The Accidental Hero

by Matt Myklusch

  “Good work, Rex!” Mrs. Theedwheck declared as she made her way through the stacks of books toward the two boys. “I knew you were up here, Jack, I just kn— oh my goodnessl Are those comic books?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jack replied in a sullen voice. What else could he say? He was caught red-handed.

  “The comic books I told you to throw away?!” Mrs. Theedwheck let out a horrified gasp. “That was years ago!”

  Jack just stood there looking guilty while Rex smiled on.

  “This explains everything,” Mrs. Theedwheck said, still in shock. “Why you won’t behave, why you never listen… it’s these! These ridiculous magazines poisoning your brain with nonsense! Childish nonsense! This is why you’re always such a problem!”

  “It’s why he’s always such a weirdo,” Rex added.

  “At least I’m not a snitch,” Jack said to Rex, who immediately punched him in the shoulder. “Ow!” Jack yelled. “Mrs. Theedwheck, are you just going to let him hit me?”

  “You deserved that,” Mrs. Theedwheck scolded. “Calling Rex names when he’s only being responsible,” she added, shaking her head. “Young man, when are you going to grow up?”

  “Grow up?” Jack said. “I’m only twelve years old.”

  “Well! When I was your age, I was much older than that!” Mrs. Theedwheck fired back. “Mr. Calhoun is going to hear about this, Jack. You can count on that. And as for all of these absurd comical books, this time we are going to throw them out. Rex, before you get back on the bus, I want you to put every one of these childish publications in the incinerator.”

  “No!” Jack yelled, and the lights in the room suddenly grew brighter, before fading down to their regular levels.

  “What in the world?” Mrs. Theedwheck wondered aloud.

  “It’s Jack,” Rex said. “He’s messing with the lights!”

  “What are you talking about?” Jack said. “I am not!” The lights grew incredibly bright again, then slowly returned to normal.

  Mrs. Theedwheck went to the window and saw sparks coming off the electric fence. “Calm down, Rex, it’s just the rain shorting out our fence. It drains the power from the school’s generator. This won’t happen when we get the new one.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s him, Mrs. Theedwheck. This kind of crazy stuff always happens with him,” Rex said. “Like with the bus breaking down, or that time Jack broke my calculator in the middle of a math test.”

  “That was my calculator!” Jack replied. “You stole it from me! And I didn’t break it!” The lights intensified to their brightest setting yet.

  “It’s him, Mrs. Theedwheck! He’s doing it! Make him stop!”

  “I’m not doing anything!” Jack said, raising his voice for the last time, as the lightbulb above them surged with power until it blew out with a crash.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Theedwheck screamed as broken glass rained down. “Jack, that’s enough! Whatever it is that you’re doing, stop it!”

  “But I didn’t do anything! Mrs. Theedwheck, please don’t burn up my comics,” Jack pleaded. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll do chores all day. All week, even!”

  “Oh, I know you will, but the comics are getting burned either way. Rex, gather up every last one and then get on the bus. Jack, you have chores to do, but first things first.” Mrs. Theedwheck took out her yardstick. Jack knew what would come next.

  When Mrs. Theedwheck was through with him, Jack was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to sit down for at least a week. That wasn’t the worst part of his punishment either. The worst was that there were so many comics that Rex couldn’t carry them all, and Jack had to help him take them down to the incinerator. He had to help burn up his own comic book collection in the furnace. Watching those books go into the fire was the absolute worst.

  With the other kids finally off on their class trip, Jack was left alone in the basement, or what was currently the basement, bailing out water to stem the tide of the swamp. When he was younger, there used to be classrooms down there. Now the basement was surrendering to the marshlands, slowly sinking a little more each year.

  Jack hated the creepy, slanted basement, with its floor tilted on an angle. The basement was nothing more than a long, thin, warped hallway. The high end of the tilt was dry and the low end was wet. Jack thought of the low end as the “deep end,” because all the way down at that end of the hall was a pool of water around a stairwell leading to the floor below, a floor completely submerged in swamp water.

