The Creature Department

by Robert Paul Weston

To get home, Elliot had to cut through the dense forest of trees surrounding the sports fields. If anyone had asked him—even that very morning—whether or not he cared if Leslie Fang moved away, he would have said, Who’s Leslie Fang? But now, after seeing the Creature Department with her, he thought he might have actually made a new friend.

  He was surprised by how concerned he was about Leslie returning home on time. Her mother, after all, sounded like quite an unpredictable person.

  He was so concerned, in fact, that it wasn’t until he was in the middle of the forest, where the trees were densest and the shadows darkest, that he realized something was wrong. Something about the forest was . . . different.

  It was the shadows.

  They were moving.

  No, he told himself, you’re being silly. You spent one very enjoyable afternoon with a whole bunch of weird creatures and now (perfectly understandable) you’re seeing creatures everywhere.

  Following you.

  Rustling in the bushes.

  Watching you with their giant eyes.

  Their giant, angry, bulging . . .

  Eyes!

  Elliot froze.

  That was no shadow. Those were real eyes. Huge, bloodshot orbs that gazed out through the bushes. Stranger still, they appeared to be wearing a heavy dose of purple mascara.

  He stared back at them in disbelief. Surely, they couldn’t be real. No one had eyes that big, did they?

  He kept staring back at them, waiting for them to dissolve back into shadows, waiting for some sign to prove it was all an illusion. But no, the eyes gazing back at him were real.

  He knew this because—

  They blinked.

  Elliot ran.

  Stumbling along the path, he heard the rustling get louder. It was so loud, in fact, that whatever was following him must have been huge!

  In spite of its size, whenever Elliot looked back, he never saw anything, at least not all at once. All he saw were flashes of something truly terrifying.

  A huge, crooked smile full of gnashing yellow teeth.

  A massive nose the color of oatmeal, its gaping nostrils snorting like a horse’s.

  One single, enormous ear, big as a dinner tray, twitching feverishly around the black hole at its center.

  A giant! thought Elliot. I’m being chased by a giant . . .

  Creature!

  Just as this terrifying thought entered his head, all his fears were realized. A huge green hand, tipped with jagged claws, swiped out from the bushes and tried to grab him.

  “GAAAH!” Elliot screamed, and dove out of the forest. He somersaulted straight into a group of old men playing cricket.

  “Oi! Out of the way, boy, you’re ruining the game!”

  Elliot looked up, bewildered and out of breath. He looked back into the forest and spluttered, “G-g-g-giant!”

  “We don’t have time for foolishness, kid!” an old man shouted. “This is cricket, and our man’s set to bat for a century!”

  Elliot had no idea what that meant. All he knew was that he had to get home as quickly as possible.

  He turned and ran straight through the game, ignoring the angry shouts of the old men. He didn’t stop until his front door was shut tightly behind him.

  CHAPTER 6

  In which the man from Quazicom recalls his youth

  For Chuck Brickweather, the flight to Bickleburgh had been exceedingly smooth. As smooth, he thought, as the pristine runway at Quazicom’s private airstrip.

  The company boasted the most advanced corporate air fleet in the world. No matter how much turbulence swirled in the air outside, a Quazicom executive jet sliced through it without so much as a quiver. In fact, the plane soared just like the corporation itself.

  Smoothly.

  Chuck looked out the window. Down below him were mostly empty fields. The plane turned, banking to the left, and Chuck saw Bickleburgh in the distance. It was the only sign of life for miles around.

  What a pitiful backwater, he thought. How could they even call this place “a city?” More importantly, why would the world’s fifth-largest technology firm choose to erect its headquarters in a place like this? It was so ordinary. No, he thought, not ordinary. Dull.

  To Chuck, Bickleburgh had all the insipid hallmarks of a town in the middle of nowhere: dreary, uninspired houses, strip malls full of shops he had seen a million times before, and a gray perimeter of factories and warehouses. The only thing that stood out in any way was Chuck Brickweather’s destination: DENKi-3000 headquarters. The company’s four towers rose up from the center of town, gleaming in the summer sun.

