Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities

by Mike Jung

  Huh.

  “I don’t know if it can actually kill you, given your legendary invulnerability, but I adapted the power cell mechanism from a different shard of that long-ago space projectile. There was a fellow by the name of Miguel Zazueta who was struck by a different meteorite—I managed to purloin a fragment of it while he lay insensible.”

  OH NO. It came from the same chunk of space rock that turned Mr. Zazueta into Stupendous? That kind of thing never turns out to be good for the superhero.

  “It’s remarkably powerful! And if I hold it on you long enough, who knows, you just may expire. Let’s test it, shall we?”

  “NO!” Stupendous said.

  Stupendous thrashed around even more wildly, but the indestructium shackle didn’t budge an inch.

  “No, wait! What about Vincent’s mom?”

  Mayhem lifted an eyebrow.

  “Who?”

  Stupendous stared into the barrel of the gun. His eyes were almost all blue glow and no actual eye. He gulped.

  “If you kill me, I’m SO going to beat your face in,” he said, but his voice quivered.

  “Oh, I’m not going to kill you, Stupendous. Not yet. I’m just going to find out if I CAN kill you. Hold still, please.”

  He pulled the trigger, and a beam of strange light rocketed out of the gun and hit Stupendous right in the face. The light was blue, but it was the weirdest shade of blue ever—it was dark blue. I didn’t think a beam of light could be dark, but it was. Stupendous screamed so loudly that my ears hurt, and his body arched way out, arms and legs fully extended.

  For a split second the world went fuzzy and everything started to look farther away than it really was—it was too much. My brain was collapsing in on itself. But Captain Stupendous was SCREAMING! Would this kill him? What would happen when Stupendous died? Would he turn back into Polly? Would Polly be lying there dead on the floor? Polly!

  “STOP!” I shouted.

  Mayhem whipped his head in my direction and looked at me over his shoulder, one eyebrow arched way up on his wrinkled, old man’s forehead. He shut off the death beam and pointed the gun back at the ceiling. Stupendous went limp and dangled by his shoulders.

  Mayhem walked over to me, stopped between me and Stupendous, and pointed the ray gun at me. I tried to leap to my feet all at once, but that’s hard to do when you’re mostly buried. I jerked partly up, fell back, and caught myself with my elbows and crab-crawled with my arms and legs until I could stand.

  My head was still pounding, but I was amped. The threat of death by antimatter rifle made the blood rush through my whole body.

  “Good lord, it’s a stringy cockroach of a boy,” Mayhem said. “How did you get into my stronghold, boy?”

  I’d never been called “boy” before—I guess I don’t have enough pompous old men in my life—and I didn’t like it much. “Stringy cockroach” wasn’t too great either.

  I was so, so sick of people talking smack to me.

  “You brought me in here, dingleberry, figure it out.”

  Mayhem shook his head and lowered his ray gun. I started shaking all over—you just don’t realize how cool it is to have no guns pointed at you until somebody stops pointing one at you. Then Mayhem laughed, one short, hard woof of laughter.

  “Who are you, boy?”

  I almost blurted out, Vincent Wu! That would have been stupid, though, and even in the middle of all the craziness I managed to remember something Stupendous said in Stupendous on Stupendous: Civilians should never identify themselves to the enemy.

  “Nobody,” I said. “Just a fan of Captain Stupendous.”

  “Are you, now?” Mayhem had this look on his face, like he’d just heard the funniest thing ever. “A fan of Captain Stupendous! How wonderful! Do you fancy yourself a hero as well, boy? Are you going to thrash me and save the day?”

  I snuck a peek over Mayhem’s shoulder at Stupendous, but he wasn’t paying attention at all—his face was all the way down on his chest, his eyes were nonglowing and blank, and his shoulders were slumped.

  Captain Stupendous was out of it, and who knew where Max and George were? I was alone with a supervillain. But that was what I always wanted, right? Just like Mayhem said … my chance to save the day. Except I was probably gonna die instead. In front of my hero, who turns out to be a girl, and not just any girl, but Polly Winnicott-Lee! All of a sudden I wanted to beat somebody’s brains in.

