None of those facts changed what she had to do.
Celia crouched down and ran as fast as she could toward the nearest dumpster.
10
Breathe
As Celia neared the dumpster, the green boy in the cage gave her a thumbs-up and smiled, showing her his pointed fangs.
The lid of the dumpster was open. Celia jumped and landed inside.
The dumpster shook beneath her feet. The metal lid slammed shut, smashing against Celia’s head and pushing her down into the soft muck of garbage. Total darkness surrounded her. A rotten-meat smell was so strong that she threw up in her mouth. Celia crouched inside as bits of trash slithered up her legs and wrapped around her arms. Sticky tar oozed everywhere and clung to her. She slapped it off, but more and more pieces covered her. She screamed for a second but then stopped. She didn’t want anything to get into her mouth.
The heart, she thought. I have to find it. It’s in here somewhere. Probably.
The monster’s laugh boomed through the dumpster so loud that it made her ears ring.
The garbage on Celia’s arms thickened as she reached through the squishy rottenness around her, searching for something, anything, that seemed heart-like. Bits of trash climbed over her mouth and up her nose. She gagged and slapped them off with garbage-covered hands.
Celia thrust her fingers into the thickest part of the garbage and grabbed hold of soft and rotten things. The heart. The heart. Where was the heart?
Garbage covered her face. She tried to pull it off, but it held on tight. She couldn’t see. She could barely breathe. Don’t panic. Search, she ordered herself, and thought about all the girls in all the movies who managed to keep going, no matter what.
The muck squirmed around her arms and legs, alive and pushing back. Celia moved in the direction it seemed to least want her to go.
The garbage-mask thickened, and she couldn’t breathe at all. She wasted a couple of seconds trying to claw it off with her hands, but too much slimy wet garbage clung to her fingers.
Celia searched faster. The need to inhale built in her chest, and she grew light-headed. All she found was endless soft muck.
The heart. Where was it?
Her arms grew heavy as bricks. A blackness, deeper than the pitch black of the dumpster, grew at the edge of her awareness. Her chest throbbed with pain. Monsters were real, and she was going to die.
The heart.
It got harder to remember to keep going. Her lungs hurt.
The heart, she thought faintly.
Her finger brushed against something firm. She grabbed onto it and felt the vague edges of a cardboard box beneath her coated fingers.
Celia’s legs collapsed. She fell forward into the garbage and pulled the box toward her. It seemed to expand and contract against her still chest.
I need to breathe, she thought, and passed out.
The monster’s heartbeat echoed around her, shaking Celia awake.
The mask of trash fell off her face, and Celia sucked in air. Nasty dumpster air that smelled like puke and death, but she breathed in great gasps of it as she lay on a mass of rotting garbage, curled around a box that throbbed in her arms.
“I need to get out of here,” she whispered with a mousy voice she barely recognized.
The dumpster lid opened above her, and the charcoal sky hanging over the city had never looked so beautiful. She stood up, still clutching the box, and saw Amber lying in a fetal position in the back of the alley, haloed by a circle of fallen garbage. Her arm bled and her pants were slashed open at the knee and thigh. Sticky black tar pooled lifelessly at her feet.
With a growl, Ruby leaped out of the other dumpster and landed in a wary crouch. Every inch of her was covered in wet, moldy trash. She spun around slowly until she saw Celia. Her jaw dropped open as she stared at the box in Celia’s hands. In the dim light of the moon, Celia saw it was a pizza box with the words Pizza My Heart printed on the outside of it. It was soggy around the edges and looked like anything else you might find in the garbage, except for the way it expanded and contracted and made a soft lub-dub sound. Something that looked like pizza sauce dripped out from one corner of it.
“The doom girl saved us?” Ruby whispered. She ran a hand through her slicked-down hair and flung gray goop off her fingers.
“I had to try. There was no one else,” Celia said as she carefully stepped out of the dumpster, clinging to the heart box and wobbling on uncertain legs.
