Brooklyn T., age 8

 

“Today is the big road trip!” Sarah and her family were going to the country, and it took five hours to get there.

 “Buckle up,” said Sarah’s mom, Mrs. Clood.

 “Buckle up,” said Sarah. Mr. Clood got into the car and looked in the back seat to Sarah.

 “You excited?” asked Mr. Clood.

“Ooh ya,” Sarah shouted.

Sarah’s next door neighbor Logan walked over to the car and hit the hood with a loud THUMP.

“Can’t I come with you?”

“Go home Logan.” said the Cloods.

“Alright, alright. But bring me back something nice,” yelled Logan as the Cloods drove off.

About an hour into the drive, Mr. Clood needed gas. Sarah went into the gas station with her dad for some snacks and a bathroom break. The gas station was dark and all the snacks were gone.

“Excuse me sir, can you tell me where to find the snacks?” Sarah said, looking at the back of the gas station attendant. As he turned around Sarah noticed something was not right, not quite…alive. “Ahhhhhhhh!” Sarah ran to the door screaming. It was locked. As she looked out the window, she gasped. “Everything is broken down. No, no, no, this can’t be happening,” Sarah thought. “This has to be a prank.”

Then she remembered the time she went over to Logan’s house and he dressed up like a monster to scare her. “HA. HA. Very funny, Logan!” she shouted.

“No, no, no! You’re supposed to be scared,” said the zombie, “and how did you know my name?”

This was starting to get weird. This wasn’t Logan. What happened here? Sarah thought. She decided to ask this zombie what was going on.

 “Well, it all started when a strange man came to the station while me and my co-workers,” he said while gesturing to the other zombies that had slowly filled the area, “were working. He looked up from shopping and told us that we would leave this place. I didn’t understand what he meant. But shortly after, a customer walked up to check out—that woman over there.” He pointed at a tall, yellow-haired woman with pink high heels walking into the bathroom.

“Anyhow, the ground started shaking, the roof started falling one tile at a time, and the strange man started pointing at each person in the store until one by one, this is what we all became.”

“And you’ve been stuck here ever since?” asked Sarah. “What year was this?’

“1590.”

“I want to know who the guy in the strange coat is.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, I never said anything about a man in a strange coat!”

“Sorry,” mumbled Sarah.

A man in a red sweater, tan church slacks with a handlebar mustache, and a beard like Santa walked up to them. “Excuse me, can you remember one thing the man said?” he asked with a grunt.

 “Yes,” Logan the zombie said.

“Tell me what he said about the people in the station.”

“Don’t let people that didn’t die here in,” said the co-worker.

“This is one of my co-workers,” Logan whispered to Sarah.

 “Yay! That’s what I thought,” exclaimed Sarah.

A little while later Sarah was on her phone trying to find the strange guy who cursed them. She pulled up a picture and showed it to Logan. “Is this the guy you saw?”

“Yes,” yelled Logan.

“It says here Anguslie Andrus was the most powerful man in the whole universe. Some say he is over 5,000 years old.”

“Wow, he’s old!” said the co-worker John.

“Ahooo!” they heard. Sarah fled. She had never ever heard anything like that in Kansas, where she was from. She looked around and all the zombies were sitting there unbothered by this noise.

‘Why aren’t you scared?” Sarah screamed.

“Well, we are already dead. So we aren’t scared of anything, really. Except for the strange man,” Logan told her.

“OOoohhh,” said John obnoxiously, “it says here in the year 1590 he cursed a gas station and fled to a place called—,”

“—BEEP BEEP—SHUTTING DOWN—,” said Sarah’s phone.

“Noooo!” they all said.

Sarah tried to charge it, but there was no service. Just then Logan remembered there was a computer inside of the closet. “It’s not much but it’s something.”

“He fled to a place called ‘HALLOWEENTOWN.'”

“Seriously?” said Sarah.

“Oh, I saw a movie about that once,” said a little girl zombie with dark hair.

They made a plan to go find this Anguslie Andrus in Halloweentown. After dinner, they got on a plane filled with zombies. Sarah was more than a little uncomfortable. “Don’t worry,” said Logan. “Everyone is really nice.”

One of the zombies on the plane was Sarah’s great-great-great grandma, and she got her cheeks pinched a bunch.

Finally, they got there and they searched house to house until there it was. A big black mansion, the same one they’d seen during their research.

“Should we knock?” asked Sarah. Logan nodded his head.

KNOCK- KNOCK-KNOCK.

“Yes,” asked the strange man when he answered. Sarah stood up very bravely.

“We’d like to know why you cursed that gas station.”

TO BE CONTINUED