My Brother is a Superhero

by David Solomons

  My eye fell on the invitation to the launch of Crystal Comics’ new flagship store, which I’d propped up on the windowsill. The party was scheduled for next Monday, one day before Nemesis was due to impact. I couldn’t imagine it would still go ahead, but that wasn’t what bothered me. It was something about the odd-shaped invitation. I held it up for a better look. If I’d had Spider-Sense it would be tingling. And then I saw it. My hand started to shake. I turned to Lara and Serge, barely able to speak.

  “What have you got there?” asked Lara.

  “The invitation … from Christopher Talbot.”

  “Oh, I got one of those too…” I could see her rummaging around her desk. “It’s a bit strange, having a launch party so close to the end of the world, don’t you think?”

  “These things, they are planned months ahead,” explained Serge. “If he were to cancel now he would probably lose his deposit on the chair hire.”

  “Never mind that,” I interrupted. “Look at the shape of the card!” I pressed it to my laptop’s camera so that it filled their screens.

  “It’s a triangle,” said Serge, mystified.

  “It’s more like a trapezoid,” said Lara.

  “No,” I said, my voice trembling with excitement. “It’s a volcano.”

  26

  NICE VOLCANO

  Early the next morning, as soon as I was able to give my parents the slip, I joined Lara and Serge and we made our way to the address at the foot of the invitation. Before long we found ourselves outside the most fabulous comic book store in the soon-to-be-obliterated world. Between a Bella Napoli and a Carphone Warehouse rose a volcano on seven floors – Crystal Comics’ flagship store.

  “It is bee-yoo-tiful,” breathed Serge.

  Despite the fact that my brother was almost certainly being held in there against his will, I had to agree. Sloping flanks were scored with what looked like claw marks, but which were in fact fissure vents. I knew this thanks to my basic knowledge of vulcanology, which is the study of volcanoes and not Star Trek characters, as I’d originally believed when I borrowed the book from the library. As I watched the fissures ooze with glowing lava there was a rumble from deep inside the volcano like a dragon clearing its throat and then a cloud of ash and fire spewed from the crater. The ash cloud and lava were both fake, of course, but the effect was highly impressive. A banner was draped across the front, declaring the grand opening next week. Incredibly, the party was still on.

  “How come we didn’t notice this was here before?” Lara asked. “What kind of hi-tech camouflage did Christopher Talbot use? Hypno-gas? Distract-o-Beam?”

  “Uhh … a tarpaulin,” I said, my cheeks colouring. “A big tarpaulin,” I added, but that didn’t make it any better.

  We had found Zack’s prison. The next thing was to spring him from captivity. That wasn’t going to be easy – the volcano was ringed by a high fence topped with razor wire. There was one gate in and out, secured by the kind of weighty padlock that Wolverine would put on the biscuit tin to prevent Juggernaut from stealing his KitKats. Multiple surveillance cameras on long poles swayed like king cobras. No patch of ground went unmonitored. As we watched, a crow fluttered over the fence and touched down on the highest wire. There was a crackle of electricity, a bright-blue flash and then a strangled squawk. Its rigid body fell to the ground with a thud.

  We went back to my house and assembled in my bedroom to draw up our plan. “We have a lot of work to do,” I said. “One does not simply walk into a heavily fortified secret volcano headquarters.”

  Faced with the prospect of hard work, Serge opened a packet of salt ’n’ vinegar crisps while Lara used her cub reporter skills to do some quick digging online. On Bromley Council’s website she found a downloadable layout of the Crystal Comics building (it turned out that supervillains did seek planning permission) and we spent the next few hours devising a brilliant plan. It didn’t start off brilliant. In fact, I’m not sure we ever quite made it beyond “pretty good if overly complicated”. I wanted to storm the volcano. Serge favoured a stealthy approach. We settled on “infiltration”, which I had to convince Lara was not a kind of water purification system. We pored over the layout until we had come up with a series of inventive methods to gain entry, and then Serge pointed out that we had invitations, so if we waited until the launch party we could simply stroll through the front door. That seemed a whole lot easier than my best plan, which involved a zip-wire, wigs and a small amount of high explosives.

