Kid Normal and the Rogue Heroes

by Greg James

  There was a blur of noise and movement.

  The next thing Murph knew, he was back at the end of the hall, tucked under Mr Flash’s highly muscled left arm. The teacher had raced in and saved him from the jets of flame. Annabel, on the other hand, was now a small pile of smoking ash.

  ‘What in the name of Heck, Hades, Hull and all points north do you think you’re doing, you ridiculous cabbage?’ bawled Mr Flash, putting Murph down and striding over to inspect the damage.

  ‘Erm … rescuing the hostage?’ replied Murph, trotting after him.

  ‘Fighting without fear,’ added Mary, looking at him proudly, which made Murph’s insides go strange. ‘Saving without glory.’ There was a flick of green as Nellie violently nodded her head in agreement.

  ‘Learning what it means to be a true Hero,’ finished Hilda, hands on hips.

  Mr Flash grunted dismissively before rounding on Frankenstein’s Nephew. ‘And what about YOU? Were you trying to burn down the flamin’ Capability Development Centre? What’s the matter with you?’

  Frankenstein’s Nephew shuffled his large feet and looked sideways at Gangly Fuzz Face for support. But the leader of their gang just grimaced slightly and said, ‘Yeah, not cool, mate’ in an undertone.

  ‘WELL,’ screamed Mr Flash to the class. ‘WHAT DO WE THINK WENT WRONG WITH TODAY’S MISSION?’

  ‘The hostage got burned to death?’ suggested someone meekly.

  ‘The hostage got burned to death,’ confirmed Mr Flash grimly. ‘I sewed that doll myself as well. It’ll take me ages to make another one.’ He collected himself. ‘RIGHT! Well, consider yourselves a bunch of complete, half-baked, soggy-bottomed failures. Why didn’t any of you help this lot out once they’d rescued Annabel, eh?’ He gestured towards the Super Zeroes, who had gathered together sheepishly.

  ‘Because they’re lame!’ said Corned Beef Boy, or Roland, as we now know he is called. ‘What superheroes do you know who prance around with umbrellas and stupid little horses?’

  There were a few giggles at this, but Murph noticed that Gangly Fuzz Face didn’t join in. Instead he met Murph’s eye before looking away awkwardly.

  ‘WELL, THEY BEAT THE LOT OF YOU!’ said Mr Flash, looking as if the words had to be dragged out of his mouth with pliers. ‘Go on, get out of here, it’s nearly break time.’

  The class straggled off, with the Zeroes following last of all.

  Mr Flash watched them go with a slightly strange expression. Murph caught a glimpse of it as he left the ACDC. If he didn’t know better, he might have thought it looked a teeny, tiny bit like respect.

  12

  Magpie and the Weasel

  Now, those of you with Olympic-standard memories will remember that something very intriguing happened earlier. You know – when we found out that Mr Drench is now living in a bin, and helping Magpie. This is what is known in the authoring world as a cliff hanger. We chuck in a bit of information like that, then throw our authorial scarves over our shoulders and swan off to talk about something completely different for a few chapters. It’s extremely irritating, so please accept our apologies. This is the chapter when we explain everything and we can all be friends again.

  To rescue you from the literary cliff from which you are now dangling, we must go back to the day that Mr Drench first disappeared. The day of Nektar’s defeat.

  Being captured and mind-controlled by an evil man-wasp had a rather unexpected effect on Mr Drench. All the time he was doing Nektar’s bidding, a tiny part of his brain was realising that, for the first time in many, many years, he was actually enjoying himself. He really rather liked being evil. He might have been able to recover from this with a good lie-down and a cup of tea, and possibly some pictures of cute kittens to remind him about being nice. But unfortunately, that’s not quite how things turned out.

  Instead, Mr Drench was hit very hard on the back of the head with a large frying pan and knocked unconscious, which did his already scrambled brain no good at all. Then, when he came round, it was to the sound of several Cleaners in the corridor outside shouting things like ‘Room clear!’ and ‘Locate possible hostiles and neutralise!’ as they swept through the building.

