Sidekicks Read online

  “Seriously … you being the voice of my conscience is really surreal.”

  “One mile south on Jay Street is the New York City College of Technology. Get there. And hurry up, jerkface. He’s coming,” Jake barks in his best bully voice. “Is that better?”

  “Oddly enough, yes. Right now, I’ll take anything that feels normal, even if it’s you being mean to me.”

  I turn and start sprinting across rooftops. The moment where my life changes is less than five minutes away. I keep sprinting anyway.

  “OK,” I say. “I’m here. At the college. Now what?”

  “Find the library building. Go inside.”

  “Uh, hello … it’s two in the morning. It’s closed.”

  Jake sighs. “You just got here, from Manhattan, by leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Also, the majority of your thoughts, at this very moment, are directed toward figuring out how to kill Trent when you see him again. So what exactly is holding you back from breaking into a library: your ability or your morals?”

  I head for the ground, spy a building with columns and a telltale library sign on the front, get a running start, then go crashing through the front door. There’s no alarm. “Huh. OK … now what? Is there a secret bookshelf or a trapdoor or something?”

  “Get in the elevator and press the basement button.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Do it!”

  I do as I’m told. The elevator goes down one floor to the basement.

  “Now wait for the doors to open again,” Jake says, “then close.”

  “OK.”

  “Now quickly, hit the buttons in this order: five-two-four-three-five-four-five-four-three-two-one-three-four-three-four-three-four-five-six-four-three-two-one-one-three-four—”

  Jake is rattling off numbers as fast as he can speak them. I stop trying to think about it, because if I think, I’ll make a mistake. I just react, pressing the numbers as fast he says them.

  “Five-four-one,” Jake says, then stops.

  “Is that it?”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “Maybe we got one wrong.”

  “OK,” I say, sighing, “Let’s try it again.”

  “Five—”

  The elevator plummets down at a force and speed that start to lift me off the ground.

  “Scott?”

  “Wait!” I say, and just manage to stop the vomit rising in my throat. “Is this the only way to get down here?”

  “No, but it’s the quickest.”

  The elevator comes to a dead stop. I slam against the floor but immediately spring back up. The doors start to open. I’m queasy, from both my nerves and that elevator ride, but I rush out anyway.

  “Allison!” I shout as I run from room to room. The place is big, but split up into a lot of smaller rooms. Some of the rooms are crammed with so much junk that I can’t even open the door. Others are completely empty. “ALLISON!”

  “It’s an old testing lab,” Jake says without me having to ask the obvious question. “They put it a mile underground, so that if anything went wrong …” He trails off without finishing the sentence.

  “What were they testing?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “You’re right. ALLISON!”

  I crash through a door, and find myself in a much larger room than the rest. It’s as big as an airplane hangar. The junk in here is newer, and I recognize some of it. These are Dr. Chaotic’s old weapons. His desk is set off by a bunch of work lamps. There’s a plate with a moldy sandwich on it, but the mold is fairly recent. There’s a bunch of bookcases, with books, tools, and junk stuffed haphazardly into them. One shelf has a bunch of remote control cars and stuffed animals on it, in various states of deconstruction. A teddy bear smiles lazily at me from the shelf.

  I start running through the room, looking for something, anything to indicate that Allison was here recently. “ALLISON!” When I don’t find anything, I start throwing stuff around, looking for clues … a secret passage … anything … “ALLISON!”

  “Scott,” Jake says. “Scott! Listen to me!”

  I ignore him.

  “SCOTT!! You have to listen to me.”

  I don’t.

  “LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO ME!” starts blaring on endless loop in my head.

  “Ow! All right! I’m here!”

  “Scott … you need to stop. You’ll find her later.”

  “No, I’ll find her”—I stop—“now.”

  I found her.

  “Scott …” Jake says.

  I walk toward her, slowly.

  “Scott … I’m so sorry.”

