Archvillain Read online

  ARCHVILLAIN

  by BARRY LYGA

  For my brother, Eric —

  my very first audience

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Teaser Chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright

  from BouringRecord.com:

  Where Were You When the Stars Fell Down?

  In the days since a massive meteor shower lit up the night sky over Bouring, residents have been asking one another, “Where were you when the stars fell down?” It’s a question that has set abuzz a town whose motto is “Bouring — It’s not Boring!”

  Lacey Clark, owner of Clark’s Bakery on Wayne Street, was closing up her shop that night. “I was just locking the door when I saw a bright flash of light to the east,” she told BouringRecord.com. “I sort of stood there in shock, watching.”

  “It went yellow, then white, then yellow again,” said Paul West, who was working on a utility pole on Allen Road at the time of the meteor shower. “I was up pretty high, so I had a good view of the whole thing. I swear, it was like a curtain of light or like seeing the stars fall down.”

  Best estimates place the meteor shower’s landing point at or near the Bouring Middle School athletic fields and the nearby Bouring Water Tower. The shower lit up the entire town for a period of two minutes, causing many to run or drive to the fields.

  When they arrived, however, they did not find a smoking crater or other evidence of meteors. In fact, according to astronomers, the meteors all burned up in Earth’s atmosphere before hitting the ground. This burning, astronomers say, is what caused the bright flashes of light.

  Of course, something else was found at the scene when all those people arrived: a young boy, approximately twelve years of age, who had apparently stumbled onto the scene. Suffering from amnesia, that boy — named Mike by the doctors who took care of him — is now in the care of a local foster couple.

  It’s been four days and we want to know, Bouring: Where were you when the stars fell down? Tell us in the comments below!

  from the top secret journal of Kyle Camden (deciphered):

  “Where were you when the stars fell down?” Idiots!

  The stars didn’t “fall down.” Stars can’t fall down! Stars aren’t little pinpoints of light up in the sky. They’re gigantic balls of superheated gases. They’re basically enormous nuclear bombs. If a star — any star — came within fifty million miles of the planet, the entire solar system would be realigned by tidal gravitational forces and all life on Earth would end. So nothing “fell down.”

  These people should do their research.

  Second of all, it wasn’t a meteor shower. It was a focused curtain of supercooled plasma. That’s why there was no physical evidence of a meteor shower.

  How do I know this? I was there.

  I was in the field that night. No one knows this. I watched the plasma storm as it fell; it was extraordinary.

  I don’t remember much else. Certainly not this “Mike” the article mentions. I stumbled home, then collapsed into bed.

  The next thing I knew, I woke up at home days later….

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  Kyle Camden did not like his mother fussing over him, as she did now. “That was just the worst flu I’ve ever seen,” she told Kyle as she fluffed his pillow and urged him to eat the chicken soup she’d delivered on a tray.

  Kyle also did not like chicken soup.

  Correction: Kyle did not like his mother’s chicken soup. The broth was watery and flavorless. Kyle could make better chicken soup without even using a chicken. That’s how bad a cook his mother was. At least she kept trying, though. He had to give her points for persistence. If she kept trying, maybe someday she would get it right. Kyle figured there was a fifty-fifty chance.

  “I’m fine, Mother,” he told her. Kyle knew that he hadn’t had the flu: He had witnessed something amazing the other night, out in the field by the school. And even though the local newspapers and websites apparently had never heard of that exotic practice known as “fact-checking,” at least they allowed him to catch up with what had happened since that night he’d stumbled home, delirious.

  The plasma curtain had done something to Kyle. He realized it as soon as he woke up and logged on to the London Times website for his morning ritual — solving the Times crossword puzzle. (American crosswords had long ago proven too easy for him — the British ones were tough.) Instead of taking ten minutes, like it used to, Kyle had solved the toughest crossword puzzle in all of two minutes.

  Kyle had always been smart. Really smart. Much smarter than his parents, in fact. Sometimes he felt a little twinge of guilt about this. His parents were nice enough people, he supposed. A bit dull. But they were kindhearted and they tried hard, which counted for something, right? Still, it had always been frustrating to be a genius in a family of … non-geniuses.

  Kyle didn’t mention his ramped-up brainpower to his parents. At twelve years old, he already knew how important it was to keep his own business secret. It would remain between him and Lefty, the fat New Zealand rabbit who lived in a cage in Kyle’s room. Lefty was snowy white all over except for a tiny patch of brown fur on his left front paw. The rabbit placidly observed everything with his pink-red eyes as though he knew a secret he would never, ever tell.

  “I don’t want you on the Internet,” Kyle’s mother said, having finished fluffing the pillow and placing it behind Kyle’s head. “I want you to rest.”

  Kyle rolled his eyes. “Mother, I need to catch up on what’s been happening while I was sick. And I need to catch up on my schoolwork.” That last part was a lie. Shortly after waking up, Kyle had sat up in bed with his laptop and done his missed schoolwork in an hour. Then, just to be safe, he’d also done the next two weeks’ worth of work. That had taken another hour. Superintelligence could be convenient.

