by Mike Jung
Is there anything as freaky as standing in front of a classroom and talking? About anything? I took a deep breath.
“My report’s about Captain Stupendous,” I said.
“Again?” somebody in the class said.
Mrs. Burnell closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “And, Vincent, you’ve included—”
“A historical component, yeah,” I blurted out. “I always do.”
“Yes, I know.” Mrs. Burnell tipped her head to the side and smiled, sort of. Her forehead was more wrinkled than foreheads usually are during a smile. “Go ahead.”
Somebody made a smooching sound, immediately followed by a fart sound. There was a ripple of laughter.
I coughed, shifted from one side to the other, shifted back, and noticed how sweaty and wrinkled the report was getting where I held it.
“Like I was saying, my report’s about Captain Stupendous and how Copperplate City’s the only major city in the past twenty-six years with no mayor abductions.” I said all that in one long breath, then had to suck in another long breath when I was done.
Just as I was about to start again the door opened and Polly came in, followed by Mr. Castle.
“Sorry to interrupt your class, Mrs. Burnell,” he said. “Miss Winnicott-Lee was late for an appointment with the school counselor.”
Oh dude, SO humiliating—there’s nothing like having the whole class know about your appointment with the school shrink. Someone coughed the word “mental” as Polly went to her desk. Her expression didn’t change, but her face turned pink. She slumped down in her chair as Mr. Castle closed the door.
“Polly’s the one who should give a Captain Stupendous report.” Ah, that came from evil cheerleader airhead and Stupendite Carla Bing in the back row. She was obviously jealous, if her snarky tone of voice was any sign.
“Please exercise some self-control, class.” Mrs. Burnell used her emotionless robot voice, and everybody settled down. People don’t mess with Mrs. Burnell when she uses that voice, no matter how good she smells.
“Sorry for the interruption, Vincent, go ahead.” Mrs. Burnell nodded at me, then turned and smiled at Polly. Polly gave one of those superfast fake smiles for like a nanosecond, then slumped a little farther down in her chair.
“Out of the fifty largest cities in the country, Copperplate City is the only one that’s never had a kid abducted by a supervillain,” I said. “The reason is Captain Stupendous. My report is on the history of abduction attempts over the past twenty-six years and how Captain Stupendous stopped them.”
I was having trouble talking because I couldn’t help sneaking glances at Polly out of the corner of my eye, but when I said that last part she did something that totally threw me off. She sat up straight in her chair and looked right at me.
Like she was listening to my report. Which would make her the first person to ever do that …
“I’m telling you, she was totally listening to my report! Something weird is going on with Polly.”
“You sure, Vincent? Because it’s probably just that post-Stupendous-rescue attack-syndrome thing, isn’t it?”
I sighed. “You always get that wrong, Max.”
We were at our usual lunch table, one table away from the food lines and the crabby old ladies who ran the cash register. We were at one end of the rectangle-shaped space—at the other end were all the windows, jocks, girls, Official Captain Stupendous Fan Club members, sunlight, and happiness. All the bullies and jerks were over there too, though, so there was an upside to being so close to the smelly old lunch ladies and their bad attitudes.
“Post-rescue attachment syndrome,” I said. “And yeah, I guess it could be, but it was … I don’t know, different from that.”
“Because you’ve met so many rescued people you’re an expert, huh?” George said as he stuck a Tater Tot in his mouth.
“Oh, like you have?” I shot back. George put his ketchup-smeared hands in the air.
“Look, there she is.” Max nodded to his left, where the entrance to the cafeteria was. Polly walked down the ramp that went from the doors to where the food line usually started. She got to the end of the ramp, ignored the food line, and made a beeline for the girls’ bathroom. She passed our table on the way and totally made eye contact with me! Of course I wussed out and looked down at the table, ignoring Max kicking my shin under the table. Polly disappeared from eyeshot, and I heard the door to the girls’ bathroom close with a THUNK as she went in.
“Come on, man, bust a move on her,” Max said.
