Power Rangers - The Official Movie Novelization

by Alexander Irvine

  PENGUIN YOUNG READERS LICENSES

  An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  ™ and © 2017 SCG Power Rangers LLC. Power Rangers and all related logos, characters, names, and distinctive likenesses thereof are the exclusive property of SCG Power Rangers LLC. All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.

  Motion Picture Artwork © 2017 Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  Published by Penguin Young Readers Licenses, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. Printed in the USA.

  Cover design by Gabriel P. Cooper

  Ebook ISBN: 9781524784515

  Version_1

  SPECIAL THANKS TO

  HAIM SABAN

  AND

  THE REST OF THE FILMMAKERS

  AS WELL AS

  EVERYONE AT SABAN BRANDS,

  LIONSGATE,

  AND

  TEMPLE HILL ENTERTAINMENT

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue

  PROLOGUE

  The Red Ranger knew he was going to die. Here on this distant planet, surrounded by the huge native creatures. Some of them, long-necked and curious, watched from the shallows of the nearby ocean. He dragged himself through the dirt, mud, and torn-up landscape. Behind him a spaceship crashed, catapulting him over the broken earth. Intent on his mission—his last mission—he kept crawling. Debris and crushed rock cascaded down around him. He got to the Yellow Ranger, and her armor peeled away. She knew what was going to happen just like the Red Ranger did.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, taking her coin. He already had three others: black, blue, pink. Her eyes closed. She was gone.

  He sent a message on the emergency frequency. “I’m the last one left. Commence destruction.” He had no choice. In less than a minute it would all be over.

  The Red Ranger pulled a small tree root from the destroyed soil. When he had dug a pit deep enough for them to be safe, he placed the coins in the muddy bottom. Finally, he removed his own coin, demorphing in the process.

  Placing the coin alongside the others, the Red Ranger whispered, “Seek only those who are worthy. Find only those who are strong.”

  A boot crunched on the gravel near him. The Red Ranger looked up, unable to stand. Towering over him was the Green Ranger, Rita Repulsa, her golden staff planted in the ground. Once, the two had fought together. Then they had become enemies when Rita betrayed the Power Rangers’ mission.

  “It’s time to tell me where the Zeo Crystal is,” she hissed.

  “That was never going to happen,” the Red Ranger said.

  She nodded at him. “Then you will die with all your friends, Zordon.”

  She raised her golden staff for a killing blow—but paused as a rumbling sound filled the air.

  A massive asteroid burned across the sky, streaking down. Zordon’s destruction order was about to be completed. The planet would survive. The Power Rangers would not.

  “We will all die together, Rita,” he said.

  “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!” Rita screamed.

  Zordon took advantage of her distraction. Diving over the hole in the ground, he protected the coins with his own exposed body. Zordon felt the ground heave with the meteor’s impact. He looked up.

  The blast wave from the collision rolled over the landscape, destroying rocks, trees, the saurian animals . . . everything in its path. In the last moment before his annihilation, Zordon saw the blast fling Rita far away into the burning sky over the ocean. He had done the right thing.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was Prank Night in the town of Angel Grove, and Jason Scott had put some serious thought into what he ought to do: Get a cow into the Montgomery High locker room and leave it there as a surprise for their first-period gym class tomorrow. A little message from their crosstown rivals at Angel Grove High, where Jason was about to start his fourth year of football and . . . well, pretty much football. It would be legendary.

  But the cow didn’t seem to want to go into the locker room. It mooed loudly as Damo and Hawkeye, two of Jason’s pals, braced themselves against its haunches.

  “You know me,” Damo was saying. “I never question your pranks, you’re the master . . . But we coulda just toilet-papered their sign like the seniors did last year. Why’d we steal a cow?”

  “We borrowed this cow,” Jason corrected him. “We are not thieves.”

  “We just tore the door off the locker room,” Hawkeye pointed out.

  Okay, maybe vandals. But not thieves, Jason thought. “Hawkeye, stay here,” he said. “Be the lookout. Damo, pull yourself together.” He patted the cow’s flank. “Beefcake . . . time to be a winner.”

  They got the cow into the locker room. It mooed in the darkness and for some reason, the absurdity of the whole situation cracked both Jason and Damo up. The cow kept mooing, and they kept laughing, and then Hawkeye charged in. “COPS!!! THE COPS ARE COMING!!!!”

  All three of them ran for the exit.

  “Beefcake, I’m really sorry!” Jason said to the cow as he and the others ran out of the locker room.

  Eventually, Beefcake started to follow them.

  By the time Jason got to his truck and jammed it into reverse, one of the cops had cut him off. The truck slammed hard into the cop car. Uh-oh, Jason thought. Not cool. The only way out was . . . well, onto the lawn.

