scooped and tossed. Clump after clump of ice cream hurtled through the air.
“You’ll never stop me!” he howled.
And maybe he was right.
14: Scoop de Loop
Scoops of ice cream streaked through the control room. They splattered onto instrument panels. They dripped from the ceiling. Anyone but a superhero would have been creamed by now.
But not Abigail. No way. She snatched a tennis racket from her duffle bag and let the scoops have it.
Thwap! She struck with a forehand. Thwip! She followed with a backhand. Every scoop that came her way got swatted.
Zoë held her ground too. Vegetables weren’t all she could zap. Her lasers blasted vanilla blobs left and right.
Andrew popped out the wheels in his sneakers and skated expertly through Sure-Burt’s icy onslaught. Because his shoes had wheels, he could ride them like a downhill skier on a slalom course.
Shh-h-h-whoooh!
Before Sure-Burt could react, Andrew skated past and grabbed the ice cream tub from his green hands.
“Nooo!” the alien wailed.
“It’s over, Sure-Burt,” Andrew said victoriously.
Sure-Burt’s eye narrowed darkly, and he smiled.
“Wrong,” he said, chuckling lowly. “It isn’t over.”
With a flick of his wrist, he raised a small antennae from the top of his ice cream scoop and held the device to his lips. When he spoke next, his words boomed throughout the ship.
The scoop doubled as a microphone!
“Attention robo-cones,” Sure-Burt said. “Enact Plan Zero Degrees. Now!”
15: Plan Zero Degrees
The heroes held their breath and Sure-Burt laughed. In fact, he laughed so hard that he threw back his head and howled.
“Plan Zero Degrees is my secret weapon,” he cackled. “It gives you earthlings permanent brain freezes. You will be my zombies forever!”
Aside from Sure-Burt, only one other thing in the room moved. Not Zoë and not the twins. It was ice cream. Some of it oozed down the walls as it melted. Some plopped from high places and splashed onto the floor.
One clump even dropped into Sure-Burt’s gaping mouth as he laughed.
Sploop!
The surprised alien stopped laughing, swallowed, and then blinked twice. His mouth fell open.
“Eat your ice cream,” he said, and the heroes cheered.
Sure-Burt had a brain freeze! The ice cream had turned him into a zombie.
“Have a taste of your own medicine, Sure-Burt,” Andrew snickered.
“Yeah, game over!” Abigail added.
The twins were feeling pretty proud of themselves. They had defeated a real supervillain.
Only Zoë wasn’t celebrating. “Attention,” she said seriously.
“The others!” Andrew and Abigail exclaimed. Their family and neighbors were still in danger. In their excitement, the twins had forgotten about ominous Plan Zero Degrees.
Abigail sprinted from the control room. Zoë flew close behind. Andrew clutched the end of her cape and held on for dear life. The wheels on his sneakers squealed as she dragged him down the hall.
In the Deep Freeze Cafeteria, the heroes found their friends. The people of Traverse City stood in a crowded lunchroom line. Behind the counter, robo-cone robots served up heaping bowls of alien ice cream.
A robo-cone spotted the heroes and raised a spoon-shaped arm.
“Halt, earthlings,” it demanded.
Andrew sneered and skated closer. “Halt or what? You going to spoon us to death?”
In response, a panel in the robo-cone’s chest slid open. Then a stocky barrel extended from the opening. It looked like the nozzle on an army tank.
“Do not be ridiculous,” the robot replied. “We will blast you with our snow cone cannons.”
16: Snow Cone Cannons
Seconds later, a snow cone blizzard howled through the cafeteria. Blue snow cones, red snow cones, purple snow cones, and yellow snow cones filled the air like a swarm of colorful hornets.
Yellow snow cones? The heroes didn’t want to know where those came from.
Everything the snow cones struck turned to ice.
Andrew darted right and a lunch table to his left was frozen. Abigail swatted a snow cone and her baseball bat shattered like an icicle.
It took Zoë to get the heroes moving as a team. They didn’t have time to play snow cone dodge ball. They needed to stop the robo-cones.
“Attack!” she cried.
Her bat ruined, Abigail reached into her duffle bag. This time she pulled out a bowling ball and sent it spinning into a crowd of robo-cones.
BLARNG!
“Strike!” she cheered. The ball ripped through the robo-cones as if they were bowling pins.
Not wanting to be outdone, Andrew leaned forward and started skating hard. He sped around a group of robo-cones in a blazing circle.
“Watch my Robo-360!” he cheered.
At first the robo-cones tried to keep up. They spun tightly, gears whirling. But Andrew was too fast. In no time, their icy circuits melted and went haywire. Then they fell apart and tumbled to the floor in pieces.
