Chapter 26: Anti-Shockaganda

Zak went back into the room and waited for Mr. Kittler. He finally came in a minute before the bell rang. “Zak,” he said when he saw him. “What are you doing here?”
“I was having troubles with the homework.”
Mr. Kittler looked at Zak with a concerned expression. “How so?”
“I just couldn’t figure out how to solve questions thirty through forty.”
“What do you mean? You just use the formullet.”
“Really? It’s that simple.”
“Well, yeah. It is that simple. That’s why I taught you it, so you can use it on any question you’re faced with.”
“Oh… I thought would… hmm. Okay. Now I feel stupid.”
“You should. You really, really should.” The bell rang. “Well class is starting soon. Do you have any other questions?”
“No, that was all.”
“All right. Then take a seat. Nice costume by the way. I’m surprised you wore it.”
“Thanks,” Zak said. “Wait, what?” But Mr. Kittler had already left the room to greet incoming students.
Jimmy came and sat down beside Zak. “Did you figure out how to do the questions?”
Zak looked at Jimmy. “That and more.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked down at his desk. “Nothing. I don’t—it was nothing.”
“Oh. Okay.” Jimmy wasn’t convinced, but who cares about Jimmy?
The bell rang and Mr. Kittler walked in the room, closing the door behind him. He organised his things at the front then waited for the class to go silent. “Okay, we’ll go through the homework now. Is there anything that someone had a lot of trouble with?”
One kid raised his hand and said, “I had trouble with thirty through forty. It just didn’t seem to work.” Most of the class agreed with him.
Mr. Kittler stared at the class, not knowing where to begin. After a couple of times opening and closing his mouth, he finally uttered a sound. “How?” he said, “how could you possibly have trouble with it? You use the formullet. For every question.”
“Oh, really?” The kid said, “Oh, I thought I was supposed to do something else that you hadn’t explained yet.”
“The formullet is the only thing that I am going to teach you. You are supposed to use it for everything. I know I told you this already too. I don’t know how you could have misunderstood.” The class was silent. “Okay, Jimmy, what do you assume is the answer for question thirty?”
“I hypothesise, that the answer is 156… to how many decimal places?”
“As many as you can calculate.”
Jimmy thought for a second. “That would take me all class to say.”
“Okay, then to maybe seven decimal places.”
“156.9925453.”
“Okay, everyone put that in your calculators. What do you get?”
“Twenty-five,” Aurora said.
“Now, is that not the answer to the equation (cosx + 23) x/5 – 2 = 2.65? And that is how you do it. I guess for now you can do the questions that you missed, and then we will move on to something completely different.” The Larch.
*
Zak walked into Drama to find it buzzing with activity. For once, he found that he was the only Zapblapoman in the room. Everyone sat in a circle, still talking about their day’s adventures. The bell rang and Mrs. Eves walked into the room. “Okay everyone,” she said in a happy voice. “You all look great in your costumes, but we all need to continue working on our—”
Aurora walked into the room and accidentally slammed the door behind her. She was wearing an almost completely white except for cyan gloves, boots, odd random shapes around her torso, and a diamond in the centre of her chest. It was almost the invert of Zapblapoman’s costume except on top of that cyan diamond was a blue lightning bolt, outlined in white, in the shape of a “Z” on its side. “Sorry I’m late,” she said.
“I’ll excuse you only if you tell us whom you’re supposed to be.”
“I’m Namopalbpaz.”
“Who?”
“Would you agree that a woman is the opposite of a man?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. And then if you were to be the female version of Zapblapoman, you would just make the name opposite to his, or in reverse in this case. ”
“Very creative. I like how you turned the ‘Z’ on its side in the shape of an ‘N’.”
“Thank you.”
“Okay, get into your places and we will start. Today we will practice the scene where the vampire kills its second victim on the train. Zak you’re at the bar having another Bloody Mary and the Vampire Hunter is eyeing you suspiciously. Where is Lenard anyway?”
“I don’t think he’s here today,” Zak said.
“Okay, that sucks. We’re going to have to have someone fill in for him? Who knows approximately what he says?” The spot was filled by a guy named Andrew. Zak went to his position. Mrs. Eves was about to say something, and then paused in thought. “Do you know what? I just changed my mind. It’s Halloween. Let’s just play some games instead.”