  The basement smelled of moisture, mold, and mildew. It was dark, too, since it wasn’t safe to use electricity on a floor that was almost halfway below swamp level. The only sunlight that crept through the windows was a combination of dim rays that either climbed above or dove below the swamp water outside. On a gray morning like this, there was almost no light at all, making the whole place look like a ghost school with empty desks scattered about each room, unsolved equations left on the chalkboard, and lonely art projects still taped to the walls.

  Jack navigated the puddle-ridden basement in squishy shoes. Splish, splash. Splish, splash. He had a bucket to carry water from the deep end of the floor up to the shallow end. Back and forth, he made his way across the basement, up the tilted floor to the dry side, where he would climb a rickety wooden staircase that led to a window by the ceiling. Once he got there, he’d dump a bucket of green water outside and go back to do it again. He was supposed to keep going until the floor was dry. Splish, splash. Splish, splash. It was no use. Swamp water seeped in everywhere. It was a never-ending job.

  One way or the other, Jack always ended up doing jobs like this as punishment for something. These days, it was usually punishment for something he did, in fact, do. There was a time when he used to keep his head down and try to follow the rules, but he found out that didn’t work at a place like St. Barnaby’s. Not for him, anyway. Even when he did what he was told and played the part of the model student, he always managed to get in trouble with the teachers for some new rule he had broken or was suspected of breaking. It was no wonder he started sidestepping the rules whenever he could, like hiding from Mrs. Theedwheck to dodge chores or stashing the comic books in the library. Sometimes it worked out and sometimes it didn’t. This time, it didn’t.

  While he worked, Jack thought about what had happened with the lights in the library. He had to admit, weird stuff like that did happen a lot—like the calculator incident Rex was talking about. Jack remembered it well. It was the day of a big math test and Rex had forgotten his calculator, so he stole Jack’s. Jack was so mad, and then the calculator fried itself two minutes later. The look on Rex’s face at that moment was almost worth losing the calculator, but Jack didn’t have anything to do with it breaking. How could he have?

  Jack’s ponderings were cut short just as he was emptying a pail of water out the window. He heard something behind him. Something way back on the deep side of the floor. A sound almost like bubbles. A sound like something was coming up from the water.

  “Hello?” Jack called back from the window.

  There was no answer.

  Jack waited a minute, then tried to shake it off. “Probably just some air bubbles,” he told himself as he started back down the stairs. No big deal.

  Then he heard the dripping. Heavy dripping, like water running off a person’s body onto the floor. Like a large person stepping out of a bathtub. Or a swamp.

  “Hello?” Jack called out again, a little more scared this time. “Is anyone down there?”

  The reply was footsteps—watery footsteps from all the way down on the dark side of the basement….

  Splish, splash. Splish, splash. Splish, splash.

  There was no question about it. Somebody was definitely down there.

  Jack walked with his pail to the flooded side of the basement. He stood at the doorway of a waterlogged classroom. “Who’s down here?” Jack called out with all the courage he could muster.

  Again, he heard footsteps. Splish, splash. Splish
, splash. The sound was coming from another room down the hall. Jack’s first thought was that Rex and his cronies were messing with him, but everyone was supposed to be out on the field trip. So, who was down there? Slowly and carefully, Jack walked after the footsteps, following the sound.

  He was sure the noise was coming from a classroom down near the deep end of the hall. He followed the noise to another warped doorway and looked inside to find dead quiet and an empty room. He checked a few more rooms but found nothing each time. The footsteps were gone. Jack decided it was just his imagination. He filled his bucket with water and started back toward the rickety wooden staircase on the dry side of the floor.

  A door shut behind him. Jack turned around with a jump and dropped his bucket. An old, creaky door dragging several inches of water with it had just closed itself at the end of the hall. This was not his imagination.

