Inheritance of crises an.., p.21
ChupaCarter and the Curse of La Llorona, page 21
Praise for the
series:
“ChupaCarter is an uproariously good time, full of humor, heart, and unexpected friendships.”
—Zoraida Córdova, award-winning author of Valentina Salazar Is Not a Monster Hunter
“A fresh, lively escapade with lots of übercreepy bits. ¡Órale!”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Fast-paced and funny, with lively illustrations.”
—The Washington Post
“Actor/comedian Lopez and Calejo offer a rollicking tale brimming with Latinx folklore and culture about finding one’s home in the unlikeliest of places.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Good and gross humor…in this fantasy-infused tale.”
—School Library Journal
“Lopez and Calejo have created another exciting adventure for young readers that is sprinkled with Spanish words and phrases. The humor in the story is elevated by Gutiérrez’s artwork. A great reminder that you can count on your friends to help save the day.”
—Booklist
“Message-driven but well stocked with chills and chuckles.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Also by George Lopez and Ryan Calejo
ChupaCarter
ChupaCarter and the Haunted Piñata
ChupaCarter and the Screaming Sombrero
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
1745 Broadway, New York, New York 10019
First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2025
Copyright © 2025 by George Lopez
Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Paperback ISBN 9780593466070
Library Binding ISBN 9798217042418
Ebook ISBN 9780593466087
Cover art credit: Santy Gutierrez
Cover deisgner: Opal Roengchai
Edited by Jenny Bak
Design by Opal Roengchai, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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pid_prh_7.1_152035053_c0_r0
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
About the Contributors
_152035053_
To the moon—thank you for always finding me
—G. L.
To all the ChupaCarter fans out there—thank you!
—R. C.
To my family, who patiently waited countless hours for me to finish working
—S. G.
Chapter 1
Okay, okay, I’m lying.
That’s not how it happened.
We weren’t supersleuths and we didn’t have an office with a view of Albuquerque and a cool bronze plaque.
But you’d be surprised how much trouble a kid from L.A. can get into when his mom sends him to the middle of Nowheresville, New Mexico, to live on his grandparents’ farm. He could meet a chupacabra one night while sitting on his roof, moon watching.
They could become best friends. The chupacab-ra’s name could be Carter.
Trust me, it could happen…
I know because it happened to me.
My name is Jorge Lopez, and I have a confession to make: my best friend is a seven-foot-tall bloodsucking monster, and ever since my mom sent me away to live a quiet, “normal” life, my life has been anything but. Just ask the talking sombrero we teamed up with to find the treasure of El Dorado last month. Or, if you think you’re brave enough, have a lollipop and chat with the local haunted piñata. They’ll tell you. If exercise is more your thing, go for a run with the killer vampire dogs called the dips…you’re guaranteed to get a great workout with them!
Anyway, back to the sleuthing thing.
Like I said, my three best buds and I weren’t professional detectives or anything like that. But word about some of the mysteries we’d solved had obviously gotten around, because we finally got our first “official” case.
It happened exactly one week after the last day of school. Liza, Ernie, Carter, and I were hanging out in the woods about a mile from my grandparents’ farm on a warm, sunny afternoon, climbing trees and just generally goofing around. After everything we’d been through over the last few months, we were all hoping for a nice, peaceful summer.
Turns out, things were only about to take a turn for the scary…
Somewhere behind me, I heard Ernie shriek, “Aaaahhh! A chupacabra!” And Liza and I gave each other looks like, Uh, you think he just noticed that about Carter now?
But when we turned and spotted the huge, fur-covered, fang-faced monster—who, by the way, most definitely wasn’t Carter!—the two of us started sounding an awful lot like our pal Ernie.
The monster waved and said hola, showing us a smiley mouthful of gleaming white fangs, which didn’t help us feel any less scared. He politely introduced himself. I think he said his name was Pepe, but it was kind of hard to hear him over our shrieks and screams of panic.
“Carter! Where’s Carter?” I shouted, looking frantically around for backup.
“¡Ah, sí!” The strange chupacabra grinned. “¿Dónde está Carter?”
Just then, the big guy dropped down from a mass of thick branches overhead, landing as gracefully as a cat right beside me. “Right here!” he said.
But suddenly he froze, his eyes narrowing suspiciously on the other chupacabra. “And I’m right there, too…?” I could see the supernova of panic exploding in the brown depths of Carter’s enormous eyes. “JORGE, HOW IS DIS POSSIBLE?” he cried.
