The Monster Apocalypse Read online

  “What?” Brin said. “Are you kidding me?” She glanced at Mr. Barker, then at Ash.

  “He’s stuck!” Brent shouted from inside. “Someone help me!”

  “This can’t be happening,” Brin said. But it was. And Brin didn’t have a choice. If she didn’t act fast, Dylan would be cast up onto the spaceship, forever.

  Brin raced toward the van. Time was running out. Thankfully the car was moving only 10 MPH—if it were going any faster, it and Dylan would have been loaded up onto the spaceship before she even had a chance to take a breath.

  As soon as she reached the sliding door, she jerked her eyes to the right, to see the little aliens at the top of the walkway. The flying saucer was still glowing red, so much so that Brin had to put her hand out in front of her eyes to get a proper glimpse of the alien creatures. They didn’t look like any modern interpretation of the space creatures—they looked more like Steven Spielberg’s interpretation in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, albeit without the awkward and obvious masks.

  “Oh my God,” Brin said. “They’re really there. It’s really aliens!”

  “Brin!” Dylan shouted from the back of the van. “I need help!”

  She turned back to her friend, who was pushing on the seat-belt release so hard his palms were bleeding. Brent had escaped from the clutches of his seat-belt and was busy assisting Dylan. Brin jumped back into the vehicle and pushed Brent out of her way.

  “Let me see,” Brin said. She pushed down on the release but nothing happened. She pulled on the seatbelt, every which way, but it didn’t budge. She inspected it all the way up to Dylan’s shoulder. “Can’t you just slip out from under it?”

  “No! It’s too tight!” he shouted.

  “Well, why the hell did you make it so tight?”

  “I wanted to stay safe! Especially when a goddamn werewolf is driving the car!”

  Brin pushed down on the release again. She shoved her fist against it, then tried to yank it right up out of the seat. Nothing.

  “Brin! The car’s touching the spaceship!”

  The blinding glow of the saucer covered the interior of the van with a bright, bloody glow. Dylan shielded his eyes, and Brin did her best to look away. She didn’t want to give up, but she was borderline frantic. Dylan’s time was up.

  “Brent, get out of the van,” she said.

  “But what about—”

  “Now, goddammit!”

  The cute sports editor glanced at Dylan with a somber expression, then tipped his body back and rolled out onto the concrete. He jumped up and ran away from the van, away from the spaceship.

  “Are there scissors anywhere?” Brin said. “Maybe there’s a pair in the glove compartment—”

  Dylan touched her shoulder. “Brin… stop…”

  “I’m sorry I’m not the strongest person who ever lived, but I’m going to try to rip this seatbelt out from under you, all right?”

  “Brin…”

  “Maybe I can get Mr. Barker!” Brin shouted. She looked out the back window to see all the others in the distance. “He can turn into a werewolf and knaw away the seatbelt! I know exactly what we’ll—”

  “Brin.” Dylan brought his hand up from her shoulder to her cheek. “You have to go.”

  Her tears started flowing, and she didn’t wipe them away; she just kept yanking on the world’s sturdiest seatbelt, hoping it would bust.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not leaving you in here, Dylan. You’re not going anywhere, you understand me?”

  Brin fell headfirst against the backseat when the van struck the walkway and started ascending toward the interior of the spaceship. The little white men stood together, like one big happy family.

  “Brin, please, go.”

  “No!” She pushed herself back up and looked at Dylan’s face. She could barely even make it out, it was so covered in the red glow. He grabbed her hand and pulled her close.

  “It’s OK,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a flying saucer. Now… I can.” He kissed the top of her hand and said, “Thanks for trying.”

  “Dylan, I’m sorry. I’m so—”

  He didn’t let her finish her sentence. In the little room he had to maneuver in, he lifted up his right leg and kicked Brin in the gut, hard, catapulting her back over the middle seat and straight out of the van. Brin rolled over the right side of the walkway and landed with a loud thud on the dirt ground below.

