Mad Mask

by Barry Lyga

  Really, when you think about it, I helped Axis by stealing those chemicals today!

  That was nice of me.

  Kyle closed his journal and stretched. He was in his parents’ basement, which they never used, so Kyle had turned it into his own special lab and workshop. The basement was one big room that stretched the length and breadth of the house, so even with all the old junk his parents had dumped down here, there was still plenty of space for Kyle to work on his schemes and experiments. He had multiple projects going at once, including his pride and joy: a fully functioning time machine.

  Well, someday it would be a fully functioning time machine. Right now it aspired to be a fully functioning time machine.

  But that wasn’t the only project on Kyle’s agenda. Multitasking was the hallmark of genius, so Kyle decided to completely reinvent two sciences at once. He would reinvent physics with the time machine, and with the drum of stolen chemicals, he would reinvent chemistry.

  “One at a time is for wusses,” he told Erasmus.

  “I’d just be happy if you would finally put together that wireless earpiece for me,” Erasmus responded. “Half the time when you fly around, my earbuds either fall out of your ears or the plug gets pulled out or you get all twisted up in the cable.”

  “Fine, fine. I’ll work on it.”

  “You could just buy one off the Internet, you know.”

  “I want to build it myself. To my own specifications.”

  “If I had eyes, I would be rolling them right now,” Erasmus said. “Stop being a cheapskate and buy a Bluetooth headset already.”

  Kyle won the argument by switching Erasmus off. What had moments before been a brilliant and annoying artificial intelligence was now a silent iPod, decked out in customized blue flames.

  Kyle stretched again and twisted. Ever since his exposure to the alien energies of a plasma storm, he was basically indestructible, but when he exerted himself, he could still get sore muscles. He hopped off his workbench stool and checked out the drum.

  PROPERTY OF AXIS RESEARCH & CONSUMER PRODUCTS! was stenciled on the side. Under that, it said:

  CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE

  DO NOT EXPOSE TO OPEN FLAME OR VACUUM

  Well, no problem there. Under all of that:

  FACILITY NO. A1265 — *DO NOT REMOVE*

  Oops. Well, Kyle didn’t plan on exposing it to open flame or vacuum, so he decided two out of three wasn’t bad.

  He spent a moment figuring out how to open the stupid thing. It would have been easy just to crack it with a karate chop, but he reasoned that having gallons and gallons of experimental chemicals slopping all over himself and the basement probably wasn’t the brightest idea in the world. There was a complicated sort of locking mechanism on the top of the barrel — it looked like a credit card swiper had married a fingerprint analyzer and had a baby. Pretty difficult. Kyle figured he needed the right fingerprint and a key card to open the tap. He also figured the right fingerprint and the key card both belonged to some guy at Axis who wouldn’t let him borrow them, no matter how good his intentions.

  Fortunately, what Kyle lacked in fingerprints and cards, he more than made up for in brainpower. He scrounged around for some wire strippers and a spare USB cable. Within a matter of minutes, he had the lock pried open and attached to Erasmus. He switched the AI back on.

  “Okay, Erasmus. I need you to crack this lock and open it up.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?” Erasmus complained. “In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have fingers, much less fingerprints.”

  “You don’t need fingerprints. The lock just needs to think that the right fingerprint has been put on the screen. You can hack into the little computer in there and convince it that it’s already seen the right fingerprint.”

  “That’s going to be a lot of work. Wouldn’t it just be easier to go get the guy with the right fingerprint? Or just get his finger?”

  “Erasmus!” Kyle couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I’m not going to take someone’s finger!”

  “It’s not like he doesn’t have nine more …” Erasmus grumbled. His hard drive whirred, and Kyle knew that he was hacking the lock. “Don’t know what you people need with those fingers anyway. I get along just fine without them.”

  “That’s enough commentary. Just keep working.”

  The basement went silent except for the occasional click and hum from Erasmus’s hard drive (Kyle made a mental note to install a flash drive inside Erasmus for silent operation) and the noise of Kyle puttering around, straightening his tools. He liked things neat.

