“You’ll never catch me alive!” cried Victor Power.

“Yes, I will!” panted Doctor X. “I’m going to…wait…hey, Jack, wait up!”

Jim—or “Jimbo” as his brother called him—pushed his thick glasses, broken but taped together with a Band-Aid, up his sweaty nose. He was eight and small for his age. Not only was his battered yellow Schwinn a lesser bike than the Sportcrest, but it was so large that Jim had yet to discard the training wheels. Dad had sworn to Jim that he would grow into it. Jim was still waiting for that to happen. In the meantime, he had to stand up on the pedals to really make it go, which made it difficult to shoot his ray gun with any accuracy. Doctor X was doomed.

The Sportcrest shot through a pile of litter. Jim followed moments later, training wheels squeaking, but when he saw the crumpled milk carton, he swerved around it. The face of a smiling little girl had been printed on the side of the carton along with the words LOST CHILD. It gave Jim the creeps. This was how they advertised missing children, and there were a lot of them.

It had been a year earlier when the first kid had disappeared. San Bernardino had organized search parties, rescue teams. Then another kid went missing. And another. The town tried for a while to search for each one. But soon it was a child missing every other day and the adults couldn’t keep up. That had been the scariest part for Jim, seeing the resignation in the faces of the sleep-deprived parents. They had surrendered to whatever evil was taking their children, and when they poured milk for their families, they tried to ignore the faces on the sides of the cartons stamped with those dreadful words:

HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

The last count Jim had heard was 190 missing kids. The number would have seemed like fantasy if not for the evidence he saw everywhere: a higher fence around the school, larger numbers of parents patrolling the playgrounds, the police crackdown on kids being on the streets after dark. It was unusual that Jim and Jack would be allowed to be out on their bikes this close to sundown, but it was Jack’s birthday and their parents couldn’t say no.

Jack had wasted no time in making a single improvement to his bike. He had taken his transistor radio and fixed it with wire to the shiny red handlebars. Then he had turned it on as loud as it could go, and their entire afternoon had been orchestrated to the bounciest songs of the day: “Sugar, Sugar,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Proud Mary.” You wouldn’t think those songs would be the perfect sound track for the laser-blasting volleys of Victor Power and Doctor X, but they were. As long as Jim could keep his mind off those milk cartons, this just might be the best afternoon of his whole life.

Up ahead on Jack’s bike, the radio changed to a new song: “What’s Your Name?” by Don and Juan. It was a love song, not Jim’s favorite, but for some reason the wistful crooning captured the mood of the dying day. The sun was going down fast, school started up again the next day, and this final half mile of riding might be the last flare of summer before fall classes snuffed it like a candle.