Captain Kissy-Face!: Book One in the Red Cloak Island Series

By Joe Mosher

A new student named Kevin McFarland has arrived on Red Cloak Island, home of the world's first school for superheroes. He's having trouble making friends, doubting whether he fits in or even wants to be there. But when a mysterious illness spreads across the campus, the school is locked down and he finds himself unable to leave. Even worse, his classmates start investigating the source of the illness on their own, and they've decided that Kevin is one of their prime suspects! Can he clear his name, earn their trust, and save the day?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483542881

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Chapter One

Evil came to Red Cloak Island in the darkest hour of the night, in a military-style stealth helicopter ... just like the good guys did. There was no other way.

The black helicopter flew low over the waves, spraying water in all directions with its massive rotor blades. It had no windows and no pilot. All of its lights were turned off. In the midnight darkness, it was nearly invisible. Not that there was anybody around to see it, anyway. This area of the ocean had almost no boat activity and no air traffic. An empty and unimportant corner of the world; the perfect place to keep a secret.

The island was also virtually invisible in the gloom. Even in daylight, it wasn’t much to look at. It was a tall, wide tower of black rock jutting up out of the ocean, topped by a constant cloud of volcanic ash and smoke. There were no beaches, just high cliffs and sheer rock walls that dropped away into the churning water. There was no obvious place to dock a boat or land an aircraft. Red Cloak did not invite guests.

But the island was not what it appeared. It was not a testament to the power of nature but instead was manmade (or to be completely accurate, super-manmade.) The smoke belching from the top was manufactured by a complex ventilation system. Within the smoke, if anyone were to look closely (but of course no one ever did) they would find that what looked like molten lava was instead a cleverly designed red dome covering the top of the island and protecting the buildings hidden inside.

Those buildings were the campus of Red Cloak School, where specially selected young people from all across the world came to study math and science, fighting tactics and a variety of skills that could be learned nowhere else. Red Cloak was the world’s first – and perhaps only – school for superheroes.

The helicopter had secrets of its own. It had a computerized brain that controlled its flight, corrected course based on instrument readings, and automatically contacted other intelligent computers in the island's belly as it approached the tower wall. In the language of machines, the helicopter and the island greeted one another like old friends. They asked each other questions that only they could answer. Passwords were exchanged. Satisfied that they could trust one another, the island opened a large hidden doorway in its side wall and the helicopter flew inside and landed smoothly in a wide hangar bay. When the carefully constructed door closed, the wall was once again smooth and featureless. From outside, there was no evidence that the doorway or the helicopter had ever existed.

Safely within the hidden hangar, the helicopter’s computer shut its main engine down and its whirling rotors slowed to a stop. A hatch on the helicopter’s left side opened, revealing a small number of passengers who stepped out and looked around nervously. There was not much to see; the chamber was wide and tall but empty except for the helicopter itself. Attached to one wall was a pair of rolled hoses that were probably for refueling the aircraft. On either side were several unmarked doors, all of which stood closed.

The experience was designed to be disorienting for the arriving passengers. Coming out of a windowless helicopter into a windowless room, they could have been anywhere: a desert or a city, underground or high atop a mountain. They had been told very little before their departure and would not be told much now that they had arrived. The exact location of Red Cloak was a secret shared with very few, a secret that protected the school just as much as the thick walls and unique red dome were designed to do.

But one of the passengers knew he was on an island. He did not know the exact location, but he knew it was somewhere in the open ocean in an area where surveillance satellites rarely bothered to scan. He knew that the hangar in which he stood was far enough below the school buildings that none of the students would have any idea when the helicopter arrived or left. And he knew that soon one of those doors would open, and he was pretty sure he knew who would step through it.

He knew a lot more than he was supposed to know.

Chapter Two

Red Cloak was not an ordinary island, and the school hidden inside it was not an ordinary school, but people can get used to the strangest things if they see them every day, so the morning evil arrived started out as an ordinary Red Cloak school day. At seven o’clock on that October Tuesday, artificial lights brightened slowly beneath the protective red dome, giving the illusion of morning sunrise. For ten minutes or so, all was extremely quiet. The campus looked like outside, with grass and trees and simulated sunlight, but it was an indoor environment with indoor weather. There was no wind, no autumn chill in the air, no chirp of birds or insects.

