Villainous (2 page)

Herman’s bunk was on the far side of the boys’ room, and he wasn’t halfway there when a shadow stepped into his path. No, it wasn’t a shadow; it was just Bill Tyler.

“We know what you done to Jake,” said Bill. A few of the other boys were standing behind him. They all wore evil looks. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t knock your block off. Bad enough you’re always skulking around, stealing other people’s things. Herman the sneak. Herman the fink!”

Herman did try to think of a good reason why Bill shouldn’t hit him, but he couldn’t lie his way out of this one. And when Herman couldn’t lie his way out of trouble, he had one other tactic that had served him well—he ran.

He was out the door before Bill had taken two steps. Out of the boys’ room and through his secret exit—a loose floorboard at the end of the hall. Then past the backyard and all the way to his hiding place.

The outhouse was empty, as it always was (the seat in this
one was particularly splintery and best avoided). Herman closed the door and flipped the lock. Then he hugged his knees to his chest and waited. Bill would have to go to sleep eventually; then Herman would sneak into his own bed so that he’d be there when the brothers woke them for morning chores.

Herman waited for hours, until his own eyelids began drooping with sleep. When he finally opened the outhouse door, he was shocked to see that the sky overhead had changed. The stars had been swallowed up by a heavy blanket of storm clouds, but instead of lightning flashes, the clouds were lit with that sallow greenish light. It looked like the end of the world.

Herman was wondering if the other children were seeing this same sky, or if they were tucked into their beds asleep and unaware, when the air was rent with a tremendous boom. Before he’d come to St. Alban’s, Herman had spent time in a mining town where he watched the miners use dynamite to blast their way into nickel veins, but this sound was ten times as loud as that had been. It set his ears ringing, and the clouds parted as a streak of green fire came hurtling from the heavens. It burned shadows into Herman’s vision as it got bigger and bigger, a falling star set to collide with the earth. Truly the end of the world.

It must’ve hit the cloister directly because the impact blew up such a cloud of dirt and fire that Herman was thrown into the back of the outhouse and the door slammed
shut behind him. Once the cloud settled, Herman inched the door open and saw that the flames—green flames like the lightning overhead—had already begun to consume the frater. The kitchen was ablaze; the monks’ quarters had been leveled in the destruction. The only building still standing was the orphans’ bunkhouse, but the fires were already drifting that way.

Why weren’t they running? Why weren’t the children fleeing for their lives? But they couldn’t, not without facing the rising inferno outside their front door. They were trapped in there and they would die. Eileen would die.

But not if Herman saved her. No one knew about the loose floorboard, Herman’s secret exit. He could open it and lead them all out that way, through the back of the bunkhouse and into the safety of the woods.

Herman just needed the courage to step out of his hiding place and face the fire. He could do it. For Eileen.

He’d managed his first step when he saw a shape emerging from the trees. It was the trapper Johnny, and he was sprinting toward the burning orphanage. The front gate was aflame, so Johnny used the butt of his rifle to smash open a window high in the bunkhouse wall. Immediately, greenish black smoke came pouring out—the bunkhouse must have been filled with it. But Johnny didn’t hesitate. He hauled himself up and through the shattered window, swallowed up by the smoke.

Seconds passed. Minutes. Whatever courage Herman
had summoned up to save Eileen had begun to falter as he watched the fires grow. It was too late surely. Johnny and the orphans would have succumbed to the smoke by now. There was no escaping it.

Herman’s eyes stung with tears, but it wasn’t from the heat or smoke. He was upwind of the blaze and spared the worst of it. His tears were for Eileen.

Then there was another crash as the bunkhouse’s roof gave way and collapsed in on itself in a shower of glowing cinders.

“Eileen,” Herman whimpered.

A moment passed, and the wreckage moved. The fallen timbers stirred and, unbelievably, rose. Johnny was lifting the collapsed roof over his head. His clothes were aflame but he didn’t seem to notice. It was impossible. Ten men wouldn’t have been able to lift that roof. Not a man alive could have withstood that heat.

Then she appeared. She wasn’t alone—the other orphans rose with her, freed by Johnny and lifting themselves out of the burning wreckage, but Herman only saw her. Eileen floating up into the sky.

At first Herman thought she’d died and he was seeing her angel make its way to heaven, but she wasn’t dead. She was glowing, and not with the green light of the fire but with a light all her own. She shone as brightly and as golden as the sun. She was flying.

“Mr. Plunkett? Mr. Plunkett, are you okay, sir?”

“Hmm?” said Herman, noticing the nurse’s fat face for the first time. How long had she been standing there? “I was just thinking about something that happened to me a long time ago. Long, long time ago.”

The young nurse was new here, but she’d already learned how to infuriate Herman with her chipper smile. She seemed determined to make up for her inexperience by becoming best friends with every patient at the Mountain View Home. But Herman knew there was no making up for inexperience. Experience counted for everything. At nearly a hundred years old, it had to.

“You’ve got just a little bit of Jell-O there on your chin, Mr. Plunkett,” she said, and dabbed at his face with one of those dreadful wet wipes she always carried, the ones that smelled like a dentist’s office. He knew he had Jell-O all down the front of his dressing gown as well and in his lap, but she either didn’t notice or chose not to comment on that. He hadn’t seen much use in cleaning it up before.

They’d parked his wheelchair at his favorite window, the one with the clearest view of the mountain, but though he stared at it all the time, he never really saw it. Not as it was today, in any case.

“Did you enjoy your morning paper?” the nurse asked as she tried to slip the newspaper away from where it lay clutched in his lap. But his fingers, swollen knuckles gone white, would not release their grip.

