“Not any crazier than you are right now,” she said with a laugh. “You’re not a danger to anyone, Flinch—except for those who stand between you and a box of chocolate-covered cherries. Come on out.”
Flinch tried the cell door. It was locked tight. He gave his harness knob a twist and then ripped the door out of the wall.
Dr. Kim didn’t seem fazed. “Agent Brand told me to send you back to class. He says the team has the Monkey Master under control and will be back soon.”
“OK,” Flinch said. He left and headed for the middle of the dome. In the center was a panel of blinking buttons. One was labeled RETURN TO CLASS. Before he pushed it he turned to Dr. Kim, who had followed him. “Um, sorry about that door.”
“It happens,” she said.
Flinch grinned and pressed the button. The gigantic fans turned on, and soon he was pushed up through the dome and into the tunnel system. He fully expected to land inside Locker 41, but instead he found himself in his chair in Mr. Gilligan’s health class just as the roll was being called. Flinch popped up so quickly that no one even noticed his arrival.
“Julio Escala? Has anyone seen Julio Escala?” the teacher snapped.
“Here!” Julio said.
Mr. Gilligan sighed. “People! You need to speak up when I’m calling attendance. Tommy Friedman?”
Before Tommy could answer, there was a knock at the door. It swung open, and Ms. Dove and Mrs. Reinhold, the science teacher, entered the room. As usual, Ms. Dove was all smiles, but Mrs. Reinhold looked like a vengeful god from Mount Olympus.
If Flinch hadn’t known any better, he might have thought actual flames were burning in her eyes. He didn’t need to be told they were there for him. He slid out of his chair and followed the two women down the hall and into the principal’s office, where they closed the door behind him.
“Mr. Escala, I find you in my office for the second time this week,” Ms. Dove said with an exaggerated pouty face. “You realize there have only been three days of school so far. You are not starting off very well.”
“He threatened me!” Mrs. Reinhold shouted.
“Threatened?” Flinch said. “I did not!”
“He said he would relieve himself in my classroom!”
Flinch struggled to respond. What was he supposed to say? I had to go save the world, and that kind of thing is usually urgent? But he didn’t have to say anything. Mrs. Reinhold launched into a fiery tirade, describing his high crimes and outlining the bleak future that lay ahead of him.
He was a troublemaker. He was disrespectful. He was a bad role model to the other children. He didn’t take his education seriously. He didn’t listen. He didn’t follow directions. He didn’t play well with others. If he didn’t shape up and fly right, he was going to find himself in a heap load of trouble. He would grow up to be shiftless. He would disappoint everyone, but most important, he would disappoint himself. He would go through life sneering at authority and someday end up in prison. Yes, prison! In thirty years of teaching she had never seen anything like this. She didn’t know what had gotten into kids these days. They had no respect. When she was a student she would never have been so disrespectful to a teacher. She blamed the video games. She truly thought the world was falling apart and wondered if she could find work as a waitress.
When Mrs. Reinhold finally talked herself into exhaustion, she plopped down onto a chair to catch her breath. Flinch turned to Ms. Dove, fully prepared for another lecture, but the big-eyed woman just smiled. “What are we going to do with you, Mr. Escala?”
The answer was another detention.
Mrs. Reinhold and Ms. Dove walked him down the hall to the detention room. Flinch took his seat and put his head down in disgrace. Mama Rosa was going to kill him. In three days he had gone from nerd to full-fledged juvenile delinquent.
“Psst,” a voice said from behind his head. He sat up and turned. The four boys who had bullied him on the first day were all sitting in a row. He expected them to either be angry at his manhandling or completely terrified of his inhuman strength. But they were grinning at him and nodding with respect. He scanned the room and saw that everyone else was also watching him with an odd sense of awe. It was almost as if he was one of them, now that he’d been tossed into detention twice in the same week.
“Yo, bro,” the kid with the red hair said. “Welcome back.”
When he got home, he found a note on the kitchen table. It read, I’m very disappointed. We will discuss this after my stories.