  “Why?” Chuck wondered aloud. “Why here?”

  A moment later, a Quazicom flight attendant came sauntering toward him. “Did you call for me?” she asked. “Is there something I can get you?”

  “Just thinking out loud,” Chuck muttered, without even looking at the woman. His eyes remained fixed on the city.

  Seeing that she wasn’t wanted, the flight attendant drifted back to her seat at the rear of the cabin.

  Chuck opened his briefcase on the seat beside him. He heard the clink of glass as two bottles of Dr. Heppleworth’s Knoo-Yoo-Juice knocked together.

  He had been drinking the disgusting stuff since before he took the job with Quazicom’s Corporate Takeover Division. Strictly speaking, Knoo-Yoo-Juice was a diet drink (and yes, it certainly kept him slim), but it tasted terrible. Nevertheless, it was something he had to contend with. Keeping his size down was crucial. Quazicom was a sleek company, and they preferred to employ sleek people.

  There was a time—although you would never know it—when Chuck Brickweather had not been very sleek at all. Quite to the contrary, Chuck had been the opposite of sleek. He had been fat. Fat and oafish and simply not the sort of sleek, trim corporate consultant a company like Quazicom would ever contemplate hiring.

  In Chuck’s mind, there were two versions of himself. The new, fit, super-sleek Chuck of today and . . . that other guy. That big slobbering lummox he used to be. The new Chuck despised that other guy, his former self, which was why, wherever Chuck went, he always carried a minimum of two bottles of Dr. Heppleworth’s foul-smelling, even-worse-tasting purplish-red concoction. In fact, besides the two bottles in his briefcase, he was traveling with several crates of the stuff, safely stored in the plane’s cargo hold. Just in case.

  When he opened his briefcase, however, he wasn’t looking for his Knoo-Yoo-Juice. He was after something else. He wanted to check his DENKi-3000 file one last time.

  While the majority of technology companies devoted themselves to making smart phone apps and Internet software, DENKi-3000 was still producing actual inventions.

  Their success, it seemed, rested on the shoulders of one man: Professor Archimedes von Doppler, the company’s Chief of Research and Development. Unfortunately, Chuck had been unable to find very much information on the man. He rarely gave interviews and never talked about where his ideas came from.

  Chuck looked through what little he had collected on the professor. There wasn’t much more than a few articles and a handful of grainy photographs.

  “What’s your secret?” he asked, speaking aloud to the images. They didn’t answer (of course), and Chuck closed the file.

  The professor’s secret . . .

  That was why Quazicom had sent him to Bickleburgh: to uncover the company’s secrets. They were the most valuable things at any company. After all, he knew from experience that once you understood a company’s secrets, you understood its lifeblood—meaning you understood what made it valuable. Or, to borrow a phrase from his boss, “Once you understand the lifeblood of a company, it’s simple enough to tear out its heart.”

  Chuck, however, had his own secrets to keep. He had a hunch that maybe—just maybe—he already knew what the professor was hiding. If so, then Chuck h
ad a plan of his own, but it was one he couldn’t put into action until he was absolutely certain. . . .

  Chuck placed the file on the seat beside him and reached deep into the bottom of his briefcase. He drew out a small sky-blue box with dark green letters. On the label, it said:

  TransMints

  Get your freshness direct from the web!

  The DENKi-3000 logo was printed in the corner. The company was famous for these things, but Chuck had never tried one.

  He flipped open the box and tapped one of the mints into his palm. It looked like a miniature robin’s egg, a pale blue orb, speckled with tiny white dots. While he was staring at it, the airplane’s intercom crackled to life.

  “Mr. Brickweather?” the pilot said. “Sit back and relax; we’ll begin our descent momentarily.”

  Chuck did as he was told. He sat back in the plush leather seat and relaxed, a thin smile on his face. At the moment, he was only a consultant with Quazicom, but he could certainly get used to this executive lifestyle.

