Angstrom chuckled; this deadly game was just the kind of thing he adored. “I believe the advantage is ours,” he goaded. “You are finished, John Smith, as are your friends.”
Kate, Cal, and Tex all had the same sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs. They knew John had been good at juggling bowling balls and making weird faces, but his double looked evil to the core, and they weren’t at all sure John stood a chance against him.
Kate noted the sly devilish grin; so much the same as John’s that seemed to contain all the anguish in the world. Cal sensed the turmoil behind the empty eyes; they were John’s eyes, but they betrayed a heart bent on cruelty. Tex felt the strength of madness emanating from every pore of this John Smith look-alike, and madness added the strength of ten men in any dimension.
Hunter had no feelings one way or another. Doctor Angstrom was paying him to do a job, and as long as the money kept coming, he kept doing. Besides, he had learned long ago that taking sides in someone else’s fight was a bad idea because it severely limited your options.
“You’re living in a fantasy land, Angstrom,” John said. “I’m taking my friends home, and I’m stopping you two for good.”
It was too much for the Wild Child beside Doctor Angstrom. His turbulent anger had been churning with the force of a thousand tornadoes since the first moment he had laid eyes on this thief who had stolen his life. Even though Angstrom had explained to him that he would get much more pleasure and relief from torturing his adversary, he found that he was no longer capable of containing his anger. He wanted to break this arrogant fool in two, and what better way to break him than on an anvil.
In a pure expression of his animosity and hatred, and with the devastating speed of the most legendary martial artist, the Wild Child swept at John while metamorphosing into the hard solid-iron block. Luckily, John saw it coming and managed to move away from the major force of the blow. But it still caught him on the shoulder, and sent him sprawling to the ground in a dazed and confused heap. In the very next moment the Wild Child swept back to Angstrom’s side, changing back to his own body, and Angstrom laughed.
“That’s not fair,” Kate howled, crouching down to help John, lying almost unconscious on the floor.
“Life is never fair,” Angstrom chortled. “You must be ruthless to win. A lesson you’ve all learned too late.”
The look of anger on the Wild Child’s face had deepened to a smoldering cauldron of contempt. “Can I take care of him now, Doctor Angstrom?” he seethed.
“No, my son,” Angstrom replied in a malicious tone. “Let me teach you how to play with your victim first. It’s much more enjoyable that way.”
Steve was flabbergasted. He wasn’t sure he had seen what he’d seen, even though he’d seen it. He was awash with conflict, and drowning in confusion. It had been a bad day, and it just seemed to keep on getting worse.
“You’re a low-life creep,” Cal screamed at Angstrom, hoping to buy some time for John.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten you little children,” Angstrom warned. “Your turn is coming next.”
Since the anvil caught John, Hunter had been watching Kate as she cradled John’s head in her arms. She was totally distraught, with tears running down her cheeks, then suddenly she seemed to remember something; he could see it in her gaze. Then in the very next moment she brought her face to John’s and kissed him for all she was worth.
It must have been a hundred-thousand-watt smacker, Hunter thought, because after a second John’s fingers began to twitch, and after two seconds his eyes opened wide in disbelief. After three seconds he completely disappeared. A moment of chaos ensued as everybody looked around, trying to ascertain where he had gone.
All of a sudden, a meteoric hunk of rock appeared out of thin air and smacked the Wild Child in the head, sending him reeling to the ground at Angstrom’s feet. Kate leapt up from her knees and into the air with a shout, and Cal and Tex jumped up and down beside her triumphantly as John swooped back to their side and materialized beside them.
“I warned you, Angstrom,” John declared. “Perhaps now you’ll listen.”
Angstrom was crestfallen; he hadn’t calculated any opposition at all. He stared at the champion lying at his feet. “You are a fool, boy,” he wheezed; he was now following Cal’s lead and buying time, “a coward and a fool. I suspect when it comes to finishing the job, you won’t have the guts to do it.”
“He won’t do it fighting dirty like you!” Kate spat.
“No, cause he’s got guts,” Tex said.
“And that’s something you don’t have!” Cal added.
Hunter was amazed; these kids actually believed in something like the Bushido Code of the samurai. Samurai had strength and invincibility in battle because they had studied the intricacies of the fight, but they would only fight for a cause, never for a personal vendetta. It made him feel kind of seedy to be holding a gun on them, so he holstered it, and signaled Steve to do the same.
Doctor Angstrom laughed. Who were these petulant little brats who thought they could dictate to him what was or was not to be? He was a billionaire with private jets and limousines. He was a well-respected businessman whose empire stretched around the globe. There was no opposition capable of stopping him; he was part of the elite, and he was only taking what he assumed was already his. “I’m tired of your childish rhetoric,” Angstrom proclaimed, noting that his downed champion was stirring. “I think the time has come to send you all to hell.”
Normal kids are said to be capable of creating bizarre phenomena without even knowing it. When they are pent-up with anger and frustration and boiling inside like a volcano, they produce waves of ill will capable of slamming doors, moving furniture, and inexplicably toppling expensive vases from supposedly secure shelves.
