1st 5 Pages August Workshop - Leun Rev 1

Name: Garrett Vander Leun
Genre: YA - Urban Fantasy
Title: MONSTER TOWN

Henry had thought about killing his dad before. Hell, he'd wished it on candles.

Henry picked apart a fistful of foam from the hole in his seat, watching while his dad got his special driving outfit all sorted out.

A pink gardening hat with a brim big enough to blot out twenty suns.

Yellow plastic kitchen gloves, cinched around his wrists with hair ties.

Orange snowboarding goggles, wrenched down so tight that his pasty face screamed pink mercy all around the edges. And then there was the shirt. A vintage, loosey-goosey Hawaiian shirt just because. Because he liked the way the breeze tickled his pits, just like he liked the way his leather sandals let his toes sing, just like every little thing he did seemed calculated to piss Henry off.

Henry's eyes shifted over to a green, wooden gardening stake on the work table in the garage. What would it take, two seconds to climb out and grab it? Five more to plunge it through his dad's vegetarian, vampire heart? Henry smiled. Blood would spurt all over the concrete, his dad would drop, and the wonders of his weakness would do the rest. His dad would probably gurgle out some sort of wheezy last words, too.

But I loved you, Son!

Bullshit! He'd straddle his dad while while he convulsed. I'm being released tonight, and you haven't said one word to me about it because the only thing you care about in this prison is you and your kind. Henry would slap him when the death rattle crept up his throat. Hey! Stay with me, he'd yell. This is for mom. This is for chasing her off when I was three, for leaving me with nothing but a faded picture and half a bottle of her perfume. This is to remind you that my kind won.

Henry saluted his dad with a middle finger.

Anton yanked the car door open and climbed inside. "You know what?"

Henry never would, because his dad loved to let the empty threats dangle. Cowardice was the lifeblood of Section 671, the reason all of the non-fighters ended up between those four giant walls in the first place. None of them fought during the war between monsters and humans. Their monster kids played the same game; anytime they wanted to work their vengeance against humankind out on Henry, they simply made it look like an accident. Like Henry couldn't walk without tripping one foot over the other.

Scratches, scrapes, scars - the school principal knew the truth, but every single report went to the sheriff station with a box marked 'accident.'

The car screamed when his dad turned the engine over, belts and things he'd promised to repair for years. You could hear it coming from blocks away, a sound like someone playing basketball with a typewriter. But his dad was going to fix it eventually, right after he made room in between all his secrets. All-nighters in the library, backroom meetings in the hardware store, entire days hunkered down inside his blackout chamber, and not a single one of them explained to Henry.

But I'm going fix our van up this weekend, Hanky Panky - trust me!

Anton held his breath when he backed out, waiting to see what bit of skin he'd forgot to cover when the sunlight rolled over the car.

"Your forearms, Anton."

"Ah-ya-ya!" The exposed flesh crackled like bacon as soon as the sun hit.

"Jesus!" Henry grabbed the cuffs of his dad's long-sleeve t-shirt and pulled them out from under the short-sleeved Hawaiian one. The whole car smelled like rotten lunch meat.

"We're good - I'm good - everything's good." The car pummeled the neighbor's bushes and laid waist to most of their lawn before everything was finally good. Anton steered the van out on the open road and choo-choo'ed his pain through the back of his teeth. "I asked you to lay off his name."

"Who? Jesus Christ?"

His dad moaned through a wave of nausea.

"You realize Arbo fucks with me every time you destroy their yard?" Their neighbors were plant elementals; they felt every green, growing thing in town like it was their own skin.

"Can you not with the language? Tell Arbo it was an accident, he'll understand."

Henry shook his head. Not even the monsters understood his dad.

He'd disbanded his gang of vampires before Henry was born and gone vegetarian shortly after that. Henry came along right about the time The War was coming to an end and his dad was the only supermonster to sit it out. Henry had never even seen him sprout a single fang or batwing even though he'd begged him for years.

It cramps up my arms, Hanky Panky!

Between that and all the Cat Stevens music, Anton was basically a human, too.

Anton pushed the cassette tape in. True to form, Peace Train came blaring down the tracks. Henry gave it about two seconds before he popped it back out.

"Don't start - it's my week, Henry."

"And it's my release day, Asshole."

His dad's face went paler than pale. The tiny blue veins practically screamed from the sides of his temples. "I didn't forget. I was thinking about it this weekend, but I had the thing at the library last night and I guess it just slipped out, you know?" His dad cleared his throat. "Happy Birthday, Son."

Henry turned out towards the window. The whole town was one endless, tattered rainbow. Yellow was the color of the weeds in the ghouls' yards, because they were too dead to care. Black was the color of the oil stains splattered in the driveways of the ghosts, because they were too immaterial to scrub it. Brown was the color of the burnt and brittle dirt in the centaur paddocks, because those proud little ponies would never be forced into running behind a fence.

Every time something else raced by, Henry told himself it was the last time he was going to have to look at it. That it was going to be the last day he lived in a world built on hand-me-down human relics. By tomorrow, everything's going to be new, he thought.

In all his time poking through the scratched up records and DVDs at Jukebox, Henry had only found four records that did anything for him. They did everything for him, actually.

BLACK FLAG's Damaged. He started shaving his head because of the cover and he worshipped the lead singer, also Henry, by name and grumbled gruffness alone.

DAMNED's Damned, Damned, Damned. The album sounded like a bunch of fools slopping their way through a party. Henry liked to pretend the band were his best friends, that he was rocking out right beside them.

MINOR THREAT's Out of Step. A galloping, relentless anthem for change and rebelliousness. Henry cued it up whenever his dad told Henry to take his mouth to his room.

He'd found the fourth gem hidden inside of the MINOR THREAT record. An anti-monster band. WOODY STEAKS' The Last Drop. Henry's dad still didn't know he had it; he played it during the day with headphones on while his dad slept.

Henry looked at his dad in the driver seat and then he flipped the cassette over - he'd recorded all his favorite songs on the backside - and shoved it in. And turned it up.