Virus Attack (2 page)

Lorna and Emily flew close on either side, talking in low voices.

“I'm getting cold,” complained Lorna. Having learned from previous adventures, they were all dressed in thick black clothes, but the chill still permeated.

Toby didn't bother replying. Over the last few weeks his sister's complaints had increased with each job they had downloaded from Hero.com. His best friend, Pete, had even started to agree with her, which wasn't good news. Luckily Pete wasn't within earshot. Toby glanced around, suddenly aware that his friend had been gone longer than he'd anticipated. He glanced at the lights on the horizon.

“We're running out of time,” he warned. “We can't wait for Pete. We have to stop this thing now.”

“It's a massive boat. How are we supposed to stop it?” said Emily.

“Why bother? This is something we should leave for the police,” Lorna grumbled.

“Police don't patrol out here,” Toby snapped back.

“The coast guard, or customs, or border patrol or whatever you call it. What's the point in having these great powers if we're just stopping
normal
people?
What about the supervillains out there? We're supposed to be fighting
them
.”

Toby rolled his eyes. “It was on the job board and it needed to be done.”

The list of jobs on Hero.com seemed to be growing by the day, although not every job was a direct result of an errant supervillain. “Besides, I thought we decided after the trouble with Doc Tempest that we should take things a little easier?”

“
You
decided, Toby,” Lorna retorted.

Emily tried to avoid getting involved with the argument. Which was just as well, as she detected movement on the deck below. Figures had left a cabin and were running to the bow of the ship. The moonlight glinted tellingly off the rifles they carried in both hands.

“Shush, you two! Look, they're coming out!” she said—maybe a little too loudly. One of the figures looked up and began yelling in Spanish. He pointed at the three figures with the barrel of his rifle.

Toby realized with dread that, while arguing, they had moved so that the moon was
behind
them—highlighting their silhouettes so the men below could easily spot them.

“Down!” he yelled.

They all plummeted just as the dull clatter of gunfire broke out across the deck. Bullets shrieked through the air—too close for comfort.

Toby dived straight for the ocean's surface, aware that he hadn't downloaded any power that would render him bulletproof. He was so low that foam from the boat's wake soaked his chest. He glanced up to see that Lorna had thrown up a protective shield of energy that rippled as bullets harmlessly struck it. Emily cowered close behind her.
Typical of Lorna to pick a defensive power
, thought Toby. Not that selecting powers on Hero.com was a straightforward process.

Chameleon, the only heroic Prime that Toby had ever met, had told them there was an instruction manual on the Web site. When he'd eventually found it, Toby had been baffled by the complex jargon used. He did learn that the stick figure icons, which represented the powers, were laid out with
some
degree of logic. Lorna always seemed smart enough to pick the most useful powers for their missions, whereas he just chose the most fun-looking ones.

His thoughts were interrupted as a deckhand leaned over the gunwale of the ship and spotted him. Toby could make out the square night-vision goggles the man wore. The muzzle flash of the weapon flickered and a stream of bullets zipped past him.

Time to end this
, he thought.

Toby barrel-rolled to one side to make himself less of a target. He extended his hands and fine black tendrils shot from his fingertips, each no wider than a strand of
cotton, but bunched together they were as thick as rope. The sticky tendrils splattered against the man's night-vision goggles and the gun. Toby yanked the strands back, tearing the equipment from him. He shook his hands and the strands broke away, falling into the sea. The startled man stared in Toby's direction as if he'd just seen a ghost, then spun around and ran across the deck, shouting in panic.

Above, Emily peeked around Lorna's energy shield and flicked her hands. A pair of golden orbs, no bigger than Ping-Pong balls, sprang from her palms and raced toward the crew. She watched in fascination as the heat-seeking orbs were guided toward two men, striking them in the chest. The orbs exploded with a dull
plop
and the men were catapulted across the deck. They slammed into the bulkhead, weapons skittering away.

