Shock the Monkey, page 10
“Oh no…,” said Kratz.
“Sweet Fancy Moses, this is bad,” said Knell.
Because before them… were vegetables. Dozens and dozens of vegetables.
Kratz had long suffered from lachanophobia—the irrational fear of vegetables. It stemmed (no pun intended) back to his mother, who would refuse him the slightest kindness unless he ate all the vegetables on his plate. She would scream at him, torment him, and threaten him with all sorts of horrific consequences. “They’re called squash for a reason,” she would say. “Pray you never find out why.” Or “Potatoes have eyes! Better eat them, or they’ll just keep watching you!” But artichokes were the worst. Because “choke” was right there in its name—and his mother took good advantage of that.
Thus, he had never eaten a vegetable in his adult life and avoided the produce section of the local Fresh and Funky supermarket like a vampire avoided garlic.
Knell couldn’t help him, because being Kratz herself, she had the exact same vegetable terrors—and this particular garden of giant veggies was beyond their worst nightmare.
“My God, Nell… what do we do? What do we do?”
“Just keep your eyes forward,” she said. “Find your happy place.”
“I don’t have a happy place!”
Agent Knell took a deep breath.
“Me neither.” Then she took his hand. “We can be each other’s happy place.”
And together they strode forward into the unthinkable horror of torturous tomatoes, egregious eggplants, Brobdingnagian brussels sprouts, and the kale… the kale…
They were almost to the porch steps when something appeared before them that they hadn’t noticed before. Three stalks, crowned with nasty, prickly leaves. Bulbous things molting malevolence.
They both shuddered. Artichokes. Why did it have to be artichokes?
“Close your eyes, Nell,” Kratz said, the grip of her hand giving him strength. “Close your eyes, and in five steps we’ll be past it.” And so together, eyes closed, they passed the great gagging monstrosity and achieved the porch.
But then they realized that once they captured Noah, they would have to cross the garden again to get out.…
The pie was, without question, the best the kids had ever tasted. Except, of course, for Andi, who had no actual taste buds and only ever pretended to eat. Naturally, she was a little resentful.
“Fruit, fat, flour, and sugar. Big deal. My power source is a lot more efficient and long-lasting.”
Miss Luella patted her on the head. “Not everyone has the luxury of a beryllium sphere, my dear.”
But it still didn’t ease Andi’s sour grapes, which she wouldn’t have been able to taste, either.
“Now then,” said Miss Luella, “what is this business you speak of?”
Ogden practically leaped across the table, wired on the aforementioned sugar. “We have to go after Claire. They took her into space, and we have to get her back.”
The wizened woman raised her eyebrows. “Ah, that troublesome kerfuffle last night on the other side of town,” she said. “Sorry to hear your friend was mixed up in all that.”
“We’re pretty sure it was Usurpers,” Sahara told her.
“Usurpers!” said Miss Luella. “Well, that’s a fine kettle of fish.”
To which the cat meowed, and she got up to get him more mackerel.
“Oh, I completely forgot to put the kettle on,” she said. “What type of tea would you prefer? Earl Grey? Chamomile? Or Relativity T’oolong—that one’s my personal favorite. Of course, it takes forever to brew, but it’s always done before I start!”
Noah took a deep breath. “Miss Luella, we’re kind of under a time crunch here.”
“Well then,” she said brightly, “let’s go for the T’oolong. Oh look, it’s ready. Let me pour you a cup so I can begin brewing it.”
Noah knew if this woman was going to give them assistance, they needed to play by her rules and in her own time. The last thing they wanted to do was alienate the one alien who might be able to help them. So Noah and Sahara dutifully drank their tea—but Ogden’s patience ran out after his second sip.
“The Usurpers already have a twelve-hour lead on us,” Ogden blurted. “We don’t have time for this.”
“My dear boy,” said Miss Luella, settling into her chair. “As long as you drink my T’oolong, time in the outside world slows to a crawl, providing us all the time we need.”