“Someone finally found his heart, after all these years,” a small voice said beside Celia. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” The Little green monster pressed his face against the bars of his cage. Sores and scars covered his face. He used to be a kid, before a monster attacked and changed him, Celia thought.
“Can I have it?” he asked, and reached a claw-tipped hand through the bars.
“Give the heart to me,” Ruby ordered. “We can use it to make the Big talk.” One of her eyes had swollen shut, rimmed with a fat, purple bruise that matched the color of her hair. Amber got to her feet, picked up her broken glasses, and limped toward Ruby.
Celia looked down at the pulsing pizza box. For what felt like the millionth time today, she wasn’t sure what to do.
“Give it to me. Let me destroy him,” the caged boy whispered. “I’ve earned it. He’s hurt me for so long.”
A whimpering sound came from the dumpsters.
“Shut up,” Celia commanded, still staring at the pizza box.
The dumpster went quiet.
“Give me the heart,” Ruby said. “Now.”
“Please?” the Little monster asked again.
Celia looked at Ruby and then at the Little in the cage. “You’ve been his slave?” she asked.
The boy nodded and looked like he might start crying. He might be a monster, but he was also someone small who had been hurt for far too long.
“We need the heart, Celia,” Amber said. “We’ll explain why. We—”
Celia tossed the pizza box toward the Little’s cage.
His clawed hands reached out from the cage and grabbed it.
“No!” Ruby and Amber screamed. Both dumpsters shook so hard they bounced.
The Little pulled his hands back into the cage, taking the box with them. He raked his claws across the surface. Where he scratched, blood pooled up. The dumpsters screamed louder. A wet, squelching sound filled the air as the boy ripped the box in two. Blood splattered across his face and all over the cage.
A deep silence followed.
The Little monster sobbed and tossed the two pieces of the box out of his cage. They landed on the garbage-strewn ground, as lifeless as any cardboard.
Ruby glared at Celia. “That. Was. Dumb.”
Celia flicked a blob of wet Kleenex off her shirt. She glared back at Ruby. “I’d do it again,” she said. If you were owned by a monster, then you should get to decide what happened to him. Celia might not understand a lot of things, but she knew that was true.
“I tried to explain ahead of time about the heart,” Amber said angrily to Ruby. She sighed and turned back to Celia. Her fingers explored her shoulder where her coat and sweatshirt lay slashed open. She picked off a gelatinous handful of black goo and threw it on the ground. “If you have a Big monster’s heart, you can control him. We could have used Dreck’s heart to learn everything he knew about the earthquake.”
“But no, you had to let the Little destroy it,” Ruby said.
Celia crossed her arms over her chest.
Ruby exhaled and shrugged. “But whatever, we’re alive because of you. With no training, you bested Dreck, one of the oldest Bigs in town. There’s only one way to control or kill a Big, and that’s to get their heart. You did it.”
“You’re sort of amazing, Celia.” Amber squinted through the broken glasses that hung crookedly on her nose. “How did you know what to do?”
“I told her to go into the dumpster,” the Little said. “We’re on the same side about most things. I
don’t get why hunters never see that.”
“The same side until you destroy one of us,” Amber said.
Ruby ignored the Little and kept her somber gaze on Celia. “Amber and I should both be dead.” The leader of the hunters pulled a black leather string out of her pocket, grabbed Celia’s wrist, and tied it on. “You got your first monster. Welcome to the hunters, Celia.” She hugged her, crushing Celia against her banana-splattered shoulder.
Amber hugged her too, and Celia stood in a hunter sandwich for a long time, feeling their warmth before they let her go.
“Let’s bounce, unless you two want to hang out in the nastiest alley ever,” Ruby said. “We’ll walk you home, Celia.”
“Are you kidding me?” the Little called out from the cage behind them. “You can’t just leave me here. You have to let me go.”
11
Nothing Could Hurt Her
“We’re not leaving you,” Ruby said over her shoulder. “We’ll have the Council of Elders pick you up and take you in.”
