My Gym Teacher Is an Alien Overlord (3 page)

Lara shuffled her feet and smiled at me shyly. “Luke, I want to tell you something. It's kind of . . . awkward. It's not something I expected to say to you, but—”

Just then, two kids from her English class swung past, and Lara looked alarmed. Her tone changed. “Oh, I'm going to be late. Gotta shoot,” she said, hurrying off. “We should do lunch,” she called over her shoulder. “It's veggie lasagna in the cafeteria tomorrow.” And with that she turned the corner and was gone.

I stood in the empty corridor, thinking over what she'd just said. Apart from her acting all weird, two things bothered me. One, I hated veggie lasagna. Two, airplanes didn't fall out of the sky for no reason.

“No more
Star
Guy
for you, Luke Alfred Parker.”

When Mom discovered what had happened at school, she hit the roof. She marched into my bedroom and removed the Xbox, informing me that I could have it back at the end of the break,
if
I managed to stay out of trouble until then. Brilliant. First no S.C.A.R.F., and now no video games. I considered getting down on my knees and pleading, but I knew it would do no good. Mom was as likely to change her mind as the Joker was to start performing at children's parties.

She wouldn't let me near the computer in the living room either, which made it impossible to probe the mystery of the plummeting airplanes. I was reduced to watching the news on TV like someone from the olden days.

Annoyingly, the midair rescue was even more amazing than Lara had made it sound. As usual these days, every moment had been caught on multiple camera phones. First, you see the landing lights of the three planes as they line up for the runway. Then there's a flash and the planes suddenly drop.

The TV newspeople had overlaid the pictures with the conversation between the pilots and air traffic control. So as the first plane nosedives, you hear, “Control Tower, this is Delta Two Four. Experiencing catastrophic power loss to both engines. Attempting restart. Mayday. Mayday.” Before the control tower can respond, you hear the other two pilots call in the exact same Mayday from their cockpits.

There was even video from inside the planes. The passengers are screaming and crying. The man holding the camera phone is desperately recording a message for his children. Saying good-bye. It's awful.

And then . . .

“Look!” shouts the woman in the seat beside him, pointing a shaking finger at the window. The man turns his phone. At first you can't see anything, but suddenly there, dropping through the clouds at three hundred miles per hour, streaking to the rescue, it's . . .

“Star Guy!” cries the woman.

“And . . . the other one!” shouts the man.

The coverage switches back to the outside of the planes. You see Star Guy approaching, cape fluttering in the wind, sun glinting off his sigil. He loops around the wings, containing the failing engines with his force field; then he uses his telekinetic power to stop the planes' rapid descent. Dark Flutter dispatches pigeons to the wingtips, steadying the aircraft. Then Star Guy flies alongside the cockpit of the first aircraft and throws the pilots a salute, before leading them in for a perfect landing.

Inside, the passengers' screams turn to whoops of excitement. The man with the camera is crying, telling his kids that he'll see them soon.

Even I had to admit that my brother was getting the hang of this superhero business. The salute was a particularly nice touch.

“Those passengers were very lucky,” said Mom, wiping away a tear as we watched them slide down the emergency chutes onto the runway in front of a line of waiting ambulances and fire engines.

Statistically, she couldn't have been more wrong. The chances of three modern airplanes going down like that at precisely the same moment in the same airspace were infinitesimally low. That's what made it so suspicious. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“If that had happened anywhere else in the world, Star Guy wouldn't have been around to save them.”

I hadn't thought of that. Mom was right. Could it be a coincidence, or did it point to something more significant? If I was going to investigate, I needed the Internet.

“Mom, I really need the computer to do my homework.”

“Really? Can't you use a wax tablet and a stylus like your dad and I had to?”

I think Mom was trying to be funny, since they only used wax tablets and styluses in ancient Greece. And they didn't have girls in school back then. And my mom wasn't 2,500 years old.

“Fine. You can use the computer,” she relented. “But I'm installing a new security feature to make sure it's only for homework.”

I sat down confidently in front of the screen. There wasn't any security software on the planet that I couldn't outwit.

Mom drew up a chair and planted herself down beside me.

OK. There was one.

There was the snick of a key turning in the front door. Zack tended to use his bedroom window these days, which meant it had to be Dad. He was home late from the office again. Mom and Dad both worked at a big insurance company in town. The company had had to pay out a lot of money following all the damage caused by the Nemesis asteroid. Even though Star Guy had stopped the main asteroid, he couldn't prevent hundreds of small chunks of rock getting through. They broke windows, cars—and even sank a ship. All of them were insurance claims. My parents had been working like crazy for weeks to clear the backlog.

Dad appeared in the living room doorway. He looked even more tired than usual. With his sunken eyes and pale, drawn complexion, he hovered on the threshold like a vampire unable to enter without an invitation. “Hey, Luke, good day at school?”

“Don't ask,” said Mom, before I could reply.

He caught her eye and in one of those this-is-not-for-children's-ears voices said, “Can we have a chat?”

She turned to me and raised a warning finger. “When I come back I'm checking your history.”

They disappeared into the kitchen, and I got to work. I wasn't worried about Mom checking my Internet history, since she'd find nothing. I was a ninja piloting a stealth fighter dipped in invisible ink.

As I started my search I couldn't help thinking about Lara. She was great at this kind of thing. I missed her. Back before she got her superpowers we could talk for ages, but now there was an invisible barrier between us. And not one of the cool ones. The kind that made it difficult to know what to say around her.

