A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting #3

by Joe Ballarini

  “Shoo! Get away!” I said.

  That only made them happier.

  I caught the track as the rope snapped. With a shaky grip, I quickly climbed down the loop the loop. Gremlins cursed me from above.

  “Suck it!” I said.

  I fished my staff out of my backpack. It would have to do since I’d given Berna my sword. A gremlin dropped down on me, and I spun, smacking the little guy into the air like a mushy baseball.

  A rain of nuts and bolts pelted me from above. When I glared up at the other gremlins, they pretended to be busy. I smirked. The little creeps were more scared of me than I was of them.

  I tightened the straps on my backpack and followed the cart tracks deeper into the damp, cold cavern, where the rocks sparkled with strange flecks of green. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I tried contacting Berna on the walkie-talkie, but there was no reception.

  Follow the tracks, and eventually, you’ll meet up with Berna and the others, I kept telling myself.

  I tried to block out the horrible thoughts, the negative voices, the cruel criticisms.

  Who are you kidding? You’re not a leader. Look where you lead everyone.

  I had done a pretty good job of keeping down the dark stuff inside me because I had my friends with me, and we gave each other strength and hope. I wanted to look like a leader, but now that I was alone, the floodgates opened.

  Victor hates you. Berna used to want to be your friend, but now she sees that you’re a loser, she’s going to drop you and never talk to you again. If they’re even alive. Cassie never liked you. Mama Vee will kick you out of the order. Your parents are going to be furious. Not to mention Elder Pressbury. You let down Liz and Kevin. Those kids. Those parents who have given up hope for their children. What a zero. You should have never been a babysitter. No one likes you. Total mistake face. All those comments on your Facebook page and Instagram were right. You’re nothing. Do the world a favor and disappear.

  “Stop!” I screamed, clutching at my head. “Do not let this island get to you.”

  My voice echoed down the tunnel, which had split into two different paths. One set of tracks went down each fork. I studied the two paths.

  Which way did Berna and the others go?

  The rail switch was set to the middle.

  I knelt down and held the metal rails on the right, but there was no vibration. The left tracks trembled in my hand. I pressed my ear to the rail. There was a faint rumble.

  With a tiny flicker of hope, I set off down the left tunnel. To keep the bad thoughts away, I whistled a little tune until I realized I was whistling the Sunshine Island theme song.

  Don’t let this island get to you.

  Sharp white rocks hung from the cave ceiling like giant, dripping fangs. I walked on the tracks to avoid the pools of steaming, swirling minerals on the ground that filled the air with an unsettling heat.

  I took a breath, but my lungs filled with the cave’s rotten-egg stink. The smell was so bad that I almost fell off the end of the tracks.

  I wobbled at the broken rail edges. A dark crevasse waited below. I could see stacks of broken carts piled up at the bottom. A fist seized my heart. I cried out for Berna and the others. The response was the lonely echo of my voice.

  I tossed a green glow stick into the craggy pit. There was no movement among the skeletons of riders past.

  Look on the bright side, I thought. You might be lost, but at least they’re not down here.

  And then worry began to set in, and with it came my mean voice.

  There is no bright side, you moron. You’re lost. You’re a failure. A big, dumb, redheaded failure, and you deserve to wander around down here forever. You’re a mistake, not a babysitter. You should have never joined the sitters.

  I probably would have stood there for an hour, mentally ripping myself to shreds, if I hadn’t heard laughter. Like a bunch of kids who were watching television. I followed the giddy noise to a rocky ledge where a shoddy wooden walkway had been built into the side of the cave. A bluish light flickered deep in the rocks.

  Maybe it’s a way out.

  Maybe it’s your death.

  Either way, have fun!

  I crept along the planks and peered inside the glowing, craggy chamber. I gasped. Nothing in the guide could prepare me for what I saw.

  28

  Ten computers sat on ten messy desks with ten hulking figures hunched over their keyboards. They were scrolling through Facebook feeds and YouTube videos and Instagram pictures.

