Popular Clone (25 page)

At last, after what felt like hours, the rumbling sub-sided, and Fisher uncovered his eyes.

Only a massive dust cloud floated where the building once stood. Anyone and anything that had been left inside it when the final blast occurred was now little more than mist.

CHAPTER 24

Fools! You will never defeat me!

—Prince Xultar of Venus, enemy of Vic Daring, approximately 3.1 minutes before being defeated

Fisher could barely breathe. His mom and dad were squeezing him so tightly, he felt like a watermelon being pushed through a straw. They had arrived on the scene minutes earlier, along with a full SWAT team and dozens of military officers. It looked like they had been about to storm TechX when it exploded. Fisher felt tears drip onto the top of his head from both sides. FP was bounding excitedly around their feet.

“I thought I'd never see you again,” managed his mother between sobs, her lab gear still hanging loosely from her neck, her hair disheveled. “Dr. X always terrified me, but I never thought he'd go this far!”

“Were you really planning to give up the AGH?” Fisher asked.

His mom sniffled. “My FBI contacts wanted to use the AGH to lure Dr. X into an ambush,” she said. “But I was so scared that it wouldn't work… . I was so scared that he would find a way to …” She dissolved into sobs again.

“We had decided just to give up the AGH,” Fisher's dad said. “It seemed like the safest thing to do. Only minutes later, and Dr. X would have had all that power in his hands!”

“Well,” Fisher said when he finally managed to wrench away from his parents' double embrace. “You won't have to worry about him ever again.” Fisher mentally reminded himself to return the AGH from his mother's perfume bottle to its container when they got home.

A pang struck him sharply when he thought of his four-day brother. Two had sacrificed himself to save Fisher's life. And now, his clone was reduced to dust. It was painful, and wrong. Fisher felt numb. He couldn't think about it, about how much he would miss Two.

Two had driven him crazy at first, but Fisher had really grown to admire him. Two had demonstrated qualities that Fisher had never seen in himself: courage, daring, confidence.

He thought about what Two had told him in the complex: that Fisher, too, was brave. Suddenly, it struck him that maybe he and Two hadn't been so different after all. Fisher himself had been brave, when it was necessary for him to be. He had been bold, when the situation was too important for him to sink into his usual worrying routine. And he had stayed calm during times of incredible danger to himself.

Two was just another side of himself. And in that sense, Two would always be around.

“However did you escape?” Fisher's dad asked, once again stepping in to squeeze Fisher so tightly he could only respond with a muffled “
errrnhggghmph.
”

It was only when Fisher's parents finally released him that Fisher realized people and cars were jamming the street. There were news trucks, police cars, and fire trucks. The street was packed with hundreds and hundreds of people. And they, and their cameras, were all focused on him.

Cheers went up from the crowd as Fisher's parents walked him to their car. Fisher was awestruck. Did all of these people really care whether he'd survived the TechX dungeons?

Fisher's mom bent down to whisper to him. “Now that the truth about Dr. X has been exposed, you're a hero, Fisher.”

Reporters tried to crowd around him as he walked toward the street, and he found himself floating in a dense haze of glory. He, Fisher Bas, was a champion, and reporters were clamoring for his attention.

“Fisher!”

“Fisher, over here!”

“Fisher, just a few questions!”

As the reporters were about to engulf the Bas family, a man and a woman, both in suits, both in sunglasses, and neither apparently capable of smiling, steered them around and through the crowd and straight to their car. The man got in the driver's seat while the woman got in her own car and followed them as they drove home.

“This is Agent Harris,” said Fisher's dad in the passenger seat.

“We contacted the FBI as soon as we got the message Dr. X sent to us,” said his mom, sitting next to him.

“Good job, son,” said Agent Harris in a flat voice.

“Uh, thank you,” Fisher said.

“We've been monitoring Dr. X's activities for some time now,” he went on in monotone. “We were arranging for your mother to deliver a poison to Dr. X disguised as the AGH formula, but you made that unnecessary.”

“Er … ,” Fisher said. “I see.”

Mrs. Bas put her arm around Fisher's shoulders and squeezed. “We're just glad you're all right, and that Dr. X can't hurt us—or anyone—anymore.”

The next day, a parade was organized. As smoke still rose over Palo Alto from the smoldering crater that had been TechX, Fisher was led into the back of the mayor's convertible by the mayor himself, a great portly man with a bushy white mustache. The mayor smiled hugely and shook Fisher's hand with a firm grip. The parade got under way, music played, and people cheered. Someone dressed up in the Wompalog Furious Badger costume danced along at the front, just next to the new DBYBBD mascot.

