by Gavin Brown
“The one of you and the gremlin, dummy.” Spike sighed as she kept tapping at her laptop.
At least I’m doing something, Spike thought as she went to work. And, of course, her dad would finally get a job and it would be working for a crook like Mike Tuckerville. She should have known not to trust Tuckerville and his smarmy hoodie and tie from the start.
Karim continued watching Mad Mackenzie’s live stream. On-screen, Mad Mackenzie was back in her Jeep, holding the captured gremlin in a crazy contraption. “That’s a little more sophisticated monster trap than our pot,” Karim said.
“Lads, this is a triple-reinforced titanium cage,” Mad Mackenzie said. “It only unlocks with my retinal scan. This little bugger is not going anywhere, even if what you folks are saying in the chat is true.”
Spike felt the snoring sound behind her, the one that Tommy made whenever he was annoyed.
“You took me out of the pic!” he said. “I sent you my selfie and you took me out of it!”
Spike shrugged. “I didn’t want your picture spread all over the internet because of this. Believe me, you don’t want that noise.”
She smiled, admiring her work. She’d posted it to Mad Mackenzie’s Twitch stream chat, along with a screenshot from Mad Mackenzie’s gremlin capture, showing the perfect match. The chat was full of other adventure fans calling her a liar and a fraud. But there were a few who believed her.
“Karim. That thing Mad Mackenzie just said. She was mentioning us!” Tommy started to jump up and down, shaking the floor. Ms. Hernandez yelled something from below about not breaking her house, and he stopped. “We’re flippin’ famous!”
“I can see that.” Karim turned to Spike. “What are you doing?”
“Spreading the hard truth,” Spike shot back. “The thing no one wants to hear. Life’s not all fun monster hunts and easy money. The system is busted.” They’d see. They’d all see.
“We should have talked this through before we jumped in.” Karim shook his head. “Who knows what could happen?”
“And then what?” Spike demanded. “You would have said you didn’t really want to do it? And then no one would know about this!”
“Or we’d have planned it out. Figured out how to do it smarter!” Karim shot back.
“No, I had to do it immediately, or you would have chickened out,” Spike said. “Like you always do.” She knew it wasn’t a very nice thing to say. But it was true, wasn’t it? Why shouldn’t she be able to say something that was true just because it wasn’t nice?
Tommy stood up. “Maybe we should leave her alone for a bit.”
Spike looked at him and nodded thoughtfully. Since right now she was furious at pretty much everyone and everything, that was probably the smartest thing he’d said in a while.
“Okay, sure,” Karim said, grabbing his backpack from the bed. “Are we going to try that monster hunt from AppVenture tomorrow?”
Tommy pulled out his phone and pulled up the app. “There’s still an adventure available.”
Spike glared at them both. “That company is corrupt. How can we keep adventuring if we know they’ll just release the monsters back into the wild?”
“We don’t know they do that for sure!” Karim responded. “Anything could have happened with that gremlin.”
Spike looked at them sadly and sighed. Were they really that naïve? “Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. I’m not adventuring until we know for sure. And even then—”
“Come on, Karim,” Tommy said with a shrug, and led the way down the stairs with Karim trailing behind him.
Spike sat for a long moment after they’d gone. AppVenture had made life so much fun for a week. And now her dad and that imbecile Mike Tuckerville had taken that away from her. Well, if they could take away something she loved, was she just going to sit there and accept it?
No. No, she was going to take something from them.
A few minutes later she was curled up in bed with her laptop, shoulders set in concentration. Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she spread the word across forums and chat rooms, and recruited others to her cause. She was going to blow this thing wide open.
Even if she could never seem to tell her dad how she really felt.
Well, this would show him, at least.
“She’ll be fine,” Tommy said. In response, Karim put a fork holding a single pea into his mouth.
