Joshua Dread

by Lee Bacon

  A burst of lightning.

  And then the person vanished. Gone.

  “Wh-what are those things?” I asked.

  Dad looked down at me. His face was as pale as ice. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.”

  The inside of the conference hall was a madhouse. Screams filled the air. People knocked into each other. Villains on hover scooters flew near the ceiling, looking down at the terrible scene. Others blasted holes in the wall to get away. Some tried using their powers against the smoke monsters. Fireballs, freeze rays, sonic booms. But nothing worked.

  A shiver of fear ran down my neck. If these things couldn’t be stopped by a huge building full of supervillains, then the rest of the world didn’t stand a chance.

  I was knocked to the ground by a mob of people running toward an exit. I turned in time to see what the group was running from.

  One of the smoke creatures was heading toward me.

  Its featureless face turned in my direction. As I tried to stagger away, my feet slipped on a pile of Cheswick’s Vintage Villain Uniforms and I fell to the floor again.

  The creature was only a few feet away. Its arm reached out.

  I rolled under the table of vintage uniforms and out the other side just as the thing grabbed for my leg. Clambering to my feet, I began to run. Pushing through a screaming crowd, I managed to lose the smoke creature in the maze of smoldering booths. To my left, I caught sight of the stage. Vex looked like he was trying to climb down to the floor level, as if he wanted to personally fight the smoke creatures who’d interrupted his speech, but a team of bodyguards held him back.

  Next to the stage, I spotted my parents huddled behind an overturned speaker. Dad was desperately looking out over the madness. Mom called out for me. And from where I was standing, I could see something they couldn’t. A smoke creature was approaching them from behind.

  I tried screaming their names, but my voice was swallowed by all the other sounds in the hall. From this distance, there was no way to get their attention. Panic clutched my heart. Behind my parents, the smoke creature stalked closer. It would reach them any second.

  Without another thought, I took off running as fast as I could—straight for the smoke creature. I knew it was a crazy thing to do. I should’ve been running away from them—not toward them. But my parents were in danger. I couldn’t just stand by and watch them vanish in a flash of lightning.

  An unstoppable monster that’s over six feet tall, made of smoke, and capable of terrorizing even the deadliest supervillains. Unless you want to vanish in a bolt of lightning, this guy is not to be messed with.

  My feet pounded the floor. Halfway there, I passed by the zombie obedience booth we’d visited earlier. Now the trainer was gone. And so was the zombie. Its chain hung broken next to a pile of uneaten tofu.

  Without slowing down, I grabbed a handful of the tofu and threw it as hard as I could at the smoke creature. I’m not sure what I expected to happen. If all the devious gadgetry and special powers in the hall hadn’t been able to harm the creatures, I doubted a blob of meat substitute would do the trick. But as the tofu left my hand, it wasn’t pink any longer. It was as black as a piece of charcoal. Fire trailed it through the air as though it were a missile.

  Spontaneous combustion. It had somehow allowed me to transform a lump of tofu into a fiery projectile rocket.

  Like all the other weaponry in the convention hall, the charred tofu brains sailed right through the creature. But at least I’d managed to get the thing’s attention. It stopped moving toward my parents and turned its dark, cloudy head toward me. Then it began walking my way.

  “Joshua!” Dad called. “Get out of there!”

  I turned to run, but that was as far as I got. Behind me was another smoke creature. I was surrounded.

  My options had dwindled away to nothing. The creatures stalked toward me from both sides. Flaming booths blocked any chance of escape. And I didn’t even have any tofu left.

  I could hear my parents calling out to me, but there was nothing either of them could do. It was too late. The smoke creatures were closing in. The one closest to me reached out. Its cloudy fingers were circling my neck when I heard another voice.

  “Stop right there!”

  The voice was deep, authoritative—both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The smoke creature and I both turned to look at the man who had just spoken.