And sure enough, when they glanced out of the window, the trees had almost stopped moving in the breeze.
“Now,” said Miss Luella, “tell me everything.”
Well, they didn’t tell her everything. She didn’t need to know about Noah being a N.O.A.H., and his Fauxlite parents being turned into a pair of pearl earrings, and how he was the last surviving human ark—or that he had been the one who had freed Mittens and hundreds of other imprisoned alien criminals—or how their imbecilic science teacher, Mr. Kratz, had fouled everything up, and may have even been responsible for the volcano.
But even without all that, the story of Claire’s abduction and the events leading up to it took twenty minutes to tell, because everyone had something to say about it. Yet only ten seconds passed in the world outside the kitchen. And so involved were they in the tale, that no one saw, or sensed, the two individuals coming in the front door and moving extremely slowly through the front parlor. Not even Miss Luella.
“Well,” said Miss Luella, once the tale had been told, “that’s quite a tempest in a teapot. Sounds like you could certainly use a friend right about now. I’m in!”
“Great,” said Noah. “Andi, can you pilot a faster-than-light ship?”
“Duh,” she said. “I’m insulted you had to ask.”
But Miss Luella rose from her seat. “Sorry, Andi—nobody flies my ship but me.” Then she turned to the cat. “Ready for another adventure, Mittens?”
And the cat purred.
“Okay,” said Noah, “take us to your ship.”
To which Miss Luella replied, “You’re sitting in it.”
The “naught-abnormal” energy field that surrounded Miss Luella’s quaint home was more than just a countermeasure against curiosity. It protected Miss Luella from attention that might be drawn from sudden arrivals and departures of her home—which was, in a way, a motorhome, in the purest sense of the word, because its basement housed a powerful RipTearRupture drive. The same basement in which Kratz and Knell were currently hiding.
“If you’re going to leave, Sahara, you should go now,” Noah said. Even though he was up for this adventure, he wouldn’t push Sahara into joining it—or guilt her into it the way Ogden had tried to do. For her sake, he was willing to say goodbye, even if he wasn’t ready.
But Sahara didn’t say goodbye. She just stood there looking at him. Until Miss Luella said, “Sahara, dear, would you accompany me up to the flight deck? I could use a copilot.”
The cat hissed, and the woman gave Mittens an apologetic shrug. “Sorry, my love, but she has opposable thumbs.”
Noah could see in Sahara’s eyes the moment she decided. Such a huge decision, quietly made during a single swing of the grandfather clock’s pendulum. She offered him a tiny but mischievous smile, then went to join Miss Luella.
“The rest of you find a comfortable seat,” Miss Luella said, pointing to the overstuffed armchairs and loveseat in the parlor.
“Don’t we need seat belts?” asked Ogden as he sat down.
“Not to worry,” said Miss Luella as she and Sahara went upstairs. “The furniture knows to hold you down.”
Which is really something you don’t want to hear under any circumstances.
Out of all of them, only Mittens knew there were two unexpected guests in the house. Not only could he smell them, but he had seen them trying to secretly cross the living room while Miss Luella and the kids were talking. They had taken refuge in the basement, leaving the door slightly ajar. So the cat gently leaned into it to close it and used his telekinetic mind to lock the deadbolt, for no reason other than his own amusement.
And in so doing, unknowingly sealed the fate of an entire planet.
Interstellar ships are fairly common throughout the universe, because every advanced civilization makes such a mess of their home world that they need to find a way off their planet to “somewhere other than here.” Spaceships were originally sleek and aerodynamically streamlined to make it easier for beings to escape their worlds’ atmospheres—and also because every civilization goes through a big-things-that-look-cool stage, which is where planet Earth is currently stuck. However, once the RipTearRupture drive was invented, shape was no longer an issue, and spaceships took on fantastic and frightening forms ranging from simple cubes to crystalline fortresses to terrifying titanium beasts. It all depended on the taste of the owner.
