Against All Odds Read online

  “Cut it out, you stupid clone!” Boney shoved the clone in the shoulder.

  The clone shoved back, copying his words and actions exactly. Boney raised his fist and the clone raised its fist, too. They were about to punch each other when an entire platoon of Boneys and Squeaks appeared around the corner.

  “Now we’re really in trouble,” Itchy wailed. He turned as though to run, but Sam stopped him.

  “Wait,” she said. “We don’t have to fight. We can use this to our advantage.”

  “How?” Boney and Squeak asked together.

  “How?” all their clones repeated.

  “Would you please stop that?” Itchy pleaded.

  The Squeaks and Boneys stared at him scornfully.

  Itchy shook his head. “This is insane. What is the purpose of replicating clones that just act exactly like the people they’re cloned from?”

  “I can think of several applications,” Squeak said, his clones repeating his words.

  “So can I,” Sam agreed.

  “Now everybody is repeating everyone else,” Itchy groaned.

  “It’s not a bad thing,” Sam said. “The clones simply reflect the behaviour of their originators in order to fit in. So … why not be kind?”

  “What do you mean?” Boney asked.

  “What do you mean?” his clones repeated.

  “Give your clone a hug,” Sam said.

  “What?”

  Boney’s clones mimicked his surprise.

  “Just do it,” Sam said.

  Boney stared unsympathetically at the clone in front of him. All the Boney clones stared back.

  Sam nudged Boney in the ribs. “Go on.”

  Boney pursed his lips. His clones did the same. He hesitated, then stiffly raised his arms. The clones raised their arms together as though performing a strange ballet. Boney twisted his face like he was swallowing a bitter pill, and then put his arms around the clone and gave it a quick hug. The Boney clones twisted their faces and made a hugging motion with their arms.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Sam said.

  Boney shrugged, his clones shrugging together in front of him.

  “This is so weird,” Itchy said.

  “Now hug each other,” Sam told Boney and Squeak.

  The Squeaks looked uneasily at the Boneys.

  “I’ve spent a whole lifetime learning to hide my feelings,” Squeak said, his clones repeating his words.

  “This is no time to be Spock,” Itchy blustered. “Just give Boney a hug.”

  The Squeaks faced the Boneys. They stared at each other for a few moments, and then hugged, stepping quickly away from each other.

  “Do it again,” Sam directed. “But this time put some feeling into it.”

  The Squeaks put their arms around the Boneys and squeezed, hugging as though they hadn’t seen each other in years.

  “Good, good,” Sam encouraged. “Now tell him you love him.”

  The Squeaks looked at Sam with mild concern showing through their goggles.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re making really good progress here.”

  Squeak cleared his throat. “I love you,” he mumbled.

  “I love you,” his clones softly chanted.

  The clones kept hugging on their own, even as Boney and Squeak pulled away.

  Itchy sniffed, holding back a tear. “This is so beautiful.”

  Sam tugged on his sleeve. She pointed down the passageway to the right. The four friends slowly tiptoed away, leaving the clones hugging happily in the corridor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A WRONG TURN

  Boney, Squeak, Itchy, and Sam crept along the corridor, careful not to draw attention to themselves. Itchy craned his neck, as though expecting the hugging clones to appear any second. “You told us before that we needed to turn left,” he said to Sam.

  Sam pushed her hair behind her ears. “I know. But we don’t really have a choice now. I’m hoping this passageway connects up with the one we were on—or that we’ll find another way out altogether.”

  “Haven’t these aliens ever heard of signs?” Itchy grumbled. “How do they find their way around this white jungle?”

  “There’s another passageway around the corner,” Squeak said, indicating an identical-looking corridor to the left. “Perhaps it will lead us back the way we came.”

  The four friends took the new route. But they hadn’t travelled more than a hundred feet when they heard the same strange whistle they’d heard in the blob’s room, followed by a series of odd clicks and beeps coming from some unknown location in the corridor.

