Joshua Dread

by Lee Bacon

  Ahead of us was an opening. Milton passed though it first, then Sophie, then me. As I emerged, I caught my breath.

  In front of us was a steel platform. Beyond that was a cavernous room that stretched far beneath us. A stairway to our left led to the bottom of the chamber. If the rest of the hotel had seemed like it had been rotting away for the last fifty years, this room looked like something from the future.

  The platform was lined by two-story silver canisters. Wires protruded from the bottoms of the canisters like tangles of unmoving snakes.

  “I can’t believe all this is connected to that old hotel,” I whispered.

  Taking cover, we gazed down at the room beneath us. More silver canisters lined the walls, each of them connected to dozens of wires that all led in the same direction—toward a wall of glass. I strained to see what was behind the glass, but it was too dark.

  A movement caught my eye, and all at once I knew we weren’t alone. Two men were walking toward the center of the room. One of them had a dark suit and a face that seemed weirdly familiar.

  The other man was much easier to recognize. There was no mistaking the silver uniform, the shimmering blue cape and matching gloves.

  “Dad?” Sophie said.

  At the sound of her voice, Captain Justice and the other man spun around.

  Milton and I kept ourselves hidden behind one of the huge canisters while Sophie descended the stairs.

  “Sophie?” Captain Justice said. “What the blazes are you doing here?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said.

  “How did you know where I was? How did you even get here? Did Stanley drive you? I’m going to have to reprogram that robot as soon as I—”

  “Stanley didn’t drive me. I found another way to get here.”

  “What’s going on, Captain J?” asked the man in the suit.

  As soon as he spoke, I realized where I’d seen him before. He was the hologram head. Fink.

  Sophie’s feet clanged against each metal step until she reached the bottom of the stairs.

  “I know you’re a family man and everything,” Fink said to Captain Justice, “but I thought this was a private meeting.”

  “It is,” Captain Justice said. “Sophie, you shouldn’t be here.”

  “I already know about your secret project,” Sophie countered.

  Captain Justice’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. “You do? But … how?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The point is, I know—and I came here to ask you to stop.”

  “Look, darling … I am aware that this might seem like a big change, but sometimes change is necessary.”

  “Why are you being so secretive about it, then?”

  “I was going to make an announcement. That’s why Fink and I are meeting. We’re here to discuss the next stage of the project. The press release is already written, the new uniform has been designed—”

  “Okay, I think we’ve all gotten a little ahead of ourselves,” Fink interrupted. “Maybe it’s best if we talk about this later—”

  But Sophie ignored Fink. “I know all about it, Dad,” she said. “Your little scheme to have microscopic robots teleport all the supervillains in the world.”

  “Microscopic robots? Teleport?” Captain Justice shook his head.

  “Captain J,” said Fink, “I really think that we should—”

  “You nearly killed me and my friends—twice!” Sophie said. “Is that a part of your plan too?”

  “Sophie, I would never …” Captain Justice looked bewildered, as if he were hearing about the details of his plan for the first time. “You must be mistaken. Fink and I are working on a secret project, that’s true. But it has nothing to do with teleporting villains or trying to kill anyone.”

  Before Captain Justice could say anything more, Fink reached into his pocket and removed a cell phone. He jabbed a finger at the touch pad. An instant later, an enormous glowing red wall formed around where Sophie and Captain Justice were standing, trapping them in place like a cage. Fink stared back at them from the other side of the barrier, the cell phone clutched in one hand.

  Captain Justice beat his fists against the glowing wall. But no matter how hard he pounded, the barrier stayed in place.

  “What is this, Fink?” Captain Justice yelled. “What have you done?”

  “I’m sorry, Captain J,” Fink said from the other side of the barrier, “but like you said, sometimes change is necessary.”

  “Curse you, Fink! Let us out of this thing at once!”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that. My boss wants to keep you there.”

  “I am your boss!”

