Council of Evil (3 page)

“A likely story. Save your lies!” Mr. Falconer's finger quivered with rage. “I know your type, Hunter. I had to put up with them myself when I was a boy. Picking on younger kids; you should be ashamed of yourself!”

Jake was so angry at the injustice of it all. He started to feel a burning pain in his gut like very bad indigestion
and he beccame uncomfortably warm. The words slipped from his mouth before he could stop them. “Are you stupid? Or does that egghead of yours make you deaf?”

Falconer went apoplectic. “That's it! I'm going to make sure you have detention for the rest of the year—”

But Jake wasn't listening. He'd zoned out and was looking around with a frown. “Do you smell that?”

“I'm talking to you, Hunter! Don't ignore me!”

“It smells like burning wood.”

Mr. Falconer opened his mouth to argue back, but stopped as the distinctive odor caught his nostrils. It was getting stronger by the second. They both scanned the room with growing concern before spotting fine white smoke curling from the planks of wood stacked against one wall.

“Fire!” yelled the teacher rather pointlessly.

Before he could move toward the fire alarm, the workbench in front of him was suddenly ablaze. An orange tongue of flame punched toward the ceiling and caught the tiles. Mr. Falconer backpedaled in astonishment as all the other wooden workbenches were engulfed by the inferno.

Jake looked around frantically. Even the window frames had started to smolder, and a small potted plant on the corner of the teacher's desk was now aflame.
Jake knew he should move, but something bizarre caught his attention.

His hands and arms were glowing with a green energy that randomly shot out from his body and set fire to whatever it touched. Luckily, Mr. Falconer was turned the other way, running toward a fire extinguisher.

Streamers of green energy lashed from Jake's body, and he watched in amazement as they struck the steel legs of the stools around the room and buckled them as if they'd suddenly turned to rubber.

Mr. Falconer stretched for the fire extinguisher on the wall but pulled his hand away from the invisible wave of heat radiating from the cylinder. Another streamer caught the metal tank and it began to melt like wax. The pressurized contents exploded outward, metal fragments embedding in the burning benches next to Jake and the teacher.

More ceiling tiles ignited with a loud
WHUMP
, and the flames rapidly spread above them, dripping burning debris down.

“Hunter! Get—” Mr. Falconer stopped in surprise. He saw Jake's entire body was glowing with a green aura that extended several inches from his body. Even as he watched, Mr. Falconer could feel his mustache start to singe. He batted at it and looked around in panic for an escape route, but the room was now thick with smoke.

A distant fire alarm was triggered, but that was
drowned out by an earth-shattering crack as lumps of the flaming ceiling started to drop. A chunk of plaster struck Mr. Falconer's head, and he fell unconscious to the floor.

Jake's anger had been replaced by fear and he ran for the door, fueled by an instinct for self-preservation. He glanced at his hands—the weird glow had vanished. He hesitated at the exit.

The room was now a cauldron of fire, but strangely, Jake didn't feel the heat at all. He looked down at the prone body of his teacher, who moments before didn't have the time of day to listen to reason. Now the flames were approaching him with each passing second.

Jake hesitated. He knew he should go back inside and drag his teacher out, but the room was blazing and he doubted that anyone could survive a rescue mission.

And whatever power had erupted from him now seemed to have faded away, so there was no certainty he would survive either.

Precious seconds ticked by as Jake hesitated….

Clouds of steam billowed from the remains of the art room as the fire crews bathed it with high-pressure hoses. The seasoned firefighters marveled at the ferocity of this outburst; they had rarely seen anything that could melt metal the way this conflagration had.

Jake was sitting on the bumper of an ambulance looking, and feeling, completely fine. He didn't even have signs of smoke inhalation. He had eventually doubled back and dragged Mr. Falconer from the inferno. Despite the teacher's thin appearance, he was incredibly heavy and Jake had made slow progress. But if he had delayed another few seconds, then Mr. Falconer would now be lying under half a ton of rubble. A support beam had burned through, causing the roof to crash in, and with it the contents of the classroom above.

