Hot Dog and Bob: Adventure 1 Page 2

  Finally she turned to Clementine, Marco and me.

  “Twenty-four down and three to go!” She laughed and pointed straight at us. Hot Dog struggled to free himself from her grip, but it was no use.

  I held my breath, closed my eyes and waited. When I opened my eyes, Marco was pizza. But for some reason, Clementine and I were still people! Luckily, Cheese Face was too busy celebrating her victory with her zombie pizza army to notice that Clementine and I hadn’t been zapped into pizza soldiers, too. We crawled behind a bookcase to hide.

  “How come we’re not pizza?” whispered Clementine.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back. “Maybe being Hot Dog’s partner and Hot Dog’s partner’s friend makes us immune to Cheese Face’s zapping or something.”

  “I just hope we live long enough to find out the answer,” said Clementine.

  “Today Miss Lamphead’s class, tomorrow the world!” Cheese Face belched, holding Hot Dog high in the air like a trophy.

  “Today Miss Lamphead’s class, tomorrow the world!” repeated the pizza-slice army.

  “I don’t think so!” Hot Dog said. He’d managed to free one arm, reach inside his bun and push a hidden button. A gigantic glob of spicy mustard squirted right up Cheese Face’s nose. “RRRRRAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!” Cheese Face screamed, flinging Hot Dog through the air.

  I watched helplessly as my poor little partner sailed across the room. He slammed into the blackboard with a splat.

  “NO-OOOO!!!” I wailed. “YOU KILLED MY PARTNER!!!”

  Chapter 6

  Mozzarella Misery

  I ran straight for poor, dead Hot Dog.

  “Bob! Stop!” Clementine hissed from our hiding place. “What are you doing?”

  To be honest, I didn’t even think about what I was doing until it was way too late. Just before I reached my dearly departed partner, Cheese Face dropped a sick blob of mozzarella right on top of me. I was completely stuck in a disgusting, cheesy prison, and there was no more superhero left to save me—or the rest of the planet.

  It was official. Cheese Face was taking over the world, and it was not going to be pretty!

  “Victory to the pizza people!” Cheese Face cheered.

  “Victory to the pizza people!” her army repeated.

  Now there was only one hope left. Clementine bravely crawled toward me under the desks. When she reached my sticky prison, she used the only weapon against cheese she could find … her teeth.

  As Clementine chomped and chewed away at my cheesy prison, I stood there with one stupid thought in my head: “I want my mommy!!!” Clementine was doing her best, but no way could anybody eat through THAT much cheese—not even Clementine.

  As the seconds passed, mozzarella dripped down my face. I was running out of air. I was running out of time! I had to face facts. I wasn’t going to see my mom, my dad, my good old dog Chomper or my annoying little brother Bug ever again.

  I was just about to give up when I saw the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen: Clementine’s pearly white teeth. She actually did it. I was free!

  Now I wouldn’t blame you for having a hard time believing that a regular kid with regular teeth and a regular stomach could eat through enough cheese in a couple of minutes to free another kid who’s covered in the stuff. But that’s Clementine for you. I don’t know, maybe all her years of eating those gross “creative” lunches prepared her for that moment. But I do know this: That girl can eat!

  As soon as I was free, I ran to Hot Dog. “You gave it your best shot, partner,” I whispered, scooping his limp little body off the floor. “And I’m going to make sure you get a real superhero’s funeral, because even though you didn’t actually save our class or our planet, you died trying.”

  “Shhh,” Clementine said. She signaled me to follow her under the desks. I carefully put Hot Dog in my pocket and started crawling. We were almost at the door, just a few inches from freedom, when—

  “Stop right there!” General Barfalot said. “You two don’t go anywhere unless I say so!”

  “Get them!” Cheese Face commanded.

  Chapter 7

  He’s Alive!

  Barfalot and all the other pizza soldiers started marching toward us. We were cornered. But I had an idea.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a bunch of peanuts.

  “Peanuts!” I said to Clementine. “I told you peanuts were cool!”

  “Trust me,” Clementine hissed. “This really isn’t the time to be talking about peanuts!”

  “Don’t be so sure,” I said, tossing a handful of nuts on the floor.

  The soldiers started slipping and sliding all over the place. I threw out another handful. KA-BLAM! General Barfalot and his entire army fell down like a bunch of bowling pins.

  “Yes!” said Clementine. “Let’s make a break for it!”

  We opened the door and ran. But we didn’t get far. Cheese Face’s stretchy arm reached clear down the hallway and wrapped around us like a boa constrictor. She pulled us back into the classroom, smiling her sickening, gooey smile. “Too bad your silly little superhero is deader than a doorknob. Nobody can help you or your pitiful little planet now.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Hot Dog said, zooming out of my pocket.

  “Cool! The flying weenie’s okay!” said Clementine.

  “Hot Dog!” I said. “You’re alive!”

  “General Barfalot!” yelled Cheese Face. “I order you to get rid of that annoying little pest once and for all!”

