Middle School: Rafe's Aussie Adventure Read online

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

  IT WAS HORRIBLE.

  Eyes like oysters, gaping mouth full of tombstone teeth, flaking, clammy skin. I felt my breathing becoming panicky as the thing reached out toward me, its bony hands getting closer and closer and …

  I whipped off my 3D glasses and sank back into my seat as the zombies swam out of focus. I risked a quick glance at Ellie to see if she’d noticed the big fat yellow streak running down my back.

  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 might not have believed 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 happy red-and-green haze. Just before the movie ended I put the 3D glasses back on so the rest of The Outsiders wouldn’t think I was a total wimp.

  We slurped on slurpees in the movie theatre cafe and discussed the finer points of zombie etiquette. Now would probably be a good time to properly introduce The Outsiders. If this was a superhero comic I’d tell you all about their special skills, but they were just a bunch of kids. And that was okay by me.

  The Outsiders knew a lot about zombies.

  They knew a lot about horror movies of every description, 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, bro.”

  The rest of The Outsiders nodded.

  “You should see her latest,” 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 slurpee.

  “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 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 the part of civilization that included Shark Bay.

  The only question was, would I risk everything to get even with Brad?

  I was still thinking about that when Ellie took me to one 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 doing the whole screaming-and-falling-into-the-Coogan-pool thing. The clip had racked up eleventy trillion hits already. I hadn’t mentioned the drop bear incident to Ellie.

  I played it cool. If you can call turning the color of a stoplight cool. What’s that? No, you can’t? Okay, I didn’t 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 cafe. 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-sized cut-out of Leonardo DiCaprio into smithereens. As people started screaming and running in all directions I stamped a big green foot. The ground shook. I—

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

  I blinked and looked down at my skinny non-green arm. “Sorry, I was miles away.” I laced my fingers together and cracked my knuckles. “This bunyip of yours,” I said to Ellie, “can I see it?”

  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 and Mom had gone off somewhere with my archenemy, Kell Weathers. What with Brad and Belinda and Kell, not to mention the rest of The Surf Gorillas, that list of sworn enemies was getting longer than one of Grandma Dotty’s shopping lists. And that’s without bringing up all the sworn enemies I have back in America.

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

  Leo, who had been keeping a low profile recently, popped up and 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 crossed 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 KW 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 Brad’s prized skateboard and zipped there as fast as I could go.

  It had been 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 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. I walked up to her door and knocked. My whole plan depended on Ellie’s bunyip.

  No pressure.

  “HI,” ELLIE SAID when she opened the door.

  “I’m here,” I announced, smiling.

  “I can see that, Einstein,” Ellie said.

  She had a point.

  “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 had died when she was little. That would have been great, Khatchadorian, I said to myself. Real tactful. I reached up and adjusted my imaginary halo.

  Ellie’s house was just like a regular house—not too tidy, TV, kitchen, furniture. A bit boring, really. 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, boxes, bits of models, plastic horror masks, electronics, lights, rolls of canvas, paper, lengths of wood, coils of wire, aerosol spraycans, cleaning fluids, remote-controlled devices, mirrors—anything that looked like it might be useful when making an animatronic bunyip was there.

  A massive, paint-spattered wooden workbench stretched the length of Ellie’s workshop. Lying in the centre of another workbench was something under a dust sheet. A spaghetti mess of wires snaked out from whatever was there and dripped onto the floor of the basement. A vice at one end of the bench was holding what looked like an alien arm.

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

  Thunder cracked outside, and lightning cast shadows which 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

  It was


  It was

  “Wow,” I said.

  As reactions go it wasn’t the best I’d ever heard, but it was from the heart. The bunyip was wow. It was as wow as anything I could remember ever seeing. 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 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’d said but I knew one thing: I was in love (with Ellie’s bunyip, in case you were wondering).

  “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.

  “What for?” 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 Brad 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 Mind-Meld—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. “I have to live here once you go back to Hell Valley. And I’m guessing this plan might involve my bunyip, right? I put a lot of work into that.”

  I nodded. I didn’t correct her about Hills Valley. It didn’t seem important. What did seem important was that Ellie was contemplating helping me out with my plan.

  It was a start.

  MY MISSION, SHOULD I choose to accept it—and I had choosened—was to get into the Shark Bay Surf Club, 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 Awfulich, my Mission Controller, snarled as I leaned out into empty space. “You’ve only got one shot at this! If you mess up, HQ are going to bury you so deep they’ll need a team of miners to find you.”

  “Check,” I said.