  He held up the TransMint between his thumb and forefinger, glancing at it one last time before popping it into his mouth.

  At first, it was disappointing. There wasn’t any flavor at all. In fact, the taste was somewhat unpleasant, a bit like having a dry pebble in your mouth. But the unpleasantness only lasted a moment.

  Suddenly, his tongue was hit with a tiny jolt of static electricity (if static electricity tasted like peppermint) and his whole mouth was flooded with taste.

  Chuck had always thought of the TransMint as frivolous candy, aimed mostly at children, but now he understood it was so much more than that. Somehow, the tiny robin’s egg in his mouth was collecting all of the Internet’s data about freshness and converting it into . . . flavors!

  First, he tasted the sweetness of a pine forest at dawn, then the quenching refreshment of a midsummer rain, then the sharp crispness of an arctic night. A vivid memory suddenly returned to him, something he had forgotten until all these flavors brought it back.

  He recalled himself when he was much younger, chubby and red-faced, rolling in the very first snowfall he could remember. In his mind, he saw himself lying faceup on the ground as snowflakes silently caked around his eyelashes, melting into tears that ran down the sides of his pudgy cheeks.

  It was a moment of pure, unadulterated nostalgia—and Chuck couldn’t stand it. Who was that kid? Not the sleek Chuck of today, no sir! That kid belonged firmly to his former self, the former self Chuck despised with every sleek fiber of his new sleek body. That self had nothing to with the Chuck of today, smoothly slicing through the air above Bickleburgh in a private company jet. And yet . . .

  The memory was so clear, the nostalgia so intense that Chuck actually shivered with—

  WHOMPH!

  The plane lurched sickeningly to one side. Chuck was so taken by surprise that he swallowed the TransMint.

  The pilot’s voice returned to the intercom. “Mr. Brick-weather? You better buckle up back there.” The man sounded just a bit flustered (which was rather disconcerting). “We’re having some trouble up here with, uh . . . well, anyway, you better buckle up.”

  The intercom went dead.

  WHOMPH!

  WHOMPH!

  Two more stomach-churning lurches rocked the plane. It no longer felt like they were flying. More like bouncing!

  Chuck gripped the plush armrest of his seat. How could this be happening? Turbulence never affected a Quazicom private jet!

  Suddenly, the plane veered into an aerobatic maneuver so intricate, with so many spins and twists, that Chuck couldn’t help but . . .

  Vomit.

  He spewed his breakfast all over the window and the seat in front of him.

  This was incredibly embarrassing, not merely because he had thrown up, but because for months he had consumed almost nothing but Dr. Heppleworth’s Knoo-Yoo-Juice. As a result, Chuck Brickweather’s vomit was a bright, almost glowing purplish red.

  “That is definitely going to leave a stain,” he muttered to himself.

  The plane went on careening through the sky. Chuck noticed that rolling back and forth through his Day-Glo puke was something that looked like a tiny blue robin’s egg.

  That was when he figured it out.

  “Why you little—” he said, stomping on the Trans-Mint. There was a crackle of tiny green sparks as the thing was destroyed. Almost instantly, the plane stabilized.

  The intercom came to life once more. “Hope you’re all right back there, Mr. Brickweather,” said the pilot. “Sorry if we gave you a bit of a scare, but everything appears to be working normally now. Let’s try that again, shall we? Sit back, relax. We’ll be landing momentarily.”

  Chuck wasn’t sure he could relax, especially not with the cuffs of his pants soaked with the bizarre contents of his stomach. Worse, he hadn’t even brought an extra pair of shoes. He found the box of TransMints on the seat beside him. Turning it over, he found a very clear warning:

  CAUTION: Not recommended for use during air travel

  “What is that smell?” asked the flight attendant, calling to Chuck from the rear of the cabin.

  “Uh, sorry,” Chuck replied sheepishly. “I was a bit sick back here.”

  “What have you been eating?”

  How could Chuck tell her? It was far too embarrassing to explain he had hardly eaten anything but Knoo-Yoo-Juice for weeks on end, so he simply said, “Bit of indigestion.”

