My Brother is a Superhero (13 page)

25

AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE

They cancelled school. We had one more day with Mrs Tyrannosaur, and at the end of the last lesson she gave out prizes for the best drawing and story of the term, even though term wasn’t officially over for another month. I knew I’d be leaving junior school for the last time this year – I just hadn’t expected it to be because of a giant asteroid. All year long I’d been anxious about moving up to the big school, but right then my fears about leaving old friends and making new ones, getting lost in unfamiliar corridors and being late for class, about not being smart enough and falling behind – all that seemed so tiny and unimportant.

Before we went home, Mrs Tyrannosaur gave each of us a big hug and told us how much she loved us and then our parents collected us at the gates – even the kids who normally walk or take the bus themselves.

Lara, Serge and I walked out together under a cloud of hopelessness. The stakeout of Talbot Grange had so far failed to produce the location of the secret volcano, and if we didn’t find it by next Tuesday, when the asteroid struck, it would be too late. Time wasn’t just running out, it was sprinting wildly, waving its arms with its hair on fire.

Mum and Dad were waiting for me outside the school gates. They were smiling, but I could tell that they were putting on a brave face. I didn’t blame them – what was there to smile about? Zack was missing and it was six days until the end of the world.

“You have to tell them about Zack,” whispered Lara. “The world needs Star Lad and we need help finding him.”

The Prime Minister’s appeal for Star Lad’s assistance had, of course, resulted in silence from the superhero. Every night Bromley Council would beam his signal into the sky, and every night it would go dark without a response. Online and off there was furious speculation about why he had failed to answer the call. For some
people his silence proved he was a fake, others were convinced he’d returned to his home planet, a few suggested he’d entered the cocoon form of his evolution and in five days would emerge as Butterfly Man. Which was bonkers. Only we knew that he was tied up in a volcano and couldn’t come to anyone’s aid until we had come to his. Which didn’t look like happening any time soon.

Lara was right. If I told Mum and Dad, they’d inform the authorities. A full-scale search of Bromley with dogs and police and probably Special Forces and helicopters with infrared and thermal cameras would surely uncover Christopher Talbot’s volcano lair. So as we took the short walk home through the park, I told my parents the story, from the beginning. They listened in silence as we strolled past the swings where Zack and I used to play together, nodded as we wended our way alongside the pond where we’d fed the ducks and played shark attack, and by the time Mum was slotting the key in our front door they knew everything.

There was only one problem.

“What d’you mean, they didn’t believe you?” asked Lara.

It was later that night and I was wearing my Human Torch pyjamas. I had sneaked the laptop up to my
bedroom and was Skyping with her and Serge. I could hear Mum and Dad down below. They weren’t dancing badly like they usually did, instead they were arguing and crying. I preferred it when they danced. I couldn’t make out much, but I could tell that they were discussing Zack and me.

“They think I’ve made up the kidnapped superhero story.”

“Why would you do that?” asked Serge.

“To protect myself.”

“I do not comprehend,” he said.

Parents had a weird way of looking at the world. “They think that I’ve invented a superhero fantasy in order to escape from the horrible reality of the situation.”

“But the kidnapped superhero story
is
the horrible reality,” protested Lara.

I watched the little video image of me in the lower corner of the screen shrug. “I know. But in their minds it’s better for me to imagine my brother as Star Lad, rather than picture him dead in a ditch somewhere, or a victim of some awful kidnapper.”

“So they won’t call the police?”

I shook my head. “No chance.” I had an idea. “But that doesn’t stop
us
from calling them.”

I grabbed the house phone, sat back down in front of
the laptop and dialled the local police station.

“Bromley Police Station. Sergeant Gordon speaking.”

“Hello. My name is Luke Parker and I have vital information regarding the disappearance of Star Lad.”

There was a slurping sound like he was drinking tea and then the sergeant said, “Is that so?” He said it as a question, but I got the feeling that he didn’t actually want to know the answer. I filled him in on Zack’s kidnapping. When I got to the bit about the volcano I could hear him choke.

“So, you’ll send out a search party?” I said. “I think six helicopters and twenty-five patrol cars should do it. Oh, and dogs. Yes, lot of tracker dogs. Though you don’t need to send the ones with brandy barrels. Unless it snows.”

