Sidekicked Read online

  Dedication

  To my parents, Wes and Shiela Anderson,

  who never leave me hanging

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue Thirteen Years Ago . . .

  Part One: IN WHICH I ALMOST DIE

  1 Just Hanging Around

  2 Split Personality

  3 How I Got Out of Gym Class

  4 The Superhero Sidekick Code of Conduct

  5 It’s Not a Disease

  6 The Last Hurrah

  7 Remember the Titan

  8 Tested

  9 Upping the Ante

  10 Eavesdropping

  Part Two: IN WHICH I ALMOST DIE . . . AGAIN

  11 Promises

  12 Unlikely Heroes

  13 Something Doesn’t Smell Right

  14 The Call

  15 Caught in the Act

  16 The Best Two and a Half Seconds of My Life

  17 The Worst Fifteen Minutes of My Life So Far

  18 All Alone Together

  19 An Invitation

  Part Three: IN WHICH SOMEONE ELSE ALMOST DIES FOR A CHANGE

  20 For What It’s Worth

  21 Jenna’s Date

  22 Crashed

  23 H.E.R.O.’s End

  24 Breaking In

  25 Red

  26 The Broken Heart

  27 With This Ring

  28 Just You and Me

  Part Four: IN WHICH SOMEBODY FINALLY DIES

  29 Hot-Wired

  30 We Are Too Late

  31 Help Is on the Way

  32 The Jack of Hearts

  33 Just Hanging with My Super

  34 The End Justifies the Means

  35 One Minute More

  36 H.E.R.O.’s Return

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  THIRTEEN YEARS AGO . . .

  Captain Marvelous sighed.

  The Nullifier loomed over him, arms crisscrossed in a pretzel of triumph. The supervillain held the detonator in one hand, his thumb hovering over the oversized red button. His black armor leeched the light from the streetlamps, and his mask hid his undoubtedly twisted grin. All around echoed the heavy percussion of gunfire as the minions of the Void confronted the Legion of Justice in a battle that had raged for hours.

  It was pretty much epic.

  Battles like this only came around once every decade or so. Most of a Super’s time was spent stopping bank robberies, starring in commercials, and changing the spark plugs on the fill-in-the-blank-mobile. Seldom were a Super’s powers truly tested.

  Then again, seldom did a villain like the Nullifier get his hands on enough explosives to take out the entire city. In the comics, this would have been a five-part special.

  And for a while it looked like a happy ending. The Legion of Justice had managed to locate and disarm four of the Nullifier’s bombs and crush twelve dozen Zilchbots, all before evening rush hour. But their heroics were ultimately for naught. Kid Caliber and the Diamond Dame were trapped in the Nulzone, Mr. Malleable was stretched to the limit nearly two miles away, and the Mantis had fallen prey to a posse of armored mechanical minions.

  And Captain Marvelous, the leader of the Legion of Justice for nearly two decades, the cover boy for superhero fanzines everywhere, had been beaten for the first time in his thirty-year career. There were still six bombs planted around the city, and the Nullifier was simply one drawn-out speech away from ending it all.

  Captain Marvelous lay helpless on the cold pavement, his own superpowers sapped by the Nullifier’s coup de grâce—the marvelantium-infused laser that had leveled the Legion’s leader with one blast. Marvelantium was the Captain’s only known weakness; there was nothing the Captain could do but squirm. The big yellow M on his chest was obscured by the explosive charge the Nullifier had strapped there, and his arms and legs were bound with simple duct tape—more than enough to hold him in his weakened state. With his ruby-red cape wrapped half around him like a shroud, the Captain could only watch as his nemesis quivered with glee.

  “You wewe foowish to think you could beat me.”

  The Nullifier’s words were muffled through his mask, but the Captain had heard enough of these final speeches to get the gist. The villain would lead with a taunt or insult. Next would come a series of revelations designed to induce feelings of shock and chagrin in the Super, followed by some grandiose claim to power, something along the lines of “Soon I will take over the world!” Or Manhattan. Or the top bunk. Depending on the rank of the criminal.

