Cassidy and the Space Monkey Rampage: Adventure Kids, #9

By T. James Logan

Space Shenanigans and Monkey Mayhem!

 

It was just a normal summer night until something really weird landed in a pasture outside of town.

 

When Cassidy ventures out there to investigate all by herself, she discovers more than she bargained for, and uncovers some alien skulduggery that might put Planet Earth itself in peril.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bear Paw Publishing
• Release date: Jan 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215791424

Book preview

Cassidy

and the

Space Monkey Rampage

By

T. James Logan

Bear Paw Publishing Denver

www.bearpawpublishing.com

Copyright © 2023 by T. James Logan

Cover Illustration by João Rodri

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical without explicit permission in writing from the Author or Publisher.

I

Cassidy leaned her head against the window of the pickup’s back seat, staring out at the night sky passing by, and sighed.

From the front seat, Mommy said, It’s okay, honey. You’ll do better next time. Everybody messes up once in a while. And it's only your first year.

But I had it! Cassidy said. I was in first place. Her eyes teared up again, just a little. Her Colossal Flub had happened in the heat race and put her go-kart out of commission with a busted wheel. She couldn’t even race in the feature. Her wheel had caught a rut that yanked her into the tires bordering the dirt track, which bent her rear wheel out of shape. She kept replaying it over and over in her mind, forward and backward.

From the driver’s seat, Daddy said, You’ll blow their wheels off next time, Cassidy. It’s only your second time out, and you’re only in sixth grade. This kinda thing happens to everybody sometimes. Daddy would know because he raced stock cars when she was a baby.

Her parents’ words made her feel a little better, but still not as much as a feature race trophy would have. Instead, her brother Wyatt had won both his heat race and the feature race trophy, like he usually did. When she started go-kart racing this summer season, she had vowed to beat him at least once. And she had a chance, too. At half his weight, she could get better acceleration out of the turns.

The lights of her hometown were on the horizon. Moonlight bathed the dark countryside of undulating hills scattered with patches of trees and the occasional farmhouse.

A light moving in the sky caught her attention, a steady glow that changed colors from red to blue to yellow to green to orange and back to red, cycling through the colors about every ten seconds as it grew from a tiny pinprick to a glowing bead. She’d never seen an airplane flashing those colors at night.

The bead became a shooting star streaking across the sky with a long, sparkling tail.

Cassidy stared. Look up there! she yelled, but before the words left her mouth, the bead swooped into a spiral and fell to earth somewhere on the other side of town.

What, honey? Mommy said, looking up from her phone.

A shooting star maybe, Cassidy said. Or…something. She didn’t want to get laughed at when she wasn’t sure herself.

I saw something streak by up there, Daddy said. But it went by too fast.

She tried to keep her gaze focused on where the bead had disappeared, but that was difficult among the hills and gullies surrounding the town, which sat on high ground overlooking a broad, green river valley and lots of pasture and farmland. The more she thought about it, the surer she was that that had not been a shooting star at all, but a UFO. Shooting stars don’t change course. The more she thought about that, the more quivering excitement replaced her glumness, to the point she could no longer sit still.

The last few minutes of the drive found her bouncing up and down in her seat. She couldn’t wait to tell Wyatt about it. Since he was the only person she knew who had ever left Earth, maybe he would know what to do.

She was the only person he’d told about his adventures go-kart racing around the asteroid belt, for which he’d won the Belt Blaster Championship, defeating the evil Martian racer known as XOLTHOR. The enormous trophy still sat on Wyatt’s desk in his bedroom, and he kept it dusted and polished. He’d told their parents he’d won the trophy in a huge, online video game racing tournament.

Ever since, though, at his earthly go-kart races over the summer, he somehow had his own dedicated cheering section beyond his family and Grandma and Grandma, a handful of people no one knew, who arrived promptly when the races started and left immediately when they ended. Wyatt told her they were Ganymedeans in disguise, his fan