Teen Monster Hunters

By Alex Ames

X-Files meets Buffy meets Stranger Things meets Men in Black

Hawthorne High is not Sally Storm’s favorite spot in the world. Nothing going on, an overzealous deputy principal, obnoxious football jocks, and cheerleaders that get on your nerves. And Sally is stuck at a back-row table beside the class genius Ryan Montgomery.
When the school’s janitor is mysteriously attacked in the basement, it’s written off as the result of a drunken stumble and an overeager dog’s scratches. How convenient! But not everyone is convinced, and curious Sally starts to investigate, and ends up making a hair-raising discovery!
Monsters don’t exist. That’s what you believe. That’s what Sally believes. Because your parents told you so over and over again. The only time when you take monsters seriously is in a scary Hollywood movie; but it is one thing to get light chills of fright in a comfortable seating, and quite other to face monsters in real life!
Do monsters exist, after all? There’s only one way to find out! With the help of her newly-found genius friends Ryan and the monosyllabic, gentle giant Moe, Sally sets out to face whatever it is in the basement.

Teen Vampire Hunters is the first full length adventure of the Teen Monster Hunters, three kids who work as very special agents for the super-secret Supernatural Investigation Agency SIA.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Ames
• Release date: Nov 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463837658

Alex Ames

Alex Ames always dreamed to -- but never dared to -- become a famous jewel thief or computer hacker or super spy. After some consideration the only morally feasible option was to become a writer and to create „To Catch a Thief meets Stephanie Plum”.

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Teen Monster Hunters

Book Series 1

By Alex Ames

Smashwords 3.0 Edition - Jan 2019

Copyright © 2017 Alex Ames

Cover Girl by Pietra Schwarzler on unsplash.com

Cover Basement by Markus Spiske on unsplash.com

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To Dreams and Monsters

Chapter One — Bowling Mr. Cronin

WRAPPERS! CHOCOLATE BAR wrappers! Right in the middle of the corridor where the stairs ended and the three basement corridors started. Five of them. Chocolate Peanut Hero bars, America’s finest.

Which of you bastards left these here? Jason Cronin, the janitor and caretaker of Hawthorne High, hollered in anger. He had the tendency to talk to himself, a habit that had developed during the time he had spent at the veterans’ hospital, where he had been treated for injuries he had received when his military convoy had been attacked by insurgents in a desert country far away. Memories he tried to push as far to the back of his mind as possible.

Or is Rose getting lazy? Rose was the Mexican cleaning lady responsible for the basement and ground floors.

Tyler, Cronin’s terrier-sized dog of mixed origin, sniffed at the wrappers, inhaling the delicious aroma of the absent contents. He was more bark than bite but saw himself as the alpha dog of the house.

As normal and boring as Hawthorne High was, its teachers were friendly and well-respected at most times, and not better or worse than elsewhere. The school’s football team was a mess, although the new coach who had joined in that school year was whipping them into shape. Three games into the season, the Hawthorne Hawks were at 3-0, tying with the Alameda Ants at the first place in the state’s regional high school league.

The number of bullies, vandals, and misfits among the students was limited. The usual suspects were known to everyone, and the teachers kept an eye on them, in cooperation with the underworked but efficient Sheriff’s department.

There are never enough eyes to catch them all, mumbled Cronin. He was a big man, usually dressed in workman’s clothes, as his job required him to do a variety of handyman’s tasks. Once a man with a muscular body, he had now gotten flabby and walked with a shuffle. His appearance was not improved by his long unwashed hair. His main task was to make sure that everything was in working order and that the many helpers who he had subcontracted work to did their jobs. It was their job to clean the building properly, maintain the air conditioning, make sure that the floors were swept regularly, the windows were cleaned, and the litter removed. A futile task! A presumptuous and pompous group of football players and their entourage had developed the nasty habit of dropping their snack wrappers and soft drink cups wherever they went, feeling invincible after their string of wins. Have to talk to Coach Black about it! he muttered. Mr. Cronin continued his way through the basement for the final evening check.

Further down the corridor, Cronin and Tyler heard a door click into its lock. Tyler looked up to his master, still dazed by the good smell.

Hello? Anyone still here? Locking up in five! Cronin shouted down the corridor.

There was no reply. All he could hear were strange noises that seemed to be coming from one of the lab rooms.

Is there a party going on? Or is that crazy Montgomery kid experimenting on something? Cronin muttered. He walked down to the first lab door and poked his head into a dark and empty room. He closed the door again and noticed that his dog, usually protective of his territory and master, was not by his side but stood rooted to a spot twenty yards away.