  She’s lying in a glass-lidded coffin. The glass is cool to the touch, and the clinical part of my brain knows that it’s because her father is keeping her cold … to preserve her. The hopeful idiot part of my brain suggests that she could be just resting … recovering from her injuries in some sort of stasis. But I’ve seen enough bodies in my time to know when one still has life in it, and when one doesn’t. That doesn’t stop me from staring at her, wishing for a blink or a twitch or something, damn it! And I’m slapping my palms on the glass and I’m screaming and I want to rip her out of there and hold her and perform CPR on her in a last-ditch attempt to revive her, but I know it won’t … I know it can’t … She’s already … I’m lost.

  I rest my forehead on the glass. It’s cool, and the morbid side of me wonders if the glass on her side is just as cool as this.

  “Scott!” Jake yells inside my head. “Come on, man, pull it together!”

  “Yeah, come on, Bright Boy, pull it together.”

  I whip around. Phantom Justice is standing there, smiling at me.

  “He’s there!” Jake yells in my head. “He’s there! How the he—?”

  “Tell your accomplice to shut his yap,” Phantom says in his whisper-growl. “He’s giving me a headache.”

  “Accomplice?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve thwarted justice long enough, Bright Boy … and to think, I trusted you!”

  “What?! What are you—?!” I yell … and then it clicks. I look around, and there they are—cameras. Four of them, tracking our every movement.

  “How could you kill Louis,” Phantom says, “after all he did for you?”

  “So that’s how it’s going to go down?” I ask.

  Phantom gives me a look and a half-smile that tells me that’s exactly how it’s going to go down.

  I think about Chaotic’s last words to me … about Bear always telling me the truth. “He always will,” he had said. I think about Allison, and how I accused her of lying to me, right before she—

  I pick up a heavy piece of metal from Chaotic’s desk.

  “You’re going to need more than that to defeat the power of justi—”

  Before Trent can finish, I throw the piece of metal at one of the cameras. All that’s left of it is a sparking wire and a pile of glass and plastic on the ground.

  “Scott!” Jake yells in my head. “What are you doing?! You’re killing my feed!”

  “I’m sick of it,” I say. I fling another piece of metal at another one of the cameras, destroying it. “Sick of the games … the lying …”

  Another piece of metal … SMASH! Another camera falls to the ground in a hail of broken plastic. Three down.

  “This, right here, is going to be about the truth,” I say. “I want to see your real face, Phantom ‘Justice.’ You at least owe me that much.”

  I smash the last camera.

  Phantom smiles. “Whatever you say, Bright Boy,” he hisses.

  “Uh, you do know that those cameras were the only things keeping him from killing you!” Jake yells at me.

  “I doubt it,” I say. “Right, Trent?”

  “Smart kid,” he answers, but there’s not a trace of Phantom Justice in his voice now. It’s just me and Trent. “Ready to join your little girlf
riend?”

  I’m looking around the room for a weapon … any weapon …

  “Like the spare dart gun?” Trent asks. He points at the desk to my right. “Third drawer up on the left. I find it particularly torturous when a person knows that their saving grace is right there, within arm’s reach, and they still can’t get to it. Just makes the moment more … delicious. You know what I mean?”

  I look at the desk. If I go for the drawer, he’ll slam it shut and probably chop my hand off.

  “Probably wouldn’t work even if you had it,” he says, laughing. “I’m too fast. Just ask Dr. Chaotic. Oh wait … you can’t.”

  My mind is racing, trying to formulate a plan … any kind of plan.

  “Here’s the thing, Scott. I’m going to kill you. There’s nothing you can do about it. Now, if you give me a good enough challenge—if you earn your death—I’ll put you in a nice little pose with your girlfriend, so all the little teenyboppers can scream their little heads off about how romantic this whole thing was. But if you suck … if you’re an embarrassment to the training I gave you … well, let’s just say, there won’t be much of you left.”

  “Are you going to bore me to death? Is that your plan?” I growl, and take a couple of steps toward him.

  He smiles, nods slightly, then comes at me with a vicious right hand. I push him to my right so his momentum carries him past me. I slip behind him. His left is fast enough to clip me in the ribs. Trent follows up with a right toward my head. I leap over it, because I know if I duck, he’d come at me with a kick, and I’d be too off balance to block it.