  Eventually, Erasmus found the routine deep in the computer memory of the drum’s lock that was supposed to be triggered when the right fingerprint pressed against the scanner. Erasmus went ahead and told that routine to function and the lock popped partially. Then he did the same thing for the routine triggered by the key card, and the lock opened the rest of the way.

  “Good job,” Kyle told Erasmus. He disconnected the cables and lifted the lid off the drum.

  Inside were six long metal cylinders bolted into place inside a bath of liquid nitrogen. Kyle dipped a finger in tentatively at first — he was usually impervious to physical harm, but he’d never tried cold this extreme.

  Whew! He blew out a sigh of relief — the liquid nitrogen didn’t feel cold at all. Just a little cool. He undid the bolts holding in the first cylinder and pulled it out.

  In a dusty corner of the basement was Kyle’s biochemical forge, a large, boxy contraption made out of the shell of an old mini refrigerator and the guts of an air-conditioning unit, a discarded breathing apparatus, and two broken microwave ovens. A funnel with a lid led into the forge. Kyle unscrewed the cylinder and poured the contents into the funnel. Once the chemicals hit the guts of the biochemical forge, the forge would start combining and recombining them, creating new compounds, new chemicals, and, eventually, the thing Kyle needed most in the world —

  Just then, the kitchen door opened and Kyle heard footfalls on the steps. He looked around for a place to hide the cylinder, but there was nowhere nearby, so he just stood there, the chemicals glug-glugging into the forge as his father came downstairs and beamed at him.

  Busted! Kyle froze in mid-glug.

  “How — how you doing, slugger?” Dad asked brightly. (Ever since Kyle had used his special brain-wave manipulator to make his father decide not to take the family to the Mighty Mike Day parade a little while ago, Dad had been stuttering on the word how. Kyle kept meaning to fix that but then kept forgetting. He was busy.)

  “Um, fine, Dad.”

  “What’s this you’re doing?” Dad craned his neck to study the cylinder, which was now almost empty.

  Kyle took a deep breath. “Well, Dad, I’m stocking the reserves of my biochemical forge so that someday I can breed a custom bacterium that will remove Mighty Mike’s superpowers.”

  Dad stared for a second, then laughed. “Oh, you kids and your crazy ideas from the Internet!” He went back upstairs, chuckling and shaking his head.

  It was so convenient to have idiots for parents! Kyle had spent most of his life annoyed by his parents’ lack of intelligence, but he had to admit that it made it easier for him to lead a double life.

  Kyle finished dumping the rest of the chemicals into the forge, then fiddled with the forge’s controls. If his numbers were right — and why wouldn’t they be? — he should be able to use this particular chemical combination to generate that special bacterium. And then …

  “Kyle!” Dad was coming down the steps again.

  “What?”

  “I forgot why I came down before. Mairi is upstairs waiting for you.”

  Mairi! Kyle’s best friend, Mairi MacTaggert. Of course — he’d forgotten that he had promised to work on a school science project with her this weekend. Sure enough, it was Saturday and Mairi had arrived.

  Kyle was so busy — he had to go to school, deal with his parents, plot the destruction of Mighty Mike�
�. Was it any wonder he kept forgetting to fix his parents’ brains? (Mom had a twitch that just wouldn’t go away — the brain-wave manipulator again.)

  He finished up in the basement as quickly as he could and ran upstairs. Mairi was waiting for him in the living room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, her notebook already out and her pen uncapped. Her bright red hair was tied in two pigtails and she smiled when he came in. No matter how annoyed Kyle was, his best friend’s smile could always put him in a better mood.

  “Hey, Mairi. Sorry. My dad didn’t tell me you were here the first time.” He rolled his eyes at his father’s goof.

  “That’s okay. He seems a little …” Mairi leaned in and whispered, “Have you noticed he stutters a little bit now?”