But then there were signs of life. On top of the boys’ dormitory building, a door opened and a dark-haired sixth grader stepped out onto the flat roof. He yawned and rubbed sleep from his eyes, adjusted the straps of his school backpack, and stepped to the roof’s edge. Just before he jumped, another door opened three floors below and a boy perhaps one year younger stepped out on the concrete walk that led away from the dormitory toward other campus buildings. The second boy looked up and for a moment locked eyes with the first boy, plummeting toward him from above. Then the first boy spread his arms like wings, arched his back slightly, and was no longer simply falling but flying calmly, ten feet off the ground. The boys mumbled good morning to one another and headed off toward the cafeteria in Mammoth Hall. More boys spilled from that dormitory building, girls emerged from a similar dormitory a short distance away, and the day had begun.

So far, pretty normal.

The first sign that this would be anything but another boring day of school (yes, even superhero school is boring at times) was the chubby man in the baseball cap. Most of the boys saw him for the first time walking along the path near their dormitory. He was wearing a red sweatshirt and a matching red New York Yankees cap, and he was headed in the opposite direction of everyone else, away from Mammoth Hall. He had a brown and white beard and wore glasses, and he walked slowly with his hands in his pockets, apparently in no hurry to be anywhere, just enjoying the morning. He smiled and nodded at the students as they passed. They smiled back, though they had no idea who he was, and then promptly forgot about him. Their minds were on breakfast.

Most of the girls saw the man for the first time near their dormitory building, walking slowly in the same direction as them, toward Mammoth Hall, wearing a green sweatshirt and matching green New York Yankees baseball cap. He smiled and nodded at them, they smiled and nodded back.

Some students saw him in Hansey Park, sitting on a bench to the side of a path, wearing a blue sweatshirt and matching blue New York Yankees cap. And just about everyone saw him standing out in front of Mammoth Hall, smiling the same smile, except now his New York Yankees cap was orange and so was his shirt. For perhaps three minutes that morning, as everyone lined up for breakfast in the cafeteria, the chubby man was the hot topic of conversation. Everyone had seen him at least twice. He showed no signs of having hurried from one place to the other: he wasn’t red in the face, wasn’t out of breath, wasn’t sweating. Of course there were other ways to get from one place to another quickly, even instantly, as a few of Red Cloak’s students could have demonstrated. But since nobody could think of a sensible reason for him to stop along the way to change clothes, the prevailing theory was that it was probably several guys who just looked very much alike, rather than one lightning-speed dude with a mix-and-match wardrobe. Not twins or triplets but maybe quadruplets ... or clones.

Then the students saw another new face, and promptly forgot all about the chubby guy.

She was washing dishes in Kitchen B. At first, no one noticed her. She wore the same blue uniform as the rest of the cafeteria staff, her hair was stuffed up under a mesh cap like the rest of the kitchen helpers, and she was facing away from the rows of cafeteria tables. But then she turned around and started to gather up the first of the dirty trays on the counter near her station, and the room went suddenly quiet.

In a word, she was ... scary-freaky-icky-ugly. Her face was as round and orange and bumpy as the surface of a basketball. She had a mole on her chin that had its own little head of hair. Her eyes were squinched almost shut and her nose was wrinkled up, as if she didn’t like what she was seeing or smelling. But she had a funny wide grin on her face, which showed that her gums appeared in pretty good shape and her tongue was a healthy pink. Her teeth might have been healthy as well, or they might have been dead rotten. Since they were no longer in the woman’s mouth, there was no way to know for sure.

Seventy-three kids in five grades were assembled in the cafeteria, and for a long moment all of them were silently staring at the new kitchen helper. Then they all went back to eating their breakfast, talking to their friends, or frantically doing last night’s homework. The woman was definitely strange, and scary-freaky-icky-ugly, but this was superhero school and everybody had their little oddities. Normal people went to normal schools, and Red Cloak was anything but normal.

So they all saw the chubby guy, and pretty much forgot about him. They all saw the woman in Kitchen B, and pretty much forgot about her. But there were two other new arrivals on the island, one of whom was somebody the students would not be able to forget so easily.

Chapter Three

Ask any superhero, and they will tell you that a good education is the most important weapon in the fight between good and evil. It doesn’t matter how fast or strong you are if you don’t have the brains to apply your powers to best advantage. You have to be fast and smart, or strong and smart, to win the day. A dumb hero might end up tied to a train track with their own cape. The school’s main goal was to keep that from happening again.

Mathematics was the first class of the day for Red Cloak’s sixth graders. This early in the school year, lessons were similar to any other Math class in any school around the world. For now, it was just simple algebra and geometry. But that would soon change: after the winter holidays, there would be discussions on numerical cryptography (because supervillains sometimes communicated in code) and spatial trajectory computation (in case a satellite plummeted out of the sky toward a populated area.)

Scary stuff, but most of the Red Cloak sixth-graders agreed that they were