Caley Cross and the Hadeon Drop Read online

  Copyright © 2020 Jeff Rosen

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Published by SparkPress, a BookSparks imprint,

  A division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC

  Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 85007

  www.gosparkpress.com

  Published 2020

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-68463-053-0 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978-1-68463-054-7 (e-bk)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020906194

  Edited by Sarah Riley

  Book design by Stacey Aaronson

  All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To Natalie and Emma, my inspiration.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dead (+ Zombie Frogs)

  In three and a half hours, Caley Cross would be dead. Which wasn’t even the worst thing to happen to her that morning. The zombie frogs took that prize. Some days, it’s better to stay in bed. But like most things, Caley didn’t exactly have a choice, because when she woke up there was a large greasy rat on her pillow.

  “Good morning.”

  Said the rat. Or did it? If it did, it was pointless. A rat in your bed automatically made it a bad morning. Especially one that talked.

  Caley screamed. The scream spooked the rat, and it shot off wherever rats go. Caley closed her eyes and tried to breathe normally again. A shard of the dream she’d been having came back. She was swinging in a hammock outside a cottage on the edge of some northern sea. The screen door swung open, and her mother was standing there with smiling green eyes, her red hair caught in the wind. She held her arms out, and Caley went reaching for that perfect embrace. Then the sky split apart and a black rain fell, vaporizing everything it touched. The cottage, her mother … it all melted away. And the hooded man was coming for her.

  It was always the same dream. And always the same nightmare that followed … her actual life.

  Caley would have to hurry if she didn’t want to be late for school, each move executed with military precision. She tidied her room, which was really a basement cold storage crammed with shelves of prehistoric pickle jars and headless mannequins. The mannequins belonged to the Gunch, who was a seamstress before she caught the “rheumatoids.” Now she ran the Gunch Home for Wayward Waifs, a foster care facility where Caley lived.

  Deciding what to wear was easy. Caley dressed in whatever rags the Gunch threw away. The last time she asked for clothes the Gunch had said, “New clothes? What on earth would a thirteen-year-old girl want with new clothes?”

  Caley hurried upstairs to the bathroom. There was already a line of little orphans, and despite the fact that she’d be late doing her chores she let a few in front of her. Caley was by far the oldest, and, she reasoned, the others all had smaller bladders. By the time she got in the shower, it was ice-cold because the Gunch turned the hot water off at exactly 6:15 each morning. (“Who needs heat when the sun is coming up?”)

  Caley studied herself in the mirror. Her bright red curls—which normally looked like a nest of flaming snakes—were even screwier than usual. There was no shampoo left, so she coated her hair with baby powder so she could at least drag a brush through it. As a result, her hair looked (and smelled) like baby barf. Her freckles seemed to have spontaneously multiplied overnight, making her pale white skin appear poxified. She considered her eyes, green and large, to be her best feature, but today all she saw was the intense combination of red, white, and green and decided she looked like a Saint Patrick’s Day parade float.

  Definitely a hat day.

  Caley set out food for the orphans crowded around the kitchen table. There was just toast this morning. Everything else had run out, and the Gunch only shopped on Saturday, when the grocery store gave a seniors’ discount.

  “Is there jam?” an orphan asked.

  The Gunch was poking behind the fridge with a broom, presumably for the rat. She screwed up her buzzard face at the little kid as if deciding if he was roadkill worth devouring. Her forehead vein began to bulge like it did whenever she was angry.

  “I’m soooo sorry, Your Lordship, but our private yacht from Marmaladeland was rerouted to acquire fresh salt from the Dead Sea!”

  The poor little kid started to sniffle, and Caley slipped her own toast to him as the Gunch turned her attention back to the rat hunt. The broom was suddenly snatched right out of her hands by a giant dead ivy vine that snaked out from under the fridge. The Gunch wheeled around to Caley with a vinegary look.

  “There was a rat. I told you not to bring food to your room, and now vermin have infested my house!”

  “Maybe I should eat up here with everyone else,” Caley said mildly, then braced for the rabid response.

  “Yes, by all means, eat here,” the Gunch began reasonably enough, turning to the table. “Hmm … eleven orphans … ten chairs. I’ll just run out and purchase a new chair, perhaps a throne for Your Highness. And then we can all drink jam and gargle with caviar like they do in Buckingham Palace!”

  Her vein was swelling like a python swallowing a rabbit. The Gunch turned to a long list addressed to Caley, taped to the fridge:

  NO EATING IN KITCHEN!

  NO EATING IN ROOM!

  To which the Gunch now added:

  NO EATING IN HOUSE!!!

  The Gunch snatched the butter dish from an orphan, plunked it on a high shelf no one else could reach, and stormed out of the kitchen.

  “Caley Cross! Caley Cross!”

  Albert dropped a piece of toast on Caley’s plate. Albert the parrot belonged to the Gunch and was in even worse shape than Caley because the Gunch fed him moldy seed she made Caley steal from the neighbor’s bird feeder. He looked like an old feather duster.