  Lara raised an objection. “There is one bad part to Serge’s plan.”

  “Which is?”

  “The launch party isn’t until Monday, the day before Nemesis is due to hit the Earth. That’s cutting it fine. If we fail, there won’t be time for another go.”

  Another go? She made it sound like we were queuing for a turn on a roller coaster. “We won’t fail,” I said firmly. “We can’t.”

  We printed out the layout, unrolled it on my bedroom floor and gathered round to finalise our tactics. There was some debate about the use of a flamethrower (I was “for” but got outvoted). By the time Mum called us down for lunch Operation Star Lad was good to go.

  Our path was filled with peril, the threat of failure dogged every step, but there was something irresistibly exciting about the promise of adventure. Was this how Zack felt each time he stepped out as Star Lad? My whole body fizzed, even more than the time Dad let me have a sip of sparkling wine. I felt as if I could fly faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings in a single bound. Looking into the faces of my friends I knew with the force of a Hulk upper cut that we had it in us to pull this off. I know what you’re thinking. I’m getting carried away. I’m in danger of saying something about the power of friendship being more powerful than a supervillain and his army of evil minions. Well, no, that would be silly. Frankly, at that moment I would happily have traded Serge for a well-stocked utility belt.

  Lara doodled in the margin of the building layout. “Let’s say we do rescue Zack in the nick of time,” she said. “Do you really think he can save the world? After all, the reason Christopher Talbot was able to kidnap him in the first place is because he’s lost his powers.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Didn’t superheroes always save the world? But Lara was right, without his powers Star Lad was just an ordinary boy.

  “Zorbon put his trust in Zack,” I said. But I wished that Zorbon had been a bit less mysterious about his powers. I know you don’t get a handbook in situations like these, but a troubleshooting guide would’ve been useful. I doubted we could reset Zack’s superpowers by turning him off and then on again. So why had he lost them in the first place? And how were we going to restore them?

  There was a crunch from the other side of the room. Serge’s unfinished packet of crisps had dropped from his hand and fallen under his foot. He stood at the window, his back set rigidly towards us, his attention gripped by something outside.

  “I think you two had better see this,” he said nervously.

  Strong winds had driven away the leaden clouds that had squatted over the country for days. Like a bad-tempered teenager the gusting wind kicked up stones from the street to hurl them at windows, it pushed over old ladies and grumbled all day and night. On TV the weather report called it “atmospheric conditions” caused by the approaching asteroid. The short-term forecast was gloomy. There was no long-term forecast.

  “There.” Serge pointed to the horizon. Above the slate roofs and chimney pots spinning madly in the wind the blue sky hung like a freshly laundered cape. But in one corner was a small black spot edged in fire. No stain remover in the universe would have any effect on this spot. It blazed through the darkness of space on an unstoppable collision course. And in the wind’s endless howl I could hear the words, over and over.

  Nemesis is coming.

  27

  NINE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND TEN

  It was the day before the end of the world.

  As it drew ever c
loser Nemesis loomed larger, an immense thumb reaching down from the heavens to squash a bug – and we were the bug. Fragments broke off the main body of the rapidly approaching asteroid and already the first impacts were happening around the world. The skies were streaked with fire as chunks of burning rock punched through our atmosphere. Tracking stations across the globe monitored their unerring course and alarming news reports came in every few hours. Most of the fragments landed harmlessly in the oceans, but a few struck cities. New York, Paris, Beijing, all of them suffered. We were not immune. The Glades Shopping Centre took a direct hit. YO! Sushi and Marks and Spencer were wiped out. No one was killed, but it was bad for me since I had a twenty-pound M&S gift card from my birthday that I hadn’t yet spent.

