Chapter 5

Chapter Five That night, the strange human villain haunts my dreams, like the baddie in an '80s horror movie...

I wake up shivering. Partly from the cold— because yeah, IT IS FREEZING. My winter sleeping outfit is someone's weird old Halloween CHEWBACCA COSTUME. And Quint's makeshift heater—a bunch of PlayStations and Xboxes piled on top of one another—is not working. But mostly, it's a shiver of fear. That was a human villain. A human villain using MY WEAPON as part of a bad-dude plan. We need to find that human and retrieve my Louisville Slicer. And soon! Because if this monster-riding human decides to attack, I'm afraid we're unprepared.... See, our monster town is now a ghost town. The monsters are huddled up inside stores and shops inside Wakefield Town Square, too terrified of the snow to come out. This must be fixed. I brew some hot chocolate, and the smell soon has my buddies waking. "Guys," I say. "This villain lady knows stuff about .e...c.. So, if a fight goes down—and fights DO KIND OF ALWAYS GO DOWN AROUND HERE—then we need our monster buddies ready to rumble alongside us. And they are not ready to rumble."

WE MUST SHOW THEM THE WONDERS OF WINTER. I don't get their problem. WINTTER rules That way when the bad stuff sets off, they won't be too terrified to battle alongside us. Oh, I'll give you a battle follow me. Moments later, we're outside having a— LIGHT-HEARTED, JUST-HORSINGAROUND, BUDDY SNOWBALL BATTLE! "Isn't winter the best?!" I shout as I hurl a snowball. "Such a delight!" June says.

Monsters start watching. Some are huddled up in blankets, peering through frosty windows. I think I even see one watching through a mailbox slot. I grin. "Guys, play up the fun!" I whisper. "Everyone loves a good friendly snowball fight!" That's when Quint appears on the deck of the tree house with an armful of snowball artillery. Our old-fashioned snowball battle turns awesomely post-apocalyptic and gadgetfied. Dirk wields our old Tennis Blaster 2000—which is now the Mobile Snow Sphere Slinger—and things get intense...

We're all giggling and laughing and freezing. And it's working. A monster comes shambling out and joins the fun! Unfortunately, that monster is Biggun. He scoops up a Biggun-sized snowball and—

And that's the end of that. The Biggun Blast freezes us to the core. We spend the rest of the day in the tree house, huddled up near the video game systems, trying to get warm. And the monsters are now extra freaked out. They've become afraid of snow in both flake form and ball form.