Countdown Zero Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Amanda, again and always

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Prankpocalypse

  Chapter 2: Sometimes It Is Like in the Movies

  Chapter 3: Secret Corned-Beef Messages from Reformed Pirates

  Chapter 4: Wizard vs. Armadillo

  Chapter 5: The Guts Stew Question

  Chapter 6: Bonecrusher and the Zombie Apocalypse

  Chapter 7: The Dirty Rat Who Saved the World

  Chapter 8: The Chandlergast

  Chapter 9: Eating Fish Heads under a Bridge

  Chapter 10: The World Ends in 2029

  Chapter 11: The Wal-Mart Connection

  Chapter 12: Replica Faces Are All the Rage

  Chapter 13: The Card Shark

  Chapter 14: The Flammable Tent

  Chapter 15: Why Nobody Ever Messes with Australia

  Chapter 16: ManBearPig

  Chapter 17: Bulgarian Cookbooks

  Chapter 18: Mount Rushmore Is Filthy

  Chapter 19: In Teddy Roosevelt’s Shadow

  Chapter 20: Carson Just Died?

  Chapter 21: A Fruit Roll-Up Saves the World

  Chapter 22: When Having No Rhythm Is the End of the World

  Chapter 23: The Tim Tebow of Heroes

  Chapter 24: Happy Birthday, Gollum

  Chapter 25: The Tapping of Time

  Chapter 26: Being Teddy Roosevelt

  Chapter 27: Countdown Zero

  Chapter 28: La Pistola

  Chapter 29: Zero Times Zero Equals Zero

  Chapter 30: Another Countdown

  Chapter 31: The Forty-Third Street Saint

  Chapter 32: Awkward Friend Hugs

  Chapter 33: Vacuums and Applebee’s Dinners

  Chapter 34: Troll Hunting

  Chapter 35: Blue in Brown Short Shorts

  Chapter 36: Snakepeople

  Chapter 37: Beyond Snakedome

  Chapter 38: El Quippo

  Chapter 39: One Swipe of the Blade

  Chapter 40: Sometimes It Is Just Like the Movies, Redux (Sort of)

  Chapter 41: Counting Stars

  Chapter 42: Bison Apocalypse

  Chapter 43: Eleven Ways to Die inside Snakedome

  Chapter 44: When Fear Becomes a Weapon

  Chapter 45: Lazy Eyebrows

  Chapter 46: Leggo My Leg Dough

  Chapter 47: Sailor! To the Moon with Ye!

  Chapter 48: Three Countdowns in One Day Is Three Too Many

  Chapter 49: Ten Minutes(ish) and Counting

  Chapter 50: So Much for the Rules of Countdowns

  Chapter 51: You Ruined It!

  Chapter 52: Questions

  Chapter 53: Answers

  Chapter 54: Just Another Boring Monday

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE DARKNESS CONCEALED ME, EVEN AMID THE BRIGHT WHITE snow that drifted down from the night sky. I stayed low and crept behind a row of trees next to the massive brick building. The whole operation depended on the success of my next directive, which was the second phase in the mission. The third, if you count the sneaking-out-of-our-houses-after-midnight part.

  I reached the window and slowly stood up, grabbing the sill and pulling myself up so I was half crouched and half sitting on the snow-covered, eight-inch-wide ledge. It was about as comfortable as having two live rats fighting over a piece of cheese inside your shorts.

  Not that I knew what that felt like, exactly. But it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t be there for very long.

  I grabbed the window I’d unlocked earlier that day right after my sixth-period class. That had been phase one of the mission. I’d unlocked it from the inside and pushed it open just a centimeter when Ms. Freely’s substitute teacher had stepped out to get more coffee between classes. There was no way a sub was going to check to make sure every single window was closed and locked at the end of the day. In my experience, substitute teachers were always the first ones out of there when the final bell rang. Anyway, the point is, the window was still unlocked just like I knew it would be.

