SuperZero (school edition) Read online

  “Daniel’s an animal lover,” explained Madame Hoblidaya. “He heard Ulric telling some of his followers to burn down the science labs. There are animals in those labs, so he went to the school to stop them.”

  “I waited by the gates,” said Daniel Dundee. “But they came in another way. When I got to them, the labs were already on fire. All I could do was to save the animals.”

  “He went into the burning building to rescue the mice and the hamsters,” said Madame Hoblidaya. “Very courageous. He told me all about it on Monday night when we met. He saw Ulric here, and he was afraid he was here to harm some more animals. When he saw Ulric sneaking back here he followed him. We had a long talk. We get along very well, Danny and I.”

  Madame Hoblidaya smiled at Daniel Dundee and Daniel Dundee smiled back at her. “I found him an after-hours job,” said Madame Hoblidaya. “He’s an apprentice strongman.”

  “I can bend iron bars now!” said Daniel Dundee. “Son of Sam showed me how!”

  “He’s going to join the circus when he leaves school. He likes the animals. He belongs here with us.”

  Zed shook his head to clear it. The hissing in his ears had become a crackling, as though someone were crumpling cellophane just behind him.

  “We have to get to the school,” he said. “Now, before it’s too late. It was never the circus that was in danger. It’s the school. It’s everyone there.”

  He turned to Madame Hoblidaya.

  “The machine that Edrich Krasner was working on – the zombie machine. He completed it. And now Ulric Chilvers has it. He’s been practising with it and testing it, first at Bighton, then at Wentville. Now he’s ready! At the talent concert – tonight! – he’s trying it on the public for the first time!”

  After reading

  3.

  Who is the “her” Daniel refers to on the first page of this chapter? Why is Daniel so protective of “her”?

  4.

  Zed is knocked into the portapool.

  4. a)

  What creatures are in the portapool?

  4. b)

  Why, in your view, is Zed still alive after having been shocked by so many electric eels?

  5.

  What does Zed realise about where the real danger lies?

  6. a)

  What is a zombie?

  6. b)

  What do you think a zombie machine could do to people? What does Ulric plan to do?

  7.

  “Lab” is short for lab....

  While reading

  1.

  What important role does Daniel Dundee play?

  12. The boy in the golden suit

  Zed was in the back seat of a car travelling fast through the dark and stormy night, sitting beside a boy who until an hour ago had been his mortal enemy, and he was wearing a shiny gold bodysuit and a shiny gold crash helmet and a shiny gold cape with a round, black cannonball embroidered on the back.

  Big Bertha’s Human Cannonballs were the only performers at the circus small enough to have a spare outfit that would fit him, gold suits, with capes and crash helmets.

  Zed hadn’t wanted to wear the suit, but Madame Hoblidaya had insisted.

  “Your clothes are sopping,” she had said. “You’ll catch the flu.”

  Madame Hoblidaya had told one of the roustabouts to take Zed and Daniel Dundee to Wentville Primary in the delivery vehicle. Daniel had been reluctant to leave Madame Hoblidaya, but she had insisted. “I’m safe here,” she’d said. “Others are in danger.”

  And so there they were, roaring across the wet streets of the city, like Batman and an oversized Robin. Daniel Dundee sat cracking his immense knuckles. Zed still felt dreamy, floaty. His face seemed to hover in the rain-spattered windowpane like the moon. The crackling was still in his ears. He held up his hands and a kind of fizzing light seemed to run across them. Daniel Dundee was staring at him.

  “What?” said Zed.

  “You look … shiny,” said Daniel Dundee.

  Zed tried to focus on what would be happening at the school. It was after eight; the show would have started. The chairman of the school board, Sir Arthur Vanzgabbit, who wasn’t really a sir but who donated a lot of money, would be making his speech. Then he would hand over an envelope con­taining the cheques for the winners, and make his grand exit and depart in his shiny helicopter from the tennis courts behind the hall.

  And then the concert would begin …

  Zed clenched his fists. The first act was Katey and Ulric Chilvers and the music they had been rehearsing. Once they went on, there wouldn’t be a second act, there would just be a hall full of zombies – parents, grown-ups, all ready to obey Ulric Chilvers’s commands.

