I stood in the empty corridor, thinking over what she’d just said. Apart from her acting all weird, two things bothered me. One, I hated veggie lasagna. Two, airplanes didn’t fall out of the sky for no reason.
The Salmon Fillet of Doom
“No more Star Guy for you, Luke Alfred Parker.”
When Mom discovered what had happened at school, she hit the roof. She marched into my bedroom and removed the Xbox, informing me that I could have it back at the end of the break, if I managed to stay out of trouble until then. Brilliant. First no S.C.A.R.F., and now no video games. I considered getting down on my knees and pleading, but I knew it would do no good. Mom was as likely to change her mind as the Joker was to start performing at children’s parties.
She wouldn’t let me near the computer in the living room either, which made it impossible to probe the mystery of the plummeting airplanes. I was reduced to watching the news on TV like someone from the olden days.
Annoyingly, the midair rescue was even more amazing than Lara had made it sound. As usual these days, every moment had been caught on multiple camera phones. First, you see the landing lights of the three planes as they line up for the runway. Then there’s a flash and the planes suddenly drop.
The TV newspeople had overlaid the pictures with the conversation between the pilots and air traffic control. So as the first plane nosedives, you hear, “Control Tower, this is Delta Two Four. Experiencing catastrophic power loss to both engines. Attempting restart. Mayday. Mayday.” Before the control tower can respond, you hear the other two pilots call in the exact same Mayday from their cockpits.
There was even video from inside the planes. The passengers are screaming and crying. The man holding the camera phone is desperately recording a message for his children. Saying good-bye. It’s awful.
And then . . .
“Look!” shouts the woman in the seat beside him, pointing a shaking finger at the window. The man turns his phone. At first you can’t see anything, but suddenly there, dropping through the clouds at three hundred miles per hour, streaking to the rescue, it’s . . .
“Star Guy!” cries the woman.
“And . . . the other one!” shouts the man.
The coverage switches back to the outside of the planes. You see Star Guy approaching, cape fluttering in the wind, sun glinting off his sigil. He loops around the wings, containing the failing engines with his force field; then he uses his telekinetic power to stop the planes’ rapid descent. Dark Flutter dispatches pigeons to the wingtips, steadying the aircraft. Then Star Guy flies alongside the cockpit of the first aircraft and throws the pilots a salute, before leading them in for a perfect landing.
Inside, the passengers’ screams turn to whoops of excitement. The man with the camera is crying, telling his kids that he’ll see them soon.
Even I had to admit that my brother was getting the hang of this superhero business. The salute was a particularly nice touch.
“Those passengers were very lucky,” said Mom, wiping away a tear as we watched them slide down the emergency chutes onto the runway in front of a line of waiting ambulances and fire engines.
Statistically, she couldn’t have been more wrong. The chances of three modern airplanes going down like that at precisely the same moment in the same airspace were infinitesimally low. That’s what made it so suspicious. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“If that had happened anywhere else in the world, Star Guy wouldn’t have been around to save them.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Mom was right. Could it be a coincidence, or did it point to something more significant? If I was going to investigate, I needed the Internet.
“Mom, I really need the computer to do my homework.”
“Really? Can’t you use a wax tablet and a stylus like your dad and I had to?”
I think Mom was trying to be funny, since they only used wax tablets and styluses in ancient Greece. And they didn’t have girls in school back then. And my mom wasn’t 2,500 years old.
“Fine. You can use the computer,” she relented. “But I’m installing a new security feature to make sure it’s only for homework.”
I sat down confidently in front of the screen. There wasn’t any security software on the planet that I couldn’t outwit.
Mom drew up a chair and planted herself down beside me.
OK. There was one.
There was the snick of a key turning in the front door. Zack tended to use his bedroom window these days, which meant it had to be Dad. He was home late from the office again. Mom and Dad both worked at a big insurance company in town. The company had had to pay out a lot of money following all the damage caused by the Nemesis asteroid. Even though Star Guy had stopped the main asteroid, he couldn’t prevent hundreds of small chunks of rock getting through. They broke windows, cars—and even sank a ship. All of them were insurance claims. My parents had been working like crazy for weeks to clear the backlog.
Dad appeared in the living room doorway. He looked even more tired than usual. With his sunken eyes and pale, drawn complexion, he hovered on the threshold like a vampire unable to enter without an invitation. “Hey, Luke, good day at school?”
“Don’t ask,” said Mom, before I could reply.
He caught her eye and in one of those this-is-not-for-children’s-ears voices said, “Can we have a chat?”
She turned to me and raised a warning finger. “When I come back I’m checking your history.”
They disappeared into the kitchen, and I got to work. I wasn’t worried about Mom checking my Internet history, since she’d find nothing. I was a ninja piloting a stealth fighter dipped in invisible ink.
As I started my search I couldn’t help thinking about Lara. She was great at this kind of thing. I missed her. Back before she got her superpowers we could talk for ages, but now there was an invisible barrier between us. And not one of the cool ones. The kind that made it difficult to know what to say around her.
