Monster World Read online

  I pulled into the parking lot of Romano’s Pizzeria fifteen minutes early for my shift, and my old ford pickup coughed like a chain-smoker when I turned it off. I checked myself in the mirror, fixed my hair, and then slapped the dash at the exact moment I knew the truck would backfire. I winced at the sound, which was a lot louder than normal in the small shopping plaza.

  I got out of the truck, not bothering to lock it. If someone wanted to steal it, they could be my guest. It was probably worth more as an insurance write off than it was in its present state.

  The sun was beating down pretty good for late May in Lake George, NY, and the tourists were already out en masse for the beginning of Memorial Day weekend. The pizza shop wasn’t opened yet, but people were already peeking through the windows, and it was only 9:45 in the morning. The place opened at ten o’clock, and I’d shown up early to make a good impression with my coworkers and old Mr. Romano.

  When I walked into the joint, Michelle was already behind the workstation, kneading dough. I offered her my best smile. She didn’t so much as nod at me, and I wondered if she remembered me from Business 101—or more importantly, from last weekend’s frat party. We’d been in the same class freshman year, but we’d never spoken to each other. She was the real reason I’d wanted the job at Romano’s.

  “Jake,” Roman Romano, the owner, said in his gravelly voice.

  “Good morning, sir,” I said.

  “Come with me, Jake.” He turned toward his office.

  I followed him inside, wondering if I should close the door. He answered my silent question with a nod, so I closed the door and sat opposite him at the big oak desk. I glanced around while Roman worked at lighting a fat cigar. The office was a stark contrast to the rest of the pizzeria. While the kitchen and dining room were bright and modern, this room looked to have been decorated sometime in the 1970s. The walls were old panel board, and the ceiling was a grid of stained and half-broken drop ceiling tiles. The only things hanging on the walls were calendars, and there were dozens of them. The oldest dated back to 1972, and they were all covered in notes scribbled in tiny handwriting.

  “They help me remember my life,” he said, scowling at me over a cloud of smoke.

  The cigar stank like hell, which told me that it was probably an expensive one.

  Roman smiled through the smoke, and in that moment he looked like an old Italian Mafia godfather. He wasn’t tall, but he had a look about him that suggested he wouldn’t have a problem breaking someone’s legs if they crossed him or his family. At the same time there was wisdom and kindness in his eyes that instantly put me at ease.

  “I know why you took this job,” he said matter-of-factly, licking his lips and considering the cigar.

  “I love making pizza,” I said with a small laugh.

  “You want to put your breadstick in Michelle’s marinara,” he said, rolling the Rs.

  “What?” I chuckled.

  “I was young once,” he said, squinting through the smoke. “Now I see through the eyes of an old man. Michelle is a good girl and a hard worker, you hear? I don’t want any funny business in my pizzeria.”

  “No funny business,” I said, hands up and donning my best smile.

  He nodded and slid a piece of paper across the desk. “This is the non-disclosure form for the secret sauce. Read and sign.” He slid the document across the desk slowly.

  I signed it and gave it back, and Roman put it in a filing cabinet.

  “You can shadow Michelle tonight. Pay attention and don’t get in the way.”

  “Mr. Romano, sir, I’ve been slinging pies for two years. I think I can—”

  “Not Romano’s pizzas, you haven’t. Now get out of here.”

  I went to the kitchen. It was five minutes to ten, and a crowd was already gathered outside the door. Aside from Michelle, there were two other people in the place. I introduced myself to Carry, who was working the register, and Matt, another cook. Michelle looked up at me with faint recognition when I approached.

  I grinned and rubbed my hands together. “Welp, the Don wants me to shadow you today.”

  “Don?” she said, but then she got it. “Oh, Roman? Don’t worry about him. He’s a teddy bear.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah.” She laughed, and the sound was musical. “Come on, I’ll show you the ropes.”

