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I shook my head. There’d been no signs of distress, but I recalled the pilot’s glowing red eyes and long fangs. I must have imagined them….
“Well?” Officer Smart asked.
“I don’t remember.” The less I said, the better. If I told them what I’d seen, they’d really think I needed a head scan. “What happened to the pilot?” I had to ask.
Smart glanced at Mom like she was looking for permission to tell me the awful truth.
“We haven’t found anyone,” Smart said. “There’s a search crew on the way.”
I didn’t see how anyone could have survived crashing into…Hold on. Search crew? My body stiffened. What if they found my cave? It would be
all over the news and all kinds of explorers would show up, thinking it was their volcano.
A car pulled up, and a second later Mr. O and Ms. Cab got out. They crossed the night desert slowly. She was wearing her big Chanel sunglasses to cover her nonworking eyes, and he had on his wide-brimmed cowboy hat, as usual, to cover his baldness. They looked like an old married couple, but unfortunately for Mr. O, that wasn’t the case. He was always asking me questions about her: What’s her favorite color? Does she ever talk about me? Do you think she’d go out with me? So one day I finally asked Ms. Cab if she’d ever be Mr. O’s girlfriend. By the look she gave me, you’d think I had asked her to leap into a fire pit. I never told Mr. O about it, because I knew it would make him feel fatter and balder than he already did, and he hadn’t given up. He was always working on some scheme to get her to go out to dinner with him. I respected the guy for that.
“Zane!” Mr. O said as he led Ms. Cab by the arm. His brown eyes were huge with worry. “I saw the explosion. Are you okay? Did the fire catched you?”
“It’s catch,” Ms. Cab mumbled as she pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.
I must’ve drop-rolled just in time, I thought.
Mom patted my shoulders. “Thank the saints, he’s safe now.”
“No good comes from stepping out of your house in the middle of the night, Zane,” Ms. Cab said. “What were you thinking?” She turned her head toward the volcano, and even behind her sunglasses, I could see her scowl. Her hands went to the Maya jade pendant dangling from a leather cord around her neck. She’d told me once that a protector spirit lived inside the jade. Seemed a pretty lame (and claustrophobic) place to live.
Smart asked to speak alone to Mom, and they wandered out of earshot.
Before I could wonder what that was about, Ms. Cab took me aside. “I’ve told you, this place is muy peligroso. You shouldn’t spend time here.”
“It’s not dangerous,” I argued. At least it wasn’t before tonight, I thought.
“Evil lurks here, Zane.” Ms. Cab adjusted her sunglasses. “I can sense it. You must stay away.”
Ha. If she only knew I’d found a way inside! Good thing her psychic abilities were hit-and-miss. It would seriously stink if she could see everything.
“Did you predict the plane crash?” I asked. “Did you know it was going to happen?”
Rosie chose that moment to break free. She took off running toward the volcano. Even with only three legs, she was a little rocket. I went after her, taking long strides, wishing I could break into a run. Still, I was a crazy-fast hobbler. “Rosie!”
“Zane!” Mom called after me.
I jumped from shadow to shadow to slip past the searchers. I headed around to the other side of the mountain, in the direction Rosie had gone. When I got there, the coast was clear—no one else was nosing around there yet. Smoke curled from the top of the Beast as if it were awake. Rosie stood at the base, barking like crazy. I picked my way toward her, wondering what had gotten her so worked up, and was finally able to grab her collar. Then my eyes followed hers until I saw what she saw.
I didn’t think I’d hit my head that hard. I froze, thinking what I was seeing had to be a hallucination.
I still wasn’t sure what exactly had been in the cockpit when the plane was coming straight toward me: An alien? A monster? A drunk pilot in a really good Halloween costume? Whatever it was, it had to have been killed in that crash. Yet here the dude was, behind a scrub brush a mere twenty feet in front of me, hunched over and digging like a wild animal. In the flesh, it was even more hideous than before, and it for sure wasn’t an alien or an award-winning costume. It… it looked like one of the monsters from my mythology book, except this guy was a whole lot uglier. The monster’s skin was a pasty bluish gray in the moonlight. It didn’t wear any clothes, but it didn’t need any. Its bloated body was covered in patches of dark hair. Cauliflower-like ears drooped down to its bulging neck. It turned and looked at me straight on with its huge lidless eyes. Standing up to its full freakish ten-foot height, it hobbled toward me, dragging its knuckles across the ground. How the heck had this dude fit in that tiny plane?
It hissed something at me that sounded like Ah-pooch. Or maybe it was Ah, puke. My mind was reeling too much to be sure.
I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out.
A giant black owl with glowing yellow eyes circled just a few feet above my head. It swooped so low, I had to duck to avoid its talons.
Mom caught up with me then. “Zane, what’s wrong with you? Why did you run off like that?”
“Mom, get back!” Why wasn’t she screaming?
The monster opened its awful mouth and yellow slime oozed out.