  “Check out at this loser with her cat,” one of them said, staring at a picture of a little girl cuddling her tabby cat. “It’s uglier than she is.”

  The others chuckled mildly.

  From my hiding place, I couldn’t see their faces; only their reflections on their computers. At first I just thought their screens were warped. Drawn by morbid curiosity, I quietly waded through the piles of potato chips, candy bars, power cables, and crushed cans of diet cherry Rocket Fuel Fizz to steal a look at these round mole people.

  What I saw will haunt me to the day I die.

  Their bodies were shrunken and withered into drooping sacks of pale, almost see-through flesh that hung down over the edges of their chairs. Their little legs had atrophied into footless nubs. From the sweaty haze and their rancid T-shirts, I took a wild guess that none of them had showered in years. Their arms, thin and wiry, were sunken into their sides. The only part of them that looked mobile was their twisted flippers that clacked away on their keyboards with remarkable speed. They were pruned into shriveled thirty-pound bodies.

  Their eyes were bloodshot and swollen to the size of ostrich eggs, stranded in pools of drooping skin. Their hideous, transfixed gazes never left their screens as they swallowed the internet whole.

  As the human beach balls scanned people’s profiles, they called out their cruel comments while typing them:

  “Nice pimples, freak!”

  “What a disgusting family you have. Now I see where you get your bad looks.”

  “No wonder your boyfriend dumped you. Hashtag yucky girl.”

  “This one’s superhot! Give her a billion likes!”

  “Oh, yeah! Billions and billions and billions of likes! Hottie McTotty.”

  “Did you get your outfit from a dumpster? All you could afford? So sad!”

  “Mistake face!”

  “Ew! You are so poor!”

  “You are a stupid fool with no IQ. Hashtag total life fail. LOL.”

  “Check out her bikini! So lit!”

  They made each other giggle a little, but none of them seemed really happy with what they were doing. None of them ever looked at each other. They kept searching for a target, commenting, and searching again.

  From A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting

  NAME: Internet troll

  TYPE: Mutated human

  ORIGIN: Born online

  STRENGTHS: Flaming insults, typing fast, hacking private accounts, bullying from afar, influencing people’s self-worth and perception of the facts by questioning and tearing everything to shreds. Disruption. Helping the enemy win. Ransoming people for Bitcoin.

  WEAKNESSES: Human contact IRL. Showers. Power outages. Blue skies.

  Gravel scraped under my sneaker.

  “Intruder!” shrieked a troll.

  There was a wet, squishing noise as they all turned to look at me. A troll lunged, but his squashy body was stuck to his seat.

  “Message the guards!” one of them cried.

  I dove for the power cord and yanked it out of the wall socket. Their computer screens died with a satisfying voip.

  “No!” they shrieked.

  Their slimy pseudopods trembled over their dead screens.

  A meatball-shaped boy-troll angrily scooted his chair across the floor. “Plug that back in or we’ll flame you.”

  I leveled my staff at his slimy forehead. “Only if you tell me how to get to the Baron’s compound. Start talking, Meatball.”


  The bags of flesh sneered and looked me up and down.

  “You’re her,” said Meatball. “The redheaded sitter.”

  They whispered my name. “It’s Kelly.”

  I narrowed my eyes. How did they know my name?

  “We know all about you, Kelly Ferguson. We’ve seen your pathetic posts and your wannabe pictures,” said Meatball.

  The others joined in.

  “Your selfies suck. I can’t even.”

  “She’s the creepy Crimson Crusader! The Fire Face Freak! Ha-ha! LMFAO!”

  My jaw hung open.

  A weight sank my heart to the floor.

  It was them.

  The trolls.

  “Your Insta-game is Insta-trash.”

  “Snapchat should ban you for life for the amount of times you’ve used the dog filter.”

  I slammed my staff into the ground. They trembled from the loud noise.

  “Are you human?” I asked.

  “Of course we are!” said Meatball.

  “Aren’t we gorgeous?” snickered another troll.

  “Have you looked in the mirror lately?” I snapped.