  Caley crammed the toast in her mouth and began mopping the floors, thinking about her dream. It was weird, because she’d never met her mother. Knew nothing about her. Didn’t even have a picture. But the Gunch knew. She always promised she’d tell her where to find her one day if she worked hard enough and didn’t cause trouble. Never would say why she left her there in the first place.

  The Gunch was primping in her hallway mirror, so Caley mopped around her. With her face-lifted face stretched like an overblown balloon, teetering bleached blond beehive, and fox collar wrapped around her neck (she always wore heaps of jewelry and furs and loud-patterned jumpsuits), she looked like one of those killer clowns.

  Mahjong!

  The Gunch’s mahjong group would be arriving any minute for their game. That’s why she was getting all clowned up. Caley shooed the orphans to their rooms where they spent their days mending clothes for the Gunch’s seamstress business. One of her mahjong players worked for the government, and the Gunch was paranoid she would tell the cops she was running an illegal sweatshop on the side.

  The Gunch gasped. A cricket had wriggled out of her fox fur and sprang onto her lipstick, which she squished into her lips before she could stop herself. The squished cricket dropped to the floor, jerked a bit, came back to life, and hopped away. The Gunch turned to Caley, her cricket-smeared lips quivering.

  “I’m warning you, girl, no more of your shenanigans or you’re back on the street where I found you. Do you think anyone else would take you?”

  The Gunch marched into her room and returned a moment later with a thick file labeled “CALEY CROSS
ADOPTION.” She dumped it out on the hallway table. It was an impressive pile of papers.

  Caley had to admit she had a lousy record in the outside world. Every time the Gunch tried to get her adopted out of her group home, something went wrong. The line for “REASON FOR RETURN OF ADOPTEE” on the form varied from “UNSUITABLE” to “WITCH” or was sometimes just left blank with the word “HELP!!” scrawled across it in blood.

  The Gunch always said, “Caley Cross, you are my cross to bear. But I try and see the positive in everyone.”

  Caley supposed the “positive” she saw was the part about having a personal slave who was forced to listen to her rant about robots coming to take her job. Anyway, there she was, living with the Gunch, probably the world’s oldest orphan. At least she got to go to school, unlike the others, because, as much as the Gunch loved free labor, she hated Caley and would do anything to get her out of the house.

  The bus!

  Out the front door, Caley could see her school bus making its way up the hill. She crammed her hair in a hat.

  “What about my feet?” The Gunch kicked off a snakeskin stiletto. She always wore super swanky shoes that seemed way too small for her fat sweaty feet, which seemed way too large for her little weasel-like body. “I had to chase a rat this morning. And me with the rheumatoids.”

  “Sorry, Ms. Gunch. I’ll massage them when I get home.”

  The Gunch fixed Caley with a speechless stare like she’d just informed her she would have to amputate. Albert flew out the door. The Gunch went hobbling after him on one shoe. She always caught Albert because, like Caley, he was too weak from hunger to move fast. Seeing her chance, Caley made a break for the bus. It began to rain, great sheets that made an instant mud puddle just in time for the bus to drench her as it screeched to a stop. As she bent to wipe off her soaked sweater, her hat blew away.

  Could her day get any worse?

  Yup. (Loads)

  CALEY scanned for an empty seat on the bus. Each time she spied one, the kid sitting beside it said it was saved or just sprawled across it with a stupid smirk. Caley hadn’t made any friends at school, and things weren’t looking promising. Bouncing from foster home to foster home with a new school each time wasn’t great for making lasting connections. Wearing the Gunch’s hand-me-downs didn’t help either (today: a moth-eaten leopard-pattern jumpsuit two sizes too big and flaking ostrich pumps two sizes too small). Her clothes along with her electric eel hairdo made her look like someone who’d been unearthed from a time capsule. So Caley kept to herself as much as she could and tried to be invisible, which made the kids decide she was stuck-up, so they were mean and paid way too much attention to her. Life was funny.

  (But not “ha-ha” funny.)

  Caley sat beside Daphne Doyle, a frog-faced girl from her class who was too busy taking selfies to notice her. The bus stopped for another kid whose mom kissed her and handed her a lunch bag. Caley wondered what that must be like, having someone who would miss you.

  Or lunch for that matter.

  A thin shriek was followed by another. Caley sometimes heard bugs scream when they hit the windshield. No one else ever seemed to. It had been happening her whole life, the awful cries of animals killed in awful ways. She put it down to her starvation diet. She had read books about people lost in the wilderness who hallucinated when they didn’t eat enough. It didn’t get any wilder than the Gunch’s.

  Caley stared out the window. The run-down town in a rundown part of the coast had been declared a disaster zone a while back because of a chemical spill. The bus was passing the poison ponds. The ponds were because of a tire-burning plant that filled the air with stinking gunk that stuck to your clothes and skin. Dead fish were washed up on the banks, their gaping mouths making a pathetic gasping sound. It made Caley angry when she saw what happened to poor, helpless creatures. Maybe if everyone heard them scream like she did they’d stop. Probably not. People were the worst. Caley clamped her ears and didn’t unclamp them until they were safely past.

  “Who said you could sit beside me?”

  Daphne Doyle glared at her.

  “I don’t need your permission—” Caley began.