A third man gaped as his colleagues were blown aside, and then looked up as if realizing for the first time that the two girls were suspended in the air as if by magic. He hesitated in firing—giving Emily an opportunity to fire another set of golden orbs.

The man dropped his weapon and fled. He glanced behind him to see the orbs were weaving across the deck in his direction. He skidded around a corner leading to the main cabins and checked behind him. The orbs were relentlessly pursuing. He increased his pace
and threw himself into an open cabin door, pushing his whole body against the steel door to close it.

Both orbs hit the door with such thunderous force that the metal buckled and the door was blasted from its hinges. The warped steel propelled the man across the cabin and into the far wall, knocking him unconscious.

Toby gained altitude to join Emily and Lorna.

“I thought there would be more of them,” said Toby. “And I thought pirates would be a lot tougher.”

“Wrong type of pirates,” said Lorna in her best “ye olde pirate” accent.

“It's turning!” exclaimed Emily. As they watched, the boat increased speed and began to slide in the water. “Must be somebody at the wheel.”

Toby felt slightly disappointed at what seemed like an easy victory—he had been expecting the mission to be a lot more fun, but knew better than to say so out loud. “We didn't need Pete after all, the slacker. Let's get onto the boat and stop it.”

Toby wondered if Pete was okay. The last time he'd seen him was when Pete had plummeted underwater several minutes ago, convinced he had downloaded aquatic powers. Toby wasn't too concerned, since Pete was a strong swimmer. Besides, his friend had been acting differently since they had been using the superpowers. Toby just hoped being a hero wasn't going to his head, like it was with his sister.

They edged forward toward the ship's dark helm at the front of the boat. As they drew nearer they could see the captain inside the control room, bathed in pale lights. The captain didn't look around, but instead stared at his instruments. The ship was old enough to be steered by a large wheel, instead of the small computer joysticks of modern vessels. The captain was using all his weight to keep the wheel level.

Toby landed on the raised deck and took a step forward when Lorna suddenly gave a loud yelp. She had been about to follow her brother through the control room door when she was violently dragged up and backward into the sky by some invisible force. She suddenly stopped and hung stationary for a second, before rapidly zigzagging through the air like a balloon—coming to another abrupt halt. She stopped screaming for a microsecond before plummeting into the water.

Lorna's screams alerted the captain. He spun around to see Toby—who had his back to the man, watching his sister's plight. He didn't see the captain pick up a small fire extinguisher and raise it to strike Toby's head.

Emily dragged her gaze from Lorna, who was thrashing in the ocean, to Toby, who was about to be clocked by the captain.

“Tobe!” she screamed and extended her hands. The orbs appeared as before—but then they popped like harmless soap bubbles. For a brief second she
panicked—the friends' powers were only temporary and liable to run out at any moment. But she reasoned that her powers hadn't expired, or else she wouldn't still be flying.

Toby heard her warning and turned just as the captain swung the fire extinguisher down. Toby ducked aside but the extinguisher still clipped his shoulder. The might of the attack forced him to the floor, his right arm numb from where he'd been struck. The captain loomed over him and hissed in an unfamiliar language. Toby could see the bloodthirsty rage in the man's eyes….

A sound like a million waterfalls rumbling interrupted the captain. After years on the sea, he knew trouble from the ocean when he heard it. He looked through the control room's window. Toby followed the captain's gaze, his eyes widening.

A wall of water rose in front of the ship, almost one hundred feet tall and four times as wide. It was a tidal wave—except this one didn't move, but stood up from the sea like a liquid wall, seawater rising on one side and cascading down the other. The cap of the wave bubbled and frothed, betraying the force of the water contained beneath—and Pete stood on top of it like a champion surfer. Dressed in his black wetsuit with his arms folded, he was laughing in delight.

Once they had accepted the mission to stop a pirate vessel from smuggling its illegal cargo into the country,
Pete had scoured the Web site for aquatic powers. It had delayed them by a good forty minutes as he struggled to make an educated guess about which icons symbolized them.

