Monsters Unleashed #2

by John Kloepfer

  “We’ll be done soon, Grams. You don’t have to worry about us,” Quincy told her.

  “Okay, as long as it’s for school,” she said and stopped in the doorway for a second. “I hope you all get an A.” Then she walked out.

  Freddie let out a long sigh of relief.

  “Your grandma’s awesome!” Jordan said.

  “Forget about her. Let’s get this party started.” Quincy twisted both hot and cold knobs on high, but only a tiny trickle of water leaked from the showerhead.

  “What’s going on?” Freddie asked. “Why is there no water?”

  Quincy reached up and unscrewed the showerhead. A few droplets of excess water dribbled down his wrist.

  Suddenly, an entomon as big as a king-size candy bar wriggled out of the pipe.

  “Ahhh!” Quincy flinched back and the rest of them took a step away from the shower. The first entomon hit the shower floor, followed by three more, falling in rapid succession. Five, ten, twenty more squeezed out like toothpaste.

  “Oh, ma jeez!” Freddie squealed as the entomons continued to fall. “They’re in the pipes!”

  The bug monsters hit the ceramic bath tiles with a clickety-clack, landing all around Slurp.

  “Slurp!” Freddie yelled. “Look out!”

  The entomons surrounded the brand-new monster and started closing in. Slurp had no way to defend himself, and the entomons were way too big for little Slurp to slurp.

  In a blur of fur, Mungo swooped in and pulled Slurp out of the way as another waterfall of bugs fell out of the pipe.

  “That’s disgusting,” Jordan said, a shiver of revulsion rippling through his entire body. “I’m never showering again.”

  “Now that would be disgusting,” said Nina.

  “It’s like they know we’re here,” said Quincy. “Like they’re targeting us.”

  “Some species can home in on their prey from vast distances,” Trevor informed them. “It’s not uncommon in the insect world.”

  “That’s really fascinating and all,” Freddie said, “but we need to get to water, you guys!”

  Everyone retreated through the bathroom doorway as the thick crunchy insects continued to drop. Freddie slammed the door behind them.

  The kids sprinted downstairs to the kitchen, where Freddie tossed Slurp in the sink. He hit the faucet and a hiss of water spritzed from the nozzle. The water stopped as quickly as it had started. The base of the faucet started to rumble.

  “Whoa, what is that?” Quincy said.

  The faucet rattled louder and louder until the whole thing popped off with a sharp clank. More bugs popped out.

  “AHHH!” shrieked Manny. The entomons were invading from the inside out. “We have to get out of here!” Manny yelled.

  Freddie ran to the kitchen window and looked out. The first rays of daylight peeked over the horizon. “I don’t think we’re going anywhere.”

  An entomon the size of a baby elephant walked down the middle of the street. That’s the biggest one yet, Freddie thought, as it crawled easily over a parked car and crumpled the hood.

  Across the street, another giant entomon crawled out of a manhole. Another scurried out of a drainpipe. Inside, entomons poured out of Quincy’s kitchen sink, skittering up the walls.

  “We’re trapped!” Trevor exclaimed.

  Freddie racked his brain for a plan. How were they supposed to grow Slurp if they couldn’t get to any water? He gazed out at the chaos of the insectomonster infestation. Then he noticed it. The words Go ’Dillos! up in the sky.

  Freddie pointed to the water tower in the distance. “We have to get up there. It’s our only shot at making Slurp big.”

  “But, Freddie, how are we supposed to do that?” Manny asked, looking outside at Quincy’s backyard. It was covered in entomons. Not just covered. Swamped. There were thousands upon thousands of them scurrying over everything.

  “No way we’re going through that,” Nina said. “I’m putting my foot down.” She lifted her foot and stamped it on the ground.

  Splat! The juicy green innards of an entomon squirted from beneath her shoe.

  Freddie was getting an idea. “Quincy, do you have speakers and a microphone or something? Anything that can amplify sound.”

  Quincy’s eyes lit up. “My parents have a karaoke machine in the basement!”

  Quincy ran downstairs and ran back up carrying the microphone and speaker from his parents’ karaoke machine. Freddie tested it and turned up the volume.

