The Adventures of a Wimpy Superhero Read online

  They won’t let Amy stay at home alone at night so she has to come too. She hates being a superhero because she thinks the police are under enough pressure without meddling idiots in fancy dress, and also because her costume makes her look fat.

  She should be pleased her parents have a cool hobby to bring her along to – Henry’s parents used to take him line dancing.

  She reckons Dan is annoyed with me for messing things up on the mission, so I’ll have to make it clear to him that I intend to do much better in future.

  TUESDAY 9TH FEBRUARY

  Today I made a mistake that was even more painful than knocking myself out with a tranquilizer. I admitted to Henry that I’d joined the League.

  He sat next to me in English and asked me over and over again why I was absent on Friday. Eventually the penny dropped and he asked if I’d tired myself out fighting crime. I told him it was really serious and I couldn’t say any more, which he took as proof.

  I realized I’d have to tell the truth just to shut him up. At lunchtime I took him to the far corner of the playing field and admitted I’d joined a league of costumed vigilantes. I said it was top secret and I’d be in great danger if anyone ever found out.

  So how did Henry react to this serious news? By swearing on his life to never breathe a word to anyone? By tapping the side of his nose and changing the subject? No. He held his fist out and ran around shouting, ‘superhero league!’ What a brilliant way to keep a secret.

  When he’d finally calmed down, he asked when he could come along to a meeting. I told him that our leader had decreed no one else could ever join again.

  It wasn’t easy for me to tell such a blatant lie, but at least it made him shut up. Instead of running around the school and shouting, he sat down on a bench and stared at the floor.

  I felt bad, but what could I do? Bringing someone as excitable as Henry along on a crime-fighting mission would put us all in danger. The only real winners would be the criminals.

  WEDNESDAY 10TH FEBRUARY

  I turned up early for the League meeting to apologize to Dan for messing things up on the mission. He said it was fine, but his fists were clenched and the veins in his forehead were bulging, so I’m sure he was just trying to make me feel better.

  While we waited for the others, I read the framed newspaper articles in his hallway. Some of them were about major stories:

  Others were much less serious:

  ‘Were all these crimes foiled by the League?’ I asked.

  ‘Kind of,’ said Dan. ‘Some of them date to the time before the East Dudchester League of Costumed Vigilantes merged with the Central Region Masked Crime-Fighters Society. Doctor Infinity, Pi and myself were the East Dudchester League of Costumed Vigilantes. We tackled things like robberies, police corruption and gang violence. The Amazing family were the Central Region Masked Crime-Fighters Society and they focused on stuff like this.’

  He tapped one of the newspaper articles, which read, ‘MISSING HOOVER ATTACHMENT FOUND.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘You three were solving really important crimes and they were doing trivial stuff. Why did you want to merge with them?’

  ‘If someone has made up their mind to become a masked vigilante, I can’t stop them,’ said Dan. ‘And it would be too dangerous to let them run around on their own. The only answer is to accept all would-be crime-fighters into the League, no matter how incompetent they are and how likely they are to mess things up on important missions.’ His face had gone red and his forehead veins were bulging again.

  I was about to mention that I had a friend who also wanted to be a costumed vigilante, but I’m glad I stopped myself. No doubt he’d have to accept Henry into the League too if he knew about him. I’ll have to be sure never to mention him.

  ‘I’ve had to put my foot down with the Amazing family a few times, though,’ said Dan. ‘Mr Amazing wanted his dog to join the League at one point. He tried to set it on a shoplifter, but it just ran after a squirrel.’

  Dan said he had only ever rejected one costumed vigilante from the League. He was called Tyler but said his name was Flamestorm and that he could produce fire from his fingertips. Whenever they took him on missions, he’d just set fire to things with his cigarette lighter. He ended up in prison for arson shortly after Dan kicked him out, so he reckons he made the right decision.

  AMAZADOG

  Powers: Barking, fetching sticks, drinking toilet water.

  I also asked Dan about all his bottles of water. He said he never drinks tap water or even brushes his teeth with it because the government put fluoride in it to control our thoughts. He said he once drank some by mistake, and the words ‘OBEY’, ‘CONFORM’ and ‘STAY ASLEEP’ flashed up in his mind all night.

  I’d better get Mum and Dad to buy me bottled water from now on. I definitely don’t want that to happen to me.

  The others arrived soon after and we went down to the basement. Dan congratulated them on the mission before revealing the good news: that there’s still lots of crime to fight.

  Doctor Infinity has been looking into the local crime boss Vercetti, and he’s managed to hack his phone calls and record his voice for the first time. He hopes eventually to track him down so we can confront him, but in the meantime we’re going to foil a robbery he’s planning for Monday next week. He’s getting some of his men to rob a truck delivering computers to the warehouse of a huge technology firm and we’re going to stop him.

  I immediately volunteered to do tons of heroic fighting to make up for my performance on Thursday. There was an awkward silence before Dan told me my duty would be to take the register.

  The register? I should be taking down tough criminals, not names. Just because I tranquilized myself last time doesn’t mean I’m going to do it again.