“Carter, that’s not you!” Liza tried to explain. “That’s another chupacabra!”
At Liza’s inarguable logic, the big guy seemed to relax. A fangy grin that would send any goat (and probably most people) running for its life spread across his furry face. “Dat make sense! Hola, Not-Me!”
Pepe the chupacabra waved a skinny, clawed hand in return. “¡Hola, Carter! ¡Es un honor! I’ve very much been looking forward to meeting you and your amigos!”
“You…you’ve heard of us?” Ernie asked, sounding more than a little surprised as he peeked cautiously out from over my shoulder.
“¡Cómo no!” said Pepe with a sheepish giggle. “What chupacabra hasn’t heard of Carter and his three amigos? You are all muy famosos!”
“Famous for…what, exactly?” Liza wanted to know.
“For what?” Pepe looked at her like she’d just grown a third eyeball. “How about solving el misterio de la haunted piñata? Or finding the lost treasure of El Dorado!” Pepe was beaming at us now, happy as a mosquito at a blood bank. “I have to say, when I heard how the four of you gave all that treasure back to the people, I almost cried.”
Whoa. So he really had heard of us. “Who told you about all that stuff?” I said, honestly curious.
Pe
pe laughed. “Gossip is not only a two-footer thing.” I’m assuming “two-footer” was chupacabra slang for humans. “Forest animals talk, too.”
“You’re saying a little birdie told you?”
“Actually, it was a blue jay,” said Pepe. He sounded like he might be telling the truth, too, so I decided not to poke any more fun. “Pajaritos get a nice bird’s-eye view of the world and pass along mucha información.”
Huh. That kind of made sense when he put it like that. (Note to self: make sure there aren’t any birds flying by when you hide Grandma’s cooking pot so she can’t make her infamous pork stew.)
“Do you live around here?” Liza asked.
Pepe shook his shaggy head. “No. Mi familia y yo live very near the Sierra Pelona mountains.”
“Hey, isn’t that in Cali?” I said. “Right by Los Angeles?”
Pepe looked impressed. “You know those mountains?”
“Well, not personally or anything. But I’m from L.A.”
“What are you doing way out here?” Liza asked the grinning chupacabra.
Suddenly that bright, fangy smile froze, dimmed, and fell into a deep, fangless frown. “My clan is in trouble,” he revealed in a low voice. He sounded anxious now. Scared. And he looked it, too. “We are about to lose our ancestral home!”
Chapter 2
“Why? What happened?” Ernie asked Pepe.
The chupacabra shook his head sadly. “Nada. Yet. But I have seen the two-footers with the red vests. They came in great metal beasts with four round legs that spin and spin and spin. They studied our lands closely, all the way around, measuring them with their strange tools.”
“You mean, like, surveyors?” said Liza.
“¡Sí! That is the word I heard Grandfather use! They were surveyors!” Now a sort of gloomy hopelessness filled the large, almond eyes. “They are going to destroy our tierra. Our woods. They are going to kill all the plants and animals and build enormous dead structures like the ones on that long road to the north.” He was talking about the strip mall on Yucca Street. “The two-footers are coming, because Señor Gomez can no longer protect us. That is what Abuelo said.”
“Who’s Señor Gomez?” Carter and I wanted to know.
“Maybe you should start from the beginning,” Liza suggested.
Pepe didn’t say a word for a good half a minute. He stared down at his giant clawed toes, as if deciding how much he could say without getting into trouble. When he spoke again, his voice was low and secretive. “My grandfather would not like me telling you all of this,” he explained slowly. “I had to sneak away even to come here. He doesn’t want me to get involved. He believes everything will turn out all right, but I know it won’t. My grandfather is the elder of our clan and I do not like to disobey his wishes. The two-footer I told you about, Señor Gomez—he is my grandfather’s friend. My grandfather has known him for many moons. He is also called Archie.”
Ernie blinked in surprise. “Hold your seahorses. Are you talking about Archie Gomez, the famous movie producer?”
Pepe nodded like he thought so but wasn’t sure. “I believe so. Señor Gomez makes pictures that move. You can watch them on the talking boxes. I have seen some. They are very funny.”
