Attack of the Shark-Headed Zombie Read Online Free Page B

finally said, “If the zombie breaks through the walls and gets in here—”
    “We’ll be sitting ducks.” Keats finished the sentence for him. “We have to get out of this library.”
    Henry nodded. “But how? There was just that one door. And it’s gone.”
    Keats slid a few books off a nearby shelf.
    “We tried that, Keats,” Henry said a little sharply. “Yanking on books isn’t going to open a secret passage.”
    “I have a new idea,” Keats said. He pulled out another book. This one had been half eaten by the worms. The cover was ripped off. The pages inside were shredded. Keats grabbed a handful of torn pages. He waved them at one end of the nearest worm.
    “What are you doing?” Henry asked.
    Keats didn’t answer. He dangled the pageslike bait. Then he started talking to the worm. “Mmmmm, delicious book juice,” he crooned.
    Henry chuckled. “If you’re looking for the worm’s face, you’re at the wrong end.”
    Keats blushed. He went to the other end of the worm, which was half buried in a book. Keats shook the torn pages in the air again.
    The worm pulled its head out of the book and sniffed the air. It smelled the pages. Then Keats rubbed them on the wall next to the worm.
    “Come and get it, wormy!” Keats said softly.
    Gloob.
With yet another gassy sound, the bookworm wriggled to the wall. Its mouth opened wide. The worm took a huge bite out of the wall, right where Keats had rubbed the pages.
    Instantly the worm’s whole body shook. It spit out the pieces of the wall on the floor. Plaster, wood, and a few chewed-up pages dribbled out of its mouth. Keats could imagine the worm thinking, “Gross!”

    Henry said, “I bet that’s how I look when I eat my mom’s tuna surprise.”
    “Pretty much,” Keats agreed with a laugh.
    The worm slithered higher up the bookshelf to find a better meal. And the boys were left looking at a pile of bookworm vomit and a hole in the wall. The hole wasn’t big. But the boys could squeeze through it and get out of the library!
    Henry slapped Keats on the back. “Great job, cuz,” Henry said. “And sorry. I did it again. I doubted that you’d find something in a book to help us.”
    Keats smiled. “No big deal, Henry.”
    Without waiting another second, the boys crawled over what the worm had thrown up and went into the hole together. Three words on a scrap of paper in the goop caught Keats’s eye.
    “…  zap the zombie …”
    He plucked it out of the gunk and kept going.
    Once they were through, the hole closed up behind them, just like the doorways. But it didn’t matter. They were back in the hall. Careful to avoid the faces in the carpet, they got to their feet.
    Keats wiped the scrap of paper on his pants. “Look! That worm must be the one who took a bite out of the
How to Zap Anything
book. This is the missing part of the spell!”
    Keats held the scrap next to the page from the book in the kitchen. Like two puzzle pieces, they fit perfectly. “For step three, we say, ‘Pause the snapping jaws and zap the zombie from IS to WAS!’ ”
    “We have the rest of the spell?” Henry asked.
    “Right,” Keats said. “But we still need the lightbulb to fix the wand. We’ve got to get up to the attic.”
    Keats glanced back toward the kitchen. The wall where the kitchen door had stood was shaking. The zombie was breaking through it. They didn’t have long.
    The cousins headed quickly toward the spiral staircase at the other end of the hall. This time they didn’t bother trying to tiptoe. They just ran. Their feet smooshed the faces in the carpet.
    “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” the faces cried.
    The faces tried to bite their toes, but the boys were moving too fast.
    “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” Keats and Henry told them.
    When they reached the winding staircase, they raced up to the gloomy, dusty attic.
    There were no windows, but light came through small cracks in the roof. Keats brushed cobwebs out of his eyes.
    It was like Keats’s attic at