  They’re looking for the bad guys, thought Mr Drench to himself woozily. I’m one of them. Hide! He stood up sharply, which delivered another blow to his head, as he was underneath a table. Then, as the clomping of boots got even closer, he dashed across the room in sheer panic and dived out of a large shattered windowpane.

  His fall was broken by a skip on the ground below. Well, we say his fall was broken, but in fact he hit his head again on the way in, which made a surprisingly pleasing noise, not unlike a large bell. Mr Drench sank to the bottom of the skip, which was full of waste from the kitchens, and lay there in a daze as the Cleaners carried on their search around him.

  As he sought refuge in the refuse, something very strange happened to Mr Drench. The series of blows to the head, the aftermath of being mind-controlled, the fact that being evil had come quite naturally to him … they all merged inside his addled brain as he lay amongst the food scrapings and discarded packaging. Then and there, he decided that he was finished with being a mild-mannered teacher. He had had a taste of sweet villain-honey, and he liked it.

  A very slightly mad-sounding chuckle escaped from his lips, soon growing into a cackle of crazed laughter.

  Mr Drench felt a powerful affection for the rubbish that had protected him and kept him hidden. This would be his habitat from now on, he decided, chewing meditatively on an old, moist teabag. He would live amongst the cast-offs as he plotted revenge on the Heroes who had underestimated him and taken him for granted. No longer would he be the meek and mild sidekick known as the Weasel.

  And he would never wash, or be nice to people, ever again.

  The story of Mr Drench’s first few weeks as a sneaky, bin-dwelling villain is a very bizarre one, but we haven’t got time to tell you about it now because as we’re writing this our tea’s nearly ready and it’s chips. Let’s just skip to the part where he arrived at Shivering Sands. Because after a while he decided that to become a true super-villain he had to learn from the best – and surely the best was Magpie, the most feared Rogue of them all.

  Stowing away on one of the ships that brought supplies out to the rusting towers in the sea, Mr Drench slipped unnoticed into the waste disposal systems of the prison. He slid into pipes and burrowed through bins. He existed on a diet of food slops and rainwater. With his super-hearing he listened to the conversations of the guards and prisoners, gradually building up a mental map of the whole prison and its security systems.

  Before long he worked out that there was no way he could get in to see Magpie in person. The elaborate security system for Magpie’s cell operated on a different electrical circuit to the rest of the prison. The Heroes’ Alliance was taking no chances – there was no way for anyone to override the auto-destruct mechanism on Sub Level One. So instead, Mr Drench decided to bide his time.

  During this time-biding period, he also befriended a small rat, which made a nest in the pocket of his tattered, bin-soaked tweed jacket. He had decided it could be his sidekick when he had learned enough to commence his reign of evil, and named it Ratsputin. It became his constant companion – he would feed it on the leftovers from the leftovers that he ate himself – and he would sit and talk to it for hours, telling it his plans.

  ‘It won’t be long before I find a way to contact Magpie,’ Mr Drench was telling Ratsputin one day, a few weeks after he’d arrived at Shivering Sands. He was crouched in the bottom of his favourite hideout – a large wheelie bin that stood on a platform outside the kitchen block. Privately he’d nicknamed it the Weasel-y Bin. ‘Then I shall learn how to be truly evil. The Alliance will regret taking me for granted for so long.’

  ‘Yes, my friend,’ answered a smooth, whispering voice, ‘soon they will learn to fear you.’ Mr Drench was rather taken aback by this. Cute as he was, Ratsputin had never shown any pa
rticular talent for speaking before.

  ‘Erm, yes, that’s right,’ he answered uncertainly. ‘I didn’t know you could talk, actually.’

  ‘It’s not the rat speaking,’ answered the soft voice – perhaps a little sharply. ‘It is I, the one you seek.’

  Mr Drench narrowed his eyes. ‘Magpie?’

  ‘Yes, my friend. I can hear you. I know of your plans. And I can help!’

  ‘You will help me to be truly evil?’

  ‘Of course! I will help you achieve your true destiny.’

  ‘And I shall no longer be a sidekick?’

  ‘Do as I tell you, and you will never be a servant again.’

  A voice at the back of Mr Drench’s mind told him that the phrase ‘Do as I tell you’ was generally something that people said to sidekicks, but he silenced it. This could be his big chance.

