Joshua Dread (17 page)

I swung my arm, and a surge of energy pulsed through my veins. The birds were consumed in an explosion that knocked me onto my back. A wave of heat pushed past me. And a smell. The smell of short-circuited wires.

The charred remains of robot birds were scattered around me. Dismantled wings and wires, broken legs still twitching.

Nearby, Sophie was back in full glowing mode. She ripped one bird out of the air and chopped another in half with the side of her hand. A third was dismantled with a single kick.

“Guys!” Milton screamed from behind us. “A little help!”

Shiny metallic birds flapped all around him. He struck out at one, spun around, and then lost his balance and fell to the ground. The birds swept down on him in an instant.

Sophie was already running. When she reached Milton, she punched one of the birds into oblivion. Scrap metal flew everywhere. She chopped a second bird to the ground just as I arrived.

I grabbed a bird out of the air just before it could plunge its silver beak into Milton’s throat. Another throb of energy passed through me, and the thing exploded into a thousand pieces.

Once we’d finished off the last of the birds, an eerie silence settled over the field. The sounds of clanking metal and flapping mechanical wings were suddenly gone. Now I could only hear my own heavy breathing.

Milton rose onto one elbow, brushing pieces of grass and bird parts off his clothes. “These robots really hate you guys, huh?”

“I guess you could say that.” Sophie picked up a part of one of the birds—a midsection with only one wing attached to it. A familiar logo was etched into the smooth, black surface.

“What do you think they were guarding?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Milton shrugged. “But whatever it is, it’s inside there.”

He cast a nervous glance toward the building in the distance. It was a grim old structure that looked like it had been abandoned years ago. Tangled vines clung to the gray walls; boards were nailed across the windows.

Leaving our hover scooters in the tall grass, we approached the building. Getting closer, I spotted a faded sign outside that read:

“What kind of a name is that?” Milton asked. “I don’t even see any ocean.”

“And there isn’t much of a view either,” I added, surveying the dreary fields all around.

The only sign that anyone had visited the hotel in the past decade was the brand-new red convertible parked in the overgrown dirt road out front. The license plate read:

Turning to Sophie, I saw that she was still holding the bird fragment in one hand. Her eyes moved from the car to the
Z
logo engraved into the bird’s midsection.

“How could my dad be doing this?” she whispered.

I didn’t know how to respond, and I doubted Sophie was waiting for an answer anyway. She threw the bird at the ground with so much force that the remaining wing broke off. Then she stomped up the shaky steps leading to the front door of the hotel. When she turned the rusted knob, the door creaked open.

Hesitating on the doorstep, the three of us peered into the dark interior. Then we stepped inside.

T
he inside of the hotel was even crummier than the outside.

Near the front door, a stairway twisted upward into the shadows. At the bottom of the stairs, two rusty iron gargoyles leered in our general direction. Dreary curtains covered the lobby windows. Everything was shrouded in darkness. There was no sign of Captain Justice, or anyone else.

We were alone.

The floorboards groaned beneath our feet as we
passed a long reception desk. But like everything else, it was vacant.

At the far end of the lobby was an open corridor. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I noticed a dark shape moving across the open space. But when I looked, there was nothing except faded carpeting and peeling wallpaper.

“Are you sure we should be here?” Milton asked. “Maybe there’s a bed-and-breakfast somewhere nearby that we should check first.”

“My dad’s here,” Sophie said. “We just need to find him.”

We pushed open a door that led into a vast room with dirty tiled walls. In the center of the room, the floor dropped away, revealing an empty pit. The hollow space was surrounded by plastic lounge chairs.

“It’s the indoor swimming pool,” Sophie said. “They drained out all the water.”

There may not have been any water, but the pool wasn’t empty. At the bottom was a pile of supervillain uniforms and accessories. I recognized the cape and spear that had once belonged to the Abominator. The big armor-plated gloves of Tesla the Terrible.

