Beast from Beneath the Cafeteria! (2 page)

“This is
news
?” said Sean.

“No, listen. My mom heard from her lunch-lady friends that something's getting into the food cellar under the kitchen.”

“Maybe it's mice?” said Mike. “We had mice in my old school.”

“No way,” said Liz. “I'm talking about big stuff. Huge school-size packs of hot dogs and—”

“Hog dogs,
” mumbled Jeff.

“And bags of french fries,” Liz went on, “and hamburger meat, and big tubs of nacho cheese. But my mom said the worst part was—was—”

“Fooood,” said Mike, running a finger in the sauce on his burger and lifting it to his mouth.

Wham!
Liz pinned Mike's hand down and pushed the apple at him. “If you have to eat, eat something healthy!”

Mike glared at the apple as if it were poisonous. “But … but …”

“You guys aren't listening!” Liz cried. “I'm talking about a gigantic gross food mess under the school! It's disgusting. Raw meat and gloppy cheese and mushed french fries and rotten—”

Mike, Jeff, Sean, and Holly stopped eating and held their hands over their mouths.

Liz smiled. “Now that I have your attention, I'll tell you something else I heard—”

Eeeeiiiioooaaaccch!
A horrible screech echoed down the halls!

It was coming from the gym.

3

A Surprise Guest

I
n an instant, Liz, Mike, Sean, Jeff, Holly, and exactly two hundred ninety-four other kids stampeded from the cafeteria down the hall to the gym.

They entered the big bright room.

The wood floor gleamed under the noon sun.

“Something's wrong,” whispered Liz.

It was Mr. Gilman, the coach. Normally he would be scribbling on his clipboard and checking kids off one by one as they came through the door—Duffey Liz. Mazur Mike. (He always called everybody by their last names first.) But he wasn't doing any of that now.

Mr. Gilman was standing in the center of the floor. His clipboard was lying at his feet. His face was all twisted. And he was pointing.

Up.

Liz followed his shaking finger. Then she gasped. Everyone gasped at what they saw.

An enormous, jagged hole was torn out of the gym ceiling. Sunlight flooded into the big room. Birds fluttered around the hole.

“Air-conditioning,” said Holly. “That's new.”

“But who would do that?” muttered Jeff.

“Guys,” said Liz, “this place is definitely weirding out. I don't know what it is, but I think we've got trouble. Big trouble in our school.”

“
My
school!” screeched Mr. Sweeney as he entered the gym.

Mike gazed up at the giant hole in the ceiling. “We didn't have a sunroof in my old school.”

“Ahem!” boomed a voice.

It was Principal Bell. He was standing in the doorway with his hands on his hips, staring down at everybody. He stepped to the center of the gym, right under the jagged opening in the ceiling.

“I am shocked by what is going on in this school and I want everyone to know that I will—”

Splat!

A fat drop of something wet fell on Mr. Bell's head from above.

Slowly, he looked up.

Splat! Splat!

Two more drops fell, this time on his nose.

Liz looked closely at the stuff on Mr. Bell's face. It was green and oozy. It smelled bad.

The glop had dripped from the jagged edges of the hole in the ceiling.

“Oh, go finish your lunches!” cried Mr. Bell, as Miss Lieberman came running out of nowhere with a towel. “Be in the auditorium for my reading program assembly. I'll deal with you there.”

Whoom!
In a flash two hundred ninety-eight kids roared back to the cafeteria.

Mr. Bell and Miss Lieberman stalked back out into the hall. Mr. Sweeney went to get a mop.

Coach Gilman stooped for his clipboard and stumbled into the hall, scribbling and mumbling. “Hole … ceiling … suspects …”

But Liz couldn't move. She stared at the hole in the ceiling, watching the green ooze drip and hiss onto the wooden floorboards.

What is going on here? she thought.

Ripped-open bags of rotten potatoes?

A pretzel for a flagpole?

A sunroof in the gym?

Smelly green ooze?

When Liz stepped back into the cafeteria she was trying hard to make some sense of it all.

She was trying so hard, she didn't notice right away that something was different. Very different.