The results of my search were displayed before me. I found the news report I’d watched with Mom, and fast-forwarded to the moment just before the planes fell. I played through the section one frame at a time until I found what I was looking for. In the top left corner, half hidden by a cloud, was a flash of light.
“What are you up to?”
It was Zack. I’d been so focused that I hadn’t heard him come in. He had shed his superhero costume and now wore regular clothes, although they were noticeably clean and pressed, and his hair was spiked with gel.
“I think you should see this,” I said.
He yawned. “Can it wait? I’m completely zonked. After I stopped those planes from crashing, I had English with Mr. Bonnick. If you think catching three airplanes is hard . . .” He shook his head. “And then I was hanging out with Cara.” He tugged at his collar and preened in the mirror.
Cara was Lara’s older sister, and my brother had a crush on her that was stronger than the Hulk’s grip. But he wasn’t hanging out with her. At least, not the way he made it sound. Zack was tutoring her in physics, though he liked to pretend otherwise. Sadly for him, his crush only went one way. I may have been powerless, but I knew my brother’s weak spots. How’s her boyfriend? I thought. One of Zack’s superpowers was telepathy—and being brothers, we had a special telepathic bond. So I knew my question would boom inside his head in surround sound, which would make it even more irritating.
“That’s it!” he yelled, turning the same color as an enraged Commander Octolux. “One more inappropriate use of my telepathic power and I’m blocking you. Got it?”
He was overreacting. It wasn’t as if I used our telepathic link for trivial reasons.
“Yes, you do,” said Zack, reading my mind. “All the time! Last week you used it to ask me to pick up a bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips from the corner store.”
“Well, we’d run out.”
/> Zack threw up his hands in exasperation. “I wasn’t even in the corner store! I was locked in fierce hand-to-hand combat with a man in a lion costume. Don’t ask. But that wasn’t your worst telepathic abuse, oh no. That would be when you used it to ask for answers during a math test.”
Typical that my goody-goody brother would be wound up most by that.
He stomped to the door, muttering, “I’m the world’s greatest superhero, and he uses me like a takeout menu and a calculator.”
“Zack, I’m sorry. Don’t go. I think some sort of electromagnetic pulse weapon brought down those airplanes.”
He raised one dubious eyebrow. “So tell me, this electro-magenta laser gun thingy—does it by any chance belong to your gym teacher?”
Ah. “You heard about that then.”
“Um, yeah. The whole school heard. You’re a laughingstock, Luke.”
“But I was so sure Miss Dunham was evil,” I complained. “All the evidence said so.”
He thumbed at the photo on my screen. “And don’t tell me—all the evidence here screams big bad supervillain.”
It did. “No army, navy, or air force in the world has an electromagnetic pulse weapon capable of bringing down airplanes,” I explained. “What’s more, this one is airborne and, if the lack of reports is anything to go by, invisible to radar. It has to come from a technologically superior mind. If there isn’t a supervillain behind this, I’ll eat my limited-edition Crimson Avenger fedora.”
Zack relented with a sigh. “OK, so show me this mysterious, flying, invisible gun then.”
“There. That flash of light.”
He leaned in, squinting at the screen. “You’re kidding me, right? That’s nothing. It’s a light from another plane or a smudge on the camera lens, that’s all.”
“So why did those planes fall out of the sky?”
“How should I know? I can fly, but that doesn’t make me an expert on airplane engineering. And you aren’t one either. Just because you don’t understand what happened doesn’t mean you can jump to ridiculous conclusions.” He shook his head sadly. “You can’t go through life seeing supervillains everywhere.”
There was no point trying to persuade him. After all, he wasn’t the only superhero in the world anymore. Tomorrow I’d fill Lara in on my suspicions—even if I had to do it over veggie lasagna.
Mom called us in for dinner. The four of us ate in the kitchen together as usual. Zack might have been the one with superpowered senses, but as soon as I took my seat, I could tell that something was wrong. A cloud hung over the table, and it wasn’t coming from the steamed rice. I didn’t have to wait long to learn the bad news.
Dad had lost his job with the insurance company.
“Did they fire you because you disobeyed orders and went rogue?” I asked.
“Unfortunately not, Luke,” he said, picking at his food with a fork. “Nothing as exciting as that. With all the money the company has had to pay out because of Nemesis, they’re having to cut back.”
Zack sat up. “But that’s not fair,” he said. “Nemesis was, what do you call it, an ‘act of god’?”
“You’re right,” said Dad. “But all those chunks of asteroid that broke off when Star Guy stopped Nemesis—well, they were an act of man, albeit a superhuman one, and they smashed houses and cars. Those were claims.”
I looked over at my brother. He was clenching his fists so tightly they’d turned white.
“I’m just a victim of downsizing,” said Dad. He lifted his fork. “Which, before you ask, yes, is exactly like a shrink ray.” He gave a short laugh. Mom laid her hand on his.
