“This will only take a few seconds,” Dr. Kim told him. “And then you’ll be at the base of the brain. The transmitter is buried inside the left hemisphere of Heathcliff’s brain. When you see an enormous gray mass, fire your tether into the wall of the artery.”
Flinch couldn’t miss the gray mass. It was huge and right above him. He fired the tether and lodged himself in place. He eyed Heathcliff’s amazing brain. Flinch could almost see the evil ideas it was conjuring.
“It’s a wonder,” Dr. Kim said.
“It’s gross,” Flinch said.
Dr. Kim laughed. “Unlike the twisted mess that is Heathcliff’s body, his brain is very much unchanged—except for its size. All of the regions seem to be like any other human brain. I’m pulling up a map right now to help guide you.”
But Flinch stopped listening to the scientist midway through her explanation. Hanging over his head, high in the cavernous reaches of Heathcliff’s skull, were thousands of black, shiny creatures. They were clinging, heads down, to the boy’s brain, like sleeping bats with eyes that glowed neon green. Every one of their eyes was turned to Flinch.
“Uh-oh,” Flinch said.
Two of the creatures flew down and buzzed by his head as if they were just interested in getting a better look. Then they zipped back up to join the others. The creatures chattered back and forth and then, all at once, like a crowd that has just witnessed the hometown team lose in the final second, all of their voices roared with anger.
“Uh-oh,” Flinch said again.
“What’s ‘Uh-oh’?” Brand asked.
“The nanobytes know I’m here,” Flinch said as the creatures scurried out of the gray meat and ran toward him, clicking their legs together like beetles. Flinch took a few more greedy gulps of juice, and, with sugar racing through his bloodstream, he could only think of one thing to do: run right at them with fists clenched. He stomped through them like a rampaging rhino, snatching two by their necks and smashing them together, causing them to explode into a thousand pieces of metal and circuitry. He punched another one’s head off its shoulders, then snatched one of its spindly limbs to use as a club on a dozen more.
“C’mon, ugly, let’s dance!” he shouted at one, which was soon a pile of broken robot parts. More and more came. He drank his juice and pounded his chest and shouted, “I AM MIGHTY!”
WELL, SO FAR YOU’VE DONE PRETTY WELL, OR MAYBE I JUST HAVEN’T BEEN CHALLENGING YOU. SO I’M GOING TO THROW OUT THREE VERY INTENSE TASKS. IF YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH THEM, THEN I WILL TIP MY HAT TO YOU AND HAPPILY REPORT THAT YOU ARE IN TIP-TOP SECRET AGENT SHAPE. THINK YOU’RE UP FOR THIS? GOOD!
CHALLENGE #1: ARM-WRESTLE A TRUCK DRIVER
YOU ARE A BRAVE SOUL. TRUCK DRIVERS ARE NOTORIOUSLY SURLY CHARACTERS WHO ENJOY A GOOD BOWL OF CHILI, THE OPEN ROAD, AND TEARING AN OPPONENT’S ARM OFF IN A GAME OF STRENGTH.
FIRST, FIND A TRUCK DRIVER. SECOND, FIND A DINER WITH A LOOSE POLICY ABOUT THIS MOST VENERABLE GAME. THIRD, SAY SOMETHING MEAN ABOUT THE TRUCK DRIVER’S MOTHER.
FORGET WHETHER OR NOT YOU WON—IF YOU SURVIVED, THEN YOU’RE A WINNER IN MY BOOK.
CHALLENGE #2: WRESTLE A BEAR
DON’T GIVE A THOUGHT TO THE FACT THAT THIS SKILL IS TOTALLY IMPRACTICAL, SINCE THERE ARE ONLY, LIKE, THREE BEARS WORKING AS ENEMY SPIES, SO THE ODDS OF BEING ON A MISSION WHERE YOU ENCOUNTER ONE SPYING ON YOUR COUNTRY IS PRETTY LIMITED.
FIRST, FIND A BEAR. SECOND, GET REALLY CLOSE TO THE BEAR AND POKE IT WITH A STICK. THIRD, THE REST WILL TAKE CARE OF ITSELF.