The two were at their usual table in the cafeteria. Karim was just pushing his food around on the tray, though Tommy had destroyed his own meal with a vengeance and was slurping on one of his ridiculous Brotein (“It may cost an arm and a leg, but your remaining arm and leg will be totally ripped”) concoctions. It was supposedly chocolate but looked like goo left behind in the tracks of the notorious bog lurkers of the Louisiana bayou.
“You think so? She seemed pretty mad.” The only thing Karim had heard from her was a request to run an analysis of the Federal Monster Administration’s monster sighting data for the last year. He’d wanted to talk to her about why she was asking—but once he got started on the analysis he got a bit distracted. It was a good puzzle, and he’d been able to get all the data to make sense.
It turned out that there were monsters showing up all out of place, and usually a week or two after one had been confirmed caught somewhere else. But after he sent it over to her he didn’t hear anything back. She hadn’t even been in Karim’s math class that morning.
“Yeah, this is really not good,” Tommy said. “I was hanging out at Spike’s house when her dad came to visit last year. She was … let’s just say she was really not fun to be around. Like, the most not fun you can imagine. Really lashing out at everyone. Some of the things she said … I got out of there as fast as I could.” Tommy took a deep slurp of his shake.
Spike still laughed at Tommy and his protein and workout obsession. But if Karim was honest with himself, over the past month something about Tommy was starting to look a little more … muscley. Maybe this whole exercise thing had something to it after all. Karim was still not quite convinced.
They sat quietly for a moment, with only the sounds of kids at other tables and the occasional slurp from Tommy. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, two hands slapped down on the table, and Spike slid into a chair a moment after.
“Where were you this morning?” Karim asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Spike said. “They think I was sick, or whatever. Anyway, we need to go on more adventures.”
“What, just like that?” Karim demanded. “You just roll back in and we’re supposed to play along and do what you say?”
Spike brushed him off. “We need more evidence. A few people believe me, and they’re gathering data. But most of them are saying we’re wrong, just making things up. I have to catch and ID some monsters. I’ve been posting about it, but on the official AppVenture forums they just delete all the posts about it.”
“I totally want to catch more monsters,” Tommy said. “I haven’t earned enough money for camp yet. But what about all that stuff you said last week?”
Spike shrugged. “Sorry, I guess. Can we just forget it?”
Karim sighed. “You bailed on us! We had an adventure reserved. Tommy had to cancel it.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a good thing you didn’t go on it. You probably would have gotten yourselves killed. That would suck.” Spike paused for a moment. “Seriously, though. Don’t do that. I would be super bummed.”
Karim looked down at his plate and thought it over. Was that all the apology they were going to get?
“How do we know you’re not just going to bail on us again?” Tommy asked.
“He has a point,” Karim said. It wasn’t fair, Spike freaking out on them and then expecting to come right back like nothing had changed.
They sat staring at one another in angry silence for a minute as lunch ended and the cafeteria began to empty out. The table suddenly buzzed, and everyone looked down at Tommy’s phone.
“It’s … a video c
all … from AppVenture,” Tommy said. He just sat there, dumbly staring at it.
“Well, pick it up!” Spike said, and Tommy hesitantly hit the button.
Spike and Karim crowded around. The screen flickered for a moment. And then there he was, resplendent in his hoodie over a business suit. Mike Tuckerville.
Tuckerville raised an eyebrow. “Are you Thomas Wainwright? You look … young.”
Tommy glared back at the face on the phone. “I just look young! This camera doesn’t have enough megapixels to capture my beard. And look at these muscles!” He flexed.
“Look, punk,” Tuckerville began, “I pulled your file. I know that it was you who captured that gremlin and then posted it online.” The man leered at Tommy, the look of a killer if Karim had ever seen one.
“I, uh, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tommy said, stumbling over the words.
Tuckerville shrugged, then adjusted his tie with a sneer. “Sure, sure you don’t. Just leave off, and we won’t have a problem. Or keep going, and we will have a big, big problem.”
“Um, what sort of—” Tommy started, but Tuckerville plowed ahead.
