Monsters Unleashed

by John Kloepfer

  Freddie lifted Kraydon in the palm of his hand until they were face-to-face. He stared right into the little monster’s pulsating eye. “Turn them back,” Freddie ordered him sternly.

  Kraydon just stared at him.

  “Turn them back!” Freddie wailed at the top of his lungs, but Kraydon could only look at him sheepishly.

  “Freddie, chill,” Manny said. “Maybe this is what happens to people when they’re mean. . . .”

  “No way, man,” Freddie said. “I don’t want this on me. And neither do you.” He pointed Kraydon at the bully statues. “You did this!” he shouted at the minimonster. “Do you see what you did? You think it’s okay to turn people to stone? Well, it’s not! It’s not okay, Kraydon. And we’re not leaving here until you—”

  Freddie’s tirade was cut short by the sound of Kraydon sniffling. Very slowly, Kraydon’s eyeball glazed over and looked like it was going to fill with tears. “It’s okay,” Freddie said, his voice softening. “We just want our friends back.”

  The little monster’s eyeball began to spin, rotating in the opposite direction from usual. Kraydon emitted the pulse from its eye, aiming it at the three statues. The energy from the pulse had a warm glow and enveloped Freddie’s friends. And just like that Jordan, Nina, and Quincy transformed from stone back into flesh and blood.

  Their human selves gasped for air.

  They looked at Freddie and Manny and Kraydon and the rest of their tiny monsters. “What’s going on? Is this a dream?” Nina asked, groggy eyed, rubbing her face.

  “No dream,” Manny said, handing her mini Yapzilla. “Completely real monsters.”

  “What happened to them?” Jordan and Quincy both asked at the exact same time.

  “This little guy.” Manny picked Mungo off the floor and held him up. “We got more silica from the beef jerky in the vending machine and Mungo fed it to the monsters when they were all fighting because Mega-Q hurt Oddo, except not really because when we shrunk him down, he was okay. . . .” Manny gasped for air.

  “We’ll just see it when the movie comes out,” Quincy said.

  Nina giggled as Yapzilla nuzzled into her arms.

  Mega-Q slithered up Quincy’s pant leg, and Quincy started squirming and even laughed a little until his monster came out his shirt collar and perched on his shoulder.

  Jordan lifted Kraydon and placed him in the pocket of his varsity jacket.

  Freddie and Manny let Oddo and Mungo sit on their shoulders.

  “You really came through in the clutch, Freddie,” Quincy said, like he read Freddie’s mind.

  “Yeah, for real,” Nina said. She went up to Freddie and gave him a big hug.

  “Thanks, guys,” said Freddie. “I was just trying to get us out of the mess I got us into in the first place.”

  “Nice work, brother! Way to go!” Jordan high-fived Freddie.

  “Okay . . . okay,” Manny said jokingly. “Just remember he was my friend first.”

  Freddie looked at the four of them and smiled. He couldn’t believe that earlier today, he couldn’t stand these three people. And now they were actually friends. It was almost as crazy as a bunch of 3D-printed monsters coming to life.

  Almost.

  They still had some business to attend to.

  “We have to make sure this doesn’t happen again . . . ,” Freddie said, heading back to the art room.

  “What are we doing?” Nina asked as she and the others trailed behind Freddie.

  “I’m going to destroy the printer,” Freddie said, a steely look of determination glinting in his eyes.

  “But we haven’t even gotten a chance to study it to figure out how it made real monsters!” Quincy said. “You can’t do that!”

  “Watch me . . . ,” Freddie said as they approached the art room.

  “Whoa!” Manny called out in surprise. The five of them came to a sudden stop. A massive fleshy blob was blocking the doorway and squishing out into the hall. It looked like a humongous piece of bubble gum. Freddie could barely see around it. What little he could see was disturbing, to say the least. The rest of the art room was filled to the brim with Mega-Q’s waterlogged blob spawn. Mega-Q made a gleeful chirping noise when he saw his army.

  “Nuh-uh,” Manny said to the little milli-monster. “Not cool.”

  “The rain must have gotten inside and made them huge!” Freddie yelped. The blobs were seeping out through the windows and the gaping hole in the wall made by the bus.

  “They’re getting out!” Freddie shouted. “Come on!”

  The kids all hustled outside.

  The last of the storm clouds passed above them and only a hint of sunshine remained, peeking through for a moment to cast an eerie low lighting over the scene.

  There were five blobs total, each one bigger than the next, growing superfast as they squished and squelched out of the art room and soaked in puddles on the parking lot. Some of them didn’t even have eyes or faces, just mouths. They looked like enormous slugs.

  Freddie and his friends watched in horror as the blobs rose up to enormous heights. Manny’s chin pointed straight up in the air as he gazed at the mindless giants that Mega-Q’s blob monsters had become.

  “Aw, man,” Manny said. “Not again . . .”

  19

  Quickly, Freddie dug around in his pocket. He had only twelve silica packets left. That meant about two per monster. He hoped it would be enough.

