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.”