But the Wild Child lying at Angstrom’s feet was no normal kid. He was an out-of-control force of nature intent on madness, mayhem, and destruction, and as he returned to consciousness, his anger knew no bounds. He stretched out the passionately wrathful fingers of his mind deep into the molecular fabric of the planet, stirred it up like a muddy pond, and the earth began to rumble and shake.
John focused his attention on his nemesis as he began to climb up from the ground, and he knew instinctively that he was the source of the earthquake. His vision flipped onto a channel he never knew he could receive before; it was as if he could see into the very heart of matter. He could see the individuality and the interconnectedness of everything, and he could see the tide of fury emanating from the mind of his evil twin.
As is often the case in a battle, there is no insignificant maneuver that can be ignored and left unanswered. But John didn’t have an answer, he just willed with all his might for the sky to go dark, and inexplicably it did. Dark clouds exploded from the horizon and roiled across the sun like violent curtains. It was like the end of days as the earth shook furiously, and the sky blackened into darkest night.
Angstrom cowered beneath his umbrella; the darkness didn’t bother him, but earthquakes have an inexplicable way of wringing the neck of mortality and hanging it on a hook in your soul. Steve had already thrown himself down onto the quaking ground in abject horror. But Hunter, who had suffered through his fair share of earth-shaking experiences, closely regarded the quiet resolve of Kate, Cal, and Tex as they stood watching the two John Smiths prepare for battle by the light of the enormous pizza slice.
Standing in the stillness at the center of the storm, John knew that his saving grace would be calm detachment. The blind rage exhibited by the Wild Child opposing him was a dangerous force. But if John could just maintain his awareness and stay focused, he could turn that force as a weapon against his foe. The irony of the situation washed over him like a wave; in order to step into the future, he had to vanquish the past—a past in which perhaps he had unwittingly made errors of judgment that he’d come to accept as truth. He was a pupa shedding his outmoded thinking like a cocoon, in order to become a butterfly.
He had no intention of standing in its path and defying it though, and he already had in his mind an object with which he could defeat the missile. With a move that had now become second nature to him, he changed into a huge metal shield, setting the angle so the projectile would glance off his surface and go careening across the drive-in. Kate, Cal, Tex, and Hunter all dove to the ground as the fireball whistled over their heads, and the shield took off after it.
In any fight there are rules: Hit hard, hit fast, and attack as many places as you can at one time. There is also a rule that states when the enemy is running away, don’t chase after him. Sadly, it was a rule John was woefully unfamiliar with. In life these traps are laid to be fallen into; it’s how we get out of them that shapes who we are.
The missile and the shield flew through the sky, and John’s mind must have been working on a very instinctive level, because the shield carried a crest with the letters SK emblazoned on it. The Subatomic Kid was a knight fighting for his lady, but he was just about to be unseated from his horse.
The only tactics the cannonball had to employ to cause major damage was to stop dead in midair, which it did, causing the shield to crash haplessly into it, breaking the spell of John’s metamorphosis, and sending him plummeting to the earth like a rag doll.
Doctor Angstrom grasped the arms of his wheelchair and imagined victory. Kate, Cal, and Tex winced, fearing defeat, and Hunter wondered what the kid would do next. John began his fall to earth by kicking himself mentally in the head; rushing after the missile had been his downfall, and now he was finished.
He had let his friends down, and his ebbing consciousness prevented him from pulling out of his dive to destruction. He saw the hard tarmac rushing toward him. Only seconds before it smashed him to smithereens, he heard a voice in the back of his mind whisper, “Into the Subatomic World John.” It wasn’t his thought, he was sure of that, but it was enough of an impetus for him to make the transition. He disappeared in a cloud of shiny particles, and the missile hot on his tail did the same.
Once he splashed through the cosmic barrier into the rejuvenating waves of the subatomic stream, all physical pain dissolved away like a seltzer tablet in a glass of water. Just like bubbles, his being stretched out across space, and being unburdened from physicality, his essence danced on waves of electromagnetic freedom. He was at once everything and nothing again; his heartbeat was a drum beating at the edge of time, and his consciousness was the drummer silhouetted at the birth of dawn.
He had entered this sanctuary in a conscious state somewhere between dreams and reality. His pride was wounded, he was confused, and he needed to take stock of the situation so that he might plan his next assault. Then, in a blinding flash of realization it suddenly occurred to him how futile it was to be fighting with himself. Fighting never solved anything. What purpose did it serve? Only Doctor Angstrom’s. Surely it would be far better to just absorb all the rancor of his nemesis, both positive and negative, back into himself and transform it into his new being. The Subatomic Kid! That would solve the problem for good, and Doctor Angstrom would be de-fanged.
He had no idea whether he could incorporate the Wild Child back into his being--but why not? It was, after all, himself, and the two of them were floating in a subatomic soup, which was already beginning to blend them together. He let the idea form in his mind, gave it wings and released it with a prayer of forgiveness, and in no more time than it takes a moth to fall into a flame, the angry byproduct of Doctor Leitz’ experiment was absorbed back into his essence.