  Most of the time Captain Marvelous took these speeches as opportunities to gather his strength for his final heroic maneuver—a pile driver or a simple bone-crunching punch. This time, however, he really had been foolish and nearsighted. He couldn’t beat the Nullifier—not without his powers. He couldn’t even wiggle around enough in the tape to scratch his butt. Which meant that, for the first time in decades as a Super, he would have to listen to this stupid speech from beginning to end.

  And then, apparently, he would blow up.

  The Nullifier cackled. “It was I who intercepted the armored convoy and stole the top-secret sample of marvelantium. I who sent you that text message that you thought was from that redhead at the bookstore, which led you to your doom, I who crippled your precious Legion. And soon I will rule the galaxy!”

  The Nullifier cocked his head to the side, perhaps rethinking his ambition. But it felt right. He had bombs. He had laser-toting robots. Things were on fire. So for emphasis he added, “I will be the greatest supervillain the world has ever known!” Then he laughed again, because, as near as the Captain could tell, insane supervillains always laughed at nothing funny at all.

  Captain Marvelous grunted. Even that took effort with the weight of the explosives on his chest. He knew he had to say something. If he could just keep the Nullifier talking, he might stall the city’s destruction, though what he would do with the bought time was beyond him.

  “You’ll never succeed, Nullifier!” Captain Marvelous said through clenched teeth.

  “Really?” The archvillain held up the detonator and wiggled it. “Which one of us has ten pounds of C-4 strapped to his chest, hmm?”

  The Captain looked at the gray stuff settled above his rib cage, like a mound of Play-Doh with all the colors mixed together. There were a few wires and a little red light and a little green light. The little green light was on. Even if he still had his super strength, he wasn’t sure he could withstand the force of the explosion.

  The Nullifier took five steps back. His titanium armor would protect him from the force of the blast, of course, but there was no point getting bits of Marvelous all over it.

  “O Captain, my Captain, I’m afraid your days are done.”

  Captain Marvelous clenched every muscle he had. He hated poetry. Almost as much as he hated exploding. The leader of the Legion of Justice closed his eyes.

  The Nullifier pressed the big red button.

  At least he would have, if the detonator had still been in his hand.

  Instead, the supervillain turned to see another man looming over him, five fingers wrapped around the detonator, the other five wrapped into a fist. The stranger was at least a foot taller than the Nullifier. He wore torn blue jeans and a tight black T-shirt underneath a leather jacket that barely seemed to contain him. He had no weapons, no capes, no armor. There were no letters, emblems, or sponsors on his chest. His only distinguishing feature was the sunglasses he wore, despite the fact that the sun had long ago set on the presumably doomed city.

  The Nullifier shrugged his shoulders and reached out with one armor-clad fist to take back his remote, but the stran
ger slammed his fist into the villain’s metal mask. A normal human would have broken every finger and not even made a dent, but this stranger’s punch crumpled the helmet like aluminum foil, crunching the Nullifier’s nose and causing the villain to spin halfway around before collapsing to his knees.

  The Nullifier was out cold.

  The mysterious new Super crushed the detonator in one hand the way someone much less extraordinary would crumble crackers over a bowl of chili. Then he bent over Captain Marvelous and tore the bomb from his chest, lifting the surprised Super to his feet.

  “Who are you?” the Captain asked, brushing himself off.

  It was a question the Captain himself had answered at least a few dozen times before. But he had never asked it.

  The stranger looked up heroically into the sky.

  “You can call me . . . the Titan.”

  Four hours later, in a hospital room nearly seven hundred miles away, an infant coughed the last bit of fluid out of his lungs. The whole world assaulted him. The heartbeats of humans and machines, the smell of plastic and antiseptic and bodily fluids, the cool rush of air and the instant heat of the lamp, the intricately engraved tips of fingers poking and prodding him. If he could open his eyes and focus, he would see every pore in his mother’s skin as she held him against her and the crystalline reflection of his own red and wrinkled face in the single tear that lingered near her eye.

