Superfreak - Bad Monkey

Superfreak

Bad Monkey

Melanie Kendry

Copyright @ 2014 By Melanie Kendry

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

1 Hard to Hide

2 Freak

3 Bad Thing

4 Bad Dreams

5 Superfreak

6 Fogg

7 Heaven

8 Sally

9 Yoghurt Pots

10 Two Halves of the Moon

11 Emptied Out

12 The Dark Glass

13 Future Tense

14 A Crater, Fifty Miles Wide

15 Until One of You Is Dead

16 Creature

17 Bad Monkey

18 A Lot of Screaming

19 Not Any More

20 Evidence

21 All Sorts of Very Bad

22 The Faculty

23 Two Degrees to Midnight

24 The End

25 We Are the Bomb

About the Author

Superfreak: The Monkey Is Driving

1 Hard to Hide

We scraped through the shadows, puffing out misty breath. I pulled my overcoat higher round my hoody which was pulled down till I could barely see out. In these narrow streets, the houses seem to peer down, watching. We come here so often, I’m getting nervous. Someone from school is bound to spot us.

‘You two look like grim reapers in those overcoats,’ Bobs said. ‘Especially with the garden clippers.’

‘No we don’t. The grim reaper is a skeleton with a big knife on a stick,’ Eris said because she is smart but also annoying. ‘Garden clip-pers are more like scissors.’

I stuffed mine into my pocket but I don’t know why I bother trying to hide. Bobs is practically luminous. It’s as if he doesn’t know how to blend in.

Eris grimaced at him. ‘Do you have to wear that purple fur coat?’

‘It’s a nice change from what they used to make us wear in the City,’ Bobs said. ‘I think it’s cheerful.’

Mostly we tell people Bobs is famous - though he isn’t. He looks like he got dressed in the dark out of a skip. He thinks purple goes great with orange and what will really finish off an outfit is bright blue earmuffs.

So Bobs is mine and Eris’ dad, though we don’t admit it. Bobs says his main job is keeping us alive, but really Bobs’ main job is making us do jobs. Every day, mostly when we have to eat his cooking, I really wish we hadn’t lost mum. Mum wouldn’t make us get up at half past six in the morning to learn survival. Or let Bobs go out dressed like a mental patient.

‘Why do we have to do survival before school?’ Eris said.

‘Because I said.’

‘And after school?’

He never tells us the answer. He says it will make us anxious. But Eris needs to know the answer to everything. If there’s any gap, any little hole, dark and empty - then she gets wheezy and finds it hard to breathe. Like someone sucked the oxygen out.

We scuffed down the alley behind the church, squeezed between the bush and came to a rusted wire mesh fence. Somewhere here, there’s a gap into the Scrub, a tangly mess of shrubs and brambles. The problem is getting our blue plastic sacks through without ripping them. Eris dumped hers in the dirt by the hedge, pulled out her catapult and started pinging on the elastic.

When I learn to hit the target, I think the first thing I will do is catapult Toad. Then he won’t dare call me a freak. Unfortunately, I am not allowed a catapult, only a peashooter. Allegedly, this is because I will hurt myself, but really it is more because I will hurt someone else.

‘I thought we were trying to hurt people?’ I said.

‘Yes, but you’re supposed to hit them, not us,’ Bobs said. ‘Right now you’re more of a danger to your own team. Lift it up a bit - no not that much! Nice shot, Eris!’

I don’t know why he sounds so pleased. Eris always hits the target. Mostly I blow on my peashooter till my cheeks hurt then the pea drops slowly to the ground, covered in my spit, and Toad would laugh until he was sick in the dirt.

‘Why can’t we do this in the back garden,’ Eris said. ‘Someone might see us.’

‘It needs to be in a clear, wide space so no one can get hit.’

‘I don’t need any more practice. And Frank might as well practise in a toilet cubicle. He can’t land a pea more than ten centimetres.’

This was true but shameful and my face went pink. If only I could aim straight then maybe I could stop Toad. I tried again, squinting hard, face screwed up, arms and back as taut as my cheeks puffed out, closed my eyes, and –

‘Frank!’

I opened my eyes again.

‘You hit it!’ Bobs said, eyes shining with fatherly pride. He talked joyfully about how he used to shoot rabbits in the old days when he first escaped from the City.

