Middle School: Rafe's Aussie Adventure

  FIVE THINGS THAT TOTALLY FREAK ME OUT:

  Deadly drop bears

  Perfect pod people

  Bloodthirsty zombies

  Anyone who says “She’ll be right, mate”

  Tiger sharks, bull sharks, whale sharks, hammerheads, and the great daddy of them all, the GREAT WHITE SHARK!

  For about a nanosecond, my life was looking A-OK. That was until my chance-of-a-lifetime trip to Aussie land went south. Further south than even I, Rafe “The Great Dreamer” Khatchadorian, could ever have imagined!

  DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU!

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Zombie Invasion!

  Chapter 2: The Great Hernandez Mustache Theory

  Chapter 3: Budgie Smugglers, Ahoy!

  Chapter 4: Fair Trade

  Chapter 5: Killer Fruit

  Chapter 6: That Old Donatello Mind-meld Juju

  Chapter 7: Mutant Albatross Feathers

  Chapter 8: The Beast

  Chapter 9: She’ll Be Right, Mate

  Chapter 10: Thunder Down Under

  Chapter 11: Chunder Down Under

  Chapter 12: Biffzilla Versus Mom

  Chapter 13: In the Big House

  Chapter 14: Beetroot? Beetroot?

  Chapter 15: The Rope of Doom

  Chapter 16: Revenge of the Teenage Pod People

  Chapter 17: Where’s a Giant Meteorite When You Need One?

  Chapter 18: T-Rex on the Roof

  Chapter 19: Bad News and More Bad News

  Chapter 20: The Shorts from Hell

  Chapter 21: Let’s Go Surfing

  Chapter 22: A Freakin’ Huge Shark

  Chapter 23: The Naked Truth

  Chapter 24: Can You Get Radioactive Sharks Online?

  Chapter 25: Kell-ing Me Softly

  Chapter 26: The Artist Has Landed

  Chapter 27: The Outsiders

  Chapter 28: A Drop Bear Ate My Sanga

  Chapter 29: You Won’t Like Me When I’m Angry

  Chapter 30: Selfish? Me?

  Chapter 31: I Was Working in the Lab Late One Night …

  Chapter 32: The Plan: Day One

  Chapter 33: Action!

  Chapter 34: Eggsterminate!

  Chapter 35: Kell Goes Barking Mad

  Chapter 36: True Grit

  Chapter 37: Let’s Get Things Started

  Chapter 38: The Point of No Return

  Chapter 39: Go! Go! Go!

  Chapter 40: Freak Out!

  Chapter 41: Oops

  Chapter 42: Laser-beam Eyes

  Chapter 43: Life’s a Gas

  Chapter 44: Boom!

  Chapter 45: Staring Death Right in the Face

  Chapter 46: Who, Me?

  Chapter 47: There’s No Reasoning with an Angry Mob of Zombies

  Chapter 48: Mighty Mom

  Chapter 49: The Truth About Ellie’s Clip

  Chapter 50: Kangaroos Suck

  Chapter 51: Attack of the Fifty-foot Conscience Monster

  Chapter 52: I Was a Teenage Outsider (And I Liked It)

  Chapter 53: An Artist Like Khatchadorian

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by James Patterson

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  To Mortimer and Agnetha DeVere,

  the ultimate Middle School survivors

  —M.C.

  YOU KNOW THAT icky feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you look out of your bedroom window at night and see a mob of bloodthirsty Australian zombies heading right at you?

  No?

  Well, I’m here to tell you that seeing a whole bunch of the walking dead making a beeline for yours truly was definitely NOT one of my better moments. And for any of you who’ve been keeping up with all things Khatchadorian, you’ll know that there has been a ton of weirdness in my recent history.

  From the look on their crummy, dirt-streaked, bug-eyed faces and the nasty collection of homemade weapons they were waving around—pitchforks, tennis rackets, flaming torches, barbecue tongs, a rusty exhaust pipe from a 2006 Holden, a viciously spiked fin off of a surfboard—these dudes were serious about claiming top spot in Rafe Khatchadorian’s All-Time Disaster list.

  I don’t mind admitting I was a teeny-tiny bit FREAKED OUT.

  The zombie dudes had made a real effort too. Do you have any idea how hard it would be to find a pitchfork these days? No, me neither, but it must be pretty difficult. The fact that this mob had come up with THREE of the things showed a real level of zombie determination. No howling mob is complete without pitchforks.

  Despite the worrying presence of pitchforks, there was, however, one small ray of hope that I clung on to: Maybe it wasn’t me they were after. It could be that the zombies had other fish to fry besides Rafe Khatchadorian of Hills Valley.

  That hope faded quickly when they started chanting: “WE WANT RAFE! WE WANT RAFE!”

  I guess that settled it. The seriously messed-up truth was that these guys wanted BLOOD—and lots of it. Very specifically, they wanted my blood, which was a real worry. I like my blood. Call me selfish, but I want to keep as much of my blood as I possibly can, for as long as I can.

  In a weird way, though, a small part of me was kind of proud. It takes a lot to make that many Australian zombies mad, but I, Rafe Khatchadorian, had managed it in just a few short weeks. Ta-da!

