Defender Read online

  There’s a faint smell in the air, something bad. It always stinks down here, with mold everywhere and mushrooms sprouting in the darkest corners. We find the occasional dead rat, and you get slobs using the stairwells as urinals.

  Scanning my light away from the furnace to the back wall, I catch sight of something. What is that?

  A major crack in the wall stretches from the ceiling halfway to the floor, opening up a big hole. Chunks of concrete and plaster are scattered around. The crack looks new, with fresh scrapes in the dust where the debris has fallen.

  As I go for a closer look, the rotten smell gets stronger. I aim my light into the hole and see that it opens onto a shaft that shoots up behind the wall. This must be the garbage chute that emptied out near the furnace, where the trash bags would pile up on the floor before getting shoveled into the flames. Shining the light beam down, I spot something stuck at the bottom of the shaft.

  A dusty garbage bag is stuffed in there. Looks like it was torn open by the falling concrete, with what’s inside now spilling out.

  My little light barely penetrates the blackness. But it shows me—

  It’s like something from a butcher shop. I make out a rib cage. Might be a whole animal carcass dumped in there, split open down the middle and hollowed out. How did that get here? The whole chute was emptied before they sealed it.

  No way I’m cleaning this up. Not touching that.

  Shifting the beam up the ribs, I see—

  What is—

  Oh God! No! No!

  It’s a face! A face! A human face!

  I can’t move. Can’t look away. Shocked stiff.

  The skin is shriveled tight to the skull. Closed eyelids sunken like there’s nothing left in the sockets. The head stretched back, neck tendons standing out like wire. Mouth wide.

  I can’t move.

  A girl’s face, twisted in pain.

  It looks dried out and mummified. Like it’s been in there a long time.

  My knees go weak and I stumble back. The throbbing of the pump pulses from the walls.

  I stagger to the door and slam it behind me.

  Run!

  “STOP,” DAD TELLS me. “Slow down and breathe. You’re not making sense.”

  There was no one home when I rushed up to the apartment, so I had to track Dad down. He’s replacing blown fuses on the fifteenth floor.

  My heart is still hammering. Dad puts his hand on my shoulder to steady me, his face gone pale.

  “You saw a body? In the basement?”

  I nod, panting.

  “A dead body? My God, where?”

  “The incinerator room. Inside the wall. The old chute.”

  He frowns at me. “What do you mean? That’s sealed up.”

  “There’s a big hole in the wall. Must be from them tearing up the street. I saw cracks all around the door and went inside to check for more damage. That’s when I found it.”

  “But that chute?” Dad is shaking his head. “It was emptied out before it was closed years ago.”

  “Are you hearing me? There’s a girl’s body stuffed inside.”

  I guess it finally hits him that I’m serious. He looks stunned.

  “A girl?”

  “Yeah. A teenager, maybe.”

  He’s lost in shock for a long moment.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah. I’ll…I’ll go check it out.”

  “Let me show you.”

  He shakes his head. “No. No, you wait in the apartment. Sit, calm down and catch your breath. I’ll go look.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. Just wait for me there. Don’t do anything, just stay there till I come back.”

  We get on the elevator, and he lets me off on our floor before heading down alone. I go in the apartment and pace around the kitchen. Wherever I look I can’t stop seeing that thing—it’s scorched into the back of my eyes. Dried and mummified, preserved in death. Ripped open and gutted—

  My stomach starts to heave. Rushing to the bathroom, I collapse on my knees and puke till I’m empty. My legs are so weak I have to pull myself up on the sink. I rinse my mouth and brush my teeth.

  Then I sit on the edge of the tub till I can stand again. I go to my room and suck in deep breaths by the window, forehead pressed to the screen. Wish I could stick my head out into the sunlight, but Dad bolted screens onto all our windows, because Squirrel climbs on everything.

  Standing here, I zone out for a while.

  What’s taking Dad so long? Is he calling the police? I don’t see any cop cars. It’s been maybe twenty minutes. Longer. What’s he doing?