  THURSDAY 11TH FEBRUARY

  Henry was waiting outside school for me this morning. He asked if I’d rethought my position on letting him join the League. I told him it wasn’t up to me, but he got really angry and said he wanted to officially break up as friends.

  When we first made friends at the age of seven, he made us chant, ‘Make friends, make friends, never never break friends.’

  You’d think he would have grown out of that sort of thing, but today he made us chant again and say, ‘Break friends, break friends, never never make friends.’

  He then wandered into school, presumably to find a new gang. I’m sure he’ll be back when he finds out the boys from the football team don’t own any back issues of steel Guy and the cool gang don’t care who’d win in a fight between Astonishingboy and Ratman.

  FRIDAY 12TH FEBRUARY

  Henry stopped me in the corridor today to tell me that he doesn’t care about my crime-fighting league because he’s joined a different one instead. He says they’re called the Awesome Crusaders and they recruited him last night when he was running around the cinema car park with his costume on. Apparently the league contains a superhero who can pause time, another who can move objects with his mind and another who can fire lasers from his eyes.

  I think our league would know if there was another in town, and I think everyone in the entire world would know if someone could really shoot lasers from their eyes or move objects with their thoughts.

  But I suppose it’s better to leave Henry to his little fantasies while I get on with the real business of protecting the town. It’s a shame he has to make silly things up to compete with me, but at least it keeps him away from serious danger.

  UPDATE

  We had the school Valentine’s Day post this afternoon and I didn’t get a single card. Every year, we can anonymously send cards to each other to raise money for charity. I usually get one card, but today I got nothing.

  I think all the girls must sense there’s something dangerous and forbidden about me now I’ve become a superhero. I expect soon they’ll all be swooning over pictures of The Loner and I won’t be able to admit he’s me.

  ‘If only we could meet a boy
as cool and handsome as The Loner,’ they’ll say, and I’ll look on in silent frustration, putting their safety above my own happiness.

  Henry got a card for the first time and I heard him boasting about it from the row behind me. He can boast all he likes. I have the satisfaction of knowing I’m a real superhero, and that’s something he’ll never have.

  UPDATE

  I’ve just thought of a more worrying explanation. Maybe Henry is the one who’s been sending me Valentine’s cards so I wouldn’t get upset about not getting any. And now we’ve broken friends he sent one to himself instead.

  SATURDAY 13TH FEBRUARY

  There’s a new superhero movie out today called Steel Guy IV. I usually go to the cinema with Henry whenever a new one opens. We go to the day’s first 3D showing, sit on the front row and get a pizza afterwards to discuss where the film stands in our all-time top superhero movies. Henry always puts it at number one in his list, even if it’s something awful like Ratman Forever, which had terrible effects, a badly designed Ratmobile and a lame romantic subplot the studio forced them to include.

  I really wanted to see Steel Guy IV, but I couldn’t ask Henry now we’ve officially broken friends. I was tempted to go on my own, but then I thought Henry might be there too and it would be really awkward.

  Also, someone else from school might have seen me and teased me. I know that I’m meant to be The Loner and live outside normal rules, but I’d still feel a little ashamed about going to the cinema on my own.

  In the end, I gave it a miss. It would probably be really boring for me to watch a superhero movie now, anyway. It would be like Mum and Dad watching a film about people driving to the grocery store.

  SUNDAY 14TH FEBRUARY

  At the meeting this afternoon I told everyone about my slogan, ‘You’re never alone when the Loner’s here’ and asked them to think of their own ones.

  Here’s what they came up with:

  Army Dan – The war on crime will never end.

  Mr and Mrs Amazing – Fighting crime and having an amazing time.

  Amazagirl – Shut up, I don’t have one.

  Doctor infinity – Justice goes on forever.

  Pi – How I wish I could overpower Pi.

  I thought Doctor infinity had the best one. Dan’s was too negative, because we could win the war on crime one day. Mr and Mrs Amazing’s slogan wasn’t very memorable and I didn’t understand Pi’s slogan until he explained that if you count the letters in each word, it gives you the number Pi to six decimal places, 3.141592.

  That sort of thing might impress his maths friends, but it will go over the heads of most criminals. If they knew about smart stuff like maths they wouldn’t have turned to crime in the first place.

  Even if Doctor infinity and Pi are a bit too brainy for me to fully understand, I admire their approach to fighting crime. They use technology very creatively, taking advantage of techniques the police don’t know about yet. For example, when they were tackling a spate of muggings last year, they wrote a computer program to simulate the behaviour of criminals and predicted where they’d strike next. Dan used this knowledge to patrol crime scenes and ambush the robbers.

  ‘We were able to fight crime using the most important element of all,’ said Pi.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Doctor Infinity. ‘carbon? Hydrogen? Nitrogen? Oxygen? Phosphorus? Sulphur?’

  ‘No,’ said Pi. ‘The element of surprise.’

  They both chuckled.

  I think Mr Amazing got jealous because he started going on about the time he rescued a piglet that had escaped from a town farm. Apparently it got all the way to a garden centre before he found it. I had to pretend to be just as impressed so he didn’t feel left out.

