European Vacation Special
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Weapons, Armor, and Guns
What works, and what doesn’t. Free book with class!
Florida Beach Tips
Learn to spot scrabs in the sand.
The last one was a couple years old. There hadn’t been a scrab sighting in Florida for a long time. They were rarely spotted anywhere in North America these days. It had been three months since the last one, in South Carolina, and the National Guard had shown up almost immediately to whisk it away.
Bubba must never have removed old flyers, because I spotted a bunch of old stuff—the announcement requiring Texas high school students to take combat class instead of gym, a seminar discussing scrab origin theories, even a newspaper article from 2013 about the attack in New Orleans, with a photo of President Obama standing amongst the wreckage. The walls were more history than advertising.
“All right, Clara,” Bubba said as he walked through the door and sat down at his desk. He pushed aside a coffee mug. “That’ll be twenty.”
I dug the bill out of my pocket, flattening it with my hand against the counter before handing it over. Bubba whisked it into a box in the top drawer of the desk. I swallowed as I watched it disappear. With the exception of a few quarters, that was all the money I had. I’d been saving that twenty for months.
The television mounted on the wall above my head was silently playing the news, and Bubba glanced up at it. The words Grayson St. John and Elite Fighting Squad scrolled across the bottom of the screen, beneath a photo of three scrabs standing over a destroyed food cart in Beijing. The scrabs looked a bit different depending on the region—in Asia they were large, typically six or seven feet tall, with enormous bodies covered in spikes. They ran on all fours and mostly used their massive mouths full of fangs to fight. Scrabs in Europe and the UK fought on two legs and made better use of their front claws. North American scrabs were a mix of both, but everyone said ours were smaller and kind of sluggish compared to the rest of the world.
I wondered which version Bubba had modeled his dummy after.
“You thinking of joining?” Bubba asked.
“Uh, I don’t know.” I was too embarrassed to say yes.
He squinted at me, running a hand over his dark beard. “You got any special skills or anything?”
“No.” I tilted my head. “Well, maybe. Is surviving a special skill?”
“I guess?” Bubba said it skeptically, probably thinking of my four deaths he’d just witnessed. But Bubba didn’t know. Not really.
“Yeah, I’ve got that, then. Not dying. That’s what I’m good at.”
2
I had to take two buses to get home. The second one was crowded, and I pressed my body into a corner, face-to-face with a poster of Beyoncé selling makeup.
My phone dinged repeatedly in my pocket, but I didn’t pull it out. My news alerts hadn’t stopped since last night. The same headline was everywhere—on the phones around me, rolling across the small television screen mounted to the wall of the bus behind the driver. GRAYSON ST. JOHN ANNOUNCES INTERNATIONAL FIGHT SQUAD.
Grayson St. John would have beaten that fake scrab five out of five times. The people trying out for his fight squads probably could have done a level one course with their eyes closed.
The bus screeched to a stop. I squeezed around a guy staring at his phone and stepped off.
Sweat rolled down my back as I trudged down the sidewalk. It was May, in Dallas, which meant it had already been summer for a month.
Fridays were always lively in my neighborhood, even with the heat. The Brown boys whizzed by on their bikes, a taco truck at the end of the block had several customers, and Mrs. Gonzalez sat on her porch, wearing her leather shoulder holster over her loose blue dress. Her gun sat against her hip, clearly visible to anyone who walked by. She’d moved here from New York City several years ago, after the scrab attack in Midtown Manhattan, and she spent all day, every day, on her porch with her gun. Some of the neighbors reminded her that she’d moved here because there had never been a scrab attack in Dallas. She’d showed them the scar on her leg—twenty-four stitches—where a scrab had swiped its claws across her flesh. We all left her alone.
A few girls I went to school with were gathered around a car in the street, one of them on the ground, pulling a flat tire off the wheel. The girl sipping a large fountain drink, Adriana, caught me watching them and smiled, lifting her hand in a wave.
“Hey, Clara!” Her nails were so bright pink that I could see the color from across the street. Adriana’s hair and makeup were always perfect—she’d been the one to teach me how to put on eyeliner.
I waved back and walked a little faster.
All the eleventh-grade girls in my neighborhood were friends, except for me. I’d hung out with them until middle school, when it had become clear that they were the smart girls, the girls who would get scholarships and spend years voluntarily going to school after the required portion. It would be a miracle if I even finished high school. I just made them uncomfortable, so I came up with excuses not to hang out with them until they stopped asking.
I turned the corner and headed for the first house on the left. It was small, one-story, white, with bars on the windows that were ostensibly for our protection.