  “Let me grab one more thing.” Quincy ran through the hall to the garage, which was connected to the house. When he came back to the kitchen, he was pulling a red wagon.

  “Wait,” Manny said. “So what’s the plan?”

  “We’re gonna put the reech back in Yapzilla’s screech,” Freddie said.

  The kids all gave him a puzzled look.

  “We’re going to amplify Yapzilla’s screech and use it as a kind of shield so we can make it to the water tower.”

  “You’re sure that’s going to work?” Manny asked skeptically.

  “She did it back at the cornfield,” Freddie told them. “It was like a sonic forcefield.”

  “All right then,” Nina said, looking at Yapzilla. “Let’s do this, girl.”

  They all got ready. Jordan straightened the gemstone magnifier on Kraydon’s forehead. While Freddie and Quincy arranged the speakers in the wagon, Oddo and Mungo opened the drawer next to the sink and armed themselves with forks and knives.

  While Freddie finished hooking up the microphone to the speakers, Quincy ran out of the room and came back with a bag of cotton balls. “For our ears,” he said, and passed them out.

  “Wait, how are we going to turn on the speakers unless we have a power source?” Trevor asked.

  “We do have a power source!” Quincy said, nodding at Mega-Q.

  Mega-Q slithered next to the red wagon and charged the speakers with his electric blue current.

  Nina grabbed a shovel and two cans of bug repellent from Quincy’s garage, and Manny chose a metal trash can lid for a shield and a pickax off the wall. Freddie stuck with the lacrosse stick he still had from Trevor’s house. Jordan found a Weedwacker in the corner, and Quincy opted for two tennis rackets. Trevor picked up a rake with a metal head. They were ready to roll.

  Freddie called Yapzilla to come over: “You’re up, Yap!” He gave her the microphone. “When we go outside,” he instructed her, “I want you to shriek as loud as you can nonstop, okay?”

  Yapzilla took the microphone in her talons and nodded. The twin-necked monster preened. Even in the middle of a bug attack, she loved to be the center of attention.

  The kids put the cotton into their ears and gave Yapzilla the signal.

  Without wasting another second, they threw the back door open and rolled the wagon outside into the bug-filled bedlam.

  Yapzilla the double-necked monster screeched into the microphone. The high-pitched shriek was amplified through the speakers. Just as Freddie had predicted, the ear-piercing noise formed a sonic force field. The entomons skittered back, giving the kids a buffer to move through the swarm untouched.

  “You’re doing great, Yap!” Freddie called to her as they fled through Quincy’s backyard and down his driveway.

  Yapzilla held her shrieking opera note, keeping up the sonic force field.

  In the dim light of the sunrise, they made their way across the street. They moved through the thick of the entoswarm until they reached the flat dirt field where the water tower looked over their town.

  At the fringe of Yapzilla’s sonic barrier, the monster bugs’ jaws snapped and snarled. Above the swarm, the original parentomons flew over their army of bug monsters. How long had it been since they’d sprouted wings? How much longer until the entire swarm grew wings, too?

  The kids weren’t waiting around to find out. They were going to stop this infestation once and for all.

  When they reached the water tower, Freddie slipped Slurp into his
pocket and began climbing the metal ladder. “Don’t look down, don’t look down,” he said to himself. But when he reached the top, he looked down at his friends. They seemed so tiny.

  Yapzilla’s screech continued to keep the thick mass of bugs from attacking them. She belted out a high-pitched F sharp into the karaoke microphone.

  While Mega-Q zapped the bugs, Kraydon turned his one-eyed gaze at the oncoming onslaught. Around the perimeter of Yapzilla’s sonic shriek barrier, the wall of stone-frozen entomons rose up. The more bugs Kraydon hit, the taller the stone wall became. The bigger bugs hardened in the wall, looking like gargoyles from another planet.

  Let’s hope they can keep it up until I get down, Freddie thought.

  Freddie reached the top and pulled Slurp out of his pocket. With both hands, he tried to crank open the hatch on the side of the water tank. It wouldn’t budge.

  “It won’t open!” he called down.

  Quickly, Oddo and Mungo scaled the water tower’s ladder and met Freddie at the top. The two of them grabbed the metal valve wheel and tried to turn it. Freddie gave one final twist, and the hatch popped open.

