Dudes Dystopia

By Tyler Reynolds and Emily Kay Johnson

Tweens triumph over the pandemic:
Snowballing Screentime? Sweatpants proliferation? Zoom-bombing grandparents? Sherwood Heights has all the signs of a true dystopia. Luckily, the Dudes are ready to fill the power vacuum. See how the Dudes take on:
Family-style Forest Bathing
Suburban Tsunami
Diwali Inferno, and
The Ultimate Alien Conspiracy!
During a global emergency, the Dudes brave both sanitizer shortage and detergent deluge. They tackle the challenges of socially distanced pest control, remote-controlled church, and, worst of all: Mandatory Family Game Night! (Aaaagh!).
Follow them through spine-tingling thrills like Jayden’s unearthly encounter and the mayor’s dog-napping-skeleton-lips debacle! Along the way, they’ll create trick-or-treat contraptions, dupe their dads, and prank Teresa (of course). And they’ll do it all in the funniest way possible. That’s how they roll!
Dare to survive Dudes Dystopia!

Book 7 of the hilarious kids series brings all new adventures for boys who like humor more than a serious message in their reading. Prevent summer boredom with these kids who know how to make their own fun! Read the series in any order for laugh-out-loud neighborhood adventures. Take anywhere in ebook format!

The Dudes are a diverse group of preteen boys with awesome ideas for IRL action. These five best friends find clever ways to entertain themselves and, incidentally, turn their suburban neighborhood upside down. Not even a global pandemic can stop them!
Fun on an epic scale for tweens! Middle grade readers love the zany, action-packed neighborhood adventures.

The Dudes Adventure Chronicles is a modern series for intermediate readers 8-14 who are looking for laughs. Each chapter book provides several realistic capers that are wacky enough to keep kids reading to the delicious conclusion!
This diary of Dude-approved adventures is filled with wholesome boy fun like: battles, corny jokes, zombies, treehouses, pranks, secret codes, and summer fun!

Praise for (series starter) Save the Dudes:
"With one priceless, laugh-out-loud scenario after another, the mother and son team of Johnson and Reynolds delivers a fine tale...
"...the story is given depth by emotional challenges each friend must face, described with subtlety.
"Readers will likely be eager to read the next adventure.
"Hilarious comic mayhem, rounded out by affection and insight." --Kirkus Reviews

Spoilers: Classic humor without movie tie-ins or fart jokes! Appeals to middle grade readers who like funny, realistic fiction without a tacked-on message or ripped-from-the-headlines problem. Lacking in butts, farts, and crude humor, this series is perfect for fans of Gordon Korman, Dave Pilkey, Jeffrey Brown, Mike Lupica, Gary Paulsen, and Kwame Alexander.
If they like Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins or Barbara Robinson's The Worst Best Christmas Pageant Ever, they'll love the Dudes!

Warning to Parents: This series will NOT provoke serious discussions on controversial topics! However, anecdotal evidence suggests that readers of the Dudes may imagine some resemblance between the Dudes’ parents and their own.

Classic reading fun that’s not about selling toys. This series also lends itself to read-a-louds that have the whole family cracking up. Fills time on family trips. Makes a great gift or a perfect stocking stuffer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tyler Reynolds
• Release date: Aug 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781949212334

Tyler Reynolds

Tyler Reynolds has been entrusted with the awesome duty of preserving the legend of the Dudes' epic adventures for all time. He lives with his Mom, Dad, two brothers, and a dog and spends his non-screen-time with his four best friends.He wants to point out that the Dudes are straight up fun. His novels aren't about kids with problems, and they are not supposed to teach you something.His dad wants to point out that anything you DO learn from the Dudes is strictly your own fault.

Book preview

DUDES DYSTOPIA

Book Seven:

The Dudes Adventure Chronicles

By Tyler Reynolds

and Emily Kay Johnson

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This work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Text copyright © 2023 Emily Kay Johnson

Cover illustration copyright © 2023 Jacquelyn B. Moore

All Rights Reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

This book available in ebook and paperback.