  “I’m gonna beat your brains in,” I said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You heard me, whack job! Come on, fight like a man!”

  I put my fists up, and it must have been obvious I had no idea how to fight because Mayhem burst out laughing again.

  “Boy, you must be joking! Look at you, you wouldn’t last thirty seconds! A girl could knock you senseless!”

  Stupendous raised his head. His eyes started glowing again, and he clamped his mouth shut in a hard, straight line.

  “Why are supervillains so full of themselves?” I said. “You’re all the same, every one of you!”

  Mayhem tensed up and stood straighter with a little jerk.

  “I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, boy,” he said.

  “You ARE all the same!” I shouted. “You just talk and talk, blah-blah-blah, ‘I’m so great, I’m so smart, I’m so much better than you.’ You’re such total BULLIES. But you all end up making some incredibly dumb mistake, every time. You’re all losers!”

  Mayhem stiffened. He stood up really straight and looked down his nose at me. I could actually see his nostril hairs from that angle.

  “Hold your tongue, you little swine,” he said.

  “Loser,” I said, still holding up my fists. “You’re gonna lose, and you know it, because you’re a loser. Luh-luh-luh-LOOOOOOOOOSER!”

  “Your hero is about to enter oblivion, you foulmouthed, little wretch. But fear not, you may accompany him. Ta.”

  Mayhem pointed the gun at me again, but I saw something that freaked me out in a totally different way. Over Mayhem’s shoulder there was a flash of blue light.

  Captain Stupendous changed back into Polly.

  There was a muffled thud—probably Polly hitting the floor, since the full-body shackle was way too big to hold her—and Mayhem flicked his head to the side for just a second.

  I let out a demented-rooster war cry, jumped forward, and grabbed the gun with both hands. By some miracle I got hold of the gun’s barrel and stuffed it under my arm so I wouldn’t get shot in the face. Mayhem staggered backward and I lost my balance, dragging his arm down to the floor. I tried to tie my arms into a knot around the gun, and when Mayhem reached for me with his free hand, I snapped my teeth at it.

  “Ye gods, boy, are you some type of savage?”

  Mayhem snarled and pulled his hand back, then lifted his gun hand, with me wrapped around it, until I was standing again. Mayhem was strong! Who knew? He made a fist and, PAPOW, hit me right in the face.

  Sadly, this was not the first time I’d been punched in the face—Scott Fanelli cornered me in a stairwell last year and socked me in the eye for using words with more than two syllables—but Mayhem was even worse than a middle-school bully. I howled as Mayhem grabbed the front of my shirt and hauled me off my feet. He shook me like I was a cheap plastic utility belt and hissed into my face—no words, just hissing.

  “Wow, you are a freak,” I said.

  Then my head remembered how bashed-in it was, my stomach realized how much toxic swill was sloshing around in it, and I threw up. A bellyful of puke hit Professor Mayhem right smack in his ugly, evil face.

  He said something like “AAARRRHHFFFVVGGGHH!” and tried to throw me, but I still had his gun hand in a hammerlock, and my weight pulled him down sideways. I landed on my feet but I had nothing left in the tank, so I lost my grip and fell to the floor. Mayhem jerked away and slapped his hands over his eyes. He spun halfway around just as Polly stepped out from behind him and swiped the gun away with her foot. Mayhem
stood up straight, trying to wipe the barf out of his eyes, and Polly did a karate spin move and kicked him in the solar plexus.

  I was pretty sure that’s where she kicked him, anyway, because Mayhem doubled over and started gasping like a dying goldfish. He bobbed his head up and down, wrapped his arms around his stomach, stepped in a greasy puddle of vomit, did a cartoony, running-in-place thing for two steps, and toppled over backward. The back of his head hit the floor, KACHUNK, and he slumped flat on his back, eyes closed and hands flopped out to either side.

  I propped myself up on one elbow. Polly kept her eyes on Mayhem as she walked over and kneeled on the floor next to me. I used the crook of my other elbow to wipe a little bit of vomit off the corner of my mouth. Then I looked cross-eyed at my nose.

  “Is it broken?” I poked at it with one finger.

