Accidental Hero (Jack Blank Adventure) (3 page)

“Hello?” Jack called back from the window.

There was no answer.

Jack waited a minute, then tried to shake it off. “Probably just some air bubbles,” he told himself as he started back down the stairs. No big deal.

Then he heard the dripping. Heavy dripping, like water running off a person’s body onto the floor. Like a large person stepping out of a bathtub. Or a swamp.

“Hello?” Jack called out again, a little more scared this time. “Is anyone down there?”

The reply was footsteps—watery footsteps from all the way down on the dark side of the basement….

Splish, splash. Splish, splash. Splish, splash.

There was no question about it. Somebody was definitely down there.

Jack walked with his pail to the flooded side of the basement. He stood at the doorway of a waterlogged classroom. “Who’s down here?” Jack called out with all the courage he could muster.

Again, he heard footsteps.
Splish, splash. Splish, splash.
The sound was coming from another room down the hall. Jack’s first thought was that Rex and his cronies were
messing with him, but everyone was supposed to be out on the field trip. So, who was down there? Slowly and carefully, Jack walked after the footsteps, following the sound.

He was sure the noise was coming from a classroom down near the deep end of the hall. He followed the noise to another warped doorway and looked inside to find dead quiet and an empty room. He checked a few more rooms but found nothing each time. The footsteps were gone. Jack decided it was just his imagination. He filled his bucket with water and started back toward the rickety wooden staircase on the dry side of the floor.

A door shut behind him. Jack turned around with a jump and dropped his bucket. An old, creaky door dragging several inches of water with it had just closed itself at the end of the hall. This was
not
his imagination.

Most of the classrooms were connected by interior doorways, so Jack had no way of knowing which door had just mysteriously shut. He stared down the hall, looking for a clue. The dim light from the windows flickered ever so slightly off the surface of swirling water at the very end of the hallway. Something was down there. Jack picked up his bucket and started inching down the corridor into
ankle-deep water. The closer he got, the better he could see the water churning about, like someone had just slipped beneath its surface. He reached the stairwell, the very place where the swamp was flooding in from below. A lone banister was all that remained to mark the location of the staircase. It reached out from the murky depths in a futile gesture to escape the swamp.

Jack sloshed through smelly water to the open doorway at the stairwell. It was a doorway to both the staircase below and the depths of the swamp.

Jack was scared enough to keep his distance but curious enough that he had to find out what was down there. If Jack had known what was lurking below the surface, he would have run the other way as fast as his feet would take him. That wouldn’t have mattered, though. It had followed him this far already. It had followed him across the swamp, up through the lower levels of St. Barnaby’s, and right up to the basement stairwell, where it could feel Jack’s presence. It was so close. Just on the other side of the water.

The time had come.

Jack was staring into his own blurry reflection in the
murky water when the image was dispelled by a grabbing hand reaching to clutch at his wrist.

“AGGHH!” Jack yelped, backing away so fast that he tripped on his own feet. He hit the ground with a splash. The hand that had grabbed at him disappeared back below the water’s edge. What
was
that?

From the ground, Jack watched, trembling, as the rest of the thing emerged from the deep. It looked like a heap of scrap metal. It smelled of mildew and rust, a random collection of corroded metal plates. But it wasn’t random. Not really. Wires, nuts, and bolts were sticking out everywhere, and the rising pile of waste looked like garbage left over from the construction work that was always being done around St. Barnaby’s. That garbage was routinely dumped in the swamp, but this garbage was forming the shape of something.

The shifting mass lurched forward, out of the pool of water in the stairwell. Jack got a good look, and what he saw was impossible. The mass was dark gray everywhere except for a shining red light in the center of what was apparently becoming a person’s chest. A newly formed neck raised a newly formed head, and on that head an eye blinked open.
An eye with a black mark running all the way around it and a dark line running down from its inside corner.

The creature was
exactly
like one of the aliens Jack had just read about in his comic books. He was looking at a Robo-Zombie. Jack shivered in place, letting out a stuttering burble of shock. Frozen with fear, his mind tried to tell him he was seeing things, that none of this was possible.

