The Candy Man Cometh (5 page)
“I have the worst headache,” I said after banging my head several times on the table.
“
You
have a headache?” Earlobe Lad mumbled from under the table. “Welcome to
my
life! And stop blinking so loud!”
That was when my phone rang.
Speedy to the Rescue!
“Spuddy! Spuddy!” Pumpkin Pete’s voice cried out over my cell phone. “I need your help!”
“It’s not laundry day!” I replied.
“No! Something worse! I — hey! Hey! Get away from me! Don’t! No! Aaaah!”
Pete’s phone went dead. He really was in trouble! I leaped from my chair. “Gotta run!” I said, and jumped up to head for the League of Big Justice.
“Hey! Speedy! You haven’t voted for the new sidekick!” Exact Change Kid said.
“Can’t vote now! Gotta save Pete!”
“What’s with that guy and never wanting to vote?” Boom Boy asked.
“Maybe he just doesn’t like democracy,” Exact Change Kid commented.
“It’s probably because Spelling Beatrice always beats him when they play it,” Spice Girl commented.
“That’s
Scrabble
,” Spelling Beatrice corrected. Exact Change Kid pulled out the ballots and handed them to the other sidekicks. He dropped one under the table for Earlobe Lad.
“I need a pencil,” he mumbled. “And could you
please
not drop it so loudly? And whose stomach is gurgling? Aaah! Will everyone
please
eat lunch before these meetings? Is that too much to ask?”
I ran through the League of Big Justice Super Justice Lobby and past the League of Big Justice Super Souvenir Gift Shop of Justice, and that was when I saw him. Pumpkin Pete came racing toward me like the building was on fire, or at least like it was Halloween night and an angry pumpkin-carving mob was on the loose.
“Spuddy! Spuddy! You gotta help me! It’s terrible! Terrible!” Pete shouted.
“What is it, Pete? Is evil attacking? Is King Justice in trouble? Is it an angry pumpkin-carving mob on the loose?” You never know.
Pete collapsed and I caught his big, fat, orange pumpkin head with both hands. “The horror! The horror!”
“What’s happening, Pete?! You have to tell me!” “He’s evil! Pure evil!” Pete’s head slumped in my arms. And that was when I saw it.
“Where big orange bawoon man?” Super Vision Lad yelled, racing around the corner toward us.
Pete jumped up and hid behind me. “Get that monster away from me!”
“Pete! It’s just Super Vision Lad!” I assured him.
“Super Vision Lad, or the greatest evil the world has ever known?” Pete gasped.
I looked at Super Vision Lad. He made a spit bubble between his lips. It popped, and he giggled, “I wike bubbose!”
“The kid’s mother... she tricked me! Promised me ten bucks an hour if I watched him until six o’clock! The kid’s unstoppable! She should pay me a hundred dollars a minute!”
“Well, Pete, what’re you going to do?”
“I’m not going to do anything! It’s your problem now!” Pete informed me, and pushed me toward Super Vision Lad.
“Me? I don’t want to babysit this kid! I’m a sidekick! I have to be ready to fight evil at all times!” I couldn’t believe Pete was trying to pawn this kid off on me.
What am I saying? Of course I could believe it. “You want to fight evil?” Pete asked. “Just turn your back on that kid for ten seconds. I swear, he needs constant supervision!”
“Tacos are funny!” Super Vision Lad shouted, and started banging his head against the display stand of Pumpkin Pete action figures at the League of Big Justice Super Souvenir Gift Shop. One of the action figures fell off the top shelf.
“I have all the powers of a pumpkin!” the action figure boasted when it hit the floor. Super Vision Lad picked up the doll and began to chew on its big, fat, orange pumpkin head.
“You break it, you buy it!” Pete shouted, and then immediately ducked behind me again.
“Look, Pete, I have to get back to the other sidekicks and vote,” I informed him. “By this time, they probably think I really, really hate democracy.”
“And well you should!” Pete snorted. “I hear that Spelling Beatrice always kicks your butt when you play.”
I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. But then, I almost never had a clue about what Pete was talking about. Or Exact Change Kid. Or Spice Girl, Boom Boy, Earlobe Lad, and Boy-inthe-Plastic-Bubble Boy.
Oddly enough, though, I knew exactly what Boy-in-the-Cardboard-Box Boy had been talking about.
“Sorry, Pete. I have to go,” I told him, and started to head down the hall. “I have to play in my first football game tonight.”
It’s a long story, but basically, I lost my temper one day at school when Mandrake Steel (a.k.a. Charisma Kid) was taunting me in front of Prudence Cane (a.k.a. The Girl I Have a Crush On But Doesn’t Even Know I’m Alive Even Though I Sit Next to Her in Class). So I used just a little bit of my super speed to make Mandrake look stupid, and the school’s football coach saw me. Let’s just say he made me the starting running back on the spot.
Sure, I’m too small to play. Sure, I’d never played real football before the first team practice, and sure, I was more scared to play in tonight’s game than when I saw Pumpkin Pete blasting off from Pluto in the final escape rocket, but I figure a little super speed goes a long way.
Or at least it goes far enough to help me avoid any broken bones when the padded giants on the other team try to squish me.
I was almost safely out the door when Pete shouted, “Wait! You can’t go! Don’t you remember Rule #2?”
I froze. Nailed on a technicality!
I turned around, and in a deeply sighing breath said, “ ‘Rule #2: No matter how crazy it sounds, no matter how dangerous you think it may be, always, always do what a superhero asks you to do.’ ”
“Nah!” Pete scolded. “That’s Rule #9!” “There is no Rule #9!”
“If there’s no Rule #9, then how come you just recited it to me, smart guy?”
