The Last Monster

by Ginger Garrett

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

  Text copyright © 2016 by Ginger Garrett

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2016 by Dinara Mirtalipova

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhousekids.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Garrett, Ginger.

  The last monster / Ginger Garrett. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Thirteen-year-old cancer survivor Sofia has been chosen as the next Guardian of a book called The Bestiary, an ancient text. Drawn into violent and unpredictable mysteries, Sofia learns that these misunderstood monsters from the book are in danger and she is the only one who can save them” —Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-553-53524-2 (hc) — ISBN 978-0-553-53525-9 (glb) — ISBN 978-0-553-53526-6 (ebook)

  [1. Monsters—Fiction. 2. Cancer—Fiction. 3. Amputees—Fiction. 4. People with disabilities—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.1.G375Las 2016

  [Fic]—dc23

  2015003381

  eBook ISBN 9780553535266

  Cover design by Sarah Hokanson

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To every reader who

  still checks under the bed at night

  •••

  Friday, February 21

  I had to pick up a new leg after school.

  Dark storm clouds hung low over the Children’s Cancer Center of Atlanta. Mom took the last turn into the parking lot, and all the old familiar fears coiled around me. I groaned under their weight.

  Mom glanced at me, worried.

  “It won’t stop people from staring,” I mumbled.

  “Is that really what’s bothering you?” she asked softly.

  I glanced at her and realized her knuckles were white. She was gripping the steering wheel as if it were a life preserver. Coming here was just as hard for her as it was for me.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. “The worst is over, isn’t it?”

  She slowed the car as we approached the entrance. “I’ll let you off at the front door, in case it starts raining,” she said. “But wait for me before you go back.”

  I nodded as I glanced out the car window. A hawk circled overhead, hunting some small, frightened thing that hid in the shrubs by the entrance. The bird screamed when it saw me, a shrill welcome.

  Mom stopped in front of the double doors before leaning over to give me a quick peck on the cheek. Her lips were cold. This was our last big appointment for four weeks. We’d basically lived here for two months last year, from the end of October until just after New Year’s; then we had switched to outpatient visits. After a month of rest to build my strength, I had started physical therapy. So this place had been my second home for almost four months. Now the idea of freedom felt surreal. “Free” was a strong word, though. It was more like I’d gotten extra length on my leash. I still needed to come back. Cancer was a part of my life that I would never escape.

  The wind moaned as I opened the car door. I swallowed hard, my stomach in knots, as if this place were the nightmare I would never wake up from.

  Inside, the TV in the waiting room was tuned to a twenty-four-hour health channel. I settled into a vinyl-cushioned chair that wheezed when I sat. The volume was so loud no one noticed. A special feature called Meet Your Meat was playing, a behind-the-scenes look at how meat products are manufactured. In the corner, a coffee machine sat undisturbed, its electric red eye watching us all.

  “Sausage casings are made from the intestines of pigs, horses, or sheep. Machines remove the fat and mucus before extruding the final casing, which will give some lucky sausage that satisfying snap.”

  My eyebrows shot up in horror. Sausages were like babies; I had a general idea of how they were made, but I didn’t want the clinical details. I glanced behind me, praying Mom would find a parking spot soon. We didn’t do the “free” valet parking anymore. Tipping required cash, and we rarely had any now.

  I noticed a boy about seven or eight years old, hunched over, holding a beach sand pail in front of his mouth in case he vomited. A little bit of drool clung to his chin. He still had his hair, though, so he was probably a new patient, trapped between terror and denial. He cringed as images of greasy pink sausages flashed above his head.

  The TV was mounted on the wall. If there was a remote control, I had never found it. The only way to change the channel would be to reach way up and press the buttons, and somebody needed to do that fast before the poor little guy hurled again. He glanced at me and nodded weakly in the direction of his mother. She was standing by the windows, chatting furiously on a cell phone, her back to us. Fat drops of sleet began pelting the tinted lobby windows. A bright whip of lightning ripped across the sky and split in five directions, like a giant claw. Strange, even for a city known for its weird weather.

  “And now we’ll take a closer look at ground beef. The name itself is misleading, since it includes skin, connective tissue, fat, and even bone….”

  The kid put his head down and retched loudly into the bucket. I stood and walked to the TV, praying the other kids didn’t notice how one of my legs moved differently from the other one. The prosthesis I wore was too big, and it made my gait clumpy. The new prosthesis would make my gait very natural, but of course everyone at school would stare anyway, trying to figure out which leg was real. They got them mixed up.

