Monster Club

by Gavin Brown

  Karim stood slowly, muttering something under his breath. Tommy thought he caught the words fear talking, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Karim tapped a button on his tablet. “Look at this, Dad.”

  They all watched as the screen showed a shaky camera view of what looked like a kid’s birthday party, along with a boy’s voice.

  “There’s something coming in the front door,” he said. “It’s the harpy. Grandma and Grandpa didn’t believe me, but I saw it. And now it’s here.”

  An elderly couple was standing next to a table with a pot roast and a birthday cake, as if they’d just been serving dinner. There were scratching sounds, and the boy swung his camera to the door. It suddenly burst open in a shower of wood splinters.

  The creature had the face and shoulders of a furious woman, but the body of a bird. She hopped forward, clawed feet scratching on the kitchen tiles. Tommy looked closely and, sure enough, he could see that where one of her ears had been there was only an old, nasty scar.

  The elderly man slashed at the harpy with his walking stick and the woman tried to use her walker as a shield. But they both toppled over as the monster burst past them. A child, who Tommy guessed might be their granddaughter, sat strapped in her high chair as the harpy ate the pot roast sitting in the middle of the table. While everyone else freaked out, the baby dug into her cake with a spoon.

  They heard the screams of the boy holding the camera. He appeared to lose his nerve and the view changed dramatically as the camera angle swung to the ceiling. They heard the sounds of the harpy messily eating the pot roast as the camera recorded only the whirring ceiling fan above.

  The video paused, and Karim turned back to his father. “That harpy has been captured three times by AppVenture. First in Connecticut, then in Kansas. This video was recorded this morning in Arizona.”

  “It’s still out there,” Spike added. “The police chased it off before anyone could be hurt, but it escaped.”

  Karim looked at the ground. “Should we just sit here and do nothing about it?”

  “Someone has to stop them,” Tommy added. He certainly wasn’t going to let the other two have their hero moments without him getting in on the action.

  Mr. Khalil looked at each of them in turn, and then sighed. “Okay, you’re right. Something should be done. But not you kids running in without a plan or gear! Okay?”

  “Okay,” Karim and Tommy said in unison. Spike didn’t say anything, but Mr. Khalil didn’t seem to notice.

  “I’m going to call some of my friends who are still in the game,” Mr. Khalil continued. “They’ll figure this out. Handsome Hal and his crew were going to be passing by from a hunt in San Diego, anyway. You can show them all this evidence.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he left the room, pulled out his phone, and started dialing.

  Spike watched until he left. “So … he didn’t say we couldn’t keep adventuring.”

  “Yes, he did!” Karim answered.

  Spike shook her head. “He said we couldn’t go in without a plan or gear. We have the gear, and I think coming up with clever plans is one of our strong points.”

  Tommy grinned, appreciating Spike’s usual vague interpretation of the rules.

  Karim threw a couch cushion at Spike, but he had a smile traced at the edge of his lips. Tommy knew from experience that it would take a bit more persuasion, but Karim would come around. Their crew had at least one more adventure in them.

  Spike eyed Tommy skeptically.

  “It was pretty easy,” Tommy said, shrugging. “I just made up a name and created a new account, so we can keep going, like we said.”

  “And they just let you do that?” Spike asked.

  “I … don’t think safety or paperwork are things Mike Tuckerville really cares about,” Tommy suggested.

  Spike nodded. She could respect that, at least. Paperwork was for chumps.

  “That’s awesome!” Karim said. “Our best bet to find recycled monsters is going to be AppVenture. We can’t take big corporate adventuring contracts and wandering around on our own wouldn’t be all that helpful.”

  “And this way we can tag anything we catch,” Spike added.

  The three were sitting at the bottom of the flagpole outside school. The day was over and nearly everyone had gone, piling onto school buses or picked up by their parents.

  “They did freeze our payouts on the other account, though.” Tommy said, frowning. “That means it’s going to be hard to get the money I need for camp.”

