Monster Club

by Gavin Brown

  Everything in him screamed to apologize, to take it back—even to run away. But the screen was frozen on the shot of a rescue worker helping one of the Adventure Scouts into the helicopter. He had to stay strong. This mattered. Fear wasn’t going to talk him out of this one.

  Mr. Khalil drew in a slow breath, then let it out with a sigh. “Do you know how many people I saved in my career?” he asked, voice almost wistful. “Hundreds, at least. Probably thousands. I was good, wasn’t I?”

  Karim looked his dad in the eye. “You were the best.”

  Mr. Khalil shook his head. “But, Karim, you’re just a kid. How can I let you risk your life out there?”

  “What were you doing at my age? You were chasing basilisks, imps, and other low-level monsters,” Karim said. “I’ve seen the biography show they did when you officially retired. When you were nine you did a solo raid on a slagworm den and came out with an enchanted dagger.”

  Mr. Khalil chuckled. “I was a crazy little scamp, wasn’t I?” He sighed. “Look. If you’re going to do this, I won’t stop you. But make sure you know what you’re getting into, and stick to the low-level stuff, okay?”

  Karim nodded. “I know. I’m not a total idiot.”

  Mr. Khalil started to leave the room, then spun and glared at his son. “Oh, and one more thing,” the old adventurer said. “Follow me.”

  His father led the way into his study, and Karim at first was confused. But as Mr. Khalil rolled to the display case and opened it up, Karim’s heart felt ready to explode.

  How had he let his two crazy friends talk him into this? Had his dad known all along that they had taken his sword—or worse, was he about to find out?

  “I saw you and your friends running around with that sparkly purple sword,” Mr. Khalil said. “If you’re going to go adventuring, you’ll need a real weapon.”

  Those two idiots had gotten him into this. Now it was all going to fall apart. He just knew it. But despite knowing that, he took a deep breath and stood perfectly still.

  His father lifted the replica and hefted it. “Well balanced,” Mr. Khalil said, holding it out to Karim.

  Karim just stood there for a moment, unable to convince his body to move.

  “You look so scared.” His father pushed the sword forward. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to carrying such a valuable artifact around.”

  Karim gulped and took the fake sword, trying his best to look reverent and honored.

  “Thanks, Dad” was all he could croak before he turned and fled.

  “You were amazing!” Tommy said, grabbing his sister in a bear hug. Elissa had not, in fact, been amazing. That wasn’t to say that she had been bad. She had done a perfectly decent job. It wasn’t fair to compare her to his favorite stars in the Broadway musicals that toured through town every year.

  The reality was just that Elissa was eight years old and in third grade. And that the gulf between third grade theater and Broadway was large enough to fit Nebraska. Tommy shook his head. The singing had been pitchy, the choreography sloppy and uninspired, and the tiny actors delivered every line in a flat monotone.

  “Your solo was fantastic!” he added. To be fair, it had actually been one of the least awful parts of the show. So, relatively speaking, he wasn’t lying.

  A year ago, he probably would have said something mean, or nothing at all. But since they’d been working together to save money for Adventure Camp, they’d mostly stopped arguing.

  “Thanks,” she answered, and Tommy stepped back as his parents took their turn making Elissa feel like a big star. The bouquet of flowers that his mom had brought was almost larger than Elissa was. Big Tom was on, his face looking like it couldn’t decide between grinning or crying with pride.

  Tommy smiled as he stood back and watched the scene. At least Elissa was happy, for the moment. He hadn’t told her yet, and he was dreading it.

  “You were sooooo good up there!” Mom cooed. “Maybe when you grow up, you’ll be a famous actress!”

  Elissa grinned, glowing under the praise. “Maybe I can be an adventurer in the summer, and an actress in the winter!”

  A sigh slipped out of Tommy, and he turned away so that the regret on his face wouldn’t spoil his little sister’s joy.

