by Jane De Suza
‘What is your plan?’ Tara Rumpum asked eagerly.
‘I am here to kidnap the Grazor,’ announced Eggster.
‘I have been planning it for thirty years. He ruined my snapping clownfish attack. And now I will finally get him. I will kidnap him and get my bees to sting him till he turns fatter and fatter and bursts. And then I will have my revenge.’
Gra was trying to follow him but gave up midway and began to swat bees.
‘Don’t do that!’ Eggster yelled. ‘Those are my weapons, my babies. I need them.’
‘You eat them?’ Gra asked.
‘Go home!’ Eggster yelled at him, ‘you silly deaf man in fancy dress.’
‘ET go home,’ said Gra suddenly and walked off. Phew!
Tara Rumpum told Eggster, ‘Well, you’re too late. The Grazor disappeared years ago. He hasn’t even been seen for the last thirty years. So you’ll never be able to kidnap him.’
‘Noooo!’ Eggster started hopping around in fury. ‘Tell me where the Grazor is, or I will . . . I will . . . I will kidnap you instead.’
Tara Rumpum’s eyes lit up. She couldn’t believe she was getting a chance to switch from reporting the news to making the news. The cameras were still rolling. She would be on prime time TV. Kidnapped! How very exciting! She held out her hands to the hopping villain. ‘Kidnap me!’
Eggster was getting exceedingly frustrated. His plan was not going according to plan. The bees had escaped early, the Grazor had disappeared, the city was locked down except for two lunatics—one in bandages, who, thankfully, had toddled off, and a hysterical woman in a yellow raincoat. Where was the resistance, the violence, the drama?
‘Are you important?’ Eggster asked Tara Rumpum. ‘If you are kidnapped, will the city come to a standstill?’
‘What is the ransom you want?’ asked Tara Rumpum, thoroughly in her role now. She held Eggster’s hand and pulled their joined hands up towards the camera. ‘People all over town, this is the latest breaking news. The leading journalist and fearless reporter, Tara Rumpum, that is, er, me, has been kidnapped by the evil Eggster, who plans on feeding her to his lions unless a ransom is paid.’
Eggster had not thought of a ransom. He asked, ‘Who are you talking to? There’s no one else here!’
Tara Rumpum railed on, ‘Good people everywhere, ask yourselves. Will you be manipulated by an evil villain and pay a sky-high ransom or will you see the lovely leading lady, er, that’s me again—die a violent death, torn apart by barracudas?’
Eggster had had enough. He seriously doubted the sanity of the people of this city. While he’d locked himself in for thirty years, planning his revenge, he suspected the city had been increasingly populated by idiots: first that kid who kept disappearing in patches, then the man in bandages and now this woman who talked to the air. No superheroes at all left to attack. A good villain needs a good hero to compete with. Well, this weird woman would have to do, since she kept insisting on being kidnapped.
‘You stay with me here,’ Eggster growled at Tara Rumpum, ‘and don’t try to run away, if you want your family to ever see you again. Now, contact the police and tell them they have to do every single thing I say.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Tara Rumpum eagerly, and turned to the camera, ‘YOU HEARD HIM! Do everything he says or he will feed me to the sharks.’
‘Bees!’ snapped Eggster, losing it. ‘They are not barracudas, lions or sharks. They are BEES.’
‘The vampire bees!’ yelled Tara Rumpum. ‘Give him his ransom, good people, or I will never again bring you the news live.’ She turned to Eggster. ‘Now, what do you want?’
Eggster puffed out his chest and said in a steely, cold voice, ‘I want the Grazor. I want every single person in this city to go searching for the Grazor, find him in whichever hole he’s hiding in, and bring him to me.’
Blank, who had been listening invisibly, was totally uncool with it all by now. How could he, a mini-superhero, just stand by and watch while the heroine got kidnapped and fed to the bees? Because surely the Grazor had like, copped it, died, and disintegrated into dust years ago.
He went flying towards Eggster and tried to unlink Tara Rumpum and Eggster’s hands. In the chaos, his arms became visible once more. Eggster laughed. ‘It is the patchy boy again!’ He grabbed one of Blank’s arms, and he now had two hostages instead of one.