  I pressed the channel button repeatedly, but every other station was running a special bulletin on the weather. A bad storm was coming. Lightning in the northern suburbs of Atlanta was especially dangerous; we had huge blocks of granite under the ground that attracted lightning. When a storm came, it didn’t just give us a pretty show; someone usually got hurt.

  Finally, I found the cartoon channel and released the button. I turned around to check on the boy and saw that his mom was still on the phone, unaware that he would never eat sausage again. The thunder boomed and a fragile-looking baby cradled in its mother’s arms began to wail.

  “Thanks,” the boy said to me. “You’re my hero.”

  I nodded and quickly looked away, my cheeks getting warm and probably red. My face had always been like a giant mood ring. “Hang
in there,” I said. “It’s not always this bad, I promise.”

  If he could tell I was lying, he didn’t show it. The boy rested his face on the side of the pail and sighed, eyes closed. I felt a little bit better too, which surprised me. All I had done was change a TV channel.

  The baby’s crying suddenly grew louder, as if it knew something we didn’t.

  Lightning flashed again, illuminating the room like a sinister X-ray. Thunder chased it immediately, and the walls shook. It sounded like the hospital had been hit.

  The TV blanked out with a hiss of static as all the lights shut off and the hum of the heater died away. There was nothing but darkness and cold silence. The baby whimpered; I could hear its breath coming in little stutters.

  The lightning must have knocked out the lobby’s power. The hospital’s power grid was designed to protect patient rooms and equipment first, so it didn’t surprise me that the power down here had gone out. Still, if lightning struck again, maybe the lights wouldn’t come back at all. I got nervous about it. I knew a girl whose mom had parked their car under a bank’s drive-through awning and lightning had struck their car, melting all their tires. Lightning ruled the skies here.

  Everyone began talking loudly or crying, but all I could hear was the drumbeat of my own heart. What was taking Mom so long? The cancer center shared a parking lot with the children’s emergency room and hospital, so maybe the lots were all full. Fridays weren’t normally this busy, though.

  Through the chaos, I noticed a little girl illuminated in the red glow from an overhead Exit sign on the other side of the waiting room. She had one hand wrapped around her IV pole; the other was dragging a pillowcase with something heavy inside.

  Her face was gaunt and her long hair hung lifeless. Instead of a blue hospital gown, she wore a white nightgown that skimmed the floor. Bloodstains dotted the hem and there were rips in the fabric, as if she had been attacked. The Walking Dead television series filmed here in Atlanta; maybe she had wandered off the set and was lost.

  A shadow rose from the floor beside the girl, like smoke from a fire. Goose bumps spread across my arms, as if my body recognized a change in the atmosphere, the warning of a lightning strike gathering energy before choosing its victim. In the blood-red glow of the exit light, the dark smoke blossomed, unfurling into the form of a woman dressed in flowing robes, her braided blond hair pinned under a crown of round gray stones, each with what looked like a blinking eye at its center. Every stone swiveled like an eyeball, each moving in a different direction, until they all came to rest on me.

  She glared at me like I was her worst enemy, but I had never seen her before.

  Dread surged through my body, an icy river of fear that burned down into my stomach, making me clutch it in pain. The woman sneered as she rested a paper-white hand with thin, spidery fingers on the girl’s shoulder, making her flinch. The woman’s fingers stretched down and around, covering the girl like the roots of a growing tree.

  The girl shuddered as if the touch was cold, but her eyes never left mine. She needed to tell me something; I could feel her sense of urgency. She nodded once, slowly, willing me to come and help her.

  I froze, panic overtaking my body. I didn’t know her. I didn’t want to know either of them. I pushed myself backward in my seat, sinking down. My heart pounded against my ribs, like it was trying to escape. Was this a nightmare? Or some sort of dream? I wasn’t even asleep.

  An emergency alarm blasted through the lobby. “Code Amber. Code Amber. All personnel report.”

  The power snapped back on, light exploding inside the room.

  I turned to check on the vomiting boy to make sure he was safe. He was. When I looked back at the hallway, the girl and the woman were gone.

  I exhaled in relief, then started breathing too fast, pushing the air out and sucking it back in until I felt light-headed. Oh man, if I tried to tell someone about what I had just seen, they’d keep me overnight for tests, certain I was suffering a late side effect from chemo. It was possible. Chemo was just carefully measured poison, a Pandora’s box of dreadful surprises.

  A hand grabbed my shoulder and I lurched around, ready to scream, my hands balled into fists. It was Barnes, my prosthetic technician. He curled his hands into fists too. “You want to hit old Barnes? You want much of this?”

