Minecraft: Mob Squad: Never Say Nether: An Official Minecraft Novel

I don’t know what happened. Everything was fine, if mortifying, and now I’m on the ground on my back with everyone asking if I’m okay. I can’t quite focus, and everything hurts, but especially—

Oh no.

When I turned my back, the zombie bit my butt, and I was in so much pain I didn’t even notice. But now I do. Now that I’m lying directly on what’s got to be a horrible, life-ending wound.

“Jarro? Are you okay?” Mal asks, kneeling by my side. She looks genuinely worried, which feels nice.

Nothing else does, right now.

“Zombie bite,” I groan. Then it hits me. “Wait. Am I going to turn into a—?”

“We were worried about that, the first time, too,” Lenna says from my other side. “But no. I can see the wound on your arm, but where else did it get you?”

My face flushes. “Uh, nowhere. Just the arm.”

“Nobody passes out from one zombie bite,” Chug says. “Unless maybe you’re allergic?”

I shake my head and try to sit up, but that puts the place that hurts the most in direct contact with the bumpy stone floor. They all see me gasp and wince.

“Jarro…” Chug pins his lips, his eyes sparking with amusement. I have never wanted to punch him as badly as I do right now. “Did the zombie…perchance…bite you…on the rrrrump?”

He rolls the R for emphasis, and Lenna squeaks a smothered laugh. Mal’s keeping it together better, but even she is fighting her giggles.

I glare at Chug, and I want to hit him and call him names, but he’s the one holding all the meat that could help me heal. “Yes, Chug. That is exactly what happened.”

As if on cue, all three of them burst out laughing. Their big, raucous belly laughs fill the cavern and echo back. It’s like being slapped with embarrassment, and I can’t take it anymore. I just can’t.

“You guys are jerks!” I bellow. “You think you’re the good guys, but you know what? You’re mean. You leave people out of your little circle at school, always act like you’re royalty while the rest of us are losers. And you’re not that special, okay? Just because you know stuff I don’t doesn’t make you special. I’m hurt and scared, and you’re laughing at me. So go ahead and be bullies, but don’t pretend like you’re the victims or the heroes here, because you’re not. You’re not heroes!”

My voice echoes through the empty cave.

Not heroes—not heroes—not heroes.

They all look…stunned.

And hurt.

And ashamed?

“Do you really feel that way?” Mal asks.

“No, I just came up with the whole speech on the fly.” I shake my head. “Yes, I really feel that way, and so do a lot of people. Now that we’re outside the wall, it’s like sometimes you guys are nice and kind of accept me, but then you find some reason to laugh at me again.”

“I don’t want to be a jerk,” Lenna says, thoughtful. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

Chug says nothing, but I can hear his teeth grinding.

“I didn’t know people thought of us that way.” Mal blinks back tears and dashes at her eyes with her hand. “We saved the town—”

“That’s not how people in the Hub see it. They fought the illagers. They saved themselves.” I shrug. “You guys only see what you want to see.”

“So what do we do?” Lenna asks.

“Just be nice. Stop treating me like who you think I was and start treating me like I’m an equal. I’m…I’m trying to be better, okay? So you guys have to try, too.”

Lenna nods. “I’ll try.”

Mal nods, too. “So will I.”

Chug says nothing, and Mal stares at him like she can telepathically force him to step up, but he stubbornly refuses.

“Can I please just have some meat so I can start healing?” I ask as exhaustion floods into the empty spaces left by my anger. Because it’s great that they’re realizing that they can be jerks, too, but I’m still in bad shape.

“Well, you have to show us the wound first.” Maybe Lenna and Mal heard me, but Chug is still Chug, and he’s enjoying this way too much. “Because it’ll probably heal fine with a good meal. Zombie wounds aren’t quiet as dire as explosion wounds. In fact, I would say when it comes to wounds, they’re at the bottom of the pack. Don’t worry—soon, this will all be behind you.”