And then my heart clenched as I noticed a pair of my dad’s customized goggles at the top of the heap. Nearby was a green and black bundle of spandex and body armor that could only be my mom’s.

“My parents,” I whispered. “They’re here. Or at least, they
were
.”

I stared down into the drained pool. A shadow shifted across my thoughts.

“Why is all this stuff just piled in here like this?” I asked. “You don’t think my parents have been—”

“No,”
Sophie said. She must’ve known what I’d been about to say. “My dad wouldn’t do that.”

“What about the smoke creatures and the Firebottomed Rompers your dad’s controlling?” I said. “What about all the other secrets your dad’s keeping from you?”

Sophie shot an angry glance my way. But I felt too full of fear and anger to keep my mouth shut.

“Maybe your dad isn’t who you think he is,” I said.

Sophie’s hands were curled into trembling fists.

“Hey, come on,” Milton said in a fake cheerful tone. “We don’t know what happened here. I’m sure your parents are fine.” He patted me on the back. “They probably just took off their clothes so they could go skinny-dipping.”

The thought of a hundred supervillains skinny-dipping together didn’t cheer me up (especially since my parents were part of the group). Besides, this didn’t look like the kind of place that had a Jacuzzi. There had to be another explanation for why all these clothes had been dumped here. And I knew it wasn’t good.

“Come on,” I said. “We might not have much time.”

We’d nearly reached the other end of the pool when a dark form shifted out of the shadows. A jolt of fear shot through my chest. The figure turned to gaze at us, but where its face should’ve been, there was only a featureless cloud.

A smoke creature.

It was standing in the corner, right next to a
NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY
sign.

I spun around to run in the direction we’d come from, but that was as far as I got. A second smoke creature was headed toward us.

“This way!” Sophie pointed to the door at the other end of the room.

Our footsteps echoed off the tiled walls as we raced along the edge of the pool, past a rack of foam noodles and kickboards that looked like they’d last been played with before I was born. The smoke creatures stalked toward us, getting steadily closer.

One of them reached out, its fingers like tendrils of smoke. I kept running, following Sophie and Milton through a narrow hallway that wove in and out of crumbling rooms and empty offices.

The dilapidated scenery of the hotel blurred all around me. Broken furniture, dusty antiques, tilted chandeliers. There was no time to figure out where we were going. The smoke creatures were trailing close behind, their dark bodies moving soundlessly in our wake.

We turned down a corridor that led into a kitchen, and ran past a refrigerator with a missing door, and a broken-down stove. Milton collided with a counter, sending a cascade of rusted pots and pans crashing to the ground.

Bursting through the door, we found ourselves in a ballroom. Like the rest of the hotel, it looked like the ruins of a place that might’ve been nice many years ago. Faded velvet curtains lined the walls. The bar in the corner looked like it had been hit by a wrecking ball.

The smoke creatures swept into the room a few seconds after us. We started toward the other end of the ballroom, but came to a halt when we saw what had just emerged from the opposite doors. Another pair of smoke creatures. There were four of them now, blocking both the exits.

We were surrounded.

“What do we do now?” Milton was staring at the approaching smoke creatures, his eyes wide with fear.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but we’ve got to think of something. Just don’t panic.”

“Too late!”

The cloudy figures were closing in on us, their smoke legs carrying them swiftly across the stained carpets.

I looked around the ramshackle ballroom, searching desperately for some kind of an escape. Then I caught
sight of a boarded-up fireplace near the bar. If we could get there in time, maybe we could climb to safety.

Sophie had the same idea. She took off running toward the fireplace, and Milton and I trailed close behind. By the time she got there, the glow was radiating from her skin. She ripped the boards away like they were made of paper.

“Whoa,” she said, peering into the fireplace.

Looking over her shoulder, I saw what had caught her attention. This wasn’t an ordinary fireplace. It was a tunnel.

There wasn’t any time to wonder why this hotel came with a walk-in fireplace or where the tunnel led. Smoke creatures were steadily drifting toward us.