The Robo-Zombie opened its mouth to speak, and a mechanical noise poured out, screeching through the air like choppy analog ringtones and static:

“KSSCHHHHHHH-ANG-ANNG-ANNNG!!!!”

Jack screamed and threw his bucket at the mechanical beast. It was all he could think to do. The robot caught the bucket and crushed it in its left hand. It tossed the bucket away and slowly advanced on Jack.

Frantic, Jack scooted himself backward, still on the ground. The lights in the basement were coming on. Just like before, they were starting out low and gradually growing brighter. This was impossible, Jack thought. Then again, he was staring at a seven-foot robot that had just climbed out of the swamp, so what did impossible really mean? The light intensified. The Robo-Zombie noticed
the lights as they reached their height of brightness and sparks shot out of the sockets. The power to the lights was supposed to be off because it wasn’t safe. As Jack cleared the pool of water by the stairwell, electric bolts shot up through the water, striking the robot. It cried out in pain.

Jack ran.

Sprinting down the long hallway to the staircase on the dry side, Jack was scared beyond belief. Behind him, he could see the robot down on one knee, looking up at him. Smoke rose off its frame. It looked angry. Getting up quickly, it charged at the doorway. Too wide to fit through the door, it broke through the wall on either side. It was coming for Jack, and it was picking up speed.

Jack had always wished he’d had superpowers. He’d go to bed hoping that he’d wake up with the ability to fly, turn into steel, or shoot ice rays from his hands. While flying was Jack’s first choice, anything would have been fine as the Robo-Zombie was coming after him. You don’t get picky when you have a monster robot chasing you down the hall. Jack reached the wooden staircase that led up to the window. He scampered up the rickety
steps, tripping halfway to the top. He caught himself and turned to see the robot powering up in his run. It left the ground and flew right at him.

Jack just barely managed to squeeze himself out through the window at the ceiling, and took off running across the marsh. The robot barreled through the window behind him, taking chunks of the wall off as it charged out of the basement. The damaged section of the building’s foundation sludged into the swamp and the robot shot high into the air.

The Robo-Zombie circled around in the sky, looking for Jack. There was no real cover to be found in the marsh. It was an endless stretch of tall, colorless grass and weeds surrounding vast pools of cold, still water. The drab landscape was interrupted by a few trees and rocks planted here and there, with long, half-barren hedgerows winding in between. Everything was beige and tan. Everything looked dead.

With the robot up in the air, Jack knew he would be easily spotted running through the grass. In fact, any movement at all was sure to give away his position. Jack was scared to death but somehow managed to keep
thinking straight. He stayed perfectly still and ducked down below the reeds.

A hundred or so feet away, the tall grass fluttered. The robot zeroed in on it immediately and swooped down from the sky. Diving like a torpedo, the robot hit the earth with a slam. Jack shook in his hiding place as a gaggle of ducks scattered off in a dozen directions, quacking up a storm.

The Robo-Zombie remained on the ground, swatting at the ducks. Jack ran. He ran hard with all the energy he had. All of it. Pure supercharged adrenaline and fear powered his legs as he ran blindly through the thin stalks of grass. The freezing water was past his ankles, but he ran as fast as he could and didn’t dare look back. He plowed ahead through the marsh, and then suddenly he slammed right into the electric fence.

Jack bounced back with a shock. The robot heard him. Jack looked across the marsh and locked eyes with the iron brute. It was coming for him.

Unable to climb the fence, Jack just kept running. It was still raining outside, and sparks flew off the electric fence as he ran alongside it. From behind him he heard
two zaps from the electric fence and then a third, louder noise.

“Whoa!” Jack yelped as he ducked behind a tree. That last zap was no spark from the fence. Some kind of laser blast had just missed him! The robot was fast approaching. It was taking shots at him as it came. The first two blasts disappeared in the murky water to Jack’s left and right, and the third one struck the trunk of his tree, splintering it in two.

