Escape to Australia Read online

  I looked at it suspiciously.

  “Look,” Kell continued, “I know we haven’t exactly hit it off, but I’m really not a bad guy, and I couldn’t let you sit around over here without giving you a heads-up, you being from overseas and everything.”

  “A heads-up?”

  Kell pointed at the branches above my head. “It’s highly unlikely, but we do have a small problem in Australia: drop bears. You heard of ’em?”

  A chill ran down my back.

  “There are drop bears here?” I asked, looking up at the trees nervously.

  Kell nodded. “They can smell fresh meat in the neighborhood.” He eyed my sandwich. “And they do love a cheese sanga. Watch yourself, mate.”

  I looked at Kell. Maybe I’d been wrong about him. Perhaps he wasn’t so bad after all.

  “Thanks,” I said, and opened the can.

  As I did, two things happened.

  The first was that the soda exploded all over my face, temporarily blinding me.

  The second (and this one was much more worrying) was that I felt something furry fall onto my head and wrap its arms around my neck.

  A drop bear!

  I screamed like a startled pony and leaped backward. For a split second, my feet teetered on the edge of the pool, and then, with an almighty splash, I fell in, clawing wildly at the drop bear on my head. I wasted no time in expertly sucking in about eighty-three gallons of chlorinated water and sank below the surface, sure that at any moment the thing was going to rip open the top of my skull and commence drop bear dinner. Main course: Khatchadorian brain à la mode.

  I erupted from the pool like a ballistic missile shooting from a submarine, dragging the creature off my neck. Without hanging around to see what happened to the drop bear, I kicked toward the edge of the pool so fast it was like someone had strapped a speedboat engine onto my rear end and pressed the Start button.

  Surrounded by a foam of white water (caused by my high-speed arm flailing), I wondered why no one was diving in to save me. Couldn’t they see that I was about to be eaten alive? Or maybe they were too scared of the drop bear?

  And then I saw the pool was surrounded by laughing faces.

  I got an awful feeling of déjà vu.

  I stopped swimming and looked around. A stuffed animal—a pink bear—bobbed on the surface of the pool. I looked up and glimpsed Bradley in the branches of a nearby tree, laughing like he’d just swallowed a joke book.

  The whole dirty trick became as clear as the Coogans’ swimming pool.

  I’d been tricked. In public. Again.

  I clambered out of the pool with as much dignity as I could. Which, in case you were wondering, was exactly zero.

  “C’mon, Rafey,” Kell shouted as I stalked toward the house. “It’s only a joke, mate!”

  I said nothing, but one thing was certain. Kell Weathers had just joined Bradley Coogan at the very, very top of the Rafe Khatchadorian Revenge List.

  YOU WON’T LIKE ME WHEN I’M ANGRY

  It was horrible.

  Bloodshot eyes, a gaping mouth full of broken yellow teeth, and flaking gray skin. I felt my breathing becoming panicky as the thing reached out toward me, its decaying hands getting closer and closer and…

  I whipped off my 3-D glasses and sank back into my seat as the zombies swam out of focus. I sneaked a quick glance at Ellie to see if she’d noticed how badly I had just freaked out over seeing that flesh-eater come right toward us.

  She had.

  “Are you okay?” she whispered.

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Um, these glasses give me a headache.”

  “Uh-huh.” Ellie’s smile made me suspect she didn’t believe me, but she returned her gaze to the screen without saying anything else.

  I left the glasses off and watched the rest of Zombies Ate My Brain in a red-and-blue haze. Just before the movie ended, I put the 3-D glasses back on so the rest of the Outsiders wouldn’t think I was a total wimp.

  Afterward, we all got slushies in the movie theater café and discussed the finer points of zombie etiquette.

  The Outsiders knew a lot about zombies.

  Now would probably be a good time to introduce them.

  The Outsiders knew a lot about horror movies, period. I was impressed and got a whole lot more

  impressed when I found out that Ellie was the Outsider in charge of special effects.