  “I don’t think so,” Polly said. “That was, like, the mother of all pukes.”

  “Geez, kick a guy while he’s down….”

  “No, you took him out by barfing on him. It’s good. Disgusting, but good.”

  My head still hurt, but the good thing about throwing up is at least it makes you stop wanting to throw up. I stood up, feeling like a hundred-year-old man, but I forgot about that when Polly started shaking.

  Her hands shook first, and the shaking ran up her arms and down the whole length of her body. She took a step forward and kind of fell into me, and I barely managed to catch her without falling over myself. She made a thick noise, like crying and swallowing at the same time, then breathed in and out really fast as I stood there with my arms around her.

  Now that was complicated, because Polly was seriously losing her marbles, and all I could think about was what it felt like to hug a real live girl. I patted her on the shoulder with one hand while I tried to figure out what to do with my other hand. Eventually I just left it hanging in midair.

  After a couple of minutes—actually I had no idea how long it was, it could have been an hour—she elbowed my arms off her and took a step back, pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay.” I wasn’t sure what she was sorry about—getting tortured by Professor Mayhem would make anyone freak out.

  We looked at Mayhem again, keeping a few feet away from him. When you’re dealing with the worst villain in history, it pays to be a little cautious.

  “Oh gross, his head’s all bloody,” I said.

  “Good,” Polly said in a growly voice. She grabbed her elbows with her hands and shivered. “If I had an electric guitar, I’d smash it against his ugly face.”

  “You think he’s dead?” I said.

  “Does it look like I care?”

  “Yeah, but still … I’ve never killed anybody.”

  “Me either, but we don’t need to worry about it—he’s still breathing.” She pointed at Mayhem’s chest, which was going slowly up and down. “Let’s find your mom and get out of here,” Polly said.

  We looked toward the other end of the room—if you rolled a basketball across the floor, it probably would have vanished into the distance. When we were looking that way the Stupendous trap was to our right, the robot and its giant robot door were behind us, and a bank of big, flat-screen video monitors was to our left. The rows of tables stretched out in front of us, looking like they went on forever. The tables were covered with mad scientist projects, and each one was probably as big as the whole fan club headquarters.

  We walked over to the video screens. Most of them showed places around the city—the torn-up mess at Corwin Stadium, Corwin Plaza, Copperplate Bay, city hall. One screen was all murky green, with a vague, dark shape that might have been a dome at the bottom.

  “That’s where we are, huh? The bottom of the lake?” Polly said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So we’re underwater. Great. How are we gonna get out of here without drowning?”

  “You’re not gonna drown. Captain Stupendous doesn’t need to breathe, I’m the one who’s gonna have problems.”

  “Well, geez, Vincent, that’s no good either,” Polly said. She put her hand on my arm, right above the elbow.

  Despite the aftertaste of barf in my mouth and the three or four hundred bruises all over me, what I felt right then was a warm, fizzy vibration where Polly’s hand touched my arm.

  I’m not saying I was happy about it, just so you know. I’m just saying I was aware of it.

  “Hey, uh, thanks,” she said. “For, you know, saving my life.”

  Oh great, time for some mushy talk. Yeah, my heart was thumping kind of fast, and my palms itched, but it wasn’t because of the drippy thank-you stuff, or Polly touching me on the arm or anything.

  “That’s cool,” I said.

  Polly arched one eyebrow. She let go of me, crossed her arms, and stared at me with a smile that was … well, I couldn’t tell what kind of smile it was. Only one side of her mouth went up, and she shook her head back and forth reeeeeeally slowly.

  “What?” I said.

  Polly smiled with both sides of her mouth, went hmmmfff through her nose, then combed her hair backward with one hand. A few sweaty-looking strands stuck out from the sides of her head and floated over her ears. Out of nowhere I found myself wanting her to smile really widely, just so I could see the gap between her front teeth.

  “Nothing, Vincent. You’re just such a … such a boy.”

  Girls are so bizarre! It’s like they don’t know how to talk like regular people.

  “I don’t see your mom up there,” Polly said, scanning the rest of the screens.