  In their secure room in a top-secret location the brightest and best minds on the planet had been eating pizza and hatching plans. (I did wonder how the pizza delivery guy could find them if their room was so secret.) Over the course of the last week they had emerged to suggest various strategies to avoid the total destruction of the planet. Most of them sounded like plots of expensive Hollywood blockbusters. Converting the Earth’s core into a giant engine and driving it out of the asteroid’s path? Check. Blasting the moon into the asteroid to knock it off course, like a cosmic snooker shot? Check. But the plan they came up with and the one that the world’s leaders settled upon was even worse.

  You know how there’s always that bit at the end of the film when the good guys finally get their starship back and the bad guys’ shields are down and the captain shouts “Fire everything!” Well, that was their plan. Every country on the planet was to aim its entire arsenal of nuclear weapons at the asteroid and fire at the same time. It was crazy. It was dangerous. It was doomed to failure. I made a quick calculation (on the back of a pizza box, funnily enough). I reckoned that even if seventy-five per cent of the missiles hit the target, which would be remarkably accurate, it would be like firing a peashooter at a charging elephant. And if the asteroid didn’t finish us off, the radiation from the missiles that exploded in the atmosphere would make the surface of the Earth uninhabitable for fifty thousand years. The aftermath would be like one of those other movies, the kind in which there’s a handful of human survivors who have to eat cold beans forever and live underground and everyone else has three noses and zombies around in a barren radioactive wasteland. Perhaps the only thing worse than the plan itself was what they’d decided to name it. Operation Spitting Umbrella. I mean, you could see what they were getting at, but come on, surely they could have come up with something snappier.

  The smartest people on the planet weren’t the only ones who’d gone nuts. With the clock counting down to the end of their lives, most people on Earth were behaving madly and, in a lot of cases, badly. For instance, all the people without big TVs started stealing them from all the people with big TVs, but then the first lot must have realised that they didn’t want to waste the little time they had left watching TV, so that was the end of all the stealing. There was a great deal of crying, which was understandable. Then there was the kissing. You couldn’t ride your bike down any street without running over a dozen canoodling couples. Didn’t they know that during the average kiss five million germs are swapped between the participants? I could only suppose that with the extinction of the human race approaching they didn’t really care about the effect of a few hundred bacteria colonies.

  The night before, Lara and I had sat in the doorway of the tree house, our legs dangling down into the quiet darkness of the garden, our eyes fixed up at the noisy sky. (Not kissing.)

  “How many stars do you see?” I asked her.

  She frowned in concentration and for a moment I thought she was making a serious attempt to count them. After a few seconds she blew out in exasperation. “Millions.”

  “Uh-uh.” I shook my head. “If you live somewhere really dark then according to the Bright Star Catalogue you can see nine thousand one hundred and ten stars with your naked eye.” Lara looked at me in amazement. “I know! You’d think it’d be millions, but it’s not.”

  She tilted her face up to the now slightly less infinite sky, paused and said, “Nine thousand one hundred and eleven.”

  I knew what she meant. Technically, Nemesis wasn’t a star so wouldn’t make it into the Bright Star Catalogue, but I wasn’t going to argue. It was so close now that it hung almost level with the moon, two great silver circles like the unblinking eyes of a wolf from a fairy tale. A giant devouring-space fairy-tale wolf. With two major light sources the nights weren’t as dark as usual. The whole world had never been brighter, which was back-to-front since it was about to be extinguished. The extra light cast strange night shadows and made it hard to sleep. When I did I had strange dreams.

  In one of them I am sitting in the tree house with Lara. Nemesis is heading straight for us. There’s a great rushing wind and the asteroid strikes the tree. But the old oak doesn’t break. It creaks and groans and bends all the way to the ground, but we hang on and then it whips upright and, like a rock from a catapult, sends the asteroid flying back into space. I know that dreams are supposed to mean something important, but I think that one was just wishful thinking. And I don’t know why Lara was in the dream, but when I wake up I’m glad that she was.

