All These Monsters

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Part One: Run

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part Two: Team Loser

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Part Three: Engage in Combat at Your Own Risk

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Part Four: Keep Calm

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Part Five: Alive

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  Acknowledgments

  Coming Soon from Amy Tintera

  More Books from HMH Teen

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Copyright © 2020 by Amy Tintera

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Cover illustration © 2020 by Katlego Phatlane

  Cover design by Sharismar Rodriguez

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Tintera, Amy, author.

  Title: All these monsters / by Amy Tintera.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2020] | Summary: Seventeen-year-old Clara runs away from home to join a vigilante monster-fighting squad, only to discover that sometimes the most dangerous monsters are where you least expect them.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019011416 | ISBN 9780358012405 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Monsters—Fiction. | Social media—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | Family violence—Fiction. | Racially mixed people—Fiction. | Hispanic Americans—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.T493 Al 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011416

  eISBN 978-0-358-01170-5

  v1.0620

  Part One

  Run

  1

  The bag slammed into my body, and I hit the mat with a grunt. I flipped over, scrambling to my knees as I tried to find the weapon that just flew out of my hand.

  Four claws appeared at my throat. A loud buzzer sounded.

  Dead.

  I flopped back on the mat, letting out an annoyed huff of air. That was embarrassing. I didn’t even make it thirty seconds that round.

  “You have one more life,” the voice on the intercom said. “Do you want to take a break first?”

  I got to my feet and turned to where a large, skeptical man named Bubba watched me through the window. I considered telling him to forget about the last life. Surely I’d humiliated myself enough for one day.

  I shook my head. “No, I’m fine.”

  Bubba made a face like, wow, she’s an idiot. I was very familiar with this expression.

  He pressed a button on his computer, and the practice dummy retracted, squeaking as it zipped along the track mounted to the ceiling.

  I put my hands on my hips as I took a deep breath. Four lives, and I died within two minutes each round. I really was an idiot. Bubba was a good judge of character.

  “You sure you don’t want the body pads, Clara?” Bubba asked over the intercom. “You took a pretty big hit just now.”

  “No.” I shook out my shoulders. “I don’t need pads.” Pads were for football players. I’d never had padding to protect me from a hit.

  “The girls usually take the pads,” he said. “Especially . . .” He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t need to. Especially the girls who didn’t look tough. Especially the girls with their dark brown hair in French braid pigtails and breasts that were made to hold up dresses, not jump around fighting monsters. I really shouldn’t have been doing this in a regular bra. Sorry, boobs.

  “I don’t need pads,” I said again.

  “All right. Ready?” Bubba asked over the intercom.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sword.” Bubba sounded like he’d lost what little faith he had in me.

  I grabbed my sword from the mat. It wasn’t actually a sword, just a plastic tube that looked like it belonged on a vacuum cleaner. It had a light on the end that glowed green if I hit a weak spot. I’d only seen it light up once, briefly.

  The buzzer sounded, indicating that I had five seconds to prepare. I tightened my grip on my vacuum attachment.

  There were four practice dummies hanging from the ceiling, but I’d picked a level one session, so only one jolted away from the wall. It was made out of a large punching bag with plastic arms attached, complete with four-inch claws at the end.

  It looked cheap, and stupid. Until it started moving.

  The dummy flew at me, metal screeching as it zoomed forward. It was made to approximate a real scrab, and it moved incredibly fast.

  Claws sliced through the air. I stumbled backward, the mat squishing beneath my feet.

  The dummy’s body swung side to side as it raced along the track, claws outstretched. I ducked beneath its arms and darted around it. I’d clearly surprised it, because it took a second for it to swing around.

  I jumped forward, thrusting the sword at its neck. I saw the green light, but only for a second. I hadn’t put enough force behind the weapon for a kill shot.

  I barely pulled my hand back in time to miss getting dinged by plastic claws. I spun and ran, ready to swerve and surprise it again—

  The bag slammed into my back, sending me crashing into the wall. I hit it so hard that I could have sworn the wall shook. That was going to leave a bruise.

  “Whoa, are you—”

  Bubba’s voice cut out as I jumped away from the wall and dashed around the dummy. It swung to face me, all ten claws stretching for my face. I launched at it, throwing my sword into its neck as hard as I could.

  The sword glowed bright green. The dummy’s arms dropped. A pleasant dinging sound echoed through the room.

  I won. I killed it.

  “Congrats, darlin’,” Bubba said over the intercom. He didn’t actually sound all that happy for me. “You sure can take a hit. Last guy in here cried after round two.”

  I blew my bangs out of my eyes. I could definitely take a hit. One of my few talents.

  And I could kill a dummy pretending to be a scrab one in five times.

