Chapter 3 We Have Dinner with Wormzilla
We Have Dinner with Wormzilla
I never realized there were so many ways to beg for your life.
First, I tried an aw, shucks routine on the harpies, complete with disarming grin. “Come on, it’s our first day! Can’t you let it slide just this once?”
Then Harper went for a happy, healthy harpy angle. “Seriously, you deserve better than four dirty, scrawny kids.” He pointed to the forest. “Why not go for a protein-rich drakon? I think I heard one back there in the woods!”
He poured on the charmspeak so much my mouth watered for a drakon burger, but the harpies did not look impressed.
Next was Benny’s we are family attempt: “Camp Half-Blood needs all of us! You’re part of Camp Half-Blood, too, right?”
Zuri opted for an aggressive flap around and find out strategy. Her skin took on that golden Apollo glow like she was about to go nuclear. “Or are you just a bunch of oversize birds? Because I hate birds.”
The harpies looked at one another. Then they burst out laughing.
“She hates birds!” The first harpy chortled.
“He tried charmspeak on harpies!” said the second, motioning to Harper.
“And her with the huge smile?” said the third. (Pretty sure that was about me.) “More teeth than Charybdis!”
I clamped my mouth shut. So much for my mom saying I had a good teeth-to-gums ratio.
The first harpy wiped away tears of laughter. “Too much for harpies’ stomachs.”
“They are so full of themselves, they would taste terrible,” agreed the second.
“A different punishment, then,” said the third.
All three heads swiveled in our direction. “Kitchen patrol!” they said in unison.
“Every night, two weeks,” said the first.
I exchanged looks with Benny, Harper, and Zuri.
“That…doesn’t sound so bad,” ventured Benny.
He shouldn’t have said that.
The harpies laughed even harder.
“Then you can start now!” said the first. “It is technically still night!”
“Yes!” the second cried with glee. “There is still much garbage behind the dining hall.”
“Go!” said the third harpy. “Take garbage to the Pit!”
“The Pit?” I asked. “What is that?”
“It is a pit.” The second harpy tilted her head. “This new camper is not so bright.”
The third harpy pointed with her wing. “Go past the dining pavilion. You will find the holy circle.”
Zuri crossed her arms. “It’s gotta be four in the morning. We’re not in any shape to find some holy circle of garbage.”
“Or we could eat you.” The first harpy stretched her lips into a wide smile. “Harpies would need antacids afterward. You seem very acidic. But it might be worth it.”
“Zuri’s just kidding!” Harper yelped. “We’ll take care of that garbage, no problem. Right, team?”
Without waiting for a response, Harper herded the rest of us toward the dining pavilion.
The harpies let us go, but I could feel their beady eyes on my back, watching to make sure we were headed in the right direction.
I glanced at the woods. Still no sign of Grant.
“Maybe this is good,” I mumbled, mostly to myself. “Maybe we’ll take all the heat, and Grant can slip in without getting caught.”
“I still can’t believe you just left him,” Benny muttered.
I threw my hands in the air. “Grant promised he had a plan! Doesn’t he seem like the kind of guy who would have a plan?”
I looked to Harper and Zuri for help.
Zuri shrugged. “Maybe. But around here, it seems like you have to have a plan, a backup plan, and a backup backup plan.”
Harper squinted at her. “And what was your plan back there? If you were trying to get us eaten by harpies, you were doing a great job.”
Zuri scoffed. “They weren’t going to eat us. They’re glorified chickens.”
“Shh,” Benny warned. “Let’s keep moving. The faster we take out the garbage, the sooner we can get to sleep.”
That sounded really good, though I figured we would only get a few hours of shut-eye at best. That was assuming I could even fall asleep after what we’d been through.
Another one of my superpowers, along with mental-gridding, occasional bursts of strength, and my Charybdis smile, was being too hard on myself. I’d had a lot of practice.
I couldn’t believe I’d been at home just two days ago, griping about normal stuff like my Perfect Older Sister? and my mom’s way-too-high expectations for me.
Now I’d lost my mom and Olivia. I’d fled my house.
I’d been recruited into the world’s weirdest training camp, abandoned my only friend in the Wild Zone, and gotten assigned to kitchen patrol with three other kids I didn’t know and who didn’t seem to like me much.
Not that I could blame them.
I didn’t like myself very much at the moment either.
At least we found the garbage. It was hard to miss, since it smelled even worse than the harpies.
Piled against the back steps of the pavilion was a mountain of burlap trash sacks overflowing with half-chewed corn cobs, gristly pieces of brisket, mushy potato salad, and—yep, the mangled remains of several chili cheese dogs, may they rest in peace.
“Ugh,” I said. “What kind of barbarians leave this much trash after dinner?”