  “Oh, burn!” mocked Meatball. “Now who’s being the meanie?”

  I stopped myself.

  Don’t play their game. You might end up like them.

  I know this sounds weird, but I felt bad for them. Once, they were normal kids, but something about this island and their addiction had changed them into monsters.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “For the lolz,” said Meatball. “It’s fun.”

  My jaw clenched. “It’s fun to tear people apart and make them feel horrible?”

  “We also give out likes and shares.”

  “But usually that ends up being garbage, too.”

  “Even the people we make Insta-famous end up hating their lives because they feed on the image of happiness. But that’s not really them, is it? Sad.”

  “Sad.”

  The trolls nodded happily. It made my lips curl into a snarl.

  “Bullying kids from the comfort of your stinky chairs. You’re a bunch of cowards.”

  Meatball proudly lifted his chin. “Hate the game not the player.”

  “But why me? I never did anything to you,” I said.

  “Why you? Because you were an easy target.” His cruel, bulging eyes bored into me. “And because once the Baron sets his sights on you, there is no escape.”

  My ears perked up. “The Baron made you do this?”

  “He knew he could tear you apart from the inside out. Destroy your confidence. Ruin your self-image until you hate everything about yourself.”

  I swallowed hard.

  Their mutated faces leered at me.

  “And once we gutted you so you didn’t know which way to turn or what to believe, you would no longer be a threat to monsters everywhere. You’d be a hollow shell of a girl, endlessly scrolling through her phone. Seeking happiness and approval that would always be beyond your reach. Clearly the Baron’s plan worked. Because . . . here you are. A shadow of a girl. Broken, defeated. Stuck with the rest of us. Totally pwned.”

  A dark heaviness hung around my shoulders. My lower lip trembled.

  “Are you going to cry?” Meatball asked happily.

  “All the feels!” exclaimed a girl troll.

  “Cry! Cry! Cry!” they chanted.

  I wiped my tears with the back of my sleeve. “I’m not crying. Your smelly body odor and fart breaths are stinging my eyes!”

  I sniffed a snot bubble back into my nose. Their cackles swirled around me. I closed my eyes to block them out, but suddenly, I was back in Willow Brook Middle School, standing at my locker. Deanna and the Princess Pack were laughing at me. The whole hallway of kids and teachers joked about my flaws, my weaknesses, my weird stuff. The giggles and snarks pricked like a thousand knives. And just when I was about to crumble under the crushing weight of it all, I saw through the laughing crowd . . .

  Berna, Victor, Cassie, Curtis, Liz, and Kevin.

  They were surrounding me, forming a force-field of friendship that blocked out all the cruel jokes and evil chuckles. I basked in their warm, strong light.

  I opened my eyes.

  “Go ahead. Laugh,” I said. My voice was shaking. “If you want to make fun of me, say it to my face. I’ve got frizzy red hair and big ears. There isn’t a name I haven’t heard. Carrot Curls. Fire Face. Ginger Head.”

  The trolls giggled. They liked that one.

  “I might not be pretty or popular or cool, but I know me and my friends are freaking beautiful.”

  They groaned.

  “And yeah, I’m dorky and needy and awkward and weird, but that’s just me. But you know what? I like me. So do my friends. So does my family.”

  Saying that out loud gave me a boost of strength.

  “And if you want to say I’m chubby or I’m short or I’m stupid, go right ahead. Take your shot. But you don’t know me just because you saw a few pictures and posts online. I’m not taking the clickbait anymore.”

  My voice was no longer shaking.

  “I’m Kelly the Babysitter. And I came here to kick monster butt. And that is exactly what I’m going to do.”

  The trolls stared at me in shock.

  “Well, you’re still ugly, so there,” mumbled Meatball.

  “Yeah! And your hair is so, so, so red!” said the girl troll. “It looks like your head’s on fire.”

  I sighed and motioned for them to keep trying.

  “And . . . and . . . and your face is weird!”

  “Yeah! Mistake face. LOL!”

