Science Fiction and Fantasy Box Set 1: The Squishies Series

by Claire Chilton

  “Er, yeah.” Carla peered at the label. It read:

  FOAMY WASHING UP LIQUID WILL MAKE YOUR DISHES SPARKLE!

  “What are you doing? You don’t read it. It’s not an exam!” the team leader cried. “Put the label on the bottles. Don’t miss any bottles. That’s it.”

  “My mom says that this stuff leaves streaks on her dishes. Isn’t false advertising against the law? Like, shouldn’t it be true?”

  The team leader narrowed her eyes. “Put the labels on the bottles.” She snarled at Carla. “No time for stupid thoughts. Stay ‘ere and practice while I go ‘ave a cuppa.”

  Carla nodded, peering at the empty conveyer belt as the team leader hurried away. This was going to be a long, boring day.

  The day progressively got worse as it became evident that sticking labels on bottles at high speeds was a physical impossibility.

  Her shoulders ached, and she felt like a wreck by the time she fell into the hard bed inside the workhouse late that night.

  She hugged the itchy gray blanket to her chest as she stared up at the grimy pipes on the ceiling above her bed.

  She’d heard some of the workers discussing their children getting sick. She was convinced that she had the same illness.

  Sweat beaded her skin, and she shivered. She was certain she had some kind of fever. I want to go home.

  She eventually fell into a troubled sleep, as the voices of her co-workers whispered around her.

  The conveyer belt was moving fast, and no matter how fast Carla tried to stick the stupid labels on the stupid bottles, they whizzed by so quickly that she missed more than she labeled. The ache in her shoulders was far worse this morning, and her head was fuzzy.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  She moved down the conveyer, trying to catch the bottles with missing labels.

  The labels themselves were irritating. The ones that hadn’t cut her fingers were refusing to come off the roll. When she stuck them on the bottle, they wrinkled and rolled up into a sticky mess.

  “Looks like the new girl can’t stick a label on a bottle!” The team leader screamed down the conveyer belt.

  Several green-faced workers peered at Carla with a look of distain.

  “Stop the belt, again!”

  Crap!

  Carla ran down the line, trying to fix the messy stickers.

  “Bloody foreigners, taking our jobs when they can’t even do them properly,” a nearby worker muttered. “Go back to where you came from.”

  Carla peered down at the fat, angry face of the worker nearest to her. She had lopsided eyes and a nasty smile on her lips.

  “You know that there’s a reason why siblings shouldn’t marry, don’t you?” Carla said.

  “You startin’?” the big woman asked.

  “Starting what, a race? Finish your bloody sentence.” Carla slapped a sticker on the woman’s forehead.

  “You, foreign girl, get over here!” the team leader snapped.

  Carla ground her teeth and walked over to the snide team leader. “What now?”

  “I realize that working for a living is not something your kind is accustomed to, but over here in Derobmi, we do our jobs.” The team leader picked up a bottle with a wrinkled label on it. “This is crap?”

  “That’s unfortunate.” Carla rolled her eyes at the woman.

  “What’s tha s’posed ta mean?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “If sticking labels on bottles is too much fer ya, we do need someone to clean out the latrines.” A nasty smile spread across the team leader’s face.

  “Screw this, and screw you,” Carla said. She’d had enough of Herb’s punishment. She was going home regardless of the consequences. She slapped a label onto the team leader’s cheek. “This is crap.” She pointed to the label.

  Carla turned on her heel and walked away from the conveyer belt.

  “She’s just another dirty immigrant. Let her go, boss.” Carla heard another voice as she stormed down the conveyer belt toward the exit.

  She paused, tensing her shoulders and narrowing her eyes. After the array of racist comments, she’d had enough. Her skin was on fire. She wiped her brow as beads of sweat appeared on it. She frowned at the moisture on her fingers.

  Seriously, am I sick or something?

  “Dirty skanks should go back to where they came from, especially if they’re too thick to stick on a label.”