  I try him on my cell, but it goes straight to voice mail.

  That girl wasn’t just killed, she was slaughtered. What kind of monster—

  I jump at the sound of our apartment door opening. I find Dad in the kitchen, washing his hands in the sink.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah.” He keeps scrubbing, his back to me.

  “So? You saw it? What do we do?”

  He glances over, but it’s like he’s looking right through me, his eyes focused on something else. It takes a moment before his gaze locks on to mine.

  “What?” he says.

  “You saw it?”

  Turning the water off, Dad dries his hands on a paper towel. “Honey, there was nothing but some old garbage in the chute. No body.”

  “What? You must have been looking in the wrong place. It’s in the incinerator room, at the bottom of the chute. There’s a huge crack in the wall. You can’t miss it.”

  “I know where you mean, Tyne. But you’re—you’re wrong. It’s dark in there, all shadows. Really, I—I dug around and there’s just trash that got trapped and left behind when it was sealed shut.”

  “No. I saw it. That thing. It’s a real dead body. I had my flashlight and everything. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  I move toward the door.

  He just stands there, drying his hands. “Tyne, I believe you—that you think you saw something. But you must have been seeing things. I’m thinking maybe it’s a side effect from the painkillers. They can mess with your brain, right? Make you see things. Hallucinate stuff.”

  “I wasn’t hallucinating. I’m sure. I saw it.”

  “Just sit down for a minute.”

  “I can’t sit. Let’s go back down. You’ll see.”

  “I was just there. And looked all around in the chute and the shaft.”

  He’s not hearing me. “Whatever. I’ll go myself. And take a picture of it for you.” I wave my cell phone and head for the door.

  Dad grabs my wrist. “Hold on. Just wait.”

  “For what?”

  I can see him thinking that I’m freaking out. But he looks kind of shaken too. Maybe scared I’m losing it.

  “Okay.” He gives in. “But…calm down. You’ll see it’s nothing.”

  So we go. It’s a long, quiet ride down on the elevator, till I break the silence.

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “I wasn’t saying that. It’s just—you have to trust me on this.”

  We get off at the basement and the first thing I notice is the silence. That drumbeat pulse is gone.

  “The pump?” I ask.

  “Off. The flood’s been drained.”

  As we approach the incinerator room, a cold sweat trickles icy fingers down the back of my neck. Dad steps over the rubble of fallen plaster and unlocks the door. It’s still jammed, so he shoves it open.

  My heart is hammering so hard it hurts.

  Dad turns on his flashlight, a big one with a bright high beam that pushes the shadows back. I flick mine on too and follow him in.

  “Over there,” I whisper.

  “I know.” His deep voice echoes in here.

  His boots kick up a haze of dust crossing the room. Dad stops in front of the gaping hole in the wall, and I have to force myself those last steps to join him. The rotten smell is very faint now, barely there. He shines his light into the ch
ute. Glancing at him for his reaction before I lean in to look, all I see is his worried frown. Then I follow his light, bracing myself for that corpse. And—

  It’s not there. What the hell?

  “It was here. I swear it.”

  Twisting around, I sweep my beam along the bottom, then up the shadowy tunnel of the shaft. As if that thing might be clinging to the sides up there or something, hiding. There’s just a scattering of trash at the bottom, not enough to bury a body in.

  “I don’t…I don’t understand. Can you smell that?”

  He shrugs. “Might be a dead mouse. That’s all.”

  I shake my head. “No. There was a body. I’m sure, really….” I trail off.

  Dad rests his hand on my arm. “Don’t worry. Your painkillers are strong drugs; they can make you see things, especially in the dark. Hard to see anything in here.”

  “I don’t know. Don’t know.”

  “Let it go, Tyne. Come on, we’ll get out of here. You get some fresh air and sunshine. This will all seem like a dream in no time.”

  I’m not sure what to do, what to think. But I follow him, lighting up the corners of the room as we go, searching for anything. To make sure nobody else was here between when I ran out and Dad came down to check, I study our shoe prints in the decades-old dust on the floor, and see that there are only mine and his. No tracks but ours.

