Chapter 9

chapter nine After our little birthday celebration, I tell Quint all about the monster Blarg, and Quint FREAKS. I tell Quint to stop being a nuclear-over-reactor, but secretly, I'm glad Quint knows about the Blarg threat. Quint puts his current top-secret project on hold, the one we went to Home Depot to get supplies for, until we finish truly arming the tree house. He has Dirk knock down the back wall to the Robinsons' garage, so we can get inside without opening it up to the street side of the house. And inside the garage, Quint sets up a full-blown invention workshop...

So while Quint spends his time in the garage, working on blueprints for a newly fortified tree house, Dirk and I keep busy and time flies... I take more photos. Great photos.

Some afternoons, Dirk and I just go out and look for trouble. We should explore the ruins of the Best Buy today. I wonder if that weirdo cashier is a zombie now? He already was a zombie.

We could watch DVDs on the side of the garage Pro, we need a catapult! A giant catapult Every few days, Quint hands Dirk and me a list of things we need to help arm and defend the tree house. It's easy—the town is a smorgasbord! All for the taking! Fireworks, video games, trampolines— everything. Dirk spray-paints a giant, almost life-size version of Blarg on the side of the neighbor's house. Quint says I need to be prepared, so the next time I see Blarg, it's the last time—and not the last time I see him because he plucks my eyeballs out or something, but the last time I see him 'cause I slay him.

Remember I said how I look at things like video games? Well, if life is a video game now, it sure feels like Blarg is the final boss. And everyone knows you NEVER battle the final boss without being prepared. I sit and stare at that big painting on the side of the house. And I look at that forehead. The scar. What did Arnold say, in that movie with the alien? If it bleeds, we can kill it. So while I spend my time practicing whacking away at spray-paint Blarg, Dirk finishes digging the moat—which is really just a swimming pool that goes all the way around the tree house. We had to wait for a hard rain to fill the pool. It's pretty muddy, but still—it's our own moat pool! Whenever Quint takes a break from his plotting and planning, we play swimming pool games. Like diving-board catch.

Quint and I are terrible at diving-board catch. I haven't caught a single ball yet. Something goes wrong every time: either I jump too high or he throws it in the wrong direction. And still, every morning and every evening, I hop into Big Mama and go for my ride—cruising down the street, hollering "June Del Toro! Are you out there? June Del Toro! Are you out there?!" Still nothing. But I'm not giving up hope. So anyway, yeah, this is it—this is life now. And on a random night, when the weather is right, Quint and Dirk and I do something different. We stop. We stop adventuring and we stop researching and we stop battling monsters and we just chill out. We make root beer cocktails and we roast