“Because that was Rule #2!” I said. “Weren’t you paying any attention when I trained you yesterday?” Pete slapped his forehead with his viney hand. “Rule #2 is — and
please
try to pay attention this time — Rule #2 is: You have to baby-sit. See ya!”
Pete turned and raced down the League of Big Justice Super Justice Lobby. “Pumpkin feets, don’t fail me now!” he yelped.
“Do I at least get to keep the ten dollars?” I shouted.
Pete skidded to a stop at the door to the League of Big Justice Inner Sanctum of Justice. “Are you kidding? All money earned by a super-hero goes to charity!” he called back.
I thought for a moment, then shook my head. “And let me guess, you’re donating this money to the Charity to Help Persons with Big, Fat, Orange Pumpkin Heads?”
“Bingo!” Pete said and slammed the door behind him.
The thing is, Pumpkin Pete
is
the only person with a big, fat, orange head.
Like a pumpkin.
2 + 2 = EVIL!
I looked at Super Vision Lad as he chewed the head off the Pumpkin Pete doll and spit it onto the floor. The head bounced across the gray marble and rolled to a stop at the edge of the Hall of Heroes of Big Justice.
“Since I’m stuck babysitting you for a few hours, you might as well tell me your real name,” I said.
“Soap tastes bad!” Super Vision Lad shouted. “Fine. I’ll just call you Super Vision Lad. How’d you like to go play in the park across the street?”
“Soap tastes bad!” Super Vision Lad shouted, and head-butted me in the stomach.
We walked across the street to the park. Well, it used to be a park. About a month ago, Sunburneo attacked the League of Big Justice with his solar satellite. His calculations were off a bit (he forgot to carry the “2”) and instead of melting the League of Big Justice, he just burned the park across the street to a crisp. Now it was just a vacant field with a melted slag heap that used to be monkey bars.
Super Vision Lad and I sat on the blackened grass and suddenly, a very strange thing happened. No, Super Vision Lad didn’t stop kicking me in the shin. Nor did he stop yelling “The itsybitsy spidah! The itsy-bitsy spidah!” No, what happened was, the melted slag heap that was once monkey bars slowly dissolved into nothingness. Then, the charcoaled remains of a nearby tree dissolved as well.
“Uh... maybe we should get the heck out of here,” I said to Super Vision Lad, but it was too late. Evil was upon us.
“Well, helllllooo, my little goggled one! Are you the champion of the League of Big Justice come to do battle? I didn’t expect him to be so...goggled. But no bother! You shall fall before the decaying might of The Candy Man!”
“The Candy Man? Am I supposed to be afraid or hope you’ll give me a chocolate bar?”
“Oh, llllaugh while you can, chimpanzee of goodness. But once I attack with my rainbow of fruit flavors, we shall see who is llllaughing!”
“Probably still me.”
I looked at The Candy Man. He was tall and very thin. He had narrow shoulders and long, narrow arms. His long, thin legs were like short stilts. He wore a pinkish waistcoat with a frilly shirt. On his head was a tooth. A very large, oversized tooth that strapped under his chin like an enormous water bucket on his head. In his right hand, he held a cane. Actually, he held a large
candy-
cane cane.
“I mean, what’re you going to do? Pelt me with Skittles or something?” I asked. I pressed my palm against Super Vision Lad’s forehead and gently pushed him back so he’d stop head-butting me.
“Oh! I shhhhall do far worse than that! I shall ssspread candy and chocolate throughout the world for all to eat! Bwahahahaha!” The Candy Man thrust both fists in the air as if he had just won a championship boxing match.
I took Super Vision Lad by the hand and started to walk away. “Go ahead,” I said.
“How dare you turn your back on The Candy Man!”
“What? You’re going to give free candy and chocolate to people. You want me to fight you over
that
?”
“But their teeth... they’lllll...rot out! Yes! Rot right out! And the dentists! The dentists will make lotsss of money, and no one likes dentists! Bwahahahaha!”
“Nice try.”
“Then the chocolate will melt and ... they will get it on their clothes and have to wash them...and... then all the extra detergent will wash to the sssea and poison the waters! Bwahahahaha —” He stopped laughing and gave me an eager look.
“I doubt it.”
“But the sssugar! All the sssugar will make everyone very hyper and —”
“You didn’t really think this out very well before you came, did you?” I cut in.
“Welllll. No...perhaps I did get a little excited when I got my new candy shhhipment this morning,” The Candy Man confessed. “But the costume! The costume I have been working on for months!” He proudly rapped the large tooth attached to his head.
“Look, I’m not one to go around giving super villains advice, but you really need... like ...a theme. And a plan. Something that’ll really get people’s attention and make them wonder if you really will be the next ruler of the earth.”
“But I don’t want to rule the earth! I just want to give everyone cavities! And then rule the earth! Must do thingsss in the proper order, my Jujube of Justice!”
The Candy Man thrust out both of his arms and revealed two small chocolate rockets. They targeted me and shot from his wrists. I grabbed Super Vision Lad and rolled out of the way just in time. The twin chocolate rockets hit a burnt tree and melted it on impact.
“Rot it away, my sssweet, sssweet treats!” The Candy Man shouted. “Rot the chewy goodness that stands between us and worldwide cavities!”
This guy may have a stupid name and an even stupider costume, but there’s one thing I’ve learned since becoming a sidekick: No matter how dumb the villain, he can probably do a real good job of blowing things up.
Or in this case, rotting them away like a cavity rots teeth.
The League of Big Justice could deal with The Candy Man easily enough, but I had to protect Super Vision Lad. I snatched him off the ground and raced back across the street to the League of Big Justice.
“Twains go ‘choo-choo’!” Super Vision Lad shouted, and bit my ear.