  “You’ll be okay, little buddy!” Freddie tossed Slurp into the open water tower. The little octovarkephant monster made a splash, and Freddie shut the small door.

  He began to climb down with Oddo and Mungo above him. But Freddie soon realized that climbing down was much scarier than climbing up. He forced himself to go slow, but he could tell from the rumble inside the water tower that their monster was growing fast.

  Just then, Freddie felt the ladder jerk. He clung to the ladder as their monster started to outgrow the water tank. The metal banged and dented outward. A loud creak tore through the air, and the whole tower shifted.

  Freddie’s body stiffened with fear.

  “Holy—”

  CRRRRR-ACK!

  13

  The top of the tower exploded, and Slurp’s tentacular snouts burst out. A huge gash zigzagged through the giant metal tank. Water spewed out from the crack and rained down in a flailing puddle.

  “Look out below!” Freddie shouted to his friends. They jumped out of the way as Slurp burst free and hit the entomon-covered ground with a wet thwock.

  A wave of water fell from the sky and spattered onto the front lines of the entomon horde. They started to grow.

  “Oh no!” Quincy shouted as entomons soaked up the water. In a flash of electricity Mega-Q zapped the waterlogged swarm. The electrocuted entomons dropped into a scorched, motionless heap.

  But they weren’t the only thing that was dead: the speakers had shorted out, too. Yapzilla’s screech was drowned out by the sound of the bugs’ creepy chittering.

  The bugs were closing in.

  “C’mon, Slurp! Go get ’em!” Freddie shouted from the ladder.

  The massive octovarkephant stood up to his full height. Slurp let out a voracious elephantine roar that sounded like a humongous trumpet. He was ready for battle.

  Their monster’s huge waggling snouts were like vacuum cleaners, and he began to suck up the entomons with incredible speed.

  We might actually win this thing, Freddie dared to hope as he kept climbing down one rung at a time.

  Just then, the ladder began to shake. Freddie looked down. The entomons were climbing up the unsteady structure, scrabbling straight for him.

  Mungo scampered down, positioning himself on the ladder, getting ready to defend Freddie from the attacking bugs.

  On the ground below, Slurp’s massive tentacles swung across the dirt field, batting away the bigger entomons, sucking up the smaller hordes. One of his eight appendages slammed into the base of the tower and sent a vibration ringing up to the top.

  The water tower lurched like it was going to topple. Freddie whipped to the left, his fingers slipping. He lost his footing and dropped to the next rung, holding on for dear life with one arm.

  Higher up on the same ladder, Oddo reached down and grabbed Freddie by the wrist with one of his furry arms. Freddie hung from the monster’s grasp, looking up. Their eyes met. Oddo looked scared but determined not to let Freddie go.

  The tower creaked loudly and shifted again.

  “Ruh-roh,” Oddo rumbled.

  Everything felt like slow motion as the tower groaned and tipped like a tree going timber. Freddie’s face froze in shock as he dropped into a free fall. He twisted in the air, soaring toward the ground headfirst. He could see Oddo and Mungo skydiving just in front of him. A smattering of entomons speckled the air around them.

  Slurp was directly below them.

  Mungo reached out and ate a bug in midair.

  “Yum yums,” he chirruped, his ears waving in the wind.

  The octovarkephant swiveled his eyes up at the falling threesome: Freddie, Oddo, and Mungo. Slurp extended one of his tentacles toward the sky, and Freddie could see right into the suck hole of its slurping snout.

  Please, don’t slurp me, Slurp, Freddie thought, Slurp, don’t slurp me, please!

  SPLUNK!

  Freddie felt the cushion of the octovarkephant’s smushy trunktacle, breaking his fall. He bounced off the gigantic monster’s tough skin and belly flopped onto the ground. Oddo and Mungo landed on Slurp’s back and slid down to the ground.

  Freddie’s knees hurt, but at least he was in one piece. He hobbled in place for a second and shook off the pain.

  Manny and Jordan raced over to protect Freddie from the swarm.