  The pain of her fall was excruciating, but her adrenaline made her overcome it. She crawled forward, then jumped back up to her feet. She ran away from the flying saucer, toward the group, who all stood together about a soccer field’s length away from the alien spacecraft.

  “Did you get him?” Anaya said.

  “No!” Brin shouted, still crying. “He was stuck, I tried everything. I didn’t know what to do!” She grabbed Anaya and pulled her toward her. “You just stood here! You all did! Why didn’t any of you try to help me?”

  Anaya shook Brin off of her. “I thought you were handling it!”

  “I’m not superhuman! I’m not like Valerie, or like Mr. Barker! I’m just me! I can only do so much!”

  The noise of the flying saucer revving up pierced the eardrums of everybody on the pavement. Anaya smashed her hands up to her ears, as did Valerie and Ash. Mr. Barker walked past them and approached Brin.

  “Why couldn’t you help him?” she asked the teacher / werewolf / adult of the group. “Why did you just let him die?”

  “He’s not going to die,” Mr. Barker said.

  “But how do you know?”

  Brent brushed past Brin and took a few steps toward the spaceship. The van was now all the way inside, with no sign of Dylan. The walkway stayed still, not pulling back up and inside the spacecraft, as if the aliens knew a second earthly being was still due for an entrance.

  “Dylan,” Brent whispered, so low Brin barely heard him.

  “He’s gone,” she said. “There’s nothing you could have done, Brent—”

  “Dylan, wait for me!” he shouted, and he started running straight for the spaceship.

  Brin’s jaw dropped, and the others brought their hands to the backs of their heads in surprise.

  “Brent! No! What are you doing—”

  “Dylan!” Brent shouted. He didn’t slow down. He sped up so fast that his feet struck the bottom of the diagonal walkway in barely ten seconds. “Dylan, don’t go! I… I…” He stopped for a moment, like he wanted to catch his breath—but he didn’t take the time to look back at the group. Instead, he ran up the walkway. “I’m coming with you!”

  As soon as Brent disappeared inside the spaceship, the walkway ascended off the ground. Brin watched as the flying saucer started to spin, faster and faster, until the wind started pelting everyone down against the pavement. Brin’s hair roared into the wind, while her brother, keeping a tight grip on his shotgun, curled up into a ball. Dylan was in. Brent was in. Their van was in. And the spaceship was off.

  It rose up into the air, slowly for a few seconds, then shot up into the sky faster than a blink.

  The wind stopped. The red glow disappeared.

  The six still left on the ground stepped close to one another. They just stood there, looking up at the sky and the stars in awe, as the spaceship hovered over the California mountains and vanished from their sights.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sprawled out on the cold cement floor, his jaw still in pain from his father’s kick, his forehead pressed up against the bars with enough pressure to give him a migraine, Paul managed to look on the bright side of things: at least he had his high school principal to make conversation with.

  “Paul, what are you doing here?” the principal asked, his voice tired and defeated. He sounded a million miles away, even though he was just two cells over. “I’d expect your wily friend Brin to come out here—she was the one involved in the Bodie incident, after all—but not you. You’re new to the community, and to Grisly High. You shou
ldn’t have come here.” He coughed, twice, then banged on one of his bars. “Wait a minute! Did Brin come here with you?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head slightly, even though Principal Stine couldn’t see him. “It’s just me. I’m alone.”

  “Well, what business is it of yours what happened to Chace and Sawyer? You weren’t even here. You’re an exchange student. From Germany, right?”

  “I’m not an exchange student.”

  “What?” The faceless voice in the hallway didn’t get it.

  “Principal Stine, I imagine this might get me banned from your wonderful high school—and I do mean that when I say wonderful. In all my many years on this planet, it’s the best I’ve ever attended…”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “What do you mean you—”

  “I’m a Volga,” Paul said. “Err, a vampire, I guess, to be more generic. I’ve been alive for more than a century. The man who locked you into your cell, that creepy man with the top hat, is my father. And I know how Chace and Sawyer died.”