I stared into the dirt.

Eris moved nearer, poking it with a stick. ‘You murdered an elderly rabbit.’

‘We could eat it for dinner,’ Bobs said, ‘as a treat.’

There was nothing about the grimacing, twisted, moulted pelt that would have made anyone want to touch it, let alone put it near their mouth. It looked like it had mange and probably died from a heart at-tack, not the dried up pea that I got it with by accident. And yet, I started drooling. We are never allowed meat.

’Don’t be disgusting!’ Eris looked at Bobs like she wanted to snatch it from him but didn’t want to touch it. ‘We need to bury it.’

‘See how useful a peashooter is,’ Bobs said. ‘You neutralised a rabbit.’

‘You’re only saying that to make me feel better.’

‘Not at all,’ Bobs said. ‘When civilisation collapses and people are rampaging down our street, trying to get into our bunker and steal our supplies, you will be jolly glad of improving your aim.’

I shuddered. ‘Can’t we just give them food and tell them to go away?’

‘We can’t feed them all.’

‘We could feed some of them?’

‘How would you choose who to save?’ Bobs said. ‘Besides, there’s only room in the survival bunker for us. There are seven billion people in the world. It’s too much.’

‘I don’t think we can hit that many,’ I said.

‘Don’t be so negative,’ Bobs said. ‘All you need is more practice.’

2 Freak

Our school looks like an alien space ship that smashed into a big mansion and some huts made of toughened cardboard. These are for study-ing Religion in, which you can tell because they have bars on the windows to stop children escaping. We skirted round the back edge, crunch-ing over gravel, down the long edge of the playing fields, through bushes that tickle as they let you through.

‘What if we catapult Toad?’ I said.

‘You want him to die laughing?’

My cheeks went hot. ‘I didn’t mean me, I meant you.’

We stopped at the corner of the mansion, backs to the chilled red brick. The sun was up, puddling the lawns gold.

‘You got a better plan?’ I said.

‘Hide here till the bell goes then run straight into form.’

We got there just in time, slid into our seats and hunched down, hoping no one would notice. At the front, our form teacher, Miss Pooter was calling out the register. She’s spaghetti-thin with shiny eyes and a flat, weird face like a beautiful doll. When you talk to her, she presses her sharp blonde bob tighter round her head like she’s protecting her ears from whatever you’re about to say.

As soon as she started reading out the announcements, Toad started throwing scrunched up paper balls at the back of my head.

‘Miss! Miss!’

Miss Pooter looked up. ‘Yes, Frank?’

‘Toad keeps hitting me on the back of the head.’

‘He hasn’t moved.’

‘With paper.’

Miss Pooter rolled her shiny blue eyes. The bell went, then she curved up out of her chair and I got trampled in a crush of kids trying to get their homework books signed.

I tried again. ‘I said, Toa- Tom Hoad was throwing paper at the back of my head.’

Miss Pooter looked blank. ’What paper?’

He must have picked up every last piece.

In Chemistry we learned safety: how not to set our hair on fire with Bunsen burners and to remember to put goggles on so we don’t blow chemicals into our eyes, which I thought was a good tip because next time Toad got his hands on chemicals that was exactly what I’d have to watch out for. Homework was to go home and find as many toxic substances as we could and match them up to the hazard symbols.

‘Except the one at the bottom,’ Mr Bibby said, laughing like he’d just told a really hilarious joke. ‘Ha, er, you’ll need to look that one up on the internet.’

We don’t have internet in case it distracts us from our survival training. But I didn’t tell Mr Bibby about having no internet since what happened when I mentioned it in Geography. Someone must have told Toad because then he started calling us Mormons and Eris said did he mean Amish and then it all got out of hand. Bobs says we don’t need internet. The 1979 Encyclopaedia Britannica that he found in a skip has good answers to most questions.

I just had to hope all these hazards were invented before 1979.

Except then I looked down and saw the last question on the homework was ‘What is a biohazard?’ so I just wrote, ‘something that eats all the flesh off your face.’

So then it was History, and I think the stress must have got to me. One moment Mrs Hale was talking about the industrial revolution. Next thing I knew I was peeling my head off the desk. I must have fallen asleep.