Fisher stood in the convertible, waving to crowds who had come to marvel at the boy who had single-handedly (as far as they knew) taken down the terrifying Dr. X. He kept searching for Veronica, scanning the dense crowd of faces.

After the parade, Fisher stepped down onto the sidewalk and found himself surrounded by people and reporters.

“Did you fear for your life?” one man asked as television cameras started to close in from all sides.

“I certainly did,” Fisher said with newfound ease. Before, he would have been spluttering and searching for words with even one stranger looking at him. “Dr. X was a madman. I had never guessed how nefarious his schemes really were.”
Thank you, Vic Daring,
he thought,
for teaching me the word
“nefarious.”

“And what about his robotic henchmen?” one woman said, an excited look on her tan face. “How did you defeat them?”

“Well,” Fisher began, feeling a slight blush on his face, “it wasn't easy, but with the proper application of my technical knowledge, I was able to take them down.” He was seriously warping the truth, but all of the evidence that might have disproved him was now in powder form.

“
I
have a question,” said a young female voice as the speaker pushed her way to the front of the crowd. It was Amanda Cantrell. Fisher had noticed her watching him during the parade, and she had managed to sneak through the crowd between the legs of the other reporters. Now the look on her face registered a curious suspicion. “I couldn't help but notice that you've been signing autographs with your right hand. When you borrowed my pen at the protest, you wrote with your left.” Fisher's old freeze-in-place reflex came back in full force. “Also, you had two freckles on your nose before,” she went on, “and now you have three. Were these changes the result of strange chemicals inside the labs, or is there some better explanation you can give us?” She shoved her microphone closer to his face.

“I … uh … ,” Fisher said, looking around at the crowd, who eagerly awaited his reply. “Things happened in there I can't begin to describe,” he began, feigning a look of sorrow and pain and hoping that the crowd's sympathy would be stronger than their curiosity. “Fiendish machines, evil instruments of destruction. I can only guess how many bizarre substances I was exposed to. They may have changed me in permanent ways. I'm just lucky to be alive.”

Amanda crossed her arms, eyes narrowing. She wasn't buying it. But as Fisher looked around, he realized he could've said Santa Claus had flown a dinosaur from Mars to give him a new nose freckle, and the crowd still would've smiled at him admiringly.

“Well,” she said a little drily, “you're
lucky
I noticed your absence and notified the authorities when I did. Otherwise, it might've taken much longer to organize a
parade
.” She frowned at him and flounced off into the crowd.

Other kids were starting to gather around him, waving and cheering. Most of them had never spoken to him before. Most of them, in fact, had probably not known his name until Two started causing such a ruckus at school. But here they all were, shouting, trying to catch his eye. Into the middle of this formation appeared the one and only Chance Barrows, sporting mirrored shades as he often did, his perfect teeth shining in the morning sun.

Fisher saw Chance and gave him a double-gun handspoint. Chance returned the gesture, smiling even wider, and the rest of the kids erupted into a chorus of even louder cheering.

People were starting to line up with pens or permanent markers and whatever they could grab to write on, demanding the new town hero's autograph. Fisher was getting squeezed from all sides, and Fisher started to feel as if he couldn't breathe.

Fortunately, as everyone was closing in, his parents managed to elbow their way through the crowd and hustle him toward their car. All the way, he kept looking for any sign of Veronica in the crowd, but he didn't see her anywhere.

“All right, hero,” his mom said, tousling his hair. “Time to go home.”

Fisher and his parents drove home, all three happy and exhausted from the day of celebration. FP was one step ahead of them, being happy and asleep.

“Welcome back, my dear boy!” said Lord Burnside as Fisher walked into the kitchen. “We all feared for you greatly! I was beginning to wonder if I would ever prepare bread slices to your exact crispness preference again!”

Fisher walked up and patted the toaster. “It's good to be home, your lordship.”

The glowing eyes waggled up and down happily.

In spite of his father's earlier complaints, the Bas family ordered King of Hollywood for dinner, and Fisher dug into a Movie Monarch–sized order of spicy fries, feeling like he hadn't eaten anything in days.

After dinner, Fisher turned wearily to his parents. “I'm going to go and sleep now, if you don't mind,” he said, and hugged them both before wearily slogging up the stairs to his room with FP close at his heels.

Fisher collapsed into bed that night, exhausted. It was really weird to go from being totally ignored to having all eyes on him. The pressure he felt was unlike any he'd ever been under before.

All the same, it should all prove to be worth it tomorrow. Because tomorrow he would go back to school, and at school, he would see Veronica again.

CHAPTER 25

I figured out why heroes always ride off into the sunset in the end. they want to find a place where no one's even heard of them. Because being a hero is exhausting … and leaves little time for playing video games.