  “Hm. Maybe we’ll be able to make more on this new account?” Karim offered. “Assuming they don’t figure it out and shut this one down too.”

  Spike looked around the school. The only kids still around were the athletes on the fields across the street, running through their drills for lacrosseball or footbasket. Whatever they called those ridiculous wastes of time. Her mom was supposed to have picked them up half an hour ago. She was, of course, nowhere to be seen. Typical. Her mom had the memory of a potted fern and a bad habit of not checking her phone for messages from her daughter.

  “Yeah, great. Now all we need is an actual ride home.” Spike hated when it was her mom’s turn to drive them home. Mom was always so sure that she was going to be on time, and then about a third of the time she just “got caught up in things” and showed up an hour or more late. Why couldn’t Mom just admit she wasn’t going to make it and let them take the bus?

  She looked up and down the street, and then back at the school, as if that would help. All the windows were empty, except for the one where she could see Maria Struthers and Eddie Suarez, who were still frozen in shock. Students had added hats and drawn mustaches on both of them. They were due to thaw any day now.

  “Should I call my dad?” Tommy asked.

  “It’s starting to get late,” Karim complained.

  Before Spike could answer, a shadow fell over them.

  “Tommy. Karim. Colleen,” Ms. Smithfield, aka the Sheriff, said, glaring down at the three of them.

  “It’s Spike,” Spike corrected her, glaring right back. “I don’t know any Colleens around here.” Why couldn’t the guidance counselor use her proper name? She had never thought she would miss their elementary school guidance counselor with his touchy-feely magical crystal nonsense. At least that man had been willing to use her actual name.

  “I’ve seen you three,” the Sheriff said. “On your phones all the time, late for classes, late for school. Thick as thieves, you three. Don’t think I don’t notice.”

  Tommy looked up at her dumbly. “Are thieves thick?” he asked. “Like, are you saying I’m a thief because I’m a little overweight?”

  “That sounds like profiling to me,” Spike added in. “Discrimination. That’s pretty serious, Ms. Smithfield. You know Tommy’s mom is a lawyer, right? The suing kind. She’ll sue anyone for anything.”

  “Hey!” Tommy said, pretending to be offended. “My mother isn’t like that!”

  “Yeah,” Karim said, emboldened by the other two. “She won’t sue anyone. She only sues people if she thinks she can win lots of money.”

  “What … what are you going on about?” the Sheriff sputtered. “You’re lucky it’s after school hours, or I’d haul you all in to have a good chat about respect.”

  “I’m, uh, sorry,” Karim mumbled, while the other two glared at him. Karim just didn’t have it in him to really defy authority, did he?

  “Just remember, I’m watching you three,” the Sheriff said, and stalked back into the school.

  “What is her deal?” Spike asked after the Sheriff was out of earshot. “Why is she always after us?”

  Karim shrugged. “It could be because the school has been evacuated three times this year. And we’ve been involved in every single one of them.”

  “Allegedly involved!” Tommy interjected. “There’s no hard evidence we were involved in any of them. Pure hearsay.”

  Spike chuckled. Maybe Tommy’s mom being a lawyer was
n’t completely useless.

  Her phone buzzed and she glanced down. She growled and shoved the phone back in her pocket.

  “My mom will be here in two minutes. Her client kept her late, apparently,” Spike said.

  “Those crystals giving her a hard time?” Tommy said with a chuckle. “Were they too shiny or something?”

  “It’s amazing,” Karim said, “that in a world with actual magical artifacts, people still fall for that bunk.”

  “Can it,” Spike shot back. Spike’s mom sold special “magnetic” crystals that were supposed to enhance people’s vital essences. It wasn’t real magic, like Sidesplitter. It was just a load of pseudoscience bunk.

  Spike stared at the street grimly. Back when her dad lived here, he would always pick her up on time. But it was better this way. Her mom might be late, but at least she showed up. Not like that one day, the one time her dad had been late. So late that he just never showed up and disappeared to San Francisco for the last two years.

  “Okay, are we hunting more monsters tonight?” she asked.

