Hot Dog and Bob: Adventure 2

BOOK: Hot Dog and Bob: Adventure 2
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Adventure #2

and the Particularly Pesky Attack of the Pencil People

by
L. Bob Rovetch

illustrated by
Dave Whamond

For my dear friend Martha Weston whose
wonderful laughter will always be with me —L.R.

Chapter 1

Trouble

Want to know the freakiest day of my life? It was the day I opened my lunch box to find a superhero hot dog sitting on top of my pizza.

“Hot Dog’s my name, fightin’ bad stuff’s my game!” said the talking wienie. “It’ll be me and you, stickin’ like glue. Partners till the very end!”

The next thing I knew, my teacher, Miss Lamphead, had morphed into a huge alien pizza person named Cheese Face. Things got really weird when she turned everybody, including our class hamster, into mutant zombie pizza soldiers.

To make a long story short, everything turned out okay in the end. My classroom went back to normal, Hot Dog went back to his planet, Dogzalot, and my best friend, Clementine, and I were the only ones who remembered that anything weird had even happened.

We promised never to talk about Hot Dog or the whole scary pizza thing ever again. We tried as hard as we could to act like normal kids in a normal school, and if you ask me, we did a pretty good job—until last week, that is.

“Mmmm! Yummylicious!” Clementine said with her mouth full. “Wanna bite?”

I looked at her lunch. It was another one of her usual
un
usual creations: a peanut butter, banana, avocado, red pepper, onion, ham, chocolate chip, cream cheese, raisin, alfalfa sprout and extra hot horseradish on rye bread sandwich. Yummylicious? I don’t think so!

“I seriously don’t get how you can eat those things without getting sick,” I said. But I knew better than anyone that Clementine had a stomach of steel. She could handle even the most repulsive foods.

That’s when Clementine broke our sacred promise. She burped and said, “Hey, Bob, don’t you ever wish you could see Hot Dog again? You know, just for old times’ sake?”

“No way!” I said. “The only time superhero hot dogs show up is when something terrible is about to happen. Asking to see Hot Dog would just be asking for trouble.”

“Did someone say
trouble?
” a voice called out from my lunch box.

“Oh, no,” I said, lifting the lid. “It can’t be!”

But it could be—it was! Smushed between my carrots and my juice box. Looking up at Clementine and me with that crazy gotta-save-the-world kind of look that only superheroes get. Hot Dog was back. I glared at Clementine. If only she hadn’t mentioned his name!

“Dude,” I whispered into my lunch box. “PLEASE tell me you just popped by to say hello.”

“I won’t lie to you, partner,” said Hot Dog. “You got a heapin’ helpin’ of trouble on this planet of yours.”

“Don’t tell me Cheese Face is back!” said Clementine.

“No such luck,” said Hot Dog. “This mission is so tough the Big Bun almost sent two of us superhero hot dogs down from Dogzalot.”

“Well, why didn’t she?” I asked nervously.

“Oh, I convinced her that we could handle it,” said Hot Dog.

“W-w-w-we?” I stuttered.

“Between you and me and the little lady here,” he said, pointing at Clementine, “we’ve got it covered. No problem!”

The end-of-lunch bell rang, and I hadn’t eaten a single bite.

“Tell me this isn’t happening again,” I begged Clementine.

“Okay, Bob,” she said, rolling her eyes. “This isn’t happening again.”

But we both knew perfectly well that it was happening. And there was nothing either of us mere mortals could do about it.

Chapter 2

Be Afraid, Humans!

“Hurry and take your seats, class,” said Miss Lamphead. “It’s time for our Thursday spelling test.”

I slid my lunch box under my desk and held my breath.

“The first word is
boysenberry,
” Miss Lamphead said. “The nice boy made boysenberry jam with his mother.
Boysenberry.


Yes
!” I thought to myself. “That is so easy.” And I wrote down the word
boysenberry.
But when I double-checked, it said, “BE AFRAID!”

“The next word,” said Miss Lamphead, “is
history.
The history of our country is so fascinating.
History.

“Another easy one,” I thought. But when I wrote it down, it came out “HUMANS!”

“What in the world?” I accidentally blurted out loud.

Every single kid in my class turned around to look at me. I didn’t know what was going on with my pencil, but I knew it couldn’t be good!

“Is there a problem, Bob?” asked Miss Lamphead.

“No, no problem,” I answered, trying to look as unlike someone with a potentially possessed pencil as possible.

“Very well.” She continued. “The next word is
invitation.
Geraldo gave Petunia an invitation to his birthday party.
Invitation.

I tried as hard as I could to write
invitation,
but my pencil had a mind of its own. It went crazy, scribbling the words “PREPARE TO BE
ERASED!!!” I struggled to tackle it. How could a measly little pencil be so strong? Finally I grabbed it by the bottom end, flipped it over and erased. But my messed-up spelling words just got all smudgy. Then everything got all slippery. My pencil was oozing slime all over the place. And to top it off, I could have sworn it was laughing at me.

“Awesome!” said Barfalot, my least favorite person on the face of the Earth. “Bob just puked all over his spelling test!”

“Awesome!” repeated Barfalot’s brainless bodyguard brothers, Pigburt and Slugburt. If there was ever a place in the
Guinness Book of World Records
for the meanest, dumbest fifth-grade bullies ever invented, nobody could even begin to compete with the Terrible Triplets.

“Oh, dear, Bob!” said Miss Lamphead. “You’d better go straight to Nurse Bunyan’s office!”

I grabbed my lunch box and left, only I didn’t go to the nurse’s office. I slipped into the janitor’s closet and opened my lunch box.

“How come you didn’t tell me to watch out for scary slime-spewing pencils?” I asked Hot Dog.

“That ambulance siren of a lunch bell cut me off,” said Hot Dog. “I was just getting ready to tell you about our mission when—”


Our
mission?” I interrupted. “No way! Uh-uh. Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t want anything to do with your crazy interplanetary weirdness!”

“Sorry, kid,” said Hot Dog. “But you’ve got no choice. If you back out now, the Big Bun’s gonna be hoppin’ mad. And believe me, Bobby boy, you do
not
want to make the Big Bun mad! Besides, she said you did such a
swell job helping me get rid of Cheese Face she knows she can count on you.”

“Really?” I asked. “She said that?”

“Yes siree,” Hot Dog answered. “And she had plenty of nice things to say about your spunky little girlfriend, too!”

“Clementine?” I asked.

“She’s one smart cookie,” said Hot Dog. “Yes indeedy, that one’s a keeper. I betcha if you play your cards right, wedding bells’ll be ring-a-ding-dingin’ for the two of you some day.”


Eww
. Now I really am gonna throw up.” I gagged. “Clementine and I are just friends. That is
so
sick.”

“Speaking of sick,” Hot Dog said, rubbing his tiny little hands together all excitedly, “where are you keeping that good-for-nothin’ pencil?”

“I’m not
keeping
it anywhere,” I said. “It’s back in class, on top of my wrecked spelling test.”

“You—you let him go? Tell me you didn’t just let him go! Oh, this is bad, buddy boy. This is really, really bad!” Hot Dog hopped out of my lunch box and started pacing around in circles. “
That,
I’m sorry to say, partner, was not just any old number-two pencil.
That
, my friend, was
the Scribbler!

“The Scribbler?” I said.

BOOK: Hot Dog and Bob: Adventure 2
10.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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