Jack kept running through bushes and weeds, trying to get away, but it was no use. The robot was closing in, screaming its static-filled battle cry and firing shot after shot from its wrist cannons.

Eventually, Jack cleared the swamp, exhausted and with no energy left to keep going. He reached a dead end, penned in by the electric fence at the edge of St. Barnaby’s property. There was nothing there but the orphanage’s power generator out back by an old shed. Jack hid in the shed, hoping to escape. It wasn’t happening. No sooner did he get into a good hiding place than the shed’s roof and walls were ripped off the ground. The robot threw them away and hovered menacingly over Jack. It trained
its arm, ready to blast him into oblivion. Jack sat there shivering, wondering what he’d done to make a monster from his comic books come to life and try to kill him.

“What do you want?” Jack screamed at the monster. “Why are you after me?”

There was no answer, but the monster paused.

It was almost as if the iron beast that chased him all this way was now struggling with the thought of killing him. This came as no comfort to Jack. He was still terrified, and his heart bounced around in his chest like a racquetball. What he didn’t realize was that the faster his heart beat and the more scared he became, the faster the power generator across from him seemed to run. The generator was big enough to light the entire orphanage and power the electric fence. The robot was hovering right over it.

Jack stared up at the monster that was still deciding whether or not to finish him off. Knowing there was nowhere left to run, Jack could only hope that the monster had some kind of a conscience. As the robot primed its wrist cannons, Jack could see that the evil thing intended to complete its mission.

Meanwhile, the power generator below the robot was redlining. A mechanical whirr grew louder and louder, faster and faster, until first one bolt popped and then another and another. By the time the monster finally noticed that the machine below him was bursting at the seams, it was too late.

The explosion was incredible. It rose up in a ball of orange and black flames, a vigorous blast that engulfed the robot in a blazing conflagration. Within that blast thundered a second explosion that knocked Jack off his feet. It was like something out of an action movie that Jack wasn’t allowed to watch, or the comic books he wasn’t allowed to read. The heat from the flames blew into Jack with a draft of sizzling air. The smoke set Jack into a coughing fit, but he didn’t mind. He was actually pretty darn happy. The warm gust of air that hit his freezing body couldn’t have been more welcome if it had come from an oven filled with freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies.

When the smoke cleared, Jack still had no idea what had happened, but he could see the destruction was total. A huge, smoldering hole in the ground and some burned-out chunks of metal were all that remained of the power
generator. It was a good thing St. Barnaby’s was getting a new electric fence for free, because the new generator they were going to need wouldn’t be cheap. And there were no identifiable pieces left of the robot that caused all this mess. The generator had blown up and taken all of the robot with it. Jack sat down in shock and waited in the rain for someone to come and yell at him.

He knew no one was going to believe this.

H. Ross Calhoun was far too angry to even look at Jack. The head disciplinarian stood facing away from him, staring out his office window with his hands clasped behind his back. Jack could still see the smoke from the explosion on the horizon.

“Let me get this straight,” Calhoun began. “You didn’t destroy the power generator and cause thousands of dollars worth of damage… an evil robot that came out of the swamp in the basement did it. Do I have that right? That’s your story?”

Jack was sitting on the other side of an enormous oak desk. “It was a Robo-
Zombie
,” he replied meekly. “From Asteroid R.”

Calhoun sunk into his desk chair with a heavy sigh. He was a grim older man with a serious face, a crooked nose, and fiery black eyes. It was a known fact that he had only smiled four times in his entire life. This was not one of those times. Calhoun’s intense eyes were closed and he rubbed his temples. The whole ordeal gave him a headache.

“The situation is worse than I thought,” he said at last.

Jack didn’t want to know what Calhoun was planning to do with him. This was a man who had once petitioned the Board of Trustees to change the name of the orphanage to “St. Barnaby’s
Ward
for the Hopeless, Abandoned, Forgotten, and Lost,” simply because he thought the word “home” sounded too soft.

“Basically, what you’re telling me is that either you are a liar or you are, in fact, mentally ill,” Calhoun stated.