  Boney searched for the source of the sound. “What is that?!”

  “I don’t know,” Itchy said. “But whenever we hear that whistle, something bad happens.”

  Squeak looked at his feet. “The floor is starting to shake.”

  “It’s the Itchys!” Sam cried, pointing to the end of the corridor. “Run for it!”

  The red-headed clones appeared, stomping their slime-soaked sneakers robotically as they marched.

  Itchy took off, Henry bouncing and squawking in his sling. “Why can’t they just leave us alone?”

  “You tell me!” Boney shouted. “They’re your clones.”

  Squeak ran, his messenger bag bouncing against his back. “I’m really getting tired of this.”

  “There’s got to be a way out of here!” Sam sprinted to the front of the group, her legs a blur.

  The clones growled and moaned, the gunshot of marching feet reverberating off the walls of the ship.

  “They’re gaining on us!” Boney yelled.

  Itchy gasped for air. “I haven’t eaten all day. I have no energy left!”

  Squeak pushed him from behind. “Keep running!”

  The whistle sounded again and the clones began to shriek as they marched, stomping faster and faster.

  “We’re doomed!” Itchy wailed.

  “There’s some kind of button up ahead,” Sam said. She ran to a point in the hall that looked the same as every other part of the ship except for a silver disc on the wall.

  “How do we know what it is?” Squeak asked.

  The clones surged, gaining on the friends.

  “Just push it!” Itchy howled.

  Sam slapped the button as hard as she could. An opening appeared in the wall. “It’s a door! We can hide in here!” She yanked Boney, Itchy, and Squeak into the room, then found an identical silver button on the other side of the wall and smacked it, shutting the door against the rising hordes. The clones hit the door in a rush, banging and pounding viciously. Doubled over, hands on knees, the four friends choked and wheezed, trying to catch their breath.

  “That was close,” Squeak rasped.

  Boney puffed. “You can say that again.”

  Itchy coughed. “Please don’t.”

  “Oh!” Sam suddenly exclaimed.

  Staring back at them from behind a white console were two startled blue aliens, their faces the very picture of anguish. They were tall and thin and hunched over, their bulbous heads seemingly too large for their thin bodies. They’d obviously been caught off guard, as they’d barely had the opportunity to right themselves from whatever it was they were doing before they were so rudely interrupted. One was leaning toward a microphone of sorts, a silver whistle dangling from his horrified lips. The other sat poised, a coffee mug held midway to his mouth.

  “Fifth-level Blues,” Sam whispered in awe.

  The four friends shifted uncomfortably on their feet. The aliens seemed equally uncomfortable, staring awkwardly back, until the one with the mug gave a half-hearted wave. Boney, Squeak, Itchy, and Sam waved limply back, the Itchy clones pounding relentlessly on the door behind them. The alien with the mug continued to stare as he slowly leaned into the microphone and gave a series of hesitant clicks and beeps. This caused the pounding in the hall to mysteriously stop. It was immediately replaced with muffled shuffling and meeping outside the door. No one said
anything for the longest time until Boney stepped forward.

  “Um … are you in charge here?”

  The aliens looked nervously at each other and turned to look at Boney, shrugging and blinking their eyes.

  Squeak leaned toward Boney. “They may not speak English.”

  Boney cleared his throat, then spoke, slow and loud, exaggerating every word. “Are … you … in … charge … here?”

  He waited for the aliens to answer, but they just kept bobbing their heads back and forth and looking at each other and flopping their hands around. After a long stretch of this, Itchy grew frustrated and stepped up beside Boney.

  “Well? Are you in charge here?” he demanded. “Because we want some answers!” He flung his hand toward the aliens, sending a glob of green slime arcing across the room and splattering in a large starburst on the pristine white console.

  The aliens shrunk back in disgust, blinking and bobbing until the one with the mug eventually placed his cup on the console and picked up a clunky headset. He wrestled to put it on and began talking, a stream of Punjabi and then Spanish gibberish blaring over the loudspeakers. The four friends covered their ears as the alien twisted a dial on the device and smacked it several times.