  Dan then took us through his plan for the truck heist tomorrow. Sadly, I’m still only in charge of the register. I’ll just have to make sure I do a good job and get promoted next time.

  Doctor Infinity played us some phone calls between Vercetti and his mob that he’d intercepted. One of the gang members had a really high voice, and the contrast with Vercetti’s gravelly voice made me laugh. Dan said I had to take the mission seriously or wait upstairs, so I forced myself to stop.

  After the calls had finished, Dan laid out a large plan of some crossroads and placed a toy truck on them.

  ‘The delivery truck will approach the junction,’ said Dan. He placed two toy cars on either side of the truck and pushed them towards it. ‘Vercetti’s men plan to intercept it at 11:30 p.m. tomorrow night.’

  He pulled the cars back to their original positions and then threw a load of plastic soldier figures on the plan. ‘But we’re going to turn up and change that.’

  I was getting quite excited by this point, so I shouted ‘East Dudchester League of Costumed Vigilantes (incorporating The Central Region Masked Crime-Fighters Society) assemble!’

  ‘Just so you know, I’ve been looking into this tech firm,’ said Amazagirl. ‘And they don’t even pay all their taxes. They’re worse than Vercetti’s gang in their way, and I don’t see the point in helping them.’

  Dan’s face went red and the vein in his forehead bulged again. I thought he was going to shout at Amazagirl, but he just looked down at the plan and said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’

  He shoved the plastic soldiers around. ‘The Loner will take the register. Mrs Amazing will wait at the end of the road, before the junction, and flash her torch when she sees the truck approaching. Mr Amazing will step out in his police uniform and divert the truck along a parallel road, away from the criminals. Doctor Infinity will simulate the noise of an approaching truck using his laptop and some large speakers. The criminals will emerge from their vehicles and Pi and myself will neutralize them with tasers.’

  Pi fetched, a huge black gun from the table at the far end. He explained that it fires electrodes into the criminals, sending a current through them, which stops them being able to control their muscles.

  I asked Dan if I could hold it, but he refused. I can tell they all think I’m going to tase myself because of what happened with the tranquilizer. They need to understand that was a one-off accident that could have happened to anyone.

  MONDAY 15TH FEBRUARY

  I’m so stoked about catching those criminals tonight. I know I don’t have a very big role to play, but it’s a vital one. If I didn’t take the register, we’d have no way of knowing who was present, and the whole mission would fall apart.

  I’ve looked into what Amazagirl said and lots of people seem angry about the tech firm avoiding tax. But they’re not breaking the law and the criminals are, so I’m sure we’re doing the right thing. If you start thinking too hard about who the real goodies and baddies are, you’ll never get anything done.

  UPDATE

  It’s now 4 a.m. I’ve just returned from some really intense crime-fighting.

  As soon as I heard snoring from my parents’ room I jumped on the Lonercycle and rode to Dan’s house. I took the register while everyone was getting in the van and I did it again when everyone was getting out to show my commitment to my responsibility.

  Amazagirl didn’t answer either time, and it turned out she was in a foul mood because she was missing a sleepover at her friend Bethany’s house.

  ‘I can’t believe you made me come on this stupid mission,’ she said as she stepped out of the Van.

  ‘We’ve been through this before,’ said Mr Amazing. He threw his fake police uniform on the ground and stuck his hands on his hips. ‘if you want to protect the innocent citizens of this town, you have to put your duties first.’

  ‘I don’t want to protect the innocent citizens of this town,’ said Amazagirl. ‘What’s the point of paying taxes to fund the police if you’re just going to do their job yourself? You might as well pave roads or fix streetlights.’

  ‘The police are too scared to do anything,’ said Dan. ‘And don’t get me started on the criminal justice system. All these bleeding hearts banging on about the rights
of criminals. What about the rights of victims?’

  I felt things were getting heated so I tried taking the register again. It didn’t work. Dan kept ranting about the police, Amazagirl went on and on about how fighting crime outside the law was stupid and her parents shouted at her for being ungrateful.

  I saw a couple of bright lights at the end of the road. A large truck was approaching.

  ‘They’re here!’ I shouted, but the others were too wrapped up in their argument to listen. They were all standing at the side of the van, yelling into each other’s faces.

  ‘Don’t you want to stop crime?’ Dan asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Amazagirl. ‘But you need to address the underlying causes if you really want to tackle it.’

  I knew it was down to me to save the day – Mr Amazing wasn’t going to divert the truck. I’d have to do it.

  I grabbed the police uniform and pulled it on. The coat was really baggy and the pants were so long I had to hitch them up at the knees.

  I ran towards the truck, stopped in the middle of the road and waved my arms around. The truck pulled up in front of me and the driver wound his window down. I walked round to his side, trying to look as authoritative as possible. Unfortunately, I tripped and fell to the floor.

  I got up and wiped the gravel from my hands.

  ‘There’s been an accident,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to turn round and find another route.’

  The driver stuck his head out of the window. ‘I can’t see any accidents,’ he said. ‘Except for you falling over just then.’ He peered at me. ‘And aren’t you a bit young to be a police officer?’