Anxiety made Flinch fidget even more than usual. Mama Rosa must have thought he had lost his mind. He couldn’t wait for her soap operas to be over. He needed to explain himself the best he could. He ran through the house, but before his foot hit the first stair, he was rocked by a massive explosion.
“What was that?” he cried, pushing himself to his feet.
Mama Rosa came down the steps, stomping like an angry bull. Strapped to her back were two silver canisters almost as big as garbage cans. A single tube led from the canisters to a nozzle in her hand. The nozzle was dripping something that smelled like fuel onto the rug.
“Mama Rosa!”
“That’s not my name anymore! My name is Hot Tamale!”
She was infected.
If the name and the flamethrower hadn’t given it away, there was also her flushed face and angry red eyes. Flinch tried to stay calm. He had to keep the old woman from doing anything drastic.
“So, that’s a nice flamethrower, Hot Tamale. What do you plan on doing with it?” Flinch asked.
“I’m going to burn down Mrs. Valencia’s rose garden,” Mama Rosa said as she pushed past him and out the front door.
Years ago Mama Rosa and Mrs. Valencia were the best of friends. They played dominoes on the front porch and drank mojitos at an alarming rate. They loved to talk about gardening, and both considered themselves experts when it came to growing beautiful, blooming roses. But one year they both entered a contest held by the Arlington Botanical Garden, and Mrs. Valencia’s roses won. Mama Rosa never spoke to her friend again. She sat on the porch, envying Mrs. Valencia as she spread her prize, a year’s supply of mulch, across her bulb garden. A confrontation had been brewing for years, but no one suspected it would involve a flamethrower.
“You can’t burn down her rose garden, Mama,” Flinch said. The old woman tried to shoo him away, but he stayed close to her side.
“She shouldn’t have laughed at me!” Mama Rosa said.
There was that phrase again. “They laughed at me.” He had heard Captain Kapow say the same thing. He’d heard Mr. Miniature say it, too. When his own fever was raging, he was certain that others were snickering behind his back. How could he convince Mama Rosa otherwise?
The old woman stopped her march right in front of Mrs. Valencia’s home. She raised her hose and sprayed her flames, scorching Mrs. Valencia’s front yard. When she turned off the hose, the grass was black and smoldering. She cackled proudly.
Flinch pinched his nose and heard the com-link in his head activate. “I’ve got another infected supervillain on my hands.”
“Who?” Agent Brand asked when he came online.
“My grandma!”
“Can you handle it until I can get the team there? Everyone has left for the day. I can’t even get Ms. Holiday on the phone,” Brand said.
“She’s mi familia, boss. I’ll handle this. I’m just letting you know Dr. Kim is right. It’s spreading.”
Mama Rosa blasted the weeping willow growing in Mrs. Valencia’s front yard. Soon the tree was a bonfire. A moment later Mrs. Valencia, wearing an apron and carrying a rolling pin, came racing out of the house. She was angry.
“Rosa, what are you doing?” she cried.
“Something I should have done a long time ago, woman,” Rosa said. “I’m going to settle the score. Don’t believe what they say—revenge is a dish best served hot!”
Mama Rosa blasted fire into the sky to emphasize her point.
“Have
you lost your mind?” Mrs. Valencia shouted.
“Quite the contrary! I have finally found it,” Mama Rosa shouted back, blasting Mrs. Valencia’s shrubs.
“You think I’m going to just let that happen, Rosa?” Mrs. Valencia asked. “You think you can stand here and burn my prize-winning roses and laugh about it? Well, I’m sick of you laughing at me. I’m sick of everyone laughing at me.”
From inside her apron she pulled out a whistle. It was covered in blinking lights and knobs. Flinch had never seen anything like it outside of the Playground—which made him very nervous. Mrs. Valencia put the whistle to her mouth … and suddenly his eardrums felt like they were exploding. The high-pitched squeal shattered windows, set off car alarms, and knocked him and Mama Rosa to the pavement.
With ringing ears, Flinch helped Mama Rosa stand up. She was still dazed from the attack, which meant it was the perfect time to relieve her of her flamethrower.
