. They made me feel powerful, like no one could stop me. And no one knew what I was doing online, so no one could stop me!”
She licked her green, chapped lips. “But my cousin wanted more. He told me it would be really funny if he could hack into your e-mail. He thought he might find some embarrassing stuff on you there. I found your home address at the school and talked your mom into letting me in your room. I was in and out in a few minutes. I gave your information to my cousin, and the next time I saw him, he was super excited. He said, ‘In your wildest dreams, you wouldn’t believe what I found.’”
“The portal,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said. “I didn’t believe it, but then he brought me here with him. He showed me around. At first, he was just planning to do some griefing. He loves griefing people when they play Minecraft.”
“Griefing?” I asked.
“Messing up their games,” Destiny explained. “Then he started playing around with codes and realized he could make things happen in the Overworld. Like spawning his own zombies. Or changing the world to night. He told me we were going to come in and mess around with you guys.
But then he turned it night and released zombies on the village. I kept telling him this was wrong, but he said we were just getting started.”
“I don’t know,” Maison said. “How do we know you’re not a double agent?”
“Double agent?” I repeated. They were using a lot of terms I didn’t know.
“That means she’s really helping out TheVampireDragon555, and she’s only pretending to be our friend,” Maison said. “She’s going to tell sad stories for us to feel sorry for her, then she’s going to get information out of us and take it back to TheVampireDragon555.”
I hadn’t thought of that, but I realized Maison made a good point. Now I didn’t know what to believe.
“You said that TheVampireDragon555 is your cousin, right?” Maison said. “So you’d support him over us.”
Destiny shook her head. “He’s my cousin, but we’ve never been friends. He’s always been mean. He thinks it’s funny to upset other people. When I was saying those mean things online, it made me feel powerful and safe, but I never thought it was funny. He writes mean things and laughs.”
I thought about TheVampireDragon555’s cruel laughter. Even though Destiny and TheVampireDragon555 had both started out harassing Maison online the same way, I could see they were both very different people.
But I didn’t have long to think. Because then we all heard the sound of zombies moaning.
CHAPTER 14
OUTSIDE, ZOMBIES WERE LURCHING TOWARD US! WE were being so foolish, leaving the door open like that while we talked. Maison was right, Destiny was a double agent who’d led a whole village of zombies after us! Destiny turned and yelled at them, “Go away!”
Then I saw there were only three zombies, and they were regular zombies, not zombie villagers.
The zombies stopped. Then they turned and shuffled away, back into the night.
“Oh … my … gosh,” Maison said.
So she wasn’t a double agent? “Wait,” I said. “Does this mean that we can just take you back to the village and you can order all the zombies to stop attacking us?”
Attack on the Overworld Page 4