The Little pressed his miserable green face up against the cage bars and said, “Let me go. I promise I’ll never hurt another kid. I told her the heart was in the dumpster. I saved you. You have to let me go.”
Amber and Ruby wouldn’t look at him as they walked toward the front of the alley, but Celia watched him. Amber had said the Council of Elders took in Littles and put them in cages. How was that better than what Dreck had done to him?
“Come on, Celia. Remember what he is,” Amber said, calling back to her from a dozen feet away. “The second he’s free, he’ll attack some kid and turn himself into something as evil as Dreck. They always do.”
“I won’t.” The boy pressed his face harder against the jagged bars. “My name’s John, and I’m a kid, just like you, or I was until I got attacked by a monster.”
Celia looked from him to the two hunters waiting for her at the front of the alley. The Little did look like a kid, if you ignored his green skin, claws, and sharp teeth.
“Please?” he whispered.
Celia kicked at a rotten orange on the ground. Now that the fight was over, she felt tired and empty and didn’t want to have to think about anything besides getting home and taking a shower.
“You did tell me to search for the heart in the dumpster,” Celia said.
“I’ve never hurt anyone. Not once,” he said.
“Come on, Celia,” Ruby called back to her.
The cage didn’t have a lock, just a clasp that he couldn’t reach from the inside.
The Little saw her looking. He moved away from the door, pressing himself against the back side of the cage.
Celia darted forward, flipped open the catch, and moved back.
The door of the cage flew open, and the Little jumped out. He wore a huge smile and twirled around with his arms out and his head flung back. “Thanks so much!”
“Sure,” Celia said.
“Get away from him!” Ruby cried. The hunters walked back down the alley toward her.
Celia stood between the Little and the hunters. She stepped back.
The Little whipped his head around to stare at her. “I can feel the air move when you move. I can smell you, and it’s the most beautiful thing. It’s like”—he paused and his smile grew wider—“ice cream on the hottest day of summer!” Something glittery and unsteady danced in his eyes.
“You said you’d be good,” she whispered. “You promised.”
“Run, Celia,” Amber called out.
The Little moved so fast that Celia didn’t remember him pushing her, her falling to the ground, or his coming to be crouched on her torso, staring at her with wide, unblinking eyes.
He looked confused too. “Oh no,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to. I only touched your coat. No skin. I promise. Sorry!” He scrambled off her and backed away.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “It’s just . . . you smelled too good.”
Ruby barreled toward him with her blades out.
He danced away from her and ran, twice as fast as any human, out of the alley.
Ruby tucked her blades back into the holstered sheaths she wore crisscrossed on her back. She helped Celia up. “You always do the opposite of what people tell you?”
“Sort of. I don’t know?” Celia sighed, thinking about all the rules she’d broken today, and all the things her parents hadn’t even known to put on the list but would have been forbidden if they had.
“Fabulous. The Bigs are banding together and the doom girl at the center of the prophecy has a rebellious streak.” Ruby scowled. “Whatever. You get a pass today, Celia, because you saved us and you don’t understand what we’re up against. But from here on out, you have to listen to us.”
Celia gave her a nod-shrug. She’d listen to Ruby, but she wasn’t a hunter. She didn’t have to obey anyone.
“Come on. We’ll drop you off on our way home,” Ruby said.
“You two live together?” Celia asked.
Amber nodded. “I needed a place to go, after my parents . . .”
“And I needed a place when my mom found my weapons and kicked me out. She wouldn’t believe me that my best friend had been killed by monsters, and that I hunted them. No one believes us. Most hunters are orphans or runaways.”
Celia thought about not living with her parents. That idea made her so sad.
Amber smiled at Ruby. “No grown-ups, but sometimes Ruby acts like a really bossy older sister, even though we’re the same age.”
Ruby rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out at the other girl. “And if I’m lucky, Amber acts like a professor of boring-ology and can talk at me for hours.”