Well done, Blank, well done, you clod. If you’d only stopped acting the hero, and let the real hero (me) save the day!
26. Get a ’brainweave’
Thankfully, we’ve got back to the good spelling bit, which means, back to me.
In the cave.
With mosquitoes inside.
And the Lanther outside.
The next morning brought sunshine and crowds milling all around the zoo, but no warden came in to save me. Instead, at around ten in the morning, there was some sort of show outside the Lanther enclosure. It was feeding time! And the warden was outside the fence there, showing off in front of a crowd of schoolkids. He was talking to them, and giving them a whole lot of lies, I bet, and throwing large chunks of meat into the enclosure, so that the Lanther jumped at each piece and swallowed it.
In my cave, I swallowed too. But for the closed metal door, I would be that chunk of meat. Ulp!
I tried to call out for help from inside the cave, but the cheering of the stupid schoolkids drowned out my cries for help.
It was now or never. While the Lanther was distracted, I opened the metal door of the cave and snuck out. I didn’t want anyone to see me, or they’d scream and that would warn the Lanther. So I dropped to my belly . . . softly, carefully crawling forward like a snake . . . and as I’d crawled about a dozen feet, with no one noticing, get this, after all that hullabaloo, the crowds and the warden just moved off. The Lanther turned back, licking its lips, and its eyes widened when it saw the stupidest chunk of meat in the world crawling right towards it.
And there we were—me and the Lanther—face to face again, with nothing in between.
This is where the story could have ended.
Except for one small thing. I wasn’t a wimpy little pushover any more. I was not ready to be Lanther-feed. No way! I would show that mutant kitty just who I was. I was SuperZero!
In that second, a whole lot of things flashed in my mind. I could make super things happen. I’d been doing it all my life—the homework papers flying out, the paper plane flying in, the light switch turning on, the fountains flowing into the building—I was making this cool stuff happen. And—the most super of them all—Gra! If I was the grandson of the Grazor, I must have inherited something similar to his powers, right? He stopped trains. He upturned cars. He . . . hey, he did a lot of things to . . . things. He seemed to have had power over things.
Like perhaps getting their energies to work overtime, like Mom told me happened in a microwave. And that right there was the microwave brainwave that changed it all! Or ‘brainweave’, as Blank woulda said.
I could freakin’ control things! With my super-duper mind! What a power! What a mind! What a granddad! What an idiot I’d been! What a snarl!
Snarl?
The Lanther had crouched, its muscles coiled, its yellow eyes now slits, and then with an earth-shattering growl, it leapt up towards me, breaking into my happy what-a-dream.
Earth-shattering? That’s all I could think of, with the Lanther mid-air and microseconds from landing on me, the pink pyjamas wouldn’t be all it would get this time.
My head was pounding, glowing, throbbing. I could feel that red heat, and this time, it came naturally to me—what to do. I trained that awesome red-hot power towards earth-shattering. And it happened!
A hole appeared right under me in the soft soil, and I fell into it. Then it caved into a long, narrow tunnel and I was inside it, scraping my way further in, while I saw the Lanther’s furious face above. It was too narrow a tunnel—the Lanther couldn’t even get its head in. Ha! Kind as I was, I peeled off my pink-striped jammies and
flung them towards the Lanther’s face—let it rip that up instead. Was I thankful to see my own purple SuperZero suit again, duckie undies and all!
I scraped further in, crawling further and further till it got pitch-black, and I was on all fours, just fumbling away inside, trying to get away as soon as I could. I was just so excited about finally getting my superpowers that I didn’t mind getting my knees scraped a bit.
After what seemed like ages, I popped out in the middle of a whole lot of legs in socks and shoes. The schoolkids were as surprised as I was. The warden was going on and on about ‘burrows and how some snakes and rabbits make burrows like long tunnels to . . .’ and there I was, popping up out of the ground!
I probably looked grimy and mud-covered from my recent crawl, and one of those teacher’s pets piped up, ‘And what ugly species is that?’
‘Look, his head is glowing,’ said the smartass kid, ‘it’s a big, ugly glowworm.’ I decided this was as good a time as any to start practising my superpower. I focused on the kid, my red-hot beam on his geeky green cap.