  “You’re the definition of the poop emoji!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Guys, we’ve been through this. Now you can either help me find my way out of here and get back to my friends or . . .”

  I swung my staff at Meatball’s computer.

  “No!” cried the troll.

  I stopped my staff an inch away from his precious screen. The trolls shook like Jell-O in their seats.

  Meatball whimpered and pointed to a crooked hole in the ceiling. “That’s where the goblins come down to feed us once a day. It leads to the Professor’s lab.”

  I cautiously looked up into the hole. A rusty, retractable ladder dangled from the dark opening.

  “If your friends aren’t there, they’re probably in the jail cells.”

  I narrowed my eyes at Meatball. “You know your way around this place?”

  “Like the back of my handlike object,” he said, holding up his flipper. “Wait, what are you doing?”

  “You’re coming with me,” I said, hoisting him out of his chair. “I need a guide, and it’s the only way to make sure you’re telling the truth.”

  Meatball flailed in my grip as I tied him to my backpack with a bunch of straps.

  “Let go of me!” he cried.

  He thrashed around, but he wasn’t used to so much physical activity and wore himself out quickly. Panting, he resigned to being carried like a sad thirty-pound water balloon.

  I dragged a desk under the ladder.

  “Wait!” cried the other trolls. “You need to plug the power back in.”

  They desperately pointed at the extension cord a few feet away from their chairs.

  “Why don’t you guys take a break. Stay off-line for a little bit,” I said.

  “And do what?” they shouted.

  As I scrambled up the ladder with Meatball in tow, the trolls yelled a flood of insults and cruel comments after me.

  “We hate you, mistake face!”

  The climb was long and hard, but I kept going, and soon, the voices below faded into nothingness.

  29

  At the top of the mile-high ladder, I shouldered a wooden door open and pulled myself and Meatball onto a concrete floor. I gulped for breath and rubbed my forearms. We were in a damp room filled with a wall of cages that held tiny monsters with tubes sticking out of their fur. Their blood was being drained i
nto nearby test tubes.

  I was about to set one of them free when it snapped a set of spiky, foaming fangs at me. I jumped back. Not only were they vicious, but they looked like they had monster rabies. Footsteps clomped around from the ceiling.

  “Don’t make a sound,” I whispered over my shoulder to Meatball.

  “You’re the one making noise, bigfoot,” he snapped. “I’m just hanging out.”

  “What’s up there?” I whispered. “Hey, I’m talking to you.”

  “You said not to make a sound,” he said.

  I shot my elbow into his side. “Do not mess with me, Meatball. I’ve iced monsters bigger and meaner than you.”

  “Testy, testy,” he said. “Up there is Professor Gonzalo’s creation station. But I wouldn’t go that way if I were you.”

  I looked around. A spiral staircase was the only exit. “Is there another way out?”

  “Nope. Hashtag you’re doomed.”

  “Thanks for nothing, Meatball.”

  “Hashtag you’re welcome for nothing.”

  “Stop hashtagging!”

  “Stop calling me Meatball, neck beard!”

  “Fine. What’s your name?”

  “Bow before the King Gamezee Seven Underscore Zero.”

  I cringed. “Your real name.”

  He thought for a moment and then said quietly, “You know, it’s been so long since anyone’s asked me that, I can’t remember.”

  Even though he reeked of moldy cheese, I felt sorry for him.

  “Well played,” he sighed. “Hashtag Meatball sad.”

  “Look. You help me find my friends, and I’ll set you up with a brand-new computer with the biggest screen and the fastest connection.”

  “And what do I get when the Baron kills you?”

  “Dude. When I say I’m going to do something, I can do it. I’m a babysitter.”

  Meatball let out a gurgling sigh. “Fine. Calm down. I’ll help. Please stop talking.”

  A door creaked open. I slid under the staircase and held my breath as a goblin wearing a hairnet, a doctor’s mask, and green scrubs bounded into the basement and collected the tubes full of black blood. The fuzzy, rabid creatures in cages barked and yapped at me.