Joshua Dread

by Lee Bacon

  White liquid shot out of the end of the nozzle, smothering the flames. Seconds later, my parents appeared in my doorway, their faces pale.

  “What happened?” Mom asked.

  My carpet was black and charred. Half my bedspread was ruined. White fire extinguisher goo was everywhere.

  “Just practicing,” I said.

  Over the next two weeks, I spent every spare moment training. In the mornings, I concentrated on heating up my toast. In PE, I tested my power out on my gym shorts (not while I was wearing them). After school, I went onto the back porch (bringing the fire extinguisher with me, just in case) to try out my spontaneous combustion on twigs, leaves, and clumps of dried grass.

  I brought The Handbook for Gyfted Children to school with me sometimes, hiding it between the covers of my books and reading whenever I could. When I came across a part that seemed useful, I wrote it down in my notebook. Even though I wasn’t sure how all these notes were supposed to help me in the end, I kept writing them down. Doing it made me feel a little better, like I wasn’t alone.

  Soon I could set fire to leaves and cause sticks to explode. Of course, this was small stuff. I still hadn’t tested my Gyft on anything bigger than a lawn gnome.

  At least not until I got a chance to try it out on Joey and Brick.

  I got to school a little earlier than usual on Thursday. I’d been so busy practicing over the past weeks that I’d pretty much ignored everything else, including school. I was hoping to catch up on some homework before first period. Instead, I ran into Joey and Brick.

  They were waiting for me at my locker. It seemed strange that they were there so early. I guess for them, bullying was an extracurricular activity.

  “Hey, Dorkface,” Joey said. “We’ve been looking for you.”

  The rest of the hallway was empty. Brick began to walk in my direction, Joey following close behind.

  “We know all about you,” Joey said. “You’re some kind of freak. You should be in a circus, not in a school.”

  My first instinct was to run. My second and third instincts were pretty much the same. I could already imagine the consequences of sticking around. Teasing, pushing, punching, locker-stuffing, swirlies, noogies, wedgies, nedgies.

  But I had something they didn’t. Spontaneous combustion.

  Just a jolt, that was all it would take. Maybe a little fireball, for dramatic effect. Nothing too big. I didn’t want to have to explain to Principal Sloane why two students had exploded before first period.

  “How’d it happen?” Joey asked, getting closer. “Didja wake up one morning knowing you were a freak? Or maybe you got bit by a radioactive worm.”

  Brick let out a laugh. He was getting really close now.

  I thought about electric fences, spark plugs, malfunctioning toasters.

  They were five feet away.

  Three feet.

  I held out my arms, flexing my muscles and concentrating my energy. I took a deep breath, summoned all my power, and …

  Brick threw me into the girls’ bathroom.

  The door flew open, and I landed with a thud on the hard tile floor. Fortunately, the restroom was empty. I staggered to my feet. There’d been no shock, no jolt. There hadn’t even been a spark. What kind of a lousy superpower was this? All that practice, and when I needed it most—nothing.

  My parents had said my power would be difficult to control. I guess that was why they called it spontaneous combustion.

  Through the door, I could hear Joey and Brick out in the hallway. They were trying to intimidate me. Screaming. Banging on lockers. Throwing things around.

  To be honest, it sounded like overkill to me. They had already tossed me into the girls’ bathroom. Why not just punch me in the stomach, hang me by my underwear from the basketball hoop, and get it over with already?

  I curled my hands into fists, waiting. But the door stayed closed.

  All of a sudden, the noises stopped. No more clanging, no more screaming. Just silence.

  Opening the door, I glanced into the hallway. What I saw was beyond anything I could’ve ever imagined.

  11

  Because only a small fraction of the population is born with a superpower, the chances of meeting another Gyfted child are tiny.

  Several lockers had been ripped apart, leaving gaping holes where the doors had been. Books and papers were strewn everywhere. Joey and Brick were lying on the floor, moaning in pain. Four locker doors were curled around them. They were trapped up to their necks inside the twisted sheets of steel, like human burritos.