  “Come on, you guys!” Freddie passed out two packets to everyone: Manny, Jordan, Nina, and Quincy. Mungo and Oddo took off with a packet each, and in no time, they’d climbed up two of the blobs, scaling their gooey flanks. The two monsters held on tightly to the silica packets as they worked their way up the slope of the blobs’ bulbous bodies.

  Jordan started running around the third blob with Kraydon riding on his back. The little monster’s eye swirled and shot his eye beam at the foot of the mammoth blob.

  The pinkish flesh hardened into stone, and the glob monster stopped in its tracks, unable to drag its cement body any farther.

  Meanwhile, Nina dashed back through the hole in the art room wall. She grabbed a spray can of fixative off the storage shelf and ran back outside. She sprinted toward the fourth blob and sprayed the flammable liquid around the base of the blob.

  “Come on, girl!” she shouted to Yapzilla on her shoulder. “Let ’em have it!”

  She dropped Yapzilla on the ground, and the tiny two-headed monster galloped up to the massive blob. Yapzilla unleashed a torrent of streaming fire.

  In a bright flash, the blob went up in flames. As the thing burned up, it didn’t even shriek or make any kind of noise. It just sunk to the blacktop in an icky pink puddle.

  The next blob over, Manny was yelling at Mungo, directing the little guy at the monster’s blobby mouth.

  The fifth blob moved toward Quincy and Mega-Q.

  “Zap it, Mega!” Quincy ordered. Mega-Q looked like he wasn’t going to obey, but then, right as the blob was about to pass through a puddle, Mega-Q shot a blue volt of monster energy at the rainwater.

  The blob flew back in shock, jiggling back and forth like a Jell-O mold. And it seemed like they got him, but as he toppled, he fell onto Manny. The blob gulped him up with a glug-gluggle, and Freddie watched in horror as his friend became encased in the blob monster’s blubber.

  Manny mouthed the words: “I can’t breathe!” He desperately tried to claw his way out.

  Freddie ran over to the blob and jumped on it with a squelching splat. He jammed his arm into its misshapen mouth, and dropped a silica packet inside the thing’s middle. His arm made a suction-cup pop as he pulled his arm out of the monster. He watched victoriously as the blob convulsed and shrank into a mushy puddle.

  As it rolled over, Manny wrenched his way out of the monster. He fell onto his butt, gasping for air, covered in sludge.

  “You okay, Manny?” Freddie asked.

  Between coughs, Manny was able to talk. “Yeah . . . I’m good. . . .”
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  As Manny recovered, Jordan threw more packets into a blob’s mouth hole. Mungo followed Jordan’s lead and fired the packet of pellets into another monster’s blob mouth. Oddo plunged one of his arms into the last blob’s boneless bod and released the silica.

  All was quiet, and in a matter of minutes, all the blobs had melted into the ground.

  “We did it, you guys!” Freddie shouted. But he was cut off by the wail of a siren and the grumble of a car engine in the distance. A pair of helicopters chopped through the clouds, shining two spotlights on the ground below.

  A caravan of cars, police cruisers, and three news vans were headed straight for the school.

  “Oh, now they send us some backup!” Manny grumbled with sarcasm.

  “We have to hide these little guys!” Freddie said, gesturing to the monsters.

  “He’s right—we can’t let anyone know we have the monsters,” said Quincy.

  “Okay, monsters, listen up!” Nina said. “Nobody can know about you, so we’re going to put you away for a little, and it’s really important that you be quiet . . . that means no roaring or shrieking or fire breathing or electric blue spark things or saying ‘yum yums’ or anything else, for that matter, that’s going to get us in trouble with the grown-ups. You’ll learn about them later. They’re a real pain in the you know what. So just chill out and everything will be cool, capiche?”

  The monsters stared at her blankly.

  “Capiche?” she shouted at them, and the monsters blinked and nodded.

  They each put their monsters away in their backpacks.

  The cars were getting closer, but Freddie had one more job before he faced the music. Quickly, without anyone noticing him go, Freddie ducked back into the art room and into Snoozer’s office. He picked up the 3D printer and raced down the hallway. He stopped at his locker and opened the lock as fast as he could, then he placed the 3D printer at the base of the locker, covering it with old homework assignments and draping an XXL T-shirt over it. They’d have to figure out what to do with it later. Nothing good would come from leaving it out for anyone to see—he knew that for a fact.

  Freddie raced back to his friends as the cars drew closer to the school.

  The cars slowed to a standstill, idling in the school parking lot. Cops, cameramen, and reporters jumped out of the cars and surrounded the kids.

  Nina’s eyes lit up when she saw the TV cameras. She stepped toward the bright light of the reporters like a moth to a flame.

  Freddie yanked her back by the shoulder. “No way,” he said. “None of us can talk to anybody about this. Not even if it gets us on TV.”

  Nina snapped out of it. “Of course! You’re right. We have to protect our new little monster pets.”

  “Exactly,” Freddie said.

  “Whoa, check it out,” Quincy said, pointing to the crowd of people heading their way. “That’s the sheriff and the mayor. And that’s Councilman Rodriguez, and that’s the school superintendent.”

