by Andy Briggs
“Daniel, what have you done?” began Miss Campbell.
“ALL DATA ERASING” suddenly appeared on the boy’s screen in letters big enough for the whole class to see.
“No!” he yelped as the computer screens on either side of him turned deep blue, and a mass of computer code raced across them. The Internet browser disappeared as Jake was about to click on the mysterious e-mail.
Computers began to crash like dominoes around the classroom, leaving a wake of complaints from surprised students.
“Turn them off! Turn them off!” yelled their teacher, but it was too late—the virus had spread in a spectacular manner through the school network and onto the servers, where it would be particularly destructive.
Jake felt a flurry of activity behind him and braced himself for the reprimanding hand of Miss Campbell on his shoulder.
“What have you done?” she cried.
Jake looked up, relieved to see that Miss Campbell was towering over the boy next to him. The boy’s face was a picture of shock, something that made Jake smile all the way home.
Jake managed to avoid spending too much time with his gang after school; he just wasn’t in the mood to be standing around on a street corner as it got dark. He’d left them outside Patel’s newsstand with the shopkeeper loudly complaining that they should hang out somewhere else.
Jake just wanted to head home. Lately he’d felt something was missing from his life. Everything he did seemed a little too predictable and boring. He was smart enough to know that only he had the power to change that.
Loud Ironfist tracks pumped from his computer speakers, and with any luck the blaring music would bother his sister. Jake pulled up his e-mail and saw he had one unread message. He clicked on it.
FROM: Jake Hunter
TO: Jake Hunter
SUBJECT: Jake, join me and rule!
The sender’s e-mail address was different from his own; in fact, following the swirling @ sign was a jumble of characters that seemed assembled from dozens of world alphabets. It was complete nonsense, probably just spam: junk e-mail. But with nothing else to do Jake sighed and clicked on it anyway.
The e-mail opened up in a separate window that drifted through several different languages before settling into English.
“Jake Hunter, unleash your true potential and click here to join me at VILLAIN.NET—the world awaits you!”
Jake hesitated, the mouse pointer hovering over the link. “Why bother?” he thought. As if in answer to the unspoken question the text shifted on the screen. Jake read it in surprise.
“Because you feel you need something more. I offer you the power to rule the world with a simple mouse click. Join me, Jake Hunter. It’s in your blood.”
Jake frowned. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make it stand out from the usual spam he got. Then a thought occurred to him: “This must be just another of Big Tony’s stupid e-mails.”
The screen suddenly went black.
Jake felt a moment’s dread and hoped he hadn’t just infected his own computer. The screen changed to a blinding white that hurt his eyes before slowly fading to reveal a plain-looking Web site. A banner declared:
“VILLAIN.NET—WELCOME!”
Underneath was a single animated icon. Jake clicked on it, waiting for something stupid to appear. Several new icons appeared below a message.
“You have been selected to receive a free gift that will allow you to conquer the world.” As long as the gift involved shooting something, then he wouldn’t complain. A game would help him relieve the boredom. He continued to read. “You will be granted a single temporary power for demonstration purposes. After you have demonstrated your ability you will be met by one of our representatives. Click below.”
Jake glanced through the range of icons on offer. Some were stick figures with various lines and shapes emanating from them, others were just shapes and logos. One particular logo seemed familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. He clicked on it.
The screen rippled as though made from liquid and he could have sworn it warped into a slender finger that tapped him gently on the forehead. The whole experience was over in a second, leaving Jake a little dizzy and doubting anything had actually happened. He certainly didn’t feel any different, and when he looked back at the screen, the Web site had vanished.
“Stupid site,” muttered Jake. He must be more tired than he thought. With resignation, he cranked up the music, turned his attention to his TV at the foot of his bed, and started up his Xbox console. Within a minute he was lost in a world of rampaging monsters. Midway through the game he noticed a symbol on a door within the game’s environment. It was the same as the one he’d clicked on earlier and now he recognized it.