“Shut up.” I stuffed a forkful of the cafeteria’s nasty Swedish meatballs into my mouth and chewed violently.
“She’s totally scoping you out, Vincent.” Oh great, even George was getting on my case. “Just talk to her.”
“Oh right, George, like you’ve ever done that.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“This is, like, official club business, Vincent.” Max clamped a hand on my shoulder. It was depressing to be reminded that Max’s hand is actually bigger than my entire shoulder.
“You could—”
Every cell phone in the cafeteria went berserk with the Stupendous Alert ringtone. The cafeteria’s like a giant echo chamber, so the sound of all those phones combined with everyone screaming their heads off was enough to make a guy instantly insane. I looked at my phone.
“HERE! HERE! THAT’S HERE!” Geez, Scott was standing on a table again.
“Loudmouth,” I said as we all got up from the table.
“He’s right, though.” George was hopping up and down. “That’s practically next door!”
“It’s almost ten blocks over, actually,” I said. I knew that only because the school district offices, where my mom works, are right around there. I wondered if Mom could see the robot from her office window or anything like that.
“We better hurry up, then.” Max cracked his knuckles.
The school loudspeakers burst into crackly, high-volume life.
“ATTENTION, KING KIRBY MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS! THERE IS A STUPENDOUS ALERT, REPEAT, A STUPENDOUS ALERT! LOCKDOWN PROCEDURES ARE IN EFFECT IMMEDIATELY!”
“LET’S GO!” Scott shouted, and with a collective “GRAAAARRRGH,” every kid in the cafeteria rushed the doors. The lunch ladies didn’t even try to stop anybody—one of the more leathery ones actually headed outside too.
We went through the halls of the school like a thundering herd of buffalo, ignoring the teachers who tried to slow us down.
“HALT! REPORT TO YOUR HOMEROOMS IMMEDIATELY!” I was pretty impressed by how loud Vice Principal Castle’s voice was when he yelled, but he was as helpless as all the other teachers. The entire population of King Kirby Middle School spilled out the front doors of the school and took off down the street, howling with excitement the whole way.
“This way! This way!” I shouted, peeling off from the main crowd.
“This is the right way, Vincent!” Max pointed in the direction everyone else was going.
“No it isn’t, there’s—forget it, I’m going this way!”
Feeling pissed off, I took off running on a side street, and after a few seconds I heard Max and George following me. They caught up a half block over, and together we turned into an alley.
“Oh, really good, Vincent,” Max said.
“This is a dead end too!” George shouted, skidding to a halt.
“Through the doughnut shop, you dummies!”
We reached the back door to Ye Olde Donut Shoppe, expecting its usual collection of suspicious-looking guys in ratty clothes drinking from Styrofoam cups. The shop was empty, though.
We burst out onto the next street and stopped, because the street was already crowded. All the doughnut shop guys were there, for one, and as we stopped, a bunch of other kids came skidding up behind, colliding with each other and lurching around like crazy. I got separated from my friends and ended up in the middle of the giant mosh pit that formed on the sidewalk, but I heard Max yellin
g “VINCENT!” from somewhere to my right.
“Ungfh!” Somebody elbowed me hard in the side.
“Out of the way, loser.”
I couldn’t even tell who did it—when it’s that crowded the bullies all run together in an obnoxious blur.
I squirmed through the crowd, taking at least two more elbows to the ribs and a smack to the head that was probably on purpose before finding Max and George up front. Max was craning his neck to look around, and he relaxed when we made eye contact. He reached out with one big paw and hauled me in by the shoulder when I got within range.
“You okay?” he said, brushing imaginary dust off my shoulders.
I shook his hand off.
“Yeah, yeah, no worries. Where’s Stupendous?”
“Dude, Stupendous isn’t here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he’s not here, it’s just the robot.”
“What do you think it’s looking for?”
George pointed at the robot, a block down the street at the intersection of Kirby and 17th. It was bending over and looking into the windows of the Corwin Enterprises Research and Development Lab that took up one whole block. Knowing stuff like the locations of research labs was just one of the things that made us better than the Official Captain Stupendous Fan Club, just so you know.