  Mum, Dad and I sat down to breakfast for what everyone assumed would be the last time. Mum put out Zack’s Cheerios as she had done every day since he’d gone missing, and glanced at his empty chair. Dad laid a hand on top of hers and squeezed it gently. She sniffed, gave a tiny shake of her head and said in a cheery voice, “What would you like this morning, Luke? How about a boiled egg and soldiers?”

  I could tell that she wasn’t as cheery as she wanted me to think. “Yes, please,” I said. A good breakfast was essential on any normal day, but I’d need all the energy I could store up for tonight’s mission. “Two eggs, please.”

  “Two eggs for a growing boy,” she said, and then her smile slipped. It must have occurred to her that barring a miracle the height I was today would be as tall as I’d ever grow. Dad would never scratch another mark into the height chart on the kitchen wall. Mum sat down, put her head in her hands and sobbed quietly. Dad put his arm round her and said comforting words. He looked across the table at me and I could see that his eyes were damp. And not the kind of damp they’d been after we’d watched Star Wars together for the first time.

  Ever since Zack had gone missing Mum and Dad had endlessly circled the neighbourhood sticking posters to every lamppost, wall and tree trunk. But now even the police had given up looking for him. I slipped off my chair and walked round the table. Stretching my arms as wide as they would go I hugged them both. I wanted to tell them that they shouldn’t worry, that everything would turn out all right, but I couldn’t.

  The whole family had decided to spend the last full day on planet Earth together. Lara and Serge were with their families too. We’d agreed to rendezvous after dark. The question was how we would get through this most unusual day. Mum had decided to cook a big feast, Grandpa Bernard had brought his crossword book (since all the golf had been cancelled), the BBC was showing the film The Great Escape and the Queen was planning to address the country at three o’clock. It was a lot like Christmas Day, except instead of turkey we were having a giant asteroid.

  “At least they’ve a nice day for it,” said Grandpa Bernard, as if he was talking about a trip to the seaside and not the last day of the human race.

  He was right (a bit bonkers, but right all the same). Until this week the country had been covered in a thick band of cloud that stretched from coast to coast. It was like living under the dreariest blanket knitted by the most miserable grandma in the whole world. At night you couldn’t see a single star in the sky.

  The clouds. Something about the clouds…

  It hit me like a punch from Colossus.

  It had been cloudy the week Zack was kidnapped. In that instant I knew why his force field had died, why his telekinesis had given up
the ghost, why he couldn’t breathe underwater.

  “Zack needs starlight to recharge his powers!” I muttered under my breath. The final, missing part of our plan was in place – all we had to do was expose Zack to the stars and he’d recharge like a plugged-in iPhone.

  The day drew on slowly and then all of a sudden it was over, like curtains coming down at the end of the school play.

  Mum and Dad insisted on tucking me into bed even though I am far too old for such shenanigans. I wasn’t tired, of course, but pretended to be in order to carry out my mission. It’s called a ruse.

  Mum adjusted my pillow. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay up longer?”

  The world really was ending if my parents were asking me to stay up past my bedtime.

  “Just another ten minutes?” said Dad.

  I faked a yawn. “But I’m so tired.”

  They sat on the edge of my bed and I could see them exchange awkward glances, as if deciding who should go first and then Mum said, “Luke, we need to have a talk.”

  Dad chimed in. “If Operation Spitting Umbrella doesn’t work…”

  “It won’t,” I said firmly.

  “It might,” said Mum, but I could tell that she didn’t believe it herself. I don’t think anyone in the whole world believed it was going to save us, even the geniuses who’d come up with it in the first place.

  “Is there anything you want to ask?” asked Mum.

  I didn’t know what she was getting at. “About what?”

  “About what happens next,” said Dad.

  “Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “According to the latest projections the impact will smash the Earth into three giant pieces. But without the mass of the whole planet, there will be no gravity and the atmosphere will rush out as if someone left the door open in a hurricane. The entire population of the world will be dead within eight minutes.” I could see from their faces that this wasn’t the conversation they’d been planning. “Oh, you meant Heaven and stuff.”