  The screams I’d heard had been screams of pain.

  Joey and Brick were in shock, staring blankly into space, mumbling to themselves. I almost felt sorry for them. Almost.

  I crouched down next to Joey. “Who did this to you?” I asked. My parents couldn’t have been responsible. They might have been supervillains, but they still had boundaries.

  “Never seen anything like it …,” Joey muttered. “Didn’t look human.”

  “Who? Who’re you talking about?”

  Joey’s only response was a whimper.

  Behind me, I heard the steady click of footsteps. Spinning around, I glimpsed a girl walking quickly in the other direction.

  It was impossible to be sure, but I could’ve sworn it was Sophie Smith.

  A middle school is not a good place to keep a secret. News of what happened to Joey and Brick passed through Sheepsdale Middle School like wildfire.

  The story changed each time I heard it. The basic information was all there—the bent locker doors, the books and papers spilled across the hall—but other details had been added along the way. By the time seventh period came around, it was out of control.

  “They were hanging upside down with their underwear on their heads!” Milton said.

  He was barely able to contain his excitement. We were in our usual desks, near the back of the room.

  “Every single locker in the hallway had been ripped to shreds,” Milton went on. “And there was fire too! Lots of fire! You wanna know the best part?”

  “What?” I said, trying not to sound too doubtful.

  “Joey was crying out for his mama!” Milton burst into laughter.

  Everyone was thrilled to see the two biggest bullies in the school get beaten up and humiliated. But no matter how much I hated them, I couldn’t share in this excitement. I needed to know who had done this.

  And apparently, I wasn’t the only one.

  “Who do you think did it?” Milton asked Sophie as soon as she got to class.

  She shifted in her seat. “I don’t know. Probably just a freak accident.”

  “No way! It had to be someone in this school. And I wanna find out who!”

  “Anyway,” Sophie said, sounding like she wanted to change the subject. “When do you guys want to work on our project? Our presentation’s next week. I was thinking we could meet up tomorrow.”

  “Hey, why don’t we go to the Chilled Grease Diner?” Milton said. “It’ll be fun!”

  The Chilled Grease Diner was this place a few blocks from school. It was kind of a dump. But it also served all-you-can-eat curly fries, which meant that it was Milton’s favorite restaurant.

  “Wasn’t that the place where some guy found a thumb in his omelet?” Sophie asked.

  “Only the tip,” Milton explained. “And it wasn’t a big deal. They didn’t even charge the guy for the omelet, so I don’t know why he was complaining.”

  Sophie shrugged. “Sounds good. What about you, Joshua?”

  Her voice sounded like it was coming from the end of a tunnel. All my attention was trained on something else. Something I’d just noticed. A jagged rip ran halfway down Sophie’s sleeve. It looked as if her shirt had been snagged by a nail. Or a large sheet of metal.

  Suddenly it all added up. The glimpse of her in the hallway this morning. The ripped sleeve. She was the one who’d beaten up Joey and Brick. But how? The only people who could create that kind of dest
ruction were people like my parents or Captain Justice. People with superpowers. Did that mean that Sophie was …

  Gyfted?

  Curiosity flared across my thoughts. Was it really possible? And if so, what kind of power did she have?

  I spent all of seventh period wondering whether I should talk to her about it. If there was another Gyfted kid at school, I wanted to know. On the other hand, after seeing the way she’d beaten the school’s biggest bullies to a pulp, I wasn’t sure it was the best idea to confront her with personal questions.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to decide. Because when class let out, Sophie wanted to talk to me.

  “Hey, Joshua. Wait up.”

  As soon as she joined me in the crowded hallway, I had a feeling about what was coming next. Sophie was going to confess that she had a Gyft. And ask me not to tell anyone about how she went around beating up bullies and causing some serious damage to school property.