The robot stood up, turned around, and bent down to look in the building across the street from the Corwin Lab. That was the school district office building. Where Mom’s office was.
I felt a small but weird sort of tingle in my spine, like that feeling you get when you’re looking down from a really tall place—nerves, maybe? Fear? My mom worked in that building, after all.
What the heck was Professor Mayhem looking for?
Where was Captain Stupendous?
“You were right about the shortcut,” Max said, still not looking at me.
“No kidding.” I didn’t look at him either. “How long’s it been since Mayhem showed up?”
“At least five minutes, right?” Max said. “It took us a while to get out of the cafeteria.”
I couldn’t believe it. Stupendous never took more than a couple of minutes to show up for a villain smack down.
The robot stopped peeking into the windows of the school district offices and stood up. Its shadow was so long it covered the street behind the robot for an entire city block. The sunlight twinkled briefly off the robot’s head, and I looked up and behind me to see where the sun was. That was the only reason I saw Captain Stupendous fly up from behind the doughnut shop.
“CAPTAIN STUPENDOUS!” I yelled, swiveling my head and pointing up. There was a sharp whoosh overhead, followed by the sound of fabric whipping in the wind. A roar went up from the crowd.
“Time to take care of business, baby!” I yelled.
A girl standing in front of me turned and gave me a why-don’t-you-roll-over-and-die look, then whispered something to the girl standing next to her, who smirked.
The robot turned and raised its fists as Stupendous flew straight at its chest. He flew by too quickly for me to get a look at his face, but his fists were straight out in front of him, and his yellow cape was really bright in comparison to his blue costume. Stupendous is a big guy—six foot seven—but the robot made him look like an action figure.
“AH, THERE YOU ARE!” Professor Mayhem sounded insanely cheerful to see Stupendous.
“Game over, baby,” somebody in the crowd shouted. “Watch, it’s gonna be over with one punch!”
Whoever said it was wrong, though, because the robot swung one big metal fist and hit Stupendous face-first with a loud CLANG. Stupendous flew sideways, spun around, and crashed into the building across the street from Mom’s office.
Just like that, everyone quit cheering. George, Max, and I stood there with our mouths hanging open.
“What just happened?” George said.
Captain Stupendous does NOT get hit that easily. When twenty-six Bluvian galactic battleships invaded our atmosphere and fired their antimatter missiles, he dodged every single one. When Mandible Moe attacked with his lightning-fast scissor bite, Stupendous just leaned out of the way, laughed, and knocked out three of Moe’s serrated fangs. The Plutonium Brothers never touched him, no matter how many times they blew themselves up.
“ON YOUR FEET, CAPTAIN THYROID!” Mayhem hollered. “MY LITTLE SURPRISE ISN’T QUITE READY, BUT IT’S NO CONCERN. HAVE AT THEE!”
Well, that sounded very supervillainous and sinister.
“Oh, it’s never good when villains talk about their ‘little surprises,’” Max said.
“Maybe he’s planning on blowing up the school,” George said, and I couldn’t help myself—a tiny streak of hope went through me when he said it.
“He’s definitely got something in the works,” I said.
Stupendous poked his head out of the hole he’d left in the side of the building, shook cement bits out of his hair, and launched back into the air. Then a weird thing happened—his entire body was lit up by this blue light, like there was a giant blue lightbulb inside him.
Stupendous stopped midflight and held up his glowing blue arms. That was plenty of time for Mayhem to hit him with a hard uppercut. The blue light vanished as Stupendous ricocheted straight back up in the air, flailing his limbs wildly. The robot did its Tasmanian Devil trick again—everything between its head and waist suddenly turned into a spinning blur of destruction, and Stupendous fell right into it. The robot’s rotating arms hit him with a CRACK, and Stupendous whizzed all the way down the street. I spun around as he went by and disappeared behind the doughnut shop. Oh, that had to hurt—it hurt looking at it.
