Ms. Gable marched over, arms crossed. “What. Happened.”

Peas—frozen, solid, and surprisingly heavy—smacked the zombie in the chest. It stumbled back, lost its traffic cone, and collapsed into a pile of dust and a single nickel.

But the zombies kept coming. Cones. Buckets. A Pole-Vaulting Zombie leaped over two rows of Pea Shooters and almost reached the reference desk.

Leo, a quiet sophomore with messy brown hair and a talent for bypassing network restrictions, hunched over a library computer. Beside him, Mia, the student librarian, nervously tapped her library card against the keyboard.

“You’re going to get us expelled,” she whispered, eyes darting toward Ms. Gable’s office.

And somewhere deep in the school’s server room, a single line of code flickered: “GAME OVER. YOU WIN.” Then it rewrote itself into a screensaver of a peaceful, sunny meadow.

The library’s automatic doors slid open with a cheerful ding .

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