Mal smacks his shoulder. “Chug should behave, but he’s mostly right. For real, Jarro, this is not something to be embarrassed about. We’ve all been wounded. We’ve all healed. Laughing just makes it easier to deal with…”

“The emptiness left over after a fight,” Lenna finishes for her. “And, hey. At least we’re not on horseback for the next part of the journey.” She holds out a cookie, and I take it, recognizing a peace offering when I see it.

With the first bite, I already feel a little better. It’s a good thing I’m on the ground, because if I could stand up, I would most likely end whatever truce I thought we’d found and beat the crud out of Chug. Mal and Lenna are smiling at me, but he is clearly still trying to think of more embarrassing puns to torture me with.

Mal holds out some chicken, which I also take, as the cookie is already gone. “Good point. The mine cart is a lot faster, and…” She looks up at Chug, and I realize that I don’t like it when Mal looks worried. “Don’t we need two mine carts?”

It’s a pleasure, watching Chug’s smugness disappear. “Oh. Wow. Yeah, I guess so.” He sorts through the stack of stone and ore left behind by Mal’s mining, and she picks through her pockets with more offerings. “I think I remember how to build a furnace. Tok said it was super easy. But then again, for Tok, pretty much anything smart is super easy.”

Mal puts a hand on his arm. “I know it’s hard, not having him here, but you can do it. I believe in you. We all do.”

I have to look away. No one has ever spoken to me like that before. Including my mom. No wonder Chug does whatever she says.

“You can do it,” Lenna agrees, and I feel like a lost little kid. Mal nudges me with her foot and raises her eyebrows expectantly. She wants me to encourage Chug, too. I don’t want to, but I do want to get back home, so I have to say something.

“I guess if you can make a mine cart, you can make a furnace, whatever that is,” I grumble.

Chug gets to work, and Mal looks to Lenna before she goes back to mining. “Can you two stand guard again?” she asks.

“We kind of have to,” Lenna tells her.

Mal takes her torch and pickaxe back into the hole she’s hewn in the rock, and Lenna stands over me while I finish my chicken. I guess the great thing about using a ranged weapon like her bow is that she’s usually not close enough to a mob to take any damage. One skeleton shows up while we wait, but Lenna knocks it down easily. I can only hope nothing worse shows up. I’m clearly not going to be any help.

“I never stopped practicing, but I can feel my skills and instincts coming back. It feels good, like stretching when you’ve just woken up from a deep sleep,” Lenna says, but more to herself than to me. She’s a weird kid, but out here, away from town, she makes a little more sense.

Mal finds more iron ore, Chug pulls things in and out of his furnace and hammers on his crafting table, and then we have two mine carts. They fit perfectly on the track, and Mal and Chug help me stand and climb into the first cart. Mal hops in beside me, does something with a lever, and without a single word of warning, sends our cart careening out into the darkness. I jerk backward, my entire body rattling as we hurtle through space.

Only then does it occur to me that…well, there are plenty of things that could go wrong. There could be another cave-in like the one that Lenna said once covered these tracks, making them dangerous and unusable. There could be mobs. There could be pretty much any horrible thing that spawns in darkness—or hides there. Things I’ve never seen—things I’ve never even heard of.

But it’s too late now. The cart is going, and there’s nothing I can do but hold on.

After a few minutes, I realize that it’s actually not terrible. I like this feeling—the wind in my hair, even when I know perfectly well there’s no actual wind underground. I like the smells, the glimmer of ore and stone as Mal’s torch briefly illuminates the sparkling wall. I’ve never gone this fast in my entire life, and I’m scared, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I can either enjoy it or be terrified, and maybe it’s the zombie bite talking, but I’m just going to try to enjoy it.

“Are you feeling any better?” Mal asks.

I do not like girls asking me about my wounded butt.

“I’ll be fine.”

“I have some more chicken—”

“I’m getting a little sick of chicken. Do we have anything else?”

She rummages in her pocket. “Nope. We already ate all the steak. That’s how it goes, beyond the wall—you take what you can get. Chicken is better than starving. And it really does heal you.”