The clock said 12:35. Still lunchtime. All the tables were filled. First-, second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-grade kids. Normal kids.

Well, thought Liz, as normal as you could get in this school. In this town.

No, it was something else. Then Liz realized what it was. The kids, nearly three hundred of them, were absolutely quiet. No sound at all.

The cafeteria, jammed with kids, was silent!

“Strange,” Liz hissed. “Definitely very straaa—”

Then she saw the reason. Well, she didn't actually
see
it. It was more like she
felt
it. It was the floor beneath her. The floor was humming.

It wasn't humming a tune.

It was—vibrating. A little at first, then a lot. The vibrating turned into rumbling. The rumbling turned into quaking.

Then the linoleum floor tiles began to crack.

And split. And pop.

A bulge heaved up in the middle of the floor.

“This is new,” said Liz. Holly, Sean, Jeff, and Mike stepped around the hump and over to her.

Suddenly, the floor itself gave out an awful, grinding, ripping, tearing sound.

KKRRREEEEEOOOWWNNNCH!

Chairs and tables went flying. Everybody ran to get out of the way as the floor burst apart.

And something came out.

The first thing Liz saw was the thing's head.

It was the size of a garbage can. It was green and all scaly, with burning red eyes and a long snout.

Under the snout was an enormous open jaw filled with teeth as long as bananas.

Sean looked over at the head twisting in the hole. He tapped his sister, Holly. “Is that Dad surprising us in one of his monster costumes?”

Just then the cafeteria doors swung open and Mr. Vickers appeared with a movie camera on his shoulder. “Hi, kids. I'm here to film!”

That's when the silence broke.

“Ahhhh!” screamed everyone at once.

4

Smile!

“R
RRROOOOOOAAAAAARRRRRRRR!”

The creature sticking out of the floor blasted up and leaped into the cafeteria.

It was eight feet tall, all scaly, had jagged spikes running down its back to a long thick tail, and clawed feet.

“Whoa!” screamed Sean. “It looks like a dinosaur! Only smaller. And weirder!”

“And here!” yelled Jeff.

The huge scaly head swung around, drooling and snorting.

“It sure is ugly!” shouted Holly.

“It's got way bad breath, too,” Mike added, holding his nose and backing away.

They were right. It was ugly. And it did have bad breath. But worse than that, the ugly, bad-smelling thing seemed to be mad at something.

“RRRROOOOAAAARRR!”
It booted a table out of the way with a huge clawed foot. The table soared across the room and crashed through the windows into the parking lot.

“Wait, do that again,” Mr. Vickers said, dodging behind a water fountain and trying to focus his camera. “I didn't get the best angle.”

Whoom!
A chair sailed inches away from Mr. Vickers' ear and hit the wall.

“Never mind!” the director yelped.

Suddenly, the creature's tongue unrolled like a party noisemaker. It flicked down into the room and—
“SLURRRK!”
The huge tongue sucked up nearly every single crumb of food from every table, from the floor, even right out of kids' hands!

The suction was incredible.

“Hey! That thing stole my lunch!” cried Jeff.

It stole everybody's lunch!

Hundreds of sandwiches, thousands of potato chips, dozens of hamboogers with spackle sauce, and every other piece of food in the cafeteria got slurped up into the beast's ugly mouth hole.

And with each slurping mouthful the beast grew bigger and bigger. And it blasted its stinky breath farther and hotter with each belch.

“I'm gonna faint!” gasped Jeff, staggering.

But the beast was still hungry. It licked its slurpy jaws and looked around for more food. It stepped toward Liz and her friends.

“Don't you dare, you big creep!” Liz whirled around and saw her two apples still on the lunch table. She grabbed them and chucked them right at the beast.

“Slurp! Slurp!”
The shiny green apples disappeared into the beast's giant jaws. He still looked hungry. His red eyes flashed with anger.

That's when everything came together for Liz. The food mess in the storage cellar, the flagpole in a knot, the gaping hole in the gym ceiling.

“There's a beast in our school!” she cried.

“RRRROOOAAAARRR!”
The monster growled his thunderous growl and lunged at the kids!