  “Hold on,” I said and hurried to the front door. “I’ve got to grab my pizza shovel.”

  “You have your own peel?”

  Shovel and peel meant the same thing; the tool enabled its user to slide things in and out of an oven. “Oh yeah.” I raced out the door.

  I grabbed my shovel from the passenger seat and took the cover off the metallic end. It had been given to me by my first boss, Mitch Roberson, at the first pizza shop I’d ever worked at. It was five feet long and had an oak shaft and aluminum blade shaped like a crescent moon. I thought it looked badass, and it also doubled as my tae kwon do practice halberd. I’d been swinging that thing around for three years, and I’d also slung a few thousand pizzas with it.

  I returned to the kitchen and joined Michelle at the prep station. She showed me how Romano liked his crust, how much sauce to put on each pizza, and emphasized that a handful of cheese meant a heaping handful.

  The shift went surprisingly well, given that we served more than three hundred pies. By the time we closed at nine, I felt like I could run a marathon. I loved it when a shift flew by, and Romano’s had kept me hustling.

  Roman told us we did better than expected, which wasn’t exactly a compliment, then he left, leaving me and Michelle to clean up.

  “What do you want to do after college?” Michelle asked as she cleaned the workstation.

  I was stacking the last of the dishes. “I don’t know. I’d like to have my own pizza parlor someday.”

  “Parlor,” she mused. “That makes slinging pizzas sound so romantic.”

  “That’s me,” I said with a grin. “A hopeless romantic.”

  I had her on the hook. She tried not to make it obvious, but I caught her checking me out more than once. What can I say? I’d been blessed with good looks and great genes. I was six foot one and 190 pounds of lean muscle. My father instilled a strict exercise ethic in me from an early age, and it had paid off. If I had my eyes on a girl, it was only a matter of time.

  “What do you want to do after college?” I asked, knowing girls would rather talk about themselves than someone else, unless they were gossiping.

  “I don’t know,” she said and sighed. She was being real with me, which was a good sign she’d grown comfortable around me. “I’m taking the business class for the credits. I don’t want to own my own business, though. Too much work.”

  “There must be something you love to do.”

  “I’d like to travel,” she said. “But it’s hard getting paid to visit exotic locations. I’ve started a travel blog, but since I haven’t left New York in a year, there isn’t much to write about.”

  “You just keep flashing that smile, and there’s no limit to what you could accomplish.”

  “She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, okay.”

  “I’m serious. You’re smart and beautiful. That’s a hell of a combination.”

  She smiled. “You’re really full of shit.”

  I finished up with the dishes and helped Michelle get the dough ready for the next day. She opened up about her love for travel and told me how she planned on going overseas for her externship, perhaps to Greece or Italy.

  “I’ve been to Italy,” I told her as I finished up the last doughball.

  “Lucky,” she said and hip-bumped me.

  Oh yeah, I was so in.

  “My parents took me when I was thirteen. We did som
ething like that every year. They even dragged me around with them when I was a baby and they traveled the country in an RV.”

  “See, that would be awesome.” She took in a sharp breath and looked around.

  “What’s up?”

  “My ring,” she said, searching the counter. “I always put it on the counter when I’m making dough.”

  “Maybe it fell on the floor.”

  “I have to find it. My mother got it for me before she died.”

  We searched all over for that damn ring, but half an hour into it, I was ready to give up. Michelle was adamant we find it, though, and I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I kept on looking.

  “If we’re going to search this place up and down,” I said, grabbing a wad of dough, “I’m making us a pizza.”

  “Fine, whatever.” She was scouring the floor under one of the tables.

  “What the fuck?” I said after looking in the oven. “Is that it?”

  She rushed over. “Oh my god, you found it!”

  I put down the dough and grabbed my pizza shovel, but try as I might, I couldn’t get the ring to slide up on it. I put the shovel down and climbed into the big brick oven on my stomach. I had been looking for the thing for nearly an hour, and I was pretty over it.