CHALLENGE #3: WIN THE OLYMPICS
YES, THE ENTIRE OLYMPICS: THE WINTER AND SUMMER GAMES, THE SKIING, THE WRESTLING, THE SHOT PUT, THE DECATHLON, THE FAST WALKING, THE GYMNASTICS, THE MEN’S ONE HUNDRED METER FREESTYLE, ALL OF IT. THEN, IF YOU CAN STILL STAND WITH ALL THOSE GOLD MEDALS WRAPPED AROUND YOUR NECK, YOU ARE TOUGH ENOUGH TO BE ON THIS TEAM!
Agent Brand and Dr. Kim stood over the monitor and watched the tiny dot that was Julio Escala move around in Heathcliff’s mutated body. Flinch was doing better than Brand could have ever hoped. Now that the boy was at the base of Heathcliff’s brain stem, he just had to find the transmitter, and then the world would stop being a gigantic insane asylum.
It couldn’t come a minute too soon. Since Flinch had been miniaturized and injected, they had lost eight of the remaining twelve scientists All that was left of Brand’s team was Dr. Kim, the three other scientists, Ms. Holiday, and the four juvenile delinquents. And it wouldn’t be long before the virus got to them as well.
“Can you believe how great he’s doing?” Ms. Holiday asked.
“I think I have misjudged him,” Brand said.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” she said. “There are lots of things in life you just don’t see until they are right in front of your eyes. Take me, for instance.”
Brand smiled and got one in return.
One of the remaining scientists rushed to Brand’s side. “Sir, may I have a word with you?”
“What is it, Doctor …”
“Yerkey, sir,” he said. “It’s very important and private.”
“Can it wait? I have to guide an agent into a human brain,” Brand said.
“It’s about the blood tests from before,” Dr. Yerkey said. “Some of the results were erased on purpose, and I found out who did it.”
“Who?” Dr. Kim cried.
Agent Brand turned away from the screen to face the scientist, but suddenly he felt a sharp pain in the back of his head and everything went black.
Ms. Holiday stood over the unconscious bodies of Agent Brand and Dr. Yerkey. Her hand clutched a metal pipe from one of the experiments that had been dismantled to create the miniaturization rig. She looked at the weapon and grinned. Some things, like clobbering a person cold, were best done the old-fashioned way.
“Ms. Holiday!” Dr. Kim cried. “What are you doing?”
“C’mon, sister. You didn’t see that coming?” Ms. Holiday said as she reached into her pocket, removed a mask with a skull painted on the front, and pulled it over her face. “And don’t call me that name. My name is Miss Information.”
“She’s infected!” Dr. Kim cried.
“Duh!” Miss Information said, and then she slugged the woman on the chin. The doctor fell hard onto the floor, where she joined the others in sleepytown.
“Benjamin, it appears Agent Brand is incapacitated,” she said, turning her attention to the floating orb. “Control of the school passes to me as the next in command.”
Benjamin twittered. “I cannot do that. I’m shutting down all systems available to you and putting the Playground in lockdown.”
The woman snarled. “Benjamin, Supreme Override Four Seven X, and my password is ‘Dewey decimal.’”
Benjamin’s glowing blue light turned red, and then the orb spun around several times in midair. It bobbed and weaved as if struggling with something that was happening inside its circuits. Then it righted itself, and the red light glowed brighter than ever before. “Protocol Four Seven X. Operations of school are now in the hands of Ms. Holiday.”
“Very good, Benjamin,” she said. “Take the school out of lockdown. My boyfriend is here.”
Miss Information took her phone out of her bag and dialed it.
“I’ve been out here for hours, darling,” the Antagonist said in a strained voice.
“Sorry, honey bun, but it took a little longer to wrap all this up,” she said. “Why don’t you come and see me? I’m in the basement. Go through Locker 41.”
She hung up the phone and looked over at the two remaining scientists.
“You’re going to help me with a little chore,” she said.
The two men shook their heads.
Miss Information frowned behind her mask, then removed a bright red ray gun from her purse. “You do realize I’m a supervillain, right? Now what would a supervillain be without a superscary weapon? Let me introduce you to mine. It’s called the atom smasher. Wanna see what it does?”
The men shook th
eir heads.
“Good! Then let’s get to work. We have a lot to do.”
By the time the Antagonist reached the Playground, Miss Information and the two remaining scientists had dragged Agent Brand, Dr. Kim, and Dr. Yerkey into a holding cell. Two containment suits were prepped and ready and the miniaturization ray had been adjusted and properly aimed.