  But that wasn’t what she said. Instead, Sophie took a step toward me until I was looking right into her blue-gray eyes.

  “I know about your Gyft,” she said.

  The ground dropped out from underneath me, pulling the sounds of the hallway with it. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. I was supposed to know about her Gyft. Not the other way around.

  “How—how did you find out?”

  “I saw you reading The Handbook for Gyfted Children during class.” She hesitated. “I … I have the same book.”

  I clenched my teeth. At the end of the hallway, I noticed Joey and Brick walking toward us. Joey had a sling around one arm. Brick had a fairly noticeable bump on his forehead. When the two of them saw Sophie, they became pale as ghosts. Joey turned and hobbled in the other direction, and Brick followed closely behind.

  “Maybe we should go someplace more private,” Sophie said.

  We walked in silence through the exits and out past the line of waiting buses until we reached a hill that overlooked the football field.

  “How long have you known that you’re Gyfted?” Sophie asked.

  I hesitated. It felt strange to be having this conversation with a classmate, but there wasn’t any point denying it now. “Couple of weeks. What about you?”

  “About a year. Girls tend to develop their Gyfts a little earlier than guys.”

  “And you’re able to control it?”

  “Kind of. At the beginning, I was clueless.” Sophie gazed out across the football field. “The first time it happened, I was at soccer practice. I accidentally kicked the ball at my coach’s minivan.”

  “So that’s your power? Bad aim?”

  I had to fight back the urge to laugh, but Sophie never even cracked a smile.

  “When the ball slammed into it, the minivan flipped over,” she said. “Then a few weeks later, during my piano lesson, I hit the keys a little too hard and the entire piano collapsed.”

  My eyes widened. It seemed impossible that someone as little as Sophie could leave behind such a trail of devastation.

  “Superhuman strength,” she said. “That’s my Gyft.”

  Compared with superhuman strength, my power suddenly seemed a lot less impressive. I thought of all the things she was capable of—knocking over cars, beating up the school’s biggest bullies. I couldn’t do anything nearly that cool. I was just an oversized electrical socket.

  “It’s not as great as it sounds,” Sophie said. “There’s a side effect.”

  “What do you mean?”

  By the way Sophie’s eyes dropped to the ground, I could tell she didn’t want to say any more about it. My memory flipped back to this morning. Joey lying on the hallway floor, mumbling. Never seen anything like it, he’d said. Didn’t look human.

  “What about you?” Sophie asked. “What’s your Gyft?”

  “Spontaneous combustion,” I admitted. “Basically, I make stuff blow up.”

  I told her about the explosions, the burn marks, the weeks of practice.

  “Have you met any other kids like us?” I asked her. “Kids with—superpowers?”

  She shook her head. “Not many. Most Gyfted kids are too scared to talk about it. But I’ve met a few through friends of my dad. He, uh, grew up Gyfted too.”

  “Your dad?”

  Sophie sighed, digging her heel into a patch of grass. “So, what have you heard about him?”

  As the new kid, Sophie’s a mystery around school. But when Joshua discovers the secret she’s been hiding, he’s not sure whether they’re destined to be friends … or enemies.

  “Nothing.”

  The look she gave me told me she could see right through my lie.

  “All right. Maybe I’ve heard a few things,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  I didn’t really want to, but I told her everything I’d heard. The truckloads of empty boxes and countless TVs, the machine guns, the torture devices …

  I’d expected her to deny it all, or laugh at how crazy gossip could get. Instead, she shrugged. “Yep, that sounds about right.”

  “Whoa. So you mean—all that stuff is true?”

  Sophie nodded. “Pretty much. Except the part about torture devices. I don’t think he has any of those.”

  “You don’t think?”

  It seemed like the kind of thing you would know for sure. Either you had torture devices or you didn’t. But there was plenty going on in my own house that I wasn’t aware of. I hadn’t known about my parents’ whole flooding-the-entire-world-and-blackmailing-the-government thing until the day they’d done it.