  “You do if you stink,” Daphne cut her off. “She stinks,” Daphne repeated to several of her girlfriends, who turned to Caley.

  Caley noticed they all seemed to have identical sideswept bangs today. They must have coordinated their look on social media or something. Caley didn’t have a phone, or a computer, or anything, and was always out of the loop fashion-wise (and every other-wise).

  The bus stopped outside the school. Daphne Doyle and her sideswept-bangs gang shoved past Caley like she was a particularly obnoxious speed bump.

  Just let me get through this day, Caley said to herself, tugging on her amulet. She had no idea where it had come from, but she’d worn it as long as she could remember. It was just an old hunk of amber-colored stone hanging from a chain around her neck. It didn’t look worth anything or the Gunch would have stolen it. Caley considered it her good-luck charm (though if it ever had any luck, it had worn off). Sometimes she tried making a wish on it. The wish usually went something like, “Please, if anyone out there is listening, change my life. Let me be anyone, anywhere, other than me. And straighter hair.”

  Caley noticed a dead cricket wriggling out of a hole in her sweater and swiped it onto the sidewalk with a sigh.

  •

  IN science class, the teacher placed a tray with a pickled frog on each desk.

  “Today we will be dissecting frogs to analyze their anatomy.”

  Why do we need to take frogs apart? Caley shuddered to herself. Everyone already knows what’s inside them.

  A kid puked at the sight of his frog, and the teacher herded him off to the nurse’s office after warning the class they had thirty minutes to remove the frogs’ organs.

  Caley regarded her frog warily. At least it wasn’t screaming.

  Daphne Doyle snapped selfies with her frog while her sideswept-bangs gang laughed as if she had just done the funniest thing any of them could think of (which was probably true because thinking wasn’t exactly their go-to). The frog looked a bit like Daphne or vice versa, and for a happy moment, Caley imagined dissecting Daphne.

  That she would have no trouble doing.

  Caley felt something cold and slimy before realizing Daphne had dumped a frog down her back. Caley began squirming around, trying to get the frog out, and as she did, her janky jumpsuit began to fall apart. Everyone laughed and pointed, and Daphne took a picture. It would probably get loads of “likes” or whatever.

  Caley’s amulet started tingling against her chest. Her hands were red-hot and burning, like one of those tires in the factory. It was happening again, but she couldn’t stop it. She never could. One second Caley was holding the dead frog; the next it jumped onto Daphne Doyle. Everyone began to scream as frogs—some already partially dissected—began leaping off their trays, their bursting bellies spurting frog guts over everyone. Daphne jumped out a window in a fog of frog parts.

  Good thing the classroom is on the first floor, thought Caley.

  Or not.

  Caley just stood there. The burning was gone, but she felt shriveled, like a dead match, and could barely move.

  She noticed a crow on the monkey bars in the playground staring straight at her. It opened and closed its mouth as if it was saying something and then flew off unsteadily. One of its wings looked like it was made of metal.

  Then Caley died.

  WHEN she opened her eyes, Caley lay in a stretcher in the nurse’s office. Paramedics fiddled with their emergency equipment with vexed expressions. The principal and a police officer had a hushed conversation, occasionally eyeing Caley. Just how serious an offense were zombie frogs, she wondered. Would she be expelled? Jailed?

  It would be an upgrade from living at the Gunch’s.

  Caley sat up. Her skin felt stung all over like she’d fallen into a hornet nest, and her body felt weak and floppy
as if her bones had been boiled.

  The principal turned to her. “According to the paramedics … your heart stopped.”

  “Her vitals were flat,” a paramedic said, tapping a monitor perplexedly. He shrugged and turned to Caley with an uneasy grin. “Probably an equipment glitch. She seems fine.”

  “Nevertheless, we’re sending you home for rest,” the nurse told Caley.

  “Home? Rest?” Caley repeated. Those were two words she’d never used together in a sentence before.

  “Can your mother pick you up?” the nurse went on.

  “Mother …”

  “Or … caregiver?”

  “If by ‘caregiver’ you mean ‘the person who keeps you in a dungeon and only lets you out to steal birdseed …’”

  The principal and the officer had another hushed exchange.

  THE police officer drove Caley home. She wasn’t sure how they could pin this frog thing on her, but if they did it probably meant detention or even a week’s suspension, which meant no dinner for a week because the Gunch was furious any time she was home from school early, “using up the electricity.”

  “Can you let me off somewhere else?’” Caley asked woozily. “Norway …”

  “I’d like to have a look inside,” the officer said as they pulled up to the dilapidated orphanage.

  Inside, the mahjong game was raging. When the Gunch saw the officer, she tried to hide a pile of money behind some tea sandwiches and scurried out, slamming the door behind her.

  “What’s she done now?”

  Her python vein was already bulging.

  “She attacked a classmate with a frog,” the officer read from a notebook. “A … dead frog. Several … dead frogs,” he added, looking mystified. “We are investigating the matter. After that, she appears to have … died. The paramedic’s equipment was probably faulty.”

  “She always does that.” The Gunch glowered at Caley. “And she always comes back.”

  The officer began to write something, then scratched it out. He looked up at the Gunch.