  “Well,” he finally gurgled in the Queen’s English, “I suppose we’re it, yes.”

  “So you DO understand us,” Itchy said.

  The alien shrugged and nodded. The one with the whistle put a headset on, too.

  “We can communicate in over a thousand forms of language,” he gurgled.

  “A thousand and one if you include Simultus,” the one with the mug corrected him.

  “Right, of course,” the first one agreed. “I always forget to include that one. It’s really just a dialect.”

  “Right.”

  “So … you run this ship?” Boney interjected.

  The aliens looked at each other, covered the microphones on their headsets with their hands, and began arguing furiously in their own language.

  After much arm waving and several exchanged shoves, the one with the whistle spoke into his mic. “Yes, I suppose you could say that.”

  “Why did you clone me?” Itchy jumped in. “Do you think you can just go around cloning people and get away with it?”

  The aliens slouched with shame.

  “We’re actually quite sorry about that,” the one with the mug said. “We didn’t mean for things to get so … out of control.”

  “You never should have seen the clones,” the one with the whistle explained. “It was meant to be an ‘up and down’ sort of operation.”

  The alien with the mug gave a high-pitched laugh. “‘Up and down’? You mean ‘in and out.’ Adjust your translator!”

  The alien fumbled with the dial on his headset. “Errr … uh … yes … okay … there we go. It was just meant to be a quick job.”

  Itchy scowled. “Well, your ‘quick job’ has caused me a lot of trouble. There are copies of me everywhere—I’m wanted by the police—not to mention the fact that you almost killed us in the room with that … blob.”

  The aliens nodded sympathetically.

  “It’s so hard to find good help these days,” the one with the whistle said.

  “Yes, quite difficult,” the other agreed.

  “But not to worry,” the first one continued. “We would have disposed of the clones when we were finished.”

  “Yes,” the other said. “You would never have known we were even here.” He waved his hand through the air to show how painless the whole operation was supposed to have been.

  “Then why did you clone me and Squeak?” Boney asked.

  The aliens froze. The one with the mug spoke. “That was just a fail-safe, in case the redheads didn’t work out.”

  The alien with the whistle tapped on his temple. “And they almost didn’t. They’re not very bright.”

  “Hey!” Itchy protested. “I’m standing right here.”

  “Oh yes, of course. Sorry.”

  “What exactly were you trying to achieve with all of this?” Squeak asked.

  The aliens lightly tapped their fingers together.

  “Nothing too universe-shattering,” the one with the mug said.

  “We just needed a little fill-up,” the other explained. “We were almost finished when you arrived … unfortunately.”

  The alien with the mug shot his colleague a worried look. “Not that we’re unhappy to see you,” he said. “It’s just … we’ve hit a bit of a snag.”

  “If by ‘snag’ you mean … your blob blowing up … I can explain that,” Boney said.

  The aliens waved their hands politely. “Oh no, no, no. No need to apologize.”

  “But … we never expected you to show up armed,” the alien with the whistle said.

  “Armed?” Sam questioned, joining the conversation.

  The alien pointed to Henry and the kittens.

  Sam looked puzzled. “You’re kidding, right?”

  The aliens shook their heads.

  Sam walked toward the console. “But these are helpless little creatures. They wouldn’t hurt anyone.” She held Fluffy up for the aliens to see.

  “Please, no!” the aliens cried, recoiling in fright and hiding behind one another. “Don’t make us look at it. Please! We’ll tell you anything you want to know!”

  “Yes, anything!”

  “But he’s a harmless little kitten,” Sam cooed, taking another step closer.

  “We needed some gas!” the alien with the whistle blurted out, then cowered behind his hands.

  “Gas?”

  “I don’t get it,” Itchy said.

  “To run the ship?” Squeak suggested.