  “My dad has trouble keeping his identity a secret,” Sophie said. “It’s part of the reason we have to move around all the time. He just enjoys the fame too much. It’s always the same. People start to find out little things about him here and there. Then more of the truth comes out. And then, just like that—we pick up and move to a new town, a new school, a new fake name.”

  I nearly said I know how it feels, but I held my tongue.

  “With my dad, the truth always comes out sooner or later,” Sophie said. “And he just expects me to keep silent about it everywhere we go. Sometimes I get so sick of lying to everyone, you know?”

  “So if your name isn’t Sophie Smith,” I said, “then who are you?”

  “Promise not to tell anyone else?”

  I nodded. “I’m pretty good at keeping secrets,” I said. I’ve done it for my parents all my life.

  Sophie glanced once more across the vacant hillside around us. “My dad is Captain Justice.”

  12

  For many Gyfted children, life is full of unexpected surprises.

  Take it from me, it’s not easy to find out that your project partner is the daughter of your parents’ archenemy. I stared at Sophie, my mind spinning back over the past two weeks. That was how Captain Justice had gotten there so quickly when my parents had tried to flood the earth. Because he now lived in the same zip code.

  “Is everything okay?” Sophie’s voice cut through the silence. “You look a little freaked out.”

  Maybe that’s because your dad tried to crush my dad underneath Mr. Chow’s Chinese Buffet! I thought.

  But all I said was “I’ve got to go.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” I took a step backward. “I just remembered I need to be … somewhere else.”

  I spun around before she could say anything, and jogged quickly down the hill. Sophie called after me, but I didn’t look back.

  When I got home, my parents were still in their lab. I dropped my backpack in the living room and headed into the kitchen for a snack. Micus heaved a clump of soil at me, but I was still so caught up thinking about what Sophie had just told me that I didn’t care.

  How was I supposed to go to school with Captain Justice’s daughter? How was I supposed to sit next to her in seventh period?

  Of all the places to live, her dad had chosen Sheepsdale. The coincidence was too big to ignore. What if Captain Justice had tracked th
e Dread Duo here? What if he was closing in on my parents?

  In the kitchen, I tried to use my Gyft on a Pop-Tart, but my mind refused to focus. The Pop-Tart remained frozen in my hands until I gave up and dropped it into the toaster.

  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one in the house with a lot weighing on my mind. As soon as my mom entered the kitchen, I could see the exhaustion on her face. Dark rings circled her eyes. One collar of her lab coat was stained with some kind of blue liquid.

  “How’re things going?” she asked, shuffling through a drawer.

  “Okay. I guess.”

  “And how was your day at”—she paused, pushing one drawer closed and opening another—“your day at—uh …”

  “School?” I suggested.

  “Exactly. School. How was your day at school?”

  “Not great. A couple of guys threw me into the girls’ bathroom—”

  “That’s marvelous, sweetheart!” she said in the too-loud voice of someone whose mind was a hundred miles away. “You haven’t seen a pair of pliers around here, have you?”

  “No,” I said, without making any effort to hide the annoyance in my voice. “So what are you working on?”

  Mom hesitated. “Oh … the usual. Tinkering. Experimenting. Theorizing.”

  She was hiding something from me. That much was obvious. But what?

  “Ah, there you are, Emily,” Dad said, walking in. “Did you find those pliers?”

  “Not yet, honey.”

  “Hmm. Maybe they’re in the garage. I’ll go ch—” Dad noticed me. “Oh, didn’t see you there, buddy.”

  “I’ve been standing here the entire time,” I said.

  “Right. Of course.” Dad ran a hand through his tousled hair. It looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week.

  “What’s going on with you guys?” I asked.

  Dad stared blankly into space. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been spending all your time in your lab. When you do come out, you don’t pay any attention to what’s going on. Nobody’s cooked or cleaned or gone shopping in days.”

  Mom started to speak, but then shook her head. Dad’s eyes fell to the ground.