—Fisher Bas, Into the Dragon's Mouth

Fisher stepped off the bus the next morning feeling like an astronaut getting off a space shuttle. As he walked toward the main doors of Wompalog, the crowd around him swelled. Everyone wanted to be close to him. Fisher had a hard time getting through the sea of people. He smiled at them, winked at them, gave them little scraps of his escape story—always modified, of course, to include only one Fisher.

He had a stride to his walk now. Nobody pushed him. In fact, everyone wanted to talk to him. Everyone.

“Can I get your autograph, Fisher?” said a sixth grader even shorter than he was. He obligingly got out a pen and signed the kid's notebook.

“Hey, Fisher!” said Chance Barrows, jogging up a moment later. “What was the weirdest thing you saw in there?”

“Dancing whales,” Fisher said. “I'll tell you more about it later.”

As the day wore on, his throat was getting dry. Was this what it was like to be popular? Having to talk to everyone all the time?

He'd never imagined that living the life of a hero would be this much work.

He was finally able to break away from the constant crowd around third period, when he saw Veronica, standing at her locker. She was flipping through one of her class notebooks, her quick and clever blue eyes darting over its contents. He plastered a smile onto his face and walked boldly over to her.

“Hey, Veronica,” he said, leaning an elbow against the locker. He breathed in her faintly sweet and arrestingly familiar scent, and resisted the urge to turn to his compliment-generating watch. She looked up, smiling tightly.

“Hey, Fisher,” she said. “I heard about everything that happened. I guess you had a good reason for standing me up, huh?” She gave a hollow laugh. “Anyway, I'm glad you made it out okay.”

“Well, it wasn't easy,” he said, running his hand through his hair. “The inside of that place was pretty frightening. Electric fields and strange biological creations every where. It was like something out of an old horror movie.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, the smile beginning to fade. She turned her attention back to her books. Fisher realized he must not be doing enough to impress her.

“There were robot guards around every corner,” he continued, trying to step up his game. “Big ones, too. I had to pull some pretty bold tricks to defeat them.”

“I'm sure,” she said, gathering her books together and slipping them into her bag. “Okay, I should get to class now.” She started to walk away.

“But … you don't want to hear about how I defeated them?” he said, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. Could it be that even his new hero status was not enough for her? That in spite of everything, she would remain forever beyond his reach? Maybe, he thought, he just wasn't and would never be worthy of her company, no matter what he did.

“Fisher,” she said, sighing, “I really am very happy that you got through the mess you were in. But the way you've … changed lately, it just kind of disappoints me. I always liked that in spite of everything that got thrown at you, you were always true to yourself. You didn't try to hide your real self for the sake of impressing or winning over anyone.

“It's not that I don't think you should be self-confident,” she went on, “and the pranks you pulled were pretty funny, I have to admit. If this really is who you are now, I have no right to tell you to be any different. But I'll miss the old Fisher. That's all. I'll see you around, okay?”

She walked past him, and he felt his champion aura fizzle out around him, as if someone had taken bolt cutters to his halo.

He drifted through the rest of the day. People kept coming up to him—almost entirely in twos, threes, or crowds—as if they were afraid to all by themselves. Some people even seemed shy to talk to the Great Fisher, as everyone now seemed to think he was.

The only thing that cheered him up a little bit was his biology class. A substitute teacher, Ms. Snapper, was covering for Mr. Granger's unexplained absence. He had neither shown up to school nor called to explain his absence, and rumors were already starting to spread. Was he in trouble with the law? Did he owe money to a loan shark? Was that quiet, unassuming exterior just a secret agent's cover?

Fisher listened to these conversations, but did not join in.

He had decided to leave the mystery of Mr. Granger just that—a mystery.

“Having any trouble, Fisher?” Ms. Snapper asked, coming up to his lab station.

“Nope, I think I've got it just fine,” Fisher said, adding a few drops to the bacterial colony in his petri dish.

“I'll be sure to e-mail Mr. Granger all of the notes on what we did today,” she said, then shook her head. “I hope nothing's happened to him. I've never quite understood that man. He always seems just a little bit … distant? I'm not sure. Do you understand him, Fisher?”

“I have a feeling I may be the only person who really does,” Fisher said, and smiled a bit sadly.

Walking out of science class, he saw three looming shapes, standing like towering gravestones in his path. Brody, Leroy, Willard. He sighed and walked toward them. After his ordeal, bullies like these didn't really strike the same chord of fear in him as they used to.

“We've been hearing all about what a big-time hero you are,” Brody said.

“Yeah, you're—hic!—quite a big name these days,” Willard said.

