Archvillain (10 page)

While he tried to figure it out, Mike flew up to Kyle and — before Kyle could react — punched him in the jaw. Another, louder, cheer went up from the crowd.

“He hit me!” Kyle couldn’t believe it. The punch had thrown him halfway across the square — if he hadn’t braked in time, he would have crashed into the Bouring Record building. “That doofus actually
hit
me!”

“You truly are a genius,” Erasmus said drily. “Duck.”

Kyle dodged just in time as Mike — on him super-fast — launched another powerful punch. The fist missed and Kyle swooped up in a loop to get some distance.

“I can’t let you hurt anyone else, you friend!” Mighty Mike bellowed, and the crowd roared its approval.

“Did he just call me his friend? For real?”

“I think he meant ‘fiend.’ ”

“Oh, that makes much more — Whoa!”

Kyle sidestepped two more punches. Mike was faster than Kyle, though, and Kyle knew he couldn’t dodge forever.

So, this was how it was going to be? Kyle was willing to make this a battle of wits, but clearly Mighty Mike had no wits. He had to resort to swiping the Pants Laser and then throwing punches. Yeah,
that
was mature. What a baby.

While Kyle avoided Mike’s superstrong hands, he tried to figure out how to escape. He couldn’t just fly home — Mike would follow him.

He needed to distract Mike. And he knew just how to do it.

He darted to the dais, where Sheriff Monroe and the mayor were calling for order. The crowd had finally shaken off the paralysis that came with panic; chaos ensued. Before anyone could stop him, Kyle grabbed
the fallen statue of Micah Bouring and lifted it over his head.

“No!” Mighty Mike cried. “Don’t throw it!”

Kyle didn’t really
want
to throw it. Still. He needed a diversion.

After only the slightest hesitation, Kyle heaved the statue at the nearest building, which happened to be the Town Hall. Honestly, the architecture was sort of lackluster and dull, so even if Mighty Mike missed it, it’s not like the property damage would be a huge crime. Still, he didn’t stick around to watch Mighty Mike catch it — he just boosted his flight speed to the max and flew away as fast as he could, breaking the sound barrier. The sonic boom echoed out from the square, shattering every window in a two-block radius.

Good. That would keep Mike busy even longer.

Kyle flew home.

First of all and most important: It wasn’t my fault.

I’m going to write that again, in all caps:

IT WASN’T MY FAULT!

Look,
every
great inventor has had setbacks. It’s just part of the process. You try something, it doesn’t work, you tweak it, you try again. That’s how progress is made.

If I’d had more than one day to work on it …

Or more than a couple of hours of sleep …

Or better equipment …

Or the help of more than a snarky artificial intelligence …

I could have made it work. Brilliantly.

In theory, the Pants Laser is a complete and utter success, and no one can tell me otherwise.

If that flying buzzkill hadn’t grabbed the Laser from me, I could have overridden the power regulator, shut down the enhancement mirror, adjusted the plasma intake, and recalibrated the light filter. Piece of cake.

But, nooooo! Everybody’s favorite alien punk had to showboat. He had to make me look bad in front of my town.
My
town!

I’ve had some time to think. My previous entry missed the point entirely. (Except for the part about it not being my fault. Because it
still
isn’t my fault.)

The point is that Mighty Mike has to be stopped. He’s pretending to be some kind of goody-goody who only helps people and doesn’t want anything in return. He’s pretending to be a goofy brain-damaged kid with amnesia. But in reality, he’s a space alien. He came from another planet and who knows why he’s here? If he wasn’t up to something, wouldn’t he just say, “I’m from another planet and I’m here to help?” Of course. So, since he hasn’t said that, that means he’s
not
here to help.

Since I’m the only one who knows the truth, it’s my job — it’s my duty — to expose him for what he is and drive him away from Bouring and from Earth.

Now that I’ve accepted that responsibility, things can only get better from here.

The next day, things got worse.

Kyle had spent the rest of Mighty Mike Day in a rage, arguing with Erasmus, going over the Pants Laser schematics again and again. Finally, at midnight, he’d fallen asleep. But it was a fitful sleep, jam-packed with nightmares of Mike attacking him, unmasking him, revealing his true identity to the world….

He woke up and dragged himself out of bed. His parents were at the kitchen table already, eating breakfast. Kyle slumped into his chair.

“How — how’s it going, slugger?” Dad asked brightly. (Ever since his exposure to the brain-wave manipulator, Dad had started stuttering on the word “how.” Kyle made a mental note to fix this. Someday.)

“Miserable,” Kyle told him.

“Great!” (That
wasn’t
a side effect of the brain-wave manipulator. Dad had always been clueless.)

“Links or patties?” Mom asked from the stove.

The idea of consuming the lumps of fat and gristle
his mother had the temerity — the nerve! — to call “sausage” made Kyle want to engage in vigorous reverse peristalsis (in other words: puke his guts up).

“I’ll just have cereal — what the heck is that?”

If his parents noticed the way he blurred his sentences together, they didn’t comment on it. Instead, Dad just peeked over the top of his copy of the
Bouring Record.
“It’s the front page of the paper,” he said.

A front page with
Kyle
on it!

Moments later, Kyle had swiped the paper and told his parents he needed it for a school project. Safely in his room, he laid out the front page. He couldn’t believe it — there was a full-color photo of him in his guise as the Azure Avenger, pointing the Pants Laser at the dais while the entire town watched in horror.

