“Whoa, whoa,” I said, holding my hands out in front of me. “We’re human.”

Preston Frick’s eyes were wild with panic as he gazed at each of us in turn. He didn’t look much like the picture I’d seen this morning, but it was him. That slicked back hair forked out in all directions. And his smug expression had been replaced by fear.

“You—you’re children,” he stammered, putting the letter opener down on his desk.

The CEO of Veratrum Games had been hiding in his office, probably taking a nap under his desk. No wonder he was startled at first. But now that he knew we were only kids and not zombies who’d figured out how to open a door, he shook off his fear and straightened his red tie.

“What are you doing here?” he snapped.

I jutted my chin out. “We’re here to talk to you. We know Veratrum is responsible for the zombie outbreak.”

“And the aliens,” Willa added.

“And the monsters,” Marcus said.

Charlie stepped right up to his face. “So you’re going to reverse it. Now. Make everyone human again.”

Preston laughed at us. Actually laughed. “Or what? What could you possibly do to me?”

I put my hands on my hips. “We found a way through a swarm of zombies in the parking lot, survived a horde of them lumbering around the building, and made it all the way up here to your fancy office where you were hiding under your desk. So maybe, just maybe, we could find a way to lure a couple of zombies in here and lock them in with you.”

His eyes widened for a moment, then he looked down at his desk. “I can’t fix it,” he mumbled.

“What was that?” Charlie asked.

Preston looked back up at us with something like remorse in his eyes. “I tried. But rewriting the code didn’t help. The only way to turn them human again is to play the game and cure them one by one. But there are too many . . .” His voice drifted off as a thought occurred to him. He plastered on a fake smile. “Now, with you kids here, we could make a team, right? You seem to really have a handle on this. You can go first and clear a path. I’ll follow and—”

Jason puffed out his chest. “You want to use a group of kids as human shields? That’s where you’re going with this?”

“No, of course not,” he said too quickly.

Willa clucked her tongue in disapproval. “Then what did you mean when you said ‘you can go first and clear a path’?”

Preston gazed down at his hands, which had started to tremble. “I’ve been stuck in here for days.”

“And we’ve been out on the streets curing zombies you made,” Marcus said.

Preston lifted his hands in the air. “I can’t fix it. I tried. So what else do you want me to do?”

I pulled the guest chair from the corner of the office and settled myself in. “How about you tell us the truth? The whole story. Why you created these games that weren’t games. Why you unleashed these disasters on Wolcott.”

He immediately got defensive. “It’s wasn’t—”

But Marcus cut in. “We know about your big contract. We know more than you think.”

Preston’s eyes shifted around nervously.

“We’re all stuck here,” Charlie said. “You might as well come clean.”

“It might feel good to unload your conscience,” Willa said, “if you have one.”

Preston’s chest rose and fell as he took a big breath. He lowered himself down to his chair. “They were real games, everywhere else in the world. The variations were only in the games downloaded here in town.”

“Variations,” I repeated with disgust. He said it like he’d offered the people of Wolcott a new flavor of Popsicle rather than put their lives in danger. Anger leaked into my voice. “So everyone else in the world got normal games and we got . . . variations.”

“I needed a testing ground.” He tapped his fingers nervously on the arms of the chair. “It only made sense to do it in the town where we’re headquartered.”

“You know what would have made better sense?” Willa snapped. “Not doing it at all!”

He shook his head sadly. The bags under his eyes seemed to sag, and he looked much older than twenty-four. “You kids would never understand.”

“Try us,” Charlie said. “Tell us why.”

Preston stood up from his chair and began to pace around the office. “My father gave me a million dollars to start this company.”

“Rough life,” Marcus said. “The struggle is real.”

Preston ignored him and continued. “I blew through his initial investment. I mismanaged everything. But I couldn’t go crawling back to him asking for more. I couldn’t shut down the company and admit that I’d failed!”

“Yeah, destroying an entire town is a great way to save face,” I said.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen!” He dragged his hands through his gelled hair, making it stick straight up. “I accepted the contract because I needed the money. I never thought anything bad would happen.”

“What was the contract for, then?” Marcus asked.

“The variation on Monsters Unleashed was to see if we could get video game characters to affect the real world. They wanted to see if, down the line, they could create video game armies and sell those to governments. Something like that could save human lives! So I ran a small test in town with cute monsters.”

“Cute?” Charlie snapped. “A SpiderFang nearly killed me!”

Preston waved his hand dismissively. “I never thought it would work. I thought I’d just take the money and move forward with my regular games.”

And maybe, if we hadn’t been playing around with that machine in Grandpa Tepper’s attic, it wouldn’t have worked. The old machine belonged to an ex-Veratrum employee and was the catalyst that kicked it all off. But I wasn’t going to volunteer that information to Mr. Evil Genius here so he could figure out why it happened and create more disasters with it.

“What about Alien Invasion?” I asked. “What secret test was in there?”

“We were experimenting with teleportation, with a goal of quickly moving supplies or eventually people from one place to another. But the test never worked. I heard rumors that actual aliens got teleported here to town, but I never saw any. I even sent a guy to do surveillance and he said it was a bust.”

The test did work. But only in combination with an astrophysicist’s work-in-progress alien-contacting machine at the observatory. And that “guy” followed us around in a white van with a fake plumbing logo on the side. Like we didn’t know how to check business names online to see if they were real.