It was a radiation-warning symbol.
Jake awoke with a surprising spring in his step. He met his gang and thoroughly enjoyed chasing the Professor; delivering a wedgie to him that was so severe they could hear his boxers rip. Leaving the geek on the floor, writhing in agony, the bullies strolled into school.
Jake nonchalantly asked Big Tony what the Web site link was supposed to be, but Tony had such a blank expression that Jake assumed he must have already forgotten that he’d sent it.
Maybe it was because he was feeling unusually cheerful that the day was passing quickly, and at lunch he noticed a pretty girl with long brown hair smiling at him. Jake felt a little embarrassed and was thankful he wasn’t with his gang. He had seen her a few times before and knew her name was Lorna, but he had never summoned up the courage to speak to her.
Now he found they were walking in the same direction.
“Hi, Jake.”
“Hi,” he mumbled, staring at his feet.
“What are you doing over the break? Any plans?”
Jake felt his mouth become dry and had a sudden attack of nerves as she looked at him with deep brown eyes. “I … um … nothing. Usual stuff, probably. You?”
Lorna shifted nervously but didn’t stop smiling. “Same. Nothing new.”
They stopped outside the art room, Jake’s destination. They looked at each other in silence for an uncomfortably long time, lost for idle conversation. Then Jake noticed three kids, a couple of years his junior, were picking on a boy who was clearly cornered and outnumbered. Seeing an opportunity to break the silence and act the hero, Jake intervened. The three bullies made a quick escape, thinking that Jake was protecting his standing as school thug—while their victim stared wide-eyed, thinking Jake wanted the honor of beating him up instead.
“Hunter!” screamed Mr. Falconer, the art teacher, as he rushed from the classroom. “Stop that right now!”
Jake looked confused. The bell suddenly rang and a friend of Lorna’s came up and pulled her toward her classroom and out of sight. Mr. Falconer was upon him, bristling with rage.
“I saw what you did!” rumbled the teacher, obviously misunderstanding.
Jake frowned and looked around for the boy he had saved, but the kid had vanished into the mass of students filing into their classes.
“What’re you talking about? I was helping that—”
“You can explain yourself in detention!” snarled Mr. Falconer.
The last place anybody wanted to be on a Friday, just before winter break, was in detention. That included the teachers and it made Mr. Falconer’s temper all the more heated.
“This is unacceptable behavior, Hunter,” he snapped as he paced back and forth.
“I told you, I was stopping that kid from being beaten up!”
“A likely story. Save your lies!” Mr. Falconer’s finger quivered with rage. “I know your type, Hunter. I had to put up with them myself when I was a boy. Picking on younger kids; you should be ashamed of yourself!”
Jake was so angry at the injustice of it all. He started to feel a burning pain in his gut like very bad indigestion and he beccame uncomfortably warm. The words slipped from his mouth before he could stop them. “Are you stupid? Or does that egghead of yours make you d
eaf?”
Falconer went apoplectic. “That’s it! I’m going to make sure you have detention for the rest of the year—”
But Jake wasn’t listening. He’d zoned out and was looking around with a frown. “Do you smell that?”
“I’m talking to you, Hunter! Don’t ignore me!”
“It smells like burning wood.”
Mr. Falconer opened his mouth to argue back, but stopped as the distinctive odor caught his nostrils. It was getting stronger by the second. They both scanned the room with growing concern before spotting fine white smoke curling from the planks of wood stacked against one wall.
“Fire!” yelled the teacher rather pointlessly.
Before he could move toward the fire alarm, the workbench in front of him was suddenly ablaze. An orange tongue of flame punched toward the ceiling and caught the tiles. Mr. Falconer backpedaled in astonishment as all the other wooden workbenches were engulfed by the inferno.
Jake looked around frantically. Even the window frames had started to smolder, and a small potted plant on the corner of the teacher’s desk was now aflame. Jake knew he should move, but something bizarre caught his attention.