The results of my search were displayed before me. I found the news report I'd watched with Mom, and fast-forwarded to the moment just before the planes fell. I played through the section one frame at a time until I found what I was looking for. In the top left corner, half hidden by a cloud, was a flash of light.

“What are you up to?”

It was Zack. I'd been so focused that I hadn't heard him come in. He had shed his superhero costume and now wore regular clothes, although they were noticeably clean and pressed, and his hair was spiked with gel.

“I think you should see this,” I said.

He yawned. “Can it wait? I'm completely zonked. After I stopped those planes from crashing, I had English with Mr. Bonnick. If you think catching three airplanes is hard . . .” He shook his head. “And then I was hanging out with Cara.” He tugged at his collar and preened in the mirror.

Cara was Lara's older sister, and my brother had a crush on her that was stronger than the Hulk's grip. But he wasn't
hanging out
with her. At least, not the way he made it sound. Zack was tutoring her in physics, though he liked to pretend otherwise. Sadly for him, his crush only went one way. I may have been powerless, but I knew my brother's weak spots.
How's her boyfriend?
I thought. One of Zack's superpowers was telepathy—and being brothers, we had a special telepathic bond. So I knew my question would boom inside his head in surround sound, which would make it even more irritating.

“That's it!” he yelled, turning the same color as an enraged Commander Octolux. “One more inappropriate use of my telepathic power and I'm blocking you. Got it?”

He was overreacting. It wasn't as if I used our telepathic link for trivial reasons.

“Yes, you do,” said Zack, reading my mind. “All the time! Last week you used it to ask me to pick up a bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips from the corner store.”

“Well, we'd run out.”

Zack threw up his hands in exasperation. “I wasn't even in the corner store! I was locked in fierce hand-to-hand combat with a man in a lion costume. Don't ask. But that wasn't your worst telepathic abuse, oh no. That would be when you used it to ask for answers during a math test.”

Typical that my goody-goody brother would be wound up most by that.

He stomped to the door, muttering, “I'm the world's greatest superhero, and he uses me like a takeout menu and a
calculator
.”

“Zack, I'm sorry. Don't go. I think some sort of electromagnetic pulse weapon brought down those airplanes.”

He raised one dubious eyebrow. “So tell me, this electro-magenta laser gun thingy—does it by any chance belong to your gym teacher?”

Ah.
“You heard about that then.”

“Um, yeah. The whole school heard. You're a laughingstock, Luke.”

“But I was so sure Miss Dunham was evil,” I complained. “All the evidence said so.”

He thumbed at the photo on my screen. “And don't tell me—all the evidence here screams big bad supervillain.”

It did. “No army, navy, or air force in the world has an electromagnetic pulse weapon capable of bringing down airplanes,” I explained. “What's more, this one is airborne and, if the lack of reports is anything to go by, invisible to radar. It
has
to come from a technologically superior mind. If there isn't a supervillain behind this, I'll eat my limited-edition Crimson Avenger fedora.”

Zack relented with a sigh. “OK, so show me this mysterious, flying, invisible gun then.”

“There. That flash of light.”

He leaned in, squinting at the screen. “You're kidding me, right? That's nothing. It's a light from another plane or a smudge on the camera lens, that's all.”

“So why did those planes fall out of the sky?”

“How should I know? I can fly, but that doesn't make me an expert on airplane engineering. And you aren't one either. Just because you don't understand what happened doesn't mean you can jump to ridiculous conclusions.” He shook his head sadly. “You can't go through life seeing supervillains everywhere.”

There was no point trying to persuade him. After all, he wasn't the only superhero in the world anymore. Tomorrow I'd fill Lara in on my suspicions—even if I had to do it over veggie lasagna.

Mom called us in for dinner. The four of us ate in the kitchen together as usual. Zack might have been the one with superpowered senses, but as soon as I took my seat, I could tell that something was wrong. A cloud hung over the table, and it wasn't coming from the steamed rice. I didn't have to wait long to learn the bad news.

Dad had lost his job with the insurance company.

“Did they fire you because you disobeyed orders and went rogue?” I asked.

“Unfortunately not, Luke,” he said, picking at his food with a fork. “Nothing as exciting as that. With all the money the company has had to pay out because of Nemesis, they're having to cut back.”

Zack sat up. “But that's not fair,” he said. “Nemesis was, what do you call it, an ‘act of god'?”

“You're right,” said Dad. “But all those chunks of asteroid that broke off when Star Guy stopped Nemesis—well, they were an act of man, albeit a superhuman one, and they smashed houses and cars. Those were claims.”

I looked over at my brother. He was clenching his fists so tightly they'd turned white.

“I'm just a victim of downsizing,” said Dad. He lifted his fork. “Which, before you ask, yes, is
exactly
like a shrink ray.” He gave a short laugh. Mom laid her hand on his.

I knew that downsizing was nothing like a shrink ray. Shrink rays were expensive and complicated, and the idea that an insurance company would use one to fire people was ridiculous. The electricity bill alone would make it uneconomic. I looked around at the concerned faces at the table. Everyone was thinking the same thing, but no one wanted to ask. It was up to me. “So,” I began, choosing my words with care, “will you get another job, or are you going to be hanging around the house from now on?”

“Luke!” Mom snapped.

“You idiot!” Zack punched me in the arm.

Dad just laughed. “Don't you worry about me, Luke. That job was like the Hobbit movies: it went on
way
too long. A fresh start will be good for me. I can't wait to see what the future has in store. Bring it on!”

And then he sighed and looked down at his salmon fillet.