“Every day I have to hear your stupid soap operas blasting through the window of your home, Rosa,” Mrs. Valencia shouted. “All that noise is bad for the air. It’s bad for the neighborhood, and it’s bad for my flowers! I built this little machine to show you what it’s like to not be able to hear yourself think. I guess you won’t be laughing at me again, will you, Rosa? I guess you’ll think twice before getting in the way of the Whistle Wizard!”
Mrs. Valencia lifted her whistle to her mouth, but Flinch was already on the move. He dashed into his neighbor’s yard, leaped over the roaring fire that was once her hydrangea bush, and snatched the weapon out of her hand. Then he pulverized it beneath the heel of his sneaker.
“You fool!” the woman said. “You’ve foiled my plans!”
There was a massive thump that shook the ground, and everyone fell over again, even Mrs. Valencia. That thump was followed by another and then another and another, each one growing in intensity. The trees shook, and one even uprooted, collapsing onto a nearby car. A crack in the concrete grew and grew, widening into a trench and ripping the neighborhood in two. When it was finished splitting, Mama Rosa was on one side of a wide, jagged ditch and Flinch was on the other.
“Julio?” she cried. “What is causing this?”
Flinch looked down the street and nearly threw up his Twinkies. Stomping toward them was a mechanical creature nearly three stories tall. Its body had the shape of a man, but its head was a transparent orb. Inside was a very familiar face—Old Man Augustine. Every kid in the neighborhood knew the old coot, and so did every toy store in a one-mile radius. Old Man Augustine was known as “the ball bandit.”
Old Man Augustine had constructed a six-foot fence around his entire property. Some said it was because he wanted privacy, but the kids knew different. Any stray ball that had the sad fate of flying over the fence and into his yard was never seen again; footballs, soccer balls, stickballs, baseballs—all vanished in the Bermuda Triangle of Fun. There were neighborhood rumors about what the old man did with the captured balls. Some said he made millions selling them on the Internet. Others said he melted them down and sold them to a third world country struggling with shortages of rubber and pigskin. Still others said he kept them all in a bizarre, underground museum dedicated to his efforts in ruining childhoods.
And now Old Man Augustine had a giant robot. Flinch couldn’t help but wonder which kid had accidentally tossed that into his yard.
“I have warned everyone in this neighborhood to keep off my lawn!” the old man’s voice boomed. His voice was electronically magnified, giving it an eerie, mechanical thrum. “I work hard to keep it nice, and you might think that’s funny, but it’s not. I’ve heard you all laughing about it. Well, I’ll show you what’s hilarious!”
There was an explosion of steam and flame and the giant robot’s fist separated from its arm and flew toward Flinch. Instinctively, he leaped into the air just before it crashed into him. He landed on the other side of the trench, right next to Mama Rosa.
His grandmother shook off her insanity long enough to look stunned. “Julio, how did you—?”
“Milk does a body good, Mama Rosa,” Flinch said. He didn’t have time to worry about her discovering his powers and had even less time to explain them. “I’m just going to go and take care of that robot. I’ll be right back.”
Flinch turned and ran with a burst of speed so powerful it blew Mama Rosa’s hair out of the bun on the top of her head. He burned a path toward the colossus while sorting through his possible plans. OK, superpunch? Should he try to tear its head off? Tie up its feet with a big rope?
But while pondering these possibilities, a little voice reminded him that he was a freak. He had screwed up the last two missions he was in charge of, and now he was on his way to screwing up a third. What if he just wasn’t good at decisions?
“Before I put up my fence, you heathens ran through my property like a herd of cows, tearing up the flowers and turning everything to mud. All for your stupid balls! Well, do you want your balls back? Here they are!”
A cannon boom shook the air, and a hailstorm of footballs, baseballs, tennis balls, basketballs, soccer balls, a few Frisbees, and at least one Hula-Hoop flew out of the robot’s chest. Flinch did his best to avoid them, zigzagging through the assault, but there were so many. A rubber dodgeball smacked him on the head, but he shook it off and kept running toward the robot. When he got close enough, he landed a massive punch right at its leg, knocking it clean off its body.
