The roller coaster cranked slowly up a thirty-foot peak angled forty-five degrees to the starry night sky. Below them, the zombified hordes shrank to miniature beasts ambling along the earth like voracious insects.

“Look!” Rice shouted. “Over there!”

Zack and Ozzie swiveled their heads in the direction that Rice was pointing his finger. One of the fighter jet’s parachutes was tangled in the branches of a tree.

“After the ride,” said Zack, “we’ll start there.”

“Sounds good, buddy,” said Rice. “Now hold on tight!”

CLACK! CLACK! The thrill ride cranked to the top of its mountainous track and— WHOOSH!

Rice shrieked like a girl in a horror flick as the roller coaster shot ferociously down the steep decline. The skin on Zack’s face rippled and flapped from the high-speed plunge. Ozzie whooped at the bottom as they vroomed up again into a mind-shattering corkscrew and through a tunnel on the edge of a man-made bluff. When they came through on the other side of the tunnel, the night sky seemed to swirl brightly with stars.

Then the coaster slanted upward again, and all Zack could see was the face of the near-full moon. They flipped upside down on the front end of a double loopty-loop, and Zack felt his entire stomach nearly jump through the back of his throat. As his stomach began to settle, the coaster car rumbled around a rocky bend and came to an abrupt stop, which jerked the boys forward into their padded restraints and then slammed them back hard in their seats.

The ride was over, but the zombies were quickly filling up both sides of the platform.

“Guys!” Zack shouted, throwing the restraint up over his shoulders. He spotted a clearing down the back steps of the platform. “This way.”

Ozzie followed Zack and jumped out. Rice tried to do the same, but his shoulder restraint wouldn’t budge an inch. “I’m stuck!” he shouted. “Help!”

Zack skidded to a stop and doubled back to help his friend, who was now under zombie siege. “Ahhhhh!” Rice shrieked. The herd of undead lunatics clawed at the ride.

Ozzie bounded ahead of Zack and with Zack’s new Louisville Slugger dealt a blow to one of the zombie freaks. Rice’s eyes were bulging out of his head as he tried with all his might to lift the shoulder harness off his torso.

The mob of rezombified mutants gave off a visible wave of thick, stinking heat as the impenetrable wall of sunbaked bodies came toward Zack, Rice, and Ozzie, one ankle-twisting step at a time.

“Get this thing offa me!” Rice shouted, slamming up on the metal restraint repeatedly. Just then, one of the zombies flopped off the platform and into the car in front of him.

“Ghlarghlephlarph!”

Zack jumped into the seat behind Rice’s and pulled back on the harness. He jiggled it side-to-side, trying to trigger the release mechanism, but nothing was working.

In front of them, Ozzie, with his bare hands, pummeled the undead freak in the neighboring seat. This zombie was out, but they didn’t have a moment to spare.

With one last shove from Rice, the latch gave way and the mechanical restraint released. He scrambled out of the roller coaster and leaped to the zombie-free side of the platform faster than Zack had ever seen his buddy move in his entire life.

The ghouls groped and clawed their way across the roller coaster tracks while the boys sprinted off the platform and down the wooden staircase.

As the boys raced to ground level, a trio of snaggletoothed ghouls shambled up the steps, impeding their descent.

“Blarghle!” The trio of cantankerous hellions slothed forward. They were three skinny zombie dudes in torn tank tops and Bermuda shorts. A bunch of nubbly boils blistered all over one lumbering brute’s face. Another one’s mug was set in a grimace of wild-eyed, tooth-baring hideousness. And the third one sputtered thick bits of spittle off of its hot, stinking breath as it snarled grossly.

“Schlarghph!”

Without missing a beat, Ozzie grabbed both handrails on either side of the staircase, and swung his legs up like an Olympic gymnast on the parallel bars. With one swift movement, he launched the soles of his sneakers at the chest of the zombie in front of the other two, sending the three undead brain-cravers flying backward. They crumpled up into a subhuman heap of contorted limbs.

“Come on!” Ozzie said as the boys hustled down and jumped over the twisted mass of bodies. “Let’s go get the girls.”

“Wait,” Rice said. “What about Twinkles?”

At the sound of his name, Twinkles barked cheerily. The boys spotted him over by one of the concessions stands, licking at an old melted batch of what looked like—and hopefully was—bright pink cotton candy.

“Come on, Twinkles.” Zack whistled and the little pup perked up and trotted along behind them. They jogged off through the zombified theme park past a line of gumball machine stations on the side of the rainbow brick road.

“Why are there so many gumball machines in this place?” Ozzie asked, looking around as they took off through the undead havoc.

“Actually, Ozzie,” Rice began, “that’s an excellent question and I have the answer. The guy who started Fun World is like the coolest dude ever. Don’t you remember I wrote my who-do-you-most-admire essay on him in third grade, Zack?”

“Sort of.” Zack thought back, trying to remember. “Not really.”

“Ronald Jeffrey Bunkowski started off his career in the military. That took him to South America, where he fell in love with the daughter of a wealthy rubber baron. He was wounded in combat and given an honorable discharge. He then returned to South America and wound up marrying the rubber baron’s daughter. When the rubber baron died, he left the company to Bunco, which was his nickname in the army.”

“Rice, get to the point already.” Ozzie groaned.

“Patience, my friend,” said Rice with a wry smile, and continued with the tale. “Where was I? Oh yeah. So with the rubber company’s unique plot of gum trees deep in the Amazon, Bunco landed on a gold mine. He brought the Brazilian tree gum back to the United States and started a bubble gum factory, which made him a millionaire. Then he used the bubble gum money to follow his true dream of owning an amusement park where everything is full of fun. Hence, Bunco’s Fun World. That’s why everyone gets a free gumball with the price of admission. The dude’s got a famous bubble gum factory. He even has his own cruise ship called the SS Fun World. How do you not know this?”

