Continued
Chapter One
Cerebral Salmonella
“Yahuh, mum!” Chaz mumbled frantically through a mouth full of toast. She juggled a pack in one hand, Pokeballs in the other and clinched the telephone between her ear and her shoulder.
“I just can’t believe you didn’t take the day off, honey. You deserve it! You’ve been working so hard lately,” Elanora, her perpetually worried mother lamented down the line. “And you are coming to dinner tonight?”
“Ye- yes mum.” She swallowed then struggled to balance on one leg for her sandals. In her frustration she tossed the pack beside the clothes laid out to be ironed on the sofa. Still hopping up and down to stay stable she tottered backwards into the barfridge and something inside smashed. Probably the last of the vegemite. You could say that about her fridge, whatever else it didn’t contain, there would always be vegemite. Or maybe a beetroot. How they got there was one of life’s many mysteries. “Damn things!”
“What was that?” Elanora inquired suspiciously, adding as if it was merely an afterthought, “You don’t get off until three, do you? Will you be alright flying through the dark?”
“You know what they say mum, through rain and snow and gloom of night.” She rolled her eyes, now lacing its traces up with one hand as she fished between the sofas for the television guide. With a grunt of triumph she twisted it on and then rushed off to the lopsided hat rack where her favourite cloak had been strewn the night before. She crammed it in while making sympathetic noises to her mother’s half heard checks.
There was a reason why she only called home once a week, and in the morning just before she had work. Every single one, without fail, would end with embarrassing questions. Chaz needn’t listen. She knew every question by heart. Equally, her mother knew all the answers by heart but would ask regardless, and then a second time just to make sure, and a third time, and as many times as she could weasel into the conversations.
Moving out, and indeed changing timezones, had done nothing to end this habit but at least Elanora couldn’t ruffle through her draws or check to see her toothbrush was wet after she’d left for work.
She was desperately glad her mother couldn’t see the state of the house. Chaz was not a slob, even if she did use the first-available-space filing method. Her room mates at this time, a nurse at the local hospital and apprentice electrician, were unusually tidy but nothing was ever good enough for Elanora. Mild disarray was synonymous with garbage dump, vermin and all.
And if she knew she let her Pokémon in the house different planetary orbits wouldn’t save her.
“I’m positive mum. Look, I have to go, really.”
“You really should have taken the day off,” she repeated disapprovingly. She could practically hear her mind clicking over, preparing the conversation topics of the night ahead which would start with her health and end with the strained exchange over work and a guilt laden lecture on legacy.
“Seeya tonight, mum. Hooroo!” She quickly hung up before Elanora could drag her back into conversation and raced outside to the roosts. She was sure with the brutal slam she saw the house’s foundations sink a further inch on the right side.
Note to self, mow the lawn, she thought as she ploughed through browned off grass long enough to lose children in. Or rent Mr McCloud’s bullocky team. Garden needs weeding. Damn washing is piling up and they said it would storm this weekend. And groceries….ug.
Only the goat track and the corrugated tin that rose above the growth hinted there was anything beyond the house.
The roost was in fact an old stable she had patched up where its previous owner had housed dray horses. The ‘lawn’ was a neglected coaching track and the back fence swallowed up by the advancing brush was made up of what jumps and obstacles she could drag into place one Sunday afternoon, a difficult affair considering she was the only one of her team with opposable thumbs.
“Alright mates, you better be ready because we are leaving now!” she snapped as she blew through the door where its occupants regarded her knowingly.
Never in any culture would Chaz’s voice be mistaken for one of leadership. It was however mistaken quite often for angry cartoon rodents and she used this now to best effect. “We’ll celebrate later, mates. Promise. It means I don’t have to buy the cake.”
Bag, cloak, lunch, locked house… she mentally checked, minimising her Pokeballs and cramming them into the tanned leather pouch on her belt.
She cast a last apathetic glance at her rented apartment. It looked like someone had subdivided a shoebox and substituted damp toilet paper rolls for plumbing. She was confident no one would try to rob it, or at least no one with ambitions of coming out wealthier.
Grabbing the handles of the bike she guided it at a run down the goat track. It was a rusty, clodhopping thing which had gone out of fashion with the crank-turned cars. Still, she raced out into the traffic of Jandirri, hair flying in the wind. It wasn’t as dangerous as it sounds considering the ‘morning rush’ consisted entirely of a scooter and a crippled stop sign, a relic of the time when automobiles were more common. Jandirri was tiny and the few it did have were puttered along on hydrogen or electricity.