  “She’s good,” Nico said. “Ellie knows her stuff.”

  The rest of the Outsiders nodded.

  “You should see her latest monster,” Nico said. “It’s a beaut.”

  “It’s a bunyip,” Sal added. She was the smallest of the Outsiders and was almost hidden behind her slushy.

  “A what?” I said.

  “Revenge of the Teenage Zombie Bunyip from Mars,” Ellie said. “That’s our new movie. Bunyips are these weird sort of giant amphibians.”

  “I’ve never heard of them,” I said.

  “They’re pretty much strictly an Aussie thing,” Ellie said. She sounded sort of proud. “Like frogs, but bigger and angrier.”

  My ears pricked up at the mention of frogs. Where had I heard about them recently?

  Oh, right… Bradley was pee-his-pants scared of them.

  And—BING!—just like that, a magnificently evil plan began to form in my brain. A plan for revenge. A plan so monstrous that it would probably lead to the collapse of civilization—or at least the part of civilization that included Shark’s Bay.

  The only question was, would I be willing to risk everything, including my mom’s wrath, to get even with Bradley?

  I was still thinking about it when Ellie pulled me to the side.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  She frowned. “You haven’t seen it?”

  “Seen what?”

  Ellie held out her phone and pressed the Play button on a video clip. It was only a short piece of footage—me screaming and falling into the Coogans’ pool. The clip had racked up basically a trillion hits already.

  I hadn’t mentioned the whole drop bear incident to Ellie yet, so I tried to play it cool. If you can call having your face catch on fire in the middle of the theater café cool. Okay, so I didn’t actually play it cool. I was mad. I was seething.

  “Are you all right?” Ellie asked.

  “NYAAAAARGGGH!” I roared as I started to swell up and turn green right there in the middle of the café. My eyes glowed fiery red, and muscles I didn’t know I had bulged from my arms. I ripped open my shirt, flexed my giant green biceps, and roared like a wounded lion. I lifted a fist the size of a basketball and smashed a life-size cutout of Leonardo DiCaprio into smithereens. As people started screaming and running in all directions, I stamped my big green foot down. The ground shook. I—

  “Rafe!” Ellie yelled. “I said, are you all right?”

  I blinked and looked down at my skinny nongreen arm. “Sorry, I spaced out.” I laced my fingers together and cracked my knuckles. “This bunyip of yours,” I said to Ellie, “can I see it?”

  SELFISH? ME?

  The next day I had to wait for Ellie to get home from school before I could go and see the bunyip.

  The hours crawled past. The Coogans were out at work, Bradley and Belinda were back in school, and Mom had gone off somewhere with my archenemy, Kell Weathers. What with Bradley and Belinda and Kell, not to mention the rest of the Surf Gorillas, that list of sworn enemies was getting longer than one of Georgia’s school supply lists. And that’s without bringing up all of the sworn enemies I had back in the US.

  Of all my rivals, though, Kell was the one who worried me most. I wanted revenge on Bradley, but Kell’s friendship with Mom was a teeny-tiny concern.

  Leo, who had been keeping a low profile recently, passed me a drawing.

  “Very funny,” I said. But maybe Leo was right. Perhaps I was being shellfish—I mean selfish. Maybe Mom deserved some attention, even if it was from a hand-crushing creep like Kell.

  Reluctantly, I c
rossed Weathers off my list of enemies. We’d never be what you might call buddies, but I didn’t need to let my dislike of him spoil Mom’s trip. I felt a warm glow inside, and it wasn’t because I’d accidentally swallowed a chili. I felt noble.

  When it was time for me and my halo to go to Ellie’s place, I grabbed Bradley’s prized skateboard and zipped there as fast as I could go.

  It was a hot day and the thunderclouds had been building for hours. As I reached Ellie’s street, the first fat raindrops began to fall and I heard the distant rumble of thunder.