They played improv games the rest of the day. Zak kept looking over at Aurora, but she never glanced at him. It was funny. All the conversations he had with her online, yet she still rarely talked to him in class unless it was part of the grade. It was days like this that he thought maybe he should give up on her. Maybe he should listen to TIP and never go for anyone again.
*
Rather than going on a routine super heroing tour, Zapblapoman went home instead to rest. He was going to keep an eye out for trouble while kids were trick-or-treating. He sat on the couch and watched TV.
Today was going surprisingly well. It was only inevitable that something would kill his spirits. The show he was on went to commercial, and that was when he saw the third installment of the Anti-Shock propaganda, as he came to call it.
*
Surgeon Indubitable was onscreen this time. He sat slouching on a large piece of rubble, shaking in the cold. He wore tattered clothes and mitts, and instead of an eye-patch a lopsided, wool hat covered his left eye. The background was the crumbling remains of a building. He had no fire, so he was trying to warm his hands with his breath, which rose in the chilly air. A soft, sorrowful song played in the background.
He looked to the camera and achingly rose to his feet. “Hi, my name is Martin,” he said in a shaky voice. “I used to be a student at the U of A. I was studying for my BA in Business. Just like many other students, my life changed completely in early October. Yes, I am talking about the HUB Mall terrorist bombing. If it hadn’t been for the efforts of The Invisible Person and Zapblapoman, I might have died. Or is that the case?
“Zapblapoman a hero? If you are still in denial of his true alignment, then maybe you should watch this.”
The clip was a shaky handheld shot showing Zapblapoman with a smirk on his face in front of HUB Mall, raising the detonator up high and appearing to press the button at the same time that the building behind him exploded.
“Zapblapoman destroyed my life and thousands of other lives. He cost the University of Alberta millions of dollars. Why would he rescue the people after if he was the one who blew it up? Maybe he saw that people saw him do it and wanted to make it look like it wasn’t him. Or maybe it was another one of his publicity stunts to gain the public’s trust. You don’t know what I’m talking about? You don’t think he has ever done publicity stunts to gain trust of suckers like you before? Well what do you think of this?”
A silhouetted image of Flurada walking down an alleyway flashed on screen and the commercial ended.
*
Zapblapoman’s heart froze and tongue went dry. He stared at the screen. Suddenly, it wasn’t only him. His friends were put into the mix now, too. Not that he didn’t see this coming. He knew Flurada would eventually be mentioned, that was one thing that they had on him most of all. If they could prove the events that happened in Banff were all a fabrication, it might throw off all ZBO-Man’s credibility.
It was 6:30. A few people had started to mill about the streets in search of candy. Zapblapoman grabbed a quick meal and was about to go out the door when the doorbell rang. “Trick-or-Treat,” he heard from outside. The Lab of Electrocution looked nothing like a house, so why would anyone knock on the door. He looked at the surveillance camera for the front door. TIP was standing outside. ZBO-Man opened the trap door to let him in.
“Hey what’s up, man?” ZBO-Man said. “I was just about to go super heroing.”
“Oh, I came for candy, and to see if you were going to go super heroing tonight.”
“I don’t have any candy, but I was about to leave. Do you wanna come?”
“Sure, I have nothing better to do tonight. There aren’t as many trick-or-treaters here as there are in actual residential areas. So we’ll take the invisimobile to some where more populated.”
“The invisimobile?”
“My car.”
“Does it turn invisible?”
“Well, I turn it invisible.”
“Wicked, let’s go.” TIP started the car. It made a low humming noise. “Wow your car is silent. What’s it run on?”
“It’s solar powered?”
“Really?”
“And if the Sun’s not out, I can charge it by manipulating the photons to shine on the panels. So it can potentially run all night despite the sun not being out.”
“Impressive.”
As they drove, they past many people dressed in costumes. Some were teenagers and young adults off to parties, but the vast majority were kids going from house to house in search of candy. Something about the variety of costumes took ZBO-Man off guard.
“There aren’t that many Zapblapoman costumes,” he commented to TIP.