“Thank you for your highly valuable information, sir. In accordance with procedure I shall file it along with the other reports on Star Lad’s disappearance. We will action yours in due course.”

“OK,” I said. Now we were getting somewhere. There was just one thing I wanted to check. “What’s due course?”

He cleared his throat. “Based on existing police performance targets and the four hundred or so
other
reports of Star Lad we’ve had in the last two days, that
would be … six to eight months.”

“What?! But we haven’t got that long. Nemesis is coming. Next Tuesday.”

“I am well aware of the imminent destruction of the planet, sir.” Another sip. “Was there anything else?”

I told him there wasn’t and hung up the phone in frustration. “See, this is why in films the hero never calls the police.” Serge and Lara had heard every word of my useless conversation. Their scared faces stared at me from the laptop screen. They were looking at me to do something. Even Lara, who was normally fearless and reckless, seemed to be at a loss. If we failed, it was the end. Of everything.

“So what are we to do now?” asked Serge.

“We have to find Zack ourselves – no one else is going to help,” I said. “It’s up to us.”

It really was on our shoulders. The governments of Earth had put their best people in a room to come up with a solution to the Nemesis threat, but according to the twenty-four hour rolling news coverage, so far all that had come out of the room were requests for pizza.

My eye fell on the invitation to the launch of Crystal Comics’ new flagship store, which I’d propped up on the windowsill. The party was scheduled for next Monday, one day before Nemesis was due to impact.
I couldn’t imagine it would still go ahead, but that wasn’t what bothered me. It was something about the odd-shaped invitation. I held it up for a better look. If I’d had Spider-Sense it would be tingling. And then I saw it. My hand started to shake. I turned to Lara and Serge, barely able to speak.

“What have you got there?” asked Lara.

“The invitation … from Christopher Talbot.”

“Oh, I got one of those too…” I could see her rummaging around her desk. “It’s a bit strange, having a launch party so close to the end of the world, don’t you think?”

“These things, they are planned months ahead,” explained Serge. “If he were to cancel now he would probably lose his deposit on the chair hire.”

“Never mind that,” I interrupted. “Look at the shape of the card!” I pressed it to my laptop’s camera so that it filled their screens.

“It’s a triangle,” said Serge, mystified.

“It’s more like a trapezoid,” said Lara.

“No,” I said, my voice trembling with excitement. “It’s a volcano.”

26

NICE VOLCANO

Early the next morning, as soon as I was able to give my parents the slip, I joined Lara and Serge and we made our way to the address at the foot of the invitation. Before long we found ourselves outside the most fabulous comic book store in the soon-to-be-obliterated world. Between a Bella Napoli and a Carphone Warehouse rose a volcano on seven floors – Crystal Comics’ flagship store.

“It is
bee-yoo-tiful
,” breathed Serge.

Despite the fact that my brother was almost certainly being held in there against his will, I had to agree. Sloping flanks were scored with what looked like claw marks, but which were in fact fissure vents. I knew this thanks to my
basic knowledge of vulcanology, which is the study of volcanoes and not
Star Trek
characters, as I’d originally believed when I borrowed the book from the library. As I watched the fissures ooze with glowing lava there was a rumble from deep inside the volcano like a dragon clearing its throat and then a cloud of ash and fire spewed from the crater. The ash cloud and lava were both fake, of course, but the effect was highly impressive. A banner was draped across the front, declaring the grand opening next week. Incredibly, the party was still on.

“How come we didn’t notice this was here before?” Lara asked. “What kind of hi-tech camouflage did Christopher Talbot use? Hypno-gas? Distract-o-Beam?”

“Uhh … a tarpaulin,” I said, my cheeks colouring. “A
big
tarpaulin,” I added, but that didn’t make it any better.

We had found Zack’s prison. The next thing was to spring him from captivity. That wasn’t going to be easy – the volcano was ringed by a high fence topped with razor wire. There was one gate in and out, secured by the kind of weighty padlock that Wolverine would put on the biscuit tin to prevent Juggernaut from stealing his KitKats. Multiple surveillance cameras on long poles swayed like king cobras. No patch of ground went
unmonitored. As we watched, a crow fluttered over the fence and touched down on the highest wire. There was a crackle of electricity, a bright-blue flash and then a strangled squawk. Its rigid body fell to the ground with a thud.