Preston may have thought he had a handle on his games, but he didn’t count on how they would interact with outside software and hardware. It was like the time my phone downloaded an update and my unrelated weather app started to insist I was in India. He could never have predicted or tested for me to be using a game next to an outdated Veratrum device or the machine at the observatory. He thought he was in control, but he wasn’t.

“And Zombie Town?” Willa asked.

Preston gazed at the floor. “This is when I really started to get uncomfortable. They wanted to test mind-control. To see if we could create zombie soldiers out of regular people.”

“And even though you were ‘uncomfortable,’ you did it anyway,” Willa sneered. “This is all your fault.”

Preston sat back down heavily in his chair. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The test went off too soon.”

I leaned forward. “Excuse me?”

“I signed the contract to keep my company afloat. I figured I could keep everything safe here in town. But after the monsters got unleashed, I knew this was the wrong path. I told them I was out. They’d have to find another developer to work with. But they wouldn’t release me from the contract. They wouldn’t let me stop. They said they’d leak what happened to the press. I’d get blamed. My company would be shut down. My career would be over.”

“So you made ‘variations’ on two more games,” I prodded.

“I didn’t see any way out. I couldn’t tell my father what I’d gotten involved in.”

My hands clenched into fists. I couldn’t believe this was all because of some selfish dweeb and his daddy issues.

He continued, “I knew the Zombie Town code wasn’t ready, but they said I had to launch the test right away.”

“Why rush it?” Charlie asked.

Preston groaned in frustration. “We had a whistleblower. I don’t know who, but one of my employees was feeding information to the cops.”

Detective Palamidis’s appointment. It all made sense now.

“The test didn’t go well,” Preston said as a moaning zombie shuffled past the office. “Obviously. But I figured things would course-correct like they did before. I waited in here. But nothing is happening.”

I held a finger up. “Um, what do you mean ‘course-correct’?”

Preston shrugged. “Monsters got unleashed into town and then disappeared. Aliens might have been here, but I never saw them; so if they were, they disappeared, too. I figured the zombies would also go that way.”

Willa spoke through gritted teeth. “You think the monsters and aliens magically went away? It. Was. Us. We saved the town.”

“You kids?” He gave a dismissive snort. “How?”

“We caught every single monster,” I said. “One by one. A SpiderFang nearly ate Charlie!”

Charlie shuddered at the memory and added, “And we captured all of the aliens and transported them back home after a code rewrite.”

Preston gawked at him. “You’re the one who reversed that line of code in Alien Invasion?”

“They did it,” Charlie said, pointing to Marcus and me.

“You’re, what, middle school kids?” he asked, his voice tinged with disbelief.

Marcus shrugged. “Yeah. And we’ve spent the last few days curing as many zombies as we could while you were hiding in your office.”

Preston stared blankly for a moment, then his face crumbled. “It should be you,” he said, his voice trembling, “running a company like this. Not me.”

Marcus and I glanced at each other and smiled.

“Maybe someday,” I said. Gamer Squad would be a great name for a game development company. “But flattering us isn’t going to get you anywhere right now.”

Charlie crossed his arms in front of his chest. “We want you to promise, if we make it out of this one alive, that it’s the last mess you create. Veratrum Games is shut down, immediately and forever.”

I softened my voice. “I know it’s going to feel bad, telling your father that your company is gone. But you have to do the right thing, even if it’s uncomfortable.”

Preston hunched his shoulders. “You’re right. I can’t go on like this. It’s gone too far this time.”

“You promise Veratrum is done? No more shady contracts?” Willa asked.

He nodded. “That company won’t even want to work with me anymore after this disaster. It’s over.”

I exhaled loudly. I almost couldn’t believe it. We’d meticulously crafted a plan and it had all worked. Our gamer army was out curing zombies. We’d stopped Veratrum forever. Now we just had to get out of here, and we could join our army and cure zombies until every last person in Wolcott was human again. We could do it. Hope rose in me like an old friend I hadn’t spent time with in a while.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Charlie’s started chirping. Then Willa’s, Marcus’s, and even Jason’s phone. People were trying to reach us all at once.

I slid my phone out of my pocket and scrolled through the panicked incoming texts. “Something’s wrong,” I said. “All the zombies are at the middle school. All at once.”

“Our gamer army is overwhelmed,” Charlie said, his voice worried. “Why would the zombies suddenly all go to one place?”

“Ohhhhhh,” Preston said slowly.

I gritted my teeth. “What?”

He let out a shaky breath. “There was another line of code in Zombie Town that the buyer requested. They wanted the zombies to be able to assemble.”

Charlie and I shared a look. “What does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s a built-in feature that forces the zombies to assemble in one place. To attack an enemy target, let’s say. Rather than having the zombies mindlessly wander, they all descend upon the target at once.”

“And you didn’t think that was important information for us to have after we told you we’ve built up a gamer army?” Willa screeched. “Our army is the enemy target!”

Preston raised his hands into the air. “I didn’t think it would happen. The code was in there, but it wasn’t finished. I didn’t fill in the trigger variable so I figured it wouldn’t work.”

“You figured,” I repeated, seething. “And this is why you shouldn’t be making games. You push out unfinished code without testing and are shocked when something unexpected happens.”

“They made me run it before I was ready!” he yelled.

“Oh, sure, it’s all their fault,” I snapped back.

“Guys,” Marcus said. “Arguing about it isn’t helping our gamer army.”

“He’s right,” I said, standing. “We have to go help them. Now!”

Charlie glanced at the office door. “Quick question. How do we get out?”