The school principal, Mr. Harris, watched with Jake as the ambulance carrying Falconer pulled away, its lights flashing and siren whooping. Falconer had momentarily regained consciousness and mumbled
incoherently about Jake glowing green. The paramedics assumed it was a side effect of the traumatic ordeal.

“You're a brave boy,” said Mr. Harris. The firemen could find no immediate cause of the fire, and the principal was well aware of Jake's reputation as a troublemaker. But because he'd pulled the teacher out of the flames, without a doubt saving his life, he couldn't exactly accuse him of arson. But it felt strange calling the bully a hero.

Jake mulled things over as he walked home. The green haze coming from him had definitely been real, and not a hallucination brought on by the asphyxiating smoke, that much he was sure about. The glow had increased with his anger but then slowly ebbed away when he calmed down.

But what was it? And why couldn't he feel the heat himself? When he pulled Mr. Falconer from the conflagration the shimmering green energy field had reappeared, covering him completely. Fire had rolled across the wall next to him, and he hadn't felt the flames lick across his face.

Jake would be the first to admit he wasn't a straight-A student, but he certainly wasn't stupid. He knew that he shouldn't have been able to stand in a room where the metal chairs were melting into puddles. No matter how much he twisted the facts, they all pointed back to the previous night when he visited that Web site and clicked on the radioactive button. He'd
seen the monitor warp—that couldn't have been an optical illusion as he'd originally assumed. Somehow, he had been given the power to produce radiation, and apparently to control it with his anger and fear. Jake decided that when he got home, he was going to get to the bottom of the mystery one way or another.

News travels fast. Almost at light speed if it moves from your school to your parents. Jake hadn't even inserted his key in the lock before his mother swung the door open and grabbed him in an emotional hug.

“Jacob! You're okay!”

“Yes, I'm fine,” he managed as he pushed her away.

“Brave thing you did,” his father said, standing a little farther back. “Just glad you're okay! It gave my heart a start when I heard the news. Running into a burning building took some guts!”

Jake shrugged in response. “Yeah, whatever. I have to go and get changed. I reek of smoke.” He extracted himself from his parents' hugs and questions and headed upstairs. After a long shower he quietly entered his bedroom, twisted the lock on the door, and booted up his computer.

“Let's find out what the heck's going on,” he mumbled.

His fingers were a blur across the keyboard as he logged onto his e-mail. Seconds later the mail program appeared with the mysterious e-mail from his namesake.
He had moved to click on the message when it was suddenly pushed down the list by the arrival of a new one. Bold letters read:

“CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR NEW SUPERPOWERS!”

Jake felt his heart beat faster. “What is this?”

He felt his hand tremble as he clicked on the e-mail. A larger window opened up, and he quickly read through it. “Now that you have experienced the awesome powers available to you, take your next step on the path to world domination by meeting here, thirty minutes from now.”

A small JPEG graphic at the bottom of the e-mail depicted a map. It took Jake a few seconds to realize that it showed the way from his house to the abandoned steel mill. Jake looked back up to the screen and noticed the time had already started counting down the passing seconds.

Jake wasn't naive enough to agree to meet in person a stranger he'd met over the Internet, but he couldn't ignore what had happened in the classroom. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Somehow, he had inherited some kind of radioactive power from the Villain.net Web site. He tried to recall what he knew about radioactive material. The side effects were not pleasant; he'd seen enough monster movies to know that. He worried that he might get sick from radioactive poisoning.

The timer now read twenty-eight minutes. He figured it would take at least twenty minutes on his bike to get to the steel mill, and walking out the front door would raise questions from his family and waste time.

Jake thumped a fist decisively against his desk. He had to know what was happening to him. He moved to the window and slid it open. The back porch was just underneath his room and offered a perfect step to climb out on. From there he lowered himself to the ground, dropping the last few feet with practiced ease. Making sure nobody was looking from the living room windows, Jake ran across to the toolshed.

