Page 7 of The Wild Zone

He shook his head. “There’s a creek named Cee Nine?”

I clucked my tongue in irritation. “No! It’s part of my gridding system. Look, just trust me. I’ll bet this creek is the same one that flows into camp. We can follow it the whole way!”

Voices shouted behind us. Grant rapid-chewed his gum. Then he pulled at my hand. “Let’s do it.”

We stumbled and splashed along the creekbank, using the moon’s reflection on the water for extra light. There were no signs of Benny or the other newbies. My only comfort was that the voices of Clarisse and her cronies sounded fainter behind us. I squinted through the trees, trying to spot any kind of landmark. The camp had some pretty big buildings—the arena, the dining pavilion—but we were still too far away to spot them, and the foliage was just too thick.

“Thank the gods for your grid,” Grant huffed as we ran. “All I’ve got are fun facts about ancient Greece.” He glanced at me. “Did you know one of Hercules’s labors was to steal man-eating horses?”

“Wait, those are a real thing?!”

“So are man-eating giants, man-eating gods, man-eating birds…”

“Good thing I still consider myself a child,” I mused.

“Oh, there are child-eating monsters, too.”

I groaned and peered into the darkness ahead. “Come on, come on,” I muttered, willing the underbrush to start thinning, the Wild Zone to end, but the foliage just got denser and thornier. “We should be near E19 now, so—” I yelped as Grant pulled me sideways behind the nearest tree.

He pressed a finger to his lips and pointed farther downstream.

About fifty yards ahead, a wolflike creature lapped water at the edge of the creek. I say “wolflike” because it hunched like one and had a shaggy gray pelt, but it was the size of a full-grown man. It stood on spindly goat legs, and its massive donkey ears made it look comical, but when it drank, it bared sharp fangs bigger than my forearms.

“What the heck is that?” I whispered.

“A kalamodonta,” Grant whispered back. “Its teeth—donti—are as big as reeds—kalami.”

“Fun language lesson,” I said. “But I kalamo-don’t-a want to be its bedtime snack. Come on.” I stepped to the right, cleverly managing to break the loudest twig in the forest under my foot.

Instantly, the kalamodonta reared up on its hind legs. It turned in our direction, sniffing the air.

Oh, shoot. Oh, fudge. Oh, why couldn’t I think of better curse words?

With a ferocious bark, the kalamodonta bounded toward us. Grant pulled a jackknife from his belt. I tightened my grip on my scavenged arrow, which promptly snapped in half.

“Dang it!”

Why had I left my dagger at home, lodged in that photo of my sister on the cover of Fencer’s World?

I dropped the back half of the arrow shaft and raised my newer, much punier weapon.

It was like defending myself with a mini-golf pencil.

As the kalamodonta charged, I looked for weak spots—any fang-free, claw-free, soft openings I might be able to stab. I’d been in fencing competitions, same as Olivia. Something had to have rubbed off, right?

The kalamodonta was thirty feet away, twenty feet, and then—

CRASH!

A truck-size, bright red lizard barreled out of the undergrowth and snatched the kalamodonta between its jaws.

Grant and I screamed even louder than the kalamodonta.

Our dad would have been so proud.

The giant reptile shook its head from side to side as it gobbled up the now limp body of the kalamodonta.

“A drakon!” Grant yelled, which seemed kind of unnecessary.