  “Please,” he said to the roustabout. “Please, you must drive faster.”

  The car shot through the slick streets, sending up sprays of water.

  “Daniel,” Zed turned to his new partner, “that day I saw you on the field with Ulric Chilvers, what were you two doing?”

  “I told him I wouldn’t let him hurt the animals any more,” said Daniel Dundee. “He wanted me to join his gang. He said I could have all the animals I wanted.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I didn’t want to be friends with anyone who hurt animals.”

  The car screeched around a tight corner and aquaplaned on the wet tarmac.

  “You know, you’re the only person who never fell under his spell?” said Zed.

  Daniel shrugged. “My ma says my brain works differently to other people’s.”

  There were shadowy figures at the school gate. Sentries..

  “Don’t stop!” said Zed urgently. “Go through.”

  The car stopped at the entrance to the school hall and Zed and Daniel Dundee tumbled out into the courtyard and sprinted to the door. Two boys on guard duty – Tony Shezi and Clarence Kirkhoff – came towards them. Tony stepped forward to intercept Zed, but Daniel Dundee hit him from the side, just below the ribs. Tony collapsed with an “Oooof”.

  Clarence stepped forward to throw a punch, but Zed reached up his left hand and seized his wrist. There was a fizz and a crackle and blue-white light ran up and down Clarence Kirkhoff’s arm. Clarence gasped and his eyes rolled back, and then he fell away from Zed as though kicked. Zed looked down at his hand. A white flame seemed to be dancing around it – not a real flame, but the white, transparent shadow of a flame.

  Zed felt power running through him. Physical power. Strength. That was the dreamy, floaty feeling, he realised. Since he had awoken from his black­out in the tank of eels, his body hadn’t ached, his ribs hadn’t hurt, and his muscles hadn’t been contracting with tension and fear. He felt calm. He felt every volt that was currently coursing through him.

  I was like a battery, thought Zed. And now I have been charged.

  Two more of Ulric Chilvers’s thugs came charging from the shadows. Daniel Dundee reached out his enormous hands and banged their heads together like coconuts. They slumped to the ground, but there were more coming now and Daniel turned to face them squarely.

  “You go!” he shouted over his shoulder to Zed. “Go save the school!”

  Zed rushed up the stairs into the foyer of the hall. There was a large pol­ished copper plaque on the wall. He glimpsed his reflection in the copper: a short boy, dressed in shiny gold. A helmet too big for him. Eyes bulging. Some superhero.

  There were two huge wooden double doors and on the other side was a room full of people, and Ulric Chilvers. The door handles were made of the same polished copper as the wall plaque, and as he seized them with his bare hands, blue flames seemed to run around the metal. There was a pop and a burst and sparks flew up in the air. Zed pulled open the doors and flung them wide.

  The hall was full to bursting. Sir Arthur Vanzgabbit had finished his speech and had already disappeared backstage to be escorted through to the rear stage door to descend the steps and take the short walk to his helicopter.

  Ulric Chilvers stood at a tabl
e on which lay an open briefcase. Wires ran from the briefcase to speakers mounted around the walls of the hall. For a terrible moment Zed was afraid it was too late, but then Ulric Chilvers touched something in the briefcase and from the speakers came the steady electronic signal of the opening note.

  “No!” shouted Zed. “No!”

  Heads turned. Zed was a golden blur, running with great leaping strides down the aisle through the centre of the audience. His cape billowed behind him, unfurling and catching the bright hall lights, shining like a sheet of shaken gold.

  Ulric Chilvers kept adjusting the switches in the briefcase, turning up the volume. Already the crowd was beginning to turn slowly back toward the stage, back toward Ulric Chilvers, as though he was pulling invisible wires attached to all the heads in the audience.

  Zed was running out of time.

  Chris Heuvelmann came down the stairs of the stage to intercept Zed. Zed threw out his hands towards him and Chris stopped short, as though he had run into an invisible wall. He stumbled back and crumpled to the floor. Zed’s fingertips flamed with electric fire.