  On the ride home, Tommy sat in the darkness and brooded. From the minivan seat next to him, Elissa babbled at their parents the whole ride home. She seemed so happy chattering about how one of her friends had almost gotten crushed by a sandbag backstage.

  Over the last year or two she had gotten more annoying, and they’d argued more. But he remembered a time when they were little kids and did everything together. Before Spike and Karim were around, she had been his best friend.

  As he started to get older and grow out of the kids’ games, he’d always tried to make time for her. The only time in her life that he hadn’t been there was when Tommy went to Adventure Camp. Every summer for the past four years, Elissa had cried the entire day that he was leaving. Tommy had consoled her, telling her stories about Adventure Camp and trying to distract her by promising her things he would show her when she was finally able to go.

  And this year he had promised her that she would get to go to Adventure Camp.

  He reopened AppVenture on his phone, but it showed the same thing: financial account frozen.

  Tommy had gone onto AppVenture every day since it was first frozen and tried to cash out the money they’d made so far. But the payouts had been frozen for “account fraud review,” and the status hadn’t changed for the past several days. Tuckerville hadn’t shut down the whole account, but he had locked down the most important part. There was no way to get paid for anything they had done.

  At home, Elissa waited until they were alone in the kitchen. Mom had disappeared into her office, and Tommy could hear the TV in the living room. He poured each of them a bowl of cereal, and Elissa was struggling to put a full gallon of milk onto the counter for him.

  “What’s wrong, Tommy?” Elissa asked. “You’ve been a sourpuss all night! Didn’t you like the show?”

  Tommy glanced down at his tiny sister. Could he tell her? That he wouldn’t be able to keep his promise, and she would have to wait another year to swing through the ropes course or scream when the counselors sent the new campers through the banshee hut?

  “Oh, nothing,” Tommy lied. “I was just wishing that we’d had as good plays as this when I was your age.”

  Later that night, as he poured the milk over some of the most sugar-rich cereal on the continent, Tommy took a deep breath. He was going to get that money, one way or another.

  He didn’t have any great ideas, but he knew two people who were great at coming up with those. Even if one of them was kind of bossy and the other was scared of his own reflection.

  “So the place they’re sending us is actually a company, something called MHT Aeronautics,” Tommy explained. “For some reason, this is the only adventure that’s been available for the past couple of days.”

  The young adventurers had grabbed the city bus as soon as school was out. Spike was pleasantly surprised that they’d both come along without complaint. She’d half expected them to back out.

  “It says there’s a fire drake shacked up in an old condemned office building by the airport,” Tommy continued. “It’s getting in the way of tearing the place down or some junk like that.”

  “What do we know about fire drakes?” Spike asked. It was best to go in with a plan. Spike didn’t like surprises; she liked winning.

  Karim was already tapping and swiping at his phone, and soon he had pulled up the entry on fire drakes.

  The fire drake is a small crested bird, with an internal body temperature just below boiling.

  Warm underground caverns throughout the world are known to harbor fire drakes. They despise colder climates.

  The fire drake is powered by a mystical flame inside it that feeds its energy. Their claws are perilously sharp, and given enough time, they can cut their way
out of any cage with sheer manic will. Their insides run so hot that their droppings come out scorched, like badly burned sausages.

  Purified water will temporarily still the fire drake’s energy, making it very lethargic and easy to capture. Unlike true dragons, their larger cousins, fire drakes are not very smart and don’t have a real language or true intelligence. But watch out—their deadly talons can be cut only with a magical weapon.

  I kept a fire drake as a pet for a while—after its claws were trimmed, of course. They’re great for keeping a small apartment warm when you’re behind on rent and the landlord cuts off your heating!

  “Mortimer’s says that it’s a Level Three threat,” Karim said.

  “Sweet,” Spike said. “So how do we capture it?” Her instincts said they should stop doing AppVenture since the company refused to pay them any money, but this was beyond money now. She was just glad it had kept offering them assignments. Well, one, anyway.