  “I can’t tonight,” Tommy said, shuffling his feet and looking at the ground.

  Karim shook his head. “Neither can I.”

  “What?” Spike sounded surprised, but in reality, she wasn’t. Not entirely. This was just typical of her friends, her family—everyone letting her down. She would just have to figure out how to win on her own.

  Tommy wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I have to go see my sister’s play,” he admitted. “Sorry, Spike.”

  “And I promised my mom I would help weed the garden,” Karim said, speaking so quietly that he was almost inaudible. Did he think that if he said something very softly, she somehow wouldn’t be as annoyed?

  “Ugh! Fine,” Spike spat as her mom’s beat-up old station wagon pulled up to the curb. “We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  After the boys were dropped off and Spike was finally home, she practically stomped up the stairs to her room. Why had they abandoned her? She was tempted to grab her gear and go off adventuring on her own. She should leave her useless friends and family behind, and show them that she could do it all on her own.

  She grinned. It was a tight grin, an angry grin. But running off on her own … that was loser behavior. She knew how that story went. Going off on your own ended with you trapped in some desperate situation, in mortal peril, and your friends had to come save you. And then you had to act all grateful and like you’d learned an important lesson about friendship and cooperation.

  That was not going to happen to Spike. Lessons about friendship and cooperation were for suckers.

  Spike grabbed her laptop. She could wait and keep working on the long game. Mr. Khalil had said they needed a plan, and that guy knew what he was doing.

  Karim stared at the door for a long while before he walked toward it. His dad’s car was in the driveway. He knew another shoe was about to drop. His dad never liked to chew him out in front of friends or family. No, he waited until they were gone before raising his voice.

  Karim tried to close the front door and tiptoe up the steps with the stealth of an Ecuadorian swamp wraith. It didn’t work. He had made his way up only two steps when he heard the familiar sound of his father’s wheelchair.

  “Trying to sneak past me, boy?” Mr. Khalil asked.

  “No, no,” Karim blustered. “I’m just getting my gloves so that I can go help Mom with the weeds in the garden.”

  “That can wait. Come into the living room. I need to show you something.”

  Karim glumly followed his father. He looked up at the TV screen, where a paused picture made his stomach clench.

  “Dad, I’ve seen this a hundred times,” Karim protested.

  “And it seems like that just wasn’t enough to get the message through,” Mr. Khalil retorted sternly.

  The video was from Mr. Khalil’s glory days of adventuring, when every big adventurer had their own TV show and the networks competed to see who would bag the nastiest monster and get the week’s highest ratings. Nowadays it was considered too big a risk of lawsuits and insurance, and the adventuring had moved to streaming apps.

  On-screen, a young man, handsome and fit, was standing on a rock outcropping. Behind him the mountain air practically shimmered in the dawn, and a light dusting of snow fell around Yousef “the Fang” Khalil.

  “I’ve taken care of the two trolls trying to feed in the den,” the younger Mr. Khalil said, flipping his long black hair in the wind. “Now comes the fun part. The rest of the trolls will be coming back from their night’s hunting.”

  He turned and a group of three trolls lumbered up over the ridge.

  “And here they are now,” the Fang said. He drew Sidesplitter from its scabbard with a satisfying schwing that Karim knew must have been added after the fact. Even adventuring, it seemed, wasn’t quite exciting enough for TV.

  Karim’s stomach churned as the trolls advanced on the Fang. They were rocky creatures, a head taller than an average man and with thick stone skin that even bullets couldn’t penetrate. Only an enchanted blade would do the job.

  Karim had seen this video too many times to count, and it made him sick every time. As the image of his father danced in and out from the trolls, dropping the first one with a devastating combination of blows, Karim thought of the first time he’d seen this video. At the time, his parents hadn’t let him see it. He’d found it on his own, which wasn’t hard because it was on every streaming site when you searched for “The Fang” or “Yousef Khalil.” Karim had been only six and hoping to find videos of his dad in his hero days. Instead, he’d seen this.