  On that day a hero was born.

  PART ONE

  IN WHICH I ALMOST DIE

  1

  JUST HANGING AROUND

  It’s Tuesday.

  It’s Tuesday and I’m in costume, but just barely. That is to say that I have my mask and outfit on, so nobody knows who I am. Or almost nobody, at least. Which pretty much sums up my life as a whole.

  It’s Tuesday, which means it was sloppy joe day in the cafeteria, which is bad enough, but that’s not the worst thing that can happen to you.

  It’s Tuesday—middle of September, only about a month into the new school year—and I’m hovering over the Justicia community pool, which only two weeks ago was still filled with a dozen drowning bugs and the farewell tinkle from the last toddler to be dragged screaming out of it.

  Today it is filled with acid.

  Seriously. Acid.

  There are only so many things you can fill a swimming pool with that will kill someone and make a dramatic spectacle in the process. I don’t see any alligators or piranhas. Sharks are good, but you have to have saltwater. Spikes work if they are positioned properly and a suitable force is applied. But ask any supervillain, and they will tell you that acid will always do in a pinch. Besides, I can identify over three hundred chemicals by smell alone.

  Note that this is far from a typical Tuesday for me. Most days I’d be at home, zombied out in front of my computer or asleep on top of my math book, my cheek in a puddle of drool, x + y marks the spot. Of course, I also understand acid-filled swimming pools are potential job hazards, but that doesn’t make me any happier about it.

  So today is Tuesday and I’m suspended by my wrists above a pool of acid, feet dangling below me in my gray, faded Pumas, my bandanna hiding my identity from the nose up but doing nothing to conceal my frown. The number of yards I am away from death can be counted on one hand.

  And all I can seem to think about is how much homework I’ve got. Act One of Julius Caesar to finish for tomorrow and a big math test on Thursday. Not to mention I have an outline due to Mr. Broadside on the military tactics of Hannibal in the Second Punic War as part of a history presentation I have to give, and all I know about that guy is he rode an elephant through the Alps. I guess for some people a horse just isn’t good enough.

  My only consolation is that I’m not alone. Jenna is dangling beside me, long legs stretching well below mine, her silver spandex uniform clinging to her like aluminum foil, both of us suspended, just waiting to be rescued. She’s not Jenna right now, of course; she’s the Silver Lynx, sidekick to one of the most powerful Supers in Justicia, maybe even the world. But to me she will always be Jenna.

  “I don’t think gym teachers should be allowed to be health teachers unless they have a gnat fart’s inkling of what they are talking about.”

  That’s Jenna. She is one of those girls who talk just as much with her hands as her mouth, which means between the three of them you don’t get a word in. But she’s a little restricted by the thick steel cuffs around her wrists, so right now she is just wiggling her fingers. Vigorously.

  “I mean, the man doesn’t know the difference between a femur and a tumor. He thinks iPods cause cancer and he still calls Coke soda pop.”

  Jenna’s long blond hair is a little matted, and there’s a dark red spot below her ribs where she was stung resisting capture, but otherwise she seems nonchalant. As if dangling above a pool full of acid is just part of her after-school regimen—right in between gymnastics and dinner with the fam, though she seldom eats dinner with her parents. They work two jobs apiece and are usually not around, and even when they are, they aren’t. I try to mimic her coolness, but she knows I’m faking it.

  Besides, I have more to be concerned about than she does. After all, her Super is probably only a few blocks away. Somersaulting over taxicabs or leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Mine probably doesn’t even know I’m here. It’s because of this, I suspect, that she is trying to distract me with her rant about our new health teacher.

  “It’s middle school health. It isn’t rocket science,” she says.

  Jenna would know. She knows a few things about rocket science.