  “How do you know who all those people are?” Jordan asked him.

  “I watch a lot of government access,” Quincy said, and Jordan shot him a funny look. “I’m into local politics—so what?”

  “We’re so going to get busted for this,” Manny said.

  “No, we’re not,” said Freddie. “Not if we stick together. As long as we keep our mouths shut, we’ll be able to keep our monsters. That’s what everyone wants, right?”

  They all nodded.

  “We have to make a pact,” Freddie said.

  “Group pinky swear,” said Manny.

  They stood in a circle and held out their hands. The five kids locked their pinky fingers with those of the person next to them until the circle was complete.

  Freddie looked up as the crowd of people approached the school and surrounded them. At the front of the group, Freddie spotted his dad hustling toward him.

  “Freddie! I was so worried!” Mr. Liddle wrapped his arms around his son and gave him a big hug. “I couldn’t find you, and when they told me you didn’t evacuate with the rest of the school, I thought I’d lost you, but we started a search party! Are you and your friends okay?”

  “They’re not really my fr—” Freddie started to say when Jordan, Nina, and Quincy jumped in.

  “Yes . . . we are,” they all said at once.

  Suddenly the rest of their parents pushed through the crowd and reunited with their kids.

  Mr. Liddle smiled up at his son and down at Freddie’s friends. Then he looked around, confused. “Are the monsters still on the loose?”

  “It’s okay,” Freddie said. “The giant monsters are gone. . . .” Which, Freddie thought, wasn’t technically a lie. The giant monsters were gone. Now the only monsters around were the ones that fit in their backpacks.

  Reporters and police began to swarm the kids, firing questions at them in rapid succession.

  “Did you see what they were?” one of the reporters shouted.

  “What happened to them?”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Where did they go?”

  Freddie didn’t know what to say. “Ummmm . . .” was all he could muster.

  The rest of the kids didn’t do any better. Except for Nina, who stepped right up into the limelight of the cameras. “It was just so, so scary,” she said, stammering a little, her eyes filling with fake tears. “We don’t know what happened. We were just trying not to get killed!” She paused and gasped, pretending to cry.

  She’s not bad, Freddie thought, watching Nina’s performance.

  “No more questions!” her father shouted at the reporters. “Can’t you see our kids have been through enough for today?”

  As their parents shooed away the news cameras, Freddie noticed Manny’s backpack wriggle slightly and then settle down. The little monsters stayed quiet, not making a peep.

  He smiled to himself, standing in the glare of the late afternoon sunlight.

  The black clouds from the storm had drifted away to the horizon. He looked up in the sky and caught a glimpse of a rainbow arching overhead.

  Maybe everything is going to be okay, Freddie thought.

  At least for a little while anyway.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to offer many Gargantuan thanks to the following people: Hayley Wagreich, Sara Shandler, Josh Bank, and Les Morgenstein for their mega-brained efforts in helping me conceive this idea and bring this whopper to 3D life; Alice Jerman and Emilia Rhodes for their ginormous contributions in growing this book from a tiny creature into a fully fleshed-out behemoth; and Ryan Harbage for his colossal counsel and assistance along the monster-ridden way.

  Back Ads

  The action continues in

  The only thing worse than monsters? Bugs. Billions of them.

  Just when Freddie Liddle thought he could catch a break, a new kind of terror infests his town: slimy, disgusting, man-eating, self-replicating bugs. But these aren’t just any pests—these bugs were 3D printed by Freddie’s classmate Trevor, and they’re stronger, faster, and meaner than any other insect on earth.

  Now it’s up to Freddie, his new friends, and their pet monsters to stop these bad bugs before they devour everything in sight. The kids start crunching, stomping, and smashing, but as the bugs get bigger, the chances of winning against them get smaller. Can Freddie and his friends get the creepy crawlers to buzz off before their town goes SPLAT?

  About the Author and Illustrator

  JOHN KLOEPFER is the author of the popular Zombie Chasers series and the out-of-this-world alien trilogy Galaxy’s Most Wanted. Monsters Unleashed is his eleventh book. Once he figures out how to defeat the monsters he just 3D printed, there will be more on the way. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Jenny, and their dog, Doozy.

  MARK OLIVER likes being an illustrator because he gets to paint, draw, and use his creative genius in many different ways using a computer. Sometimes he does it so well, he wins awards for it (the Stockport Children�
��s Book Award in 2006 and 2011, among others). Mark’s very clever, but he never brags about how clever he is, just in case people ask him tricky questions about zombies, string theory, or moral relativism. Visit him at www.olly.net.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Credits

  Logo art by JASON COOK

  Cover art by JONATAN IVERSEN-EJVE

  Cover design by AURORA PARLAGRECO

  Copyright

  MONSTERS UNLEASHED. Copyright © 2017 by Alloy Entertainment and John Kloepfer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016053472

  ISBN 978-0-06-229030-4 (trade bdg.)

  EPUB Edition © July 2017 ISBN 9780062290328

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  FIRST EDITION

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