  It was Phineas Vex. Up close, he looked different somehow. The scar stood out, like a ribbon running down his bald scalp. His eye patch glimmered from the lights overhead. His other eye—the good one—shifted until it found me. He focused on me, the eye narrowing as he spoke.

  “Run!” Although his voice was quiet, the word seemed to vibrate in my chest. “Get out of here! Now!”

  Vex raised his cane above his head and swung it at the smoke creature. I didn’t see what happened next. I was already running toward my parents.

  Mom and Dad took me in their arms.

  “I’m so glad you’re safe,” Mom whispered into my ear.

  “What about Vex!” I twisted to look behind me. What I saw sent a shiver through my entire body.

  Vex was now in the smoke creature’s grip, hanging a foot above the ground. His legs swung limply beneath him like an oversized rag doll’s. His cane dropped to the ground.

  “We can’t just leave him!” I screamed, trying to free myself from my parents’ arms.

  The more I struggled, the more they pulled me back. I looked around, seeking something—anything—I could throw at the thing. But it was already too late. The smoke had Vex surrounded, a chaotic mass of twisting darkness. In the next moment, the cloud filled with a blast of lightning.

  And then Vex was gone.

  “We have to get out of here.” Mom’s voice was quiet and firm. “Now.”

  I felt myself being pulled. With my parents on either side of me, we staggered over the demolished ruins of disintegrated booths.

  Halfway to the exit, Dad came to a sudden halt. The shift in momentum nearly sent me tumbling to the ground. He reached one gloved hand into a pile of wreckage, and whatever it was he found, he carefully slipped it into a pouch connected to his utility belt before I could get a look.

  Then we were moving again, running through the burning convention hall toward the exits.

  9

  Don’t believe everything you read.

  At school the rumors about Sophie Smith had only gotten crazier over the weekend. Now the Cafeteria Girls were saying that she was a recluse with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  “That’s why she doesn’t have any friends,” said one of them.

  I thought about pointing out that maybe Sophie might not have any friends because she’d been at Sheepsdale Middle School for only a total of one and a half days, but kept my mouth shut because (a) the Cafeteria Girls didn’t actually know that I existed, and (b) I was worried what kind of things they’d say about me if they ever found out that I did exist.

  “Not to mention her dad’s a complete psycho,” one of the girls said. “I heard there’s a room in his house that’s filled with torture devices.”

  The entire table gasped.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. There are, like, all these high-tech machines with sharp points and crazy-looking straps. Really painful-looking stuff.”

  “But … why would he need torture devices?”

  “Because he tortures people. Duh!”

  The girls went silent at the thought of this. It was without a doubt the longest period of silence in the history of the Cafeteria Girls, and it was only interrupted when the bell rang.

  “Can you believe that?” Milton said once we’d left the cafeteria. “Sophie’s dad must be insane!”

  I stopped walking outside the doorway to the debate hall and looked back at Milton.

  “Have you ever thought that some of the stuff we hear about people at this school is made up?” I asked
.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, those girls aren’t always reliable.”

  “Maybe, but …” Milton unzipped his backpack and reached inside. “Wait till you see this.”

  Milton pulled out a magazine. The title stretched across the top section of the cover:

  SUPER SCOOP

  I’d seen it in supermarkets, always full of gossip about celebrity superheroes and supervillains. According to my parents, Super Scoop was a trashy tabloid that made the Cafeteria Girls look like a professional fact-checking department. Maybe that was why it was so popular.

  On the cover of this week’s issue was a photograph of Captain Justice. Beside the photo was a block of bold text:

  CAPTAIN CAUGHT CANOODLING!

  Captain Justice was standing next to a tall, slender woman with fiery red hair and a matching cape. She was wearing sunglasses and holding a coffee cup. They looked to be frozen in a moment of laughter at something one of them had just said, obviously unaware that they were being photographed.