  Zed held his arms above his head, fingertips stretching to the ceiling, and slowly brought his hands around, as though drawing an immense globe in the air with his fingertips. The air began to burn. Circles moved out from his fingertips – waves in the air, like the ripples of invisible water. Zed felt power moving through him.

  The lights of the hall blew out with a loud pop and a tinkle of falling glass. In the darkness the speakers exploded in showers of white and orange sparks. The wiring burst into flame that ran the lengths of the walls. Fire leapt from the PA control board. In the audience, cellphones burst into flames, digital watches and organisers flew apart.

  The music had stopped. By the light of the burning speakers Zed saw Ulric Chilvers rip the wiring from the briefcase sockets before the fire could burn into the circuitry. He snapped it shut, slung it over his shoulder and slipped backstage behind the velvet curtains.

  Zed ran after him, the light from the fires dancing off his suit and cape.

  It was pitch-black backstage. Ahead he heard clattering and cursing as Ulric Chilvers stumbled over chairs and trunks and tool boxes. Zed blindly followed the noises, barking his shin on something low and solid, bouncing off a wall, tripping over a bicycle. Suddenly ahead there was a rectangle of grey in the blackness, a door opening, and Zed could see the shimmer of streetlamps and moonlight through rain.

  Zed burst out into the rain. There was a small landing and a flight of steps down to the tennis courts, and there on the courts, its great rotors gradually gathering speed, was the Vanzgabbit helicopter, facing away from the hall, tentatively beginning to lift.

  Ulric Chilvers was already on the ground, running onto the court, the briefcase bouncing on his shoulder. Zed threw out his hand toward the running figure, willing the white flame. Nothing came. Zed felt his knees buckle, and he nearly toppled forward, dizzy and weak. His effort in the hall had drained whatever power he had gathered from the tank of eels. He was on his own again. Just him and Ulric Chilvers.

  Zed took the stairs in one leap. He ran, rain stinging his eyes, cape flapping behind him. Ulric Chilvers looked back and saw Zed coming, gold and billowing.

  The helicopter was lifting now, hovering just off the ground. Ulric Chilvers ran underneath, clutched a strut of the undercarriage and swung himself up onto the left-hand ski. He wedged himself in place with one leg on either side and looked back triumphantly.

  Zed never hesitated. He sprinted onto the court, across the baseline, the service line. Zed launched himself upwards, his fingertips scrabbling at the metal.

  He almost hoped he wouldn’t get it, but his fingers clutched the ski, the momentum swung his legs up like a pendulum and he wound them over. The helicopter jolted and lifted.

  Zed dangled upside down, staring at the rapidly receding city. He saw the school, and then the grounds of the school, and then all the streets around the school. The lights below were blurry with distance and rain.

  Zed had never been any good at sit-ups in PE classes, but in PE classes he hadn’t been dangling hundreds of metres off the ground with Ulric Chilvers trying to kick him loose. With a heave, Zed pulled himself up and clutched at the ski with his arms. He was lying full-length on it now, riding it as he had ridden the crocodile.

  Zed and Ulric Chilvers were on the same ski, and the helicopter listed a little to the left under their weight. They were over the ocean now, the great oily black night-time ocean, passing over the lines of creamy grey where the waves rushed to the shore. For the first time, Zed met Ulric Chilvers’s stare and held it. He didn’t look down.

  “So!” shouted Ulric Chilvers over the roaring of the rotors and the wind.

  “So!” shouted Zed.

  The raindrops were coming down hard, slanting silver through the tail-lights of the chopper, silver shards from the black roaring night.

  They looked at each other, two young boys clinging to a helicopter, pulled and plucked by the winds, balanced on the edge of the abyss.

  “You can’t stop us, you know,” shouted Ulric Chilvers. “There are too many of us. There’s too many people prepared to follow me. You can never, never win. You know that?”

  “I know that,” said Zed.

  They rode on, into the storm, into the roaring night.

  “You know what we have to do now, don’t you?” yelled Ulric Chilvers.