  I land, ready to defend, but he’s stopped attacking. Instead, he stands there, bouncing in his fighter’s stance, smiling that creepy, sociopathic smile of his. “Not bad,” he says. “Are you going to attack, though, or are you going to be a total sissy about—”

  I cut him off with a left to his face. It glances off him, but the look of surprise he gives me is worth it.

  “Looks like we’re picking up where we left off earlier,” I say. “You remember earlier, when I hit you so fast you couldn’t defend yourself?”

  He laughs, but he can’t hide the look of concern on his face. “If those are the ‘cotton balls’ you’re going to hit me with, then feel free to be the fastest. A few thousand of them might slow me down.”

  I try a left roundhouse kick, but he sidesteps and kicks out my support leg. Before I can move, he lifts me off my feet.

  “Well, that was a disappointment,” he says, holding me up by the front of my shirt.

  I walk up the front of him until my foot is standing on his face. I bite his hand and push off his face with my foot, backflipping out of his grip.

  “AGHHH!” he yells. “Biting? I did NOT teach you to bite! I think that deserves a little punishment.”

  He runs at me. I steel myself for impact, but he leaps and flips over me. By the time I figure out what he’s up to, it’s too late … he’s already standing in front of Allison’s coffin.

  “Killing you just doesn’t seem like punishment enough,” he says. He smashes his fist against the glass. It starts to crack.

  “Stop!” I yell.

  “No,” he says, and smashes the glass again. The crack gets larger.

  “STOP!”

  I start toward him. He hits the glass again. This time it shatters. He pulls Allison’s body out. His face is crazed. He’s smiling at me. He strolls to the center of the room.

  I’m frozen.

  “Well, here we are at the end,” he says. “There are so many ways to do this, I just can’t decide. I wonder what your ‘fans’ will say when they find your body and cradled lovingly in your lifeless arms is Allison’s decapitated head.” He starts laughing.

  My teeth are clenched. My fists are closed into tight balls and shaking. Red light is creeping in along the edges of my vision, closing into a tunnel, with Trent in the center. Everything else in the world falls away except for Trent, and my hatred for him.

  He sneers at me. “I’m going to tear your girlfriend to pieces, Bright Boy, and there’s not a thing you can do about—”

  I rush him, slamming into his midsection. We go tumbling, our limbs tangled. Allison’s body goes flying. I’m all rage and fury, elbows and knees. My right elbow smashes his eye. “Gahh!” he says, and that just makes me go faster. He’s trying to push me off him, but I’m moving too fast for him to get a grip. My left knee hits his nose.

  “AAAAA!” he screams in pain and frustration, and I just keep whirling, twisting, punching, kicking, thrashing. He’s screaming. He gets lucky and manages to grab my arm. He flings me away. I roll and pop up, and I’m back into my stance. Trent is standing where I left him. His nose is bleeding. His left eye is swollen shut. It’s not enough. I want to pound on his face. I want the coroner to need dental records.

  “You … little … PUNK!” he screams, blood and spittle flying out of his mouth. “You don’t TOUCH me!”

  I stand and stare at him. A sound bubbles out of the back of my throat. It sounds like a growl. But I don’t rush him. That won’t work twice.

  Trent wipes his nose with the back of his hand, then takes a deep breath … shakes his head … composes himself … gets back into control. He pulls what looks like a remote control out of his belt and points it at me. “Edward’s design was a little clunky. Mine is small but lethal. Same dart as before, but you’ve already had the antidote, and unfortunately for you, it doesn’t work twice. You fought well, but in the end, it never mattered. I was always going to win.”

  My muscles tense. I have to time this perfectly. Commit and move too early, and he’ll track me. Move too late, and well, duh … His thumb is poised over the trigger button. My eyes are locked on the gun. He presses his thumb down, but not all the way. I flinch. He laughs. He presses with his thumb again. I flinch again. “Good-bye, Scott. You won’t be missed.”