  Three weeks ago I didn’t know a single person in Australia, let alone a zombie, and now I had a baying mob of the undead at the front door. Not bad when you think of it that way.

  Oh, and just in case you think I’m going to turn around and tell you that this was all a dream—relax. I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to the lame “it was all a dream” bohunkus (see Save Rafe!, one of my award-winning books) but this habit has to stop at some point and now seems like as good a time as any. This was no dream. This all happened, straight up.

  I’m Rafe, by the way. On a good day—like, a really good day—I look like this:

  But usually it’s more like this:

  Okay, you’re probably thinking all this zombie stuff is super-exciting and majorly awesome blah, blah, blah, Rafe, but why should we listen to a single word you say?

  And in reply I’d say this: Relax, readers. Draw your chairs in closer, remove persons of a nervous disposition from the vicinity and pin back your earflaps because we are about to go back, back through the mists of time, back to the very beginning, back to Hills Valley Middle School …

  WE’LL GET TO the zombies later because the BIG news at the start of this story isn’t mutant flesh-eaters, it’s that (drum roll, please!) I, Rafe Khatchadorian, have managed to stay enrolled at Hills Valley Middle School for more than a minute.

  That’s right, you heard me. Since we last spoke, I have NOT been expelled. Not even suspended! Detention, I hear you ask? Well … let’s not go that far. I could be stuck in school for a million years.

  But for me, not getting kicked out of school is seriously awesome, bordering on miraculous and hunkering down right next door to flat-out impossible.

  It only seems like yesterday when the seriously scary new Vice Principal at Hills Valley, the knuckle-crunching Charlotte P. Stonecase (aka The Terror from Room 666 aka The Skull Keeper), forced me to take part in The Program, a kind of prison camp in the woods for “wayward students”.

  “Wayward” was a category I slotted into just fine, so before I could say, “No, wait, I think there’s been some kind of mistake”, I was shipped off to the Rocky Mountains for a week of total attitude realignment.

 
; For a while there it was touch and go, but somehow I survived and made it back from Colorado alive.

  Who knows, maybe the bottom line is that VP Stonecase wasn’t so far off the mark about what I needed. Maybe she’s some sort of cosmic fortune-teller.

  Anyway, this whole not-getting-into-major-trouble-at-Hills-Valley-Middle-School situation was so weird that I was convinced the school had been taken over by pod creatures. You know what I mean? The kind of aliens who sneakily replicate everyone until you’re the only human left.

  I decided to test my theory.

  The big mistake I made was to test it by pulling Mr. Hernandez’s mustache in gym class. You can already see where this is going, right?

  Mr. Hernandez was standing in for Mr. Lattimore, our regular gym teacher, and I had some sort of brain-melt idea that pod people might use false mustaches or something. Looking back on it, I don’t know why I thought the aliens would be okay replicating every other single thing about a person but would struggle with mustaches.

  Now, in the short time he’d been at HVMS, us students had come to learn that Mr. Hernandez was not what you’d call the forgiving type. In fact, trying to test the theory that Mr. Hernandez might be an alien pod person by doing what I did would normally have resulted in (at least) a hundred years of detention in the Hills Valley Middle School High Security Penitentiary and Mr. Hernandez mutating into a black hole of vengeance.

  But things were so weird that Mr. Hernandez only made me run twenty laps of the football field.

  Like I say—weird. And we haven’t even got to the drop bears.

  LATER THAT DAY, things got even weirder.

  The school had a special assembly, and after Principal Stricker had droned on a bit like she does, she introduced the Mayor of Hills Valley.

  Mayor Blitz Coogan is one of those big, nice, friendly guys who slaps everyone on the back in a big, nice, friendly way with his gigantic paws. He gave Principal Stricker such a big, nice, friendly pat on the back that she almost coughed up a lung and crowd-surfed off the stage.

  “G’day, Hills Valley!” Mayor Coogan boomed into the microphone. “Fair dinkum it’s a bonzer arvo for you and yer cobbers to put on the old budgie smugglers and take the planks down the beach to catch a couple of goofy breaks out back!”

  There was a stunned silence.

  Other than the words “Hills Valley”, nothing Mayor Coogan had said made any sense. The principal (and most of us) looked at the Mayor like he’d lost his mind. Mayor Coogan just stood there smiling like a guy who’d won the lottery.

  “I just got back from a trip to Shark Bay, Australia, where my brother, Biff, lives. That’s what folks in Australia speak like! And I’ve got some very exciting news—Mayor Coogan paused again like he was announcing the winner of a national TV talent show—“Hills Valley is now twinned with Shark Bay!”

  Mayor Coogan beamed a big, beamy smile that made him look as though a xylophone was lodged in his mouth and waited for the applause to die down. The only problem was that there wasn’t any, other than a few claps from the teachers.

  The only way it could have been any worse was if his pants had fallen down.

  “Twinning,” Mayor Coogan continued, “is about a lot of things.”

  It was all about reaching out. It was all about sharing ideas. It was all about cultural exchange.

  It was all so boring I almost passed out.