  Most of the classrooms were connected by interior doorways, so Jack had no way of knowing which door had just mysteriously shut. He stared down the hall, looking for a clue. The dim light from the windows flickered ever so slightly off the surface of swirling water at the very end of the hallway. Something was down there. Jack picked up his bucket and started inching down the corridor into ankle-deep water. The closer he got, the better he could see the water churning about, like someone had just slipped beneath its surface. He reached the stairwell, the very place where the swamp was flooding in from below. A lone banister was all that remained to mark the location of the staircase. It reached out from the murky depths in a futile gesture to escape the swamp.

  Jack sloshed through smelly water to the open doorway at the stairwell. It was a doorway to both the staircase below and the depths of the swamp.

  Jack was scared enough to keep his distance but curious enough that he had to find out what was down there. If Jack had known what was lurking below the surface, he would have run the other way as fast as his feet would take him. That wouldn’t have mattered, though. It had followed him this far already. It had followed him across the swamp, up through the lower levels of St. Barnaby’s, and right up to the basement stairwell, where it could feel Jack’s presence. It was so close. Just on the other side of the water.

  The time had come.

  Jack was staring into his own blurry reflection in the murky water when the image was dispelled by a grabbing hand reaching to clutch at his wrist.

  “AGGHH!” Jack yelped, backing away so fast that he tripped on his own feet. He hit the ground with a splash. The hand that had grabbed at him disappeared back below the water’s edge. What was that?

  From the ground, Jack watched, trembling, as the rest of the thing emerged from the deep. It looked like a heap of scrap metal. It smelled of mildew and rust, a random collection of corroded metal plates. But it wasn’t random. Not really. Wires, nuts, and bolts were sticking out everywhere, and the rising pile of waste looked like garbage left over from the construction work that was always being done around St. Barnaby’s. That garbage was routinely dumped in the swamp, but this garbage was forming the shape of something.

  The shifting mass lurched forward, out of the pool of water in the stairwell. Jack got a good look, and what he saw was impossible. The mass was dark gray everywhere except for a shining red light in the center of what was apparently becoming a person’s chest. A newly formed neck raised a newly formed head, and on that head an eye blinked open. An eye with a black mark running all the way around it and a dark line running down from its inside corner.

  The creature was exactly like one of the aliens Jack had just read about in his comic books. He was looking at a Robo-Zombie. Jack shivered in place, letting out a stuttering burble of shock. Frozen with fear, his mind tried to tell him he was seeing things, that none of this was possible.

  The Robo-Zombie opened its mouth to speak, and a mechanical noise poured out, screeching through the air like choppy analog ringtones and static:

  “KSSCHHHHHHH-ANG-ANNG-ANNNG!!!!”

  Jack screamed and threw his bucket at the mechanical beast. It was all he could think to do. The robot caught the bucket and crushed it in its left hand. It tossed the bucket away and slowly advanced on Jack.

  Frantic, Jack scooted himself backward, still on the ground. The lights in the basement were coming on. Just like before, they were starting out low and gradually growing brighter. This was impossible, Jack thought. Then again, he was staring at a seven-foot robot that had just climbed out of the swamp, so what did impossible really mean? The light intensified. The Robo-Zombie noticed the lights as they reached their height of brightness and sparks shot out of the sockets. The power to the lights was supposed to be off because it wasn’t safe. As Jack cleared the pool of water by the stairwell, electric bolts shot up through the water, striking the robot. It cried out in pain.

  Jack ran.

  Sprinting down the long hallway to the staircase on the dry side, Jack was scared beyond belief. Behind him, he could see the robot down on one knee, looking up at him. Smoke rose off its frame. It looked angry. Getting up quickly, it charged at the doorway. Too wide to fit through the door, it broke through the wall on either side. It was coming for Jack, and it was picking up speed.