  My fingers are falling asleep. The handcuffs are tight, and the way the steel cable is wound around them makes them bite into my skin even deeper, cutting off circulation. I’m a little dizzy. I take a look at the winch and hoist we are connected to, and then at the motor that is lowering us at the rate of about an inch every three seconds: a slow and deliberate pace designed to cause maximum suspense, I suppose. If I try really hard, I can actually hear the metallic click of the individual gears meshing together, but I am blocking most of this out. It is simply too excruciating.

  That’s my approach to most of life most of the time: to ignore it. I have to in order to stay sane. Until something like this happens, and I realize what I’ve gotten myself into.

  I take a look at the pool of acid below me. Hydrochloric, I think. I’ve got pretty good senses—some of the best in the world, in fact. That’s what got me into this in the first place, that led me to Mr. Masters. To H.E.R.O., training to be a sidekick. To become the Sensationalist.

  And to dangling here.

  I happen to be pretty good at chemistry, so I know that hydrochloric acid isn’t the absolute worst thing you could be dipped into to death. After all, our stomachs are full of it, and in a diluted form, it was probably used to keep this same pool clean. But there’s a difference between an ounce of hydrochloric acid and a swimming pool of it. Plus the murky stuff below me is bubbling and seeping a noxious green fog. All signs that the acid is probably mixed with something else, something even more horrifying. I drop another inch and conclude that supervillains have way too much time on their hands.

  “I mean, why do I have to listen to him when I can just read the stupid book myself? You know I don’t have time for all of this.”

  Whether Jenna is talking about health class or dangling here, waiting to be rescued, I’m not sure. She’s in all advanced classes, not to mention gymnastics and track, and then there’s this other thing that we’re both a part of. How she manages to balance it all without completely freaking out is beyond me.

  I can hear grunts and pops about three blocks away, and something like an urrf, which means somebody is on the way. Below me and to the right, there is a line of police cars keeping their distance, their uniformed contents spread out behind them like ants circling dropped candy. Their revolvers are drawn, but they won’t fire. They’re just here as backdrop. The fire department is here too, as are the EMTs, but there isn’
t much they can do either. They know the rules. This is clearly beyond their scope, and these guys are out of their league. They’re basically here for crowd control. Besides, have you ever seen an EMT jump into a pool of acid to rescue two costumed teenagers? Do you even know what those guys get paid?

  Then there are the bad guys. I guess I haven’t mentioned them yet. After all, somebody had to capture us and secure us to this cable. A whole hive of somebodies, in fact. Scattered here and there across the gray sky, men in fuzzy yellow-and-black suits with mechanical vibrating wings. Seriously. Mechanical wings. And harpoon guns. They actually have harpoon guns. Like the kind from the movie Jaws. I wonder how they even managed to find that many harpoon guns in a town that is at least five hundred miles from the ocean. Jenna says they probably got them from Walmart.

  They are the drones, those fuzzy, flying guys circling around us. The ones who ambushed us, who brought us here and chained us up. Though, as the name suggests, even they are only acting on orders. They aren’t shooting at the cops, and the cops aren’t shooting at them. Everyone knows his place.

  The OCs—that’s ordinary citizens, for those of you who happen to be one—look appropriately doe-eyed, with hands clasped over their doughnut-shaped mouths, waiting. You’d think they would be running. Ducking for cover. Crawling under cars. And many have. But the ones I’m looking at now are the believers. The devotees. The sky watchers. The ones who still possess an all-abiding faith in their heroes to show up and save the day.

  Of course they aren’t the ones on the hook.

  I hear explosions from somewhere behind me, but I can’t make out too much over the thumping of my own heartbeat. I try not to think about the words acid, dissolve, flesh-eating, or sloppy joe. We lower another inch. My feet are less than five yards away from doom now. I can hear buzzing all around me. I look down.

  I can’t believe I left my utility belt at school. Again. Not that I could reach anything on it. It’s just a comfort thing. Like forgetting your watch or not putting on underwear. Without my utility belt, I am basically harmless. With it, I am at least somewhat potentially threatening.