  “That’s Scarlett Flame!” Milton said, pointing at the red-haired woman. “She’s the one who fought the Abominator on the roof of the Empire State Building. There’s tons of cool stuff in here!”

  My mom had a different opinion about Super Scoop. “Trashy magazines like that give us all a bad reputation,” she had whispered to me the last time we’d passed an issue in the checkout line at the grocery store. I’d wanted to point out that trying to destroy the world probably didn’t do much for their rep either.

  Mom had probably still been upset about the cover story from a few months earlier entitled, “The Botanist: Is She Getting TOO Close to Her Zombies?” This had been accompanied by a photo of Mom supposedly kissing one of her zombies. Actually, the zombie had been trying to bite her ear off, but the magazine hadn’t mentioned that.

  “It’s not even real journalism,” Mom had complained. “It’s just lies. Who buys this junk?”

  “My mom subscribes,” Milton said now, grinning. “I always look through the new issues when they show up at our house.”

  He flipped excitedly through the magazine’s pages.

  “Here’s an article about this Mexican supervillain, El Diablo Gigantico, who’s supposedly trying to make it big in America now. And this kid nFinity—he’s only fifteen, but he’s already one of the most famous superheroes in the country. Oh, and this article about the Dread Duo …”

  Milton pointed to an extremely unflattering photo of my parents. The title of the article was stamped across half the glossy page in massive letters:

  The Dread Duo—Fiends or Frauds?

  “Remember Dr. Dread from the other day?” Milton asked, nodding at the shadowy image of my dad.

  “He was that guy who tried to flood the earth, right?” I said, like I wasn’t entirely sure.

  “It says here that he’s not even a real doctor. He just added ‘Dr.’ to his name because it sounds more sinister.”

  “That’s not true! He got his PhD in engineering at—” I stopped when I noticed the confused expression on Milton’s face.

  “I thought you didn’t pay any attention to this stuff,” he said.

  “I don’t. I just meant that— Er … I read that he is a real doctor. On the Internet. But then again, maybe he’s not.”

  Milton stared at me for a second longer, then shrugged, glancing back at the magazine. He paged through a few more articles. Glossy photos of superheroes and supervillains walking their dogs, jogging with mutants, waving at fans. I caught my breath when I noticed the next headline.

  Violence at the Vile Fair!

  Underneath was a grainy photograph of one of the smoke creatures. Just looking at it sent a spasm of fear through my body. But before I could read anything else, Milton had flipped forward to the next article.

  “This is what I wanted to show you!” He pointed to the page. “It says that there was a big shipment of robot parts to a house in Sheepsdale. Do you have any idea what someone would need robot parts for?”

  I shook my head.

  “Robots! That’s what!”

  Milton checked over his shoulder, then turned back to me.

  “I wonder if this has something to do with Sophie’s dad,” he whispered. “It doesn’t say where in Sheepsdale, or who, but … what if it’s him? I mean, it’s just like what the Cafeteria Girls were talking about, with all the torture devices and machine guns and stuff. Whoever her dad is, he’s gotta be into some crazy stuff. I’ll bet he ordered the robot parts too.”

  “Maybe …” My brain was still stuck on the earlier page about the Vile Fair. “Hey, can I borrow that magazine?”

  Milton’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you didn’t like Super Scoop.”

  “I just wanted to find out more about the … er—”

  “Robot parts?”

  “Exactly.”

  Milton’s face broke into a grin. “See? I told you it’s interesting.” Closing the magazine, he pushed it into my hand.

  I said goodbye to Milton and hurried to my locker, where I opened Super Scoop to the Vile Fair article. In the time since we’d gotten back from New York, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what had happened.

  But after reading the article twice, I was still clueless. Nobody knew what the smoke creatures were or who was behind the attack. The super community was teeming with speculation—that the smoke creatures had been sent by a superhero, or a villain looking to cut into the competition, or even a business rival of Phineas Vex. The only thing everyone could agree on was that they were all afraid of what would happen next.