  Until something Mayor Coogan said jolted me out of my drooly burger daydream.

  “… and first prize in the Shark Bay/Hills Valley Art Prize will be a three-week all-expenses-paid trip to Australia. Judging takes place next week. Get creative, Hills Valley, and you could be on that plane!”

  Art, I thought. I can do art.

  I could win that prize! I bet Mom would like that A LOT.

  Let’s just say I haven’t had a great relationship with HVMS, which has been hard on Mom, too. Mostly because they have a rule book so big that it requires two grown men to open it. And also because I, um, got expelled at one point.

  Being expelled isn’t a good look for anyone, so winning Mayor Coogan’s art prize could give me another another chance at a fresh start.

  Besides, Mom deserved a break. Bringing up a problem-attracting doofus like me—as well as my annoying brainiac little sister, Georgia—can’t be easy on your own.

  So, if I’m such a good artist and I have a shot at a free trip Down Under, and if winning that trip would massively please Mom and make her life just that bit easier, why did I have a feeling in my stomach like I’d just swallowed an octopus?

  MAYOR COOGAN’S SPEECH lasted longer than the last Ice Age, so I’ll condense it down to the bare bones.

  Shark Bay is a surfing town a few hours north of Sydney. The idea was that the winner of the art prize would head Down Under to have an exhibition there and an Australian artist would come over to Hills Valley to do the same thing. Now, I had no idea about what Shark Bay was like, and I don’t want to beat up my own hometown, but that didn’t sound like much of a trade.

  An expert panel—Mayor Blitz Coogan, Ms. Donatello (the Hills Valley Middle School art teacher), and Earl O’Reilly of Earl’s Auto (the sponsor of the prize)—would make the decision.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Ms. Donatello.

  “You should give it a shot,” she said. “I think you have a real chance, Rafe.”

  Ms. Donatello is always doing stuff like that. She’s a bit like my mom in that way—saying I can do things, even when I’m not too sure I can. It kind of freaks me out but in a good way, if you know what I mean.

  “Or don’t you want a free trip to Australia?”

  Ah. Now that was a question. Who wouldn’t want a trip to Australia? Beaches, sun, shrimps on the barbie, palm trees … er … kangaroos. But even though Ms. Donatello had a good point, that octopus in my guts was still sloshing around like crazy.

  Only I knew why.

  Curse you, Discovery Channel!

  FLASHBACK: THREE DAYS EARLIER, a Friday night. My absolute favorite night of the week and I was practising my favorite pastime: Kicking Back In Front Of The TV With A Bag Of Corn Chips. Turns out I’m pretty good at it.

  Georgia was out doing little-sister stuff somewhere with her little-sister friends, and Mom was making something tasty-smelling in the kitchen. I settled into the cushions, put my feet up, and switched on the TV.

  “Doesn’t get much better than this, hey, Leo?” I shoveled another fistful of Tastee Taco Shells into my mouth. Leo didn’t say anything. He had a mouth full of Tastee Taco Shells. Plus, he’s imaginary.

  These days he mostly sticks to showing up in my drawings. I mean, it’s not like I’m completely nuts. Not yet, anyway.

  I was watching a Discovery Channel special about—you guessed it—Australia. It was great. The reason it was so great was that, apparently, everything in Australia is dangerous. Everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything everything.

  The flowers are toxic. Flowers.

  Some of them, anyway. There’s a fruit that tastes like paradise but contains vicious barbed hooks that latch onto the soft part of your throat, causing you to die. HOOKS! What possible reason could there be for a tasty fruit to contain killer throat hooks?!

  The Irikandji, the world’s most venomous jellyfish, lives in Australia. The thing looks like a transparent Gummy Bear. It was like the whole ecosystem had been designed by some complete nutzoid with a twisted sense of humor.

  “Man,” I muttered, “that is one scary place!” As far as I could tell, Australia was basically an island full of monsters. They had birds that could kill you.

  Why would a giant bird need claws? It made no sense. The cassowary didn’t even fly. It only had little stunted wings. Wouldn’t it have been a better idea for the cassowaries to have grown some proper wings and left the claws and sprinting to the cheetahs?

  Creature after creature rolled on-screen, each of them even more fearsome, bloodthirsty, or plain screwy than the la
st. Crocodiles as big as school buses, Tasmanian devils (don’t ask), goannas (basically dinosaurs), vampire bats (of course), stone fish (deadly fish sneakily disguised as stones), poisonous blue-ringed octopus (a cute little octopus that is possibly the most poisonous creature on the planet), venomous snakes by the bucketload, redback spiders, scorpions, stick insects (so big they should be called log insects), killer caterpillars (caterpillars!), toadfish with teeth shaped like a parrot’s beak that can take off your toe … and sharks.

  Lots and lots and lots of sharks. Tiger sharks, bull sharks, makos, hammerheads, blues, and the daddy of them all—the shark that gives me nightmares—the Great White.

  Nothing on earth could ever persuade me to set foot in Australia.

  “They have sharks in America too, dummy,” Leo said.

  “Not in Hills Valley, they don’t,” I replied, and switched the channel to something more soothing—a show about your friendly neighborhood serial killer.