  Jack had always wished he’d had superpowers. He’d go to bed hoping that he’d wake up with the ability to fly, turn into steel, or shoot ice rays from his hands. While flying was Jack’s first choice, anything would have been fine as the Robo-Zombie was coming after him. You don’t get picky when you have a monster robot chasing you down the hall. Jack reached the wooden staircase that led up to the window. He scampered up the rickety steps, tripping halfway to the top. He caught himself and turned to see the robot powering up in his run. It left the ground and flew right at him.

  Jack just barely managed to squeeze himself out through the window at the ceiling, and took off running across the marsh. The robot barreled through the window behind him, taking chunks of the wall off as it charged out of the basement. The damaged section of the building’s foundation sludged into the swamp and the robot shot high into the air.

  The Robo-Zombie circled around in the sky, looking for Jack. There was no real cover to be found in the marsh. It was an endless stretch of tall, colorless grass and weeds surrounding vast pools of cold, still water. The drab landscape was interrupted by a few trees and rocks planted here and there, with long, half-barren hedgerows winding in between. Everything was beige and tan. Everything looked dead.

  With the robot up in the air, Jack knew he would be easily spotted running through the grass. In fact, any movement at all was sure to give away his position. Jack was scared to death but somehow managed to keep thinking straight. He stayed perfectly still and ducked down below the reeds.

  A hundred or so feet away, the tall grass fluttered. The robot zeroed in on it immediately and swooped down from the sky. Diving like a torpedo, the robot hit the earth with a slam. Jack shook in his hiding place as a gaggle of ducks scattered off in a dozen directions, quacking up a storm.

  The Robo-Zombie remained on the ground, swatting at the ducks. Jack ran. He ran hard with all the energy he had. All of it. Pure supercharged adrenaline and fear powered his legs as he ran blindly through the thin stalks of grass. The freezing water was past his ankles, but he ran as fast as he could and didn’t dare look back. He plowed ahead through the marsh, and then suddenly he slammed right into the electric fence.

  Jack bounced back with a shock. The robot heard him. Jack looked across the marsh and locked eyes with the iron brute. It was coming for him.

  Unable to climb the fence, Jack just kept running. It was still raining outside, and sparks flew off the electric fence as he ran alongside it. From behind him he heard two zaps from the electric fence and then a third, louder noise.

  “Whoa!” Jack yelped as he ducked behind a tree. That last zap was no spark from the fence. Some kind of laser blast had just missed him! The robot was fast approaching. It was taking shots at him as it came. The first two blasts disappeared in the murky wa
ter to Jack’s left and right, and the third one struck the trunk of his tree, splintering it in two.

  Jack kept running through bushes and weeds, trying to get away, but it was no use. The robot was closing in, screaming its static-filled battle cry and firing shot after shot from its wrist cannons.

  Eventually, Jack cleared the swamp, exhausted and with no energy left to keep going. He reached a dead end, penned in by the electric fence at the edge of St. Barnaby’s property. There was nothing there but the orphanage’s power generator out back by an old shed. Jack hid in the shed, hoping to escape. It wasn’t happening. No sooner did he get into a good hiding place than the shed’s roof and walls were ripped off the ground. The robot threw them away and hovered menacingly over Jack. It trained its arm, ready to blast him into oblivion. Jack sat there shivering, wondering what he’d done to make a monster from his comic books come to life and try to kill him.

  “What do you want?” Jack screamed at the monster. “Why are you after me?”

  There was no answer, but the monster paused.

  It was almost as if the iron beast that chased him all this way was now struggling with the thought of killing him. This came as no comfort to Jack. He was still terrified, and his heart bounced around in his chest like a racquetball. What he didn’t realize was that the faster his heart beat and the more scared he became, the faster the power generator across from him seemed to run. The generator was big enough to light the entire orphanage and power the electric fence. The robot was hovering right over it.

  Jack stared up at the monster that was still deciding whether or not to finish him off. Knowing there was nowhere left to run, Jack could only hope that the monster had some kind of a conscience. As the robot primed its wrist cannons, Jack could see that the evil thing intended to complete its mission.