Chaz’s reckless poise relied happily on the fact that if you told the brain something enough times, and threatened it with the mass cell genocide brought about by Kib’s highly suspect ‘Ginger Beer’, it had no choice but to believe it.
The attitude came into being during the late years of schooling. No one who knew her now would suspect she had been timid, sensitive to what others thought and easily led. This had been remedied by slathering the thick veneer of self confidence every morning for over half decade. By now it had hardened into a bedrock of ego, bravado and self-absorption. She was one of the few people on earth who boasted about having all the depth of shag carpet.
Besides, the universe couldn’t possibly allow someone who’d just spent her last paycheck on a brand new uniform get hit the little voltzwagon on the corner.
She flew over the handle bars as a dirt caked car bounced the blind corner and clipped the hind wheel. Chaz, still lost in thoughts suddenly found the world had cocked to a confusing angle, then sideways and then a world of thorns in the form of a lantana bush.
“Dear oh dear oh dear!” squeaked Mr Ketchit, all but diving through the car window and clasping one of her hands in gnarled talons to pull her free. He blinked owlishly behind his thick lenses.
A few scratches and a bit of skin shy but no worse, the dense bush had cushioned her head from the cement. Chaz yanked her bike upright with the hind wheel spinning weakly and, still on automatic, she bowed gallantly to the onlookers venturing a wobbly wave but they only stared back with mild disappointment.
The only person showing any concern was Mr Ketchit, still squeaking “-Dear oh dear oh dear,” one hand patting her hand distressingly and the other thumping his chest.
“Chill mate,” she squeaked and tried to close her hands comforting over the little old man’s, if only to stop further bruising. “I’m okay, you’re okay. No worries, eh? Might need another inch to those glasses though Mr Ketchit.”
What if I had been one of the Skellington kids, huh? part of her wondered as she ushered him back into the car and ignoring the sting of her grazed knees. They wouldn’t have known to land in a bush.
Even her own memories were censored so not to agitate their owner’s unique point of view. The bits detailing the ungangly full air tumble were snipped away, swept off the cutting room floor and quietly burned.
Bounding up onto the bike path, she took the universe’s subtle cue for now. She stewed in the sun, stomping down hard on the pedals as the lines of ghost gums rose on either side of the sidewalk. It must have been the bent spokes that made the bike harder to push because she was in perfect shape, she reasoned, her cheeks florid with sweat.
The early morning heat had already crept up and mugged the country town. It was only early spring with light cloud cover, with more shade as the town fell away into a shadow mottled track amidst the scrub. The insects droned in the sluggish air and they were every so often interspersed with the cries of the Pokémon that took to hunting nearby.
It was a pearl of a day which she would spend being carried by billows of air over easy country towns and would be off by mid-arvie. She was one of the few people who had built up an immunity to the dreaded Monday-itis, although it did leave her highly susceptible to Fridaytoxitosis
Ahead, the brindled rodent like Pokémon called Cheeron scattered as she zoomed down the rocky path, chittering angrily.
Luckily the last little bit of the path was a level straight and the clamouring of strange Pokémon cries was dead ahead. She used this track to build up speed, pumping her legs in earnest. Finally the dusty cul-de-sac of the Pilot Light Express’s parking lot came into view.
This was her ‘office’. The front resembled a Goldilocks and the Three Bears cottage, complete with crowded garden with more weeds than purposeful rows, a second story balcony, a red tiled roof and cute little box windows.
“Gee,” Chaz enunciated brightly, leaning it against a tree. Again, chains weren’t necessary to ensure no one stole her precious lump of corroding metal. “I won-der why it is so qui-et!”
A curtain twitched inside the right window but she pretended not to notice it.
Leaning around a corner she could see down the side of the main entrance where the Pokémon lazed around before delivery rounds. A basking dragonite saw her and gave a musical hoooom in greeting but rolled over onto his side.
She waited in alcove of the front door just long enough to hear the loud stage whispers of ‘she’s here!’ and ‘shhh, everyone in their spots!’ before flinging the door open.
The suns rays streamed behind her in a god worthy halo. She must have looked fabulous and wished someone had gotten a picture of it!