Epic Spiel Press

To all the Dude survivors out there. UROK!

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The Dudes Adventure Chronicles

Save the Dudes

Dudes Take Over

Summer of the Dudes

Dudes in the Middle

Dudes Dog Days

Dudes Hard Target

Dudes Dystopia

Check them out at: TheDudesChronicles.com

Or: EpicSpielPress.com

Available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook

Contents

Prologue

1 Dudes-topia

2 Dudes Locked Down

3 Open Dude Policy

4 Dudes Smell a Rat

5 Dudes Dupe Dads

6 Dudes Have Faith

7 Dudes Dead Drop

8 Dudes Gotta Rock

9 Dudes Bubble Up

10 Dude Encounter

11 Dudes Clean Up

12 A Party of Dudes

13 Dude Kahuna

14 Your Friendly Neighborhood Dudes

15 Dude-Or-Treat

16 Dude Does Diwali

17 Dudes Shine On

18 The Dude Protocol

19 Dudes Believe

Don't Miss the Next Exciting Adventure of the Dudes...

About the Authors

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Prologue

Hi! It’s me, Tyler Reynolds, the keeper of The Dudes Adventure Chronicles. If you haven’t read them all yet, this prologue is here to bring you up to speed.

If you did read the last book, you know I made a certain joke. It was about how I should bury a copy of the Chronicles to protect the knowledge of the Dudes in case of a society-ending catastrophe.

Well, I guess it wasn’t such a joke after all. Recently, society was hammered by a global pandemic that struck all the way to the heart of my neighborhood, Sherwood Heights.

That makes my job as official chronicler even more important. I’ve got to preserve the story of the Dudes’ adventures. And we’ve had a lot of them!

In previous books, we built our own treehouse dojo, tangled with my next-door-neighbor Teresa (and her tiny canine mauler, Teacup), planned several heists, took over the governor’s office on a school field trip, built an earthquake simulator, faked a robot invasion, created a phony 8th-grader, brainwashed the middle school, became not-so-expert dog groomers, developed grit through outdoor gaming, outwitted a band of porch pirates, and built our own tank. And those are just the highlights!

But, don’t worry. You don’t need to have read the other books to enjoy this one. Here’s what you need to know:

I’m Tyler Reynolds. I live in the PNW (Pacific Northwest) in a suburb called Sherwood Heights. Our house has my mom, my dad, two little brothers, and our dog, Rob, which is short for Robin Hood Reynolds. (My middle brother, Jayden, named him. My baby brother, Leon, likes to sit on him.)

For obvious reasons, I try to spend most of my time with my four best friends:

Nate Howe is an only child, and we’ve been friends since first grade. He’s super smart and builds all our gadgets. But his mom says he is also artistic, so he sometimes films our exploits as proof.

Deven Singh lives next door to Nate with his mom and dad, his big sister, Shaila, and his grandmother, Nani. He’ll do anything for a laugh, even if it’s not funny and especially if it bugs his dad.

Connor and Ryan are twins--the kind who don’t look alike (or agree on anything). Connor has the body of an athlete, but he’s not exactly a team player. He mostly uses his strength and skill for crazy stunts.

Ryan is the official leader of the Dudes. He always has a great idea and a plan to make it happen.

Together the Dudes can do anything. That’s why it was such a problem when the global pandemic happened, forcing us to separate!

Read on to find out how we survived...

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1 Dudes-topia

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably survived the global Covid pandemic (Unless you’re undead. Which would be cool! But that’s probably a different virus.)

Anyway, maybe you’re curious about how the Dudes handled it. Well, of course the first thing we did was identify it:

Hey Nate, what’s that word for when it’s the future and everything has gone wrong? Ryan asked.

Dyspepsia? guessed Deven.

You mean dystopia, corrected Nate.

Right, said Ryan. I think we’ve got a dystopia on our hands.

How do you figure that? I asked.

Well, the news is full of riots, schools are closed, and hospitals are overwhelmed. It’s like this movie we watched with Dad one time...