  The team leader’s voice caused Carla to forget about her concerns and turn on her heel with fire burning through her veins.

  As she ripped off her stupid hat and glowered at the team leader, several things happened at once. The doors ahead of her burst open, causing a gust of wind to blow her hair around her face in wild tendrils. A handsome man in a dark suit walked into the factory, and his eyes locked onto Carla. Then the pile of boxes behind the team leader toppled over, knocking her onto her ass.

  Carla’s heart raced as she stared at the man. He was about her age with big green eyes and ruffled blonde hair. She heard gasps of awe behind her from the ladies of the conveyer belt, and the whispered name ‘Krellin Foamy’ in their sighs.

  Meanwhile, the snarky team leader was rolling around in spilt washing-up-liquid, trying to wipe it out of her red eyes.

  Carla knew she had to get out of the factory as soon as possible, but found her feet locked in position as she watched Krellin Foamy stride through the factory toward her. He was mesmerizing to look at, causing her heart to race in a way she’d never felt before.

  “Stop the belt!” A voice screamed behind her.

  Carla broke eye-contact with Lord Foamy’s son and glanced down at the conveyer belt. The bottles of detergent were colliding together at the end of the line, and spilling over onto the team leader’s head.

  Sensing that she was somehow going to be blamed for this, she managed to shake off the fog that had settled over her brain and force herself into action.

  Without waiting to see what happened next, she turned on her heel and hurried out of the factory.

  She glanced back at the door to see Krellin watching her as he knelt down to pick up her fallen hat. The intensity of his stare shocked her to the core.

  She shook her head and hurried out of the factory. Hot or not, his factory still sucked.

  She hurried out of the building and headed home as fast as she could. Whatever punishment Herb cooked up for her this time, it couldn’t be worse than working with inbred racists.

  Carla sneaked into her house, hoping to avoid a confrontation with Herb. The last person she wanted to deal with right now was her overbearing father.

  She felt better after the walk home from the factory. The fever that had plagued her during her time at Sparkle and Shine seemed to have broken when she left the place behind. There was still a mild fog over her mind when she attempted to recall what Krellin had looked like, but that could have been the fever, right?

  May the gods strike me down if I ever become a fan-girl.

  Krellin Foamy was the closest thing to a teen pin-up in Derobmi. The last thing she wanted was to start fawning over him.

  She sighed with relief as she stepped into her hallway and closed the door behind her. By the sound of it, only her mother was home, humming to herself in the kitchen.

  Her relief faded away as she contemplated a tedious evening at home with her family. Sure, she’d left the Sparkle and Shine factory behind, but she still had to live in Derobmi. The colony offered few places for teenagers to enjoy themselves. Even if there was somewhere interesting to go, she probably wouldn’t be allowed out, especially after all the trouble she’d caused at the factory. Still, she was happy to be home, if for nothing else than a more colorful wardrobe than a white coat.

  “Carla, is that you? Come help me finish making dinner. Now that you’re home, you can give me a hand.” Emily Mainston expectantly peered around the kitchen door at her.

  It seemed Carla’s two days away from the house hadn’t changed much
. It was the same old, boring routine.

  A familiar nagging feeling erupted deep inside her. She often fantasized that there was some great, mystical adventure out there waiting for her to embark on, something important in the world that only she was capable of doing.

  She tried to ignore the sudden urge to leave her life behind and chase after her destiny because she often felt this way, and the problem with this nagging feeling was that it was useless since she didn’t even know what this great adventure was, and she couldn’t work out where or when it would begin.

  Her life was so predictable that she could easily go by the same script every time she came home. Her mother would tell her to change her appearance, her father would tut at every other word she said, and her brother would be perfect and everything she wasn’t.

  She felt a moment of disappointment that Joe hadn’t been here to welcome her home. She’d expected him to be here to ask her if she was okay.

  She frowned. Where is he? School must have finished by now.