  “Not anymore. I have a new boss now. And he pays considerably more.”

  There was a sound at the other end of the room. Footsteps. The rhythm of shoes moving across the floor. And something else—the steady click of a cane.

  A figure emerged from the shadows. A man shrouded in darkness. He moved slowly, supporting himself with his cane as he approached the glowing barrier.

  Phineas Vex.

  23

  The Handbook for Gyfted Children is a resource that will be useful to you in many different ways.

  I thought about the last time I’d seen Phineas Vex—struggling in the grip of a smoke creature, just before he’d disappeared in a burst of lightning. Milton and I watched, hidden behind the canister, as he neared the glowing barrier where Sophie and Captain Justice were trapped.

  “Greetings, Captain Justice,” Phineas Vex said.

  He spoke in the same commanding voice that I remembered from the Vile Fair. A black patch covered one eye. A scar ran down the side of his face.

  “Release me at once!” Captain Justice hollered at Vex.

  “Release you?” Vex let out a single barking laugh. “After all the work I put into getting you here? I don’t think so.”

  “Very well,” Captain Justice said. “I’ll just have to release myself.”

  Vex watched, amused, as Captain Justice held out his arm, pointing his fist at the glowing boundary.

  “Engage Heat Beam of Honesty!” he bellowed. Nothing happened. He pressed a button on his armor-plated wristband and tried again.

  “I’m afraid your arsenal of badly named hologram weapons won’t work,” said Vex. “Nor will any other powers. The barrier emits an energy field that neutralizes all superpowers and disables any electronic devices. You can’t even get a cell phone signal in there.”

  Vex turned to Sophie.

  “You must be Sophie Justice,” he said, bending forward and leaning on his cane with both gloved hands. “You look just like your mother.”

  A twisted smile formed on his scarred face.

  Sophie stepped forward. Captain Justice tried to pull her back, but she stood her ground, staring at Vex through the glowing barrier.

  “I must say I’m impressed that you survived this long,” Vex said. “Especially after my attempt to”—his awful smile sharpened—“send you a message.”

  “The Firebottomed Rompers?” Sophie said.

  “That’s right. When I discovered that Captain Justice had moved to Sheepsdale, I decided to send his daughter a welcoming committee. Unfortunately, you and your little friends survived. And I suppose you must’ve made it past my flock of Guard Birds as well.”

  “And the smoke creatures,” Sophie said.

  “In that case, you at least deserve to know that your father is telling the truth about his secret project. It has nothing to do with teleporting villains. It’s more of a … How would you describe it, Fink?”

  “A rebranding effort,” Fink said.

  “That’s right,” Vex said. “Rebranding.”

  Sophie turned to Captain Justice. “Is that true, Dad?”

  Captain Justice nodded. “The brand was going stale. We were losing several key demographics. Our plan was to update my image. New uniform, new accessories. Even a new name.” He paused for effect. “Captain Justiz—with a z.”

/>   “So that’s why you had all that stuff with the Z logo on it,” Sophie said. “But what about the smoke creatures?”

  “That was my contribution,” Vex replied. “VexaCorp developed the nano-beings for the smoke creatures. And the smoke creatures brought the villains to me.”

  Fink reached into his pocket and retrieved his cell phone. The same phone he’d used to generate the neutralizing barrier around Sophie and Captain Justice. This time when he punched a button, a light flickered on behind the glass.

  There were people back there—more than a hundred of them. Villains. They were all dressed in identical white robes, and they were being held to the wall by thick metal restraints. Their bodies were slumped forward, their eyes closed.

  My mom and dad were near the far end of the glass. Like everyone else, they were draped in white robes. Their wrists and legs were secured to the wall. Their heads drooped toward the ground.

  “The world’s most dangerous supervillains,” Vex said with a note of awe in his voice. “All here in one room. They’re in artificially induced comas right now. They’ll stay that way until I release them.”

  “You’re insane,” Captain Justice said. “These are your customers. Why would you abduct them?”