“Get inside, quick!” My voice echoed in the tunnel.

Milton was first, followed by Sophie. The smoke creatures were looming over me as I scrambled in after her.

The narrow passageway slanted steeply downward, curving so that it seemed as if we were burrowing deeper and deeper into the earth. It was dark, but fortunately Sophie was glowing like a human night-light, illuminating the stone tunnel that seemed to go on without end.

My shoes slipped over the steep rocky floor, and my arms scraped against the jagged walls, but there was no way I was slowing down.

I let out a sharp gasp when I felt something grab hold of my ankle. Falling forward suddenly, terror shot through me. Lurching sideways, I expected to see the dark shapes of smoke creatures swooping down. But the tunnel behind me was empty. No smoke creatures. Nothing.

My ankle was wedged into a hole in the ground.

I took a deep breath to calm myself, then yanked my foot free. Peering back the way we’d come, I could see the cloudy silhouettes of the smoke creatures in the mouth of the fireplace we’d entered through.

“Looks like we’re not being followed anymore,” I said.

“Why do you think they stopped?” Sophie asked.

“Maybe smoke monsters are claustrophobic.” Milton’s shaky voice echoed. “Or maybe there’s something at the end of this tunnel that even
they
would rather avoid.”

“Well, unless we want to go back and ask them personally, our only choice is to keep going,” Sophie said.

We continued downward, trudging at a slower pace now that we knew we weren’t being pursued. I watched the shadows bouncing off the stone walls, and listened to the sound of our footsteps echoing dully in the passageway.

Eventually we saw a pale light shining up ahead. The tunnel leveled out. We kept walking, trying to create as little noise as possible. Sophie’s Gyft must’ve been
winding down, because her glow was fading. By the time we reached the end of the tunnel, her skin looked normal again.

Ahead of us was an opening. Milton passed though it first, then Sophie, then me. As I emerged, I caught my breath.

In front of us was a steel platform. Beyond that was a cavernous room that stretched far beneath us. A stairway to our left led to the bottom of the chamber. If the rest of the hotel had seemed like it had been rotting away for the last fifty years, this room looked like something from the future.

The platform was lined by two-story silver canisters. Wires protruded from the bottoms of the canisters like tangles of unmoving snakes.

“I can’t believe all this is connected to that old hotel,” I whispered.

Taking cover, we gazed down at the room beneath us. More silver canisters lined the walls, each of them connected to dozens of wires that all led in the same direction—toward a wall of glass. I strained to see what was behind the glass, but it was too dark.

A movement caught my eye, and all at once I knew we weren’t alone. Two men were walking toward the center of the room. One of them had a dark suit and a face that seemed weirdly familiar.

The other man was much easier to recognize. There was no mistaking the silver uniform, the shimmering blue cape and matching gloves.

“Dad?” Sophie said.

At the sound of her voice, Captain Justice and the other man spun around.

Milton and I kept ourselves hidden behind one of the huge canisters while Sophie descended the stairs.

“Sophie?” Captain Justice said. “What the blazes are you doing here?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said.

“How did you know where I was? How did you even
get
here? Did Stanley drive you? I’m going to have to reprogram that robot as soon as I—”

“Stanley didn’t drive me. I found another way to get here.”

“What’s going on, Captain J?” asked the man in the suit.

As soon as he spoke, I realized where I’d seen him before. He was the hologram head. Fink.

Sophie’s feet clanged against each metal step until she reached the bottom of the stairs.

“I know you’re a family man and everything,” Fink said to Captain Justice, “but I thought this was a private meeting.”

“It is,” Captain Justice said. “Sophie, you shouldn’t be here.”

“I already know about your secret project,” Sophie countered.

Captain Justice’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. “You
do
? But … how?”

“It doesn’t matter. The point is, I know—and I came here to ask you to stop.”

“Look, darling … I am aware that this might seem like a big change, but sometimes change is necessary.”