  I had my analogue-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, heading for the lobby at the end of the wire, my face only inches from the waterfall. 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 … that’s what I would have done if I couldn’t get in any other way. 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—and that’s exactly who she was.

  “Take your time, darl,” the manager 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 fancy dress,” 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 fancy-dress requirements. Fancy dress seemed to figure a lot in Australia. Biff had picked us up at the airport dressed as a chicken after all. I guessed fancy dress was another one of those mysterious Australian things, like cricket and Vegemite and wearing short shorts. It was also a complication I could do without, but then, as I considered it more carefully, I realized that the fancy dress could come in handy.

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

  I’D NEVER BEEN on a film set before.

  To be honest, it wasn’t as glamorous as I thought it would be, even allowing for the fact that it was just The Outsiders filming Revenge of the Teenage Zombie Bunyip From Mars.

  We were standing around on a patch of scrubby ground next to a sugar cane field a couple of miles west of Shark Bay. The equipment they were using wasn’t exactly hi-tech, but they seemed to know what they were doing.

  The Outsiders were shooting on anything they could get—camcorders, smartphones, even an old Super-8 film camera that used actual film.

  “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 tried to explain how it might be done by sketching out a few ideas, and that 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 in the shade of a tree and started sketching. Maybe these drawings could become the exhibit at the surf club, I thought. I did need something there to deflect attention from my evil plan.

  Everything was in place. Now all I had to do was convince Ellie and the gang to help. They were no fans of Brad 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.

  THE PUSH THAT sent Ellie over the edge came sooner than I’d thought.

  It was the last shot of the day and the most complicated. It was also the most expensive by a long way. Ellie and the rest of The Outsiders had saved up a whole bunch of money for this shot and had bought some flash-bangs from a movie-prop supplier in Sydney, hired a dry-ice machine from somewhere and had prepared buckets of fake blood.

  “This has got to go right first time,” Ellie said.

  Nico, the director, gave instructions to Mikey and Dingbat, who were playing the two characters. It was down to Ellie to time the flash-bangs, set off the dry ice and throw the blood. Nico had one camera—the best one—and I was given a smartphone to film things from another angle, just as a backup. A third camcorder was propped up on a tree stump to film it as a long shot.

  “Everyone ready?” Nico said. “Let’s get this right, okay? We’ve got about three minutes of sunlight left!”

  Ellie counted down the scene. “Three, two, one …”

  “Action!” Nico yelled.

  Ellie pressed the START button on the dry-ice machine, and we all began filming.

  Mikey and Dingbat came out of the cane field right on cue, and Ellie started setting off the flash-bangs. They looked amazing. Ellie smiled and looked over at me. Grinning, I gave her the thumbs-up.

  As Ellie threw the first of the buckets of fake blood over Dingbat, an egg exploded on the ground in front of her. She looked at it, puzzled, and then a second egg hit Mikey on the shoulder, followed by a bag of flour.

  A shower of eggs and flour cascaded
down on the set, and then crashing through the canes came The Surf Gorillas, yelling and screaming. Before any of The Outsiders could react, they ran through the set, scattering script sheets to the wind and kicking over the buckets of blood.

  “Losers!” Brad shouted as they ran off laughing and hooting.

  “Film this, you geeks!” Belinda screeched.

  The Outsiders stood and watched them go. The shot was ruined.

  As the sky darkened, Ellie walked over to me. She had egg in her hair and an expression on her face that would not have looked out of place in a horror movie.

  “This revenge plan of yours?” she said. “What do you need? I’m in.”

  LIFE CARRIED ON as usual at the Coogans’, which meant that Brad and Belinda took every opportunity to rub my nose in what a loser I was.

  I didn’t care. Much.

  Let them think they’d gotten away with the Great Cane Field Ambush. Let them think I was too much of a wuss to get my own back. They’d find out soon enough that Rafe Khatchadorian was a force to be reckoned with.

  As would Kell Weathers.

  Kell had let his true nature slip again one evening when he came round to pick up my mom. She was busy getting ready upstairs when Kell took me over to a quiet corner after. (I’d been giving him the complete frost the last couple of times I’d seen him. I still remembered his part in the Great Drop Bear Incident and, even though I wasn’t going to try to get revenge on him, I wasn’t ready to let bygones be bygones either. It seemed that neither was Kell.)

  “You don’t like me too much, do you, Rafe?” He prodded me in the chest. It hurt. I guess geologists have strong fingers from picking up all those rocks.

  I shrugged, trying to ignore the pain. Then Kell jabbed me again. It hurt again.