Science Fiction and Fantasy Box Set 1: The Squishies Series

by Claire Chilton

  “Can’t be bothered,” Joe said in the same dead voice.

  Carla was fascinated. Joe had become an emotionless creature that didn’t know the meaning of soap, in just a few hours. Well, she assumed it had happened recently. She had been away for a couple of days. Surely, her mother would have told her about this if she had known.

  Meanwhile, her parents were running around like chickens without their heads.

  “I’ll call the doctor,” Emily cried.

  “I’ll get some towels and warm water,” Herb added.

  Carla stared at Joe’s eyes, they were blank and empty, and his face was expressionless. She waved her hand in front of his face, but he didn’t even flinch. She decided to go one step further and flicked the end of his nose with her finger. Still no reaction.

  What’s wrong with him?

  She flopped on to the couch and began ripping up small pieces of paper and rolling them into little balls. She then proceeded to flick them at Joe, waiting for him to flinch. He sat like a statue, not even blinking. She realized that something bad was happening to him, but she didn’t know what could have caused it.

  It was something new. Maybe something that would make Joe a bit different, and then she wouldn’t be alone here anymore.

  “Carla,” Herb bellowed. “What are you doing?”

  “I was just trying to get a reaction out of him.” She snapped back to reality at the sound of her father’s voice.

  How could I even think of something so selfish right now?

  “Well, do it after the doctor has examined him. This is a disaster,” Herb said.

  “I don’t think he minds.” She continued to flick little paper balls at Joe.

  “Do you, Joe?” she asked.

  “Don’t care,” Joe replied in a droning voice.

  “Well, I do,” Herb said.

  Carla stopped trying to get a reaction from Joe, feeling scared and guilty at the same time. She loved her brother, but she also wanted so badly for things to change. It was bad, but it was also a change, and that was exciting.

  Lord Foamy ground his teeth when he heard a familiar ‘tut’ noise behind him as he walked into the country club. He’d forgotten to wipe his shoes again, or something similar.

  He clenched his fists for a moment trying to control his anger at the ridiculousness of society, and then plastered a smile on his face while he walked back to the doormat and wiped his feet on it thirty-eight times, smiling and shaking his head, as if to say ‘silly me, how could I forget’. Then he turned on his heel and walked into the dining room to meet his wife.

  He rolled his eyes as he passed the maître d’ while striding toward his table.

  This place is ridiculous. Give me somewhere I can walk in caked in mud and do as I please, not this land of cleanliness and insanity.

  But Derobmi was not going to change anytime soon, and its stupidity was quite useful at times.

  He plastered on a fake smile as he passed the rich and famous members of the colony on the way to his table, nodding a greeting to dignitaries as walked by them.

  His wife was holding court at their usual table, reveling in her place as the self-appointed queen of Derobmi society.

  He counted himself lucky for marrying her. He didn’t have to bother being charming or witty with her around. Of course, that was the only lucky aspect of his marriage. She was also a royal pain in the backside and the queen of making tutting and complaining noises.

  “Good evening, everyone,” he said smoothly as he sat down. He shook out the folded napkin and placed it on his lap, as he’d been trained to from an early age.

  He nodded a greeting to a few people, and then proceeded to let his mind wander. After all, you didn’t need to be conscious at these events, just pleasant and clean.

  Thoughts of great battles and victories filled his head. He imagined himself leading armies across the globe, conquering and ruling all. There’d be no cleanliness in that, he was damn sure.

  The problem with the world was that no one really considered it these days. Every stupid colony had its own stupid rules, and none of them were united. Even his wife, who ruled society with her manicured fist, had no scope or ambition beyond this little, green colony. None of these people ever traveled out of it, so how could they imagine a world beyond it.

  He saw the future, and it was not green, clean or antibacterial at all. He’d been schooled abroad and visited many different colonies. He’d seen great battles fought. He’d been trained by the best in strategy, and his place here was only a temporary step toward ultimate world domination.

  He’d waited a long time for his destiny, but his patience had paid off. It was all starting to fall into place. The world was changing, and a new world order was about to begin.

  Parklon Eldemf muttered swear words under his breath while he cleaned hundreds of test tubes. He was working in the deepest recesses of the Scientific Institute, in the basement laboratory, out of sight and out of mind. Meanwhile, the other scientists got to work upstairs in the nice clean labs.

  The location of his office was a rather sore point for him. He hadn’t studied at Zoolaf University to clean up other people’s mess.

  A loud smash made him jump when a box of test tubes hit the worn tile floor and shattered, much like his dreams of working on exciting experiments had when he arrived in Derobmi.

  He swore again under his breath as he knelt down to scoop the offending glass shards back into the box, shaking his head at the mundane life he was leading.

  There was a strange sniffling noise under the table near where the glass had shattered.

  He peered under the table, and a small ball of fur shot out and skittered across the floor. It was a mouse-like creature with a circular pattern in its fur, but instead of a nose, it had a tiny little trunk.

  “Oh great, I’ve got rodents,” Parklon said to the tiny Sniffledor. The creature looked up at him with soulful brown eyes and watched him from the corner of the room.

