Attack of the Shark-Headed Zombie Read Free

room.
    It was empty except for an old chair and a coatrack in the corner. Keats ran his hand over the wall where the front door used to be. The wall was smooth and solid.
    “Where’s the door?” Keats asked. “And the windows?”
    “I don’t know.” Henry got to his feet, too. “Probably the alarm made them disappear. You know, to protect whatever is inside the house. It must be some kind of magic.”
    “That’s crazy,” Keats said. “There’s no such thing as magic—”
    Blam!
A sudden pounding on the wall next to Keats made him jerk back.
    The zombie was on the other side of the wall trying to get inside.
Blam! Blam! Blam!
The wall shook but remained sturdy.
    “A shark-headed zombie is on the porch and the front door just vanished,” Henry said.“Ready to change your mind about magic, Keats?”
    “Okay, okay,” Keats said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is magic.” His stomach was flip-flopping like crazy.
    “Don’t panic,” Henry said. “It will take time for the zombie to break through. We’ll be okay for a while.”
    Keats looked to see if Henry was scratching his chin. He wasn’t. Keats felt a little bit better knowing Henry was telling the truth.
    “We need to come up with a plan to get out of the house,” Henry said. “Thanks to the alarm, the door and windows are gone. We’re trapped.”
    Keats thought for a second. “I have an idea,” he said. He held up the note from Mr. Cigam. “See where Mr. Cigam says he’ll take us home when we finish the to-do list?”
    Henry snapped his fingers. “That’s it! We just have to do all the jobs on the list. And Mr. Cigam will come back and get us out of here.”
    They both leaned over the note and read the jobs Mr. Cigam had left for them.
Weed the garden .
Bring the box of lightbulbs down from the attic.
Battle and defeat the shark-headed zombie.
Sweep the garage.
    “Okay,” Keats said. “We weeded the garden. So that’s done. The next thing we have to do is bring the lightbulbs down from the attic—”
    “And then battle and defeat the shark-headed zombie,” Henry said, skipping ahead. “But if the zombie is magical, we’ll need magic to fight it. Like a spell. Or maybe a wand—”
    “A wand!” Keats said. “At the end of the note, Mr. Cigam says there’s an extra wand in the kitchen sink. Where’s the kitchen?”
    Both boys turned to gaze down the long hallway that led out of the front room. They could see a refrigerator through a doorway at the end of the hall.
    “Let’s go,” Henry said, already moving. Keats followed close on Henry’s heels. He couldn’t wait to get away from the zombie pounding on the wall.
    The instant they left the front room something strange happened.
    The doorway they had just passed through shimmered. Then it vanished and became part of the wall. They walked through the next door-way and it happened again. The doorway was gone and a wall stood in its place.
    “It must be part of the alarm system,”Keats said. “I bet every time we go through an opening, it disappears. Just like the front door and the windows. We can’t go back the way we came.”
    “We better stick close together,” Henry said. “If I go through a doorway without you and it fades away, we’ll be split up.”
    The boys walked through the last doorway into the kitchen at the same time. They watched that door turn into a wall, too.
    The kitchen was messy but looked pretty normal. It had an old stove, a counter stacked with dirty dishes, and the big gray refrigerator. Another door was on the other side of the room.
    Keats looked for a phone to call for help. There wasn’t one, but he spotted something else. A thick, dusty book sat on the kitchen table. Keats went over to it and read the cover. The book was called
How to Zap Anything.
A bookmark was stuck inside. Keats flipped to the marked page and read it.

    Zap a Zombie
    Step one: Stand on one foot.
    Step two: Wave the wand.
    Step three: Now say
    The rest of step