  “No, really?” Kyle asked innocently. On his mental to-do list, he moved Fix Mom’s and Dad’s brains up another level. It still wasn’t at the top of the list, but it was getting closer.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “I have a great idea for the project. We can reproduce the Geiger-Marsden experiment, only in our version, we won’t rely on strictly Newtonian analytics. We’ll quantify the low-energy alpha-scattering with full quantum mechanical methods, which should yield the same results but will allow us to infer quantum dynamic principles that Rutherford couldn’t have imagined.”

  Mairi stared at him.

  “Um …” Kyle kicked himself mentally. “Um, what I meant was …”

  “I was thinking,” Mairi began, “that we could test whether or not the color of a crayon determines how long that crayon lasts.”

  “Sure, sure,” Kyle said. “That’s what I was thinking. I was kidding about the other stuff.”

  “Right,” Mairi said, but the set of her jaw said that she didn’t quite believe it. “Just another one of your pranks, huh?”

  “Exactly!” Kyle said a little too enthusiastically, glad for an out. “Exactly.”

  They spent the next hour or so planning their experiment: which colors they would use (black and white, as well as all the primary colors), what surface (regular white copier paper), and so on. Kyle had to keep reminding himself to be smart, but not too smart. He couldn’t let Mairi know that he was now the smartest kid on the planet, but he also couldn’t be stupid because Mairi knew that Kyle was no dummy.

  They were making good progress when a chirping sound interrupted them. Kyle looked around the room. What the heck was —?

  Oh. Mairi dug into her pocket and pulled out a tiny cell phone. “Hello?” She listened for a moment and her expression — which had been focused and intent — became light and open and happy. “Oh! Oh! Okay!”

  She clicked the phone shut. “Hey, Kyle. I have to, uh, I have to go. Can we finish this another time?”

  “Well, yeah, sure. It’s not due for a while.” He watched her gather up her stuff in a hurry. “Since when do you have a cell phone?”

  “Since a week ago, you dummy.” She shook her head. “You used to pay attention to everything.”

  Kyle grimaced. He knew that his campaign to rid the world of Mighty Mike was beginning to take a toll on his so-called “normal” life. He hadn’t seen Mairi in more than a week, other than on the bus or at school, for example. And now he’d missed something major like her first cell phone? He had to do a better job balancing his two lives.

  “So, uh, what’s it for? Emergencies?” He felt stupid for saying that because Mairi looked very happy, not the least bit upset, but he couldn’t think of another way to find out what was going on.

  “Kyle, if you want to know why I have to go, just ask me,” she said.

  Hmm. Sure, there was always that. “Okay. Why do you have to go?”

  Mairi put everything into her backpack and took Kyle’s hands in her own. She gazed into his eyes. “Don’t get upset, okay? Do you promise?”

  “Sure.”

  “That was my mom. She said Mighty Mike is at my house. I promised him I would hang out with him today.”

  Kyle snatched his hands back from Mairi’s quickly. He didn’t want to crush her hands with his incredible strength, and he had a feeling he was going to be making fists soon. He knew that Mighty Mike had hung out at Mairi’s house once after “saving” her from a “dirt monster,” but now they were making plans with each other? “What? But we were —”

  “Kyle, you said you wouldn’t get upset.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  Mairi shook her head. “We were supposed to work on this project a week ago. I promised Mike I’d see him today before you canceled our last meeting.”

  Oh. Kyle remembered that — a week ago, he’d decided to steal a radioactive element from a government lab three states away. He’d actually failed at that attempt, but his escape had been, of course, spectacular.

  “So now you have to go on some kind of date with him, is that it?”

  Mairi laughed. “A date? Are you nuts? My dad says I can’t go on dates until I’m fourteen. We’re just hanging out.” She looked at Kyle seriously. “We do that sometimes, you know. He’s really lonely.”

  Lonely. Kyle snorted. “Half the planet is in love with him. How can he be lonely?”

  “Because no one else understands what it’s like to be him, to have his powers, to be so isolated from everyone else.” She thought for a moment. “Well, I guess the Blue Freak might understand, but he’s no good.” And just to make sure Kyle got the point, she shivered.