  Upon noticing that her mother was still looking at her, she nodded before following her into the kitchen, feeling rather unhappy to be home.

  She watched her mother stand proudly next to a gleaming oven in the kitchen. The oven shone from a recent polish, gleaming in the sunlight that beamed through the kitchen window.

  Carla fought the urge to point out how unimportant an oven really was.

  Seriously, do we need to have this same conversation every goddamn day? Oven - worshipping is not normal!

  Her mother beamed a similar smile to the one she wore in the photograph on the wall behind her. The photograph was of Emily when she was Miss Sparkle and had won the Marigold Gloves Pageant two years ago.

  As Carla stared at her mother’s glassy smile, she realized that her relationship with her parents was unusual at best. She disliked her father and could find no common ground with him at all. He was the main annoyance in her life. With her mother, she could see parts of herself in the determination and the common sense.

  Her mother was a Derobmi just like all the rest, but there were elements of anarchy in her actions at times. Mrs. Mainston’s version of anarchy was more controlled than Carla’s, such as using untraditional shades of green in the home decor rather than Derobmi lime-green.

  Carla wanted to make her mom proud of her, regardless of the Derobmi craziness. She wanted to be all the things her mother asked her to be, but it was all so daft. Cleaning and polishing was not the meaning of life. It just couldn’t be!

  The constant nagging to be greener or more like everyone else was insulting, and she found herself constantly rebelling against it. So she tried hard, got nagged at, then rebelled, then got in trouble, then tried hard, got nagged at … and so the circle of life continued.

  She was the black sheep of the family, the troublemaker. She was the black sheep of the entire colony, much to her parents’ dismay, and she knew she’d never really fit in the land of the green ones.

  At the age of twelve, she had acquired a criminal record for making the mistake of walking mud across Mrs. Bailey’s carpet. At the time, she hadn’t believed they actually prosecuted you on a criminal offense if you broke one of the commandments and ‘dirtied another’s carpet’.

  She had been sentenced to two weeks in the Cleaners’ Reformatory for Adolescent Purification, also rather unfortunately known as C.R.A.P, where Carla had learnt about the art of Stain Devils and the evils of dust and dirt.

  The list of wrongdoings in Carla’s short life was an endless one, and there appeared to be no way to change that.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked her mother.

  The petite Derobmi woman brushed back her perfectly-styled blond hair and turned to Carla with an elegant swish of her floral print dress. “Look at the oven. It’s positively glowing! Your father will be so proud.” Her voice was overjoyed and bubbly.

  Carla sighed. “Okay,” she muttered with resignation and a disturbing sense of déjà vu.

  I’ve heard this before, she thought. Oh yes, it was the last time I was here, and the day before that, and the day before that…

  Carla glanced at the sparkling oven. It was just an oven. It was a very clean oven in a nice silvery color but, lo and behold, it was just an oven.

  She made the right oohing and ahhing noises while contemplating the importance an oven actually had on the deep meaning of existence.

  Distracted by the complexities of oven-worshipping, she failed to notice her mother examining her appearance until the dreaded words were spoken.

  “Have you ever thought about doing something with your hair?” her mother asked.

  Doing something always meant changing the color to something lighter. Her mother lifted a lock of Carla’s wild black hair and studied it.

  “A nice ash blonde might brighten it up.” She sounded hopeful.

  Carla gritted her teeth. Here we go again.

  “I like it like this.” She scowled at her mother. She tried to see her mother’s point of view but ended up feeling insulted, just like every time it was mentioned. Carla was proud of her differences. She liked her untamed dark locks and purple skin.

  “It goes so wonderfully with my eyes,” she added in a moment of placation.

  Her mother approved of Carla’s eyes. They were just as green as every other Derobmi’s eyes, and Carla's were quite pretty, even by Derobmi standards.

  “I suppose they do stand out more.” Her mother conceded for another day.