  “What?” said Zed.

  “We have to fight. We have to fight, right now, until one of us drops off.”

  Zed had been afraid he would say that.

  “Why not wait till we land?” he yelled. “Then we could fight on the ground.”

  “We can’t do that,” yelled Ulric Chilvers. “We’re a superhero and a supervillain on a helicopter, high above the ocean. We have to fight now. It’s the way things are. Otherwise we’d just be a normal hero and a normal villain.”

  I could live with just being a normal hero, Zed thought. I could live with that.

  But he knew that Ulric Chilvers was right.

  “All right, then,” he said.

  Ulric Chilvers hooked his ankles around the helicopter ski and hugged it with his knees and lunged at Zed. Zed reached out with both hands and clutched the slippery metal and pulled himself forward. He slid along the ski, under Ulric’s lunging body and sat upright, driving the top of the hard, golden crash helmet into his midriff.

  Ulric gasped and lost his grip. The wind caught him and gusted him sideways. Zed stretched out a hand and caught the strap of the briefcase containing the zombie machine. For a moment it held, for a moment Zed was pulling Ulric Chilvers back from the brink. Then, under Ulric’s weight, the catch on the strap burst.

  Even though he was falling, Ulric let go of the helicopter ski. He grabbed for the falling briefcase and clutched it to his chest. He was slipping now and going sideways down into that roaring bottomless blackness.

  “Ulric!” Zed yelled, stretching out his hand. “Drop the bag! Take my hand!”

  There was time. There was still time. But Ulric Chilvers would not let go of the briefcase. He looked calmly into Zed’s eyes in that long, slow moment. His eyes flashed green. “We’ll meet again,” he said.

  And then he dropped. There was no scream as he plunged. He was there, and then he wasn’t. Ulric Chilvers returned to the darkness.

  After reading

  2.

  Why is Zed wearing a golden human cannonball suit?

  3.

  Describe the changes to Zed and how they came about.

  4.

  Why did Daniel Dundee not fall under Ulric’s spell as many of the others did?

  5.

  Zed sees his reflection in the copper plaque and realises that he does not look like a superhero. This does not stop him from dashing to save the people in the hall. What does this tell us about him?

  6.

  Zed makes a globe-like circle in the air with his fingertips when Ulric start
s to open his briefcase.

  6. a)

  Why does he do this?

  6. b)

  What happens to everything with a frequency?

  6. c)

  Why does Ulric quickly rip out the wires from his machine and leave the hall?

  7.

  Why do the two boys end up fighting on the skis of a helicopter high above the ocean?

  8.

  Where do you think Ulric disappears to?

  Before reading

  1.

  What does the title “The end of the beginning” suggest?

  While reading

  2.

  What is the most frightening thing that Zed faces on his lone helicopter ride?

  13. Epilogue: The end of the beginning

  A small boy clung to the underside of a helicopter. The helicopter carried him through the dark night and the storm. He didn’t know where it was taking him, and he didn’t care. One life lay behind him and another lay before and both were frightening, but that howling black emptiness was below, and that was more frightening still. So the boy clung on.

  The small boy was gold, and he shone gold, and he billowed gold in the night. His enemy was gone, snatched by the storm. Do enemies ever really die?

  He didn’t know.

  Would anyone believe his story when he returned? Would he try to tell them? How long did it take for zombies to return to normal once the zombie master had gone? Who was his father? How had he died?

  He didn’t know.

  The small boy clung to the helicopter and thought of all the people in the world, all the regular people, the people who knew nothing about him and cared nothing for him – the people he’d spend the rest of his life protecting.

  Maybe Ulric Chilvers was right. Maybe the world is binary. Maybe there are only ones and zeroes. The ones have power and the zeroes give it to them. But now Zed had seen something of power and what kind of person craves it, and Zed knew where he belonged. He belonged with the weak and the foolish and the gullible. Not because he was weak or foolish or gullible, but because if there are only two choices, if there are only sheep and wolves, Zed did not want to be a wolf. He did not want to cause pain to anyone, or anything, ever. That was what he believed.