  Kyle bit down on his bottom lip as hard as he dared. It was the best way to keep himself from ranting about how misunderstood the Blue Freak was. He managed to nod in sympathy instead, even though it killed him to pretend that his alter ego was evil.

  “Most people just want things from Mike,” Mairi went on. “But he knows that he can come over to my house and just hang out and my parents won’t ask anything of him.”

  “Well, that’s great,” Kyle said, trying to sound sincere. The expression on Mairi’s face told him he’d failed, though.

  She shrugged into her coat. “You know, you could come over. Hang out with him. He wouldn’t mind.”

  “I better not,” Kyle said. “I have some stuff I have to do.” Ouch! What a lame excuse! Stuff? He had stuff to do?

  He walked Mairi to the front door. “You’re not planning a new prank, are you?”

  Only if you consider wiping Mighty Mike off the map a prank. “Me? Nope!”

  “Well, good. You haven’t pulled a prank in a while. It’s sort of weird to see you so calm, but it’s nice, too.” She grinned. “Bye! See you later!”

  As soon as she was gone, Kyle kicked the fancy wrought-iron table next to the front door, shattering it into pieces. Whoops! Sometimes he forgot his own strength. He quickly gathered up the pieces and compressed them into a big iron ball.

  Lonely. The word echoed in his brain over and over, and every time it became more annoying. How could Mighty Mike be lonely when he had screaming, squeeing hordes hanging on his every word? Kyle was the lonely one. He had once been the most popular kid in all of Bouring, but now the kids at school were all about Mighty Mike, and even Mairi had abandoned him.

  Fuming, he stalked downstairs and hid the ball under the staircase. Mighty Mike! Everywhere he turned: Mighty Mike! It was driving him nuts. Bad enough the kid was on this planet at all. Bad enough he showed up to try to stop Kyle’s heist. But now he was also hanging out with Kyle’s best friend and taking her away from him in the process.

  Kyle leaned over the biochemical forge. “Work faster!” he yelled at it. He knew that yelling at it wouldn’t make it digest those new chemicals and spit out the results any sooner, but it made him feel a little bit better.

  He went back upstairs just as his mother came home from the store. She nudged the door open with her knee, both arms loaded down with packages. Her keys dangled from a finger.

  “Kyle, honey? Can you help me with this stuff?”

  Kyle took a few packages. He could have carried the entire stack of packages easily, but that would raise suspicions. He pretend
ed they were heavy.

  “Thanks, honey,” Mom said, and dropped her keys to her left side. They fell straight to the floor and clanged.

  Kyle looked around, as if nothing had happened. “Where do you want these packages, Mom?”

  His mother stared at her keys where they lay, her face a mixture of disbelief and confusion. “Wasn’t … wasn’t there a table here? Before, I mean?”

  Kyle looked at her earnestly. “A table? I don’t think so.”

  Mom’s brow furrowed. “But I could have sworn —”

  “I would remember if there had been a table there,” he assured her.

  “Oh. Well. Okay, then.” She smiled. “Just put those things in the kitchen.”

  Kyle put the packages on the kitchen table and then raced upstairs to his bedroom before his mother could have him do something else. He had more important things to do than menial chores. He flopped down on his bed.

  “Hey, Lefty,” he said.

  Lefty, the big white New Zealand rabbit who lived in a cage in Kyle’s room, tilted his head at Kyle, regarding him with one pink-red eye. When Kyle was younger, he used to imagine that Lefty could understand him, but he knew that wasn’t true. Lefty’s head was no bigger than a baseball — there wasn’t a lot of room for a brain in there, and most of that limited brainpower was focused on remembering to poop in the litter box.

  Still, Kyle loved Lefty. No matter what happened, Lefty always licked Kyle’s hand and chinned him. (There was no higher praise from a rabbit than to be chinned by one.) Lefty never talked back or laughed at Kyle, and he never demanded anything more complicated than a chunk of dried papaya or a fruit-flavored yogurt drop.