We went back to my house and assembled in my bedroom to draw up our plan. “We have a lot of work to do,” I said. “One does not simply walk into a heavily fortified secret volcano headquarters.”

Faced with the prospect of hard work, Serge opened a packet of salt ’n’ vinegar crisps while Lara used her cub reporter skills to do some quick digging online. On Bromley Council’s website she found a downloadable layout of the Crystal Comics building (it turned out that supervillains
did
seek planning permission) and we spent the next few hours devising a brilliant plan. It didn’t start off brilliant. In fact, I’m not sure we ever quite made it beyond “pretty good if overly complicated”. I wanted to storm the volcano. Serge favoured a stealthy approach. We settled on “infiltration”, which I had to convince Lara was not a kind of water purification system. We pored over the layout until we had come up with a series of inventive methods to gain entry, and then Serge pointed out that we had invitations, so if we waited until the launch party we could simply stroll through the front
door. That seemed a whole lot easier than my best plan, which involved a zip-wire, wigs and a small amount of high explosives.

Lara raised an objection. “There is one bad part to Serge’s plan.”

“Which is?”

“The launch party isn’t until Monday, the day before Nemesis is due to hit the Earth. That’s cutting it fine. If we fail, there won’t be time for another go.”

Another go? She made it sound like we were queuing for a turn on a roller coaster. “We won’t fail,” I said firmly. “We can’t.”

We printed out the layout, unrolled it on my bedroom floor and gathered round to finalise our tactics. There was some debate about the use of a flamethrower (I was “for” but got outvoted). By the time Mum called us down for lunch Operation Star Lad was good to go.

Our path was filled with peril, the threat of failure dogged every step, but there was something irresistibly exciting about the promise of adventure. Was this how Zack felt each time he stepped out as Star Lad? My whole body fizzed, even more than the time Dad let me have a sip of sparkling wine. I felt as if I could fly faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings in a single bound. Looking into the faces of my friends I knew
with the force of a Hulk upper cut that we had it in us to pull this off. I know what you’re thinking. I’m getting carried away. I’m in danger of saying something about the power of friendship being more powerful than a supervillain and his army of evil minions. Well, no, that would be silly. Frankly, at that moment I would happily have traded Serge for a well-stocked utility belt.

Lara doodled in the margin of the building layout. “Let’s say we do rescue Zack in the nick of time,” she said. “Do you really think he can save the world? After all, the reason Christopher Talbot was able to kidnap him in the first place is because he’s lost his powers.”

I hadn’t thought of that. Didn’t superheroes always save the world? But Lara was right, without his powers Star Lad was just an ordinary boy.

“Zorbon put his trust in Zack,” I said. But I wished that Zorbon had been a bit less mysterious about his powers. I know you don’t get a handbook in situations like these, but a troubleshooting guide would’ve been useful. I doubted we could reset Zack’s superpowers by turning him off and then on again. So why had he lost them in the first place? And how were we going to restore them?

There was a crunch from the other side of the room. Serge’s unfinished packet of crisps had dropped from his
hand and fallen under his foot. He stood at the window, his back set rigidly towards us, his attention gripped by something outside.

“I think you two had better see this,” he said nervously.

Strong winds had driven away the leaden clouds that had squatted over the country for days. Like a bad-tempered teenager the gusting wind kicked up stones from the street to hurl them at windows, it pushed over old ladies and grumbled all day and night. On TV the weather report called it “atmospheric conditions” caused by the approaching asteroid. The short-term forecast was gloomy. There was no long-term forecast.

“There.” Serge pointed to the horizon. Above the slate roofs and chimney pots spinning madly in the wind the blue sky hung like a freshly laundered cape. But in one corner was a small black spot edged in fire. No stain remover in the universe would have any effect on this spot. It blazed through the darkness of space on an unstoppable collision course. And in the wind’s endless howl I could hear the words, over and over.

Nemesis is coming.