  Nobody felt safe.

  “Hey, Joshua.”

  The voice made me flinch. Shoving the magazine into my backpack, I whirled around. Sophie Smith was standing behind me.

  “I just wanted to check if you’ve started thinking about topics for our project yet,” she said.

  “Oh …” The history project. With everything else that had been going on (finding out I had a superpower, getting chased around a convention hall by smoke creatures—you know, that kind of thing), it had completely slipped my mind. “I’ve been sort of busy.”

  “Same here.” Sophie smiled, like she was relieved she wasn’t the only one. “I’m still trying to find my way to all my classes.”

  “I could show you around if you want.”

  The words were out there before I’d even realized what I’d said. Here I was talking with a girl whose dad possibly kept torture devices lying around the house, and I was offering to give her an orientation tour?

  My voice rose as I tried to explain myself. “What I mean is, I moved a lot too when I was younger. So I know that it can make you feel like a freak.”

  Sophie’s smile faded.

  “Not that I think you’re a freak!” I added quickly. “You’re very non-freaky, believe me. I was just—”

  “It’s okay,” Sophie said. “I know what you mean. Every time I show up in a new town, I think, This is going to be the place where we finally end up. But it never is. Sometimes I just feel like … like luggage. As soon as I meet a few people, my dad says we have to pack up and move again.”

  Now that she’d mentioned her dad, I was halfway tempted to ask about him. I thought about the crazy rumors swirling around Sophie’s home life. And the way she’d introduced herself in class the other day, like she was still getting used to saying her name out loud.

  But Sophie was already backpedaling away from me. “Better get going,” she said quickly. “See you in seventh period.”

  She disappeared into the crowded hallway before I had a chance to say goodbye.

  10

  Make time to practice your Gyft.

  Ever since returning from the Vile Fair on Saturday, my parents had been working nearly nonstop in their lab. It was no different when I got home that afternoon. I heard the quiet whoosh of a Bunsen burner upstairs, and the murmur of muffled voices.

  Settling onto the couch, I opened The Handbook
for Gyfted Children to the chapter titled “Practicing Your Powers.” There was a lot of technical advice relating to specific powers. For example, if you had the Gyft of flight, it was a bad idea to practice under a ceiling fan. But the basic idea of the chapter was pretty simple. If you wanted your Gyft to work, you needed to do three things:

  Practice a lot

  Control your emotions

  Focus your mind

  I searched the house for something to practice on, until I found the ceramic lawn gnome that had been sitting in a box ever since Aunt Linda had given it to my mom years before. The gnome had bright cheeks, a pointed hat, and a weird-looking smile. I figured my mom wouldn’t mind if it exploded.

  I took the gnome up to my bedroom and sat down next to it on the floor, concentrating on its long beard and its funny grin. I held out my hands, thinking about sparks raining down from my fingertips, trying to imagine the gnome’s little pointed hat combusting. I reached down and gripped the lawn gnome around its chubby ceramic belly …

  And nothing happened. The gnome looked just as it had before. Same pointed hat. Same goofy grin. Not even a burn mark.

  I closed my eyes and tried to block out all my distractions. But I couldn’t get Sophie out of my mind. It was as if the more I tried to forget her, the more I thought about her. I opened my eyes. The gnome’s expression was starting to look kind of smug, like he knew I would fail.

  Gritting my teeth with frustration, I pushed the gnome aside and slammed my fists down onto the carpet.

  BOOM!

  It sounded like a firecracker had gone off. In the next instant, the carpet erupted into flames.

  I fell backward as the fire spread. Smoke billowed up to the ceiling. Scrambling to my feet, I tripped over my chair and staggered into the hallway. I grabbed a fire extinguisher from the closet and charged back into my room.

  Behind me, I could hear my parents’ footsteps pounding the floorboards. The smoke alarm was wailing.

  Shielding my face with one hand, I lifted the fire extinguisher and pointed the hose.