Cosmic Boy Versus Mezmo Head!
Read Cosmic Boy Versus Mezmo Head! Online
Authors: Tony Abbott
Cosmic Boy Versus Mezmo Head!
The Weird Zone, Book 7
Tony Abbott
To Dolores, for her never-ending faith
Contents
Preview:
Revenge of the Tiki Men!
1
Sounds of Weirdness!
Z
whrrrrârrrrr!
Jeff Ryan walked slowly backward out his front door. The big white satellite dish on his roof was spinning like crazy.
“Something's going on,” Jeff mumbled to himself. He shifted a brightly colored box that he was holding in his arms.
Errrkk!
An army truck screeched to a stop in his driveway and a bunch of men in army uniforms jumped out. They carried a small wooden crate to the house.
“Something
big
is going on!” Jeff whispered.
Jeff's mother, who was also dressed in an army uniform, and his father, who puffed on a pipe, met the soldiers in the doorway.
Jeff heard only a few words of what they were saying. “⦠Last night ⦠fell from the sky ⦠top secret ⦠global invasion ⦠like a cabbage.”
“Cabbage?” Jeff repeated to himself. “The army delivers vegetables now?”
A moment later, the soldiers climbed back into the truck and sped off. Jeff's parents carried the small crate inside.
“Bye-bye, sweetheart!” Mrs. Ryan called from the doorway. She blew Jeff a kiss.
For years, his parents had told him that the top-secret, high-security, fenced-in area north of Grover's Mill where his mother worked was really a shoe store.
But Jeff knew it wasn't. It was an army base. His friends said the army captured alien junk and did things with it there. Jeff wasn't sure if that was strange, or just normal everyday parent stuff.
Except that normal everyday stuff didn't seem to happen in Grover's Mill. That's why his friends called their town The Weird Zone.
“The center of intergalactic weirdness,” Jeff mumbled, stepping to the sidewalk. “The Zone. A place where all the grown-ups are Zoners.”
Bong!
The giant donut-shaped clock on top of the Double Dunk Donut Den chimed the hour.
Sssss!
The oversized pancake pan on Usher's House of Pancakes hissed out a cloud of smoke.
Jeff smiled. Those two restaurants had been bonging and hissing the hours for as long as he could remember.
Bweeeep!
A high-pitched sound screeched through the air.
Jeff frowned. “That's a new one.” He turned to see a man crouching in the bushes across the street. The man seemed to be holding a large leafy green thing in front of his face as a disguise. And he wore green shoes.
The instant he saw Jeff, the man slipped back between the bushes and disappeared.
“Well, okay. That's a little strange.” Jeff shifted the box and walked to the center of Grover's Mill. He stopped in front of the X-Rays
Us Medical Clinic to wait for his best friend, Sean Vickers.
They walked to school together almost every day.
And today was special. The W. Reid Elementary School annual play tryouts were that morning. Jeff's teacher, Mrs. Carbonese, was directing an outer-space version of
The Wizard of Oz.
Jeff and his friends were going to try out.
The box Jeff was bringing had part of the Wizard's costume in it.
Jeff crouched and opened the box. It was his favorite toy a few years agoâa Cosmic Boy Space Helmet. It was based on the old TV show about a boy with incredible powers. Jeff was way beyond toys and shows like that now.
He pulled out the gray plastic bowl-shaped helmet with knobs on it. It had a row of tiny lights across the front and two antennas sticking up behind the ears.
“Pretty old, but still cool.” Jeff put the helmet on his head. It was tight. The helmet was made for a much smaller head. He turned to look at himself in the window of X-RaysUs.
Blink! Bzzz! Whrrr!
The lights across the forehead blinked off and on, a little buzzer on top buzzed, and the antennas began to whirl slowly.
“Whoa!” Jeff exclaimed. “It still works!”
“So, Cosmic Boy, we meet again!” came a deep and gravelly voice.
Jeff whirled in fear. Then he laughed. “Sean!”
Sean Vickers trotted up to him. “Excellent helmet!” He tapped Jeff's plastic head a couple of times. “I wonder who will get to play the Wizâ”
Zzzzzzt!
A sudden buzzing sound came from inside the X-RaysUs Medical Clinic.
“The big machine!” said Sean. “They're using it!”
The two friends looked through the window at a huge complicated machine with tubes and lights and wires and shiny metal parts. Bending over the controls was a man in a white lab coat.
“That X-ray machine has awesome power,” Sean whispered to Jeff. “It blasts nuclear energy right through people's heads!”
“Are you sure?” Jeff wrinkled his nose. “X-ray machines don't really work like that, do they?”
Sean shrugged. “That's what I've heard.”
Jeff nodded. “It reminds me of the sounds coming from my dad's office when he works at home.”
Sean turned to Jeff and frowned. “Have you ever actually seen that office, Jeff?”
“It's in the attic. He doesn't want me in there.”
“A secret room in your house that makes noises?” said Sean. “Pretty zoney, Jeff. Come on, let's go. We just have one short class, then tryouts!”
It was then that Jeff noticed the sign in the X-RaysUs window. It said,
CLOSED FOR VACATION. SEE-THROUGH YOU LATER!
“Wait a second,” Jeff said, grabbing Sean's arm and pointing to the sign. “If the clinic is supposed to be closed, then who's that guy using the machine?”
Sean's eyes widened as the man in the white coat continued to press buttons on the machine. The man still had his back to the boys.
“Ah, a mystery!” Sean whispered. He put his finger to his lips and tiptoed into the clinic. Jeff was right behind him.
Suddenlyâ
zzzzzt!
âthe X-ray machine buzzed loudly, exploding with large sparks.
The room flashed with bright light.
“Whoa!” Sean shouted. “He's gonna zap us!” Sean turned to run just as the man in the white coat jumped away from the exploding sparks.
Bweeeep!
came a screeching sound.
Jeff tried to move, but Sean slammed him hard and the man tumbled back into both of them.
WHAMâWHAMâWHAM!
The three people crashed into one another with the force of planets colliding!
“Whoooomph!”
groaned Sean as he drove Jeff out through the door to the sidewalk.
In the instant before he dropped, Jeff turned to see the man holding a large green vegetable in front of his face.
“Weird! Cabbage!” Jeff cried out, as heâ
umph!
âslammed to the ground, his plastic Cosmic Boy helmet crunching down hard.
“My head!” he groaned.
Then things went dark in that head.
2
Class Brain
T
hump-thump-thump!
When Jeff opened his eyes, he was facedown on the sidewalk outside the X-RaysUs Medical Clinic.