Cronin opened the next lab door and again poked his head into the room. A mistake. He noticed too late that Tyler was whimpering in a way that Cronin had never heard before, walking backward taking small steps. The guarding part of the job was now solely left to Mr. Cronin.

Suddenly, something incredibly strong grabbed Mr. Cronin’s workman’s jacket and pulled him into the room with brute force. Huh was all he could utter. He was slammed against the doorjamb and then catapulted across the lab floor like a massive rock, taking a few chairs and wastebaskets with him. He was too surprised to defend himself or scream and heard Tyler barking in the distance, who had run away, that stupid, useless piece of…

He had to shake his head to clear it. He touched his face; there was some sort of injury on the left side of his neck. He felt the wound sting when he touched it. It was wet to the touch. Blood! Images of the desert country war flashed before his eyes, and he had to blink several times to wipe them from his mental vision. His head was spinning. Should have taken my medication this morning, was his useless thought. The images of the desert landscape slowly vanished, but the blood on his fingers didn’t; the attack in the here and now had been real after all. He turned around on all fours, and, after his sense of direction returned, he lifted his head to see what had attacked him, but what he saw surprised and confused him. The large shadow in the doorway was one moment there and the other moment gone.

Hey! he shouted after the…what did he shout after? All he had seen was a fuzzy shadow. Had this been an animal attack? Or that by a person?

Chapter Two — Sally Storm's Curious Morning

SALLY STORM’S DAY didn’t start well.  In her opinion, it was pretty bad from the get-go. First, she had missed the school bus. The stupid, misaligned doorjamb would not let her properly lock the trailer, and she had not wanted to risk facing the wrath of her Mom and explain why thieves had been able to walk in and steal the old television set, which not even a desperate drug junkie would probably consider stealing. Even though Hawthorne was on the whole a safe place to live, her mom and Sally had their residence in a bad part of the town. By the time she had managed to close the door with help of the key and a screwdriver, the school bus had gone, and her bicycle was the only option if she was to reach her school. Unfortunately, it was an uphill ride almost all the way to Hawthorne High. Sally had made it long after the first lesson had started, and she was trying to sneak into the building when she was caught red handed by Deputy Principal Zach who ran patrol near the entrance. Gleefully, he wrote down her name. Third time this month, Sally Storm! This led to some internal administration process kicking in that resulted in her name being called through the aged school’s PA system an hour later. Sally Storm, please report to the principal’s office, Ms. Bowden’s distorted voice sounded like Darth Vader’s.

The announcement caused some of her obnoxious classmates to whistle and cheer. Way to go, Storm, Foster Jenkins, one the class assholes and Mr. Popular with the girls, shouted. Sally was not the most popular person, and Jenkins definitely wasn’t anywhere close to being Mr. Pop with her.

Class, quiet, Ms. Perkins admonished them and nodded at Sally. You may go, my dear. Ms. Perkins was the only person in the world who called Sally ‘my dear’, oblivious to Sally’s constant, dark scowling from underneath her mop of fire-red hair and her endless string of conflicts with her teachers and co-students. Sally nodded and made her way to the principal’s office, which was in a different part of the building. Hawthorne High was the only high school in the county, and it was massively overpopulated due to the fact that the nearby military base and two high-tech companies had caused many new families to settle in the area, bringing a constant influx of new kids.

Sally was fifteen years old. She had the slim but trained body of a Karate fighter and shock-red hair that no one believed to be natural. But it was. Her favorite movie was Lola runs, an old German movie about a girl, not unlike herself, who runs throughout the movie to rescue her boyfriend from some bad guys. She liked the film for two reasons, Lola’s red-haired look and her loyalty to her no-good boyfriend. However, Sally herself had neither a boyfriend nor close friends. But she liked the movie even more so for the attention for detail one had to have to catch all the small clues that added to the suspense in the movie. Every little thing influenced the outcome of the story, and Sally tried with all her heart to identify all the little things that influenced her life.

Unfortunately, the workings of the door lock of her house had not been one of the events that she could influence. She was pretty sure that Principal Osborne had no patience for non-influenceable events, either. Little did Sally know that the non-working door lock had set a series of events into motion that started right then and would change her life forever.

She knocked on the principal’s open front office door, and Ms. Bowden waved her in, a sixty-year-old, kind lady who had run the school’s administration for as long as anyone could remember. She had seen generation after generation of students, both good and bad ones, and in her opinion, there had, over the years, been no difference in the kids who went up to the Principal’s office to talk with him. Most kids turned out fine, after all, in one way or the other. Some did not, and that was the way it went with everything in the world. Hello, Sally, she said. Have a seat. Principal Osborne will be with you in a minute.