  I watched as the dummy retracted. If I’d had more money, I might have asked Bubba to give me another full set of lives. I wanted to pound the vacuum attachment into that fake scrab until it was thoroughly dead.

  “Meet me up front,” Bubba said.

  The dummy took its place at the back of the room, and I dropped my sword into its charger on the wall.

  I walked out of the simulation room and down the hallway to the front desk. Bubba’s Combat Training and Games wasn’t much to look at, inside or out. It was a squat, windowless building on the side of the highway, the kind of place that might be the last thing you saw before you died. The front room consisted of a few metal chairs, a desk, and walls covered in flyers advertising various services.

  Europea
n Vacation Special

  Buy 5 defense classes for the family and get 2 free!

  Weapons, Armor, and Guns

  What works, and what doesn’t. Free book with class!

  Florida Beach Tips

  Learn to spot scrabs in the sand.

  The last one was a couple years old. There hadn’t been a scrab sighting in Florida for a long time. They were rarely spotted anywhere in North America these days. It had been three months since the last one, in South Carolina, and the National Guard had shown up almost immediately to whisk it away.

  Bubba must never have removed old flyers, because I spotted a bunch of old stuff—the announcement requiring Texas high school students to take combat class instead of gym, a seminar discussing scrab origin theories, even a newspaper article from 2013 about the attack in New Orleans, with a photo of President Obama standing amongst the wreckage. The walls were more history than advertising.

  “All right, Clara,” Bubba said as he walked through the door and sat down at his desk. He pushed aside a coffee mug. “That’ll be twenty.”

  I dug the bill out of my pocket, flattening it with my hand against the counter before handing it over. Bubba whisked it into a box in the top drawer of the desk. I swallowed as I watched it disappear. With the exception of a few quarters, that was all the money I had. I’d been saving that twenty for months.

  The television mounted on the wall above my head was silently playing the news, and Bubba glanced up at it. The words Grayson St. John and Elite Fighting Squad scrolled across the bottom of the screen, beneath a photo of three scrabs standing over a destroyed food cart in Beijing. The scrabs looked a bit different depending on the region—in Asia they were large, typically six or seven feet tall, with enormous bodies covered in spikes. They ran on all fours and mostly used their massive mouths full of fangs to fight. Scrabs in Europe and the UK fought on two legs and made better use of their front claws. North American scrabs were a mix of both, but everyone said ours were smaller and kind of sluggish compared to the rest of the world.

  I wondered which version Bubba had modeled his dummy after.

  “You thinking of joining?” Bubba asked.

  “Uh, I don’t know.” I was too embarrassed to say yes.

  He squinted at me, running a hand over his dark beard. “You got any special skills or anything?”

  “No.” I tilted my head. “Well, maybe. Is surviving a special skill?”

  “I guess?” Bubba said it skeptically, probably thinking of my four deaths he’d just witnessed. But Bubba didn’t know. Not really.

  “Yeah, I’ve got that, then. Not dying. That’s what I’m good at.”

  2

  I had to take two buses to get home. The second one was crowded, and I pressed my body into a corner, face-to-face with a poster of Beyoncé selling makeup.

  My phone dinged repeatedly in my pocket, but I didn’t pull it out. My news alerts hadn’t stopped since last night. The same headline was everywhere—on the phones around me, rolling across the small television screen mounted to the wall of the bus behind the driver. GRAYSON ST. JOHN ANNOUNCES INTERNATIONAL FIGHT SQUAD.

  Grayson St. John would have beaten that fake scrab five out of five times. The people trying out for his fight squads probably could have done a level one course with their eyes closed.

  The bus screeched to a stop. I squeezed around a guy staring at his phone and stepped off.

  Sweat rolled down my back as I trudged down the sidewalk. It was May, in Dallas, which meant it had already been summer for a month.

  Fridays were always lively in my neighborhood, even with the heat. The Brown boys whizzed by on their bikes, a taco truck at the end of the block had several customers, and Mrs. Gonzalez sat on her porch, wearing her leather shoulder holster over her loose blue dress. Her gun sat against her hip, clearly visible to anyone who walked by. She’d moved here from New York City several years ago, after the scrab attack in Midtown Manhattan, and she spent all day, every day, on her porch with her gun. Some of the neighbors reminded her that she’d moved here because there had never been a scrab attack in Dallas. She’d showed them the scar on her leg—twenty-four stitches—where a scrab had swiped its claws across her flesh. We all left her alone.

  A few girls I went to school with were gathered around a car in the street, one of them on the ground, pulling a flat tire off the wheel. The girl sipping a large fountain drink, Adriana, caught me watching them and smiled, lifting her hand in a wave.