“That would be us,” Benny said.
He hefted two sacks like they weighed no more than milk jugs. Zuri and I each took one of the others. I tried to hold mine at arm’s length, but that didn’t help with the smell.
Harper, meanwhile, hugged his burlap bag of juicy grossness like it was a dear friend.
I wrinkled my nose. “Aren’t you worried you’re going to smell?”
If anybody cared about image, I figured it would be a child of Aphrodite.
Harper shrugged. “I have a strong stomach. And I already smell pretty bad from that quickmud. Besides, being Aphrodite’s kid means people are attracted to me no matter what. I could be covered in boils and smell like old lunchmeat, and all the other kids would still find me charming.”
He said this not like he was bragging, but like he found it kind of tragic.
Benny cocked his head. “Even the people in your own cabin?”
Harper frowned. “Shoot. I didn’t think about that.” He lowered his nose toward the bag, took a tentative sniff, and made a horrible face. “Oh, gods.”
“Let’s just figure out where we’re supposed to dump these,” Zuri said. “Anyone see a holy circle?”
I scanned the dark field in front of us. Just past the broad, twisted trunk of an olive tree, I spotted a cylindrical brick structure like a well.
“What about that?” I asked.
Benny approached it, and the rest of us followed. It did indeed seem to be a large well, maybe twenty feet in diameter, covered with a wooden lid.
“Okay,” Benny said. “Not sure why this is a holy circle, though.”
Zuri tapped her knuckle on the wooden cover. Holes punctured its surface every few inches. “What about a circle with holes? A holey circle.”
“Ugh.” Harper grimaced. “The harpies got dad jokes.”
Benny set down his garbage bags and pried the cover off the well. He peered inside. I tensed, remembering Grant sticking his arm into that fissure in the woods.
Benny frowned. “Huh. Weird.”
That didn’t sound good.
I inched forward, face pressed into my sleeve to avoid smelling whatever was in the Pit. If it were really a garbage dump, I figured it would smell even worse than the sack I was holding.
I had some trauma around rotting food. One time, I’d left my backpack at school over winter break with a kimbap roll inside. Trust me when I say you don’t want to leave seaweed, rice, and crabmeat alone for three weeks.
Unless you want your school to make national news.
Here at the Pit, though, there was nothing newsworthy. Not even a stench.
Zuri joined us at the rim. She made her hand glow with a soft golden light.
Nice to have a built-in flashlight feature.
I peered into the hole, expecting to see an endless morass of mildewed burlap bags and moldy food from a thousand past meals.
But all I could see, about twenty feet down, was a layer of fine, dark dirt.
“Are we sure this is the Pit?” I asked. “Where’s the smell? Where’s all the garbage from before now?”
The others peered into the hole too.
“One way to find out.” Zuri pitched her sack into the well.
THWACK!
The sack hit the dirt, the sound echoing out of the shaft.
I glared at Zuri. “Why did you do that?”
“What?” she demanded. “Nothing bad happened.”
BOOM!
A white worm the size of a tree trunk burst up through the dirt.
“AHHH!!!” I screamed.
“AHHH!!!” Benny screamed.
“AHHH!!!” Harper screamed.
“WORM!!!” Zuri screamed.
Apparently, none of us had a clever one-liner for a worm attack.
We did, however, recover quickly.
Benny grabbed the well cover and raised it like a shield while the worm swallowed the garbage bag Zuri had thrown in.
I’d never seen a worm eating up close before, and I never wanted to again.
I fumbled for my dagger, scanning the worm for soft spots in case it attacked.
Unfortunately, on a worm, everything looks like a soft spot.
Harper and Zuri threw in more bags of garbage, trying to bury the worm, but it seemed to enjoy that. It thrashed its head around, ripping through burlap and hoovering up rancid leftovers. Then, once it had consumed everything, the worm plunged back under the dirt and disappeared.
We all exchanged nervous looks.
Benny moved to try and cover us with his makeshift shield. “Is everyone okay?”
I shuddered. “Until that thing realizes it could eat us instead of table scraps.”
BOOM!
The white worm exploded out of the dirt again, twisting sideways toward Harper.
“Argh!” He dropped his garbage bag, and the worm deftly caught it in its maw, sucking it down whole. Then, instead of diving back into the dirt, the worm turned its head (front end? nozzle?) toward Harper, as if thinking Tasty?
“Harper, don’t move,” Benny warned.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Harper said.
Zuri’s hand crept toward her necklace. I gripped my dagger.
The worm swayed back and forth, face-level with Harper. Since twenty feet of its body was now showing above the dirt, I figured the thing had to be at least twice that long in total. And it was fast. If it decided to grab him…
“Hold on,” Harper said, sensing we were ready to attack.
He extended his hand toward the worm.