  The window swung open a few inches before jamming. This was something I hadn’t anticipated. It could sink the entire mission. I pulled harder; the window wouldn’t budge. It was only open three inches, which was not nearly wide enough for me to squeeze through.

  After taking a deep breath, I pushed myself up and put all my weight onto the top edge of the window. There was a loud creak followed by a few cracking noises as the old wood and dried paint finally relented. The window popped open so quickly that I almost tumbled off the narrow window ledge and into the bushes below where I’d surely have been impaled by at least a dozen branches like some sort of all-natural, certified-organic human pincushion.

  I squeezed myself through the narrow opening and, just like that, we were in business. I sent a group text to my team:

  I’m in.

  One of the few good things about the first snowfall in North Dakota was that it opened up a whole new array of possible pranks. Usually, this was the most exciting time of year for me. I’d spend a month deciding on the perfect prank to ring in the winter. And then I’d hammer out the details with Dillon and Danielle, who were twins and my two best friends, and we’d execute it to perfection.

  But this year was a little different. This year, one prank wasn’t going to be enough. Maybe it was because earlier that school year I’d become an actual, real-life secret agent and had almost single-handedly saved my town, my country, and pretty much the whole world, and since then, well, planning the same old pranks just hadn’t felt like much of a challenge. Things like hiding the class hamsters somewhere in the science lab and then putting giant snakes inside their cages so that everyone would think the snakes had eaten them. (Before you get upset, know that no animals were harmed.) Actually, I’d had Dillon handle the snake wrangling. I know a lot of kids my age think snakes are cool and want one as a pet, but not me. No thanks. Snakes creeped me out worse than anything else in the world. Seriously, I’d rather wake up and find a whole nest of baby spiders hatching in my hair than have to sit three feet away from a harmless garter snake.

  But, anyway, the point is that I used to think the snake/hamster prank, and any of the other ones I would pull, were hilarious. And they used to give me a big rush. Now, those pranks just weren’t bringing the same sense of excitement and satisfaction that they did before the whole secret-agent thing. I was no longer Carson Fender, secret agent, codename: Zero. Even if that was a lot cooler and a lot more important, that part of my life was behind me now, and the sooner I got things back to normal, the better. I needed something major to bring me back to my real life. Hence, Prankpocalypse.

  Prankpocalypse would be the largest-scale prank in the history of the world. It was going to take several hours and a lot of manpower to pull off. Which is why we had to execute it at night when no one else was around. If Prankpocalypse couldn’t deliver the goods for me, then I’d probably have to face the fact that I’d outgrown pranks entirely—and a world without pranks was not one I wanted to live in. Pulling pranks was who I was. I was Carson Fender, Master Prankster. And Prankpocalypse would be my life’s masterpiece. As long as it didn’t get all of us expelled.

  That was the main thing: to make sure nobody got caught. This was especially important today—a few of the kids in on the prank, including Danielle and Dillon, were leaving next week for a three-day field trip to Mount Rushmore that the school did for seventh graders every year. They were pretty excited about it. The two Dakotas don’t really have much in the way of interesting landmarks or monuments, so Mount Rushmore was a pretty big d
eal for us, and the selected kids waited eagerly all year for the trip. If they got into any trouble at all, they wouldn’t be allowed to go. Which explains why I wasn’t going on the trip. I got into way too much trouble to be rewarded with special field trips. The school only took thirty seventh graders each year, and to qualify you needed to meet three requirements:

  1.B average or better in all classes

  2.Less than one hour of detention total for the whole school year

  3.At least one recommendation from a teacher

  I think I actually held the record for the most detention of any kid in the history of the school. That’s not even mentioning my C average, or the fact that pretty much every teacher I’d had and a bunch that I didn’t disliked me for one prank or another. I was bummed, of course, because it’d be fun to miss a whole day of school to go on a camping trip with Dillon and Danielle. But there wasn’t much I could do about it now. Anyway, it made secrecy the number-one concern while executing Prankpocalypse.