Yeah! Connor jumped in—literally—from the climber onto the cargo net, making the rest of us bounce. We were hanging out, like always, on the elementary school playground which is right behind Ryan and Connor’s house.

In the movie, there was this scientist, Connor said, interrupting his brother as usual. And the government wouldn’t listen ‘til the army got destroyed, then the president’s blood got drained and it was too late to stop the vampires!

Hmm, said Nate thoughtfully. There are no reports of neck bites on Covid victims.

Yeah. It’s probably not that kind of movie, Deven said, disappointed.

It’s not a movie at all, I reminded him with a shiver.

It was spring, barely, but the day was gray and cold. A chill wind blew dust devils off the unused soccer field.

Think about it, guys, Ryan insisted. People are carrying around weapons or holed up in their houses. The stores are out of stuff and people are hoarding supplies. The death count is rising, and everybody disagrees about what’s the best thing to do.

It’s the breakdown of psychiatry! wailed Deven.

You mean society, Nate corrected.

Do I? Deven asked, cocking his head like a confused bird.

We had time to meet up and discuss it because they sent us home from school a week ago. And that was the biggest clue, because schools definitely wouldn’t close unless it was something serious like a nuclear attack, a teacher strike, or, apparently, a global pandemic.

The Dudes were pretty well-versed in school protocols for normal emergencies: fire, earthquake, active shooter. But none of those involve leaving school and just...not coming back.

I left six sandwiches in my locker! Connor lamented.

And a normal emergency wouldn’t involve all the schools everywhere. From what they said on the news, schools were closed all over the world.

I agree with Ryan, I said. This is the kind of thing that could lead to sending an ark into space or staging the Hunger Games.

For instance, only in a dystopia, would the after-school camps and daycares shut down, leaving the playground to bored middle-schoolers like us.

That is, until Ms Nero (the playground monitor) showed up with a roll of hazard tape and her disaster-area cones--the ones she uses when someone vomits or drips blood on school property.

The playground is closed, she told us in a voice muffled by the bandana over her face. Go home until the pandemic is over.

She said that like it would be over--maybe in a couple days or a couple weeks. That’s what everybody thought back then.

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Things were pretty dark at home too. Mom’s office had closed, just like the schools. But, weirdly, she wasn’t doing her usual weekend routine of handing out chores, picking up clutter, and correcting Dad’s laundry mistakes.

Instead, she just sat on the couch, staring at the all-news channel on TV. And she was the one who had turned it on, too! In fact, the remote was still clutched in her white-knuckled hand.

Mom hates screentime. But now she couldn’t look away as the newscaster updated the case count for each state. Her lips moved silently as she read the scroll at the bottom of the screen about the shortage of N95 masks.

There were no vaccines and no working treatments. People right here in America were dying--no matter how much they paid the doctors. And scientists were talking about herd immunity like the disease was a hungry predator stalking its prey.

The next day, when I started to go out to see my friends, Mom stopped me.

We can’t see people in person anymore, she said. "Not for a while. Why don’t you get out your laptop? Play one of those online games--what’s the one you like? Space Police?"

I stared.

B-b-but…screentime? I stammered.

That’s not important right now, Mom said. Then she returned her zombie-like gaze to the TV.

That’s when I knew: the pandemic ate my mother.

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From then on, Mom didn’t police how much I used my laptop. She actually said it was healthier than playing outside.

It was also safer for Grandad to stay away.

The disease is more dangerous the older you are, Mom said. Luckily, we don’t need a babysitter with me home all day.

I mean, technically she was home. But, in practice, she was busy spiraling.

Meanwhile, Dad still spent his time in the backyard shed he had converted into an office.

This emergency is a great chance for you kids to step up, he suggested. Dad was big on kids stepping up to take over his chores.

It shouldn’t be too hard for you and Jayden to keep your baby brother entertained, he said. Just play with him.

Yeah. I knew what that was like from when Jayden was a toddler. Leon couldn’t play with Legos because he would