“Mr. Plunkett?” the nurse said again as she tried to pull
the paper from his hands. “Are you finished with the paper, because there are other residents …”

Ignoring her, he looked down at the paper in his Jell-O–stained lap. He’d been reading a story buried deep inside its pages. A small sidebar, listed under a regular section titled “Campbell’s Curiosities.” Herman didn’t know who this Campbell person was, but his tastes usually ran toward UFO sightings and batboys. But not today.

“What’s that you’ve been reading?” asked the nurse. She’d given up wrestling with him over the paper and now seemed to be trying a new tactic of feigned interest. He really did despise her.

“Oh!” she said, looking over his shoulder. “I love that column. So unusual! What’s this one about? ‘Astronomers Say Witch Fire Comet Returning’?”

She made a face. “Well, that sounds downright spooky, doesn’t it?”

Herman turned and looked at her, and for the first time in a long time, he had a reason to smile.

“Hey, kid! What can you do?”

Daniel took his time chaining up his bike before glancing over his shoulder. He’d been hoping that if he pretended not to hear them, they’d go away, but no such luck. A tour group headed by a man in a cheap plastic cape had crossed the street and were now standing in a semicircle around him. Their camera phones were already clicking as they snapped pictures. They didn’t even ask if it was okay.

“What do you mean,
What can you do?
” said Daniel, although he knew full well what they meant.

“Do you
do
anything?” said a round woman who elbowed
her way to the front of the group. Her arms wiggled as she moved. “Anything special?”

Daniel considered what to say next. The morning was muggy already, and the sun burned hot and white in a pale sky. The heat and these tourists only worsened his mood, which was crappy to begin with. Even now, the fat woman looked flushed and sweaty from the heat, or maybe she was about to pass out from the possibility that he could be one of
them
. This was, after all, the town famous for being home to super-kids.

He could play with these tourists. He could say he had the power to erase the memory cards on their phones with a wave of his hand, or that he could read minds, and did they know that one of them was secretly in love with another member of their group? Those had worked in the past. But the best was always when he told them his power was a radioactive field that he called his
death zone
. It wasn’t dangerous as long as you didn’t look directly at him and wrapped yourself in tinfoil.

But it was too hot to mess with tourists today.

“I don’t do anything special,” he said. “I’m just a kid.”

He could feel their disappointment as, one by one, they turned their backs on him. Then they continued walking down the street, busily deleting the pictures they’d snapped of Daniel before they’d learned that he was nobody important. Maybe they’d wander into Arnold Lebowski on his paper route, the boy who could turn himself into a human-shaped
cloud. If he tried really hard, he could squeeze out a few raindrops for onlookers.

Daniel finished chaining up his bike and made for the opposite side of the street. He was a few minutes early today and decided to treat himself to something special. Lemon’s Ice Cream Parlor and Doughnut Shop had been a fixture of downtown Noble’s Green for nearly sixty years. It was a true family business that had weathered economic depressions, recent recessions, and globalization unchanged. But it had not weathered superhero mania.

As Daniel opened the door of the re-christened Happy Hero’s Ice Cream Parlor—Home to the Superpowered Root Beer Float!—he was glad to hear the familiar chime of the old doorbell. At least that hadn’t gone away. And the inside of the shop still smelled a little bit like what Daniel imagined heaven must smell like: powdered sugar and cinnamon. Standing behind the counter, wiping down the chrome tabletop with a rag, was elderly Mr. Lemon himself, dressed in a shiny silver tracksuit decorated with glued-on felt lightning bolts. Mr. Lemon had not developed any powers as far as Daniel knew, but that hadn’t stopped him from cashing in on the town’s newfound fame.

“Hey there, Daniel!” said Mr. Lemon with a smile. “What are you doing up this early on a summer morning?”

Ah, that was the question, wasn’t it? Daniel figured he’d better get used to it, as this was going to be his routine for the foreseeable future.

“Oh, well,” he said. “I’m taking a few summer classes. To get ahead, you know.”

From the look on Mr. Lemon’s face, Daniel could tell he did know. He knew that middle schoolers did not take summer classes to get ahead. It was called summer school, and if Daniel didn’t pass it, he would be repeating the eighth grade.

But Mr. Lemon didn’t embarrass Daniel by asking any more questions.

“Well, you’ll need to get something in your stomach before you hit the books, won’t you? I’ve got breakfast sandwiches that heat up real quick. Not half bad.”

“Just a doughnut,” said Daniel. “Jelly. And an orange juice. It’s hot out there already.”

“Looking for a sugar rush, eh? Well, I’ve got a fresh batch coming out of the oven right now. Be back in a second.” He scurried off to the rear of his shop, the homemade antennae on his silver superhero cap wobbling as he went.

Daniel plopped down on a barstool to wait, enjoying the chill of the air conditioner. He held his arms away from his body to let the cool air work its way into his shirt.

Summer school
.

For Daniel, it had turned out that keeping up with his studies had been a lot harder than he’d thought, especially when his nights were spent battling super-villains instead of studying. In the end, he’d just managed to scrape past his eighth-grade year with a miserable D in chemistry, but
he’d flunked history, which was normally his best subject. His parents had greeted his report card with shock—Daniel had been an A and B student up until then. But to try to explain why his grades had plummeted would mean he’d have to tell them a whole host of secrets—about how when they’d moved to Noble’s Green two years ago, he’d discovered a small group of super-children living in secret. About how he’d saved those children from their enemy, the power-stealing villain called the Shroud. And he’d have to tell them that he, a regular kid from Philadelphia, had caused the world-famous Blackout Event, when two hundred and three people woke up one morning and suddenly remembered that they could fly. Or breathe underwater. Or any number of wondrous and sometimes bizarre things. There were super-adults, but just as many were children and more were being discovered every day. He’d have to explain all that to his parents and hope they didn’t lock him in his room until college.