Escape to Australia Read online

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2017 by James Patterson

  Illustrations by Daniel Griffo

  Excerpt from Pottymouth and Stoopid © 2017 by James Patterson

  Illustrations in excerpt by Stephen Gilpin

  Excerpt from How to Be a Supervillain copyright © 2017 by Michael Fry

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  JIMMY Patterson Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  JimmyPatterson.org

  First ebook edition: March 2017

  JIMMY Patterson Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The JIMMY Patterson name and logo are trademarks of JBP Business, LLC.

  Middle School® is a trademark of JBP Business, LLC.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-43408-9

  E3-20170131-JV-PC

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  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 CHARM

  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: BEETS?

  CHAPTER 15: THE ROPE OF DOOM

  CHAPTER 16: REVENGE OF THE POD PEOPLE

  CHAPTER 17: WHERE’S A GIANT METEOROID 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 BUY 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 AUTHORS

  JIMMY PATTERSON BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  A SNEAK PEEK OF HOW TO BE A SUPERVILLAIN

  A SNEAK PEEK OF POTTYMOUTH AND STOOPID

  ABOUT JIMMY PATTERSON

  NEWSLETTERS

  TO MORTIMER

  AND AGNETHA DEVERE,

  THE ULTIMATE MIDDLE SCHOOL

  SURVIVORS

  —M.C.

  ZOMBIE INVASION!

  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 dirt-streaked, bug-eyed faces and the nasty collection of weapons they were waving around—pitchforks, tennis rackets, flaming torches, barbecue tongs, a rusty exhaust pipe from a 2006 Camry—these dudes were serious about claiming the top spot in Rafe Khatchadorian’s All-Time Disasters 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? The fact that this mob had come up with THREE of them showed a real level of zombie determination.

  Despite the pitchforks, there was, however, one tiny ray of hope that I could cling to: maybe it wasn’t me they were after. It could be that the zombies had other delicious victims in mind besides the untasty and downright bony Rafe Khatchadorian of Hills Village.

  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 problem. 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.

  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, I know what you’re probably thinking about all this zombie stuff: that it sounds super exciting and majorly awesome,

  but why should we listen to a single word you say?

  Which is totally valid. But to explain everything, we’ll have to go back, back through the mists of time, back to the very beginning of the story of how I ended up in this predicament.

  Yep, we’re going to middle school.

  THE GREAT HERNANDEZ MUSTACHE THEORY

  We’ll get to the zombies later because the BIG news to start off with isn’t mutant brain-eaters, it’
s that (drumroll, please!) I, Rafe Khatchadorian, have managed to stay enrolled at Hills Village 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, well… let’s not go that far. I’m not perfect.

  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.

  For example, it seems like only yesterday that the seriously scary new vice principal at Hills Village, the knuckle-crunching Charlotte P. Stonecase (a.k.a. the Terror from Room 666, a.k.a. the Skull Keeper), forced me to take part in The Program, a kind of prison camp in the woods for “wayward students.”

  Wayward is just another way of saying troublemaking, and 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-Village-Middle-School situation was so weird that I was convinced the school had been taken over by pod creatures. You know, the kind of aliens who sneakily make themselves look like the regular people they’ve eaten 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-melting idea that pod people might use fake mustaches or something. Looking back on it, I don’t know why I thought the aliens could replicate every other single thing about a person except a mustache.

  Now, even though he’d just started teaching at Hills Village at the beginning of the year, I’d already learned that Mr. Hernandez was not what you’d call the forgiving type. In fact, trying to figure out once and for all if Mr. Hernandez was an alien by trying to pull off his mustache would normally have resulted in (at least) a hundred years of detention and Mr. Hernandez mutating into a black hole of vengeance.

  But Mr. Hernandez only made me run twenty laps of the football field.

  Like I said—weird. And I haven’t even gotten to the drop bears yet.

  BUDGIE SMUGGLERS, AHOY!

  Later that day, things got even weirder. The school had a special assembly, and after Principal Stricker droned on for, like, ten minutes, she introduced the mayor of Hills Village.

  Mayor Blitz Coogan is one of those big, nice, friendly guys who slap everyone on the back in a big, nice, friendly way with their 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 Village!” 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 Village,” nothing Mayor Coogan had said made any sense. We looked at him like he’d lost his mind. Mayor Coogan just stood there smiling like a guy who’d won the lottery.

