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!
“RRRROOOOOOAAAAAARRRRRRRR!”
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
Wham! 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—”
That was as far as he got.
The green scaly head instantly lunged, the long tongue
flicked out, and—SLOOOORRP!— in one slurp, Mr. Bell was gone.
Only his shoes were left.
6
A Silver Bullet! Well, Okay, a Tin Bucket
“RRROOOAAARRRRR!” The enormous green beast bellowed. It swallowed hard and whipped its neck back, gashing a hole in the ceiling.
Then the beast bent over and swung its head slowly from side to side, sniffing at Liz and her friends.
“He’s deciding who to eat next!” Mike yelled. “I hope it’s not me!” He made a dash from the aisle through one of the rows to a side door.
The beast’s big red eyes followed Mike as he stumbled between the seats. It lifted its powerful claws to swipe at him.
“Mike! Watch out!” Liz yelled. Without thinking, she dived off the stage, jumped over the first three rows of seats, grabbed Mike, and pulled him to the floor in the side aisle.
Whoosh! The beast swiped at empty air.
“Oww!” Mike groaned. “Where’d you learn to tackle like that?”
“I used to be on the softball team,” Liz huffed.
Mike was quiet for a second. “But you’re not supposed to tackle in softball.”
“That’s why I used to be on the team!” Liz grinned. “Come on, everybody. Let’s beat it before we all get tackled by drool boy over there!”
Holly, Jeff, and Sean raced for the hole where the back doors used to be.
Mike didn’t have to be told twice, either. In a flash he was leaping up the aisle to the side door.
Liz was right behind him.
But the beast was right behind all of them. It stomped up the main aisle and blasted through the back wall. Not through the back door, through the wall!
Bricks tumbled and scattered as the wall burst.
“RRRRRR!” Thwump! Thwump! The beast kicked cinder blocks out of the way and chased the five kids down the hall toward the gym.
“It’s gaining on us!” yelled Sean. “It ate Mr. Bell, now it wants dessert!”
It was true. With each huge stride the dinosaur beast got closer and closer.
“Hurry, or we’re history!” cried Jeff.
“Prehistory, you mean!” yelled Holly.
Suddenly—Wham! Clunkety-clunkety-clunk!
The supply closet door on one side of the hall flew open. A gray metal bucket on wheels shot out of the shadows and stopped in the middle of the hall. There was a mop sticking out of the bucket.
“Yecch!” cried a voice from the closet. “Such a mess!”
“Mr. Sweeney!” yelled Liz, screeching past him. “The beast is right behind us. And he ate Principal Bell!”
“Yes!” hooted the janitor. “I’m in control now!” He pulled the dripping mop from the bucket as the kids raced past him.
Errrrch! The beast skidded to a stop in front of Mr. Sweeney. It lowered its head. It snarled at the janitor.
“Arg!” the janitor snarled back.
And the fight began!
The beast swatted with its claws, but the janitor twirled to one side and poked the beast’s scaly hide with the moppy end of the mop.
“Take that, you school wrecker!”
“Arrrggggg!” roared the beast.
“That’s my line!” Mr. Sweeney shouted as he dipped the mop into the bucket again and whipped it up at the beast’s face. A spray of dirty water splashed into the beast’s big red eyes.
“He’s good with that mop,” said Jeff.
“Yeah,” said Mike, huddling behind a water fountain. “Do you think he’s done this before?”
“Years of unthanked service!” Mr. Sweeney yelled, batting the beast’s legs with the mop.
“Ohhhh!” moaned a voice behind the kids. Liz turned. There was Miss Lieber-man, stumbling up the hall behind them, moaning and cradling a pair of goopy shoes in her hands.
“Pah!” cried the janitor. “No use crying over your Mr. Bell. It’s my school now!”
Suddenly, the beast jerked its head back to the ceiling, swatted its snout, shut its eyes, and—
“Phhh-toooeeee!” it exploded in a huge spray of green slime!
Something goopy shot through the air and down the hall, screaming all the way. A moment later, there was ooze all over Mr. Sweeney.
“My uniform!” cried the janitor.
“Leonard!” cried Miss Lieberman, running over to the oozy glop all over Mr. Sweeney.
Liz turned to Holly. “Leonard? Who’s Leonard?”
“Pah!” snarled the janitor. “He’s back again!”
The ooze was Mr. Bell! He was alive!
But he was a mess. “Excuse me, everyone,” the principal mumbled. “I’ve just been in the mouth of—of—that!”
CRUNNCH! The beast whirled around, slamming his heavy tail down on the janitor’s bucket. The bucket was as flat as a pancake.
“Without my bucket, I am nothing!” cried Mr. Sweeney. He ran down the hall. Principal Bell and Miss Lieberman shuffled off after him.