  Barfalot saluted. “Immediately, Your Cheesiness!” He nodded at Pigburt and Slugburt.

  The three mozzarella meanies started chasing Hot Dog around the room, clapping their hands together like they were trying to swat a mosquito. Only instead of smashing Hot Dog, they just kept smashing each other. It was totally awesome!

  “You know, all this exercise is making me kinda hungry,” Hot Dog said. “Anyone care for a little snack?”

  He reached inside his bun and pushed another button. In seconds, Barfalot and his brainless bodyguards were buried up to their necks in relish. Then Hot Dog turned his bun bottons toward Cheese Face.

  Cheese Face just laughed. “Do what you want with those useless little soldiers. Soon I shall have scrillions more just like them!”

  “In your dreams!” Hot Dog replied. He pushed even more bun buttons, and every hot-dog topping imaginable came shooting out. Clementine and I climbed up on top of the art-supply cabinet so we wouldn’t drown in the rising river of ketchup, sauerkraut, onions, mustard, mayonnaise and relish.

  The pizza-slice kids were light enough to stay afloat in the sick sea of slime. But Cheese Face didn’t float. Her huge body sank down, down, down into the gross gook. We waited and watched for a long, long time, but she stayed sunk.

  At last, the nightmare was over.

  Chapter 8

  She’s Alive!

  “Well, partner,” said Hot Dog. “It looks like we didn’t need the plan after all.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What’s making those bubbles?” I pointed at the spot of goo where Cheese Face had disappeared. Was that the top of Cheese Face’s head?

  “Oh, no!” cried Clementine. “She’s back!”

  “Quick! The plan!” I screamed at Hot Dog.

  Hot Dog was hanging on to Miss Lamphead’s favorite rain-forest mobile, mumbling, “Plan, plan, think, think, must remember plan.”

  “Combo Number Five!” I shouted. “The plan is Combo Number Five!”

  I had no idea what “Combo Number Five” meant. I knew thousands of random facts, but not this one. Was it the first letter of a combination lock that held the key to destroying Cheese Face? Or some kind of signal for the Big Bun to send a real superhero to come save us? All I could do was cross my fingers and hope that Hot Dog remembered what it meant. Did he???

  “Thanks, partner!” Hot Dog said. “I’ll be back in a flash!” He waved good-bye and flew out the window.

  “Back in a
flash? Back in a flash? He can’t be serious!” Clementine howled. “We’re going to be pizza in a flash! Wonderful superhero you got yourself there, Bob. The world’s about to end, and he decides to take a little break!”

  Speaking of flashes, my life started flashing before my eyes as Cheese Face bubbled up from the bottom of the slimy hot-dog-topping swamp. She was at least five times bigger than before. She was everywhere! She slowly opened her humungous black hole of a mouth, crocodile style, and swallowed the pitiful pizza soldiers in one gross gulp.

  “Eeeewww!” Clementine said, covering her eyes. “What a way to go!”

  Then Cheese Face spotted Clementine and me on top of the art-supply cabinet. The time had come. It was finally our turn. Pizza people or not, we were about to be devoured.

  I turned to Clementine and said, “Well, I guess this is good-bye.”

  “I’m sorry for making fun of your boring lunches,” said Clementine. “Those peanuts actually did come in handy, tripping Barfalot and his soldiers and everything.”

  “No problem,” I said. “And thanks for eating all that gross cheese to rescue me.”

  “A lot of good it did,” Clementine said, looking queasy.

  Just then Cheese Face’s huge mouth surrounded us like a gigantic, dark cave. It smelled worse than a million rotten eggs. I’d never been so scared in my life. “If only I’d just stayed in bed,” I kept thinking. “If only, if only…”

  Just then, Hot Dog crashed back in through the window, joining us in the stinky cave of Cheese Face’s mouth just before it closed shut.

  “Sorry it took me so long,” he said, catching his breath. “But you should have seen the line at Mr. Chang’s Yummy Garden Restaurant. It took forever to get this chow mein, wonton soup, egg roll and fortune cookie.”

  “I don’t believe it!” yelled Clementine. “The world’s about to end, and you’re stopping for takeout?”

  “This isn’t just any takeout,” said Hot Dog. “This is Combo Number Five!”

  “Do you actually expect us to believe that chow mein is going to save the world?” asked Clementine.

  “Yep!” Hot Dog smiled. Then he jumped straight down Cheese Face’s throat, Combo Number Five and all.

  Chapter 9

  Barf-o-Rama

  Seconds after Hot Dog took the plunge, Cheese Face made a spooky, whale-dying-in-athunderstorm kind of a noise. The stinky cave opened right up and Clementine and I jumped out of Cheese Face’s mouth.

  “I don’t know if that was really, really brave or really, really stupid of Hot Dog,” I said.