  ‘When a part of your power was transferred to me,’ Magpie went on, ‘it gave us a very special connection. I am the only one who can hear you whispering in the bins up there. And you … you are even more special. You are the only person in the world who can hear me. So, shall we begin to lay our plans?’

  Over the following days, Mr Drench told Magpie all he knew about the Heroes’ Alliance, the Super Zeroes and The School. And Magpie – supremely clever and wicked beyond imagination – realised that he had all he needed to hatch the plot that he’d been pondering for many long years. The final piece of the jigsaw had clicked into place. Kid Normal … he could ask to see Kid Normal. And perhaps, without a Cape, the Alliance would consent to send the boy to him.

  ‘We are almost ready to begin,’ he had told Mr Drench one day (about a week before this book began, if you’re really obsessed with the timeline). ‘I just need you to make a journey for me, my friend, to make sure that my … work … has been undisturbed all this time.’

  ‘Certainly, master,’ said Mr Drench. The little voice at the back of his mind complained that it felt more than a little sidekick-like to be calling someone ‘master’, but old habits die hard.

  And so Magpie had sent his new servant off on a special mission to make sure that the secret lair he had left behind thirty years ago was still intact. Then, once he knew that everything was as he had left it, he had summoned Kid Normal to him.

  Now, with the boy back at The School with his very special poem, all Magpie had to do was wait.

  As Murph and his friends were battling to save Annabel in the ACDC far away, the supervillain and his loyal servant were speaking once again.

  ‘How do you know that the boy will deliver your message?’ asked Drench, nervously gnawing at a mouldy chicken bone.

  ‘I know how these Heroes operate,’ rasped Magpie scathingly. ‘His curiosity will do most of our work for us, and his friends’ pathetic obsession with working as a team will do the rest. It is nearly time to mount our attack.’

  Mr Drench reached a finger up and flicked a blob of cold porridge off his left ear before popping it into his mouth. ‘It is nearly time …’ he whispered excitedly to Ratsputin, who squeaked and washed his ears in a not-particularly-evil fashion. ‘Time for the attack. And then will come the moment to reveal my new identity.’

  ‘Your … new identity?’ asked Magpie from his underwater cell.

  ‘Yes! I shall be meek and mild Mr Drench no more! I am no longer the pathetic sidekick known as the Weasel. From now on … I am … DOOMWEASEL!’

  ‘Seriously?’ asked Magpie before he could stop himself. But he soon rallied. ‘Yes, yes, erm, DoomWeasel. Excellent,’ he soothed.

  In the bin, Mr Drench chuckled delightedly to himself, spitting out a bit of eggshell halfway through. ‘DooooooooomWeasel …’ he murmured to himself madly. ‘Once I was but the sidekick … now I am the main … kick.’

  13

  The Scarsdale Incident

  Thanks to the Annabel Episode, it wasn’t until the following day that the Zeroes managed to put Mary’s plan of searching the storeroom into action.

  When they arrived, Mr Flash actually tried to get them to join his CT session again, albeit in a very grudging fashion.

  ‘S’pose you can come and do some star jumps with the others this morning. You know, if you want to,’ he told them in an unnaturally quiet voice.

  ‘No thanks, Mr Flash,’ replied Mary brightly. ‘We’ll get on with tidying the storeroom for you. Must get it all nice and shiny!’ and before the teacher could recover from the total shock he was experiencing at this response, she dragged the rest of them through the door to the cluttered side room.

  ‘Right!’ she said, quietly turning the key in the lock to prevent any more interruptions. ‘We’re looking for anything that mentions Magpie, or Sir Jasper, or the Dandy Man, or losing Capabilities. Anything!’ She pulled open a drawer and extracted an armful of dusty cardboard folders, sat down cross-legged on the floor and started flicking through.

  Hilda decided to enlist some help and called for her horses to trot off underneath the tables and sift through the dense piles of clutter. Meanwhile Nellie and Murph started on the boxes of junk on the shelves.

  Billy grabbed a broom and started sweeping.

  ‘Not really what I had in mind, Billy,’ Mary sighed. ‘We should probably be focusing on the paperwork.’