  Ellie lived a few blocks back from the beach in a less swanky part of Shark’s Bay, where the houses were made of timber and stood on stilts. Lots of them had small boats in the yard or old cars that were being fixed up. The streets were lined with shady trees, and the whole place was a lot funkier than down by the shore. It felt more like where I came from. I liked it.

  I hoped this bunyip of Ellie’s matched my vision of it. My whole plan depended on it looking like a monstrous demon frog from Bradley’s worst nightmares.

  I walked up to her door and knocked.

  No pressure.

  I WAS WORKING IN THE LAB LATE ONE NIGHT…

  Hi,” Ellie said when she opened the door. “I’m here,” I announced, smiling.

  “I can see that, Einstein,” Ellie said. “And stop smiling like that. It makes you look like a nut.” She turned and walked back into the house. “Follow me. My dad’s still at work.”

  I almost asked where her mom was, when I remembered Nico mentioning that Ellie’s mom died when she was little. That would’ve been great, Khatchadorian, I said to myself. Real tactful. I reached up and adjusted my imaginary halo.

  Ellie’s house seemed normal—not too tidy, with a TV, kitchen, furniture. A bit boring. But downstairs, things were different. Very different.

  “My dad put in walls between the stilts to make this into a basement,” Ellie explained. “It might be a problem if the place ever gets flooded again, but we’ll deal with that when it happens. Until then, this is my workshop!”

  I couldn’t speak. Ellie’s workshop was the coolest place I’d ever seen. The walls were lined with shelves of paint, tools, bits of models, plastic horror masks, electronics, lights, rolls of canvas, paper, pieces of wood, coils of wire, spray cans, cleaning fluids, remote-controlled devices, mirrors—anything that looked like it might be useful for making an animatronic bunyip was there.

  A massive, paint-spattered table stretched the length of Ellie’s workshop. Lying in the center was something under a white sheet. A spaghetti mess of wires snaked out from under the sheet onto the floor of the basement. A vise on a nearby table held what looked like an alien arm.

  Ellie pulled back the sheet. “There it is.”

  Thunder cracked outside, and lightning cast shadows that flickered across the walls. Lying flat on its back, missing an arm and looking exactly like it was asleep, was Ellie’s bunyip.

  It was gigantic.

  It was terrifying.

  It was perfect.

  “Wow,” I said.

  The bunyip really was wow. It was as wow as anything I’d ever seen. It frightened me half to death, and I knew it was just a bundle of rubber and electronics.

  “That is amazing. Does it move?” I asked.

  Ellie picked up a remote control from the workbench and pressed a switch. There was a soft electronic hum, and then the bunyip’s eyes opened slowly and glowed red. Ellie turned a dial on the remote and the bunyip sat up on the bench. It swung its head in my direction and howled so loudly I could feel the bass shaking my spine.

  “One hundred and forty-three decibels,” Ellie said proudly. “Twin-mounted deep-bass equalized speakers with double woofers and a Swiss-made magnifying reverberator.”

  I didn’t understand a word she said, but I knew one thing: Ellie’s bunyip was going to make all my dreams come true.

  “I’ve got a plan,” I said. I didn’t mean to say anything, but seeing the bunyip made the words just come rushing out. Ivegotaplan. Blurp! Just like that.

  “Plan for what?” Ellie said.

  I shook my head. “Forget I said anything.”

  Ellie tilted her head to one side and looked at me, her lips pursed. “Is this about getting revenge on Bradley and Belinda?”

  I don’t know if Ellie was some sort of mind reader or what—for all I knew, she could be a star graduate from the Zurich Institute of Psychic Talents—but she had read my thoughts as clearly as a billboard.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  Ellie nodded.

  “So…?”

  Ellie didn’t say anything for about a hundred years.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said eventually. “You’re going back to Hills Village, but I have to live here with them every day. And I’m guessing this plan might involve my bunyip, right? I put a lot of work into that thing.”