  “Careful,” she said nervously. “Don’t let it fall through a grate.”

  I touched the ring, but before I could let out a triumphant cheer, the oven began to glow. “Hey, did you turn on the oven?” But there was no fire, no heat, only a bright white light and a strange humming sound.

  “Jake…” Michelle sounded like she was far away.

  The oven glowed so brightly, I was forced to close my eyes. I tried to back out, but the bricks beneath me disappeared, and I was suddenly falling.

  I cried out in surprise when a funnel of swirling, multi-colored light swallowed me. A commanding female voice chanted musically in a strange language, and the faster she chanted, the faster I zipped through what I likened to a wormhole. Planets and galaxies rushed by. A star exploded, and the wormhole arced around it. I screamed in terror but also from a keen sense of wonderment and joy. I sped up, and the universe became a blur of light and color. The chanting was frantic. The wormhole veered toward a small blue and green planet.

  Everything went dark, the chanting stopped, and I slowly floated to the ground.

  I opened my eyes and blinked heavily at a cloudy sky. “What the fuck?”

  I was sitting on a hill covered in dry, dead grass. To the left an ocean stretched to the horizon. I could hear waves crashing on rock and smell the tangy saltwater. To my right was a low valley covered in dead trees. There was a grayness to this gloomy world, and I wondered where the hell I was.

  I looked up at the angry storm clouds rushing by, and for a fleeting moment I saw a ringed planet about twice the size of the moon.

  “Okay…that’s not normal.”

  I stood up shakily and checked for injuries, and that’s when I saw my pizza shovel on the ground beside me. The wad of dough I’d left on the rim of the stove had fallen in with me as well, and Michelle’s ring was next to it. I picked it up and slid it onto my right pinky finger, then picked up the shovel and dough, and wondered about my sanity.

  A flash of light left me temporarily blinded, and when I could see again, I didn’t believe my eyes.

  A woman floated in the air seven feet away from me, and she was smiling. She wore a flowing robe that blew languidly in the wind. It opened and closed around her breasts, giving me a tantalizing peek at her brown nipples. Her glowing golden skin, blonde hair, and luminescent blue eyes were so alien, I was left speechless.

  “Hello, my champion,” she said in a sultry voice. “Welcome to Tarth.”

  “Who are you? Where the hell am I? What happened?”

  “I am Celesta, Goddess of Virtue.” she said, still floating. “And you are on the planet Tarth.”

  “I’ve got to be dreaming,” I said and pinched the bridge of my nose.

  “No, my champion, you are not dreaming,” she informed me with amusement.

  “Why do you keep calling me that?”

  “Because that is what you are.” She looked me up and down with a grin. “I have summoned you here through the endless depths of space and time because I am in need of a hero.”

  “A hero?” I asked blankly. I was still trying to get used to the idea of having been pulled through some kind of portal to another world.

  She pointed at the ocean. “Do you see that tower?”

  I looked and was able to make out a tall, skinny tower in the fog. “Yeah, I see it.”

  “There is a princess trapped inside that tower. Her name is Evangeline, and she has prayed to me to send her a hero who will help her escape the Goblin King’s clutches. That is why I have brought you here.”

  I laughed. “You have the power to pull me from another planet, but you can’t get a princess out of a tower?”

  “I cannot directly interfere with the people of this planet, but you are not from this planet, are you?”

  “No,” I scoffed. “But I’m no hero. Why the hell did you pick me?”

  “You are Verasorian Smite from the planet Vanguard 5, are you not?”

  “What? No, my name is Jake Baker, and I’m a pie slinger from the planet Earth.”

  “That can’t be.” She glanced at my pizza shovel. “For you carry a warrior’s weapon.”

  “This?” I said and held up the peel. “This is a pizza shovel. It’s not a frigging weapon.”

  “Oh my,” she said and bit her lip, then glanced at the tower in deep thought. “This is most unexpected. I wonder what happened. The spell should have worked.”