Alas, no one did.
“SURPRISE!” “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”
And in true fashion, they then began to bicker in front of her.
“I told you we were yelling surprise!”
“Yeah, well it was hardly a surprise was it? We’ve been doing this for everyone for the past five years! We don’t even choose a different cake!”
“Oh shut up you guys,” Debbie grinned, darting between Caz and Corny with the cake sliding dangerously across the plate. The rest of the Pilot Light Express from the Jandirri crowed gleefully and burst into song.
“Happy Birthday to you! You’re a hundred and two! You look like a mankey! And you smell like one too!”
“My gosh!” Chaz sniggered, lifting the plate from Debbie and setting it down on a desk. It almost didn’t make it as Mouse jostled in from the side with his plate and spoon ready for the kill. “Isn’t it too early in the morning for icecream cake?”
“No!” they chorused festively, because the alternative was preparing for the day ahead of them. The real party wouldn’t happen till the evening when the local post came in, usually school kids on part time work.
Working the knife through the rock hard layers of the icecream cake, Caz leered at her elbow. “Don’t touch the bottom or you have to kiss the nearest bloke!” He grabbed her wrist and jerked it through the last difficult bit with the rewarding clink of metal on glass. “Oh well, there’s nothing for it!” he smirked, leaning it.
“Mwa!” she laughed harder. Caz was short for Casanova who would chase anything with two legs and cleavage. She pecked his cheek to the hysterics of her workmates before Corny and Sezza each grabbed her under the arm and pinned her to the wall. “Birthday punches, Kibs?”
“Oh I think so, Sez.”
“How many is it this year Corny?”
“Why Kibs, I think it’s somewhere in the vicinity of, say, twenty one!”
“No! No!” she squealed trying to escape but she may as well have tried to escape iron manacles. After a while they let her slump to the floor with no feeling from the collar bone down. “Oh I hate you, I hate you, oh mate!”
“Look, we were only doing our job,” Corny said dusting off his hands with an obscenely serious face. “Birthday punches, it’s the law. Just wait until you’re thirty, then you’ll have something to whinge about.”
“I have something to whinge about, you’re shoulder’s are bonier than houndoom! Shoulda gone for the thighs eh, chickadee!” Caz his hand fluttering lower which she slapped away indignantly. It was true that she had beefed up just an itty bit since leaving Professor Mangrove but she was more touchy because pilots were light as a rule. It was hard to gain weight when you lived on damper and sausages but somehow she had risen to the occasion.
“I think I bruised my knuckles!” Kibs joked.
“You can’t get a bruise in a few minutes, you idiot!”
“Can too, just look….Ow! What’d you do that for?”
“One of you will have to lift my spoon for me,” Chaz grunted, still trying to massage feeling back into her arm. She hopped up and weaved with exaggerated drunkness through the desks, and sprawled over the water cooler. “I’ll be right back, I gotta let my team out outside.”
“Hang on Chaz.” She knew that voice and froze with one step in the air. She peered over her shoulder.
Her department manager stood rigidly in stairwell that led up to the sorting room and his office. She knew she was in trouble. Blue was usually amiable bloke in his mid thirties with flaming red hair, a Hawaiian shirt and usually all the posture of cooked spaghetti. “Yeah Blue-”
“-Sir,” he interjected with a sternness that was so alien she had to fight the sniggering.
“Sir, if it’s about those china cups I swear I got them there in one piece.”
“No, all that was left of them was one piece, a handle I believe. You’re lucky we were insured. But this isn’t about that.”
“Then if it’s about those chocolates, I swear-”
“Don’t get yourself deeper than…. What chocolates?”
“Uh-”
“Get upstairs. And you lot, deliveries start at nine. You have five minutes to suit up.” He shot her a despairing look. “And I wish you would change at work.”
Chaz, still on one leg, lifted the hem of her uniform, white with yellow trim thick with red dust. She shrugged carelessly and winked. “Shouldn’t have chosen white for the red region.”
“Don’t try that with me,” Blue warned and started up the stairs beckoning.
“Can one of youse let out me mates?” She dumped the Pokeballs from her pouch to send them rolling over the table and bounded up the stairs after the boss.