  Paul expected a scream, or a gasp in the form of an epiphany. Instead, silence ensued. Paul waited for a response. Nothing.

  “Principal Stine? Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” he finally said. “Sorry. I’m just trying to process this.” More silence. Then: “Did you kill them, Paul?”

  “What?”

  “Are Chace and Sawyer dead because of you?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Because at this point, I just want the truth. I just want you to tell me what really happened.”

  “Of course,” Paul said. And he did.

  He started by telling the old man about his relationship with his tyrant father. Then he told him how Brin and Ash and all the others came into Bodie to shoot their movie. He told Principal Stine how he helped saved Brin’s and most of the others’ lives, that he wasn’t able to get to Sawyer in time, and that Chace ran way ahead of the group and got caught in a tangled web of vampires before he had the chance to save him. He told him that he had tried to start a new life in Grisly, away from his father, but never got a chance to—because his dad found his whereabouts within days and immediately brought him back to Bodie.

  Then he told Principal Stine about the zombies.

  “OK, now you’re just pulling my leg,” the man said. “Vampires, I guess I can understand. But zombies? Those things are pure fiction. Created merely for B-grade horror movie entertainment.”

  “I saw them. With my own eyes. I watched them rise right up out of the golf course and attack me and my friends.” He sighed, then turned around, so his back rested against the bars. He shook his head. “I don’t even know…”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “I don’t know if anyone made it out alive. Brin, Ash… any of them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We hid at Grisly High, thinking we could be safe there. Turns out we couldn’t have picked a worse place. We all split up, and I ran outside. That’s when my dad picked me up and locked me into the back of his hearse. I haven’t had any contact with Brin or Ash or Anaya or Dylan. I like to think they’re on their way here now, to rescue us. But I… I really don’t know.”

  “It’s OK,” Principal Stine said. “If your buddies don’t show up, I have someone I know who’ll come save us.”

  “Really? Who?” Paul wrapped his hands around the bars again and smashed his forehead up against the bar farthest to the left. He wished he could actually see Principal Stine. It was comforting hearing the man’s voice, but seeing him would have been even better. “Did you tell someone you were coming here?”

  “Of course I did. I knew I was potentially getting myself into trouble. I knew I wasn’t supposed to set foot anywhere near this place. But I didn’t feel like I had a choice: I had to come out here and see for myself. Nobody kills two of my students and lives to tell the tale. I thought I’d find the killers. I thought maybe I could take them down.”

  “Really? Wow. You’re like the coolest principal ever, Mr. Stine!” Paul said, with a loud chuckle.

  “Yeah, well, what else is new?” Principal Stine laughed too, then said, “So I brought my handgun, and some food and water. I was going to stay here throughout the weekend. But I was here barely thirty minutes when a dozen of these creatures just jumped on top of me, out of nowhere, not wanting to rip me limb from limb, but to tie me up and take me down into this foul dungeon. I managed to pop a few bullets off at one, but it didn’t even scratch him. Gunfire doesn’t kill these things.”

  “Yeah. Bullets don’t hurt us. Neither does the sun.”

  “Well, how the hell am I supposed to kill you then?”

  “Well, if you must know.” He cleared his throat and said, “The only way you can for sure? Decapitation.”

  Even though Paul couldn’t see the man, he actually heard him squirm a little bit in his cell. “Really? That’s the only way?”

  “Well, my dad also has the ability to create holes in the ground. You fall through that, you fall forever. At least that’s what he tells me. There’s no coming back.”

  “Well that’s a fine little story,” the principal said, clearly not believing Paul, “but what about when there’s no hole in the ground, and you have one of those things on top of you trying to bite into your larynx?”

  “Then yeah. Cut off the head, explode the head. In many ways, we’re like zombies. We can’t function without a head.”

  “Not many things can,” said Principal Stine. “But what about a bullet to the brain? Would that do anything?”

  “A single bullet to the head wouldn’t do it, no. But if you shoved, say, a shotgun to our heads and blew our entire face to smithereens, then yeah, that would probably do the trick.” Paul laughed and slapped his right hand against the bar. “Sorry this conversation is so morbid.”