  “Basically, you just need to douse it in a bucket of purified water,” Karim explained. “And then you can hold it while you use an enchanted sword to trim down its talons so that it can’t claw you up.”

  Tommy looked at the picture on Karim’s phone and flexed. “I can get it in that hold, no problem.” He took out a Brotein (“Winners don’t wear sleeves”) bar and began eating noisily, almost as if that would somehow make him stronger right now. But if that got him in the right frame of mind, she was fine with it.

  Spike leaned over to check it out as well. The fire drake looked like a tiny dragon, about the size of a goose. Sometimes they could breathe a little bit of fire, but she guessed that the water would take care of that.

  “And after that?” she asked. “Can we use a Magical Creature Containment Box on it?”

  Karim shrugged. “Once you trim its nails, it’s just a matter of getting a leash on it. You can pretty much walk it like a dog.”

  “Okay,” Spike said. “So we need a leash and some water.” This seemed like it should be fairly straightforward. Maybe one of these adventures would go smoothly, for once. She rather suspected one of the boys would find a way to screw it up, though. They always did.

  “The rope in my kit should do the job.” Karim patted a gym bag on the floor. “Dad made me put it together after we talked. He said no son of his would go into adventures unprepared.”

  “I brought a jug of purified water,” Tommy said, hefting his backpack. “I read up on fire drakes last night. We’re gonna quench that little guy.”

  Not to be outdone, Spike pulled a small contraption out of her backpack. “Long-range radio frequency identification tag,” she said. “We can tag it under one of its scales so we can track it if it’s released.”

  “Great,” Tommy said. The bus took a turn, and they all hung on to their seats for a second.

  “One more thing,” Karim said. “I was thinking about the money problem last night. And now that Spike’s alias is getting pretty well known in the adventuring community …” He pulled out a phone with a double battery pack on it.

  Spike smiled. She already knew where this was going. Karim had nailed it again. “We’re going to live stream it,” she said. “We can run ads on our adventures and make some money that way.”

  “Exactly,” Karim said.

  “Won’t that get us in trouble, though?” Tommy asked. “If the teachers or the Sheriff see us doing this … heck, or my mom!”

  Spike had to admit she was surprised that Karim wasn’t the one pointing that out.

  “No problem,” Karim said. He tapped at his phone for a moment. “We can mostly stay out of the camera and focus on the monster itself. And the live-stream app actually has a face-blurring feature. I’ll just turn that on.”

  The bus finally came to their stop, and as soon as they were off, Spike took the camera and started toward the building. After another minute of walking, Tommy came up alongside her and held out his hand. She looked down at it skeptically and raised an eyebrow.

  “Let me handle this,” he said. “You have to do it with style and class, or no one will watch.”

  Was he serious? It did make a typical Tommy sort of sense. Most of the casters kept up a constant stream of words, a sort of verbal nervous tic that she’d always thought was annoying. But that was the way things were done. Spike glanced at the camera and saw that the current viewer count was at a very impressive three.

  She handed him the camera with a shrug. “Knock yourself out.”

  Tommy gave her the type of grin usually reserved for Christmas morning and held up the camera.

  “This is Tom—um, I mean, T-Bone here,” he started. “Man of mystery, adventurer at large, and hero of the hour.” As he started to pick up steam, his voice changed into a sort of energetic parody of itself. “My face is blurred to preserve the mystery, but rest assured, gentle stream viewers—I am quite handsome and that dark patch on my chin is the beard I’ve started growing.”

  This performance was something that Spike could easily imagine Tommy having practiced before. Probably standing in front of a mirror, or taking videos of himself that he would never show to anyone else. She sighed. It might be stupid, but at least she didn’t have to do it.

  “So, as I said, I’m T-Bone,” Tommy continued. “And today we’re going after a fire drake, along with my cheerful and worthy companions, um … K-Ram, and—”

  “Spike,” Spike interjected. “Just Spike.” She was not going to get stuck with a dumb Tommy nickname.

