Alarmingly Strange Stories
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Amidst the tourist clutter of Cannery Row in Monterey, hidden behind the plastic and the lights and the packaged consumer filth, always sold, there was a row of ruins. Fenced off, caged, forgotten, crumbling with rust and jagged concrete, they lay half-submerged in the rocky coast of Monterey Bay. As oblivious herds of tourists passed by one night, a teenaged girl inched on hands and knees along the top of one of the ruin walls, completely in view but unnoticed. No one cared. She was of medium height, medium weight, medium build, completely unremarkable except for her hair, which was glued into spikes, like a startled sea urchin. Her green eyes squinted into the grafitti-sprayed interior of the ruin as she crawled carefully, but with a casual clumsiness, slouching. As the girl swung down the ladder at the end of the wall and landed on the gritty floor, crunching glass, someone called out to her from the other room. The ruin was divided into two equal cubicles with an open doorway in the middle, all elaborately spray painted and crumbling. The floor was cluttered with rusted cans and twisted metal, shards of glass and creeping shrubs shedding dead leaves, brown and rotting. In one of the rooms the debris had been swept vaguely into a corner, and chunks of concrete had been set out in a circle, where three people perched. The girl ducked through the door and they turned to face her. "Hey, Bianca," the nearest one muttered. He was a tall, skinny boy of about 17, with stringy black hair and disturbingly blue eyes. "Hi, Dan." The girl kicked over a concrete chunk and sat down. "Do you have the box?" "Right here." Dan brushed his backpack with one finger, gently. The small group stared at the backpack for a moment, completely silent as the fog began to drift gently across the night sky overhead.

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