The multicolored brick road led the boys downhill to a gumball machine–lined plaza in the center of the amusement park. Zack, Rice, and Ozzie stopped and stared up at a gold-plated statue of the Fun World founder. A realistically carved Mr. Bunco gripped the lapels of his sport coat and looked proudly out over what he had created.

At the far end of the plaza, the Fun World resort hotel stood high above all the other structures. The front of the hotel was in the likeness of a giant gumball machine. The entrance had shiny silver doors where the gumball slot would have been, and even from a distance, Zack could see a roiling mass of zombies teeming out the lobby.

Behind them, Zack, Rice, and Ozzie heard their dog barking. They turned their heads and followed the sounds until they saw Twinkles yapping at a group of zombies gathering under a palm tree in front of a costume shop, Halloween 365.

“Up here, doofuses,” Zoe’s voice yelled from up above, where she dangled from the parachute tangled in the treetops. She hung unhappily with zombie Madison still strapped to her front. “A little assistance, please!”

Zoe’s feet dangled above a small horde of zombified park employees decked out in their full-costume uniforms. There were six in total: three zombie cowboys from the Wild West saloon; two carney folk from the win-a-prize games, wearing tattered jackets with long coattails; and one overly tanned lifeguard from the waterpark. They all reached up, stretching their arms out of their shoulder sockets, howling for brains.

Ozzie, Zack, and Rice spread out, circling the undead crowd.

The costumed zombies spun around and glared savagely at the fresh meat that had just arrived. “Blaarrrrghle-ghlarghle!” one of the Wild West zombies yowled at the boys.

A gross explosion of lumpy yellow pus erupted off the zombie’s mouth as Ozzie rocked the beast with a lightning-quick elbow strike to its wobbling noggin.

At the same time, Rice ran around behind the zombie lifeguard and crouched at the back of its knees. The over-tanned undead beefcake looked back at Rice with a perplexed expression on its plug-ugly mug. Then Zack took a running start and drilled the zombie in the chest with his baseball bat like he was bunting a pitch.

WHAM! The rezombified beast flipped backward over Rice, who scampered on all fours out of the way. “Aw, yeah!” Rice cried, popping back up to his feet. “Works every time.”

“Nice thinking!” Zack said, laying out a low-five for his buddy to slap.

“Rice, watch out!” Ozzie hollered. Zack jumped back as Rice ducked out of the way of the undead carney lurching toward him. Rice then latched on to the zombie, hugging it around its leg like he was a human ball and chain. “Come on, guys,” he said, wrapped around the thing’s ankles. “Get ’im!” Ozzie and Zack joined hands and took a running Red Rover clothesline into the monster’s gut. The zombie toppled backward and knocked the back of its head against the pavement with a soggy-sounding clunk.

Up above, Zoe was starting to seem even crankier than usual.

“What’s she looking at us like that for?” Rice asked. “We just saved her butt.”

“Yeah, and my butt would have been saved a lot sooner had you three not been off riding roller coasters,” said Zoe. “Yeah, I saw you.”

“We had to ride the roller coaster to get away from the zombies,” Ozzie defended them.

“A likely story.” Zoe rolled her eyes. “But speaking of getting away from zombies, Madison’s really getting on my nerves.” Zombie Madison was busy wriggling and squirming in her parachute harness connected to Zoe.

Ozzie pulled a pair of scissors out from Rice’s backpack and shimmied up the palm tree. He clipped the parachute strings, and zombie Madison toppled hard to the ground, emitting an involuntary and foul-smelling belch as she landed.

“All right, you guys,” Ozzie said to them as Zoe carefully climbed down next to him. “Time to get inside and regroup.”

“In here,” Zoe said, tugging Madison by the collar and pulling her inside the Halloween 365 costume shop. “Come on, Biff,” she said to her zombified friend.

“Why are you calling her Biff?” Zack asked.

“Because that’s what she’s called when she’s a zombie BFF,” Zoe snapped.

“Whoa,” said Rice, turning around and taking in the whole costume shop. “This place is awesome!”

Zoe immediately started picking out princess dresses for her BFF and holding up options.

“Yuck!” Zoe squealed. “She’s all icky!”

“Zoe, what are you doing?” Zack asked.

“Gimme a break, little bro. I’m just trying to make her presentable. I’ll pay for everything,” she said. “I’d expect her to do the same for me.” Zoe continued to fix Madison’s hair, ignoring her little bro because that’s what big sisters do best. She then zipped Madison up in a pink princess dress before painting her revoltingly shriveled face with heavy layers of rosy blush and bright blue eyeliner. Zombie Madison snarled hideously as the makeover ended and Zoe fitted a plastic astronaut helmet over Madison’s freshly made-up face.

Ozzie picked up a map of Fun World from the checkout counter. “Okay, guys,” he said. “At this point, Olivia is not going to be out in the open. We need to do a sweep of the entire premises.”

“We’ve already been here and here,” Zack said, pointing at the map. “So we can cross off The Viper and the costume shop.”

“Hopefully the zombies didn’t already get her.”

“Rice!” said Zack. “Come on. We gotta stay positive here.”

“You’re right, buddy,” said Rice. “My bad.”

“We gotta turn this place inside out,” said Ozzie. “We’ll go building by building.”

“Well, what are we waiting for!” Zoe said, untying zombie Madison from a clothing rack.

“Chill out,” said Rice. “If she’s here, we’re going to find her. Besides, my threads are getting pretty grimy in this Florida heat.” He was already sifting through the costume aisles, looking for a wardrobe change.

“Fine, but we gotta hurry up,” said Ozzie. peeking out at the ambling zombie hordes. “These Fun World freaks are starting to get curious.”