  “Me neither, but I think I heard her talking to Mayhem before.”

  “Right, by those doors over there!” Polly pointed at the far end of the room. “There must be a jail cell or something.”

  We started walking to the other end of the big room, looking for doors. I pointed at a bright red car covered with long, curved spikes, with wires and tools and shiny metal parts piled up around it.

  “Check it out, porcupine car.”

  “Boy, he really likes the color red,” Polly said, laying a hand on the porcupine car’s fender.

  “I guess,” I said. “We need something airtight to get out with. A porcupine car would be airtight, wouldn’t it?”

  Polly rubbed her forehead with one palm.

  “I don’t see a key,” she said. “I guess I could break the windows, but …”

  “That’d make the whole thing kind of pointless,” I said. We kept looking.

  There was SO much freaky stuff just lying around. There was a huge, wired-together skeleton with twenty legs standing on one table, like something from a museum of natural history for monsters. Another table was covered by big metal boxes with funky writing carved into their sides. One table had nothing but a giant robot torso on it, with the chest opened up. There was a spare foot on a different table, and a spare head on another, with the face slid open like the door of a minivan. The spare parts were brighter and shinier than the robot, which was darker gray, and had a rougher texture.

  “I don’t think these are made out of indestructium,” I said. “Just regular metal.”

  With all the crazy villain devices lying around, it was weird to see things like pencils and rolls of duct tape, but there was a pile of that stuff on one of the tables too. A spiral notebook lay open on the table with the spare head. There was a sketch of the robot on the open page, with the arms spinning around. Mayhem had drawn a few curved lines to make it look like the arms were going really fast. Something caught my eye, mostly because it looked familiar—it was in the corner of a clear plastic box, partly hidden behind a few random chunks of polished metal. It was a gyroscope.

  “Hey, I have one of these,” I said, holding it up for Polly to see. She shrugged.

  “Great,” she said. “You guys have the same taste in toys. Let’s get going, Vincent.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. I slid the notebook along the edge of the table in Polly’s direction. �
�Look at this, though. I think he modeled the robot’s spinning arm thing after this gyroscope.”

  “Congratulations on finding a souvenir.”

  I stuck the gyroscope in my pocket as we kept walking. We passed the last table and walked into an empty space the same size as the one at the other end of the giant room, only with no robot or body shackles. There were two doors in the far wall—at least they looked like doors. They were really just two big slabs of metal in the wall. Each one had a glowing panel of either metal or plastic in the wall next to it at about neck height for me, although they were probably elbow-high for Mayhem. I put my hand on one—it glowed more brightly for a second, but nothing happened.

  “She’s gotta be in one of those rooms,” Polly said.

  “Yeah. Can you change into Stupendous and break them down?”

  Polly groaned, and her shoulders drooped. “Sure. Stupendify!”

  Captain Stupendous instantly appeared in Polly’s place, with his shoulders in the exact same droopy position.

  “The only time anyone tries to kill me—literally kill me—is when I’m in this body,” she said.

  “You would have had to change into this form anyway,” I said. “You can’t show your secret identity to my mom.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Stupendous rubbed his face, then raised a fist up to head level.

  “Don’t bash it in all the way, you might squish her.”

  “I’m not a moron, Vincent.”

  Stupendous pounded once on the door, almost like he was knocking. It wasn’t much more than a tap on the Stupendous scale, but the door partially crumpled anyway.

  “Dennis?” a voice said, from inside the room. It was Mom, and I felt relief go through me—it was an actual physical feeling, like having a bucket of water poured over your head. Mom was alive.

  “GET AWAY FROM THE DOOR,” Stupendous hollered.

  “Okay,” Mom said a couple of seconds later, in a fainter voice.

  Stupendous pounded on the door again. He hit it a lot harder, though, and the door screeched and collapsed into the room, landing on the floor with a CLANG.

  Stupendous and I stepped into a room about the size of my homeroom at school. On our left there was a chair and a table covered with stacks of books and papers, and on our right was a twin-size bed pushed up against the wall, with Mom sitting on it. She stood up, and when she spoke she sounded about as confused as I’ve ever heard her.