  Cheese Face’s belly started rumbling. The whole room rocked, rattled and rolled. It felt like we were in a radical earthquake. Then— “BLEEEGGGHHH!!!” It was the biggest granddaddy burp of all time.

  Hot Dog shot out of Cheese Face’s mouth like a cannonball. Then everyone Cheese Face had gobbled up oozed right back out of her mouth in a sticky stream of goo. But they weren’t coming out as pizza soldiers. They were coming out as their regular human selves!

  “I know this isn’t exactly the best time for bad jokes,” said Clementine. “But don’t you think it’s funny that Barfalot just got barfed— a lot?”

  Cheese Face didn’t stop hurling. She kept right on going until there was nothing left of her at all. In the end, all that remained was poor old Miss Lamphead standing in a puddle of yuckiness, looking seriously confused.

  “What just happened?” Clementine asked Hot Dog.

  “It’s simple,” Hot Dog answered. “Everyone knows that the only way to stop an evil mutant alien from Pizzalopolis is with a precise mixture of ingredients: chow mein, wonton soup, egg roll and fortune cookie, otherwise known as—”

  “Combo Number Five!” Clementine and I jinxed each other.

  “But I couldn’t have done it without your memory, partner!” Hot Dog said. “Or your quick thinking, Clementine.”

  “Thanks.” Clementine smiled proudly.

  “Well, I guess it’s cleanup time,” said Hot Dog. He pushed yet another bun button, and the coolest rain-but-not-rain shower poured down on everyone and everything except Clementine and me. The river of goo was gone, Cheese Face was gone and, last but not least, Hot Dog was gone.

  Miss Lamphead cleared her throat, blew her nose into her lacy purple handkerchief and said, “Now, where was I again, class? Oh, yes, I believe I was collecting your math homework. My goodness, it’s so warm in this room. Let’s open a few windows and let some air in, shall we?”

  Chapter 9½

  Spicy Hamster

  Other than the fact that kids kept finding mysterious bits of pepperoni and olives in their hair, Hot Dog’s cleanup shower seemed to make everybody forget all about the disgusting Cheese Face disaster. Everything went back to normal at Lugenheimer Elementary School. Except, that is, for our class pet, Esmeralda. She smelled so spicy and delicious nobody could hold her without licking her. Miss Lamphead got so tired of sending students to the nurse’s office with hamster bites on their tongues that she declared Esmeralda offlimits and got the class a goldfish for the pet corner instead.

  Chapter 10

  One More Time

  A couple of months later Clementine threw her string cheese at me in the cafeteria.

  “Want this?” she asked. “I’ve told my mom a thousand times I don’t eat this stuff anymore, but she keeps sticking it in my lunch anyway.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “My mom still asks what made me switch from pizza to Chinese food.”

  “Why don’t you just tell her the truth?” asked Clementine. “Pizza makes you sick now because it reminds you of Cheese Face. And Chinese food is cool because a flying weenie used it to save your life.”

  “Yeah, she’ll definitely believe that!” I laughed. I was glad I wasn’t the only one who had escaped Hot Dog’s forgetting shower. Without Clementine to back me up, I’d probably think I had imagined the whole thing. “You know, I still wonder why we were the only ones who weren’t affected by any of that weird stuff.”

  “I know,” said Clementine. “Sometimes I even wish I could see Hot Dog one more time, just to ask him.”

  “Will you two quit your yappin’ and open this thing up?” said a voice.

  I looked at Clementine. “It can’t be,” I said.

  “Why not?” she said. “It’s happened before.”

  I cracked my lunch box open an inch and whispered into it, “Please, please tell me you just popped by to say hello.”

  “Sorry, partner, there’s no time for small talk,” said Hot Dog. “The Big Bun says you got big trouble, and—”

  “I know, don’t tell me,” I groaned. “If the Big Bun says you got big trouble, then believe you me, you got big trouble!”

  The End. (Or should I say, The Beginning?) To be continued …

  L. Bob Rovetch and her brilliant advisers, Kia and Niko, live across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. When she isn’t busy looking after her crazy puppies, man-eating lovebird, and mystery pet, L. Bob enjoys having burping contests with her family.

  Dave Whamond wanted to be a cartoonist ever since he could pick up a crayon. During math classes he would doodle in the margins of his papers. One math teacher warned him, “You’d better spend more time on your math and less time cartooning. You can’t make a living drawing funny pictures.” Today Dave has a syndicated daily comic strip called “Reality Check.”

  Dave has one wife, two kids, one dog, and one kidney. They all live together in Calgary, Alberta.

  Text © 2006 by Lissa Rovetch.

  Illustrations © 2006 by Dave Whamond.

  All rights reserved.

  Series and book design by Kristine Brogno.

  Typeset in Clarendon and Agenda.

  The illustrations in this book were rendered in ink, watercolor washes, and prismacolor.

  ISBN 978-1-4521-2354-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Chronicle Books LLC

  680
Second Street, San Francisco, California 94107

  www.chroniclekids.com