  ‘Oh right, yeah, sorry,’ he said, solemnly returning the broom to its corner by the door. He joined her by the filing cabinet and started to investigate.

  As they rummaged, they could just make out the sound of running footsteps from the other side of the wall, accompanied by the foghorn-like voice of Mr Flash shouting, ‘Drop and roll! Immediately! If this was a real-life mission, you’d be mincemeat!’ Clearly the teacher was coping without them after all.

  Presently, there was a tiny neigh and a scuffling from one of the lower shelves in the far corner. Hilda’s horses had pushed over a cardboard box, spilling its contents all over the floor. It was full of plastic book-sized objects – all plain black apart from the white labels on their spines.

  ‘Naughty horses!’ scolded Hilda. ‘We’re supposed to be cleaning up, not making more mess!’

  But Mary had raced over to the scene of the spillage and was appraising the debris quizzically. She bent down and dusted off one of the black objects.

  ‘What even is that?’ asked Murph.

  ‘No idea,’ said Mary, turning the object over in her hands. It had a transparent window on the front and two round white holes in the back. She looked at what was written on the label.

  ‘Carol Concert ’92 – exploding shepherd/ laser Jesus,’ she read out loud.

  ‘It’s an old videotape,’ piped up Billy, walking over to join her. ‘My dad has loads of them.’

  ‘How do we watch it?’ asked Murph, wandering over and picking up more tapes. Surely the world’s oldest tapes must require the world’s oldest tape player.

  ‘With that,’ replied Billy excitedly, pointing to a large, old-fashioned black machine underneath the brown TV set. ‘I’ll see if I can find the leads and get it connected up.’

  ‘Straight away, Billy. Quick!’ said Murph suddenly.

  ‘Why are you so desperate?’ said Mary. ‘Why do you want to watch a Christmas play so urgently?’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Murph. ‘I want to watch this.’

  He was holding up another tape. Its label read: CLASSIFIED. SCARSDALE INCIDENT.

  Next to that, someone had written in pen: MAGPIE.

  ‘Crikey!’ said Billy, sorting through tangled wires like a frantic bomb-disposal expert. After a few anxious minutes, he stepped back and turned the video player on.

  It clunked and whirred into action.

  ‘Right. Give me the tape, then,’ he ordered.

  Murph handed it over and Billy inserted it into the mouth of the ancient machine. The TV screen flickered; the picture fizzed, wobbled and eventually came into focus. Two words appeared:

  THE END

  ‘Oh, blimey. We need to rewind it,’ said Billy as he rushed forward and mashed some
of the buttons on the front of the device. It began to make a high-pitched whirring sound.

  The Super Zeroes waited impatiently.

  ‘Is this really how people used to watch films?’ asked Hilda incredulously. ‘It must have been absolutely terrible!’

  After what seemed like an hour, the video machine clunked some more and finally burped into action. The Super Zeroes grabbed chairs and clustered around the TV.

  They didn’t know it, but they were about to witness the darkest hour of the Heroes’ Alliance ...

  The TV screen faded to black, and after a moment a deep voice spoke in dramatic tones.

  (You might want to read this bit out in an American accent. Unless you already are American, in which case just read it out in your normal voice. But deeper. And more dramatically.)

  The year was 1988, intoned the deep, dramatic voice, deeply and dramatically, and the world of Heroes was facing the greatest threat to its existence ever encountered. In response, a great number of Heroes agreed to band together to combat their most dangerous enemy. Until that day, Heroes had worked alone, or in small groups – individual fighters for justice. But the peril they now faced was so extreme, they came together for the first time in history. And a mighty battle was fought …

  ‘This is SO EXCITING!’ squeaked Hilda, tipping backwards on her chair.

  The TV began showing grainy images. They seemed to have been shot on a handheld video camera. A series of figures in outlandish costumes were running through a patch of woodland.

  This, explained the voiceover, is the first footage of what is now known as the Heroes’ Alliance. Nobody who fought that day came home unchanged. And some … did not come home at all.

  Suddenly, there was a flash of light, and the camera tilted sharply to one side before righting itself, as if the person holding it had fallen over. Mud and sparks rained down, and some of the brightly clothed figures could be seen racing for cover behind trees.