The robot came stomping after Stupendous, filling the air with gigantic CRUNCH sounds as it ran. I spun around again to run, just as the students of King Kirby Middle School ran off in all directions, screaming and slamming into each other like deranged hockey players. My feet got tangled, and a bellowing kid in an Official Captain Stupendous Fan Club T-shirt clocked me in the head with his elbow. I went down on the pavement, with little pinpricks of light going off in front of my eyes. I thought somebody yelled “Vincent!” but it was hard to be sure—the robot was loud, and I could also hear a helicopter somewhere up in the sky.
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! Just like that the robot was on top of me. It had a mixed-up smell, wet and metallic, and it stared straight ahead with its glassy eyes.
For a second, time slowed way down, and I was actually able to watch the bottom of one giant foot as it came down to squish me.
I was in serious danger of wetting my pants when Stupendous flew in from behind, scooped me up (which kind of hurt, actually) and dragged me out from under the robot’s foot. We zipped between the robot’s legs, flying a couple of feet above the pavement.
The robot bent over and tried to grab us, but Stupendous did a fast midair zigzag and jetted up at a sharp angle. I saw a couple of buildings zip past my eyes, then empty sky, then a helicopter that barely got out of the way in time. Its propellers made a WHUP-WHUP-WHUP-WHUP sound as we flew by.
“AAUGH! Stupid helicopters!” Stupendous said. “Hang on, it’s following us!”
“The helicopter or the robot?!”
The robot, of course. I looked down, and yep—it was coming after us.
“STUPENDOUS!” Mayhem yelled so loud I could hear him over the wind in my ears and the helicopter racket. “FLEE IF YOU MUST! ALL THE MORE TIME FOR ME TO CARRY ON WITH MY BUSINESS!”
What business? What was he gonna do the next day? Why wasn’t Stupendous paying attention to all the warning signs?
Stupendous twitched all over, and then we were flying so fast my cheeks felt like they were stapled to the back of my head. I was positive I’d have bruises all over from being grabbed like that, plus it got colder as we got higher.
“Where are we going?” I yelled, but it came out more like “Errr aaaghwwwee oimbbb?”
The robot fell behind fast. It got smaller and smaller, but we weren’t g
oing back. Stupendous was … running away?
???
“Hey! HEY! THAT’S A NEW VILLAIN BACK THERE, YOU KNOW! HE’S PLANNING SOMETHING! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? HEEEEEYYYYYYY!”
Stupendous didn’t hear, so I whacked him on the shoulder. That might have been a mistake—it was like whacking the side of a building. It got his attention, though, along with my scream of pain. He jerked around to look at me, and it must have thrown him off balance—before I knew it, we were twirling around like a two-person human tornado.
When we stopped pinwheeling around I grabbed my stomach and peeked at the ground, which was really far away. The robot was nowhere in sight.
“Can we go down?” I said. I had a hoodie on over my T-shirt but it wasn’t fleece or anything, and my teeth were chattering. “I don’t want to catch pneumonia.”
“Oh yeah. Sure,” Stupendous said. He looked down for a few seconds, scanning the ground.
“That looks okay,” he said, and BAM, we flew straight down, which meant I got to watch the ground come up at warp speed.
There’s this roller coaster at Thrill Town with a harness that clamps on to your shoulders, waist, butt, and crotch, but your arms and legs and head dangle free. At one point you go over a little hill, which is where all the girls start giggling and the guys start raising their hands over their heads. Then you plunge a couple hundred feet straight down, loose body parts flapping in the wind, which is where all the girls scream like banshees and the guys do too, only they try to sound all deep-voiced and manly. I used to think that was scary.
My eyes watered like crazy. I think we hit a bird, because I heard a squawk and suddenly there were feathers plastered to my forehead. I was wondering if I’d see some kind of light before I died when Stupendous slowed down and straightened up. I felt a thump, and Stupendous dumped me on my feet. I fell over and hit my funny bone.
“Aaarrgh!” I said, which summed up my feelings pretty well. We were on a rooftop, somewhere downtown. It was warm—the best thing in the history of everything ever—and I rubbed my arms frantically.