  His thumb starts pressing the button all the way down. I get ready to leap.

  “HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!” The laugh comes out of nowhere and echoes through the room. Trent freezes. It wasn’t my laugh, or his … it was Monkeywrench’s. “Hey! Phantom Jerkface!”

  Trent looks away from me for a second. I use it. I roll away, pick up a piece of metal on the floor, and fling it. It hits the remote in his hand, knocking it toward him. It fires into Trent’s chin.

  “Gahhh!” he says, falling to his knees. The convulsions start before the dart even dissolves.

  “Ooooo! Klutzy!” Monkeywrench calls out, then starts laughing again.

  I forget about Trent and start looking around the room for her. Because of the echoes, I can’t track where her voice is coming from. “Allison!” I shout. “Where are you?”

  She lands right next to Trent. She’s wearing her older costume, the one where the mask covers more of her face … the one where I can’t tell that if it’s Allison or not.

  “Allison?” I say.

  Monkeywrench just stands there, without answering. She looks at Trent, then looks back at me.

  Trent is wheezing, clawing at his chest, trying to crawl away. Monkeywrench puts her foot on his back and pushes him flat. She laughs again. He takes something out of his belt. It’s a glass vial. I’m guessing it’s the antidote. Monkeywrench guesses that, too … so she steps on it. The glass crunches beneath her foot. “Whoops-a-daisy,” she says. “Oh, and you want to know what’s reallllly delicious? The fact that you got outsmarted by Bright Boy! And he’s not even a plus intelligence! HA-HA-HA-HA!” She kneels down and grabs Trent’s face, squeezing his cheeks. She turns his head toward the bookcase, and the smiley bear sitting innocently on one of the shelves. “Smile at the hidden camera! I’m guessing that the Internet is going to find the whole ripping-a-dead-girl’s-head-off particularly interesting, don’t you? HA-HA-HA-HA!”

  She drops his face as if she can’t stand touching it anymore.

  I take a tentative step toward her. She stands up and faces me. My heart is thudding in my chest. “Allison?”
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  Her smile falters. Her eyes get moist and glassy. I take another step toward her.

  Trent twists under her foot. Something rolls out of his hand. It’s a flash grenade. Monkeywrench leaps toward me, pushing me out of the way a split second before the grenade explodes. I try to grab her, but she slips through my arms. There’s an enormous BOOM, and the world goes white.

  Smoke is everywhere. Lab equipment lies broken all around me. “Allison!” I shout. “ALLISON!” I can’t see anything. I crawl to my feet. “Allison!”

  “SCOTT!” Jake’s voice is in my head. “SCOTT!”

  “Jake? Where are you?”

  “Behind you.”

  There’s a swarm of people in HazMat suits behind him; they start going through the wreckage. Maybe later I’ll ask who they are, but right now, I don’t care.

  I go back to yelling. “Allison!”

  “Scott! You need to stop this … come on, man.”

  “She was here!” I shout, and keep looking.

  “I know.”

  “No! Not her body! She was here! Alive! Dressed as Monkeywrench! She distracted Trent so I could take him out. Then she saved me when Trent tried to blow us up. She knocked me clear.”

  “Are you sure it was Allison?” he asks.

  “Well … no … her face was completely covered. But … she moved like Allison.”

  “Scott—”

  “I have to find her.”

  “Not like this. Come on, man … let the professionals do it. If she’s under all this, they’ll find her.”

  “Fine. But I’m not leaving here until this whole place is—”

  “Sir,” one of the HazMat suits calls from across the room. “We found something.”

  her. She looks exactly the same as she did in the coffin, except now there’s some dirt in her hair. I’m trying to brush it out with my fingers, but it’s not coming out. I keep brushing.

  Jake comes walking over. “The camera was in the stuffed bear, just like you said. Was that what Chaotic meant when he talked about Bear telling the truth?”

  I nod.

  “Heck of a catch, Scott. Really,” he says. “I’ve already sent the video out to every news source around the globe. We don’t know what happened to Phantom yet, but even if he did get away, he’s done.”