I knew that downsizing was nothing like a shrink ray. Shrink rays were expensive and complicated, and the idea that an insurance company would use one to fire people was ridiculous. The electricity bill alone would make it uneconomic. I looked around at the concerned faces at the table. Everyone was thinking the same thing, but no one wanted to ask. It was up to me. “So,” I began, choosing my words with care, “will you get another job, or are you going to be hanging around the house from now on?”
“Luke!” Mom snapped.
“You idiot!” Zack punched me in the arm.
Dad just laughed. “Don’t you worry about me, Luke. That job was like the Hobbit movies: it went on way too long. A fresh start will be good for me. I can’t wait to see what the future has in store. Bring it on!”
And then he sighed and looked down at his salmon fillet.
The Breaking of the Fellowship
It was the last hour of the last day before the fumigation break. The corridors swarmed with students heading to their final classes before one precious and unexpected week off. I hadn’t seen Serge all day. I finally caught up with him and we were carried along in the noisy surge. Serge had geography and I had art, so we were going our separate ways. I was about to learn that that was true in more ways than one.
“What do you mean, you can’t come over?” I said. “We have important S.C.A.R.F. business to discuss.”
Serge gave me an awkward look. “It is my maman. After the business with Miss Dunham, she says that you are a bad influence and I must avoid you.”
“Avoid me?” I was outraged.
“Oui. I have been wanting to tell you all day, but it is difficult for me. You are my best friend, and you are a sensitive soul.”
“I’m not sensitive,” I snapped. “Or a bad influence. I’m harmless. Well, mostly harmless.”
“I know. That is what I said. Luke Parker may appear to be full of confidence and le smart aleck, but scratch the surface and beneath you will encounter an anxious boy who simply wants to be accepted.”
“I wouldn’t have put it quite like that,” I mumbled.
We were approaching the geography classroom. “There was talk at the dinner table that I should move to another school,” said Serge quietly. “I would not even mention it, but it was over the cheese course.”
This was awful. Serge was not only my best friend; he was currently my only friend. I’d gone to meet Lara at lunchtime in order to tell her my theory about what had brought down the airplanes, but she hadn’t showed, no doubt off saving some old people from a burning retirement home. What with her bailing on me to go and be Dark Flutter, if Serge left, then I’d be that kid at the back of the school cafeteria eating his sandwiches alone.
Serge couldn’t look me in the eye. “I am sorry,” he said. “Truly.”
I could still rescue the situation. After all, he and I had faced the end of the world together and come out the other side. Nothing could separate us, not even his maman. All I had to do was find the right words.
“Fine,” I said sharply. “I don’t need you either.” With that I marched off along the corridor and didn’t look back.
Lara sent a vole with an apology. I opened the note in the tree house, where I had retreated as soon as I got home from my bruising day at school. I was alone, apart from a heaped plate of crustless peanut butter sandwiches and a double-chocolate milkshake. And the vole.
The note confirmed my earlier suspicions. Lara had missed our lunch meeting because of superhero commitments. She’d written that she would try to pop by later, but her mom was taking her to buy new shoes. That said it all. I came a distant second to a pair of ballet flats. First Serge, now Lara. And forget about Zack; he’d been far too important to pay me any attention for ages.
The vole sat on the floor, gazing up. I could swear it looked sorry for me.
“What are you waiting for?” I asked. “A tip?”
The vole said nothing.
“Well, I’ll give you a tip,” I said, taking a bite of sandwich. “Stay away from owls. Got it?”
The vole looked at me blankly.
“Because they’re your natural predators,” I explained as I chewed.
I sighed. Not even voles were interested in
what I had to say. I waved my half-eaten sandwich. “Know what I don’t get?”
The vole did not.
“Zorbon the Decider, that’s what. First time he rolls up, he hands out superpowers and a warning. Nemesis is coming. Oooh. Big scary end-of-the-world riddle. But the next time he shows his shiny, interdimensional head in here, what does he do? Turns Lara into a superpowered rodent-whisperer—no offense—and that’s it. No warning. No strange prediction. Nothing.” I paused to suck a mouthful of milkshake through twin straws. When I lowered the drink, the vole had gone. I poked my head out of the tree house to see it scurrying off into the garden.
“Zorbon doesn’t hand out powers for nothing,” I called after it. “So the question is, what kind of threat is so terrible it’s going to take not one but two superheroes to deal with it? I’m telling you, something wicked is heading into town. Mark my words.”
But no one did. Only the wind answered. Swirling in the oak tree, it shook the turning leaves, making them rattle like bones.
Puny Earthlings!
The break began with a bang—and a zap and an atomic whump. I threw off my comforter and went downstairs to investigate the pounding that was coming from the living room, to find Dad slumped on the sofa in front of the TV, playing on my video game console. Mom had already left for work, and Zack was at the library studying for exams he didn’t have to take for another two years. I assumed that “going to the library” was code for “foiling a bank robbery” or “freeing the hostages,” but with my super-nerd of a brother, you could never be sure.
Dad was wearing his bathrobe and the Hulk slippers I’d bought him for his last birthday (he looked less “Hulk smash” and more “Hulk shuffle with a cup of cocoa”).
My Gym Teacher Is an Alien Overlord Page 3