  “You know, I chose to work in Derobmi because it’s supposed to be clean.” He complained to the tiny rodent, who twitched its whiskers at him.

  “But have you seen the place they gave me?” he asked it before glancing around his dingy laboratory.

  He began scooping broken glass into a cardboard box while considering what to do about the Sniffledor.

  “This place is full of idiots.” He told it. “They study Shake ‘n’ Vac for decades, but aren’t interested in my ideas for cleaning up pollution.”

  The Sniffledor sniffed the floor for crumbs of food with its trunk and sucked up any it found.

  Parklon wondered why they called it a pest, as the creature skittered across the floor again to the center of the room. The long fur on its belly made a clean stripe in the dirty tiles.

  Parklon smiled. It’s a pest that cleans up.

  He emptied the broken glass into the rubbish bin and sighed at the little creature.

  “I don’t know what I moved here for,” he said to it while remembering his life before Derobmi.

  He had emigrated from the Zoolaf colony, and he missed his old ways of fighting, drinking and swearing very much.

  He left Zoola because he didn’t fit in. He was a bit too intelligent, which isn’t that impressive when you consider that your average Zoolaf has the intelligence of an overripe lettuce, often due to years of alcohol abuse and knocks to the head in bar fights.

  However, in Derobmi, he was treated like a lout and a waster. He had thought prejudice was a thing of the past, but if your color was blue in Derobmi, your face would never be the right one.

  He kicked out at the mousetrap in the corner of the room, so it snapped shut.

  “Look at the way they treat us.” He told the Sniffledor as he pulled a cookie out of his bag. He knelt near the creature and began crumbling the cookie onto the ground. The Sniffledor had been wary of him until now. It tentatively sniffed the floor before it started zooming around him, sucking up cookie crumbs at an astoundi
ngly fast rate.

  “They don’t deserve us.” He told the little creature, who paused snorting up crumbs and tilted its head at him.

  Parkon angrily crumbled up another cookie as he thought about his lackluster superior.

  Last week, he had prepared the immunization injections for all the teenagers in Derobmi. He noticed that they had not arrived through the usual channels. This kind of thing was supposed to be reported and investigated, so he had reported it to his nattering superior at work.

  He’d written a full report about the strange markings on the packaging that the vaccines had arrived in. Then he’d presented it to his boss, as he was supposed to. His boss had told him to stop wasting time, ignored the report and had overloaded him with work based on the grounds that he obviously had too much time on his hands.

  Now, the newspapers were full of stories about teenagers coming down with a mysterious disease, and Parklon was concerned that there had been something wrong with those vaccinations. His report on it all had disappeared, and his boss had told him today that if any word about it came from his department, he’d know who to blame for allowing it to happen.

  Parklon’s hands were tied, but he was convinced that there had been something wrong with those shots. No one would believe him over his boss, and there was no evidence that the report had even been filed. Should he report his boss and take the rap for all these kids getting ill, or should he investigate it himself and save some lives?

  He felt it was in everyone’s best interests to get to the bottom of these strange vaccines by himself, and he had a pretty good idea where to start investigating.

  “Gud fud?” he asked the Sniffledor.

  It hiccupped at him before looking around for more.

  “Maybe later,” he said. He stood up and watched the Sniffledor skitter across the floor, making more clean stripes across it. “I’ve got a criminal to catch.”

  Parklon picked up a file with a picture of a pretty purple girl on the front of it. He stared at her picture, deep in thought.

  I knew there was something weird about her.

  Sometimes you could just spot the bad ones.

  Carla frowned as she sat behind her family in the psychiatrist’s office. Joe slouched in his chair with their parents seated on either side of him.

  She glanced at the doctor, who sat behind his desk, facing them all. His skin was more khaki than lime-green, and his blond hair was sparse on his extremely large head. The doctor wore a tweed suit with matching tweed shoes and an annoying smile.

  “Joe,” he said in a calming voice. “I hear that you’re feeling a bit down.”

  Carla raised an eyebrow at the doctor’s reference to her brother’s radical change. He was more like a corpse than someone who was ‘a bit down’.

  “Whatever,” Joe said, his voice tonelessly droning out the words.

  “Do you want to tell me how you feel?” The doctor rolled his pen between his fingers.

  “I can’t be bothered.” Joe’s reply was empty and flat. He turned and stared out of the window through his greasy fringe of hair.

  The doctor quickly scribbled something down on his notepad as if he had just discovered something wildly important, but a lot of doctors in Derobmi did that, and it usually meant that they didn’t have a clue what was wrong with their patient.

  “Why can’t you be bothered?” The doctor persisted once he realized that the notepad trick hadn’t fooled anyone, and he was probably going to have to cure this particular patient if he expected to get paid.

  “Don’t know,” Joe said while squeezing one of the many spots that had miraculously appeared on his normally clear-skinned chin.

  “What about the future?” the doctor asked, trying a different approach.

  Carla leaned closer, her elbows resting on her knees. This seemed familiar, but she couldn’t recall where she had heard it before. It had been something to do with expressing yourself.