“Just shut it down. Tuckerville out, losers,” the CEO said, and his picture disappeared.
Karim was frozen in place. Had that really happened? This was it. They never should have tried to go on adventures. They were screwed, screwed, screwed.
“We’ve got to bail,” Karim said. “Delete the app, hide the money. Never talk about it again. AppVenture? What’s that? Never heard of it.” He knew he was babbling, but he couldn’t stop. This could go so, so badly. “What were we even thinking starting with this? Are we really that big of idiots?”
“Karim,” Spike said calmly. “Chill.”
He stared at her blankly. “Um, okay.” He took a deep breath, trying to gain some measure of focus. “I am now chill. I am relaxed. And I quite calmly think that we have really screwed up. Okay, I’m actually not very chill. I don’t really do chill at times like this. Sorry.”
Tommy was staring at the phone, even though it just showed the home screen, which was technically a selfie of the three of them. But most of the frame was Tommy’s face; Spike was frowning at him, and Karim looked like he was thinking about something else and had no idea what was going on.
The cafeteria was empty now except for the custodian, newly thawed from being turned to stone, starting the slow work of cleaning up after the disaster zone that middle school lunch left behind. Normally, right now Karim would be freaking out about how they were going to be late for class. But this seemed a lot worse than just a tardy mark.
“Tommy?” Spike asked, tapping him on the temple. “Is anyone left in there, or did Mike Tuckerville blast it all out?”
Tommy turned slowly. “I hate him. I hate him so much. Maybe we should use the money we’ve earned so far to buy a ticket to San Francisco so that I can punch him in the face.”
“Would that solve the problem?” Spike asked.
“It would solve the problem of Mike Tuckerville not having been punched in the face,” Tommy shot back.
Spike sighed. “That might be satisfying for a minute. I can’t say I would mind seeing that. But it would be even more satisfying to win.”
Karim looked at her in shock. “Win? It’s game over!” Was Spike crazy? He supposed he already knew the answer to that one. Was there even a point in asking questions like that?
Spike shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on how good a plan we can come up with. What can you think of ? If, just imagine for a minute, we kept on fighting.”
Karim shook his head, trying to clear out the cloud of ideas that was starting to form. He couldn’t help it; wacky ideas just came to him.
“Don’t try your Jedi mind tricks on me,” he said, standing up from the lunch table. “I have to go to class.”
“Okay, okay,” Spike said. “Let’s talk tonight. It’s our usual video game night at your place, right?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess so,” Karim said. He stopped for a moment, a thought hitting him. “Just don’t do anything else until then, okay?” Karim asked. He knew it was the best he could hope for right now. He just needed to be sure Spike wouldn’t go right on the internet and get them in even deeper.
Video game night! It was the best night of the week. Tommy just hoped there wouldn’t be too much time spent talking. Those robots weren’t going to plasma blast themselves, after all.
Tommy hopped off his bike and walked it up the driveway, with Spike just behind him.
“I wish we could tell Mr. Khalil about our adventures,” he said. Even though he’d seen Mr. Khalil a bunch of times, the guy was still a living legend.
“No flippin’ way,” Spike answered. “Karim would probably snap and dye his hair blue and start listening to emo music. Which would be kind of a fun experiment to run. On second thought, maybe go ahead and—”
“Okay, okay, I won’t do it,” Tommy said as he rang the doorbell.
A few minutes later they were in Karim’s living room, sitting in front of the Khalils’ big living room TV. The video game controllers that they usually would fight over (the new one was way better, and it was definitely Tommy’s turn) were sitting ignored on the coffee table.
“Sure you don’t want to play some FIFA?” Karim asked nervously.
“No, we need to talk about this,” Spike said. “We have to go on more adventures. We’ve got to get more evidence.” She grabbed the keyboard and pulled up a series of videos. “People are finding more and more monsters that look similar. There’s a one-eared harpy that’s been caught three different times—in three different time zones!”