  “Yes, yes!” the aliens confirmed, pointing at Squeak. “The weird kid with the stupid goggles gets it.”

  Squeak blinked indignantly. “My goggles aren’t stupid …”

  Sam placed Fluffy back in his sling. “You mean … all of this was for gas?”

  The aliens nodded like bobble-heads.

  “So … you’re not trying to create a human-alien hybrid?” she asked.

  The aliens gave her a questioning look.

  “Whatever for?” the first one said.

  Squeak and Sam looked at each other and shrugged. Boney pulled on his long chin. “This has been a very odd day.”

  Itchy sighed impatiently. “Would someone please tell me what’s going on?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE ALIENS EXPLAIN

  Squeak stepped toward the console. He squinted behind his goggles at the aliens. “So … let me get this straight … that blob—”

  “—Our Flatulous,” the alien with the mug corrected him.

  “VERY expensive creature,” the other alien said. “Cost a fortune, not to mention the dozens of workers we’ve hired to wrangle it over the years.”

  “Yes, but grey men are cheap,” the first alien said.

  “A dime a dozen,” the other agreed.

  Boney’s face fell. “But we killed your blob by feeding it clones.”

  “It was old,” the first alien said, dismissing Boney’s concern.

  “REALLY old,” the second one said. “We would have had to acquire a new one soon anyway. Clones never agreed with it. Too much protein. You couldn’t possibly have known that.”

  Squeak coughed to get their attention. “So … your Flatulous required sugar to create noxious gases through the digestive process … which you then harvested as fuel —”

  The whistle alien raised his finger. “And pressurized using a three-stage diaphragm compressor …”

  Squeak nodded. “Taking into account the compression efficiency as a ratio of theoretical temperature rise and heat loss versus the actual numbers.”

  “Exactly,” the aliens said.

  Itchy turned to Boney. “Do you have any idea what they’re talking about?”

  “Wait a minute,” Sam said, obviously distressed. “Why would you use such an antiquated method to
propel your ship? There are far less dangerous and more environmentally conscientious ways to travel through space that don’t have such a negative impact on delicate ecosystems.”

  Her question hung in the air as the aliens exchanged worried looks once again.

  “Well …” the first one began but was interrupted by the second, who threw his hands in the air.

  “For the love of Zoilus, we dropped out!”

  “Mobius, please!” the other alien said.

  “What’s the point of trying to hide it, Servil?”

  “Dropped out of what?” Sam asked. “School,” Mobius confessed.

  Servil pouted. “It was too difficult. All those rules and equations and the ENDLESS homework.”

  “So here we are,” Mobius said. “Stuck on some silly little planet in a galaxy far, far away.”

  “The earth isn’t silly,” Itchy snipped.

  Servil elbowed Mobius in the ribs. “You’re doing it again …”

  “Oh, right. I always forget how sensitive humans are. It’s a lovely little place. We just don’t know how to get out of here. As we said earlier, the only reason we came at all was to fill up our gas tank. We had no idea we’d end up shipwrecked.”

  Servil massaged his eyes with his fingertips. “What an infernal mess.”

  Sam considered the problem for a moment. “Why don’t you just reroute your impulsion system?”

  “Sure, sure,” Servil agreed. “Except—we don’t know how.”

  “We skipped that day in school,” Mobius said.

  Itchy stepped forward. “So … if you’re such losers, how did you get this ship and all these little grey guys to work for you?”

  Mobius pointed a skinny blue finger at Servil. “His father is quite influential back on Zoilus. He gave us this old clunker just to get rid of us.”

  “Mobius!” Servil admonished.

  “It’s true and you know it,” Mobius insisted.

  Servil hung his head. “He’s right. My father can’t stand the sight of me. He’d rather throw money around just to get me out of his hair.”

  “Your father has hair?” Itchy asked.

  Servil waved his hand in the air. “It’s just a figure of speech.”

  “Servil is an embarrassment to his family,” Mobius added.