They grinned at each other.
“I call dibs on first shower, by the way,” Amber said. “I have rotten sausage juice in my ear.”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure I have a moldy cockroach in my hair,” Ruby replied.
“I’ve got you both beat: rotten eggs down my pants.” Celia giggled. So did the hunters.
They walked side by side down unlit roads. Everyone they passed carried flashlights and moved away from them, disgusted by the sight and smell. Celia loved the cold wind that blew through her clothes and shivered over her goose-bumped skin. She loved the broken glass on the sidewalk that glittered like tiny diamonds in the moonlight. She loved, most of all, the simple pleasure of breathing.
She’d survived. She’d saved two girls. Two friends, maybe.
The three girls laughed about the battle, retelling every awful moment and turning it into something funny. They told her about how Dreck had ruled the Five Point neighborhood for decades and used magic to keep everything dirty and run-down. He stole people’s happiness to make himself powerful, and filled people’s houses with garbage and despair.
“Tell me about other Bigs,” Celia said. The darkness didn’t scare her anymore. The rain didn’t chill her. There were monsters in the world, and she had destroyed one of them.
They told her stories about Splintered, two twin Bigs who deepened and extended winter every year on the South End, and made roads and sidewalks extra slick in order to cause car wrecks and break people’s hips. Or Gootcha, who lived under the Peralta Bridge and whispered to wayward travelers that they should give up and jump so she could capture them and put them to work in underground caverns, mining emeralds and peridots. They listed half a dozen more.
Amber worked on picking out clots of chewing gum from her long braid as they walked. “The only good thing about Bigs is they hate and destroy each other. But if it’s true they’re working together right now . . .” Her voice trailed off. “It means something really big is going on.”
They got to Celia’s dark apartment building.
Amber carefully hugged Celia goodbye, avoiding the goopiest parts of her clothes. “I’m so glad we found you. You’re the best, doom girl.”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “The best at smelling nasty. We’ll see you in the morning?”
“Yeah.” Tomorrow, she
would hang out with her friends. That fact felt almost as impossible as everything else that had happened today.
Celia climbed the dark stairs to her apartment on legs that felt so exhausted they could barely carry her weight. She tried to turn the lights on once she got inside, forgetting that they didn’t work. She found the flashlight and took a garbage bag with her into the bathroom. Celia peeled off her clothes and put them in the bag, then turned the water on extra hot to spray the oily stickiness off her body. She ran a bar of soap over every inch of her skin, grateful that she lived in an old building with an oil-fired water heater.
Today I fought a monster, she thought. It wasn’t on the list of things her parents didn’t want her to do, but . . . Celia heard the strange choking sound of her own laughter. It was too much. Way too much, and also, she sort of loved it. Not almost getting killed, but the whole strange day of learning about monsters and doom girls. Doom girl, she thought again and again. I’m going to do something important. It didn’t feel real. She washed her hair multiple times with lavender shampoo, and scratched her nails through her scalp, rooting out every last bit of rot. She touched the leather string on her wrist, over and over again, liking how it felt.
What would Mom and Dad think, she wondered, if they knew that monsters were real? She thought about her mom teasing her that the tooth fairy loved to eat her teeth. Or how her dad swore he’d met a talking toad when he was three. She’d always thought they were joking, but what if part of them knew something?
She stood under the stream of hot water and let it wash over her until it went lukewarm. After toweling off, she found an unlabeled tube of ointment in the bathroom cabinet that smelled medicinal. She rubbed it everywhere. Her ribs felt bruised where the Little had jumped on her. The flashlight confirmed purple-black marks on her chest.
She worried about that monster somewhere out in the world, and what he was doing. Not attacking a kid. Not turning evil, she hoped.
Celia put her pajamas on and meant to find some food to eat, but her bed felt so soft and the idea of lying down, just for a moment, seemed more delicious than anything.
Little Apocalypse Page 6