  As the plane began its approach into Bickleburgh City Airport, Chuck Brickweather had to admit that for the first time since he started working for Quazicom, things were not running smoothly. But that didn’t bother him. In fact, as the plane touched down—smoothly, as usual—he even smiled to himself. He felt he knew exactly where DENKi-3000’s heart was, and if he had to, he fully intended to tear it out.

  CHAPTER 7

  In which Elliot has better hair than Albert Einstein

  Elliot von Doppler, you come down here this instant or, I swear, you’re going straight into a custard tart! Your father and I have worked very hard to prepare a lovely breakfast, so I’m going to count—”

  Before his mother could finish, Elliot came bounding down the stairs fully dressed (including the green fishing vest, of course).

  “Here I am!” Elliot jumped from the third step to land directly in front of his mother.

  In return, she regarded him with suspicion. “What’s gotten into you this morning?”

  Elliot merely shrugged and waltzed past her into the kitchen. He had awoken to a warm, sunny morning, and somehow the bright blue sky convinced him the giant that had chased him through the forest in Bickleburgh Park had almost certainly been a figment of his imagination. This morning, the only thing on his mind was getting back to the Creature Department.

  He wolfed down his awful breakfast for a change—dusty cereal topped with over-fried eggs—and finished off by grinning at his parents and giving them a thumbs-up. “Great job, guys!”

  His father peered at him over the top of his newspaper. “I hope that’s not your full review.”

  “Okay, how’s this? The salty crumble of the yolk was a unique complement to the wheaty bouquet of powdered muesli.”

  “Impressive,” his father said, a bit suspiciously. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I feel great! Just in a good mood, I guess.”

  Usually, Elliot spent much of his summer vacation quietly lounging around the house or wandering through the yard, examining the world through his DENKi-3000 Electric Pencil with Retractable Telescopic Lens.

  On that morning, however, he practically danced around the house, humming jaunty tunes with a big, goofy grin on his face. His parents were astonished. It wasn’t that Elliot was an unhappy child, but he certainly wasn’t into skipping.

  Just before lunchtime, Elliot found his mother and fathe
r in the kitchen. Together, they were struggling to decipher the instructions on a box of boil-in-the-bag rice.

  Elliot cleared his throat. “Ahem! I’m going to hang out with Leslie this afternoon,” he announced.

  “I take it you found her yesterday,” said his mother. “In the park?”

  Elliot nodded. “She invited me for lunch today. Her grandfather runs a restaurant.”

  The faces of both his parents brightened.

  “Oh?” asked his father. “What sort of restaurant?”

  Elliot had to think. “Dim something. Oh, wait, that’s it! Dim sum.”

  His mother frowned. “You mean Chinese takeout?”

  “I guess,” Elliot mumbled.

  “Couldn’t you find a friend with a molecular fusion restaurant?”

  “Is that even food?”

  “It’s the newest thing,” said his father. “You’d like it. It’s all science-y.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “All right, but if you want our advice, you really ought to tell this girl’s grandfather to open a gastropub. Isn’t that right, dear?”

  His father nodded. “I hear molecular fusion’s already on the way out.”

  “Didn’t you just say it was the newest thing?”

  Elliot’s father lifted the newspaper again, hiding his face. “You know how these trends are. They come and go.”

  Elliot’s only response was to sigh, grab his knapsack, and hoof it out the door.

  Famous Freddy’s Dim Sum Emporium was in the heart of Bickleburgh’s minuscule, but always crowded, Chinatown. The neighborhood was a single block of markets and neon taverns that spilled out onto the sidewalks with vegetables, dried fish, and all sorts of toys and cookware laid out on plain tables.

  Famous Freddy’s, however, was not on the main strip. It was on a side street that wasn’t much wider than a back alleyway. There was no sign above the entrance, and the foggy glass doors looked like they belonged more to a struggling bank than a restaurant. The only hint the establishment served food was a wooden sandwich board out front: