The Mad Mask

by Barry Lyga

  The United States Army had just opened fire on Kyle. For real.

  Explosions and impacts buffeted him in the air, tossing him back and forth, up and down. He raised an arm to shield his face, even though he was wearing the ebony mask.

  “Stop it!” he yelled. “I’m here to help!” But no one could hear him over the unending roar of munitions.

  “Kyle, even your body can only handle so much punishment….”

  Erasmus was right. Kyle knew he had no choice but to retreat. He could just fly away, but that would leave Mairi abandoned in the sewers. Plus, those helicopters and drones would just follow him wherever he went.

  So it was back into the sewers. He dropped down into the filth and the stink.

  Kyle drifted along the smelly air currents in the sewer, back toward what had been the Mad Mask’s lair. The rats had apparently gotten used to him invading their territory — they barely even looked at him as he glided by.

  The Army was taking its sweet time coming down after him. That made sense. They didn’t want to go charging blind into an unfamiliar situation, especially when a “bad guy” was ready and waiting for them.

  “What are you going to do about Mairi?” Erasmus asked.

  “I have no idea,” Kyle admitted. They were the four hardest words he’d ever assembled into a sentence.

  “What are you going to say to her?”

  “I’ll explain things to her. It’ll take awhile. But she’ll understand.” That was the extent of his plan right now: Leave a trail to the lair that even the Army could follow. Explain things to Mairi. Escape through another tunnel. Let the Army rescue Mairi so that they felt like they accomplished something other than dropping a metric ton of live ordnance on Bouring. It wasn’t the greatest plan in the world, but it ended with Kyle safe and Mairi rescued, so that was all that mattered.

  “You know, when they get to her, they’re going to ask her questions. About you.”

  “I know. She won’t give me up,” Kyle said confidently. “Not Mairi. She’s my friend —”

  “Exactly. Are you going to put her through that? Make her lie to everyone about you? Are you going to make her live with the knowledge that her best friend is a wanted criminal, the most dangerous person on the planet?”

  Grr. “No. No, I guess not.”

  “You know what you have to do,” Erasmus said ominously.

  Kyle clenched his fists. Yeah. Yeah, he knew what he had to do.

  Kyle drifted into the Mad Mask’s abandoned control center. In one hand, he held the ebony mask; he held the other out in what he hoped was a calming gesture. Mairi had gotten up from her position on the ground and was now over by the viewscreen, which had gone dead when the Mad Mask fled. Mairi was fiddling with the controls, trying to coax the system back to life. Kyle didn’t have the heart to tell her that it had never really worked — the whole system had been powered by the Mad Mask’s belief in it. Once he stopped thinking about it, once he was out of range, it all became junk.

  “Mairi,” he said as calmly as he could.

  She spun around, and the terror in her eyes hurt Kyle a thousand times more than all the rockets the Army had fired at him.

  “Stay away from me!” She backed up against the console.

  “Mairi, I’m not going to —”

  “Stay away!” she screamed. “Stay away! You lied to me! You left me to die!”

  She was talking about the ASE, he knew. She didn’t know — no one knew — that Kyle had left Mighty Mike to rescue her from the ASE because there was something more important to do: absorbing the radiation that was causing the ASE before it spread to the entire town and the whole world.

  “I knew Mike would save you. I had to go and —”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Kyle.” She edged to the left, moving toward one of the tunnels. Kyle moved that way, too. He couldn’t let her get into the tunnels. She could easily get lost in there and never make her way out. “You lied to me. You tried to kill Mike on Mighty Mike Day. You trashed the town. You left me to die with the dirt monster. And then you teamed up with this lunatic who kidnapped me!”

  “Wow,” Erasmus said, “when you put it that way, you sound pretty bad!”

  “Shut up!” Kyle said. As usual, when there was no immediate danger, Erasmus wasn’t being very helpful.

  “Don’t tell me to shut up!” Mairi yelled. “I thought you were my friend!”

  “I am your friend —”

  “Friends don’t try to kill each other!”

  Kyle moved to his left a bit. He could see his goal now. He was very close, but he didn’t want to startle Mairi and make her do something stupid.

  “I never tried to kill you, Mairi. I’m trying to help you.”

  “You expect me to believe you? Do you really expect me to ever believe anything you ever say again?”

  Kyle made his move, snatching the brain-wave manipulator from the table where he’d left it. Before Mairi could move — or his own conscience could interrupt — Kyle aimed it at Mairi and triggered the device. “Don’t move,” he told her, and Mairi froze in place, her face still twisted into anger and hate.

  “You won’t remember that Kyle Camden is the Blue Freak,” he told her.

  “Who?” she said, her eyes suddenly heavy and dreamy.

  “Kyle,” Erasmus interrupted, “I’m picking up radio chatter nearby. The Army is closing in.”

  Kyle stared at Mairi. Was he really doing this? Was he really altering Mairi’s brain? It had been one thing to make his parents think a little differently — they were parents. But this was Mairi. She had trusted him, once. And now he was …

  “Kyle!” Erasmus yelled in the one remaining earbud, cranking up the volume.

  “You will forget you saw my face,” Kyle told Mairi.

  “Whose face?” she asked, sounding sleepy.

  There was so much more he wanted to do. So much more he could do. But he didn’t have the time.

  “Go to sleep,” he told her, and Mairi yawned, then stretched out on the floor and drifted off into a peaceful sleep. Kyle stood over her, watching.

  Then — before he could change his mind — he destroyed the brain-wave manipulator, crushing it into a ball of twisted metal with his bare hands.

  “What did you do that for?” Erasmus yelped. “I just fixed it!”

  “I never want to be able to make this choice again,” Kyle said soberly.

  From down one of the tunnels, he could hear them now, the soldiers, splashing through the muck.

  Kyle picked a different tunnel and flew into it. He knew that he could take the sewers to a spot outside of town and escape that way. His plans had failed, but once again he would escape to fight another day.

  As he’d thought when this all began, his plans might not always work, but at least his escapes were always …

  He flew through the dank, reeking darkness. Yeah. Slogging through the sewer was a really spectacular escape.

  A week later, and the town of Bouring is beginning to recover from the attack of Ultitron.

  And, might I add, the attack of the Army. Those guys caused almost as much damage as Ultitron did.

  Mighty Mike, of course, was instrumental in the repair work. Why bring in a bunch of cranes to lift building materials when Mike can do it? Why hoist guys up to the top of a roof to nail down slate when Mike can float up there and drive nails with his bare hands? And if he sometimes uses too much strength and breaks the slate or puts his fist through a new wall? Well, who cares, everyone says — he’s a good kid! He means well.

  Feh.

  He even helped raise money for the reconstruction by auctioning off superpowered feats. One rich computer mogul from California paid fifty thousand dollars on eBay to have Mighty Mike fly him up into the stratosphere in a space suit.

  (I’ve been to the stratosphere. It’s no big deal.)

  He also helped soothe everyone’s frazzled nerves by performing superfeats, including flying some kids around town, just t
o give them a thrill.

  Of course, he took Mairi on an extra-long flight, much to the delight of the crowd. “Mairi has suffered more than anyone else in this,” he told the Bouring Record. “She was napped by the evil villains who created the robot and left in the sewers by herself.”

  No one bothered to correct his “napped” gaffe. At this point, we might as well just let him reinvent the English language his way. We can all speak Alien instead of English. The two are very similar — one is just stupid.

  Oh, and people started calling Mairi “Mighty Mike’s Girlfriend” again. Of course.

  In the meantime, the Mad Mask’s ebony-and-ivory mask (now pocked with some dents and dings after the Army shot at me while I was wearing it) sits on a shelf in my basement next to the jar of radioactive dirt from Mighty Mike’s landing site.

  My workshop/laboratory is a mess. Most of my hard-earned materials were cannibalized to build Ultitron. The biochemical forge is useless, the chemicals inside it slowly turning inert as the days go by. Everything I’ve built since my intellect increased has been wrecked, destroyed.

  But that’s all right. I can rebuild. I will rebuild.

  Whatever it takes.

  I’ll say this:

  I am more determined than ever before to destroy Mighty Mike. If he had focused on the Mad Mask instead of me, Ultitron never would have been a threat. If he hadn’t distracted me by fighting me at Lundergaard, I could have stopped the Mad Mask sooner and none of this ever would have happened. Mairi wouldn’t have been kidnapped, Ultitron wouldn’t have been activated … None of it.

  Someday the world will know the truth about him.

  Most important, someday Mairi will know.

  This I swear.

  It took days of wandering the sewers before he eventually emerged.

  Without a compass or a map or any sort of assistance, he had wandered in circles, trudging through disgusting rivers of slime and muck. He caught and ate rats, drank condensation that collected along the ceiling. It made him ill, but illness would not stop him. Being sick was for lesser beings, not for the likes of the Mad Mask.

  He finally came out of the sewers into the cool night air for the first time since unleashing Ultitron on the world.

  The sewer conduit emptied out on the outskirts of Bouring. Looking back, the Mad Mask could see that the town was being rebuilt. But it would take time for the damage to be repaired, and even longer for the memories to fade. Beautiful little Bouring would be frightening and ugly for a long time.

  The Mad Mask took a piece of wet cardboard, poked two holes in it, and strung a shoelace through it, then slipped it over his head. He had to cover his disfigurement from the world. Until the day that the entire world was as hideous as he was.

  And that day would come! He swore it! He would have his revenge. Not just on the beautiful things in the world. No, not just the beautiful things. He would have his revenge on Mighty Mike, too.

  And on … on …

  He couldn’t remember entirely. But he knew there had been a traitor. Someone had betrayed him, stabbed him in the back and stolen his true face.

  “The Mad Mask shall rise again!” he chortled to the sky. “The Mad Mask will have his revenge upon the traitor! Upon the Blue Freak!”