His hands and arms were glowing with a green energy that randomly shot out from his body and set fire to whatever it touched. Luckily, Mr. Falconer was turned the other way, running toward a fire extinguisher.
Streamers of green energy lashed from Jake’s body, and he watched in amazement as they struck the steel legs of the stools around the room and buckled them as if they’d suddenly turned to rubber.
Mr. Falconer stretched for the fire extinguisher on the wall but pulled his hand away from the invisible wave of heat radiating from the cylinder. Another streamer caught the metal tank and it began to melt like wax. The pressurized contents exploded outward, metal fragments embedding in the burning benches next to Jake and the teacher.
More ceiling tiles ignited with a loud WHUMP, and the flames rapidly spread above them, dripping burning debris down.
“Hunter! Get—” Mr. Falconer stopped in surprise. He saw Jake’s entire body was glowing with a green aura that extended several inches from his body. Even as he watched, Mr. Falconer could feel his mustache start to singe. He batted at it and looked around in panic for an escape route, but the room was now thick with smoke.
A distant fire alarm was triggered, but that was drowned out by an earth-shattering crack as lumps of the flaming ceiling started to drop. A chunk of plaster struck Mr. Falconer’s head, and he fell unconscious to the floor.
Jake’s anger had been replaced by fear and he ran for the door, fueled by an instinct for self-preservation. He glanced at his hands—the weird glow had vanished. He hesitated at the exit.
The room was now a cauldron of fire, but strangely, Jake didn’t feel the heat at all. He looked down at the prone body of his teacher, who moments before didn’t have the time of day to listen to reason. Now the flames were approaching him with each passing second.
Jake hesitated. He knew he should go back inside and drag his teacher out, but the room was blazing and he doubted that anyone could survive a rescue mission.
And whatever power had erupted from him now seemed to have faded away, so there was no certainty he would survive either.
Precious seconds ticked by as Jake hesitated….
A Meeting in the Dark
Clouds of steam billowed from the remains of the art room as the fire crews bathed it with high-pressure hoses. The seasoned firefighters marveled at the ferocity of this outburst; they had rarely seen anything that could melt metal the way this conflagration had.
Jake was sitting on the bumper of an ambulance looking, and feeling, completely fine. He didn’t even have signs of smoke inhalation. He had eventually doubled back and dragged Mr. Falconer from the inferno. Despite the teacher’s thin appearance, he was incredibly heavy and Jake had made slow progress. But if he had delayed another few seconds, then Mr. Falconer would now be lying under half a ton of rubble. A support beam had burned through, causing the roof to crash in, and with it the contents of the classroom above.
The school principal, Mr. Harris, watched with Jake as the ambulance carrying Falconer pulled away, its lights flashing and siren whooping. Falconer had momentarily regained consciousness and mumbled incoherently about Jake glowing green. The paramedics assumed it was a side effect of the traumatic ordeal.
“You’re a brave boy,” said Mr. Harris. The firemen could find no immediate cause of the fire, and the principal was well aware of Jake’s reputation as a troublemaker. But because he’d pulled the teacher out of the flames, without a doubt saving his life, he couldn’t exactly accuse him of arson. But it felt strange calling the bully a hero.
Jake mulled things over as he walked home. The green haze coming from him had definitely been real, and not a hallucination brought on by the asphyxiating smoke, that much he was sure about. The glow had increased with his anger but then slowly ebbed away when he calmed down.
But what was it? And why couldn’t he feel the heat himself? When he pulled Mr. Falconer from the conflagration the shimmering green energy field had reappeared, covering him completely. Fire had rolled across the wall next to him, and he hadn’t felt the flames lick across his face.
Jake would be the first to admit he wasn’t a straight-A student, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. He knew that he shouldn’t have been able to stand in a room where the metal chairs were melting into puddles. No matter how much he twisted the facts, they all pointed back to the previous night when he visited that Web site and clicked on the radioactive button. He’d seen the monitor warp—that couldn’t have been an optical illusion as he’d originally assumed. Somehow, he had been given the power to produce radiation, and apparently to control it with his anger and fear. Jake decided that when he got home, he was going to get to the bottom of the mystery one way or another.