  “Oh, but you’re wrong there.” A malicious grin formed on Vex’s face. “I didn’t abduct these villains. You did.”

  A pause filled the room. Captain Justice took a step away from the glowing wall that separated him from Vex.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “On paper, all this is yours.” Vex gestured toward the rows of massive computers, the machinery, the unconscious supervillains behind him. “Thanks to Fink here, everything connected to the disappearing villains leads right back to Captain Justice. Not to mention the smoke creatures and Firebottomed Rompers. The research and development budgets. Even this hotel. Everything is registered under Justiz Industries. And Justiz Industries is registered under your name.”

  Captain Justice stared back at Vex with a stunned expression. I’d seen him hundreds of times before—on magazines, in commercials, fighting my parents—but he’d never looked as confused as he did now.

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” Vex said. “I suppose that’s to be expected. Intelligence was never your greatest strength. All along, you thought you and Fink were just working on some paltry little rebranding. Captain Justiz. But Fink was putting in a lot of extra hours without your knowledge to make sure that all of this”—Vex gestured to the underground chamber, the wall of unconscious villains—“is linked back to you.”

  “You’re even more demented than you look, Vex!” Captain Justice said. “Nobody will believe these lies!”

  “Of course they will! You have the money; you have the motivation. The paperwork, the patents—they’re all in your name. When investigators look into the smoke creatures, they’ll find the Z logo imprinted on the sides of each nano-robot. The same logo that you have on all your new uniforms and accessories.”

  The wristband that Sophie had shown me that morning. He had at least fifty other boxes, she’d said. Uniforms, accessories, capes. All of them with this logo on there somewhere.

  The founder of VexaCorp Industries, Phineas Vex is behind many of the most popular (and deadly) supervillain products on the market. If you see the eyes of his skull cane begin to glow red, it could be lights-out for you.

  “Nobody will ever suspect I was involved,” Vex said. “Why would they? An entire conference hall full of supervillains witnessed me being abducted by one of the smoke creatures when I courageously stepped in to rescue a boy at the Vile Fair.”

  “Even if you do succeed in this deception, the public will be grateful,” Captain Justice said. “With so many supervillains in captivity, the world will be a safer place. And I’ll be the one to get credit for it.”

  “That would be true. Except I intend to release the villains. Just as soon as I’ve finished killing you and your daughter.”

  A terrible silence hung over the room.

  “Allow me to explain what all the newspapers will be reporting tomorrow morning, since you won’t be alive to read any of them,” Vex said coolly. “Captain Justice’s secret plan to teleport supervillains fell apart when one of them—a certain Phineas Vex—managed to escape. Captain Justice tried to stop him and a battle ensued, but Vex got the upper hand, and Captain Justice—the greatest superhero the world has ever known—perished once and for all.”

  Captain Justice looked like he wanted to strangle Vex. But Vex went on, his single eye trained unblinkingly through the barrier.

  “As soon as you and your daughter are out of the way, I’ll free the rest of the supervillains that are trapped here. I’ll tell them everything. How you were the one controlling the smoke creatures. About my escape, our fight. They’ve been in comas since arriving here. They’ll believe all of it. And so will the media. Especially when they discover all the paperwork in your name. Once the story goes public, it will do more for my image—and the image of VexaCorp—than any amount of marketing money ever could have. The world will fear me. The supervillain community will worship me.”

  “Are you saying that this is all just a”—Captain Justice shook his head—“a public relations campaign?”

  “Now you’re catching on. You and I both know that image is everything in our line of work. Without it, heroes and villains are just a bunch of lunatics flying around in funny costumes.” Vex laughed, a low, dark chuckle. “I will forever be known as the villain who killed Captain Justice and rescued the world’s worst supervillains. Do you have any idea what this kind of publicity will do for the profit margin of VexaCorp?”

  Vex tapped his cane once on the hard floor, like a punctuation mark to his wild story.