A whole bunch of faces were staring at me, very still, very quiet. They looked pretty excited. So first I thought it was good. Then I realised they were excited because something horrible was about to happen. It was a few seconds before I discovered that the horrible thing that was about to happen was about to happen to me and that I must have been drooling in my sleep.

So really what happened next wasn’t even my fault at all. It was Bobs and too many jobs. Mrs Hale looked angry and like she was waiting for me to do something so I wiped the drool off my face. Then I realised she must have just asked me a question. I searched out Eris, thinking, Eris will know.

This is why it is especially lucky that someone messed up and put me and Eris in the same class even though we are twins. Eris thinks too much. But sometimes this is lucky too because she always knows the answer to everything, and right now, she tried to whisper it to me.

‘Were you listening to the question?’ Mrs Hale snapped.

‘Pay- paper ships, and the –’ I squinted at Eris. ‘And the electric ice pulp, of course.’

Apparently the answer wasn’t any of those answers. It was paperclips and the electric light bulb. So me getting detention was really Eris’ fault as well because of her faulty whispering - but she still sulked as if it were my fault when she found me at the end of school.

‘Why can’t you stay awake?’

‘I’m tired,’ I said.

‘I’m tired too!’

‘Yeah. You look awful.’

I don’t know why she poked me then. From across the playground, a bunch of kids started yelling at us.

‘Hey! Weirdos!’

I got ready to blast them back with a clever reply, but before I could think one up, Eris told me to be quiet.

‘But they’re calling us weird.’

‘What do you mean - us?’ Eris stepped away.

‘Haven’t you heard what they call you behind your back?’

Eris’ face sort of collapsed.

‘Oi! Freak!’ Toad yelled. ‘Freak! Hey!’ Behind him, Olly was laugh-ing. Toad flipped something small, hard and shiny at me. It was a pound. ‘So you can get your dad a new coat.’

There must have been a hundred kids listening and they all went quiet. I tried to throw Toad’s pound back at him, but I couldn’t get the angle right. Eris dragged me away.

‘Wait!’

‘I can’t wait here till you learn to throw straight, Frank. I want to go home.’

Somehow, that hurt worse.

On our street, all the other houses have big, expensive flowers in the window and artistic, expensive-looking ornaments. We’ve got jam jars at the top of the steps, full of plaecivia. The cellar lurks below ground level, like an ogre in a hole waiting to jump out. We’re not allowed in the cellar - not even to check, when there’s a really big ex-plosion, if Bobs is dead.

‘Anyway, he can’t be dead,’ Eris said. ‘I can hear him swearing.’

Bobs says his experiments are private and none of our business, which only increases my enthusiasm to figure out what’s going on down there. So Eris and I have been trying to investigate this for a while, but it’s hard to know where to start because the cellar is locked and sealed; we never see anything go in or come out: except for Bobs. The cellar is our disaster shelter, also known as the bunker, and he says he doesn’t want us messing with it.

So we went to sit in the sitting room. Eris got hold of volume B of the Encyclopaedia, and I told her there was no need and showed her what I’d written already and she laughed. Apparently biohazard is anything of biology that is a danger to health, which makes me wonder why we are learning this in Chemistry. Then we went into the kitchen and looked for hazardous substances, but there weren’t any except for dinner.

Today, dinner is brown. Sometimes it is green. This putrid slop is ladled out of a small copper pot by a yob scooped off the street and tangled up in an apron. This looks especially weird because Bobs is also wearing skin-tight leather trousers, a stringy top and the kind of boots you could use to tenderise a steak. Not that we ever see steak.

The conversation about meat goes like this:

‘What’s this?’ Eris says, pointing to thing on plate - looking like she wants to be sick.

‘Algae,’ Bobs says, ‘with a medley of fungus.’

‘Could we have meat one day?’ I say.

‘No. It takes seven kilos of grain to make one kilo of cow and ninety bathtubs of water.’

‘A cheese sandwich then?’

‘There are sixty-three bathtubs in a kilo of cheese.’

‘No there aren’t.’

‘Yes there are. And when civilisation collapses, I won’t be able to find sixty-three bathtubs of water just so you can have a cheese sandwich, so you better get used to it.’

There’s no point pointing out that civilisation hasn’t collapsed. He always looks so disappointed.

Sometimes I torment myself by going into the school canteen. We go past