At the top of the stairs were two doors. The one on the left was the sorting room where Blue’s Mr Mime’ organized the letters. Hundreds and hundreds of papery whispers coalesced into a sound that reminded her of the tides and the waves. It was rather pleasant to listen to when she had paperwork to fill out. Voices chirped back over loud fluttering of paper and rattling of breakables. The amberite in her ear stud was a translator imbued with psychic resonance. It made each syllable understandable with its unique vibrations.
She flounced through Blue’s office door feeling on top of the world. Not even a lecture on pride, self-respect or reliability could spoil today. “Honey! I’m hom-”
The words died on her lips as she stared at the man in the distinctive white and gold uniform of the Head of Department. He regarded her with the same quirked eyebrow. The thump in the background was Blue’s forehead being reacquainted with the desk, as it often was on any occasion she was invited up.
“Er,” she drawled, still hanging onto the door knob.
“Take a seat, Chaz,” came Blue's partly muffled sigh and waved in the direction of the swivel chair. When his head came up again a post-it note reading ‘return rental dvds’ was pressed to his forehead. He gripped the handle of his coffee mug like a life preserver.
Other people would instinctively regard the ancient swivel chair with distrust or at least hesitation. It had been picked up in a yard sale, like the rest of the office property and the once black metal was carpeted in gritty rust. There was more padding than support and visitors would rather have risked Kibs’ ‘Ginger Beer’ than put any weight on it greater than a golfball.
Not Chaz, who was convinced that universe always fixed odds in her favour.
She leaned back into it and rested one leg on top of the desk smugly. Her vacant smile hid amused wariness. When HoD’s got involved, something organic was going to hit the industrial sized fan. There was the possibility they were closing the branch. Those Qwiksilver buggers were already trying to muscle their way in.
“Chaz, this is Mr Ray Rosconovitch, he’s in charge of the hiring of pilots. Runs their office in Tropo in fact. Even has the ear of the President of Pilot Light Express.” The desperation in Blue’s voice was on its knees begging her not to do anything stupid.
“You don’t say,” she said with vicious brightness and attempted her least dubious smile.
“Yes I am,” he answered equally calm and she noticed his foreignness for the first time.
His suit was impeccable for one thing. Metone men would have to be pried from a barricaded room before wearing one, and the heat made it doubly true. It fit so well only the tiny creases around the calves and elbows meant it wasn’t painted on. The same couldn’t be said for his hair, slick marsh green, styled in a coif.
He flapped a piece of paper in his hand as if merely straightening it out. “It says here you’re twenty-one today. Legally responsible,” he said sharply, in the voice of the genetically engineered bureaucrat that only post offices and government tax departments could legally possess. “Tell me about yourself Chanticleer.”
Chaz shot an accusing look at Blue, who avoided it by plunging into desk draw and coming up for air with a handful of official looking papers. “My name is Chanticleer Crane, Chaz or CC for short-”
“Chance, Dicey, even the Red Devil,” Mr Rosconovitch said tediously as flipped through paper on the clipboard. He wished people would leave emotion out of reports. “The hair I expect, hmm?”
Her ears perked as she patted her head and switched legs. Where her hair parted down the centre it spiked up naturally on either side, while the rest tied at the nape of her neck and fell to the waist.
“More of a dark burgundy, sir. Or some people have even called it wine red! Natural too,” she preened, running her hand casually through the tail. Having never heard it before she was delighted with the Red Devil moniker and would definitely flaunt it later. She liked the way it sounded all dangerous and seductive, like a comicbook villain. Again, her brain patiently snipped the laughter out of the fantasy that would inevitable arise from her team mates.
“Where did you grow up, Chanticleer?”
“Bindagai, west coast,” she shrugged. She still tried to catch Blue’s eyes, who gazed out the window with the dazed smile of a crash dummy watching assistants prepare the vehicle.
“Any Pokémon?”
“I had a galaha that was a bit of a house pet.” She’d earn a tongue lashing if Chester found out she called him a house pet.
The questions went on for a while. Family? Standard mother, father and 2.5 kids. Accommodation? Rental on the outskirts where the damned landlord won’t fix the leaky water tank. Plut! Education? Secondary school graduation and a completed Bachelor in Pokémon Biology, honours on the effect of the Fly HM on steroid production in pidgeot. Other employment? Three months as a research aide under Professor Mangrove.
“Only three months? It’s notoriously difficult to become an aide.”
“Yep. My lecturer helped me land that one. I’m good.”