Tommy watched, impressed, as Spike scrolled through the videos. This had started as Spike’s crazy theory when she was angry, but he had to admit there was something to it.
“It looks like other people are all over it,” Karim said. “What’s there for us to do? Besides, you’re the one who wanted to stop just a few days ago!”
Spike shook her head. “The next step is to start tagging them, like they do in those shark documentaries. We need to tag monsters and turn them in to AppVenture to get re-released, in order to get solid evidence. Once we have real proof, we can blow the whole thing wide open.”
“Are we really going to let Mike Tuckerville win?” Tommy asked. “Are we going to let him intimidate us like this?”
He and Spike had talked about going it on their own, but they had barely finished their captures so far with three of them. They needed Karim’s clever ideas. And his dad’s magical sword. And, of course, his knowledge of monster lore—the kid was like a walking Mortimer’s Monsterpedia, only maybe a little more whiny and scared.
Karim sighed. “Look, I hate that guy too.”
“And you’re going to let him tell you that you can’t be an adventurer?” Spike asked.
Tommy nodded, impressed. He knew Karim, and that was just about the best pitch you could make to him.
Though Karim’s dad had been telling him his whole life not to adventure, it was still the only thing Karim ever talked about wanting to do. Other kids dreamed of being a basketball star or a musician. Tommy liked adventuring, but Karim lived and breathed it—even if he was less likely to put himself in danger. It was in his blood.
“Aren’t you guys worried what might happen? What if this all goes completely wrong?”
“That’s the fear talking,” Spike said. Tommy smiled. Quoting Mad Mackenzie was another good way to get Karim’s spirits up.
Karim took a long look at both of them, then straightened up. “Okay. Let’s at least look at the options, maybe. I guess … yeah, it’s like Mad Mackenzie said. Can’t let the fear be in charge.”
They started strategizing from there. Spike put a map up on the big screen, and they popped in all the sightings that had been reported by adventurers who had posted their hunts online. Even as they worked, two more data points came in from the East Coast, where a banshee and another gremlin had been hunted d
own.
It turned out that since Spike’s initial comments, Mad Mackenzie had been streaming about it nonstop and was now convinced too. Tommy had to admit, he was impressed. Spike had started something big. Her conspiracy theory had gone viral.
They were elbows deep in the internet and planning, when the floor creaked ominously. A shape came from the front hall. It was Mr. Khalil, moving almost silently in his wheelchair. Tommy’s breath caught. Mr. Khalil’s slicked-back hair had gone silver since his days on television, but his eyes blazed as dark as ever.
“Dad!” Karim exclaimed. “I thought you were at your club until nine!” Mr. Khalil had started the town’s first wheelchair parkour club.
Mr. Khalil glared at him. “So you were hiding this from me on purpose?”
“No, I, uh …” Karim sputtered.
Father glared at son.
Karim swallowed. “We’re just following along with the online adventurers.”
“And how does that explain the gremlin bites your mother found on your jeans?” Mr. Khalil asked, raising an eyebrow. “I knew I should never have let you go to Adventure Camp,” Mr. Khalil growled. “Why did I let your mother talk me into that?”
The three kids sat in silence for a long moment as Mr. Khalil’s gaze swung across them.
“Okay. So, what sort of adventuring madness have you gotten yourselves involved in?” Mr. Khalil demanded, eyeing the big map on the television screen.
Spike straightened up. “AppVenture. You know who they are?”
“Yeah,” Mr. Khalil muttered. “I’m not so completely out of touch.”
“We think they’re rereleasing the monsters they catch into the wild,” Spike said. “Probably to increase their profits.”
Mr. Khalil raised an eyebrow. “And you have proof of this? Strong evidence?”
“Well, no, not yet,” Spike admitted. “We don’t have the smoking gun. But there have been several incidents of similar-looking monsters being sighted around the country.”
Mr. Khalil sighed. “So, the usual conspiracy theories, then? People have been accusing adventurers of the catch-and-release scam since the Middle Ages.”