The Villain Virus

He was a troublemaker. He was disrespectful. He was a bad role model to the other children. He didn’t take his education seriously. He didn’t listen. He didn’t follow directions. He didn’t play well with others. If he didn’t shape up and fly right, he was going to find himself in a heap load of trouble. He would grow up to be shiftless. He would disappoint everyone, but most important, he would disappoint himself. He would go through life sneering at authority and someday end up in prison. Yes, prison! In thirty years of teaching she had never seen anything like this. She didn’t know what had gotten into kids these days. They had no respect. When she was a student she would never have been so disrespectful to a teacher. She blamed the video games. She truly thought the world was falling apart and wondered if she could find work as a waitress.

When Mrs. Reinhold finally talked herself into exhaustion, she plopped down onto a chair to catch her breath. Flinch turned to Ms. Dove, fully prepared for another lecture, but the big-eyed woman just smiled. “What are we going to do with you, Mr. Escala?”

The answer was another detention.

Mrs. Reinhold and Ms. Dove walked him down the hall to the detention room. Flinch took his seat and put his head down in disgrace. Mama Rosa was going to kill him. In three days he had gone from nerd to full-fledged juvenile delinquent.

“Psst,” a voice said from behind his head. He sat up and turned. The four boys who had bullied him on the first day were all sitting in a row. He expected them to either be angry at his manhandling or completely terrified of his inhuman strength. But they were gri

“Yo, bro,” the kid with the red hair said. “Welcome back.”

When he got home, he found a note on the kitchen table. It read, I’m very disappointed. We will discuss this after my stories.

Anxiety made Flinch fidget even more than usual. Mama Rosa must have thought he had lost his mind. He couldn’t wait for her soap operas to be over. He needed to explain himself the best he could. He ran through the house, but before his foot hit the first stair, he was rocked by a massive explosion.

“What was that?” he cried, pushing himself to his feet.

Mama Rosa came down the steps, stomping like an angry bull. Strapped to her back were two silver canisters almost as big as garbage cans. A single tube led from the canisters to a nozzle in her hand. The nozzle was dripping something that smelled like fuel onto the rug.

“Mama Rosa!”

“That’s not my name anymore! My name is Hot Tamale!”

She was infected.

If the name and the flamethrower hadn’t given it away, there was also her flushed face and angry red eyes. Flinch tried to stay calm. He had to keep the old woman from doing anything drastic.

“So, that’s a nice flamethrower, Hot Tamale. What do you plan on doing with it?” Flinch asked.

“I’m going to burn down Mrs. Valencia’s rose garden,” Mama Rosa said as she pushed past him and out the front door.

Years ago Mama Rosa and Mrs. Valencia were the best of friends. They played dominoes on the front porch and drank mojitos at an alarming rate. They loved to talk about gardening, and both considered themselves experts when it came to growing beautiful, blooming roses. But one year they both entered a contest held by the Arlington Botanical Garden, and Mrs. Valencia’s roses won. Mama Rosa never spoke to her friend again. She sat on the porch, envying Mrs. Valencia as she spread her prize, a year’s supply of mulch, across her bulb garden. A confrontation had been brewing for years, but no one suspected it would involve a flamethrower.

“You can’t burn down her rose garden, Mama,” Flinch said. The old woman tried to shoo him away, but he stayed close to her side.

“She shouldn’t have laughed at me!” Mama Rosa said.

There was that phrase again. “They laughed at me.” He had heard Captain Kapow say the same thing. He’d heard Mr. Miniature say it, too. When his own fever was raging, he was certain that others were snickering behind his back. How could he convince Mama Rosa otherwise?

The old woman stopped her march right in front of Mrs. Valencia’s home. She raised her hose and sprayed her flames, scorching Mrs. Valencia’s front yard. When she turned off the hose, the grass was black and smoldering. She cackled proudly.

Flinch pinched his nose and heard the com-link in his head activate. “I’ve got another infected supervillain on my hands.”

“Who?” Agent Brand asked when he came online.

“My grandma!”

“Can you handle it until I can get the team there? Everyone has left for the day. I can’t even get Ms. Holiday on the phone,” Brand said.

“She’s mi familia, boss. I’ll handle this. I’m just letting you know Dr. Kim is right. It’s spreading.”

Mama Rosa blasted the weeping willow growing in Mrs. Valencia’s front yard. Soon the tree was a bonfire. A moment later Mrs. Valencia, wearing an apron and carrying a rolling pin, came racing out of the house. She was angry.

“Rosa, what are you doing?” she cried.

“Something I should have done a long time ago, woman,” Rosa said. “I’m going to settle the score. Don’t believe what they say—revenge is a dish best served hot!”

Mama Rosa blasted fire into the sky to emphasize her point.

“Have you lost your mind?” Mrs. Valencia shouted.

“Quite the contrary! I have finally found it,” Mama Rosa shouted back, blasting Mrs. Valencia’s shrubs.

“You think I’m going to just let that happen, Rosa?” Mrs. Valencia asked. “You think you can stand here and burn my prize-wi

From inside her apron she pulled out a whistle. It was covered in blinking lights and knobs. Flinch had never seen anything like it outside of the Playground—which made him very nervous. Mrs. Valencia put the whistle to her mouth … and suddenly his eardrums felt like they were exploding. The high-pitched squeal shattered windows, set off car alarms, and knocked him and Mama Rosa to the pavement.

With ringing ears, Flinch helped Mama Rosa stand up. She was still dazed from the attack, which meant it was the perfect time to relieve her of her flamethrower.

“Every day I have to hear your stupid soap operas blasting through the window of your home, Rosa,” Mrs. Valencia shouted. “All that noise is bad for the air. It’s bad for the neighborhood, and it’s bad for my flowers! I built this little machine to show you what it’s like to not be able to hear yourself think. I guess you won’t be laughing at me again, will you, Rosa? I guess you’ll think twice before getting in the way of the Whistle Wizard!”

Mrs. Valencia lifted her whistle to her mouth, but Flinch was already on the move. He dashed into his neighbor’s yard, leaped over the roaring fire that was once her hydrangea bush, and snatched the weapon out of her hand. Then he pulverized it beneath the heel of his sneaker.

“You fool!” the woman said. “You’ve foiled my plans!”

There was a massive thump that shook the ground, and everyone fell over again, even Mrs. Valencia. That thump was followed by another and then another and another, each one growing in intensity. The trees shook, and one even uprooted, collapsing onto a nearby car. A crack in the concrete grew and grew, widening into a trench and ripping the neighborhood in two. When it was finished splitting, Mama Rosa was on one side of a wide, jagged ditch and Flinch was on the other.

“Julio?” she cried. “What is causing this?”

Flinch looked down the street and nearly threw up his Twinkies. Stomping toward them was a mechanical creature nearly three stories tall. Its body had the shape of a man, but its head was a transparent orb. Inside was a very familiar face—Old Man Augustine. Every kid in the neighborhood knew the old coot, and so did every toy store in a one-mile radius. Old Man Augustine was known as “the ball bandit.”