  His mom found him hours later, crying in the deep shadows under the porch. The moments that were about to play out had haunted Karim’s dreams for years after.

  One of the trolls had fallen into a snowbank, and another was retreating down the mountain, howling in pain. The Fang swung around to face the third troll, Sidesplitter swinging through the air. Karim’s eye couldn’t help going to his dad’s foot. He’d watched this moment over and over. The foot caught in a tiny crevice as his dad spun.

  Rather than performing a neat pirouette out of the troll’s way, the Fang stumbled as he pulled his foot free from the crevice. The troll lunged forward, and Karim found himself rooting for his dad, as he always did. “Come on, come on, come on,” the voice said, even though he knew the outcome.

  The Fang lurched back and the troll’s rocky fists grabbed his torso, and the two plummeted down the cliff. Karim’s dad yelled in rage and stabbed at the troll as they fell, blade cleaving straight through the crown of the monster’s head and into its neck.

  But trolls are as resilient as they are dumb. The monster’s mind was dead, but it kept pushing, kept fighting. And when the two crashed to the ground, Karim’s eyes were glued to the exact moment it happened: The Fang’s lower back landed on a sharp rock outcropping, and crimson blood splashed onto the white snow.

  There was screaming and the camera panned wildly as the TV crew ran to help the fallen adventurer. But Karim knew it was too late. His father’s spine was snapped in half, rendering him paralyzed from the waist down.

  Karim let out his breath in a rush, suddenly realizing that he had been holding it in. His stomach felt like it had been shot through.

  Mr. Khalil let out a disgusted sigh, spinning to face his son. “I had a two-year-old kid at home. What was I doing out there trying to act the hero?”

  Karim simply stared at him at a loss. Was his father right? Was this adventuring business just a death wish? Why had he let his friends talk him into it?

  “Is it worth it, Karim, to live that life? All I cared about were my TV ratings, my fame, the visits from celebrities and the money that came with it. What was the whole point? I was lucky to survive that accident.”

  Karim looked down at the floor. How could he explain to his dad? How could he make him understand? Did he even want to?

  His dad’s question tugged at him as the silence stretched on.
It wasn’t meant to have an answer … but maybe Karim had one. Maybe all those other questions were just the fear talking—the fear trying to take control.

  Karim looked up, returning his father’s determined gaze. He just might have an answer.

  “You always start at that part, Dad.” Karim took the remote from his father’s shaking hands. “But look.” He rewound the video to a minute before his dad had hit play.

  Two trolls lay dead at the Fang’s feet. He stood inside a large cave, lit only by a fire at the back. The camera perfectly caught the flicker of the fire on the Fang’s handsome face. Behind him were piles of bones, remnants of the trolls’ many victims over the years.

  At the back of the cave, a clump of figures huddled together. They had been a troop of Adventure Scouts, whom the Fang had volunteered to accompany on a trip as a publicity stunt for his TV show. After this incident, local parents had demanded that the troop be disbanded.

  “Move!” the Fang commanded. “Get out of here! The other three trolls will be coming back soon. You all need to get to safety.”

  The camera caught each of the captives’ faces as they hustled out of the cave, displaying a mixture of terror, relief, and gratitude. The remaining adult leader and several of the boys were crying. Outside, the wilderness rescue workers wrapped them in blankets and pulled them away.

  The Fang faced the camera with a self-satisfied grin. “The Adventure Scout troop has been saved,” he said. “The rescue teams will airlift them out shortly.”

  He strolled out of the cave, and pointed down the slope.

  “Now comes the fun part. The rest of the trolls have gone hunting. When they come back, I’m going to rock their world.”

  Karim paused the video before he was forced to watch the accident one more time.

  “Dad,” he began, turning to face his father, “even though you got hurt, you did come home to your family. And all those people did too.”

  Long seconds passed. Karim’s dad stared into the distance. Was he going to explode? Scream in fury, or whisper in cold rage? The tension in Karim’s shoulders built with each moment.