  “Hey, Clara!” Her nails were so bright pink that I could see the color from across the street. Adriana’s hair and makeup were always perfect—she’d been the one to teach me how to put on eyeliner.

  I waved back and walked a little faster.

  All the eleventh-grade girls in my neighborhood were friends, except for me. I’d hung out with them until middle school, when it had become clear that they were the smart girls, the girls who would get scholarships and spend years voluntarily going to school after the required portion. It would be a miracle if I even finished high school. I just made them uncomfortable, so I came up with excuses not to hang out with them until they stopped asking.

  I turned the corner and headed for the first house on the left. It was small, one-story, white, with bars on the windows that were ostensibly for our protection. The path to the front door was covered in weeds. The lawn always went to hell when Dad was gone.

  Inside, the television was on, the local news playing to our empty faded blue couch. Paintings hung at strange spots on the walls, like someone had slapped them wherever or had a very odd design sense. In reality, they covered bad patch jobs or holes that had never been fixed. The most recent addition was a brightly colored painting of Texas that hung crooked at my eye level.

  I found Mom in the kitchen, frantically stirring something in a bowl, flour dusting her black T-shirt. Mom did everything frantically, like someone was chasing her while she was mixing. I didn’t know if it was an acquired behavior or if she’d always been that way. I’d have put money on the former.

  She noticed me standing at the entrance to the kitchen. A crease appeared between her eyebrows. I was a constant source of worry, or disappointment, or concern. Never quite figured out which.

  “What are you making?” I asked.

  “Your school called,” she replied.

  My phone dinged in my pocket. In the other pocket was a summer school schedule confirming what we all already knew—I was an idiot. I swallowed as I pulled the paper out.

  “Two classes, mija?” Mom said, stirring so hard batter splattered across her shirt. “You failed two classes?”

  “I could never figure out what the physics teacher was talking about. It never made any sense to me. Even after lots of studying,” I added, which was a total lie. I never studied. How did you study something that made absolutely no sense? Was I supposed to stare at the book and hope it all miraculously clicked one day?

  “And English?” Mom asked. “How do you fail English? You like to read.”

  Not the kinds of books they made us read in class. I shrugged.

  She stopped stirring and let out a sigh so heavy the neighbors probably heard it. “You were supposed to get a job this summer.”

  “I know.”

  “You were supposed to help me.” She gestured with both arms to nothing in particular. I was supposed to get a job to help her pay the bills so she wouldn’t break down and call Dad again. It was our deal.

  “Maybe I should just get a GED,” I said.

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “I’m not going to college anyway. What does it matter?”

  “You are not dropping out of high school.”

  “Then I’ll get a job on nights and weekends. You worked in high school.”

  She gave me a look that clearly said, You’re not me. I wasn’t her. I’d never wanted to be, in most ways.

  The front door opened, and my older brother stepped inside. Laurence had an expression that clearly said he
wished he’d stayed gone longer. It was his usual expression.

  “I’m flunking out of high school,” I said.

  “Oh.” There was no surprise in his tone.

  “You are not flunking out. You’re going to summer school,” Mom said.

  Was physics suddenly going to make sense in summer school? I was going to fail, again, and we’d have further confirmation of my stupidity. It had been well established since first grade, when the teacher sent a note home to my parents saying I was unfocused and kept hitting the other kids when I got frustrated. I was nothing if not consistent.

  But no one ever asked why I was unfocused, or why I had so many absences, or why hitting the other kids seemed like a good idea. So I fell further behind, and I never found a way to catch up. My teachers got used to disappointment. We all did.

  “Just don’t call Dad,” I said. “We can figure this out.” I looked at Laurence, hoping for help, for a sudden reveal that he’d found a new job after getting fired from the last one.

  Laurence seemed uncomfortable, like he always did when anyone expected something of him. He was happiest slipping through life invisible, which should have been difficult, at six feet tall with the build of a former football player. But he managed it most of the time. He could move like a ballerina on a spy mission whenever he detected a potentially awkward situation.

  “My buddy has a line on a job,” he finally said. I didn’t try to hide my surprise. Laurence so rarely came through with the good news I hoped for.

  “It’s in Oklahoma,” he finished.

  Right. There was the Laurence I knew. Perpetually disappointing.

  “You’re moving to Oklahoma?” Mom abandoned her mixing and gaped at my brother.

  “It’s a good job,” he said apologetically. His gaze met mine, and he quickly looked away.

  If I were being reasonable, I’d say I couldn’t blame Laurence for wanting to leave. He was twenty years old; he was supposed to move out on his own, not hang around to help support his mom and little sister. Objectively, he was allowed to have his own life.

  In reality, I resented him. I wanted to ask him to stick it out for one more year, because surely—surely—I could figure out a way to escape when I was eighteen.