He felt the pain and the anguish like a tidal wave washing over his soul, and then it seemed like a huge sigh whooshed through his mind, and everything was still. He felt kind of goofy, like he was in love or something, and then he realized that in order to love anyone else, he had to truly accept all aspects of himself first. It was obviously a concept Doctor Angstrom didn’t understand. He had spent his whole life hating, which had driven him to become a wreck of a human being.
“Congratulations,” proclaimed the Master of the Perfect Word. “You have conquered the danger at the heart of the Subatomic World, and now you can continue with your quest.”
John was still reeling from the sense of euphoria he was experiencing. He had won, but he had won by giving up the fight, and he couldn’t believe how easy it had been. “You mean that’s it?” John asked. “How can that be it? It was too easy!!”
“The path of least resistance leads to the palace of peace,” the Master intoned in his enigmatic manner. “What more do you want? You have crossed the first threshold!”
“First threshold?” John asked suspiciously. “First infers second, and third, and fourth, and—”
“Life is a maze of bridges and tunnels,” the Master interrupted, “and there are seas, and rivers, and dark places in the mind. All manner of obstructions await to teach us meaning.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” John complained bitterly.
“I can’t tell you if the second threshold is in your future,” the master explained. “The future is unknown, even to me.”
“Just tell me this,” John pleaded, pressing him as hard as he could. “If I take my friends back home, can I be assured that this is over? Can I go back to being a normal kid again?”
“Oh, it’s never over,” the master said wistfully. “As long as there’s music, the song plays on. The enemy will be right there beside you, waiting for an opportunity to rise again. You must be vigilant; you have created the peace and now you must keep it.”
Damn, John thought, another cryptic answer! He knew he wasn’t going to get to ask even one of the thousand questions burning in his mind, because he felt the tug of the material world pulling him back to solidity.
Chapter 33
BACK TO SCHOOL
John dove into the subatomic stream with a whole new lease on life. He liked the fact that he’d conquered himself, and now he knew for sure that all too often we are our own worst enemy. He also knew that uniting the two halves of his being had freed him and his friends from the World of Science. He knew it instinctively, the way a bird knows how to fly south when the winter sets in, or the way a salmon knows it’s time to swim upstream. Unfortunately, it meant that Doctor Angstrom would be freed too, but that was a small price to pay for liberation.
He knew that his long, strange journey was at an end, and he knew when he got back he would…what?! What would he do? He had gone soft in the head; he was hurtling back through subatomic space and time without a plan! That’s the trouble with success; history is littered with the corpses of bright lights who burned out too early because they believed in their own invincibility! Success is a trap we set for ourselves; it brings the snakes out of the grass, and their hedonistic dance is so alluring we don’t realize we’ve been bitten until it’s too late.
He needed to maintain his consciousness through all the highs and lows of life, and he needed to start right now. He decided to shift back in time; not far, just back to the time he had disappeared. Doctor Angstrom is a megalomaniac, he thought, he will quite naturally assume that he is victorious. Success went to his head a long time ago and now he’s one of those people who figures he can trample over everybody to get what he wants. It’s time to remind him that humility is a virtue, and that the soft always conquers the hard.
He arrived back beside Doctor Angstrom just in time to see the shield crash into the missile with such a sickening crunch that the Subatomic Kid crest was completely obliterated. He watched himself drop
from the sky like a stone, and he watched the missile chase him into the Subatomic World. It looked bad, he thought; it looked really bad, and he was sure nobody watching would think he was alive after that.
When Tex turned his gaze from the fiasco to see what he thought was the Wild Child standing beside Angstrom, his heart sank into his boots. He suddenly felt very alone, and his first reaction was to worry about Kate. He reached out his arm, put it around her waist, and pulled her close to him. “I think we’ve got trouble,” he said.
When Kate glanced over at the angry-faced teen beside Angstrom, she suddenly knew what heartbreak was all about because she felt her own heart crack. “Oh no, it can’t be!” she said with a sob. “It just can’t be!”
Cal had turned at the same time, and when he heard Kate’s tiny sob his knees almost buckled. In his short life he had always tried to see the positive side of every situation. But even he had to admit that, search as he might, it was hard to find a glimmer of hope in this one.
Hunter didn’t know what to think. He was busy questioning the whole concept of reality as he knew it. People appearing and disappearing, and then changing shape: Bowling balls doing aerobatics: Moving out of one world and into another: The quirky list went on and on. But he was absolutely sure of one thing: the story is never over until you hear the very last word; he was damn sure of that.
Angstrom beamed from ear to ear; his champion was back beside him looking angrier than ever, and the looks on the three kid’s faces were priceless. It was a moment he wanted to drink in; it was a moment he wanted to prolong. Victory was a dish to savor while gloating at the enemy. “Did you take care of him in the manner we discussed?” he asked, almost salivating.
The Subatomic Kid Page 29