“Oh yeah, they’re great!” said Ernie. “He makes some awesome horror movies, too! Like Dorsal’s Revenge!” His excited eyes flicked to me. “You know, the one with the bottlenose dolphin that gets taken over by an alien parasite and starts eating spring breakers?”
I shook my head. “Nah, I don’t watch scary movies. I get enough nightmares just living with my grandma.”
“I don’t understand,” said Liza. “How is that movie producer involved?”
“It is his land we live on,” Pepe explained. “He bought it to protect our home long ago.”
“So, what happened? He’s selling it now?”
“No, they are going to take it from him!” Pepe said ominously.
I frowned. “How come?”
“Because Señor Gomez’s company is about to die.”
“To die?” Carter didn’t seem to like the sound of that.
“You mean, go bankrupt?” Liza asked Pepe, and the chupacabra nodded in a solemn, hopeless way.
“Sí. That is what Grandfather said.”
Liza turned and those sharp brown eyes found mine. “The production company must be in debt. Probably about to go belly-up, and the debt collectors must’ve hired surveyors to value his other holdings, which is where Pepe’s home comes in. They’re going to take it to help pay off his debt, most likely.”
It made perfect sense. That had to be what was going on, but…“Uh, how do you think we can help you?” I asked Pepe.
From the pocket of his vest, the chupacabra brought out a crumpled sheet of paper and handed it to me. There were a bunch of words on it. Well, more specifically, jobs. The sorts of jobs you’d find on a movie set. And they were all spelled how they sounded, not how they were actually spelled, which made them kind of hard to read.
Chapter 3
“KIDNAPPED?!” Carter’s owl eyes bugged like he’d just watched a goat go flying across the smiling face of the moon on a witch’s broomstick. “Why dey forcing kids to sleep?”
“Not kidnapped as in kids napping,” Liza told him. “Kidnapped as in taking people. Making them go missing.”
“I don’t get it. What does this have to do with you?” said Ernie, staring up (and I mean way up) at the frowning chupacabra. I wasn’t exactly seeing how it all tied together, either.
“It’s Señor Gomez’s new movie,” Pepe tried to explain. “It’s the biggest one he ever made. He put all his company’s money into it. But the movie is costing him more and more, and he cannot finish it, because somebody keeps kidnapping the two-footers who are helpin’ him make it! They’ve been disappearing in the picture-making place!” I figured he meant the movie studio. “Then nobody ever sees them again and the other two-footers are getting scared, wanting to quit. Señor Gomez is running out of time and money.”
“And just to be clear, you believe the people who work the jobs you wrote on this piece of paper are going to be the next ones kidnapped?” asked Liza.
Pepe gave his kangaroo-shaped head a few nervous nods.
“But how did you get this list in the first place?”
The chupacabra pointed a long, clawed finger at his bat-like ear. “¡Los oí! I heard them! See, forty moons ago, I snuck over to the picture-making place to see Señor Gomez—to ask if there’s anything I can do to help. I went at night, hoping to see him alone, but he was not there. Then I saw another two-footer leaving. He struck me as very strange because he looked like he came from a different time, wearing a very old charro outfit, and he smelled like he was from a very different time, too! So I followed him and soon we reached the woods and he went in. I thought this was quite strange because two-footers do not usually walk alone in the woods at night. So I kept following him. He walked far, far into the trees and then finally stopped near a wide river between the mountains. I could not get too close because there weren’t many trees nearby, but I saw him talking to somebody.
“I could not see who dat somebody was, because a tree was in the way, but the man I followed said those jobs out loud, reading them from a paper. Then he handed over the paper and said, ‘Here’s the list. Their faces are by the names, and those are the dates and times I want it done. Follow this list to a tee.’ Then, two moons later, the cinematographer goes missing! Nobody’s seen ’im! Then, a few moons later, the production designer is missing! Then the music supervisor and the choreographer, just like I overheard! In the same order, too. Look at the list!”
I peeked over Liza’s shoulder at Pepe’s list again.
SINUHMUHTAAGRUHFR
PRUHDUHKSHN DUHZAINR
MYOOZIK SOOPRVAIZR
KAWREEAAGRUHFR
SKREEN RAITR
AKTOR
STUHNTMAN
PRUHDOOSR
Liza was studying the list, too. “So the first four are the ones who went missing after you overhead all this?”
“¡Sí!” said Pepe. “That’s how I know I heard right!”