  Freddie picked up his lacrosse stick and scooped a slew of entomons over his shoulder. Manny, armed with a trash can lid and a pickax, fought off a warthog-size bug. He blocked its snapping jaws with his makeshift shield. The beastly insect’s mandibles clashed against the metal, and Manny slammed the pickax down on the monster bug’s noggin. The ravenous insect’s head caved in and neon-green sludge spurted out. The ferocious creature’s legs collapsed and it went still.

  “Jordan, look out!” Nina shouted and pointed at Jordan’s foot.

  One of the entomons clamped its pincers into the skin of Jordan’s leg. “Yow!” Jordan yipped as a trickle of blood slid down his calf muscle. Jordan swept the bug monster off his leg and stomped it into the ground.

  Slurp trumpeted another roaring elephant shriek and went back to slurping up oodles of entomonsters.

  But some of the bugs were just too big.

  Oddo and Mungo were like two master ninjas taking on a whole mob of street thugs. Mungo body-slammed five entomons in the blink of an eye, and Oddo donkey kicked two entomons in the face while punching another one in the snout with his extra arm.

  On the other side of Slurp, Quincy was fighting, thwapping the bugs to and fro with dual tennis rackets. Mega-Q zipped around his feet. He was like the world’s best bug zapper, electrocuting entomons left and right.

  Trevor jabbed his rake in the face of a massive, snarling entomonster.

  Next to Quincy, Nina stabbed her shovel into a gargantuan entobug, let go of the handle, spun on her heels, and sprayed an incoming flock of little skittering entomons with two cans of Off! that she pulled out of her waistband at the same time. Yapzilla squawked and unleashed two bursts of fire at the chemical spray. Her tongue flickered and she spat a spiral stream of flames. The aerosol spray lit like a torch and scorched the front lines, grilling the entomons to a crisp. The dead bugs blazed in a lime-green flame as their juicy guts burned like gasoline.

  Kraydon shot his spiral gaze through the amplifier. A chunk of bugs solidified, and he clobbered them with his club tail.

  Oddo dropped back into some kind of break-dance move and sent two entomons flying. Mega-Q zapped four more in rapid succession, and Kraydon froze a newly replicated batch before blasting the bug statues to smithereens.

  All the while, Slurp’s colossal tentacles swept across the ground, sucking up the entomons like the nozzles of a massive vacuum cleaner.

  “Come on, you entofreaks! Come and get some!” Jordan pulled the ripcord on the Weedwacker and its plastic blades whizzed.
<
br />   Jordan shredded the monster bugs, spraying lime-green guts into the air like a sprinkler on full blast.

  Fighting alongside Oddo and Mungo, Freddie swatted an oncoming entomon with the lacrosse stick, flipping the large bug monster on its back. He raised the butt end of the stick over his head and brought it down with a crunchy splat, impaling the colossal insect with the shaft.

  But the bugs just kept on coming.

  14

  Freddie took in the unwinnable battle before him.

  For as far as he could see, there was nothing green. Not a tree, not a shrub, nor a single blade of grass. Freddie figured that was a bad thing for several obvious reasons.

  “Hey, Trevor, what did you say happens when all these things eat all the plant life?” Freddie asked, shouting through the bug monster mayhem.

  “Then they’ll move on to us . . . ,” Trevor shouted back.

  “Great,” Freddie replied. “Just great.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the parentomon duo buzzing over the swarm.

  The flying parentomons hovered in the air above the other bugs. It seemed as though they were orchestrating the swarm’s movements somehow, conducting a symphony of chaos.

  “They’re controlling them,” Freddie called out to his friends.

  “They must be operating under one singular hive mind . . . ,” Trevor said in awe of the insects.

  “I think I’m getting hives. . . .” Nina groaned as she bashed in the head of the umpteenth entomon.

  And that’s when it happened.

  The entomons began to gather, crawling on top of one another. They crawled up and up and up. Soon, they looked like a giant bug Godzilla, with arms and legs and a head. Their beetle shells looked like shiny black scales. All together, the bugs were nearly as tall as the water tower. They were certainly bigger than Slurp.

  The bugs had turned into one enormous monster.

  Slurp didn’t have a chance against something like that.

  “If we can take out the ringleaders, then maybe we can stop that thing,” Freddie yelled. “That’s our only chance!”