  Once his mother left, Kyle immediately slid his laptop out from under his bed. Then he opened the window. It was cool outside, but Mom had the heat cranked up to “Volcanic.” Kyle sighed with relief at the breeze.

  Lefty started tugging on the bars of his cage, demanding a treat, so Kyle shook a couple of bits of dried papaya into the cage. Lefty scampered over and devoured them.

  “It’s been a strange few days, hasn’t it, Lefty?”

  The last thing he remembered after the plasma storm was stumbling home, his vision blurry, his head pounding as if someone had used it for a drum solo. His parents thought he had the flu and kept him in bed for days. Now he understood that his exposure to the plasma had changed his body and he’d needed all that rest to recover.

  But recovery time was over.

  His father poked his head into the room. “Hey, there, sport! Now that you’re feeling better, you can go to school in the morning!”

  Great.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Since all of his schoolwork was done, Kyle spent his last night of freedom thinking of ways to help his parents. They were nice enough people, and it wa
sn’t their fault that they were, well, “intellectually ungifted” was probably the kindest way to put it.

  His mother worked in the mayor’s office, but she never really complained about work, so Kyle figured she was pretty happy there. But her cooking … ugh! She definitely needed help in that department. Best of all, helping Mom in the kitchen would help Kyle, too, because he could finally eat something that didn’t make him sick to his stomach. It was a win-win scenario, the best kind.

  And Dad! Dad was always complaining about his weight. (How he could gain so much weight eating Mom’s cooking was a mystery that Kyle feared even his newly enhanced brainpower could not solve.) He would help his father lose weight and get in shape. Excellent!

  “I am probably the best son in the history of sons,” Kyle told Lefty very seriously. Lefty cocked a red eye at Kyle and twitched his nose, which Kyle chose to interpret as agreement.

  A little while later, he found his parents in their usual spot — on the sofa, in front of the TV. Kyle had little use for TV; most of it was dumb. His parents, though, were hooked on it. They had complicated schedules to determine which shows to watch on which days, which ones would be recorded and watched later, and which ones would be put off until the DVD came out.

  “Hey, guys,” Kyle said, holding up two DVDs he’d just made on his computer, “I have something for you.”

  “Can it wait until the commercial, sport?” Dad asked, his eyes glued to the screen.

  “I guess.”

  Kyle flounced into a chair that didn’t directly face the TV and waited. And waited. And waited. Was there ever going to be a commercial?

  Finally, the commercial break came. Kyle jumped up and waved the DVDs in front of his parents’ faces. “I made these for you. To help you.”

  Mom eyed the DVDs suspiciously, as though she’d never before seen this strange, futuristic technology. “Is this one of your pranks, honey?”

  “What? No!” Kyle was offended by the very suggestion. He was trying to help!

  Kyle was on his way to becoming the World’s Greatest Prankster. His parents, his schoolmates, his teachers, even the local police — all had been his victims at one point or another.

  “Victims” wasn’t really the best way to put it, though. Kyle preferred to think of them as “beneficiaries.” His pranks weren’t supposed to hurt people. They were supposed to teach people to lighten up. It wasn’t his fault if they rarely learned the lesson.

  “Look,” he explained, “I used some videos and instructional websites that I found online and I assembled them into a sequence designed to maximize knowledge intake in your frontal lobes, okay? Very simple. Then I accelerated the pace of the information display, optimized to your individual neural networks and optical capabilities so that the data can be presented and assimilated subliminally. Pretty cool, huh?”

  His parents stared at him. Then they stared at each other. Then, for variety, they stared at him again.

  “So it is a prank,” Dad said.

  “No! No. Look, it’s just …” Kyle took a deep breath and dumbed it down for them. “These are like instructional videos, only really fast and made especially for you.” He could tell he was losing them. “They run at high speed. Hours compressed into minutes.”

  “Then how are we supposed to learn from them?” Mom asked.

  “Your brain will pick up on the information without you even trying,” Kyle told her. “Look, just trust me, okay? Try them out. Mom, here’s yours.” He held it out to her. “It’s a whole series of cooking lessons, so that you can, uh …” He struggled with a diplomatic way of saying “not suck at cooking.” “Well, it’s so you can cook.”

  “But I already know how to cook, honey.”

  Kyle decided to deal with her later. He turned to his father. “Dad, I made this one for you. It’s a complete workout routine and weight-loss regimen.”

  Dad took the DVD and turned it over in his hands, then chuckled. “Well, I appreciate the thought, sport, but it’s not that easy. You can’t just watch something faster and lose weight faster.”

  Kyle growled a bit. “That’s not how it works, Dad. You watch it faster to learn it faster and then —”

  “Oh, look, it’s back on!” Mom cried. “Move, Kyle.”

  Kyle considered staying between them and their beloved TV, but it was useless. They didn’t get it. In fact, Dad had already put his DVD on the end table … and was using it as a coaster for his drink.

  Kyle stomped off to his bedroom and kicked the aluminum trash can next to his desk before he could remember how much it hurt every time he did that.

  But this time, not only did it not hurt …

  The trash can shot up off the floor and went sailing right through Kyle’s window! Fortunately, the window was still open, so the glass was safe. That screen, though, would never be the same again. It was a shredded mess.