Zoë dismantled the remaining robo-cones with a few quick karate chops. A roundhouse here and an eagle claw there took care of them. The robots didn’t know what hit them—again and again and again.
But when the last of the robo-cones fell, a new danger arose. The cafeteria line hadn’t slowed, and the people of Traverse City had filled their bowls with more alien ice cream.
Spoons in hand, they faced the heroes.
“Eat your ice cream,” they chanted.
17: Zoë’s Antidote
The heroes were too late! They had beaten Sure-Burt and his robot army, but they hadn’t prevented their friends and neighbors from eating more ice cream.
For the first time ever, they felt like failures. Plan Zero Degrees had succeeded.
“Now what?” Abigail asked, feeling helpless. “We can’t fight ice cream.”
Andrew sighed in agreement. “Fire versus water. Summer versus winter. What’s the opposite of ice cream?”
Zoë leaped up. “Antidote!” she exclaimed.
Without explaining why, she soared over to the zombified townsfolk.
“Eat your ice cream,” they told her, but she ignored them.
She zapped their bowls with a quick blink of her lasers instead. The ice cream inside melted and became a dark liquid. Their brains frozen, the townsfolk didn’t notice and kept eating.
“Mmm,” someone said. “Hot chocolate.”
Suddenly the cafeteria echoed with the sounds of slurping and smacking lips. The people of Traverse City were drinking the dark liquid in their bowls like the last bit of soup.
Andrew and Abigail looked at each other in amazement.
“What’s the opposite of ice cream?” Andrew asked again.
“Hot chocolate!” he and Abigail answered together.
Hot chocolate! That was Zoë’s antidote. It was the opposite of ice cream and cured the zombie brain freeze. Everyone from Traverse City was going to be okay.
“I had the strangest dream,” Mom said.
“Where are we?” Rabbit asked, his nose twitching at full speed.
“There’s no time to explain,” Andrew said. “We have to turn this ship around.”
“Hurry, everyone!” Abigail urged. “This way.”
Together the heroes and townsfolk raced to the control room. Once they had squeezed inside, Zoë pointed out the ship’s big windshield.
“Alien,” she said.
Sure-Burt had escaped. He was flying into deep space on a shuttle shaped like a Popsicle. His robotic voice blared over the ship’s loudspeakers.
“Farewell, Earthlings,” he said. “Your ship is on a crash course with the sun. Have a nice day.”
The only sound after that was his laughter.
18: Heroes Again
The sun blazed ahead, and the spaceship sped straight toward it. Everyone started to sweat. Some more than others.
“We’re doomed!” Rabbit wailed in a panic. Meanwhile, his sister behaved exactly like a spoiled princess by fainting into his arms.
Only the heroes kept calm. Andrew confidently took Sure-Burt’s seat at the helm.
“This ship has wheels, right?” he asked.
“Yep,” Abigail agreed.
“Aye,” Zoë double-agreed.
“Then I can ride it!” Andrew exclaimed. “Hang onto your hats!”
With a whoop, he started pushing buttons, pulling levers, and turning the wheel. The spaceship responded immediately.
Vrrr-ooosh! First it banked left, turning sharply away from the sun. Zzzz-rooom! Then it raced full speed ahead.
But before heading home, Andrew zipped around Saturn’s rings in a loop-de-loop. What a hotdog!
The joyride came to an end when Andrew expertly landed the spaceship on his family’s driveway in Traverse City.
“We’ll be the only ones on the street with a spaceship,” he said with a grin. Dad just shook his head.
The townsfolk thanked the heroes and then sleepily headed home. They would celebrate tomorrow with a big neighborhood picnic at Bryant Park. Everyone would toast the heroes with cookies and Kool-aid.
“We’re very proud of you,” Mom and Dad told their children. “But now it’s time for bed.”
The heroes didn’t complain or ask to stay up later. They had saved Traverse City before, and it was no big deal. They would save it again, too, sooner than they knew.
Because that Halloween, a new supervillain would creep from an unlikely place. The heroes needed their sleep to be ready for …
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Fighting Crime Before Bedtime
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About the Illustrator
Lys Blakeslee
Lys graduated from Grand Valley State University in Michigan where she earned a degree in illustration.
She has always loved to red and devoted much of her childhood to devouring piles of books from the library.
She lives in Wyoming, MI with her wonderful parents, two goofy cats, and one extra-loud parakeet.
Connect with the David Anthony & Charles David Clasman
Charlie:
[email protected] facebook.com/charlesdavidclasman
David:
[email protected] facebook.com/authordavidanthony
On the Web:
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facebook.com/realheroesread
youtube.com/user/realheroesread
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