“What’s all this, honey?” the Antagonist asked.
“A slight change in plans, darling,” Miss Information replied. “It seems the fifth member of the NERDS team has been shrunk and injected into this gigantic head.”
The Antagonist looked at his former employer. Despite the boy’s twisted features, he recognized Heathcliff immediately. Simon, Screwball, Brainstorm—whatever he called himself—the boy was responsible for his hook, and his white hair, and his blind eye. All of this boy’s foolish plots had blown up in his face over and over again, and the Antagonist had always suffered. By the looks of him, it appeared the imbecile had finally gotten what was coming to him.
“I’m confused,” he said.
“There’s no time to explain, sweetie pie, only to say that inside that head is the source of the villain virus and they’ve sent an agent in to destroy it. If we don’t want the entire world to suddenly get better, we need to stop him. Now get into your suit.”
She didn’t give him a chance to argue. He could be so stubborn, and worse, dim. She was his intellectual superior in every way, even if she knew he was laughing at her behind her back. Well, she had fooled him. She was running this show, even if she had led him to believe he was the one in charge. She needed his help for only a little while longer and then she would be in control of the world and he would be alligator food.
She got him into his containment suit and up the ladder to the tank before he knew what had hit him. Soon both of them were submerged in saline. Once they were settled, she tapped a button on her arm that remotely activated the ray gun. And then it was cold and dark.
Flinch was at the bottom of Heathcliff’s brain, waiting for someone to tell him what to do next. The onslaught of nanobytes had slowed, but he was still fighting them, and worse, a quick look at the timer inside his helmet told him that he had precious minutes left to finish his mission. He called out to Brand and Dr. Kim, but it was as if he had been abandoned. And then it hit him. Maybe the whole team had succumbed to the virus. Maybe he was all alone.
“Dude? Dude? Are you still there?”
“Hooper?”
“Yo! You’re still alive. Bro, you won’t believe what happened! The librarian clocked the janitor and he’s knocked out. She did the same to the scientist lady, and then she took over the base. She let some weird dude in here with a mask and they got into containment suits and shrank themselves. They’re coming after you, man. They’re going to try and stop you.”
“So who is left up there?” Flinch cried.
“Just us,” Hooper said. “We hid.”
“‘Us’?”
“Your friendly neighborhood juvenile delinquents.”
The panic hit Flinch like a slap in the face. He was a tiny, microscopic secret agent trying to save the world inside the body of a monster … and his support team consisted of four kids whose sole goal in life was to clog up toilets.
“It’s all going to work, big guy,” Toad said. “We’re going to help. Hooper’s a doctor.”
“My dad is a doctor, Toad. Not me.”
“What happened to Benjamin?”
“The librarian put a whammy on it,” Wyatt said. “It’s on the floor, popping and hissing.”
“So you’re all I’ve got,” Flinch stated.
“We are your loyal soldiers. Lead us, O great one,” Jessie said.
“Lead you! I can’t lead you. I’m the spaz.”
“The leader of the weirdos,” Toad croaked.
Flinch couldn’t help smiling. Yes, he was the leader of the weirdos, and somehow that calmed his nerves. “OK, someone needs to find a picture of a brain. Dr. Kim was mapping one, so it should be there.”
“It’s on the screen right in front of us,” Wyatt said.
“Good. Do you see a flashing dot inside it?”
“I see two!” Jessie said through his whistling nose.
“Good, one of them is me. I’m at the base of the brain.”
“We’ve got you,” Wyatt said.
“And the other beeping dot is the transmitter. I need to get to it, but I can’t just cut my way through. I could kill Heathcliff. So we need to find a path that isn’t going to hurt him.”
“Piece of cake, bro!” Wyatt said. “Looks like right now you’re hanging out on the spinal cord, and directly overhead is the cerebellum. What it does I have no idea, but it’s on the map and it’s in the way. So just push on through.”
“No way, man!” Hooper cried. “The cerebellum is the part of the brain that affects balance and muscle coordination. You screw that up and this head will never walk again.”
“It doesn’t walk now,” Toad pointed out.
“Please, guys, stop arguing. I need to hurry. I only have twelve minutes left before I’m back to normal size.”