  Carla turned away to hide her scowl. Why must they have the same conversation every day? Why didn’t anything unexpected ever happen?

  She hated being the scum of the colony, but she hadn’t quite figured out how to become what she was supposed to be.

  She admired her mother’s gleaming oven with a false smile then wandered into the living room with a strong sense of defeat.

  Why doesn’t anything ever change?

  Cole crouched low in the shrubbery beside the house. The vicious plant hiding him came equipped with sharp thorns and unbreakable branches, but it was leafy and covered him fully. It was also ideally situated beside the kitchen window.

  He watched the familiar green woman scrubbing the oven. She looked the same as she had when he’d first seen her, all those years ago. She’d never noticed him, but he’d been watching her for a very long time.

  She was always cleaning that stupid oven. He remembered the day she’d bought it with a smile, a smile that quickly turned to a grimace.

  He’d been so impulsive in his youth, and what had it got him? A life of always being on the outside looking in, a life on the run, that’s what he’d had. He felt bitter as the girl walked into the room. What did they know about suffering?

  But Carla Mainston knew some suffering. She’d been an outcast her whole life too. His anger faded when he looked at her. She didn’t belong here, and she knew it. She didn’t really belong anywhere.

  That was his fault too. So many mistakes made in one lifetime, so many youthful promises broken by reality. He sighed.

  I deserve far worse than a few thorns in my side.

  He ducked when she looked toward the window. Enough reminiscing, he needed to find out if his plan had worked.

  He crawled through the sharp shrubbery, ignoring the thorns scratching across his face and hands while he headed for the front-room window of the house.

  He peered through the window and nearly screamed when his eyes met a pair of watery green ones, staring right back at him.

  The boy was looking directly at him, but with no comprehension in his faded eyes. The change in him was shocking, from a healthy boy to a vegetable in such a short time.

  Cole sank below the window frame and shuddered. The boy should have been immune. All the children of Derobmi should have been immune from the bomb.

  He trembled all over as shock hit him. It had worked. It had worked too well. He’d made another foolish mistake that he couldn’t take back. He knew it was too late now. Th
e boy was not going to live for very long.

  He sank down on the grass with his back pressed against the wall below the windowsill. He blankly stared at the suburban close ahead of him.

  What have I done?

  Parklon had been so excited about his new life in Derobmi, but what a disappointment it had turned out to be.

  Because of his passion for science and a strong urge to travel the world, he had never really fitted into his home colony of Zoola. Unless you wanted to make beer or spend the rest of your life partying, Zoola didn’t have much to offer.

  After completing his degree in chemistry, he packed up his trivial amount of belongings and ventured out into the world with dreams of adventure and greatness guiding him to where he was now.

  He glanced around at where he was right now, scowling at the broken-down attic apartment. It had no insulation and was overrun by a large population of spiders and bugs.

  He’d tried to clean the place as best as he could, but the dust had been here for years, and it refused to move out.

  He sighed and stared out of the window across the vast city of Betterware. The city had seemed so perfect in the pictures he’d seen, and it still looked perfect even now through the window, but images didn’t tell the whole story. The place was ridiculous. Derobmi was outdated in every possible way and run by complete idiots. It was a wonder the colony hadn’t blown itself up decades ago.

  He had a job, not a career, just a job.

  He’d applied for a career at the Scientific Institute so he could use all of his wonderful chemistry knowledge. Even at the interview, he’d had high hopes. The promises of fast promotions and running his own projects had seemed like a dream come true.

  He clenched his hands into fists.

  I should have listened more carefully when they told me that ‘Everyone starts at the bottom and works their way up’ .

  The bottom had turned out to be one of the lowest vocations in Derobmi, cleaning test tubes and shipping deliveries. That was what a lab technician did in Derobmi. The job title was in no way a description of the actual job. Now, with no sign of ever getting out of the dingy laboratory, he was beginning to realize that his dream was not all it was cracked up to be.