  He gunned the truck over the curb and across the lawn, skidding around Beefcake. Jason rammed the truck through a fence, and the truck dropped hard down an embankment onto the road that cut behind Montgomery. The cops were still behind him. He made a sharp turn onto a side road and cut his headlights. In his rearview mirror he saw them go screaming by. He’d lost
them. Nice!

  He flipped his headlights back on, hitting the gas again . . . and framed in the headlights he saw a plumbing van backing out of a driveway in front of him.

  Jason swerved around the van, but his truck plowed into a parked car at an angle. It rolled over a couple of times and skidded to a halt upside down. The impact stunned him for a moment, but pretty quickly he started to feel pain. A lot of pain, mostly coming from his knee. Even hanging upside down in the darkness, he could tell it didn’t look right. Something told him it was going to be a while before he stepped foot on a football field again.

  It was only supposed to be a prank, he thought. Man, how did it go so wrong?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Three weeks later, Jason sat in the passenger seat of his dad’s truck, a beat-up old half-ton with a bed full of fishing gear and a cab full of old coffee cups. Sam Scott pulled up in front of Angel Grove High School and shook his head at the sight of the house arrest ankle bracelet on Jason’s left leg.

  “I don’t think we’ll ever understand each other,” he said. “Just when I thought you’d done the dumbest thing you could possibly do, you find something dumber and you do it.”

  “Thank you,” Jason said.

  “I promise you, this is not the moment to joke around,” his father said. Jason quieted down. You could only push Sam Scott so far. “I know you think it’s noble that you didn’t rat out your friends.”

  “I acted alone,” Jason replied. “Beefcake and I had a connection.”

  “Yeah, that’s funny. You know what’s not funny?” His father paused, looking for some kind of reaction. “This was supposed to be your season! I had scouts coming to every game. You coulda written your own ticket. Now it’s all gone. Now you gotta come here every Saturday for the rest of the year just to graduate. With all the other weirdos and criminals.”

  For the first time since they’d left the house, father and son looked each other in the eye. “Like you said,” Jason said after a moment. “We’ll never understand each other.”

  His father reached across him and opened the door. Nothing more to say. Jason got out, his right leg stiff and sore in the knee brace. He was a long way from healed.

  Several parking spaces over, Kimberly Hart sat texting in the back of her father’s car. Both of her parents were in the front seat. “This could’ve ended with far worse than Saturday detention,” her father said.

  “At least we can all agree on that,” her mother added.

  Kimberly looked up from her phone. “I didn’t take that picture of Amanda Clark.”

  “You punched a boy in the face,” her mother said.

  “Okay, I did that,” Kimberly admitted. “But he disrespected me.” She didn’t want to tell them how. Well, she did, but she couldn’t.

  “You knocked out his tooth,” her father said. He was using his this-is-serious-young-lady voice.

  “They put it back,” Kimberly said. She could see her dad starting to get more upset and she cut him off before he could get going. “Nobody understands what actually happened!”

  “Then explain it to us,” her mother said.

  She wanted to. God, she wanted to. It wasn’t fair. But no. She couldn’t. No matter how bad things got, Kimberly wasn’t going to be a snitch.

  “Pick me up later,” she said, and got out of the car.

  Jason walked slowly down the hall toward the detention classroom, favoring his injured leg. The brace helped a lot, but it was still weak and sore. He stopped to get a drink, looked up, and saw his own framed jersey: SCOTT 11. A reminder of what he’d lost by being stupid. He turned away from it and saw Kimberly Hart, one of Angel Grove’s queen bees. Not the kind who just wanted to be on the arm of the football star, either. Self-possessed, beautiful, a force of nature. She blew by him, intent on her phone. Girls like Kimberly Hart didn’t have time for him.

  Someone mooed when he walked into the classroom. Everyone laughed. Jason played it off, ignoring the scorn from all the misfit losers who populated Saturday detention. Except for Kimberly Hart, who was in the back of the room, texting away.

  Closer to Jason, Billy Cranston was arranging his colored pencils and making some kind of marks on a map. Strange kid, Billy. Another kid whose name Jason didn’t know swaggered past Billy and knocked the pencils off his desk. “You’re a freak,” he said, leaning over Billy. “We’ve been watching you play with these pencils every week. It drives me crazy. Are you crazy? What if there was an extra one?”

  He held up one of the pencils and snapped it in half. Billy twitched but tried to keep himself together. The bully held up another pencil and was about to snap it, too, when Jason had had enough.

  In two steps he was in the kid’s face. The class got dead quiet. “How old are you, five?” Jason shoved him away. “Hi, I’m Jason, this is my first time here. It’s exciting. And you must be the bully—the bully of detention? How dumb can you be?”

  The bully took a swing at Jason, but Jason saw it coming a mile away. He flicked the punch away with a simple high block, making it look even easier than it was. Another swing, another block. Neither punch came within a foot of landing. The kid hesitated. He had to keep fighting or he would look like an idiot. Jason solved the problem for him by slapping him square in the face.

  Amazed, the kid said, “Did you just slap me?”

  Jason nodded. “I did. Weird, right?” He stepped up to the kid, making sure everyone in the room saw what was happening. “I’m gonna be here every week for what seems like the rest of my life and I’m sure you are, too. Let’s make a deal.” He tapped his own chest and then pointed at the terrified geek with his pencils. “Don’t sit near me or him, and we’ll be okay.”

  Trying to save face, the defeated bully held Jason’s stare for a moment before taking a seat in the back corner. Billy Cranston was grinning. Some of the other kids seemed to have enjoyed the show, too—including, Jason noticed, Kimberly Hart.

  The detention teacher rolled through the door then, trying to assert order. “Okay. So. Approved homework or work on the Better Choices workbook. These should be out and in progress. And good morning.”

  Kimberly looked at something interesting on her phone, then stood. “I have to go to the ladies’ room.”

  The teacher lifted a hand, but Kimberly ignored him just like she’d ignored Jason.

  She went into the bathroom expecting to see Harper and Amanda, her friends who had been texting her, but the bathroom was silent. Kimberly was already on an emotional knife-edge. Her problems with Harper and Amanda kept her up at night, and now she thought it might all be taken care of . . . maybe? She didn’t really know where she stood. And she wasn’t going to find out in an empty bathroom.

  Then the two girls popped out of one of the stalls, laughing. Kimberly joined in. Like her, Amanda and Harper were queen bees. They liked to dress alike, they exchanged tips on hairstyles and social currents at Angel Grove, and they were the heart of the cheerleading squad. It was their school, really.

  “So this is where you come every Saturday instead of practice?” Amanda needled Kimberly. “Tragic.”

  “This must suck,” Harper added. She spent a lot of time echoing what Amanda said.

  “It does,” Kimberly admitted. She was playing along to ease the tension, still not completely sure how this conversation was going to go.

  Amanda smirked. “Then you shouldn’t have sent Ty that picture of me.”

  “That’s not exactly how it happened,” Kimberly said. “He’s a liar.” Amanda knew this. Why did Kimberly keep having to explain it?

  “You punched his tooth out,” Harper said.

  God, it was annoying to keep hearing about that. “They put it back!”

  “Details, details,” Amanda said. “Truth is, for whatever reason, you went after me.”

  “You know there’s way more to the story,” Kimberly
said.

  Abruptly, Amanda’s tone changed. “Water under the bridge now. Let’s move on.”

  Kimberly couldn’t believe it. “Really? Thank God.” Relief crested in her like a wave, a physical feeling in her chest.

  “We’re moving on . . . without you.” The wave crashed down, and Kimberly had the awful empty feeling in her stomach that came when someone made a fool of you.

  “Cutting you out,” Harper added. “Literally.” She showed Kimberly a picture of all three girls at a party, looking happy and cool together. In Harper’s other hand was a pair of scissors. She cut Kimberly out of the picture.

  “Unfriended, unfollowed, don’t text me,” Amanda said.

  “You can show up for cheer practice if you want,” Harper said. “But I wouldn’t.” She pinned the mutilated photo to the bathroom wall with the scissors, and the two girls left without looking back.

  Kimberly took a long look at the picture, and at her reflection next to it in the big bathroom mirror. Suddenly she hated what she saw, hated the way she’d let herself think that being part of that little clique was so important that she would—

  No, she wasn’t going to think about that. She was cut out? Well, fine, she thought. Then it’s time for some changes.

  She pulled the scissors out of the wall and ran her finger along one of the blades. They were nice and sharp. She pulled a fistful of her hair away from her head and cut it off. Then she cut a big hunk out of the other side. Oh, it felt good. She didn’t have to be the same as them. She didn’t have to worry about what anyone thought anymore. Kimberly’s hair fell into the sink and onto the floor and she didn’t care. She was going to be someone new.

  Jason did a double take when Kimberly came back into the detention classroom. The haircut was one thing, but the expression on her face—tough, daring, strong—made her look like she could be fronting a punk band. The room erupted in yells and whistles. Kimberly looked around, soaking it all up. Jason couldn’t take his eyes off her. Man, he’d liked her before, but now . . . he liked her a lot. A whole lot.