“A real school celery,” finished Leroy. Willard and Brody turned to look at him.

“Celebrity, Leroy,” said Brody. “Willard, smack him on the head, please.”

Willard did.

“Ow!” Leroy winced.

“So?” Fisher said, too tired to think of anything more to say.

“
So
we don't really like that,” Brody said. “If you're really a hero, you'll have the guts to face us. In front of the whole school.”

“Fine,” Fisher said. “When?”

“Tomorrow, noon. The cafeteria. Be there,” Brody said, and the three turned around in unison, lumbering away through the hall.

Fisher knew he should be scared, but all he could think about was the way that Veronica had walked away from him, and the disappointment on her face.

“I just don't understand it,” he said to his computer that night, sitting at his desk, with FP in his lap.

“I think it's pretty straightforward, kid,” said CURTIS, who had just finished his big move into a brand-new hard drive. “Most kids care more about what other people think of them than about showing who they really are. She admired your honesty. And she liked who you really were.”

“But she barely ever even talked to me!” Fisher said, nearly knocking FP off his lap in his agitation.

“That a fact?” CURTIS replied, a touch of humor in the weathered, old voice. “And when she did, how long did you stick around to converse? And just how many times did you gather up the guts to go and talk to
her
?”

“Um … never.”

“Bingo!” the computer responded. “So how would you even know how she felt? You weren't exactly showing your hand, either.”

“Well, I guess not. I think I was always afraid that I was too unimportant for her to care about. But I'm a hero now!” Fisher said, standing up from his seat and putting FP down on the floor. The pig gave a loud snore and continued sleeping. “And it's been really, really …” He thought about it for a moment, pacing and wringing his hands, his brow twisted up. “… really tiring and kind of annoying, actually. Everyone is coming up to me all the time with these big plastic smiles on their faces. I have to keep this hero persona up all the time, and I don't know how many of them even care that I almost got killed.”

“I don't have a visual module installed yet,” said CURTIS, “but if I did I would be nodding my head with a knowing look on my face right now. Listen, Einstein, you can have a little pride and self-respect without tossing your personality into the trunk. You just gotta find the balance.” Fisher sat back in his chair, petting FP, letting the computer's advice sink in.

“How did you learn so much about human behavior?” he asked finally.

“I got really bored being the reactor terminal interface,” CURTIS replied. “I watched a lot of TV online.”

The next day Fisher walked into the cafeteria with slow, purposeful steps. He was holding a clear canister about the size of a thermos under one arm. Kids looked up to say hi to him, but he ignored them as he took a final step and then pivoted to face three figures at the other end of the long gap between table rows.

He looked from one face, to the second, to the third. Leroy, Brody, Willard: each of them scowling darkly, standing with legs spread wide, arms down at their sides. They and he stood motionless for a minute, each side sizing the other up.

Kids sitting in seats on the inner table ends began to look up and realize what was going on. Some casually scooted around to safer seats, others got up and bussed their trays early. A hush began to fall over the busy room. Gusts of the uneven air-conditioning sent a crumpled napkin tumbling between them.

“Get him!” shouted Brody at last, breaking the silence. The Vikings lurched forward, their sneakers smacking the tiled floor in an uneven spatter. Fisher took a single step forward, swung his arm down, and released the canister like a bowling ball. It slid toward the Vikings at high speed and, as it reached them, its cylindrical metal body came neatly apart. A swift-moving black cloud of mosquitoes swept up and out, surrounding Willard, Brody, and Leroy, who twisted around, flailing at them.

“What is this?” Willard said as bright spots began to appear on his forehead.

“Agh!—Just some bugs!” said Brody. “Swat 'em!” He jabbed the air as fast as he could, grabbing handfuls of the stinging insects. But there were hundreds of them in the air.

“Somebody get a stirring gator!” yelled Leroy.

“Ex-ow-
stir-
ow-minator!” said Brody, swatting madly.

Fisher stood back, arms crossed, and watched his trained and genetically altered insects go to work. At last—his experiments had led to success!

After a minute and a half, the canister released a chemical signal into the air, and the mosquitoes that had survived the Vikings' thrashing arms flew back inside in a neat and orderly fashion.

Willard, Brody, and Leroy, breathing hard, still yelping and twitching, stared up at Fisher. Fisher grinned as he admired his handiwork.

FISHER
, read Willard's forehead in letters composed of dozens of tiny red welts.
WAS
was similarly inscribed on Brody's. And capping it off was Leroy's forehead, whose bright scarlet print read:
HERE
.

The three looked back and forth at one another's faces in between furious scratching bouts, then, as one, they turned and ran at Fisher. He ducked and slid under a table, laughing. And as he laughed, others joined in.