  “Yeah, well, it didn’t. So how about you just send me back to Earth, and we’ll forget about this whole mix-up.”

  “I cannot do that,” she said regretfully. “It would take too much power to send you back.”

  “I don’t give a shit how much power it takes.”

  “I’m sorry, but it will take me weeks to recover from the spell that brought you here, and I’m not wasting my magic sending you back. You are going to have to be my champion.”

  I was in a pretty dire spot. If she wouldn’t send me back, I might be trapped here the rest of my life.

  “If I rescue the princess, will you send me back?” I tried not to sound too desperate, but it was damn near impossible.

  She nodded. “Rescue the princess, return her to her kingdom, and I will send you back to your world.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it, but I’m going to need proper gear. I won’t get far with a pizza shovel and a wad of dough.”

  “I shall enchant your weapons, my champion. Step back and let me work my magic.”

  “I thought you were too weak from pulling me here to do magic,” I said.

  “Enchanting a weapon and pulling a living creature from another world are two very different things.”

  I put down the shovel and dough, and took a few steps back. This entire ordeal was so crazy that I didn’t know what to expect next.

  The goddess spread her arms wide, and the magical wind that surrounded her picked up. Chimes and faint horns rode on that wind, and the goddess glowed even more brightly. She chanted a short phrase over and over, and to my surprise, the pizza shovel floated into the air between us. Then it, too, began to glow, and soon it was red hot and hard to look at directly. A ripple of light pulsed through the wooden shaft, carving intricate runes into it. The ripple of light passed through the metallic blade and became thicker, sharper, and took on a silver sheen.

  The shovel floated into my waiting hands, and I immediately noticed how much heavier it was. When I went through a quick spinning routine, it proved to be perfectly balanced.

  “Not a warrior?” the goddess mused. “You look like one to me.”

  “Thanks,” I said, inspecting the runes.

  She lifted her arms again, and the dough floated into the air. Again there was chanting, this time using di
fferent words, and just like the pizza shovel, it began to glow. To my surprise, it sprouted arms, legs, and a nondescript face.

  She lowered the basketball-sized blob to the ground, and I laughed when it landed on little doughy feet.

  “What the fuck?” I blurted when it turned big eyes to me and offered me a grin. “You brought my dough to life?”

  “It was already alive,” she said, and I thought of the yeast in the dough and nodded. “I have simply given it intelligence.”

  We looked at the dough, and it, in turn, looked at its four-fingered hands. Then it opened its mouth and chomped off its arm. It swallowed hard and giggled when the arm grew back.

  The goddess shook her head. “I gave it some intelligence.”

  “Does this thing shit calzones? Because if not, I don’t see how Doughboy here is going to be much help.”

  “He will prove his worth in due time.”

  The dough flexed his short arms, and they became super muscular.

  I couldn’t help but laugh at the little guy and bent to his level. “I think I’m going to call you Doughboy. Is that cool with you?”

  He grunted, though I have no idea how. I doubted he had lungs—or any other organs for that matter. He had big anime-style eyes with large green irises, a little bump for a nose, and a toothless mouth that spread from one side of his bulbous face to the other, and he seemed to be able to change his form to whatever he wanted.

  “Can he grow bigger?” I asked the goddess.

  Before she could answer, Doughboy spread his arms, and they grew to three feet long. Then his legs grew as well. He was pretty stretched out, but he had an impressive reach.

  “You might come in handy,” I said. “You want to go on a quest with me?”

  He snapped back to his naturally compact form and did a little blob dance. Then he leapt to my shoulder.

  “You are almost ready,” she said and looked pleased. “But you will need a few more enchantments to help you navigate this world. It is by my magic alone that you are able to understand my language, and I am able to understand yours, but I must bless you if you are to understand the rest of the creatures of Tarth. May I?”

  “Is it going to hurt?”

  “Not at all.”