  I exited the classroom and switched on my flashlight. The empty school hallways looked a lot creepier at night. I found myself thinking of all of those scary movies I’d seen and wishing I hadn’t seen them. Thankfully, the need to focus on the mission at hand kept me from turning around and sprinting right back down the hall and out the window I’d just entered.

  There was a side door by the gym that was one of the few in the school that could be unlocked from the inside without a key. Most of the main entrances were these huge glass jobs that required a key, even from the inside. But this particular door could be opened simply by pushing the lever.

  My crew was outside waiting with nervous grins on their faces.

  “You guys ready?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding?” said Jake, our newest prank recruit. “Let’s do this thing.”

  Jake had always been on the fringes of our group of friends, but this was his first time in the inner circle. I could tell he was the most nervous and excited of all of us, likely from an adrenaline high. That can happen when pulling your first prank. While it was definitely risky to let a rookie in on Prankpocalypse—especially one whose mom was on the school board—this was no ordinary prank, and we needed the manpower. Plus, Dillon had really taken a liking to Jake and insisted he was a good guy whom we could trust.

  “Settle down, Jake, jeez,” Danielle said. “You’re gonna have a heart attack before we even get started.”

  Danielle hadn’t been as excited as her brother about letting Jake help us out. She said Prankpocalypse was too important to put even a small piece of it in the hands of a newbie. But I had a feeling it was more than just his inexperience. Even I could see that Danielle didn’t like him as much as the rest of us did. I couldn’t figure out why, but then, girls always seemed to dislike random kids for no reason.

  Either way, I laughed and moved aside so the whole crew could enter: Dillon, Danielle, and Jake, followed by Zack, Ethan, Katie, and Adie. They carried backpacks filled with supplies, except for Zack, who pushed in a giant wheelbarrow containing several plastic sleds and a few small snow shovels. That honor had been his, since he lived closest to the school.

  The basic concept behind Prankpocalypse was pretty simple: execute as many pranks at the same time as humanly possible.

  But the execution of it was a lot more complex than that. For one thing, it was already past midnight, so we probably had less than four hours before we ran the risk of being spotted near the school. Second, most of the school classroom doors operated on automatic locks, which meant they were always locked when closed. This limited most of our pranks to the common areas.

  Here’s a small taste of what we had planned for Prankpocalypse:

  •Build a huge wall of snow behind every entrance of the school (to be completed last to reduce melting time)

  •Rearrange all the sauce and condiment bottles in the cafeteria (i.e., put mustard in the ketchup bottles, hot sauce in the mayo bottles, etc.)

  •Hide all the tables and chairs in the cafeteria and common areas inside one of the school bathrooms

  •Cover the floors completely with printed pictures of animals pooping (this one had been Jake’s idea; Danielle found it pretty gross and stupid, but the rest of us agreed that it was hilarious, and so it stayed in)

  •Cover as many windows in black paint as possible

  •Hide expired eggs all over the school

  The main event, though, was a special prank I had planned specifically for Principal Gomez’s office. This was one I’d be taking care of personally, as it would require some pretty serious lock picking, which was something I’d learned how to do during my secret-agent training. I’d never actually done it in the field, but I had been keeping my skills sharp at home using a lock-picking kit I bought online. Once inside his office, I was going to build a giant snowman replica of Principal Gomez behind his desk. I’d even brought a fake stick-on mustache and a terrible fur scarf I found at Salvation Army that looked remarkably similar to his scrappy hair.

  I know that it probably sounds like I’m pretty hard on old Mr. Gomez—that, in fact, all of this might be considered mean-spirited by outside observers. And I agree, it would be really mean—that is, if Mr. Gomez didn’t absolutely deserve it.

  It’s not as if he was a terrible principal or an outright evil human being; as far as I knew he wasn’t secretly killing baby birds at lunchtime and keeping their carcasses stored in his small office fridge like some kind of sadistic trophy case (or, at least, I hoped not). It’s more that he was simply just a jerk. Hardly anybody liked him. Even the teachers sometimes mumbled and grumbled things under their breath about Principal Gomez and all his crazy rules. Some examples of his inhumane mandates:

  •Students were not allowed to doodle in their notebooks. Ever. If they did, it was an automatic detention. Gomez would actually go as far as stopping kids in the hallway to spot-check their notebooks for evidence of doodling.

