Free The Zombie Next Door by Nadia Higgins Page A

Should he help? Could he? No, no. He was just a seventh grader, right? He didn’t have to do anything.
    He kept watching, frozen in place. Mr. Squish pulled his bathrobe tight around him. He shuffled back into his house.
    A moment later, Mr. Squish came back out of the house carrying his violin. The terrible squeaky noises filled the night. Leo closed the window. Weird was the last thought in Leo’s head as he slumped onto the floor and fell asleep at last.

CHAPTER 2
DEEP TROUBLE
    Leo woke up with a feeling that something was wrong. What was it? Then he remembered about last night. Leo forced himself to look out his window. He took in the scene with one amazed gasp.
    Mr. Squish’s house was splattered with gobs of rotten vegetables and streams of yellow egg. At least one window was broken. A porch railing was ripped off.
    The yard was all torn up. The vandals had rolled the giant boulders from Mr. Squish’s stone wall across it. That left long, muddy streaks across the grass.
    The gardens were destroyed too. The vandals must have ripped out the plants in big handfuls. Vines lay in withered clumps like dead bodies on a battlefield.
    There was a mess of junk scattered everywhere: toilet paper rolls, empty spray cans, pieces of broken glass, eggshells, rotten fruit, and someone’s lost boot.
    Leo looked over to Mr. Squish’s apple orchard on the other side of the house. That explained the white stuff. Toilet paper streamed from the branches.
    Poor Mr. Squish, Leo thought. Why would anybody do this? What jerks!
    Then Leo scanned over to the chicken coop. The little white house with its green roof gave off faint clucking sounds that Leo liked to listen to on quiet summer nights.
    Oh no. Oh no, no, no.
    The vandals had spray-painted a message across the side of the white coop. Even from this distance, Leo could make out the angry red letters: “GO AWAY, ZOMBIE!”

    “Leo! Leeee-ooooooh!” Leo’s mother was calling from downstairs. “Leo, can you come down here, please?”
    “Leonard Francis Wiley!” That was the angry voice of Leo’s father. “Get down here . . . NOW!”
    Was it possible? No doubt, his parents knew what had happened to Mr. Squish. Had they somehow found out about his Zombie Zappers post? Did they think this was all his fault?
    Leo’s feet were actually shaking as he tried to make them land on each stair. He grabbed the railing and half-slid down to the first floor.
    The first thing he noticed was that the front door was slightly open. Then he saw a long, mud-splattered jacket hanging on the coat rack. A gray jacket.
    Leo grabbed his stomach. Something deep inside his intestines gurgled up into his throat.
    “Leo!” his father barked.
    Leo forced himself to push open the kitchen door. His father was standing there, legs spread, arms crossed over his chest. He peered down at his son.
    Leo’s mother was sitting at the table with a laptop open in front of her. The screen glowed green. My Z-News update, Leo realized. His mother reached out to him with both arms.
    “Why, Leo?” she asked.
    Shelly was there too, behind them at the counter. She wasn’t even bothering to pretend to butter her toast. She just stared open-mouthed at the unfolding spectacle.
    Sitting across the table from Leo’s mother, hands folded in his lap, was Mr. Squish. He looked weirdly different. The old man’s gray hair was usually a mess of spikes on his head. But now it was combed in neat lines over his scalp.
    Leo had never looked so closely at his neighbor before. He saw that Mr. Squish’s eyes weren’t gray. They were light green, but sunken in shadows. Mr. Squish’s cheeks were dangling flaps of skin. They caved in around his bones. His gray whiskers looked like dirt growing from his neck.
    “Have a seat.” Leo’s dad practically shoved a chair underneath him. “Mr. Smith has something he’d like to ask you.”
    Leo met the old man’s eyes. All of a sudden, it felt like something was squeezing his heart.