Let’s just say his cap got jammed on to his head, covering his eyes, and it took a whole lot of pulling and twisting and yelling from his teacher and the warden to get it off. By that time, I had slipped out of the zoo and was on my way back to civilization. Make way, ordinary people and bad spellers. SuperZero was back!
27. Be the hunter, not the hunted
Now, remember that I had, at that point of time, absolutely no idea what had happened in the city. Blank only reported it much later. So I had no clue about evil egg-shaped men, killer bees, kidnapping, and all that. I ran back, feeling absolutely on top of the world. My superpowers were here! I was finally a full-fledged superhero!
I was all ready to show off.
Disappointingly, the streets were deserted—not a single person around. I recalled there suddenly being one huge rush getting out of the zoo because everyone seemed to be panicking. They had said something about police calls and having to go home and staying locked up . . . I now wondered what all that had been about.
It was a long way back from the zoo—should I go to the hospital—or home—or to school? I stood at the crossroads. No really, I meant the crossroads when the yellow traffic light spoke, ‘So you found them?’
Blank? And found what? I squinted up at the yellow light to see the Fly sitting up there. He buzzed down and alighted on my shoulder. ‘You found your superpowers finally, right?’
‘How’d you know?’
‘You’re walking differently. Your head’s held up high.’
I smiled. ‘I found them, yup. Like you said, I AM super after all! I can control things with my mind; I can make things fly or bend or double up. I can make caps jam on kids’ heads, I—’
‘Whoa! Stop it right there.’ The Fly shook his head gravely. ‘One of the rules of superheroism is you never use it for the bad, selfish, silly things, okay? It’s a code of honour.’
‘But,’ I said sheepishly, after a while, ‘what exactly is the IT?’
‘It sounds like molecular manipulation to me—’ the Fly began.
‘Molly-what?’
‘You’re somehow able to make changes to things on a molecular level—change their shapes and abilities, and very, very few superheroes have that power. I know, in fact, only one very great superhero who had that, and he disappeared.’
‘But he is . . .’ I stopped. I didn’t want to let out Gra’s secret. Not to the Fly. Not to anyone.
As we walked along the street, a voice rose out shrilly: ‘Will I be bitten to bittereens by billions of bees?’
The voice came from a TV in the window of a large department store with many TVs and washing machines in its display window. The Fly and I turned to look. The TV screen showed something that looked like a reality show from Mars—someone in a police helmet and a yellow raincoat was holding hands with a short oval-shaped man in a space suit who was holding another pair of only hands (Blank?). Over them, a huge black cloud of bees hovered, and through the buzzing, I could hear the raincoat lady scream: ‘Good people everywhere, you are about to witness the murder of the Voice of your City, er, that is, me, at the hands of a shark called Eggster and his tiny flying sharks!’
‘Flying sharks?’ I frowned. ‘I was only away for a day. When did flying sharks attack our city?’
The Fly said, ‘Ahem, well, not really sharks. That’s Tara Rumpum and that’s the Eggster, who’s emerged after thirty years to attack us with bees that sting people and make them bloat and burst. Everyone’s locked indoors, and the Superhero School teachers are all poisoned and sick. Now the only thing that can save us is if Eggster finds the . . .’
Tara Rumpum’s screeches cut in, ‘If only anyone could find our yesteryears’ hero, the great Grazor, and bring him over, the award-winning news reporter—me—could be set free! Do any of you good people know where the Great Grazor is hiding?’
The Grazor? I paled. They couldn’t find Gra and feed him to the bees. They had no idea how old and potty he’d become. It wasn’t fair. He couldn’t fight back now.
It was up to me. I turned to the Fly and straightened my shoulders. ‘I am going to save the city. I am going to molly-er-molly-er . . .’
I saw hundreds of images of a superboy stare back at me, and then I was off.
As I walked closer to where the action unrolled, the swarm of bees seemed to sense me. They turned like a big black tornado and began to move in my direction. I walked on, desperately thinking of what thing I could manipulate to protect myself—fountains again?