  “That’s what folks in Australia speak like! I just got back from a trip to Shark’s Bay, Australia, where my brother, Biff, lives. 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 Village is now twinned with Shark’s Bay!”

  Mayor Coogan beamed a big smile that made him look like a xylophone was lodged in his mouth, and glanced expectantly around the auditorium like he was waiting for the applause to die down. The only problem was that there wasn’t any, other than a few stray claps from the teachers.

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

  “Twinning,” Mayor Coogan continued, “means that our two towns are now special partners that will learn a lot from each other. It’s all about reaching out, sharing ideas, and cultural exchange.”

  It all sounded so boring I almost passed out.

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

  “… and first prize in the Shark’s Bay/Hills Village Art Competition will be a three-week, all-expenses-paid trip to Australia. Judging takes place next week. Get creative, Hills Village, 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.

  Mostly because my trouble in middle school has been hard on Mom, too. HVMS has a rule book so big that it requires two grown men to open it—and I’m not exactly great at following the rules. So, naturally, I got expelled at one point. Mom wasn’t too pleased.

  You can see why I could use a fresh start, at least in Mom’s eyes. Winning Mayor Coogan’s art competition could give me another chance to make it up to her.

  Well, another another chance.

  But if I was such a good artist and I had a shot at a free trip Down Under, and if winning that trip would make Mom proud of me, why did I have a feeling in my stomach like I’d just swallowed an octopus?

  FAIR TRADE

  Mayor Coogan’s speech lasted longer than the last ice age, so I’ll condense it down to the bare bones.

  He explained that Shark’s Bay was a surfing town north of Sydney. The idea was that the winner of the art competition would live there for three weeks and create artwork inspired by Australian culture, then exhibit it at a special party. An Australian artist would come over to Hills Village to do the same thing. Now, I had no idea what Shark’s Bay was like, and I didn’t want to diss my own hometown, but that didn’t sound like much of a trade for the other side.

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

  After the assembly, 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—saying I can do things even when I’m not too sure I can. She really believes in me. It kind of freaks me out, but in a good way.

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

  Um, YES! Who wouldn’t want a free trip to Australia?

  Beaches, sun, shrimps on the barbie, palm trees… uh… kangaroos. But even though Ms. Donatello had a good point, that octopus in my guts was still sloshing around like crazy.

  And I knew exactly why.

  It was all thanks to the Discovery Channel.

  KILLER FRUIT

  Flashback to three days earlier, a Friday night. My absolute favorite night of the week, and I was practicing my favorite pastime: playing my TrollQuest video game with a bag of corn chips balanced on my knee for easy snack-cess. I’m pretty good at it.

  Georgia was out doing little-sister stuff somewhere with her little-sister friends, and Mom had the night off from work, so she 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, hmm, Leo?” I shoveled another fistful of Tastee Taco Shells into my mouth as I heaved a boulder onto some troll-eating maggots. Leo didn’t say anything. He had a mouthful of Tastee Taco Shells. Plus, he’s not real.

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

  After I finished my TrollQuest level, I flipped on a Discovery Channel special about—you guessed it—Australia.
It was great. Apparently, everything in Australia is dangerous. Everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything everything.

  Even the flowers are toxic. Flowers.

  There’s a fruit that tastes like paradise but contains vicious barbed hooks that latch on to 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?

  And the Irukandji, the world’s most venomous jellyfish, lives in Australia. The thing looks like an evil, transparent gummy bear.

  They have birds that could kill you.

  Why would a giant bird need claws? It makes no sense. The cassowary can’t even fly. It has these little stunted wings. Wouldn’t it have been a better idea for the cassowaries to grow some actual wings and leave the claws and sprinting to the cheetahs?

  Creature after creature rolled on-screen, each of them even more fearsome, more bloodthirsty, or just plain weirder than the last. Crocodiles as big as school buses, Tasmanian devils (don’t ask), goannas (basically dinosaurs), ghost bats (of course), stonefish (deadly fish sneakily disguised as stones), poisonous blue-ringed octopuses (cute little octopuses that are possibly the most poisonous creatures 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 are capable of ripping off your toe)… and sharks.