That being the case, a blue Victorian house rocketing through the cosmos was barely worth a raised Megaloptican eyebrow. And since Megalopticans had 193 eyes, a single eyebrow raise was really nothing at all.
The little tower room on the top floor, which appeared to be nothing more than a quaint architectural flourish, was, in fact, the flight deck. To Sahara, it didn’t appear much like the bridge of a ship. It looked more like a little reading room, where one might sit on a rainy night and read a nice cozy mystery. It was full of embroidery and lace, two comfortable chairs, and a counter with antique perfume bottles that were actually the ship’s controls.
“Hold on,” said Miss Luella.
“I am,” said Sahara.
“I’m not talking to you, dear.”
Then the paisley fabric of the chairs grew tendrils of yarn that wrapped around their legs, holding them in place. Noah’s and Ogden’s distant shouts from the first floor indicated that their furniture had done the same.
“Would you like to do the honors?” Miss Luella asked an astonished Sahara.
“I would love to!”
Sahara took hold of the tallest bottle and slowly pushed it forward.
When the launch engines engaged, the ground shook so violently neighbors thought that Mount Hood, twenty miles away, had finally erupted, as geologists have claimed it was about to do for years. But the rumbling didn’t last long enough to cause any major concern—and since the house itself was surrounded by the “naught-abnormal” field, no one much noticed its ascent, or even its absence after it was gone. People did see the expanse of freshly roasted vegetables, and the smoldering crater where the house had been—but no one remembered there not being a smoldering crater there, so people just accepted it as a standard feature of their neighborhood.
Unlike the Usurpers, Miss Luella waited until the ship was a responsible distance from the ground before she took the controls back from a thoroughly stoked Sahara and engaged the RTR drive.
The ship ripped a hole in the fabric of space-time, tore into the gap, and ruptured the very laws of physics. The universe, being much like a cranky neighbor yelling at kids to get off his lawn, then proceeded to boot the ship toward its designated exit point in an attempt to rid itself of the annoying disruption. Thus, “nuisance control” was the guiding principle of all faster-than-light travel.
Down below, Kratz and Knell were unaware of what was going on—but were horrified by the noise coming from the large metallic object in the center of the basement.
“I’ve never heard a furnace so loud!” Kratz shouted over the device’s ear-splitting roar. “It’s clearly malfunctioning!”
“Yes,” agreed Agent Knell, covering her ears. “An accident waiting to happen!”
It got even louder, its powerful vibrations seeming to rip, tear, and rupture the very cells of their bodies. Then they were both thrown to the ground by some force they couldn’t even begin to understand.
Yes, thought Kratz, this furnace is definitely in need of repair.
11
To Serve Claire
EVEN FARTHER FROM EARTH, CLAIRE JENSEN WAS MORE FURIOUS than frightened as she paced in her cell. Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a cell since her quarters on the alien spacecraft did have a separate bedroom. And a living room. And a grand bathroom with its own spa. Okay, it was more like a luxury suite, with her own personal robot-butler to attend to her every whim—but a gilded cage was still a cage, wasn’t it?
“I demand to know what’s going on!” she said to the robo-butler.
“It is a sizeable universe; many things are going on,” he said. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
She grunted in frustration. Trying to get answers from this robot was like trying to find the right prompts for ChatGPT. She had never been good at that.
“Just take me home!”
“‘Take Me Home,’” the robot said. “A song by Phil Collins circa 1985. Would you like me to play it for you?” And a drum riff began.
“No! Alexa, stop!”
“Alexa: a primitive artificial intelligence program from Earth. Would you like me to mimic her voice?”
And he did. It was all so annoying.
“Shall I draw you a bath, or retrieve a bowl of fine human food for you?” the now gender-fluid butler said.
“No!” Claire shouted. “I want to speak to a person! Or whatever passes for a person in this place!”
“As you wish, Your Highness,” they said, and rolled out.