  And no sign of that thing crawling out of there and away on its own—which is crazy, I know.

  I just want out. Now.

  STEPPING OUT INTO the sunlight with Stick, my mind’s a mess. Was I really hallucinating on my meds?

  Stick puts his arm around my waist. As we walk down the block, I let him distract me.

  Stick’s a little bit of everything. He’s got a mix of Latino-Caribbean and white blood that gives him mocha skin and crazy spiky curls that spring out in all directions. He has these electric-blue eyes, and it feels like there’s a live current charging through him. It’s contagious—his energy grabs me now.

  Hard to say when me and Stick became a thing. I’ve known him since we were little and he moved into the Zoo. He’s a foster kid who got bounced around a lot of homes before getting placed with a family here.

  I met him in first grade. They always made me sit in the back of the class because I was so tall and blocked the view for the other kids. Stick stumbled in before the start of class one morning, and went up to the teacher’s desk with a note and his goofy smile. She told him to take one of the empty desks in back. When he caught sight of me he waved like we were old friends, sat next to me and started talking nonstop.

  “Hey, I saw you at my new building. So we’re neighbors there, and we’re neighbors here too in class, I guess. I’m the new guy. I’m always the new guy, everywhere I go. I’m a foster kid and I move around a lot. I make a map when they send me to a new place so I know where I am and where to go home. The map’s got my new address and phone number on it, my new mom’s name and everything.”

  He pulled out his map. It showed our neighborhood, with the streets and our school marked on it.

  “My sister—not my real sister, she’s a foster too but older—she’ll take me home after school. My name is Ricky, but my new sister calls me Stick. We share a room, and she says if I touch her stuff she’ll snap me like a stick. She calls me that so I won’t forget, and because I’m skinny like a stick. You can call me that too if you want. I get new numbers and everything, so I guess I get a new name too.”

  He was breathless at the end, wheezing. I just sat there, stunned that anybody could say so much so fast.

  Since then he’s always been there, following me around like a lost puppy at the start, then as my sidekick exploring the city, and somewhere in these past few years he became my guy. At first it felt weird, but now it’s so right—as we walk down the street, his hand on my hip feels like it belongs there.

  “—like a grave,” he’s saying.

  I don’t catch the rest. I hear “grave” and it’s like he’s reading my mind as I flash back to the vision of the body in the wall.

  “What? What’s like a grave?”

  “This.” Stick waves his hand at the block-long trench where our street used to be, dug up to replace the sewer lines. “A grave big enough for a giant. Like you.” He laughs. “Hey, I was thinking we gotta get you a new nickname for when you’re playing hoops. I mean, some of the ones you’ve got are okay—Girlzilla, Titanic—but you want something real catchy for when you go pro.”

  “What are you talking about? Pro? I’ll be lucky if I can score a college scholarship.”

  Stick’s always dreaming.

  “Hear me out,” he says. “I was thinking of something like Amazon, after those legendary girl warriors. But how about—Slamazon. For when you slam-dunk. Slam-dunk-damn-azon.”

  “You don’t get to choose your nickname,” I tell him. “You get stuck with whatever sticks to you. Like Stick!”

  And besides, slam-dunking is what got me hurt and sidelined for the past three weeks. We were playing against Rawlings, a private school, and we were up by ten points late in the game. All we had to do was run out the clock. But they were the rich kids and we were the public school bottom-feeders, so we had to show them up on their home court. My girls were pushing me to try a move I’d only made in practice, and slam dunk. Dunking is really rare in girls’ basketball, where most of us don’t have the height or jump to make the move like the guys. But that night I was feeling lucky, and when I got an open run at the basket I went for it. I had the speed, the jump and elevation perfect—the whole calculus. I went airborne, flying to the hoop and slamming it. But what goes up must come down. While my team went wild at the shot, I landed off-balance where the court was slippery with sweat, my right leg buckled, hyperextending my knee and damaging my MCL.

