Rise of the Heroes Read online

  “Let go of me!”

  Emily landed back on the floor. Toby heaved himself back to the ceiling and flattened himself just as the door swung fully open. Sarah Wilkinson entered with her arms full of paperwork and her wet black hair plastered across her forehead.

  “Hi, Mom!” said Lorna in a bright voice she hoped would hide her nervousness. Emily and Pete forced wide smiles on their faces as they all tried to avoid looking up at the ceiling.

  Directly above them Toby held his breath, not daring to move a muscle. He didn’t know if it was his imagination, but it felt as if his grip was loosening.

  Sarah frowned, suspicious at being greeted in such a welcoming manner. She looked around. “Where’s your brother?”

  “Oh … he’s hanging around.” Lorna thought her mother looked tired; in fact, she often did these days, and Lorna hoped it wasn’t because of her mother’s diabetes. But even with the fatigue she showed, Sarah still seemed young for her age—thirty-eight was ancient by any standards, and Lorna hoped that she’d inherited her mother’s genes.

  Sarah looked suspiciously at Pete. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Need a hand?” asked Pete, pointing to her bundle of papers.

  That off-the-cuff offer of assistance deepened Sarah’s suspicions. “Seriously, what’s happening here?”

  Lorna smiled innocently. She was good at that. “Nothing. We were all just … doing homework.”

  A smell snagged Sarah’s nostrils. “Do I smell … burning?”

  Lorna didn’t hesitate. “Yes, but it’s okay. Lightning hit the telephone wire outside. It sparked a lot. Scared us all. But we’re fine. No damage done.”

  Sarah closed the door behind her and nodded. She knew her children’s penchant for getting into mischief, but nothing seemed out of place. And if there was a crisis, she hoped she’d raised them to be self-sufficient enough to cope with it.

  She was worried because the kids didn’t see much of their parents these days. Her workload had increased, and her husband was forever away on field trips. Right now she was too tired, and wanted nothing more than to take her insulin and sink into a relaxing bath.

  “If you say so. Just don’t use the computer. I need to work on it tonight and I don’t want it damaged by lightning.”

  Sarah moved into the lounge, her voice receding. Toby let out a huge breath and scuttled safely down the wall. Lorna wheeled around on him with an accusing finger.

  “See? You nearly got us into trouble. You and that stupid Web site.”

  “What did I do?”

  Lorna and Emily trudged upstairs. “I guess that’s the end of that!” Emily said.

  Toby and Pete exchanged a glance. They both knew she was wrong. Something like this could not be forgotten, or swept aside. Something like this needed to be explored and tested.

  The Job

  Lorna heaved a cart top-heavy with local newspapers. Toby was with her, providing the legwork between the cart and the mailboxes. Following the previous day’s excitement and resulting arguments, a sullen silence had hung over them. It was still there as they picked up their newspaper route from the newsstand.

  They had both done the paper route for the last two years. Their parents had insisted that earning their own money would be good for them. And, on the whole, both Lorna and Toby agreed—when Mr. Patel finally got around to paying them. He was already two months behind, not because Mr. Patel was mean, but because he was forgetful.

  Last night they had all gathered in Toby’s bedroom before Emily and Pete had left, and tried to evoke Toby’s powers again, after persuading Pete not to try his, as they didn’t want to burn the house down. But nothing happened. Whatever magic had triggered the effect, it was gone.

  After their friends had left, Lorna spent the night complaining that she and Emily hadn’t had a chance to try the powers bestowed by the Web site. Toby thought it was a typical change of attitude and had decided not to mention that he had saved the Web site in his “Favorites” folder. He was still mulling over what had happened.

  Overnight his entire outlook on life had changed. He’d always liked comic books and loved movies, but he knew they were fiction—nothing more. The world was not under constant threat, people couldn’t fire lasers from their eyes, and monsters weren’t real.

  Yet now he’d seen the evidence of superpowers firsthand and if he was wrong about that, what else existed out there? Now the world seemed full of incredible opportunities. And maybe that’s why they didn’t see their father? Maybe he wasn’t a mild-mannered archaeologist but really a superhero, saving the world from heinous villains?