“What do you mean?”
“In school today, it seemed like there was at least fifty Zapblapoman costumes, and now I don’t think I’ve seen a single one.”
“Yeah, and I’ve noticed that there seems to be an awfully large amount of last minute costumes. You know, where either they are their parents just through on a random assortment of clothes rather than a proper costume. Do you suppose it has something to do with that new commercial from the Uber Guild of Villains?”
“You’ve seen it too?” Zapblapoman looked out the window in panic. “That has to be the reason. They’re finally convincing people. I didn’t think that they could. I didn’t think they had anything on me, aside from that whole Flurada thing. But come to think of it, I guess it was I who gave them a lot of their material.”
“Dude, relax. You’re getting too stressed about this whole situation. Don’t let this get to you. Nobody likes an emo super hero. People like heroes who can deal with the problems of the world as well as their own. That’s one of the reasons super heroes are super, along with having super powers, of course.”
ZBO-Man continued to look out the window, but no longer with a panicked look, more of a confident one. “Never say die, and die say never,” he whispered to himself.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
They got on to Whitemud Drive and headed west. “Where are we going?” Zapblapoman asked.
“I was thinking we would go to a rich area like Lewis Estates. What do you think?”
“Sure, I guess that’ll do.”
“Great. I figure we’ll go disguised as trick-or-treaters. I have pillowcases in the back just in case we feel like getting some candy as well.”
ZBO-Man looked at TIP. “You’re serious?”
“What? I like candy. And what better way to get candy than while under cover super heroing on Halloween?”
“I guess that makes sense.”
They parked along the sidewalk on Potter Greens Drive. ZBO-Man got out of the car. TIP dug around in the back of the car before finally getting out. He threw a pillowcase over to Zapblapoman, and then put a sheet with eye holes over his head.
“I see you were prepared.”
“I’ve been planning on doing this for a while. I mean it’s the perfect cover. Well, I guess the perfect cover is being invisible, but for you it’s the perfect cover. No one will suspect that the kid dressed up as Zapblapoman for Halloween is actually Zapblapoman. Plus I wanted to be a ghost this year.”
As TIP stepped out into full view, Zapblapoman couldn’t see his legs. It looked as if the sheet was floating in mid air. “Yeah, and who will suspect that sheet with eye holes floating above the ground isn’t The Invisible Person?”
“Hey. As far as they know, I hid a bunch of speakers in the bushes making me only appear to be floating.”
They walked up to the first house. “Trick-or-treat.” A man opened the door.
“That’s a very nice ghost costume,” the man said. “How did you make it float?”
“There’s a speaker in the bush.”
“Ah, makes sense. Here’s some candy for you, and—” he looked at ZBO-Man. “That’s everyone.” He closed the door.
TIP looked at Zapblapoman. “That was weird. What the hell just happened?”
“Funny how he could see the ghost, but looked right through the famed super hero.”
“Maybe it’s just this house.”
They walked down the path, and went to the next house. People were already there. When they saw Zapblapoman coming, they hastily grabbed their share of candy and ran off. Some didn’t even get candy. The house owners clearly saw the two disguised super heroes, but closed the door on them. When TIP shouted “trick-or-treat” no one answered.
“Do you—Do you think it was the commercial?” ZBO-Man said to TIP.
“Maybe, but surely they don’t know that you are actually Zapblapoman. Why would they run if it was a costume?”
They walked back down the path. Just as they got to the sidewalk, they heard a woman’s voice. “How could you dare dress-up as such a horrendous man?”
“What do you mean?” Zapblapoman asked.
“He is a liar and a murderer. He killed my son when he blew up HUB Mall. He was just about to graduate this year with a degree in education. He was going to teach elementary school. Now he’s dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Zapblapoman looked to the ground, tears were in his eyes. “I didn’t know.”
It would be different if it was slander, but it was true. Out of his own incompetence, those people died. This woman’s son died.
The woman glared at him for a few second and then her expression softened. “No. I’m sorry. You couldn’t have known. For the sake of you soul, take off your costume. Maybe you can get candy as a normal human being.”
Zapblapoman was silent. Maybe he should be… just Zak Boman.