I WHIPPED AROUND.
The earth shook.
A giant monster, a hideous beast at least 150 feet tall, was marching across the flat Kansas plains, heading straight for the farmhouse.
Number 1 was back. And it was definitely bigger and badder than ever, too. Its splayed feet, which were the size of a train car, looked like they belonged on a colossal three-toed raptor. Its body was all bumpy bone and slimy, gelatinous muscle, with no flesh to cover up all the rippling tendons and gristle. It had the curled, stinging tail of a scorpion, the serrated claws of a lobster, and the carbuncle-covered spine of a hunchback demon. As the nightmarish giant lurched forward, its lobster-claw hands dragged across the open fields, slicing deep furrows in the black soil.
But its head was the most hideous part of all.
It was nothing but an exposed brain made up of swirled, spongy globs of purple goo and pus-dripping boils. Some sort of gaseous cloud wavered in the air just above the rear of its curdled brain blob. Every now and then, the gas would erupt into bursts of blue flame.
Up front, burrowed into the brow of the jiggly mound of gray matter, were two hollow goggle holes instead of eyeballs. The thing had no snout, just a gas mask–shaped mouth hole filled with a pair of fleshy, flickering tongues—each one at least twenty feet long and tipped with a deadly stinger.
“What is that thing?” said Joe, who had quickly morphed his meatball sandwich into a supercharged laser-burst bazooka.
“Number 1,” I said, sizing up the situation and running through all the new defensive strategies and classic battle strategies recently downloaded into my brain.
“I thought Number 1 was a big bug,” said Emma. “A praying mantis.”
“That was just the form it took. Until now…”
“Well,” said Willy, “this new model is even uglier. Daniel? Joe? Can one of you guys materialize me a weapon and a ton of ammo?”
We both did. Simultaneously.
“Thanks,” said Willy, balancing and leveling the two blasters. “I have a clean shot at those two frontal blow holes that might be its eyes.”
“Impossible,” said Joe. “The thing has to be two miles away.”
Willy grinned. “Looks like I came back with laser guided vision.”
The brain-headed beast kept pounding across the prairie on its skeletal stilts, tearing down power lines with its bony shins, flaring fireballs out of the back of its wet and wormy brain head.
“We should surround it,” suggested Mel. “Have Willy aim for the knee joints. Its limbs are so spindly, if Willy knee-caps it, the whole teetering scaffold of bones will just topple to the ground.”
“I like it,” I said, glad to have my best friends since forever in the battle with me once again
“And I like our odds,” said Willy. “The five of us against one Bony Moronie monster with a bad case of brain acne? Piece of cake.”
And right about then is when a dark, undulating line appeared on the horizon.
The giant beast raised one of its arms high in the air like a Roman centurion.
“Charge!” it growled.
The line at the horizon swarmed forward. The new Number 1 had brought its legions with it. Millions and millions and millions of its dark followers carpeted the Kansas plains as far as my eyes could see.
And the whole stampeding horde was gunning straight for me and my friends.