  He broke into a huge grin and I could see all the metal bits that attached his dentures. I grinned back, more from relief than anything else. Barnes was probably about seventy or eighty years old, but he said he needed to keep up with his slang for all the young patients. I think he did it to make us laugh, and it worked on me every time. I felt the dread and fear of a moment ago melt away as I giggled. My nerves had made me slightly nuts. Everything was back to normal.

  Mom walked in, waving to me before stopping at the reception desk. I stood and took Barnes by the hand. He didn’t notice mine was shaking. “You’re supposed to say ‘You want some of this?’ ”

  “What-ever,” he said, hitting the inflection just right. I had taught him well. His knuckles were red and swollen today, so I held his hand extra carefully, willing my own to soften into a steady grip.

  “Code Amber is a missing kid, right?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer me, just took a few steps in the direction of his lab and turned back to wave to Mom. She nodded back, meaning she would follow in just a second. I knew she looked forward to talking to Barnes during our visits. He never used slang with her. They had had several disagreements and he was still endlessly sweet to her. A lot of men treated my mom that way.

  “Maybe they should look down that hallway,” I added, pointing to the right. I didn’t want to sound too certain, but if the girl was real, that was where they’d find her.

  An impatient wave was his way of saying my words were falling on deaf ears. And maybe they were; he had to tilt his head in my direction if I talked in a quiet voice. Plus, his hair was thinning at an alarming rate. He’d be as bald as me before long. I wondered if it bothered him to look in the mirror the way it bothered me.

  “Let security do their jobs. You stay out of that.”

  “But, Barnes,” I started to protest. “I just—”

  He cut me off. “No arguing.” Barnes had been in the navy a long time ago and still liked to bark a command now and then. He started down the hallway on the left and I followed, soft instrumental music greeting us through the speakers.

  My hands started to shake again, but I couldn’t shove them in my pockets; I needed loose arms for balance. I hadn’t been here as an inpatient since January, but the silent terror I felt when I walked the halls of this hospital was hard to explain to anyone except another survivor.

  When you leave the hospital for the last time, they call it being discharged. That’s the same term the military uses when they release a soldier. Veterans say that once you’ve been in combat, you never completely forget it, or get over it. The pain stays embedded, like invisible shrapnel.

  I think veterans of any war probably understand each other.

  They would understand how all the scary, sad moments in here flooded my mind: the burnt smell of antiseptic, the quiet moans that echoed through the heating ducts at night, the dark stains in the bathrooms’ white grout, the endless predawn hours I spent watching Animal Planet, witnessing predators take down the weak and frightened. The doctors had fought the cancer while I had clung to life. I didn’t feel brave or strong, not here, not in this place where the enemy won so many battles and did not spare the weak.

  My head throbbed. My awkward gait made one side of my neck muscles tight, which caused the headaches. It felt like my head was being squeezed in the grip of some angry god. I was grateful that my mom had insisted on the new prosthesis. We had tried to go the conventional route, using one that was too big so I could grow into it, but I hated the way I walked with it, and she didn’t like it either. We shouldn’t have been getting a new prosthesis just after picking the other one out, but Barnes had allies all over
the hospital system. He was a veteran too, after all.

  Pain, by the way, is the reason that hospitals don’t play music that has voices and words. Words fail everyone in here. Every day when I was a patient, I had to point to a chart that showed happy and frowny faces. I had to point to the expression that represented how much pain I felt. With all the modern technology and medicine, we have to communicate through symbols about what we feel inside, like we’re still drawing on cave walls.

  Lightning flashed in the window behind us.

  I realized Barnes had slowed down to wait for my mom. He was still at the end of the hall, near the lobby. No one else was in this corridor, so I raised my voice. “I thought maybe I saw a girl in the other hallway by the waiting room.”

  “Security is working on it,” he called back. “Don’t let it ruin your big day. You are one lucky kid. Wait till you see this leg.”

  I was thirteen, bald, and had one leg, and yet everyone told me how lucky I was. Life is a precious gift, people said. No one ever mentioned that it was a gift you didn’t get to pick out. Apparently, God and I had very different tastes.

  Mom finally caught up to Barnes and they walked together toward me. His lab was at the end of a very long passageway. He said he liked to work in solitude, but I wondered if his lab was so remote because other people freaked out when they saw what he had inside. He held the door for me and Mom.

  “It looks so real,” Mom gasped. “It’s…beautiful.”

  My new leg rested on the table in front of us. The paperwork under it had a bar code and I could read my name printed in block letters. On the far end of the workbench was a bag with my name on it too, like a carrying case. Next to the case was a pair of crutches for when I didn’t have the leg on.

  Mom ran her fingers lightly over the leg.