Kyle had to admit that he looked pretty threatening. (Much to his chagrin, the cape also looked cool.)

“BLUE FREAK THREATENS MIGHTY MIKE PARADE!” blared the headline.

He whacked his forehead against his desk, then did it again. “It’s the Azure Avenger, you jerks! I have a name — use it!”

“You should say it louder next time,” Erasmus chimed in.

Kyle grumbled but made a mental note to add a public address system to his costume, just in case.

He scanned the article quickly. It wasn’t a good time.

“Pants Laser!” Kyle screamed. “Pants Laser, you imbeciles!”

“How — how you doin’ in there, slugger?” Dad asked, poking his head in.

“Fine!” Kyle yelled. Dad nodded, smiled, and disappeared.

Kyle buried his face in his hands. The story went on, talking about how much money it would cost to repair the damage to the square, expressing relief that “thanks to the intervention of Mighty Mike” no one was seriously injured.

It was humiliating how
wrong
the reporter was. Weren’t these people supposed to report
facts
? He hadn’t attacked with a death ray or fired it indiscriminately into the crowd! He had been — justifiably — about to embarrass the holy heck out of Mighty Mike and things had gotten out of hand.

He was tempted to write a letter to the editor.

After a moment, though, he realized how idiotic that was. A letter to the editor! He had bigger problems
than the newspapers. As preposterous as it seemed, the world somehow thought that
he
was the bad guy, that he was … evil. He would have to be a hundred times — a million times — more careful about keeping his powers a secret now. Before, it was just a matter of staying out of the hands of doctors and scientists. Now …

Oh, man! Now there was a chance he could go to jail!

Kyle moaned loudly.

Dad came back in. “I’ve decided it’s not a good idea for you to read about the Blue Freak. It’s upsetting you.” He took away the paper. “You can do your school project on something else.”

“The Blue Freak?”

“That’s what the paper calls him. Good thing we didn’t go to the parade, isn’t it? We could have gotten hurt.”

Kyle watched his father leave. Maybe his parents could have gotten hurt, but Kyle was now impervious to pain. Except for the pain in his ego, of course.

And the sudden shock of being hit in the face by that twerp from the stars.

“You need a better PR agent,” Erasmus commented.

“How do you know anything about the paper? You don’t have eyes!”

“True. But I’m Wi-Fi enabled, and the story is on BouringRecord.com. With more pictures.”

“Great.”

Just then, the phone rang. Mom called out that it was for Kyle.

“Hello?” he said into the extension on his desk.

“Kyle!” Mairi sounded relieved and — Kyle noted — no longer angry at him. “I had to check up on you after what happened yesterday. I looked for you, but I couldn’t find you at the square, so I was worried. They took some people to the hospital, just in case.”

“Yeah, I, uh, saw that in the paper. Uh …” Now what? Which particular lie should he tell to Mairi?

He settled on the truth: “I wasn’t even there. My family didn’t go.”

The silence from the other end of the phone went on for a long time. “You didn’t?”

“Uh, no.”

“But everyone in Bouring went. It set some kind of town record. If you didn’t go …”

Oh, no. Kyle had known Mairi his whole life. Even over the phone, he could practically see her thinking.

“Kyle, were you involved in this Blue Freak thing? At all?”

“What?” He forced out a dry, tepid laugh. “Are you crazy? What would make you think that?”

“You’re the smartest kid in town. And you’re the only person who doesn’t like Mighty Mike.”

“I never said I didn’t like him!”

“What about the other day?”

“What did I say then?”

“You said, ‘You know what, Mairi? I don’t like that kid.’ ”

“Oh. Right.”

He thought furiously. He couldn’t have Mairi suspecting him of being the Blue Fre — the Azure Avenger. “We were out of town yesterday. We had to visit my aunt and uncle. They, uh, just had a baby.”

“Better make sure you brainwash your parents,” Erasmus whispered. “And maybe find a random baby for your aunt and uncle while you’re at it.”

Kyle switched off Erasmus.

“Anyway,” he went on, “we were out of town for that. I didn’t even know anything happened until I saw the paper this morning.”

Mairi seemed to buy it. She launched into a breathless account of yesterday’s events, using the phrase “Blue Freak” over and over again, usually in conjunction with “that horrible,” “that scary,” or “that evil.”

“Can’t you come up with something a little more original than ‘Blue Freak’?” Kyle finally asked. “Maybe something with alliteration?”

“Well, that’s what everyone is calling him,” Mairi sniffed. “What else should we call him?”

Kyle gave up.

Days passed. Kyle became more aggravated.

He was famous.

But this wasn’t the good sort of famous, the kind that comes with endorsement deals, new cars, limo drivers, bodyguards, rap videos, a reality TV show, and your picture on boxes of breakfast cereal.
Oh, no.

This was the bad sort of famous. Everywhere he looked on the Internet, people were uploading cell phone videos and photographs of the “Blue Freak.” The local TV newspeople had a fairly decent four-minute clip of the fight with Mighty Mike, and it ran over and over and over on YouTube. A week after Mighty Mike Day, the video had been viewed over fifty million times and it was still getting over a hundred thousand views a day.

On TV, every news channel talked about him. And it was strange, but even though no one knew anything at all about Kyle or his powers, every news channel had someone they called an “expert” on him.

“Neat trick,” Erasmus said. “Being an expert on something you don’t know anything about.”