  “You’re crazy,” Captain Justice said. But there was no trace of the booming confidence I’d always heard from him in the past. He sounded almost … afraid. “You’ll never succeed.”

  “I already have,” Vex replied. “You and your daughter will soon be dead. And Fink is the only other person who can contradict the story. But since he’ll be dead soon too, I doubt he’ll be giving any press conferences.”

  Fink spun to face Vex, his face transforming with surprise and fear. “What?” he muttered. “What are you—”

  Before he could say anything more, Vex lifted his cane, aiming the skull handle at Fink’s chest. A beam of red light shot out of the handle, and Fink collapsed onto the ground.

  Captain Justice rushed forward. “You madman!” he screamed.

  A sickening chill crept down my neck. The cane in Vex’s hand—it had ended Fink’s life in a single flash of red light.

  Vex bent down and removed the phone from the pocket of Fink’s jacket.

  “Technology truly is a wonderful thing,” he said, admiring the phone. “When I was first starting out in the supervillain business, we needed a computer the size of an ice cream truck just to power a graphing calculator. Now I can control every function of this lair with a smartphone. There’s an app for everything. All I have to do is press this touch pad, and it will trigger a stream of poisonous gas inside the neutralizing barrier that will kill you both within minutes.”

  I’d been watching all this with a growing sense of terror. Milton was beside me, his mouth hanging open like he’d just sat through a six-hour horror movie marathon.

  “What do we do?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know.” My voice was so quiet that I barely heard it myself. “But we can’t just wait here for Vex to kill them.”

  As quietly as possible, Milton unzipped the backpack. “Maybe there’s something in here we can use,” he whispered, pulling out cans of Dr Pepper, bags of chips, packs of Justice Jerky.

  Our lives were on the line, and the only weapon we had was junk food.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Milton took out The Handbook for Gyfted Children.

  I hadn’t even known it was in there when I’d let Milton borrow the backpack. N
ot that it would do us much good now. What was I supposed to do with a book? Unless there was a chapter I hadn’t noticed entitled “How to Stop a Psycho Supervillain and His Killer Cane,” it was worthless at a time like this.

  Or maybe it wasn’t.…

  I grabbed hold of the book. Over the past couple of weeks, I’d read and reread all the parts that I’d hoped would help me figure out who I was. And now I could think of only one thing to do with it.

  “No matter what happens,” I whispered to Milton, “just stay down. Make sure Vex doesn’t see you. And keep away from his cane.”

  I took a deep breath, gripping the book tighter. And then I stood up.

  The scene below flashed across my eyes in an instant. Sophie and Captain Justice huddled behind the glowing barrier. Vex a few feet away, the cell phone in one hand, the cane in the other.

  Before I had a chance to lose my nerve, I took aim and threw The Handbook for Gyfted Children as hard as I could. All the built-up energy inside me crackled across my skin. The book burst into flames as soon as it left my hand. A trail of fire swept behind it like a comet.

  Vex spun around just in time. He ducked, and the book went flying right into one of the massive silver canisters behind him.

  KA-BOOOOM!

  The canister exploded instantaneously, sending out a wave of heat that I felt from all the way across the vast room. The detonation knocked Vex to the ground. The phone flew out of his hand and skidded across the floor.

  Behind the glowing barrier, Sophie and Captain Justice looked unharmed by the explosion. I couldn’t say the same for Vex. He was lying on his stomach, his cane gripped loosely in one hand. He wasn’t moving, but I could tell he was conscious by the look in his one good eye. It was focused on something several feet away.

  The phone.

  All at once, I knew what needed to be done. Vex had said that the phone controlled everything. If I could get to it before he did, I could save Sophie and Captain Justice—and release my parents while I was at it.

  My footsteps clanged against metal as I sprinted across the platform. Below me, the flames were spreading. Another of the massive canisters exploded. The blast rocked the platform, and I tumbled headfirst onto metal grating.