“And modest,” he said with a wooden expression Keanu Reeves would envy. “And you quit, just like that?”
“There aren’t just roos lost in the top paddock, they’ve attained sentience and discovered bronze. Her aides, if they aren’t masochistic, last as long as a good hair cut,” Chaz recalled, moodily rubbing where a clipboard very similar to his had struck her retreating head the afternoon she quit.
“Pokémon?”
“Sandslash-”
“Autoch-”
“I don’t care about their names, Ms Crane. Sandslash, Kookabaron, Tranquilla, Pidgeot, Zefire and Swellow. What level are your Pokémon?”
A slimy, smug smile gave a thousand watt lightbulb a run for its money. “Had them tested last month. Not one is below level forty. I have the certificate to prove it, if you want.”
“That’s rather high for someone who’s not a professional trainer.”
Twisting around the swivel chair and pretending to yawn, she caught a glimpse of her time sheets flicking beneath Mr Rosconovitch’s thumb.
“You have never had any interest in journeying, or becoming a professional sojourner?” Mr Rosconovitch prodded.
“No,” she interjected sourly at the title of sojourner. The word referred to those trainers that travelled on a pokémon journey for badges. She considered them the laziest functional illiterates society could produce and there was enough contempt dripping from the monosyllable to cause him to ruffle through his papers again.
“And yet you were registered in the Metone League for one year.”
“Travelled to Yunderun to see the Fly Master. Took six months, there and back with only my galaha. You can’t be a pilot if you don’t have the Fly HM.”
“I know my job, Miss Crane.”
“Good for you.”
Through the interrogation various parts of the conversation were being punctuated.
Plunk…..Plut…..Plonk……Crink…Crink…Crink.
Blue’s forehead having spent time reminiscing with the desktop over old concussions had worked its way around the room, said hello to the lamp, the fish tank and was now in deep conversation with the window pane.
“Do you have any goals, Miss Crane?” Mr Rosconovitch endeavoured through the uncomfortable silence.
“Course,” she answered, smiling infuriatingly.
Crink…Crink….Cri-ick.
This time both of them turned to the window.
“I now see why your audit contains inordinate amount window panes to be replaced, Andrew. Fortunately for you, it may be considerably less from now on. Unfortunately for me, I will probably be inheriting the debit. Chanticleer Crane, you are hired.”
She gave a sharp squawk as her feet kicked off the desk and the seat gave a mortally wounded screech of metal. So surprised that the chair had collapsed on her Mr Rosconovitch was halfway to the door before she untangled herself and lunged across the floor. She grabbed the cuff of his trousers.
“Hang on! What? Huh?” Her head creaked back while he peered back distastefully and gave his pant leg a meaningful tug. She released it and scrambled to her feet. He indiscreetly checked his watch and glanced back at her.
“Pilot Light Express is an inwardly based business. It delivers locally and regionally but has completely neglected international possibilities and is thus losing large amounts of profits. The big corporations from other regions are trying to buy us out and are picking up the slack anywhere they can find it.”
“In order to find new revenue it’s opened a new international delivery department which I will be overseeing. We need dependable flyers to cross the vast tracts of ocean and desert between Metone and everywhere else. Being deficient in the dependable Headquarters has settled on merely capable. They chose, I came to see the raw material. I already feel a case of salmonella coming on.”
“Pah! Capable!” She smirked and blew on her knuckles. He turned again towards the door when a few discrepancies clicked into place. “Hang on, then what’s a foreigner doing running it if that’s precisely what hod doesn’t want?”
His sour face twitched a very impatient twitch at the pronunciation of hod. “Pilot Light has no experience with international delivery. They encouraged me from another larger company to take over training and management. They have also employed other foreign flyers if that bothers you.”
“Nah, they’re no worries. But what if I don’t want to? I have morals you know. I’m very loyal to this little outpost, been work’n here for-”
“Two years, one month and four days.”
“I couldn’t deprive Blue of his best flyer.” Her eyes glittered greedily nether the less. “And I like being a big fish in a little pond. What’s in it for me?”
“All water dwelling vertebrates aside, we offer a package that includes free medical insurance, free accommodation, training and a salary bonu-”
“Well why didn’t yis say more money!” She forcibly stuck her hand in his and pumped vigorously. “I’m in!”
“Goodie.”