His fingers shook as he unscrambled the combination lock on the shed door and pulled out his mountain bike. A shovel fell against the wall with a loud clatter as the bike dislodged it. Jake reached forward to secure the tool before it made any more noise. A quick glance toward the house confirmed nobody had heard. He started to close the door, then hesitated; walking into the steelworks at night, alone, was ill advised. He had no idea who, or what, would be waiting for him. Just on the edge of the shed's workbench was a heavy iron wrench. Jake picked it up and weighed the tool in his hand.

“You'll work,” he mumbled and he tucked the wrench in his belt.

* * *

The factory was dark and forbidding. Jake had been here many times before, but never alone. Now the dark ruins looked oppressive and unwelcoming. He drew a long breath and tried to imagine that there was only one threat in the darkness:
him
. Everybody else had better watch out. Feeling a little more confident, Jake dismounted and followed the security fence. He knew where the rips in the rusty mesh were.

Beyond the fence, crumbling brick walls several stories high flanked the narrow roadways around the mill. Corrugated metal sheets clanked in the gentle breeze. The whirl of his bike's spokes echoed through the complex. His hand touched the wrench lodged in his belt, and he silently berated himself for not bringing a flashlight. Ivy had covered most of the buildings, while the weather had stripped away roofs, making the first stars of the night visible beyond.

Jake froze as his foot clattered aside a rusted oilcan. It bounced in the darkness, sounding unnaturally loud. He felt a chill run up his spine and could have sworn the air temperature had suddenly dropped.

“Congratulations, Hunter,” purred a voice from the darkness behind him.

Jake wheeled around, dropping his bike and sliding out the wrench in one fluid movement. He heard slow, mocking clapping from the shadows. It sounded like bricks being banged together.

“Very good. Reflexes like a cat,” continued the voice.

“Who are you?” Jake demanded.

“I'm your new best friend.”

The darkness shifted as a figure stepped from the deepest shadows. He was much taller than Jake. Faint moonlight reflected off steel struts that braced both legs and disappeared in a pair of black boots with countless buckles on them. His arms were bare and looked to have the texture of stone. The rest of the stranger was clad in matte black, but even in the dim light Jake could see the man's chest was well defined with muscles. A short black cape hung over his shoulders, and when the moonlight caught it, it seemed to glitter like a snakeskin. A wide hood covered his head, obscuring any features. He stood and appraised Jake with a slight tilt of the head. When he crossed his arms, they made the sound of stone grating against stone as they moved.

Jake held his ground, although he wanted to jump on his bike and scurry away.

“You can call me Basilisk!” The figure's voice reverberated dramatically among the deserted buildings.

After years of picking on kids with stupid names, Jake couldn't help but smile. “
Basilisk
? What kind of name is that?”

“One you will respect!”

Basilisk took a step forward, his boots thumping heavily
on the ground as he drew himself to his full height. Jake gasped; he hadn't been aware the figure was slouching until now. Basilisk must have been almost seven feet tall, and egg-shaped eyes flared neon blue under his hood.

Despite himself, Jake let out a whimper of fear and took a step backward as he lifted the wrench, ready to strike. Basilisk boomed with humorless laughter.

“Oh, very good. Feisty and aggressive. Those traits will serve you well.”

“Take one more step and I'll slug you across the head!” Jake warned.

A beam of concentrated light shot from Basilisk's finger, as fine as string, but the moment it struck the wrench the tool glowed bright red and smoldered in Jake's hand. He let go of it with a yelp.

“How'd you do that?” he said while sucking his burned fingers. “Did you get those powers off a Web site by any chance?”

“No. I was born with them. But I did send you that e-mail. You were given a gift. A temporary gift to be used how you see fit. And I have been watching you.”

“Why?”

“I saw how you used your powers for rage and revenge. Burning down your classroom was very wicked,” Basilisk's voice became thoughtful. “Although you lost points for pulling out that pain-in-the-neck teacher of yours. But you were close to perfect, allowing your
actions to be guided by your feelings. Controlled anger is the mightiest weapon.”