And then, as in times of crisis, I thought of my mom, who, when boiling mad, was a match for any number of bees, and I remembered her collection of boxes. She saved every box and every string. She never chucked anything out (‘What if this is needed one day?’). Right you are, Mom.
Focusing hard, feeling the centre of my forehead throb, I tensed myself and willed my superpower to work, work, work (after all, I had to draw something over from a pretty long way off). And just when those bees zeroed in on me, the largest box ever—a gigantic refrigerator carton—came flying over and settled over me. Nice! The bees buzzed around, frustrated.
The sharp eyes of Eggster were the first to pick me out. He shouted, ‘Am I dreaming, or has this city gone completely nuts? First the boy in patches, then the deaf mummy, then a hysterical woman talking to the air, and now a walking refrigerator?’
‘I have come to save the city!’ I announced loudly through my cardboard box.
Tara Rumpum shouted in glee, ‘Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a fridge? Heroes come in strange shapes and sizes nowadays. Good people, is this finally . . . the Grazor?’ She turned to me: ‘Are you the Grazor?’
‘No, but I am SuperZero!’ I announced, and there was a yelp and Blank’s shocked eyebrows appeared. He said, ‘SuperZero, go home! This is much too dangerous for you.’
‘Blank,’ I said proudly, though it was a bit muffled coming through that cardboard box. ‘Blank, now YOU may go home. Thanks for the help so far. Now hand it over to a real superhero.’
‘Haha, a real hero, this cardboard box.’ Eggster laughed loudly, and reached out to tug off my cardboard carton, thereby having to leave at least one hand. Blank got free and immediately disappeared again. Not bad, one saved!
‘I am SuperZero,’ I shouted to the camera. ‘I am going to save the world. Watch how!’
‘City, not world,’ whispered Blank.
‘Oh okay, the city, I am going to save the city,’ I said loudly.
‘Who are you?’ Eggster snapped. ‘Your box says you are Frost-Free. Are you a freezer? Or are you the Grazor? Because then you and I have a fight coming up.’
‘I am not the Grazor, but . . .’
‘I don’t believe you. How do we know? Take off the box and show us your face!’ Eggster barked.
‘All right. You want to see who I am?’ And I pulled that box right off me to show my face on TV—everyone would know who I was finally. There was a
gasp! From Tara Rumpum, who said, ‘The bullshit boy!’
Blank gasped too. ‘No, SuperZero, no. Now the bees will get you! That was his evil plan.’
Eggster threw the cardboard carton away, and stomped on it. He began to laugh as the bees finally zoomed in on me.
I couldn’t think outside the box (yes, yes, it’s true). So I charged off, as fast as I could, with a horde of bees following, Tara Rumpum in her raincoat and high heels running after us, dragging a camera and recording it all.
28. Be warned that sometimes a superhero’s job stinks
Later when I saw the news footage, I must admit it was hide-your-face embarrassing. There I was, a supposed superhero, running down the street, my cape flying, my yellow duckie briefs flapping, with a cloud of bees chasing me.
I will tell you how it went on the news.
Tara Rumpum: ‘The barracuda bees with jaws of steel are closing in on our victim, who will soon be stung, swelling up and bursting right on your TV screen. He looks like he’s running towards certain death, towards a violent end, towards . . . a dog?’
There was a crazy happy barking, and all of a sudden, right out of nowhere, came BigaByte. I would have hugged him—I’d missed him so much. But BigaByte, instead of running towards me, began to run away from me.
Huh?
So I chased him, while the bees chased me, and Tara Rumpum chased us all in her high red heels, and the rolling camera rolled after us all.
‘BigaByte, slow down,’ I yelled. ‘Where are you headed?’ The roads looked familiar. He ran on and I followed him, not knowing why exactly I followed him except that I trusted this waddling sausage. So we ran down twisting lanes, with tall walls on either side and an increasingly strong stench hovering around. And then I got it!
BigaByte, the world’s fattest dog—the world’s fattest saviour!
I saw a wall I knew very well, with a big bite chewed through the bottom, through which BigaByte now crawled. I squeezed myself through and the bees swarmed after me. And then we ran into the big room with the big pot full of cow dung, which was making biogas to save the world. Well, it could start saving the world right now.