  Toby dutifully pulled a newspaper from the top of the pile and approached the next house lost in thought. His hand reached for the gate latch, prompting the angry rottweiler on the other side to bristle with fury and throw its full weight against the gate, which shook violently.

  Startled, Toby backed away. The snarling beast clawed at the wire mesh, barking furiously. Toby tossed the paper over the gate, the confused mutt running after it only to shred it with powerful chomps.

  Lorna snorted out a laugh. “You’re as white as a sheet!”

  Toby treated her to an accusing glare. “Oh, talking now, are we? It only takes my near death to get you speaking again?”

  “Look who’s talking! You haven’t even mumbled for the last half hour. That’s not like you.”

  “Well, doesn’t this all seem, I don’t know … mundane after last night?”

  “How would I know? I never got to try it.”

  “Aw, don’t start that again. You were telling me not to use that Web site.”

  “Well … I was wrong.” Toby blinked in surprise. Hearing his sister admit to being wrong was unnatural. “And I wanted to try. Don’t look at me like that. I couldn’t exactly agree with you. Especially not in front of Em.”

  Toby cast a last glance at the dog, which was now covered in newspaper confetti, before continuing up the street.

  “Apology accepted.”

  “It wasn’t an apology.”

  “Well, it should have been. Promise not to flip out, but what if I told you we could try again?”

  A smile played across Lorna’s mouth. “Really?”

  Toby checked that the next yard was free from predators before taking the newspaper from the cart. Lorna grabbed the end of the paper before he could move away.

  “Tell me!”

  Toby pulled the paper, but Lorna wasn’t letting go. It was a sibling tug-of-war.

  “Okay … I’ll tell you. But it’s my find. My rules.” Lorna opened her mouth to object—but was silenced by Toby’s raised finger. “Okay? So don’t go snooping around without me. Do we have a deal?”

  Lorna released the paper. “Okay! Your rules, I get it.”

  “I saved it in the computer’s ‘Favorites!’”

  Lorna looked at him in surprise. Of course, it was obvious! That’s what the Favorites list was for, making shortcuts to Web sites you liked to visit. But there was no Web address on the site—or to give it its correct moniker, URL, Uniform Resource Locator—as Pete had kept correcting them.

  “Will that work? Without a URL?”

  A shadow of doubt clouded Toby’s face but he turned to conceal it from his sister. “Why wouldn’t it? It worked last night.”

  “Can we try it? Later?”

  “Well, it said we only have a two-day trial. So it has got to be today. I’m going to call Pete over.”

  “I’ll tell Em.”

  Toby rammed the paper through the mailbox, perhaps with a little more force than was needed. “If you have to. So we’re agreed? My find, my rules. Mom is out tonight so we have got as much time as we need.”

  “Okay. But this time we need to be prepared. I don’t want us to burn the house down.”

  “No problem. I’m in charge of the Web site and superpowers. You’re in charge of safety.” Toby sniggered. He’d just assigned himself the coolest job. Sometimes his sister was such a sucker
.

  The doorbell rang at 3:30 p.m.

  Pete came in first, giddy with excitement and with a pile of comics tucked under his arm. Emily followed, shaking her head. “He’s been talking about Spider-Man and Superman all the way down here. Incessantly.”

  Pete and Emily lived two streets apart, and their paths often crossed on the trek to the Wilkinsons’. It was an unavoidable fact they had both come to terms with and eventually started to enjoy, although they would never admit that to anyone, let alone each other.

  “This is all relevant,” said Pete. “You’re lucky I read these things, because that now makes me something of an expert.” The comic books also proved a handy method of tuning out his parents’ arguments, which had been increasing in intensity lately. Focusing on the world that unfolded in the comic-book pages allowed him to avoid the reality around him. But he didn’t want to burden his friends with that.

  Emily shook her head doubtfully. “Yeah, right.”