  “And Spike,” Tommy finished. They approached their destination, Tommy filling the air with words while Spike and Karim examined the office building. It was about eight stories high, and the lower floors were covered in graffiti. It clearly hadn’t been used in quite some time.

  “It looks like a mess,” Karim said quietly as they let Tommy go ahead. “Half the windows are broken and those walls haven’t been washed in years.”

  “I can see why it needs renovations,” Spike agreed. “Though it looks like it would be easier to push it over than to fix it up. But the structure is probably fine.”

  “Adventure team!” Tommy said from up ahead. “I’ve found a clue!”

  “Um, Tommy,” Spike said. “Sorry—T-Bonehead—this is an adventure, not a mystery!”

  The three grouped around the front door of the decrepit office building, which had a note taped to it. Tommy read it out aloud for the benefit of all three of their current viewers.

  Spike leaned in to read it for herself.

  AppVenturers! I had to run to find a bathroom where the toilets actually flush. But the door is open and the fire drake is in the basement. Usually Subbasement C, I think. Good luck! Send me snaps on Insta when you’re done.

  —Salvatore Rodriguez, MHT Aeronautics Maintenance

  “Thanks to our new friend, Salvatore, we’re inside!” Tommy proclaimed as they entered the building. The air inside was musty and every step kicked up dust. There were a few pairs of footprints in the filth, along with a long, messy furrow leading into the darkness, as if someone had dragged a large piece of equipment through.

  “Let’s hope he finds the happy toilet he’s been searching for,” Tommy added.

  Spike rolled her eyes. Tommy’s broadcast persona was going to get old, fast. But she stepped up behind him and took a glance at the screen. They were up to eight total viewers. She bit back any sarcastic comments. Tommy’s shtick seemed to be working, she gave him that.

  Spike tried a few light switches, but they had no effect.

  “Here you go,” Karim said, pulling flashlights from her bag and passing them out. “That’ll be a lot more powerful than the one on your phone.”

  They flicked on the flashlights and advanced into the darkness.

  The power being out meant that the elevator wasn’t working, which was just as well. Tommy had wanted to try it, but in dangerous situations like fires or monster hunts, it was best not to rely on elevators. The last thing you wanted was to be trapped in a tiny metal box with some
magical beast on the loose.

  They moved down the stairs to the basement single file, Tommy leading the way with the camera.

  Karim turned off his light for a moment, trying to see the place the way that a fire drake would. The office building was the perfect dungeon. Out of sight, and easy to disappear into. He shivered. There was a reason monsters hid in caves and dungeons—it made things that much harder on the adventurers.

  “And so we venture into the depths,” Tommy was whispering in his new adventure casting voice, “with only our lights, our magical sword, and our wits to protect us from the dangers that lurk beyond.”

  Karim rolled his eyes but checked the stream on his own phone. Almost a hundred viewers! How were they that popular already? He supposed that active monster hunts were a little less common than the thousands of streams of the popular video games. You needed to have a real-life monster, a magical weapon, and the guts to actually go and do it.

  How had Karim convinced himself to get down here? Looking around at the shifting shadows on the wall, he shook his head. This was madness, but he was already well committed now. He just hoped they wouldn’t end up in a hospital after it was all over—or worse.

  Tommy had the bucket of water held in one hand as he walked with the camera. Karim pulled his father’s magical sword out of its wrappings, hefting it. The weight in his hands felt reassuring. It was the same size and weight as the replica that Tommy’s dad had gotten him, but somehow holding the real magic one had an extra zing of power. It did still sparkle with purple nail polish—Karim had to admit that it looked kind of cool.

  At the bottom of the stairs, they reached the first basement level. The hall diverged in three directions, each as dark as the last.

  “Should we split up to cover more ground?” Spike asked.

  She looked at the two boys with a raised eyebrow. Karim nodded thoughtfully, while Tommy stroked the few hairs on his chin. Karim, with a chin as smooth as a suit of plate armor, had to admit he was a tiny bit jealous.