Joshua Dread (18 page)

“Why are you being so secretive about it, then?”

“I was going to make an announcement. That’s why Fink and I are meeting. We’re here to discuss the next stage of the project. The press release is already written, the new uniform has been designed—”

“Okay, I think we’ve all gotten a little ahead of ourselves,” Fink interrupted. “Maybe it’s best if we talk about this later—”

But Sophie ignored Fink. “I know all about it, Dad,” she said. “Your little scheme to have microscopic robots teleport all the supervillains in the world.”

“Microscopic robots? Teleport?” Captain Justice shook his head.

“Captain J,” said Fink, “I really think that we should—”

“You nearly killed me and my friends—twice!” Sophie said. “Is that a part of your plan too?”

“Sophie, I would never …” Captain Justice looked bewildered, as if he were hearing about the details of his
plan for the first time. “You must be mistaken. Fink and I are working on a secret project, that’s true. But it has nothing to do with teleporting villains or trying to kill anyone.”

Before Captain Justice could say anything more, Fink reached into his pocket and removed a cell phone. He jabbed a finger at the touch pad. An instant later, an enormous glowing red wall formed around where Sophie and Captain Justice were standing, trapping them in place like a cage. Fink stared back at them from the other side of the barrier, the cell phone clutched in one hand.

Captain Justice beat his fists against the glowing wall. But no matter how hard he pounded, the barrier stayed in place.

“What is this, Fink?” Captain Justice yelled. “What have you done?”

“I’m sorry, Captain J,” Fink said from the other side of the barrier, “but like you said, sometimes change is necessary.”

“Curse you, Fink! Let us out of this thing at once!”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that. My boss wants to keep you there.”

“I
am
your boss!”

“Not anymore. I have a new boss now. And he pays considerably more.”

There was a sound at the other end of the room.
Footsteps. The rhythm of shoes moving across the floor. And something else—the steady click of a cane.

A figure emerged from the shadows. A man shrouded in darkness. He moved slowly, supporting himself with his cane as he approached the glowing barrier.

Phineas Vex.

I
thought about the last time I’d seen Phineas Vex—struggling in the grip of a smoke creature, just before he’d disappeared in a burst of lightning. Milton and I watched, hidden behind the canister, as he neared the glowing barrier where Sophie and Captain Justice were trapped.

“Greetings, Captain Justice,” Phineas Vex said.

He spoke in the same commanding voice that I remembered from the Vile Fair. A black patch covered one eye. A scar ran down the side of his face.

“Release me at once!” Captain Justice hollered at Vex.

“Release you?” Vex let out a single barking laugh. “After all the work I put into getting you here? I don’t think so.”

“Very well,” Captain Justice said. “I’ll just have to release myself.”

Vex watched, amused, as Captain Justice held out his arm, pointing his fist at the glowing boundary.

“Engage Heat Beam of Honesty!” he bellowed. Nothing happened. He pressed a button on his armor-plated wristband and tried again.

“I’m afraid your arsenal of badly named hologram weapons won’t work,” said Vex. “Nor will any other powers. The barrier emits an energy field that neutralizes all superpowers and disables any electronic devices. You can’t even get a cell phone signal in there.”

Vex turned to Sophie.

“You must be Sophie Justice,” he said, bending forward and leaning on his cane with both gloved hands. “You look just like your mother.”

A twisted smile formed on his scarred face.

Sophie stepped forward. Captain Justice tried to pull her back, but she stood her ground, staring at Vex through the glowing barrier.

“I must say I’m impressed that you survived this long,” Vex said. “Especially after my attempt to”—his awful smile sharpened—“send you a message.”

“The Firebottomed Rompers?” Sophie said.

“That’s right. When I discovered that Captain Justice had moved to Sheepsdale, I decided to send his daughter a welcoming committee. Unfortunately, you and your little friends survived. And I suppose you must’ve made it past my flock of Guard Birds as well.”

“And the smoke creatures,” Sophie said.

“In that case, you at least deserve to know that your father is telling the truth about his secret project. It has nothing to do with teleporting villains. It’s more of a … How would you describe it, Fink?”

“A rebranding effort,” Fink said.

“That’s right,” Vex said. “Rebranding.”

Sophie turned to Captain Justice. “Is that true, Dad?”

Captain Justice nodded. “The brand was going stale. We were losing several key demographics. Our plan was to update my image. New uniform, new accessories. Even a new name.” He paused for effect. “Captain Justiz—with a
z
.”

“So that’s why you had all that stuff with the
Z
logo on it,” Sophie said. “But what about the smoke creatures?”

“That was my contribution,” Vex replied. “VexaCorp developed the nano-beings for the smoke creatures. And the smoke creatures brought the villains to me.”

Fink reached into his pocket and retrieved his cell phone. The same phone he’d used to generate the neutralizing barrier around Sophie and Captain Justice.
This time when he punched a button, a light flickered on behind the glass.

There were people back there—more than a hundred of them. Villains. They were all dressed in identical white robes, and they were being held to the wall by thick metal restraints. Their bodies were slumped forward, their eyes closed.

My mom and dad were near the far end of the glass. Like everyone else, they were draped in white robes. Their wrists and legs were secured to the wall. Their heads drooped toward the ground.

“The world’s most dangerous supervillains,” Vex said with a note of awe in his voice. “All here in one room. They’re in artificially induced comas right now. They’ll stay that way until I release them.”

“You’re insane,” Captain Justice said. “These are
your
customers. Why would you abduct them?”

“Oh, but you’re wrong there.” A malicious grin formed on Vex’s face. “I didn’t abduct these villains.
You
did.”