She holds out another strip of chicken, and I take it and chew. “I miss potions.”

“Yeah, me, too. The woodland mansion—we don’t know what we’ll find there. Last time, we found a few potions in random chests, but it was full of mobs. We almost lost, tons of times. We don’t know if it’s full of illagers again.”

“Or just the regular kind of bad guys who kidnap kids.”

I think back to what it felt like, being grabbed roughly by adults and shoved around. Realizing that my mom couldn’t save me. Being marched farther and farther away from home. I shudder before I can stop myself.

“Sounds scary,” Mal says.

“It was,” I admit, because it’s just us. No one else can hear us. It’s like we’re all alone in the world. “It’s like I had no control. There was nothing I could do. I just felt so helpless.”

There’s a pause. Maybe I said too much and she’s going to make fun of me now? I brace myself for the worst.

“It sucks, feeling weak and helpless, doesn’t it?” she finally says.

“Yup.”

“I used to feel that way when you and Remy and Edd stole my lunch at school.”

My jaw drops. She remembers that? “I mean…we were just little kids. That’s what little kids do. It’s no big deal.”

“It was a big deal to me. I started having stomachaches every day.”

I would rather jump out of this mine cart than continue this conversation, but she’s right there, and her shoulders are hunched up like she’s about to cry. “You were probably drinking too much milk, Mal. You always brought twice as much milk as anybody else.”

“It wasn’t the milk, Jarro. You made me feel terrible. You made me hate school.”

For a moment, there’s no sound but the whoosh of air and a distant rumble that must be the other mine cart. I realize that there is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. My mom’s not here, Edd and Remy aren’t here. It’s just me, Mal, and things that used to make me feel tough but now make me feel like kind of an idiot. I can’t even remember all the times I used to mess with people—or why I did it.

“I’m sorry.” It comes out almost a whisper.

“Say it louder.”

I clear my throat. “I’m sorry. That was dumb.”

Mal looks back over her shoulder at me, her profile lit by her torch. “Are you really sorry, or are you just saying that because you don’t know how to survive out here alone and you understand that I—or any of my friends—could abandon you at any moment?”

I take a deep breath. “Can’t it be both?”

Mal turns around, and her face is ghoulishly lit by the torch as she glares at me. “Okay, then, real talk. Maybe we were snooty, but you were really horrible to us back home, and yet we’ve still saved your life multiple times. We have real weapons. Real skills. You can’t ever bully us again. You get that?”

I nod. “But you guys can’t bully me, either. Chug needs to cool it.”

“He does. He will. I’ll talk to him.”

“Because if he keeps on taunting me, I’m going to defend myself. You get that, right?”

“I get it, Jarro, I do, but someone has to be the bigger person. Someone has to take the first step. So get on our team and don’t be a jerk.”

“But Chug was making fun of—of my wound!” I splutter. “You all were!”

Mal snorts. “Because friends laugh together! Can’t you admit that it’s kind of funny? Like, if that happened to Chug, wouldn’t you laugh?”

I chuckle. “Oh, yeah. I’d never let him forget it.”

“What if it was Remy or Edd?”

“Same thing.”

Mal shrugs. “So learn to laugh at yourself. Just drop the ego, laugh along, and get over it.”

“But then Chug wins,” I say before I can stop myself.

She looks at me like I’m an idiot. “You know that no one’s keeping score, right? This isn’t the Hub. No one cares. If you survive out here, you’re winning.”

And I kind of hate it, but I guess maybe she’s right? Back home, it’s like there was always an audience, always someone watching and judging. But here, now, it’s just us against the world. And, yeah, okay, fine, maybe getting bit in the butt by a zombie is kind of funny. If it was anyone else, at least.

She hands me more chicken. “Here. Keep eating.”

“Because I can’t talk smack when I’m eating?”

“Because you can’t talk smack when you’re eating. And because you need to be as healed as possible for what happens next.”