She wanted to throw a crystal glass at the robot as it left, but she knew a robo-maid would come to happily clean it up. At first she thought “Your Highness” was the robot just being sarcastic, the way her father would call her that whenever she was being, quote, unreasonably demanding, unquote. But she sensed no sarcasm in the robot. She didn’t even know if it was capable of it.
She hurled herself down on the plush velvet sofa and looked out the two-story circular window, upon a shimmering vista of passing stars that looked like Christmas lights.
All she knew for sure was that she had been abducted by aliens, but they had yet to tell her of their intentions. The stories she knew of alien abductions involved things like cow mutilations, painful probes, and human-alien hybrids. It did not bode well for her immediate future. Then there was that old Twilight Zone episode that always seemed to pop up during holiday marathons, where the aliens’ great manifesto of service to humanity turned out to be recipes for how to cook them. Is that why the robot wanted to bring her food? To fatten her up for dinner? So irritating.
Just then a human, or at least what appeared to be, entered her suite. It was only when he got close that she realized who it was.
“Raymond?”
“Yes and no,” he said. “The Raymond Balding-Stalker that you know is no longer in charge of this body. My name is Ø, but you can still call me Raymond if you like, or perhaps Raymønd, as that would be more accurate, Your Highness.”
“Why does everyone keep calling me that?”
“All will be made clear once we arrive on Claire.”
“Excuse me?”
“The planet that you now own. Your friend Ogden, who facilitated the purchase, officially named the star ‘Jensen Majoris,’ and named its planet ‘Claire,’ in honor of you, Your Highness.”
“Seriously?”
The Raymond-thing looked a bit confused. “Do you mean I should repeat what I just said in a more serious manner?”
“No… just… forget it.”
“I’m sorry, Your Highness, but I’m not currently in possession of a memory eraser.”
Claire sighed. “Never mind, just take me home. I want to go home.”
“But that’s precisely where we’re going, Your Highness. To your new home.”
Ø returned to the bridge, where his accomplice, ≠, was waiting for him.
“Is it quelled?” ≠ asked, shifting her very dead jaw so that it didn’t hang at such an awkward angle.
“The subject is as quelled as possible under the circumstances,” Ø told her, then reached up to remove a bit of flaking skin from ≠’s face. “You really should have chosen a host that’s still alive while you had the chance,” Ø said. “It might be less aromatic, but it’s much warmer and more agile.”
“Nonsense,” said ≠. “A living body feels pain. Plus you have to constantly contend with the resident anima.”
Ø shrugged. “The boy Raymond is barely a blip on my radar,” Ø said. “He stopped struggling hours ago and is content to sit back and watch as I control his body.”
“In that case,” ≠ said, “you chose wisely.”
“Are you in touch with the coronation committee?” Ø asked. “Is everything on track?”
“Yes, they are awaiting our arrival.”
Ø gave a satisfied sigh. “What a fine day it will be when she takes the throne.”
“Do you think she will cooperate?”
“Of course,” said Ø. “I firmly believe this is the fulfillment of all her dreams.”
≠ clapped her hands together, releasing a puff of pulverized skin.
“Imagine, just a few more planetary revolutions, and we can celebrate. All our hard work finally rewarded upon the coronation.”
“Yes,” said Ø, “but I’m more excited about what happens immediately after the coronation.”
“As am I, Ø, as am I.”
PART 3
PLANET CLAIRE
12
Bad Kitty
“WOO-HOO!” YELLED SAHARA IN ABSOLUTE JOY. “TAKE THAT, gravity! Because this girl is hotter than a heat shield on re-entry! Woo-hoo!”
“That was a wonderful blast-off, dear,” said Miss Luella, with the calm of someone who had done this a hundred times before. “Especially considering it was your first!”
Down on the ground floor—which was no longer technically a “ground” floor anymore—Ogden jumped up and climbed the stairs all the way up to the tower room the moment the chair let him go.
