Goop Soup

by David Lubar

  Starscape Books by David Lubar

  NOVELS

  Flip

  My Rotten Life: Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie, Book One

  Dead Guy Spy: Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie, Book Two

  Hidden Talents

  True Talents

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies

  and Other Warped and Creepy Tales

  The Curse of the Campfire Weenies

  and Other Warped and Creepy Tales

  In the Land of the Lawn Weenies

  and Other Warped and Creepy Tales

  Invasion of the Road Weenies

  and Other Warped and Creepy Tales

  Nathan Abercrombie,

  Accidental Zombie

  BOOK THREE

  David Lubar

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book · New York

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  GOOP SOUP

  Copyright © 2010 by David Lubar

  The Big Stink excerpt copyright © 2010 by David Lubar

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2010 by Tor Books

  All rights reserved.

  A Starscape Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  ISBN 978-0-7653-1636-3 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2509-9 (trade paperback)

  First Edition: May 2010

  Printed in March 2010 in the United States of America by RR Donnelley, Harrisonburg, Virginia

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my distant cousin, Steve Schlossman; his wonderful wife, Barbara Dennard; and my sometimes-less-distant cousin, Mikhael Schlossman

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1. Stool Pigeon

  2. No Sweat

  3. Writing on the Wall

  4. Stare Case

  5. MP Free

  6. Great Gumballs of Fire

  7. Some Things Are Hard Pick

  8. Pulse Fiction

  9. Road Work

  10. Act Naturally

  11. Follow the Leader

  12. Say Aha!

  13. Stuff Gets in the Way

  14. Of Corpse

  15. From Two to Four

  16. The Zombie Accident

  17. Breaking In

  18. Let It Slide

  19. Growth Spurt

  20. Slime Time

  21. Down to Earth

  Later

  INTRODUCTION

  I used to think life was hard. Now I know better: Life is simple. Death is tricky.

  1

  Stool Pigeon

  When the pigeon shot into our classroom, most of the boys shouted, “Whoa!” About half the girls shouted, “Eewwww!”

  Our teacher, Ms. Delambre, shouted, “My goodness!”

  That’s the sort of thing adults say when they’re trying not to use bad words. My friend Mookie and I grinned at each other. His mom says my goodness a lot.

  I didn’t shout anything until the pigeon swooped down from the ceiling and landed on my left shoulder.

  “Hey! Get off!”

  It didn’t.

  I reached up to push it away, but I was afraid I might hurt it. I read somewhere that birds have hollow bones. I knew how that felt. My own bones break pretty easily.

  They weren’t always like that. I was a normal kid until I got splashed with Hurt-Be-Gone and turned into a half-dead zombie by my friend Abigail’s crazy uncle Zardo. Now I don’t have a heartbeat. But much to my surprise, that hasn’t been too big a problem.

  The pigeon turned its head and stared at me.

  I stared back.

  The pigeon blinked.

  I didn’t.

  That’s another thing I don’t need to do. Though I try to remember to make myself blink once in a while so I don’t creep people out.

  The pigeon’s tail twitched. Something wet and white plopped on my shirt, right across my pocket.

  “Great. Thanks a lot,” I told the pigeon.

  I’d just been turned into a living statue. What next? Maybe the pigeon would build a nest in my hair and lay eggs.

  As kids all around me collapsed in laughter, pointed at my shirt, and made bad jokes about pigeon poop, the bird fluttered off my shoulder and swooped back out the window.

  Mookie, who was sitting next to me, laughed so hard, he fell off his stool. And he fell so hard, he bounced. I guess he didn’t get hurt, because he kept laughing.

  Only Abigail wasn’t laughing. She turned toward the window, watched the pigeon, and tugged at the ends of her frizzy dark brown hair. She’s so smart, it’s almost scary. But she never shows off in school.

  “All right, class!” Ms. Delambre said. “That’s quite enough. Settle down. This is science class—not party time.” She walked over to me and pointed at the blotch on my shirt. “Nathan, go wash that off immediately. Pigeon droppings carry all sorts of diseases.”

  I hopped down from my stool and headed for the sink in the back of the room. I could feel two dozen pairs of eyes following me. I wasn’t worried about germs. I was pretty sure I couldn’t get any kind of disease. And even if I did, it couldn’t hurt me. But I still didn’t want that stuff on my shirt. Mom is always telling me to be careful about getting food on my clothes. If she ever sat through a lunch period in the school cafeteria, she’d know how impossible that is.

  I grabbed a paper towel and wiped at the stain. I expected the blob to smear. But it stuck to the paper towel and slid right off my pocket.

  What in the world? . . .

  I realized it was a piece of plastic. There was something printed on the back side in tiny letters. I looked closer.

  URGENT MISSION COMING. MAJOR OPERATION. BE READY TO SPRING INTO ACTION. P.M.

  P.M. That had to be Peter Murphy—the spy who’d recruited me to work for the Bureau of Useful Misadventures. BUM looks for kids who mess up in some kind of way that makes them good spies. They also fight to make the world a better place. That’s their mission, though I’m still not sure exactly what it means.

  I looked over toward Ms. Delambre. She was trying to close the window, but it was stuck. She usually kept it open, because the room always got too hot, even when it was cold outside.

  I crumpled up the paper towel and tossed it in the trash. Urgent mission? Cool. That was exciting, and also a little scary. I was going to get my first real spy assignment from BUM. Nathan Abercrombie, Super Spy. This is the job I was born for. Or died for, I guess.

  I hoped this new mission was important. I’d already done one job for BUM, but that was just a quick little thing. I’d climbed a fence and put a package in a building. At the time, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. Even so, I’d ended up saving a lot of people. That felt so good, it made me want to do more spy stuff. Being a spy was sort of like being dropped in the middle of an action video game.

  I returned to our lab table. Mookie had gotten back onto his stool, but he was still choking down snorts and spitting out chuckles. H
e sounded like a steam engine that was in danger of exploding—a short, round steam engine with large square glasses and shaggy light brown hair.

  “It’s not that funny,” I said.

  He shook his head. “It’s more than funny. It’s like mega-funny. No, giga-funny. Wait—what comes after giga?”

  “Tera,” Abigail said.

  “Tera-funny?” Mookie frowned, then said it a couple more times, like he was trying to taste the words. “Nope. Sounds too serious. I’ll stick with giga-funny, ’cause that sounds like giggles. And seeing Nate get splattered really makes me giggle.” He started laughing again.

  Abigail tapped my arm. “I assume the pigeon was delivering a message from BUM.” She and Mookie were the only people who knew about my secret life as a soon-to-be spy. The other kids in school didn’t even know I was a zombie. To them I was just plain old Nathan Abercrombie, the second-skinniest kid in class.

  “Yeah. They have a mission for me. Something big. How’d you know it wasn’t a real bird?”

  “Wing speed and movement,” Abigail said. “Real pigeons don’t fly that way. They don’t crash and burn, either. That one flew smack into the phone pole.” She pointed out the window.

  I leaned toward the window and spotted the smoldering remains of the mechanical bird on the street.

  “Why can’t they just call me on the phone or send an e-mail?” I asked. BUM loved using all sorts of robots and high-tech equipment. It didn’t seem to bother them that most of it blew up or caught on fire.

  Abigail sighed. “Boys and their toys. Even when they grow up, they have to play.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “Toys are cool.”

  Mookie stopped laughing and poked my shoulder. He opened his mouth to say something, then lost control again.

  “Just say it,” I told him. I was getting tera-tired of this.

  “Are you exhausted?” he asked.

  “You know I don’t need to sleep.” That was actually the best part about being half-dead—I could stay up all night and play computer games. Or do other things—if I ever figured out something better to do.

  “But you must be really really really exhausted,” he said.

  I didn’t want to ask, but he was my best friend, and I could tell he was dying to do this. “Okay, why do you think I’m exhausted?”

  “Because you look pooped!”

  He fell off his stool again. Ms. Delambre, who’d given up trying to close the window and returned to her desk, made him sit in the hallway for the rest of science class. She let him in for math, but he didn’t last long before he got sent back into the hall.

  “Are you finished?” I asked as we headed outside for recess.

  “I’m not sure. I mean, you have to admit it’s pretty funny.”

  “Hilarious,” I said. “But maybe it’s time to drop it.”

  “Drop!” He pointed at my shirt, then started laughing again. “The pigeon already dropped it!”

  He was like that for the rest of the day. All through recess, he kept grabbing the ends of his jacket and stretching his arms out, making wings. “I’m MookieHawk!” he shouted. “Don’t mess with me, or I’ll mess your shirt.” He’d flap his arms a couple times, race over to me, scream, “PLOP!” and then fall down laughing.

  “He looks more like MookieCanary,” Abigail said.

  She was right. Mookie was wearing a bright yellow jacket that was about two or three sizes too large for him. His mom had won it last month on a radio call-in contest. There was a big ad on the back for Colonel Esterol’s Deep-Fried Pizza Parlor. It showed a smiling slice of pizza—complete with skinny arms and legs—happily swimming the backstroke in a vat of boiling oil. Kids made fun of it, but Mookie didn’t seem to care.

  By the end of recess, he must have fallen about twenty times. But that was okay. Even though he kept kidding me, I was happy the rest of the day, thinking about my first spy mission.

  At least, I was happy until that evening, when Mom hit me with the worst possible news a half-dead zombie kid could hear.

  2

  No Sweat

  Mom works at a store in the mall where people make their own teddy bears. Stuffy Wuffy. When anyone asks me what my mom does, I just shrug and say, “Stuff.” Which is true. She helps people stuff their bears. She also helps them pick out bear heads, bear arms, bear legs, and cute little bear sweatshirts.

  I asked her once if she could make me a bear that was just four heads stitched together without a body, but she didn’t seem to understand how awesome that would be—especially if they looked like they were screaming.

  Dad is an accountant. He likes to say that he crunches numbers. I can picture him sitting at a desk with a big cereal bowl full of numbers and milk, spooning them into his mouth and crunching down. Every number would have a different fruit flavor. Dad works late a lot. But today, he got home before Mom.

  “How about a quick run?” he asked after he’d put his briefcase down on the kitchen table.

  “Sure.” We’d gotten into the habit of running whenever Dad had time. Since I didn’t need to breathe, and since my muscles never felt tired, running was my best sport.

  “Great. I’ll get into my sweats.”

  While Dad was changing, I grabbed the plastic bag I’d hidden in the upstairs bathroom. I kept a piece of sponge in there that I’d gotten from under the kitchen sink. The sponge was pretty dry, so I added some water, then stuck the bag in my pocket. I went back to the kitchen and waited for Dad.

  “How was school?” he asked as we jogged down the street.

  “Good. I got an A on my spelling test.” I got good grades on most of my tests. Since I didn’t need to sleep, I had way too much free time, so I killed a chunk of it each night by studying.

  “Excellent. If you want, we could celebrate by going bowling this weekend. We haven’t done that in a while.”

  I liked bowling, but I realized it would be a very bad idea. I’d already lost fingers a couple times, and had to glue them back on. I could just imagine the bowling ball flying down the alley, taking my thumb and two fingers with it. I’d have just enough fingers left to give that surfer-dude Rock on! sign.

  “I’m sort of tired of bowling,” I said. “Is that okay?”

  “Absolutely. We could do something else. Whatever you feel like is fine with me.”

  “Anything?”

  “Just about. Though I don’t think your mom will let me take you parasailing. Speaking of excitement, ready to get the heart pumping?”

  “Sure.”

  He picked up the speed. I followed along.

  When we reached the end of the next block, I slipped my hand into my pocket, opened the bag, and sneaked the sponge into my palm. I pretended to scratch my neck, pressing down on the sponge enough to get some water on my shirt.

  Just like that, I had instant fake sweat. If I finished our run with a dry shirt, Dad might figure out that something was wrong. Even if Dad didn’t notice my lack of sweat, Mom would definitely spot it if she got home before we did. She pays far too much attention to me.

  It wasn’t easy being dead around Mom. I had to spend a lot of my time pretending to be alive. Whenever she was home, I made sure to go into the bathroom once in a while, even though I didn’t need to. I pushed my food around and made it look like I was eating. I did all kinds of things just to keep my parents from learning I was dead.

  “Want to cut across on the new road?” Dad asked when we reached the top of the hill. They were building some houses near us, and had just started bulldozing the road. A lot of people had moved out of town, but the new people who moved here seemed to want bigger houses. So somebody was building them.

  I nodded, and followed Dad through the development. All around us, I saw the skeletons of houses. Some had walls, but others were just empty frames. A moment later, I heard a strange sound.

  Smack. Scrape. Smack. Scrape.

  Dad and I stopped and looked around. The sound stopped. I started running again.

/>   Smack. Scrape. Smack. Scrape.

  I kept running, but glanced down.

  Oh no.

  I’d stepped on a nail with my left foot. That wouldn’t have been too bad, since I don’t feel pain. Except that the nail was stuck through a small square board. And now the board was nailed to my foot. I could see the point of the nail sticking up through the top of my sneaker. It had gone all the way through my foot. I kept jogging and tried to shake the board off. That didn’t work. The board just spun on the nail like a propeller on a cheap toy airplane.

  Dad was still looking around. Mom likes to say that Dad couldn’t find water in a rainstorm. She’s sort of right. He doesn’t pay much attention to things around him. And he’s the last person you want to ask to find the jar of pickles in the fridge. But the way the board was spinning and flapping, he’d notice it any second. I had to do something right away. I put my left foot flat on the sidewalk, stomped down on the board with my right foot, and yanked my left leg up hard. The nail pulled loose.

  I started to jog away.

  Dad glanced back, then turned and jogged over to the board. He picked it up and stared at it. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” I laughed to show him I wasn’t in pain. Of course, I’m never in pain anymore, except when I use my special glue to stick broken fingers back on. “Boy, that was close. It missed my foot. Pretty lucky, huh?”

  “Yeah. Pretty lucky.” Dad tossed the board into a Dumpster near us. “So, what do you want to do this weekend?”

  “Maybe we could play pool.” That would be safe, as long as I didn’t fall on a cue and impale myself.

  I ran next to Dad and gave myself another squirt from the sponge. The rest of the way through the new road, I kept a careful watch for nails.

  Dad let out a happy sigh at the end of our run and patted me on the back. “Life is good,” he said.

  “Yeah. Life is good.”