  Lorna led them into the study where Toby waited, impatiently pacing the room. True to his word he had not booted up the computer until everybody arrived.

  Lorna nodded. “Okay, Tobe. Let’s do this.”

  Toby shot into the chair and thumbed the power button. He nervously drummed his fingers as the machine bleeped to life.

  “I wonder if this will work without a storm?” he said. “We better hope so. There’s nothing we can do about that,” said Lorna.

  “I haven’t heard of anything like this,” said Pete, waving a dog-eared comic for emphasis. “I went online at home. Searched everywhere, but couldn’t track down that Web site or find any mention of it at all. Nothing anywhere. No newsgroups, blogs, Web pages, or links. It simply doesn’t exist.”

  Lorna snatched an X-Men comic from Pete and took a seat next to her brother as she flicked through it. “So instead, you’re using comic books for reference material?”

  “Why not?”

  “Duh! They’re comic books. Not real life.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  Lorna shrugged as though the answer was obvious. “I don’t think I am. It’s just such a geeky idea that it scares me.”

  Toby stepped in to save his friend. “Well, they may not exactly be all true stories. But maybe they’re written with some deeper meaning?”

  “Like those newspaper stories claiming Elvis lives on the moon?”

  Emily frowned. “Who’s Elvis?”

  Toby shook his head. “So sheltered.”

  Lorna thumped him on the shoulder, normally an action that resulted in a chase around the house. But not this time. Toby was concentrating on the screen as the computer’s desktop appeared.

  “We’re up and running.”

  Pete and Emily crowded around him. Toby treated them all to an appropriately solemn look. “Fingers crossed, everybody.”

  He double-clicked the mouse. Seconds later the browser appeared, instantly logging them onto the Web. They waited for the home page to appear.

  Electrons moved at the speed of light from their computer, tunneling through the phone exchange and onward to their ISP server, located in a subterranean bunker somewhere in the country. The powerful computers relayed the information, identified the IP address of the specific server the home page was located on, and shot it back into the telephone exchange. The data bumped a satellite ride, before beaming down to a receiver dish at a “ground station.” It navigated through the phone exchange once more, as it headed toward another server halfway around the world. The server acknowledged the request and issued a stream of data along a similar route—and back to Toby’s computer, all in a couple of seconds.

  “We’re online.”

  Toby moved the cursor up the screen toward the toolbar and the Favorites menu.

  To Toby it seemed the mouse pointer was moving sluggishly as he clicked. Another menu zipped down the screen, filled with a collection of sports and movies Web sites. And at the bottom: one simply labeled “HERO.”

  Click.

  The page changed to a blank screen. Nothing happened.

  Pete groaned in disappointment. “The find of the century, and we lost it!”

  “Wait,” said Toby. “Something’s happening!”

  The Web address appeared on-screen, again a string of illegible characters. And then the same basic Web page as last time appeared.

  Lorna laughed aloud. “It worked! Good thinking, Tobe.”

  Even the excitement of finding the Web site took a fleeting backseat to the rare compliment from his sister.

  Lorna’s hand suddenly lashed out, stopping Toby from enthusiastically clicking the mouse.

  “Take it easy! This time we’ll read it carefully.”

  Calming himself, Toby clicked on the download page.

  Again the screen changed to hundreds of separate icons; a pop-up window appeared, the text wavering through several languages before settling on English. Lorna read it aloud.

  “Final day of free trial. Welcome, Heroes! Please choose your download carefully and enjoy an hour of super fun.”

  Pete nodded sagely. “An hour! That’s why it didn’t work again last night.”

  Toby scrolled the message window down a little more as Lorna continued. “Once you have chosen your powers, then please check out the job board.”

  “Job board?” exclaimed Pete. “Why would we want a job?”

  “That’s what it says. And there’s a disclaimer at the bottom.” Lorna squinted as a slab of text appeared in a smaller font. She took a deep breath and read quickly:

  “Hero.com is not liable for any damage, destruction, loss of equipment, premises, or life; including loss of limb, brain function, or other biological necessities. Loss of personal possessions, sanity, or loved ones is the sole responsibility of the End User (He, She, It, who chooses to use such powers). We do not condone the use of powers for monetary gain, selfish or evil pursuit, and absolve ourselves from any such claim, misuse, or misunderstanding.”