News travels fast. Almost at light speed if it moves from your school to your parents. Jake hadn’t even inserted his key in the lock before his mother swung the door open and grabbed him in an emotional hug.
“Jacob! You’re okay!”
“Yes, I’m fine,” he managed as he pushed her away.
“Brave thing you did,” his father said, standing a little farther back. “Just glad you’re okay! It gave my heart a start when I heard the news. Running into a burning building took some guts!”
Jake shrugged in response. “Yeah, whatever. I have to go and get changed. I reek of smoke.” He extracted himself from his parents’ hugs and questions and headed upstairs. After a long shower he quietly entered his bedroom, twisted the lock on the door, and booted up his computer.
“Let’s find out what the heck’s going on,” he mumbled.
His fingers were a blur across the keyboard as he logged onto his e-mail. Seconds later the mail program appeared with the mysterious e-mail from his namesake. He had moved to click on the message when it was suddenly pushed down the list by the arrival of a new one. Bold letters read:
“CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR NEW SUPERPOWERS!”
Jake felt his heart beat faster. “What is this?”
He felt his hand tremble as he clicked on the e-mail. A larger window opened up, and he quickly read through it. “Now that you have experienced the awesome powers available to you, take your next step on the path to world domination by meeting here, thirty minutes from now.”
A small JPEG graphic at the bottom of the e-mail depicted a map. It took Jake a few seconds to realize that it showed the way from his house to the abandoned steel mill. Jake looked back up to the screen and noticed the time had already started counting down the passing seconds.
Jake wasn’t naive enough to agree to meet in person a stranger he’d met over the Internet, but he couldn’t ignore what had happened in the classroom. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Somehow, he had inherited some kind of radioactive power from the Villain.net Web site. He tried to recall what he knew about radioactive materi
al. The side effects were not pleasant; he’d seen enough monster movies to know that. He worried that he might get sick from radioactive poisoning.
The timer now read twenty-eight minutes. He figured it would take at least twenty minutes on his bike to get to the steel mill, and walking out the front door would raise questions from his family and waste time.
Jake thumped a fist decisively against his desk. He had to know what was happening to him. He moved to the window and slid it open. The back porch was just underneath his room and offered a perfect step to climb out on. From there he lowered himself to the ground, dropping the last few feet with practiced ease. Making sure nobody was looking from the living room windows, Jake ran across to the toolshed.
His fingers shook as he unscrambled the combination lock on the shed door and pulled out his mountain bike. A shovel fell against the wall with a loud clatter as the bike dislodged it. Jake reached forward to secure the tool before it made any more noise. A quick glance toward the house confirmed nobody had heard. He started to close the door, then hesitated; walking into the steelworks at night, alone, was ill advised. He had no idea who, or what, would be waiting for him. Just on the edge of the shed’s workbench was a heavy iron wrench. Jake picked it up and weighed the tool in his hand.
“You’ll work,” he mumbled and he tucked the wrench in his belt.
* * *
The factory was dark and forbidding. Jake had been here many times before, but never alone. Now the dark ruins looked oppressive and unwelcoming. He drew a long breath and tried to imagine that there was only one threat in the darkness: him. Everybody else had better watch out. Feeling a little more confident, Jake dismounted and followed the security fence. He knew where the rips in the rusty mesh were.
Beyond the fence, crumbling brick walls several stories high flanked the narrow roadways around the mill. Corrugated metal sheets clanked in the gentle breeze. The whirl of his bike’s spokes echoed through the complex. His hand touched the wrench lodged in his belt, and he silently berated himself for not bringing a flashlight. Ivy had covered most of the buildings, while the weather had stripped away roofs, making the first stars of the night visible beyond.