“And it's time to move on!” said Mike, grabbing his friends and blasting out of the cafeteria.

Liz ran to the right. Everybody else raced left down the main hall.

But the beast followed Liz—
thwump! thwump!

“Was it the apples?” Liz cried, when she saw the beast following her. “Because I threw them at you? Was that it?”

“
RRRROOOOAAAARRR!
” said the beast.

“I'll take that as a Yes!” Liz said.

The creature's spiked back scraped the ceiling as it charged after Liz, cutting a gash along the ceiling tiles and popping the hanging lights. It kept growing bigger and bigger.

When Liz dashed around the corner at the end of the hall, her heart leaped into her throat. There in the hallway, just outside the art room, was a group of kinder-gartners.

Mrs. Carbonese was crouching in front of them and looking through her camera.

“Yearbook photo!” she said.

“No!” cried Liz. But it was too late.

Thwump! Thwump!
The beast skidded around the corner and stopped behind the small class. Its head hovered over the children, dripping oozy green stuff from its open jaws.

Mrs. Carbonese tried to focus and tapped her foot. “Will the big fifth grader in the back row please remove yourself,” she said. “This photo is for young ones only.”

In a split second, Liz knew that the whole class of five-year-olds would be dino food if she didn't do something quick.

She quickly ran over and tapped Mrs. Carbonese's finger.

FLASH!
went her teacher's camera.

“RRRROOOOAAAARRR!”
went the beast.

“Run!” went Liz.

“Eeeeek!” went Mrs. Carbonese.

Liz pushed the kids and Mrs. Carbonese back into the art room and shot off down the hall toward the double doors of the auditorium.

Thwump! Thwump!

The beast was right after her.

5

Aisle of the Doomed

W
ham!
Liz blasted into the auditorium and down the middle aisle toward the stage.

The curtains were closed and there was a podium out front. Posters taped up on the sides of the stage advertised Principal Bell's new reading program and essay contest.

No Scary Paperbacks!
read one poster.

Only Good Books!
read another.

Some others had pictures of the kinds of good books that Principal Bell and Mrs. Carbonese wanted the students to read:
Tiny Women, The Hidden Garden, Charlotte's Net.

BLAM! BLAM!
The double doors at the back of the auditorium blew off and the beast barreled down the aisle after Liz.

“So I'm sorry about the apples already!” she cried, scrambling onto the stage.

“RRRROOOAAAARRR!”
growled the beast.

Liz fell against the podium, her back up against a poster with a picture of a growling mutant dinosaur in a circle with a line through it.

“Hey, monster,” she yelled out, pointing to the poster. “Don't you know what this means? It means no
you
! So shoo!”

But the look on the beast's face told Liz he wasn't impressed with the poster. The look on the beast's face was one of hunger.

Just then the back of the auditorium filled with shapes. Mike, Holly, Sean, and Jeff moved slowly down the aisle toward Liz.

“Hold on,” Holly called out. “We'll help you.”

“As soon as we figure out how,” added Jeff.

But the beast only growled again, opened its huge jaws over Liz, and lunged at her.

“Nooooo!” she screamed.

Then, suddenly, the monster stopped. Its big red eyes began to roll around. It jerked its head back, swatted its snout, shook all over, and—

Twing! Twing!

Two tiny green apples shot back out of its mouth and hurled through the air right at Liz.

She ducked behind the podium.

Wump! Wump!
The apples were caught by two hands appearing from behind the curtain.

Liz looked up. “Principal Bell!”

It
was
Mr. Bell. He stepped out from behind the curtain, looked at the two mushy green things in his hand, and shook his head. “Elizabeth Duffey, how many times have I told you that food is strictly forbidden in the—”

Before he could finish, he glanced down into the auditorium. He saw the big green creature with the long tongue and spiky scales.

“A visitor!” Mr. Bell shrieked. “But I don't see a visitor's pass!”

The principal jumped instantly into action.

“Stand behind me, Miss Duffey,” he cried. He whipped open his jacket, pulled out a little card, and yelled, “Beast, I am ordering you in the name of the Grover's Mill Board of Edu—”