  And he ran off into the darkness, his maniacal laugh following him.

  And now for a sneak peek at Kyle’s next adventure

  Lundergaard stood at the bottom of the staircase that led to the rest of the house. He held some sort of gadget in one hand and a gun in the other, pointed at Kyle. Normally guns didn’t scare Kyle — he knew from experience that he was bulletproof. Not to mention bomb-proof, fireproof, and bazooka-proof.

  But this gun didn’t look like an ordinary, run-of-the-mill pistol. It was a dull silver color and the barrel was bulbous, as if it had tried to swallow something too big to get down in one gulp. For all Kyle knew, that gun could hurt him very badly. He thought of the Mad Mask’s force field — it was definitely still possible to hurt Kyle, with the right science.

  “Finish your thought, young man,” Lundergaard said in a very calm voice. “Not necessarily what?”

  “I … uh …” Kyle’s mind raced and his eyes flicked over to the way he’d come in. At superspeed, he could make it before —

  “Ah, ah, ah!” Lundergaard said, and clicked the gadget in his hand. A shimmering field of energy blocked the exit. “A force field. I assure you passing through it will —”

  Kyle didn’t let Lundergaard finish. He moved, quickly. Not at the exit and the force field, but at Lundergaard himself, reaching out at superspeed for the gadget with one hand and the gun with the other.

  He never made it.

  A strange pain — strange both because it was pain and also because it was somehow familiar — buzzed through Kyle like a whole fleet of bees with steel stingers. He collapsed backward, stumbling away from Lundergaard and crashing into a workbench, which promptly fell into pieces at contact with his superstrong, super-resistant body.

  “He’s definitely a bad guy,” Erasmus commented as Kyle shook his head to clear it.

  “How on earth can you still be standing?” Lundergaard marveled. “That burst should have rendered you unconscious or —” He broke off and gasped, his entire expression changing to one of amazement, his eyes filled with sudden recognition.

  “You … You’re Kyle Camden!” Lundergaard cried. “You’re Kyle Camden as a child! Of course! I should have known I would encounter you in this time period. It makes perfect sense.”

  “Not to me,” Erasmus admitted.

  Not to Kyle, either, but he didn’t care. “Turn off the force fields, Lundergaard. I’m taking what I need and leaving.”

  “I don’t know if I can let you do that.” Lundergaard paused for a moment, confused. “But … I also … I don’t know if I can’t let you do that. The time paradoxes …”

  “I told you there were time paradoxes!” Erasmus said.

  “Not now.” To Lundergaard: “Look, we can do this the easy way —”

  “Or the hard way. Yes, yes, I under —”

  “No, I was going to say that we can do this the easy way or the way where I break every bone in your body. Your choice.”

  He had expected Lundergaard to be intimidated or scared, but instead the older man just sighed and shook his head. “Oh, Kyle. You haven’t outgrown your childish bluster yet, have you? You told me that you were a smug, petulant child, but I didn’t believe you.”

  “What do you mean I told you?” Kyle thought for a second. “And I am not smug and petulant!”

  “Well …” Erasmus started, and Kyle shushed him.

  Lundergaard, safe behind his force field, went on talking, as if to himself, as though Kyle weren’t even in the room. “So it’s … it’s 1987. Which means this is your first trip through time. Which means you’re only twelve years old …” He drifted off for a moment, thinking. Kyle wanted to rush him at superspeed again, push through that force field, but he was paralyzed by shock: first trip through time?

  Thanks to everyone at Scholastic, who continue to make working on Archvillain more fun than should be legal. Special thanks to Jody Corbett, David Levithan, and editor emeritus Gregory Rutty.

  A hearty plasma-powered shout-out of thanks, too, to my beta readers: Eric Lyga, Faith Hochhalter, and Mary Kole. You are all as wise as Erasmus (and, when I need it, as snarky) and as cuddly as Lefty.

  BARRY LYGA is the author of Archvillain and The Mad Mask, the first two novels of Kyle Camden’s adventures. He’s also the author of several critically acclaimed YA novels. Barry lives in Brooklyn, New York. When he’s not writing he uses his superpowers to fight crime.

  Copyright © 2012 by Barry Lyga

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data

  Lyga, Barry.

  The mad mask / by Barry Lyga. — 1st ed.

  p. cm. — (Archvillain; 2)

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Kyle teams up with the Mad Mask who, claiming super brain-power and superior superpowers, wants help building Ultitron, a robot that would rid Bouring of Mighty Mike and, Kyle hopes, the Mad Mask, as well, ridding the town of both mindless archvillains.

  ISBN 978-0-545-19651-2

  [1. Superheroes — Fiction. 2. Robots — Fiction. 3. Extraterrestrial beings — Fiction. 4. Good and evil — Fiction. 5. Science fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L97967Mad 2012

  [Fic] — dc22

  First edition, January 2012

  Cover illustration © by Andrew Trabbold

  Cover design by Christopher Stengel

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-45480-3

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.