  Kyle stood perfectly still and silent for a moment, staring at it. Lefty seemed to be staring, too. Kyle went over to the window and peered through the gaping hole in the screen. The trash can had landed at the very edge of the Camdens’ backyard, dented and mangled almost beyond recognition.

  “Well,” Kyle said. He turned to Lefty. “That’s interesting.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  In the morning, before he had to leave for school, Kyle slipped outside and retrieved what used to be his trash can. The ground around the spot where it had landed was indented, and the grass even looked a little singed. The trash can itself was …

  Well, the trash can was trash now.

  He must have been really, really angry at his parents last night when he’d kicked it.

  Back inside, Kyle choked down his mother’s oatmeal (how could she mess up oatmeal?), grabbed his things for school, and dashed outside to catch the bus as it pulled up to the end of his driveway.

  A cheer went up from the kids on the bus as Kyle stepped on the top stair. Someone started chanting, “CAM-den! CAM-den!” and soon the whole bus joined in. Kyle held up his hands to quiet them, then made his way to the back of the bus, where his usual reserved seat awaited him. Along the way, he was slapped on the back and high-fived as he moved down the aisle.

  After being out sick for so long, it felt great to be back among his friends. Kyle was the most popular kid at Bouring Middle School, which made sense, since he had also been the most popular kid at Bouring Elementary School.

  “Good to have you back, man!” James called.

  “Thanks!” Kyle replied, grinning.

  “You feeling okay? You doing all right?” Ellen asked, concerned.

  “Never better,” Kyle told her, and swung into his seat. “Never better.”

  The bus driver let the brakes go — they whined and shrieked — and then the bus lurched forward. Kyle leaned back. Already, the kids who sat in the seats in front of him had turned around to ask him questions: Was it true he’d had an incurable disease … and then cured it himself? (No. Good story, though.) Was the whole sickness thing just a bluff, a way of getting out of school? (Faking illness to get out of school? Puh-lease! Anyone could do that!) Did he spend his time at home planning his next awesome prank?

  Hmm. Well, no. He hadn’t. He’d been really, really out of it. But he didn’t want people to think he was off his game, so he just grinned like he had a secret. Everyone started high-fiving one another. Kyle’s pranks were legendary among the people of Bouring, especially the kids. That’s because Kyle didn’t just zing people his own age — he zinged the adults, too, usually in such a way that no one could actually prove it had been Kyle.

  Even the local sheriff, Maxwell Monroe, wasn’t safe. Last year, Kyle had hacked into the Bouring police band in order to broadcast his Prankster Manifesto. The Prankster Manifesto was simple and to the point:

  THE PRANKSTER MANIFESTO BY KYLE CAMDEN

  1.PEOPLE ARE FOOLISH.

  2. SERIOUS PEOPLE ARE DOUBLY FOOLISH. ESPECIALLY PEOPLE IN AUTHORITY: PARENTS, TEACHERS, ETC.

>   3. PRANKS SHOW PEOPLE HOW FOOLISH THEY ARE.

  4. IT’S GOOD TO SHOW PEOPLE HOW FOOLISH THEY ARE BECAUSE THEN THEY STOP ACTING SO SERIOUS.

  5. WHEN THEY STOP ACTING SO SERIOUS, THEY CAN UNDERSTAND THE TRUTH.

  6. WHICH IS THAT THEY’RE FOOLISH.

  7. KYLE CAMDEN IS ALLOWED TO BE SERIOUS BECAUSE HE’S NOT FOOLISH.

  It was a pretty simple manifesto. It only took a minute to broadcast it. But Sheriff Monroe acted as though Kyle had committed high treason. (As if the Bouring police band was ever used for anything other than the cops calling one another for coffee and doughnut runs.) Kyle’s parents had taken away his computer and his TV and grounded him for weeks after that. He had learned an important lesson: From then on, he operated in secret.

  He had only shared the news of his new boosted intellect with Lefty, who wouldn’t be blabbing to anyone, obviously. And, of course, he had recorded the information in a new cipher he’d invented for his top secret journal.

  (Kyle kept a written journal, as opposed to one on the computer. He had a very simple reason for this: Kyle’s business was his own and no one else’s, and after all, it’s impossible to hack paper.)

  The bus jerked to a halt, its brakes wheezing like an old man who has run a marathon, and Kyle’s best friend, Mairi MacTaggert, got on. Her eyes lit up when she saw Kyle, and she walked quickly to his seat.

  “Can I sit here?”

  “I was saving it for you,” Kyle said.

  Mairi smiled, her eyes shining green under her mane of red hair. She slid into the seat next to him.

  “I was worried about you, Kyle. That was the longest you’ve ever been sick. And when I called, your parents said they didn’t know what was wrong with you.”

  There was no one on the planet smart enough to know what had happened to Kyle. Except for Kyle, of course, and even he wasn’t sure.

  “I’m fine. They worry too much.”

  “You didn’t miss much in school. In case you were worried.”

  Kyle laughed. “I bet it was pretty boring without me around.”