  I nodded. Ellie was contemplating helping me out with my plan, and that’s all I could ask for.

  It was a start.

  THE PLAN: DAY ONE

  My mission, should I choose to accept it—and I had choosed—was to get into the Shark’s Bay Surf Club, covertly take measurements, and get out, all while staying alive, if possible.

  I braced myself against the edge of the skylight, hooked the titanium wire onto my belt, and adjusted my night-vision goggles. Below me, the raging torrent of the waterfall rushed past before falling almost six thousand miles to the boiling pool set into the floor of the lobby far, far below.

  “Careful, Khatchadorian,” Ivan Awfilitch, my mission controller, snarled into my earpiece. “You’ve only got one shot at this! If you mess up, HQ is going to bury you so deep they’ll need a team of miners to find you.”

  “Check,” I said.

  I had my analog-level measuring device (a tape measure) in one hand and a state-of-the-art measurement-recording platform (a notebook) in the other. My image-retention device (a camera) was hanging around my neck.

  I gave Ivan a final salute and dropped into the abyss, quickly lowering into the lobby at the end of the wire. One slip and I could get seriously splashed.

  Down, down, down I slid until I reached a point just above the surface of the pool and stopped dead, perfectly balanced only inches from the water. The night-vision goggles identified the tracks of the surf club’s security-system lasers and…

  Well, that’s what I would have done if I’d had to sneak into the club, anyway. In the end, I just walked up and went inside. (See why I had to spice it up a little?)

  The lobby of the club was deserted, apart from a woman who looked like she might be the manager.

  “Take your time, honey,” she said. She pointed at a poster on the wall. “Have you sorted out your costume yet?”

  “Costume?” I said.

  The poster was advertising the grand opening. My name was up there and I experienced a little thrill seeing my name in print.

  “Nobody mentioned a costume party,” I said, but the manager had gone off to do whatever it is managers do.

  I hadn’t considered the possibility that this thing would have costume requirements. But then again, costumes seemed to be really important to Australian people. Biff had picked us up at the airport dressed as a chicken, after all. I guessed costume parties were another one of those mysterious Australian things, like cricket and Vegemite and wearing short shorts in public. It was also a complication I could do without, but as I considered it more carefully, I realized that a costume could come in handy.

  I opened up my measurement-recording platform, unrolled my analog-level measuring device, and started taking down numbers. If we were going to get this right, we couldn’t afford making a single mistake.

  ACTION!

  I’d never been on a film set before. To be honest, it wasn’t as glamorous as I thought it would be, even if it was just the Outsiders filming Revenge of the Teenage Zombie Bunyip from Mars.

  We were standing around on a patch of scrubby ground n
ext to a sugarcane field a couple of miles west of Shark’s Bay. The equipment they were using wasn’t exactly high-tech. The Outsiders were shooting on anything they could get their hands on—camcorders, smartphones, even an ancient Super 8 camera that used actual film. But they still seemed to know what they were doing.

  “We do most of the sound later,” Nico explained. “There’s usually too much background interference if we record it live.”

  They were filming a chase scene through the cane field and were having some trouble deciding how to do it. I suggested that we could sketch out a few ideas beforehand just to figure things out, and it seemed to work.

  “Hey! You can be our storyboard artist,” Ellie said.

  Until then I didn’t know there was such a thing as a storyboard artist. I’d never thought about my drawings being useful before.

  I sat underneath the shady part of a tree and started sketching. Maybe these drawings could be in the exhibit at the surf club, I thought. I did need something to deflect attention from my evil plan, after all.

  I still had to convince the Outsiders to help. They were no fans of Bradley and Belinda and the rest of the Surf Gorillas, but what I was planning needed some real motivation. The Outsiders hadn’t been publicly humiliated like me.

  As I sketched, I wondered if they would risk everything just to help me get revenge.

  EGGSTERMINATE!

  The push that sent Ellie over the edge came sooner than I’d thought.