I spend the rest of the ride eating while Mal fills me in on what we might find in the woodland mansion—other than the humans that I’m already perfectly scared of. Evokers and vexes, vindicators, zombies, skeletons, spiders, skeletons riding spiders.

“And you guys emptied this place out last time?” I ask.

“Yep.”

“But it might be completely full again?”

“Yep.”

“And we’re going anyway?”

“Yep.” She turns back to pin me with a glare. “We’re going back for Tok, and if they took you, we’d go back for you. That’s what friends do.”

I want to say that’s what idiots do, but I told her I’d stop smarting off, and I definitely don’t want to get sent back in this cart alone, so I don’t say anything.

And then it hits me…

She said “friends.”

Like I’m one of their friends now.

It’s funny—back home, I saw these four kids as losers who stuck together because nobody else wanted anything to do with them. But now I’m seeing that they care about one another in a way that Edd and Remy and me…just don’t. We don’t talk about feelings or encourage one another. We talk about how much we hate school and how stupid other people are and what we could do that wouldn’t be boring. We don’t even get one another birthday gifts, because we’re always trying to act grown-up and tough, but it sure does make birthdays lonely. Maybe the Bad Apples are on to something.

Honestly, it would be hard to think of a reason to make fun of any of them right now. They’re just so…capable. It’s annoying.

I want to find stuff I’m good at, too.

Finally I’ve eaten so much chicken that I feel like I’m probably going to sprout feathers, and my butt doesn’t hurt anymore. Neither does my arm. I guess they were right—food really can heal anything. I’m about to ask Mal for some pointers on taking down evokers when the cart comes to an abrupt halt.

Mal jumps out, and before she can try to help me, I jump out, too. I feel much better, and I immediately reach into my pocket for my axe. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about this crew, it’s that they’re always ready, and I don’t want to be the only person who isn’t contributing.

The cavern around us is ginormous and almost looks like a fancy house someone built underground, with walls and stairs and torches everywhere. I don’t see any bad guys, at least—or mobs.

“This is the underground fortress,” Mal tells me, her voice low. “The woodland mansion is overhead.”

The other mine cart zips into view and jerks to a halt. Chug and Lenna hop out.

“Mal, you doing okay, or did being that close to Jarro for so long make you barf?” Chug shouts.

Mal bumps her shoulder against mine. “We’ve declared a truce on barfing. I think we’re all gonna get along fine from now on, right?”

They all look at me. The pushy jerk in me feels like I’m being ganged up on and forced to agree, but there’s this new part of me that thinks that’s just so pointless. Mal’s right—I’ve always thought of life as winning or losing, but there’s no one keeping score. Being a jerk suddenly seems like such a waste of energy.

“No barfing,” I agree. “But I’m still allowed to retch a little, every now and then.”

With a measuring, testing look, Chug holds out his fist, and I bump it.

“Where to first?” Mal says, all business now. “Upstairs?”

Chug looks around and shivers. “Yeah, given a choice, nobody would hang out down here.” He looks to Lenna. “Do you remember which stairwell?”

Lenna spins in place. “I wish we had Poppy. It was so much easier with her nose leading the way.” She points at an unpleasantly dark doorway. “Maybe that one.”

We walk up and down stairs, finding dead ends and ledges aplenty. Up until this moment, I had a lot of confidence in this crew, but now it looks like they’ve run up against something they can’t quite figure out.

“So you guys don’t know how to get up to the building?” I ask.

Chug bristles. “There was a lot going on last time.”

“Why not just get to the highest point you can and mine up, then? Mal’s pretty good with the pickaxe, right?”

They’re looking at me like I’m either the dumbest person ever—or the smartest.

“Yeah, why not?” Mal finally says. “It’s not like this is someone’s house and they’re going to get mad.” She charges up the nearest spiraling stairwell, and we follow. When she reaches a dead end, she hangs her torch on the wall and starts tunneling upward.

“Good call,” Chug says.

I can’t help grinning.

I finally did something right.