Sally sat down on the bench beside the Principal’s door, like she had done many times before. Ms. Bowden said, without looking up from her paperwork, You know, I had thought about creating a stamp card. Collect nine stamps to get out of jail the tenth time.

Sally wasn’t sure whether Ms. Bowden had made a joke or was serious, so she just scowled from underneath her hair. There came low voices from the Principal’s office. Sally could recognize them as Principal Osborne’s and Deputy Principal Zach’s. And Mr. Cronin, the janitor’s.

Ms. Bowden stood up and carried a stack of folders out of the office. Just a minute more, Sally, she said.

With the noise of the shuffle of the papers gone, Sally was able to hear the voices from the office a little more clearly, and she could make out the words, attack, imposs…, …rink, …onster, ani….

Now, that is an interesting topic, for once, Sally thought. Who had been attacked?

Her curiosity took over, and, after checking that no one was observing, she pressed her ear against the wall that separated the principal’s office from the one she was sitting in. She could hear too many noises; water-gurgling pipe noises, far away footsteps, and her own pounding heart. But no audible conversation from the office. She leaned closer to the door, where the old wood met the doorjamb, or better, did not really meet the doorjamb. By holding her ear close to the fraction-of-an-inch gap, she could hear the conversation much better.

Principal Osborne’s voice said, Jason, we know that you believe you have been attacked. But don’t you think this was just an accident? Your dog, Tyler, is  a little wild at times, and both you and I know that, sometimes, you like to drink a little too much after duty.

Mr. Cronin argued. I told you, Mr. Osborne, sir, I did not have anything last night. Did not even take my medication. I was as clear-headed as I can be. And Tyler never bit or scratched me. These are no dog scratches, look!

Mr. Zach intervened. You are putting us in an impossible dilemma about what and what not to believe. An attack at night in the basement, that too from an unknown person or animal? Come on, Jason, who would believe that?

We can’t even call the police for that. Has anything been vandalized or stolen? Mr. Osborne asked.

Stolen? No, nothing, Mr. Cronin said. There were wrappers of chocolate lying around, but that’s a different matter altogether. No, I don’t understand that part myself. I was attacked, not by a person, but by… by… I don’t know. A big shadow was all I saw.

A big shadow, Zach echoed, the disbelief in his voice clear.

Like that of an animal,  a monster from a cartoon book or a film.

Monster! Zach exclaimed. Jason, please! Get a grip, adjust the dosage of your medication!

But nothing was stolen? Osborne went back to fact-checking.

No, Mr. Cronin conceded.

Sorry, Jason, Mr. Osborne said forcefully. That is enough. Go, get those two wounds of yours properly treated in the first aid room by Ms. Bowden. The first aid you received was certainly not good enough. I don’t want to hear about this anymore. And no spreading rumors. Thanks, Jason, Jim.

Yes, Mr. Osborne, Mr. Cronin said, deflated.

Sally heard chairs shuffling and sat back straight on the bench, looking uninterested and bored, the easiest thing for her to do.

The door opened, and Mr. Cronin shuffled out. He was old, but it was impossible to tell how old. Maybe forty, looking fifty? Sally had never been able to figure that out, as his hair was blond and long, tied back in an unkempt ponytail, but the skin of his face and hands was really wrinkled. He glanced at Sally, mumbled a Hello, and walked out of the office, a figure of dejection. Mr. Zach came out after him. The deputy principal was a pudgy, rosy redhead like Sally, but with extremely thin hair. He had a habit of flickering his tongue over his lips that reminded Sally of a lizard. Maybe out of nervousness, maybe because he had dry lips.

Mr. Osborne stopped at the door of his office, as if he was surprised to see Sally. Oh, Ms. Storm, and after a short pause, Once more.

Good morning, Principal Osborne. Here to report.

Mr. Zach had paused in the doorframe and turned. Late for school! Third time this month.

Osborne did not react. Instead, he cocked his head slightly.

Explain yourself?

Sir, I missed the bus.

Osborne had to be the best poker player among the school faculty. You couldn’t read his face at all. He just looked at someone and then clearly expressed his wish or made his statement. Sally didn’t want to explain about the effing door lock, and she felt that Osborne intentionally did not insist on a more elaborate answer.

He then gave a brief nod. Thanks, Sally, you may go back.

What? No write-up or a letter to the parents? the over-eager Mr. Zach complained.

Osborne looked over Zach’s shoulder and saw that Ms. Bowden was still out. "Mr. Zach, could you ask Coach Black to come to my office