  She struggled to remember where she read it. Yes, it was in a pre-Dawn of Time brochure that Bob had given her once. Using forms of expression to let out bad feelings or something was the cure for depression. Was that what Joe had, depression?

  “I don’t know.” Joe lazily shrugged his shoulders as he examined the buttons on his creased shirt in a demented fascination.

  “What would you like to be doing in, say, about ten years’ time?” Regardless of the doctor’s serene expression, he must have been getting frustrated with Joe because he squeezed his pen until it snapped in half.

  Joe looked up, and his eyes crinkled as an innocent smile formed on his face. “I like flowers,” he said with childish delight.

  His mother gasped, and his father clenched his fists so hard that his knuckles cracked.

  “I think we need to send him for some tests,” the doctor said.

  Carla stared in dismay, as Joe was strapped onto a round table, which revolved slowly while a special camera scanned his brain.

  “Won’t he get sick with all that spinning?” she asked the team of doctors with a frown on her face.

  At first, the whole Joe thing had been rather exciting, but now she was worried about it.

  Joe, all of her friends and almost every other teenager in Derobmi had become the living dead, all in one afternoon.

  One of the doctors came over to Carla, and he placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s for the best,” he said, with a practiced sympathetic smile. “I know you love your brother, but you must leave it to us now. We do this kind of thing every day.”

  She glanced up at the doctor with as much distain as she could muster. “How can you say you’re doing this every day when you have no idea what’s wrong with him?” she said with a high level of sarcasm, which was sadly lost on most Derobmi’s, this one included.

  The doctor stood up and smiled at her parents.

  “Such a curious child.” His tone was condescending, and so was the pat he gave her on the head.

  She felt a sudden urge to bite his hand and make growly noises, but refrained.

  “It’s good she has her own way of dealing with the emotional pain,” he added.

  She scowled at him. I’m sorry, how old am I again, four?

  Although, being four-years old would have been fun right now because then she could have bitten his hand and got away with it. The after-thought cheered her up for a few seconds.

  Her parents just nodded numbly. Her mother was in tears again—it was like Niagara Falls—and Herb was being sickeningly supportive with his arm around her.

  “I’m gonna get some air,” Carla said, determinedly sticking out her chin. Her mind was set on curing Joe, one way or another.

  Nobody seemed able to cure Joe or the other teenagers in Derobmi. Carla had a feeling that she could do something about it all, that maybe it was her destiny or something. At the very least, it was something she could try to do, and it was better than sitting around here and getting more upset.

  She walked through the automatic doors of the Emergency Room, leaving a large group of distraught parents and their vegetating teenagers behind her.

  Carla stepped outside the hospital doors and peered up at the evening sky. The wind harshly blasted against her, and rain began to fall in big drops. It started with just two drops before suddenly turning into a summer downpour, which instantly drenched her.

  She stared up at the sprinkling of stars that peeped through the inky clouds. Even the stars were shadowed tonight.

  Her heart felt as if it was twisting in her chest.

  This change that she’d wished for had felt like electricity to begin with, a vibrant spark of something new, but now the changes in her world were becoming overwhelming. It was all happening too fast and leaving chaos in its wake.

  If all of the teenagers had this illness, then would the adults be next? Would they too lose enthusiasm for life? Would everything in this world be monotone and depressed? Would her green utopia become gray? The implications of a world t
hat didn’t care became more frightening by the hour. Would she too cease to care and stop trying? That question scared her the most.

  While asking questions that had no answer, she frowned when she noticed a dark figure in a raincoat making a beeline for her.

  From beneath an old-fashioned hat, which was pulled down low, a gruff voice startled her out of her thoughts, making her jump at its close proximity. The accent was unusual, and struck a chord in her.

  “Carla Mainston?” he asked.

  She turned and examined the man more closely. She could tell it was a man by his build and deep voice. She was about to demand who he was, but her words trailed off as her eyes met with a pair of piercing blue ones, which glowed with the colors of the ocean on a sunny day.

  Being a Derobmi girl, she didn’t see blue eyes very often. She decided she quite liked them, and the little sparks of imaginary electricity they emitted into her eyes.

  She frowned with recognition, but it was hazy.

  Where do I know this guy from?

  He wasn’t a particularly tall man, only a few inches taller than her, but his presence—or perhaps it was his shoulders—appeared to fill up more space and made him seem bigger.

  “I… er… oh… you?” Her attempted sentence fell apart in her mouth, and she only managed to form basic vowel sounds at him.

  He raised an eyebrow and stared at her as if she was nuts. Meanwhile, her legs had turned to some kind of jelly substance.

  “Yes, I am.” She managed a lame reply.

  “You okay?” he asked, the eyebrow still raised as an amused smile appeared on his face.

  “Um, yes.” She blinked. Looking into his eyes seemed to be causing her to have an instant lobotomy.

  “Er, who are you?” she asked in a little, breathy voice that she’d never used in her entire life.

  He scanned the empty parking lot for a moment before his intense blue eyes settled on her again. “Long story. I need to speak to you. It’s important. Have you got time for a coffee?” he asked. “Kind of nowish?”