SuperZero (12 page)

The tension was griping (gripping is what it should be—griping just means a pain in the stomach—oh well, it was that too—the tension was gripping and griping).

Tara Rumpum talked for half an hour, reminding people of what tremendous danger the city was in, what tremendous courage she was showing, how the bees would maul her to death and rip her skin off (she quite forgot that they were bees, not lions).

She had begun to exaggerate more and more, when all of a sudden, a frenzied buzzing filled the air. The bees had reached Main Street and only the brave Tara Rumpum stood out there to meet them.

‘Finally! Time to interview the man behind it all. The evil Egggggggster!' Tara Rumpum shouted, like she was announcing a dancing pony instead of a criminal genius, said Blank later.

And right around the corner came . . . an Egyptian mummy.

What? Was Blank imagining this part?

No, Blank said, an Egyptian mummy came staggering in, like it had just got out of its tomb and was exploring the countryside.

‘Presenting the evil Eggster,' sang Tara Rumpum, rushing over to him with her mic. ‘Tell us what evil you have planned.'

‘I ran away,' the Egyptian mummy said.

‘From where? From the dark chambers of Egypt's Valley of the Dead?'

‘Who's deaf? Who are you calling deaf?' said the mummy and I got a funny feeling at this point of Blank's story.

Tara Rumpum's drama was not unfolding the way she wanted it to. ‘Who is dead, that is the question. And who will soon be dead? These bees, your carriers of death—what could be worse?'

The mummy said, ‘The nurse, exactly! That's why I ran away. She wanted to give me onions. But I had to run away—see—because my grandson is lost, I have to find him.'

Gra! Oh My God!

Blank, too, got it at this point. He was in shock, of course, since he didn't know what to do. He had no idea why my grandpa was roaming around instead of being indoors.

Tara Rumpum tried hard to keep her story going. ‘Which nurse? What onions? The Onions of Death?'

Gra said, ‘So I ran away from the hospital. See my clever disguise? I stole all their bandages. My grandson taught me how to wrap myself in bandages to meet Ali-yen.'

Tara Rumpum was very confused indeed. ‘Can we get back to the bees? Shoo!' she said desperately as the bees tried to get through her helmet. She could not get bitten and burst before getting the whole truth to the people.

‘Hey,' said Gra, noticing the bees for the first time, ‘why are there so many bees?'

‘Because YOU brought them here. YOU bred the bees, to make us fatter!' shouted Tara Rumpum, happy again to be back on track.

‘What bread? What butter?'

At that point, Eggster came huffing in and almost collapsed; he was exhausted after chasing after his runaway bees.

‘Who are you?' Tara Rumpum asked him.

‘Why aren't you afraid and inside your house?' Eggster managed to pant.

Gra burst out laughing. ‘The funny man is afraid of a mouse.'

‘And who are you?' Eggster was fuming. ‘How will my plan unroll if people don't go running to lock themselves up in their houses?'

‘You are Eggster!' Tara Rumpum exclaimed, finally getting it.

‘Yes, he's extra.' Gra was rolling around laughing now.

‘A lot extra. He needs to stop eating and start running now. Let's get the bees to chase him, shall we?'

‘But who are you?' Tara Rumpum turned to Gra. ‘Are you another Angel of Death?'

Blank said that Gra looked puzzled. ‘I don't remember. Who am I?'

Eggster said angrily, ‘Look, whoever you are, will you just go home and be afraid like everyone else? Both of you? I have a plan and I can't work on my plan if you both stand here and distract my bees.'

‘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!

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!