“Hey, don’t freak,” Jessie said. “You can climb up the cerebellum and reach the brain at the top.”
Flinch did as he was told, activating the jet boosters to fly to the bottom of the brain.
“Awesome,” Hooper said. “Now you’re at a part called the occipital lobe. The chart says this part affects vision and, to a lesser degree, recognition of letters and numbers. So you gotta ask yourself: ‘Fate of the world, or a head that can’t sing the alphabet song?’”
Flinch cringed but used his laser to cut a small hole big enough for him to enter the brain. “I hate this,” he cried as he entered. “What if I just made this guy into an idiot?”
“Reading is pretty overrated, dude,” Toad said.
Once at the top of the brain, Flinch saw an amazing sight: a lightning display of little green electrical impulses and chemicals swirling from one place to another. He floated over it using his boosters.
“Bro, you are doing great. You’re out of the occipital lobe and approaching the temporal lobe,” Hooper told him. “The chart says it handles the memory of faces, as well as emotions and language.”
“Poke it and see if Heathcliff will suddenly start speaking Italian!” Wyatt said.
“I’m not poking it,” Flinch grumbled. “How much farther do I have to go?”
“Halfway there, buddy,” Hooper said. “You’re headed toward the frontal lobe, which deals with creative thinking and impulse control. The transmitter is buried there, right near the surface.”
Flinch kept moving through the gray mass until in the distance he could see a little red pulsing box.
“I see it,” Flinch said.
“Awesome possum,” Jessie said. “Uh-oh.”
“What’s ‘Uh-oh’?” Flinch cried. “You don’t get to say ‘Uh-oh.’ Only I get to ‘Uh-oh’!”
“There are two more little dots moving in your direction and they’re coming in fast. It’s got to be the librarian and her creepy boyfriend.”
Before Flinch could ask “How close?” the two figures were on him. The bigger of the two villains punched him in the chest, and even with the suit’s deflector force field, it hurt. It also knocked him backward. When he righted himself, he could feel his pack growing lighter. The Antagonist had caused a rupture, and Flinch’s fruit punch supply was seeping out. In desperation he drank as much as he could before it was completely gone.
The second figure reached down and grabbed the transmitter. He couldn’t see her face, but there was something about the way she moved. He knew it was Ms. Holiday.
“Julio, you blew it,” she said, proving his suspicions. Her voice wasn’t sweet like always. Now it was filled with a wicked glee. “I guess that’s what happens when you send the freak.”
Flinch snarled and fired his boosters, making a beeline toward Ms. Holiday’s partner. Flinch put out his fist
s and slammed into the man, causing him to fly in the other direction, entirely disappearing within Heathcliff’s brain.
“Dude, whatever you’re doing in there, you’d better stop,” Toad said. “The head is doing some crazy stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Well, its eyes opened and then a beam came out and the entire wall turned to ashes,” Jessie said. “Basically, it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Flinch cringed. They weren’t messing around in the head of a normal person. He had forgotten about Heathcliff’s power. The boy could change reality to suit him. “I’ll try, but you guys need to stay as far from the head as possible.”
A moment later the Antagonist pushed his way through the gray matter like a bull in a china shop. Flinch charged at him and they traded uppercuts, sending each other flying backward, only to spring back into the fight. Meanwhile, Ms. Holiday headed back the way she came, with the transmitter and without the Antagonist.
“Looks like your girlfriend is dumping you,” Flinch said.
The Antagonist growled and continued his attack.
“Listen, man! You got ten minutes before you are large and in charge,” Toad said.
“I’m on it!” Flinch said. He had to do something drastic. When the Antagonist drew close, Flinch punched him as hard as he could. The villain flew backward and slammed against the inside of the skull. Flinch fired several harpoon cables from his arms, stapling the villain against the hard bone.
No matter how much he struggled, the Antagonist could not free himself. He cursed and threatened, but Flinch was already racing after Ms. Holiday. The boy activated his foot boosters to catch up, knowing if he used his own speed, he would be out of power in no time. But soon the fuel was spent in his boots and he was forced to run on his own power. He ran along the surface of the skull and found her crouched at the base of an artery. She was cutting a hole in it and ready to climb in.
“Don’t do this, Ms. Holiday. You’re not evil.”