A pause filled the room. Captain Justice took a step away from the glowing wall that separated him from Vex.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“On paper, all this is yours.” Vex gestured toward the rows of massive computers, the machinery, the unconscious supervillains behind him. “Thanks to Fink here, everything connected to the disappearing villains
leads right back to Captain Justice. Not to mention the smoke creatures and Firebottomed Rompers. The research and development budgets. Even this hotel. Everything is registered under Justiz Industries. And Justiz Industries is registered under
your
name.”

Captain Justice stared back at Vex with a stunned expression. I’d seen him hundreds of times before—on magazines, in commercials, fighting my parents—but he’d never looked as confused as he did now.

“You still don’t get it, do you?” Vex said. “I suppose that’s to be expected. Intelligence was never your greatest strength. All along, you thought you and Fink were just working on some paltry little rebranding.
Captain Justiz
. But Fink was putting in a lot of extra hours without your knowledge to make sure that all of
this
”—Vex gestured to the underground chamber, the wall of unconscious villains—“is linked back to
you
.”

“You’re even more demented than you look, Vex!” Captain Justice said. “Nobody will believe these lies!”

“Of course they will! You have the money; you have the motivation. The paperwork, the patents—they’re all in your name. When investigators look into the smoke creatures, they’ll find the
Z
logo imprinted on the sides of each nano-robot. The same logo that you have on all your new uniforms and accessories.”

The wristband that Sophie had shown me that morning.
He had at least fifty other boxes
, she’d said.
Uniforms, accessories, capes. All of them with this logo on there somewhere
.

The founder of VexaCorp Industries, Phineas Vex is behind many of the most popular (and deadly) supervillain products on the market. If you see the eyes of his skull cane begin to glow red, it could be lights-out for you
.

“Nobody will ever suspect I was involved,” Vex said. “Why would they? An entire conference hall full of supervillains witnessed me being abducted by one of the smoke creatures when I courageously stepped in to rescue a boy at the Vile Fair.”

“Even if you
do
succeed in this deception, the public will be grateful,” Captain Justice said. “With so many supervillains in captivity, the world will be a safer place. And I’ll be the one to get credit for it.”

“That would be true. Except I intend to release the villains. Just as soon as I’ve finished killing you and your daughter.”

A terrible silence hung over the room.

“Allow me to explain what all the newspapers will be reporting tomorrow morning, since you won’t be alive to read any of them,” Vex said coolly. “Captain Justice’s secret plan to teleport supervillains fell apart when one of them—a certain Phineas Vex—managed to escape. Captain Justice tried to stop him and a battle ensued, but Vex got the upper hand, and Captain Justice—the greatest superhero the world has ever known—perished once and for all.”

Captain Justice looked like he wanted to strangle Vex. But Vex went on, his single eye trained unblinkingly through the barrier.

“As soon as you and your daughter are out of the way, I’ll free the rest of the supervillains that are trapped here. I’ll tell them everything. How you were the one controlling the smoke creatures. About my escape, our fight. They’ve been in comas since arriving here. They’ll believe all of it. And so will the media. Especially when they discover all the paperwork in your name. Once the story goes public, it will do more for my image—and the image of VexaCorp—than any amount of marketing money ever could have. The world will fear me. The supervillain community will worship me.”

“Are you saying that this is all just a”—Captain Justice shook his head—“a public relations campaign?”

“Now you’re catching on. You and I both know that
image
is everything in our line of work. Without it, heroes and villains are just a bunch of lunatics flying around in funny costumes.” Vex laughed, a low, dark chuckle. “I will forever be known as the villain who killed Captain Justice and rescued the world’s worst supervillains. Do you have any idea what this kind of publicity will do for the profit margin of VexaCorp?”

Vex tapped his cane once on the hard floor, like a punctuation mark to his wild story.

“You’re crazy,” Captain Justice said. But there was no trace of the booming confidence I’d always heard from him in the past. He sounded almost … afraid. “You’ll never succeed.”

“I already have,” Vex replied. “You and your daughter will soon be dead. And Fink is the only other person who can contradict the story. But since he’ll be dead soon too, I doubt he’ll be giving any press conferences.”

Fink spun to face Vex, his face transforming with surprise and fear. “What?” he muttered. “What are you—”

Before he could say anything more, Vex lifted his cane, aiming the skull handle at Fink’s chest. A beam of red light shot out of the handle, and Fink collapsed onto the ground.

Captain Justice rushed forward. “You madman!” he screamed.

A sickening chill crept down my neck. The cane in Vex’s hand—it had ended Fink’s life in a single flash of red light.

Vex bent down and removed the phone from the pocket of Fink’s jacket.

“Technology truly is a wonderful thing,” he said, admiring the phone. “When I was first starting out in the supervillain business, we needed a computer the size of an ice cream truck just to power a graphing calculator. Now I can control every function of this lair with a smartphone. There’s an app for everything. All I have to do is press this touch pad, and it will trigger a stream of poisonous gas inside the neutralizing barrier that will kill you both within minutes.”

I’d been watching all this with a growing sense
of terror. Milton was beside me, his mouth hanging open like he’d just sat through a six-hour horror movie marathon.

“What do we do?” he whispered.

“I don’t know.” My voice was so quiet that I barely heard it myself. “But we can’t just wait here for Vex to kill them.”

As quietly as possible, Milton unzipped the backpack. “Maybe there’s something in here we can use,” he whispered, pulling out cans of Dr Pepper, bags of chips, packs of Justice Jerky.

Our lives were on the line, and the only weapon we had was junk food.