  “Wow,” said Emily. Her parents were both lawyers, so she had grown up among headache-inducing contracts and declarations that she had found around the house. Her father had even jokingly created one relating to giving her an allowance. “Incomprehensible legalese” was the term he was most proud of using. “Now that’s a warning,” Emily said.

  “Loss of life …,” said Toby quietly.

  Lorna nudged him gently in the ribs. “Not chickening out now, are you?”

  “Well … no. Just … it didn’t occur to me that it could actually be dangerous.”

  “Dangerous? Pete almost burned the house down yesterday!”

  Pete nodded encouragingly. “I nearly did.”

  Toby shifted in his seat, suddenly aware that he was being the only rational person in a room of eager crazies. “It’s just that last night didn’t feel dangerous. I mean, who created this Web site? There’s no company name or contact information on it. Is this even legal?”

  Lorna tugged the mouse from his grasp. “Look, plastic bags have warnings on them, saying that they could be dangerous and cause suffocation. But do you feel scared when you use one?”

  “No, but I use plastic bags the right way. I don’t shove them over my head.”

  “Then we’ll use these powers the right way,” Lorna said in a tone of voice that suggested further conversation would be pointless. She closed the warning box and was about to select a download option when another text box appeared on-screen with a loud ping. She scanned the text with increasing excitement.

  “It says: As a special offer, all powers come with a free flying upgrade to allow you to sample the jobs on offer!”

  Pete and Emily erupted with simultaneous enthusiasm: “Flying?”

  The excitement was infectious, and Toby caught it again. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

  Lorna closed the box and hovered the mouse over a variety of icons.

  “What do they all mean?”

  Pete pointed to one icon that had wavy lines emanating from a stick f
igure’s head.

  “This looks like some kind of vision power.”

  “Vision power?” said Emily. She was feeling a little lost, as she hadn’t read a comic book in her life.

  Toby waved his hand dismissively, as though the answer was obvious. “The lines are around his head. X-ray vision, that kind of thing.”

  Emily blushed. “So you could see through clothes?”

  Toby hesitated. That hadn’t occurred to him; he was thinking more along the lines of walls and bank vaults. Although seeing through clothing could be another cool application. Lorna pointed to a similar icon, but this time the lines were straight and dashed, not wavy. “What’s this one? Looks almost the same. Or this one over here?” There were half a dozen icons, all subtly different.

  Toby shrugged. “You’ll know when you try.”

  “That’s not very helpful.”

  “Come on, hurry up!” said Pete impatiently.

  Lorna circled the mouse, then clicked on her original choice, the figure sporting wavy lines around the head. The screen flickered, funnelling out slightly as though it was made from liquid metal. But this time it snaked at an angle—as Lorna was not directly in front of the screen—and poked her temple. She stepped away from the computer as she felt something course through her.

  Toby looked at her curiously. “How do you feel?”

  “Can you see through my clothes?” asked Pete with a nervous tremor in his voice.

  Lorna thought for a moment as she stretched her arms as though yawning. “Tingling all over. What do you think will happen if I—?”

  “Not in here,” Toby interrupted. “Remember what Pete did to the rug? I’m sure Mom would ground us if you blew the study apart. Well, she’d ground me at least. She thinks you can’t do anything wrong.”

  Lorna ignored the last sentence, but had to agree with his logic. Trepidation made her voice quaver slightly. “Okay, we’ll try outside. Hurry up and get yours.”

  Toby nodded to Emily and gestured toward the computer. “You haven’t tried yet.”

  Emily examined Lorna, as though double-checking that she was still alive. She scanned the icons, searching more for a pleasurable picture than trying to decipher their meaning. One depicted a figure with horizontal lines crossing the length of the body. She liked it. She clicked and the screen warped toward her like a living entity.