  •Students were required to tuck in their shirts at all times. Our school didn’t have uniforms or a strict official dress code or anything like that. It didn’t even matter what kind of shirt you were wearing. I mean, have you ever seen a football jersey tucked into shorts? Or a sweater tucked into jeans? Yeah, didn’t think so. Trust me, it was ridiculous.

  •Bathroom hall passes were restricted to just three per week per student. I don’t even need to explain why that one was crazy.

  •Organized games were not allowed during the leftover time at lunch period. That meant no football, kickball, tag, Magic cards, or any other such activity. All we could do was sit outside, or stay sitting inside the cafeteria. Which was of course just what every kid wanted during a long school day: more sitting.

  There were more, but I’m getting too mad even listing these ones to continue without getting a nosebleed. Thankfully, very few teachers enforced many of these rules. You’d likely only get busted if Gomez himself caught you breaking them. Which just goes to show how ridiculous the rules were, that he couldn’t even get the teachers to enforce them. The way I saw it, these pranks were just sweet, sweet justice.

  Anyway, while the rest of my crew set about pulling their assigned pranks, I picked Gomez’s door lock with surprising ease, and a couple hours later I was putting the finishing touches on the finest snowman I’d ever built. It looked about as much like Gomez as was possible for being constructed out of frozen water. I was standing there, admiring my work, when my phone vibrated. It was a text message from Dillon.

  Gomez just pulled up! Get out of there!

  THE DIGITAL CLOCK ON MY PHONE READ 2:53 A.M.

  I reread the text message, just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. Gomez should be home sleeping like a normal human being. Right?

  I quickly switched off my flashlight and peeked out the office window.

  Sure enough, Gomez was striding up the sidewalk toward the school, fully dressed, as if he always arrived at work at three o’clock in the morning. I admit I hadn’t checked to see if
anyone arrived before 4:00 a.m. Gomez had showed plenty of signs of insanity in the past, so this was a major error on my part.

  Also, there was a good chance he’d seen the light from my flashlight in his office window when he pulled up because he was looking my way and walking incredibly fast, even for him.

  I quickly texted a reply:

  Just make sure everyone else gets out.

  I looked out the window again, but Mr. Gomez was gone. He was likely already inside the building. The office was just twenty or thirty feet from the front entrance, which meant I had less than a minute to get out of there. It was too bad we hadn’t walled off that entrance with snow yet.

  Gomez was just entering the administration area outside his office door as I glanced at the sled still on the floor with the leftover snow piled on it. We were all wearing winter gloves so I could probably leave that behind without worrying about anyone finding something with my fingerprints on it. Leaving behind evidence of any kind was not ideal, but I had bigger concerns right then.

  There was really only one possible escape route left: Gomez’s office window.

  I scrambled behind his desk and fidgeted with the latch. It wouldn’t budge. It probably rarely got opened. Gomez didn’t strike me as the sort of guy who relished fresh air. In fact, it sometimes seemed like the stuffier a room felt, the more comfortable he was. Like he was some sort of creepy cave-dwelling creature that enjoyed lurking in dank environments and eating bat droppings, instead of being just a normal old principal who liked comfortably conditioned indoor rooms.

  There was a click as Gomez slid his key into the lock.

  It was too late. I was finished. A former secret agent taken down by a middle school principal. That was pretty embarrassing. Not that I was going to just give up and stand there sheepishly as I got caught. No way would my secret-agent mentors, Agent Nineteen and Agent Blue, give up that easily. So neither would I.

  As Gomez unlocked the door, I dived behind a huge file cabinet and pressed myself up against the wall. It was a terrible hiding spot since he would easily see me if he stepped around to the far side of his desk for any reason. But it would at least buy me a few seconds to think.