The beast stretched, snorted, and punched a hole into the school store. It did another slurping thing with its tongue and ten boxes of candy bars disappeared into its teeth-filled jaws.
“Come on, guys,” said Holly, edging away from the beast. “I think we’d better get out of here while we can.” Jeff and Sean followed her.
Liz stood there, gazing at what she was seeing. She knew it was Grover’s Mill. She knew it was a zone of total weirdness, the center of everything that’s strange in the galaxy. But still her brain asked her, “Hey, what’s with the big monster?”
She grabbed Mike by his shirtsleeve and pulled him up to her nose. “A beast, Mike! A huge, scaly, green beast thing in our school!”
“I see it, I see it!” he nodded. “But everybody else is escaping and I wanna go, too.”
Too late.
KRACHOOOOOM!
The beast whipped its giant tail down with such force that the front wall of the school toppled!
Sending tons of bricks and cinder blocks crashing down.
Right onto the two kids!
7
Goo-goo! Ga-ga! GoRGA!
Whoosh! Something flashed quickly between the tumbling wall and Liz and Mike.
Liz felt herself being pulled up into the air.
“Hey, we’re flying!” yelped Mike.
An instant later, the two kids were standing safely in the gym as the front wall of the school crumbled behind them like toy blocks.
“You kids okay?” said a voice from the swirling dust and crumbling stone.
Before them stood a man. He wore a sun helmet, dusty goggles, brown field pants, and boots. He snapped the handle of a leather bullwhip and it unwound from an overhead light. He coiled it back onto his belt.
“Um, we’re not dead,” said Mike. “So, yeah!”
The man pulled the goggles up onto his helmet, flipped Liz’s hair, and laughed.
Then he put out his hand to Mike. “Duffey,” he said. “Kramer Duffey.”
Mike’s jaw sank to his chest. “Liz, this is your dad? Wow! He looks like, I mean, you look like—you know who!”
Liz knew who. Her father was an adventurer.
A dinosaur hunter. A danger kind of guy.
Kramer Duffey pointed over his shoulder at the beast as it stalked off into the parking lot. “Sent home for bad behavior?”
“He was under our school,” said Mike.
Kramer Duffey nodded. “It figures. I found a dinosaur egg deep in a cave and brought it to my tent. The next morning it was just little bits of broken shell and”—he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand—“then I saw footprints.”
CRASH! The beast hoisted an empty school bus in each giant claw and clapped them together like blackboard erasers.
“Footprints?” asked Mike.
“Tiny ones, heading for your school,” Mr. Duffey told them. “The other funny thing was the weather that night. A big green cloud came floating across the desert.”
“RRROOOAAARRRRR!” The huge beast growled and dropped the crumpled mess of
yellow bus metal to the ground like last week’s bad spelling test.
Liz’s mind began to work. Clank!—Clunk!—Fizzz! It didn’t get very far. “But dinosaur eggs don’t just hatch after sixty-five million years.”
“Weird, huh?” Kramer Duffey said.
“Ahhhh!” Yelling and shrieking came from outside the school.
About a hundred kids were screaming as they all raced out of the building.
Liz turned to see Mr. Vickers running backward across the parking lot, looking through his movie camera. Sean, Holly, and Jeff were right behind him.
“Excellent screams, children!” Mr. Vickers called out. “But a little more fear around the eyes, please!”
A moment later, they were all gone.
“Wow, that beast knows only one thing,” said Mike. “To eat and to destroy!”
“That’s two things,” said Liz.
“Don’t get technical,” Mike snapped.
They watched as the beast uprooted the flagpole from the ground and used it as a toothpick.
“I call him Gorgasaurus,” Mr. Duffey said. “Gorga, for short. Like it?”
“Gorga …” muttered Liz. “It sounds … big!”
It was big! And just then the big thing tore into some power lines near the school and began to chew them. After that he tramped after a crowd of townspeople who had come to watch.
“Gorga’s heading into town,” said Mr. Duffey. He turned to Liz. “You kids take cover. Gotta keep big boy away from your mom’s diner.”
“But Dad, wait a sec—”
Before Liz could say another word, Kramer Duffey, world-famous paleontologist, dashed into the street, unhooked his whip, and snapped it high. The end curled right around the huge beast’s neck.
“Ya-hoo!” Mr. Duffey yelled as Gorga pulled back suddenly and Mr. Duffey went flying up. “See you later, Liz! Nice meeting you, Mike!”
Mr. Duffey swung wide and high over Main Street. He finally let go of the whip over the roof of Duffey’s Diner.
“Wow!” muttered Mike. “Cool whip.” Suddenly, a frown flashed across Mike’s forehead. “Cool whip? Hey, I never ate lunch today.”
Liz gave him a look. “Later, Mike. We’ve got to see where Gorga’s going next. Come on!” The two kids dashed up School Road.
Bong! The big clock on top of the Double Dunk Donut Den rang the hour.