  “It’s fine. This situation is morbid.” He sighed, loudly, and asked, “What happened to your father, Paul? To make him get this… mad.”

  “I don’t know. He’s always been a selfish, greedy man, always in search of power, and more Leifers to be his slaves.”

  “Leifers?”

  “Oh, uhh, newly turned vampires.” Paul thought he heard the door open. He stalled for a second, but then continued when he didn’t hear the door shut. “He likes to be seen as powerful, so he thinks it makes him look like a fool when his own son tries to strike out on his own and turn his back on everything he’s been given. I’ve never wanted this life. I never even wanted to be a vampire.”

  “How did you become a vampire, Paul?”

  Paul chewed down hard on his tongue. He closed his eyes. He remembered that first bite into his neck, into his veins. Brin had asked him from the beginning about his long, detailed history, and he had yet to tell her anything. He thought he had had more time. He didn’t think, in less than two weeks, he’d already be back in Bodie.

  “My sister Jill escaped. Just in time. She lived a normal life, as a human. But I couldn’t get out in time. I didn’t think my dad would ever hurt me, but when he sank his teeth into me, I knew…”

  “You knew what?”

  “I knew my life would never be the same. I tried to become Droz 2.0 for a few years there, but it wasn’t the life for me. I went out on my own and tried to make it in the real world, I tried to live my life as a human to the best of my ability. But it never worked out. I just kept coming back. Recently I returned to Bodie but didn’t let anyone know. I led a quiet life up on the outskirts of town, where nobody could see me or find me. It wasn’t until I met Brin…”

  Silence ensued. Principal Stine didn’t say a word. Paul thought he was trying to squeeze his big bald head through the bars, like he wanted to get closer to hear Paul’s unexpected story detour into romance.

  “I’ve known her for such a short time,” Paul said, “but… I don’t know… she just gets me. I’ve felt that since the moment she crashed into my shack. It’s been a relationship built on fear and ten
sion and running from vampires and zombies. But we have this… connection. I can’t explain it. If there’s anyone who’s going to save me, it’s her. I mean, I kissed her—and she kissed me back.”

  “You kissed her?” Principal Stine asked.

  “Yeah. It was great. I haven’t kissed a human since 1979.”

  “How long have you been alive, Paul?”

  “Too long,” he whispered. “But anyway, then, when I pulled away—”

  “YOU KISSED MY DAUGHTER?”

  The scream from the long, dark hallway stopped Paul in mid-sentence. He stayed put for a moment, his hands still wrapped around the cold bars—but then he started to scoot back. He didn’t hear any footsteps, and hoped—and prayed—the loud, angry female voice had been a product of his imagination.

  But then the footsteps began, the loud click-clack sounds of high heels. She was coming for him.

  Paul slammed his back against the wall. He hadn’t been scared until now. As much as his father liked to threaten him, Paul knew the scary clan leader would never go the distance and kill his only son, his only living next of kin.

  “But he could program someone else to kill me,” Paul whispered. “Even someone who was good before. Who took me into her home and—”

  “Paul?” Principal Stine asked, softly, his voice sounding a mile away now. “Who was that? Who said that?”

  “Shut your mouth, you measly little man,” the woman said. A loud bang echoed through the halls, like she had taken the principal’s head and smashed it against one of the bars. Principal Stine didn’t say a word after that, so Paul wondered if his assumptions were true. The footsteps continued, and this time, they made their way straight for Paul’s cell.

  Paul didn’t recognize her when she revealed herself in the low, unflattering light. She crossed her arms and turned to Paul, not dressed in modern clothes any longer, but in an 1800’s-style purple dress, complete with ruffles on her shoulders.

  Pale white in the face, dark red in the eyes, and her hair up in a bun, Tessa Skar proudly sported a gold necklace that ran down half of her chest. Not just any necklace. The necklace that belonged to Paul’s mother Wendy 135 years ago.