The giant robot teetered back and forth on one limb before finally tumbling over. The impact knocked down Old Man Augustine’s entire fence, but in a bizarre miracle, the lawn was completely untouched.
“What in the world is going on?!” Mama Rosa demanded.
Flinch looked at her and sighed. “It’s time you knew the truth.”
“The truth about what?”
Suddenly, Mr. Crabapple from down the street squealed into view on a converted riding lawn mower covered in sharp, spinning blades. Not far behind him, Dean Barton from the next block over snapped pictures with a bizarre camera that seemed to steal everything it captured on film. Behind him were the Soreil twins, a couple of precocious girls in pink dresses, each swinging electrified jump ropes as if they were inviting Flinch to join them in a deadly game of double Dutch.
Flinch squeezed his nose to activate the com-link again and soon heard Agent Brand on the other end.
“Did you handle your situation, Agent?” Brand asked.
“Yes and no,” Flinch said. “My grandmother is fine, but my neighborhood is losing its mind.”
Antagonist: How is ur day?
Msinformation: Good. U?
Antagonist: Awesome. Watching the news. There are supervillains everywhere!
Msinformation:
Antagonist: There’s a crazy in Delaware calling himself Captain Cavity. Built a machine that gives people tooth decay.
Msinformation: Everyone is a captain.
Antagonist: lol. Everyone!!!!
Msinformation: Fail!
Antagonist: lol! Can’t wait for our date tonight …
Msinformation: I can’t wait to see you cooking for me.
Antagonist: I’m not really going to cook. I kidnapped the guy who won last year’s goulash cook-off.
Msinformation: Love, love, love goulash!
Antagonist: I love you.
Msinformation: :
Antagonist: What Is:
Msinformation: A kiss. Duh! You’re so cute.
Antagonist: Not as cute as you.
Msinformation: No, you’re cute.
Antagonist: Don’t argue. You’re the cute one.
Msinformation: Don’t tell me what to do! If I say you’re cute, you’re cute.
Antagonist: If you don’t stop and admit you are far cuter than I am, then I can’t be held responsible for the pain and misery I will heap on you.
Msinformation: And If you don’t accept the fact that I think you’re cuter, I will make sure that you never get another night of rest for
fear of me killing you in your sleep.
Antagonist: You are going to look so cute trying to crawl out of my shark tank.
Msinformation: And you will look cute when my giant laser slices you in half.
Antagonist: We are perfect for each other.
Msinformation: That’s ’cause we’re cute
The next morning Agent Brand found himself in the briefing room with the NERDS (minus Matilda), Ms. Holiday, the lunch lady, Benjamin, and Dr. Kim. General Savage was linked via satellite.
Dr. Kim wore a concerned expression. Brand didn’t like it. Scientists were supposed to be optimistic. They put their faith in numbers and ideas, and they thought the answers to even the biggest questions were right around the corner. When they looked nervous, that didn’t bode well.
“I’ve examined Flinch’s grandmother, as well as the dozen other people from her neighborhood, and all are infected with Heathcliff’s mutated nanobytes. It’s likely that we’re seeing the beginning of an epidemic.”
“An epidemic?” Ms. Holiday repeated, horrified.
Dr. Kim nodded. “Benjamin, can you assist?”
The blue orb darted around the room. “I’d be happy to help, Dr. Kim.”
The walls flipped over to reveal a collection of massive computer screens. One had a map of the greater Washington, D.C., area on it, while another had a highly magnified image of a nanobyte. Then there were charts of the circulatory system of a human body. Another screen showed a gallery of pictures, each a portrait of a normal citizen who had suddenly developed a desire to take over the world. Many of them wore masks and bizarre costumes, and all of them held some strange weapon in their hands.
“Heathcliff’s nanobytes are self-replicating,” the doctor said.
“And that means … ?” Jackson asked.
“They’re cloning themselves,” Duncan explained.
“Exactly,” Dr. Kim said. “And they’re doing it at an astounding speed. Their numbers double every ten minutes. Plus, there’s another troubling discovery. As I told you before, the nanobytes are broadcasting a message into the minds of their victims. Our science team has managed to isolate it … Benjamin?”