  I’ve rerun that moment a million times since, wishing I could replay it any other way. Lying there on the court in a world of pain, my life didn’t flash in front of my eyes, but my future did. Because basketball is my only escape from the Zoo. No way I want to inherit the family business, being super like Dad and his dad before him. This girl’s got to go!

  “You’re not limping so bad,” Stick says.

  “Yeah, and the doc told me I don’t have to wear the knee brace all the time now.”

  “Is it still hurting?”

  “Not so much when I get it warmed up and moving. And the pills take the edge off.”

  But what else are the pills doing to me?

  “Any time you need a massage, I’m there.” His hand slips from my waist to rub the small of my back. “You know my magic fingers.”

  “Your magic massages always wander higher than my knee.”

  He waggles his eyebrows at me. “I’m a full-service body mechanic.”

  I can’t help cracking up. I’m glad Stick sees the girl behind the giant; nobody else does. If I wear a lot of makeup, I look ridiculous. My wardrobe of T-shirts, hoodies and track pants comes from the men’s department. It’s the only stuff that fits. In a dress or a skirt, with my broad shoulders and slim hips, I come off like a drag queen.

  We pass by the homeless shelter on the end of the street.

  Our block, with its towering Zoo, is like an island of slum in downtown Toronto. The last ruins of the old ghetto that used to dominate the area. On the edge of what they call Cabbagetown, which got its name back when it was home to the poorest of the poor who couldn’t waste any space on lawns, so they grew cabbages in their yards instead of grass. Now the area is full of new condos and swanky stores. The Zoo is all that’s left; we’re castaways surrounded by an ocean of urban redevelopment.

  “Where we headed?” I ask.

  “Paradise.”

  Pizza Paradise has a dim, smoky interior lit by the oven fire in back. The place is a grease pit, with earsplitting metal music and a dark vibe that scares off most people. It should say eat at your own risk, but they’ve got the cheapest pies in town, and they’re death-defyingly yum
my.

  “So, you buying?” Stick asks, flashing his goofy grin. The guy’s always broke.

  “Sure, I just got paid.”

  Dad gave me extra—disaster pay.

  “Save us a spot,” Stick says, grabbing some cash and diving inside.

  I sit on the bench out front, stretching my knee. Another week and I’ll be back in practice.

  I came late to basketball. Never was a jock, couldn’t keep up with my body as it grew so big, so fast. Always awkward and out of control. When you see me coming, you think: that girl was made to play hoops. But when you grow up being stared at, laughed at and yelled at in the street—slammed for my size—the last thing you want is to get in front of a crowd and make yourself an easy target. Then, last year, I realized my grades weren’t going to win a scholarship and basketball might be my ticket out. So I went to Dad and said show me the game.

  He played in high school, but his game days ended when he snapped an Achilles tendon. He still walks with a hitch in his step. That’s why he never pushed hoops on me. He didn’t want his girl limping through life like him.

  When I play it ain’t pretty. I run around the court like Godzilla trashing Tokyo. You try dancing with size fourteen feet. But a funny thing happened when I got into the game—nobody was laughing at me anymore; they were cheering. And I was hooked. I like being where my size matters.

  The noon sun chases away the December chill, warming me. And the creeps are starting to fade. Like Dad said, it was a pharmaceutical hallucination. I checked, and that’s a possible side effect of the pills.

  But it seemed so real, the sight of it, and the feel of being close-up with death, like nothing else. How could my brain fake all that?

  Stick comes out of the Paradise smoke cloud with two larges and slides down beside me on the bench.

  “I’m not that hungry,” I say as he flips the boxes open to reveal the pizzas in all their greasy glory.

  “Who says you’re getting any?”

  Stick’s got a huge appetite and a nuclear metabolism that burns it all off. The pies are delicious. What exactly the meats are on our 3 Meat pizzas is a mystery, and there’s enough cheese to give you a heart attack—but what a way to go.