The moment they had found the freighter, Pete had plummeted into the ocean. He had been delighted to discover he could breathe just as well underwater as in the air. While the others tracked the ship from above, it had taken him time to discover what other powers he had. After some experimentation, Pete succeeded in scaring a school of inquisitive fish when he created a dense ball of seawater that was almost as hard as rock.

When the fight broke out above, he exerted himself to create a wall of water so he could stop the ship. And he was surprised to see that it had worked a lot better than he'd imagined.

Emily was the only one with a clear vantage point above the action. The tidal wave Pete had created was huge, and she was certain that it was well beyond the limits of the powers they were
supposed
to have.

“How can he do that?” she muttered to herself.

She checked that Lorna was still treading water to the right of the ship—
starboard
, she corrected herself. Toby was still on his knees outside the door.

When she looked back at Pete she saw him draw his hands together as though he were closing curtains—and the tidal wave surged forward.

She yelled, “Pete, no, don't do it!”

The weight of the tidal wave would surely crush Toby on the ship and Lorna in the water, and it didn't seem that Pete had any idea either of them was in there.

Pete was enjoying himself too much to notice Emily frantically waving her arms in warning, and the roar of the water was too loud for him to hear her.

Without thinking, Emily dived toward the ocean.

Pete was stunned at the wave's magnitude, but he assumed that he was controlling his powers like a true master. The wave tore forward. As it reached the bow of the freighter he noticed movement from the corner of his eye—it was Emily flying down. Pete looked around with a frown, suddenly aware that none of his friends were airborne.

Toby clambered to his feet, holding a deck rail as the tidal wave struck the boat. The front of the vessel was pitched almost vertically up. Toby's feet slipped from the deck and he fell. The angled floor now became a slide and he plummeted down toward a set of steel railings that circled the control tower. He hit them hard, the impact knocking the breath out of him.

His shoulder was aching so much that he could only use one hand to try and right himself as the wave carried the ship backward through the ocean at an acute angle. The water broke overhead and rained down on
the deck like a heavy downpour that increased in intensity with every passing second.

Salt water stung Toby's eyes and his mouth tasted of nothing else. He pushed himself forward to fly—but found the superpower had vanished. He suddenly felt helpless, as the world around him became nothing but seawater and a frenzy of white bubbles.

Emily had to use both hands to heave Lorna from the water. It was difficult to gain any altitude with the additional weight.

“Higher!” shouted Lorna as the wave enveloped the boat.

“I can't! You're too heavy!”

“What?” Lorna bit back any argument over her weight. Now was not the time to fight. Emily opted to try to outrun the wave instead. Lorna felt the world starting to move in slow motion as the surge bore down on them. They watched in amazement as the water submerged the vessel—and then the entire wall fell back into the ocean as though somebody had pressed a “stop” button. The colossal sound of collapsing water dissipated into silence.

Lorna suddenly jolted into the air, bouncing off Emily, as her own flying power kicked back into action. She hovered next to her friend and they watched the surface of the sea bubble where the ship
used
to be. Personal possessions floated to the surface along with
eight struggling crew members who all treaded water that was fast becoming littered with thousands of DVD cases. They spread across the surface like driftwood as they escaped from the smuggler ship's hold.

Pete swooped down next to the girls.

“Wow! Wasn't I incredible? Did you see what I did? Amazing!”

Emily looked incredulous. “That was a
team
effort.” But Pete wasn't listening. He'd become boastful of his own exploits on the last few missions they had completed. It was beginning to get annoying.

Pete suddenly looked around with concern. “Where's Toby?”

Emily pointed. “He was
on
the boat, you idiot.”

They stared at the surface for a stunned second—then Pete flew straight for the water …

And bounced right off, as if he had flown into a sheet of rubber. He rolled across the undulating surface, not a centimeter of his body getting wet.