Page 16 of The Wild Zone

“Hold on,” Harper said, sensing we were ready to attack.

He extended his hand toward the worm.

“Harper, no!” Zuri hissed.

Harper touched the worm’s head. A tremor ran down its glistening milky-white trunk.

“Oh,” Harper said with surprise. “Yes, we…we have lots more garbage. My friends will go get it.”

The rest of us shared confused looks.

“Harper, are you talking to the worm?” I asked.

Harper held up his index finger to shush me.

“We’re sorry,” he said. It definitely looked like he was talking to the worm. “We just haven’t met a lot of your kind. Absolutely, my friends are getting that garbage right now.”

He shot us an urgent glance. “Right, team?”

Harper hadn’t been exaggerating earlier. Others found him attractive no matter how bad he looked or smelled. Even giant trash worms loved him. But I wasn’t sure how long he could keep the thing pacified.

Zuri, Benny, and I hustled off to collect the rest of the garbage.

“My horoscope was right,” Zuri grumbled as we hauled bags of food waste to the well. “I do regret getting out of bed this morning.”

After three more trips, we had dumped all the waste into the Pit. The worm frolicked through the trash bags, looping in and out of the dirt, clearly enjoying itself. When the last few mounds of potato salad had disappeared down its maw, the worm looked up at us (or seemed to, since it didn’t have eyes), let loose a sound somewhere between a belch and a growl, and then disappeared again beneath the dirt.

“You’re welcome,” said Harper, almost wistfully. “Good night, Mr. Worm.”

Benny looked dazed, but he set the wooden cover back over the well. “This is a compost bin.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You mean like those spinning tumbler boxes you put food scraps in and magically get dirt?”

“It’s not magic—it’s decay,” Benny said. “But yeah. Worms in the bin eat the scraps, and their castings—uh, poop—become compost. We had a bunch of bins back on the farm where I grew up.” His forehead wrinkled. “But the worms were a little smaller.”

Now the holes in the lid made more sense. They were air holes for the worm.

I eyeballed the Pit. I wondered how deep it went, and if more giant worms were lurking down there. If so, the Pit was probably more like a series of tunnels.

I thought about the fissure Grant and I found in the woods and wondered if there was any way it connected. Maybe Grant had been able to take shelter in a tunnel with friendly trash-eating Wormzillas. Maybe one would lead him back to camp through a secret compost tunnel….

I shook my head.

I was too exhausted to think straight. Grant was probably safely back in the Ares cabin by now. He’d tease me mercilessly when he saw me covered in garbage slime and heard that we’d been condemned to two weeks of kitchen patrol.

I squinted toward the cabins in the distance. “I think we should go to bed before we get in any more trouble.”

Benny wiped a fleck of barbecue sauce off his face. “Yeah…I think you’re right.”

For once, we were all in agreement. We trekked back toward the cabins, trying to be quiet so we wouldn’t wake our fellow campers or attract more attention from harpies.

Zuri veered off at the Apollo cabin, which looked modest from the outside. A brass number 7 hung on the door beneath the stylized symbol of a harp. Cheerful yellow flowers bloomed in the window boxes. “This is me,” she whispered. “Good night.”

She sounded pretty anxious to be rid of us, but I couldn’t blame her. It had been a long night.

Harper left us at Cabin Ten. Judging from the fact that it was bright pink, the front deck was elaborately painted with flowers and doves, and perfume wafted out the windows, I cleverly deduced that it was the Aphrodite cabin.

“Good luck!” Harper told us as he climbed the porch.