Nuklear Age

by Clevinger, Brian

  “WAAAH-CHOOOO!”

  __________

  The two armored and high-speed bullets collided in mid-air. An epic battle defying description ensued which is terribly convenient for me since I won't have to think up the details. But, I will say there was biting, clubbing, bashing, swatting, slapping, punching, kicking, throwing, and poking of the eyes. All this and a constant tirade of curses, eloquent unto a Shakespearean level in their rudeness, filled the restaurant, driving away what few customers remained. Then, as if the entire event had been elaborately rehearsed, both warriors simultaneously fell flat on their backs. They wheezed and panted and stared up at the ceiling.

  __________

  Panic washed over the Cheesiediluvian populace. The pilots of the Defense Force that had been holding the Hero for all to see fled their positions and allowed Nuklear Man the kind of freedom of movement he was used to. Their great and powerful leader, who would have certainly led them to someday conquer lands as distant as the Men’s Restroom had he not just been sneezed into oblivion, had failed them. Their faith in Lobbyfest Destiny had been shaken with all the force of when that sack of potatoes had been tossed against the barrel in 3458 A.D. (“Anno Daisy”).

  Nuklear Man, being of kind heart and motive, could not bear to see them suffer. He pleaded to them, “Please, don't be afraid. I'm not going to hurt you.”

  The chaos ceased. All was silent.

  He stared at them with the kind of awe most people experience when watching ants. These creatures were powerless before Nuklear Man. He held the fate of an entire world within his grasp. “You'll evaporate nanoseconds before your little neurons have the chance to transmit the intense pain to your little brains! MUWA HAHAHAHA!”

  Chaos began anew.

  “PLAZMAAA—”

  A plastic click and the lights exploded to life.

  “Nuke!” Atomik Lad tackled him from behind. The golden orbs around Nuklear Man's hands disappeared as the two fell in a heap on the floor.

  “Hey, Sparky. Meet the Cheesiediluvians,” he motioned to the Barrel O’ Cheese barrel. “They were going to take over the restaurant, but I overthrew their leader and destroyed their most powerful weapon,” he pointed to the congealing cheese slag on the floor.

  “I can't take you anywhere, can I?” Atomik Lad sighed as he stood up and dusted himself off. “And where did you learn such a big word?”

  “From the Cheesiediluvians,” Nuklear Man insisted as he also stood up and did away with every particle that could possibly mar his spiffy outfit.

  “Cheesiediluvians? I suppose this is some idiotic race of creatures that super-evolved from a barrel of cheese left forgotten for decades and they mistook you for an intruder and started this big war thing, but you, being such a great hero, were able to stop them?”

  Nuklear Man thought on this while rubbing his eyes to help them adjust to the lights, “Well...yeah.”

  “You have such an overactive imagination. You should have turned the lights on before you came back here.” Atomik Lad picked up the barrel’s lid, “Man, 1959? Phew, I bet these fumes weren't any help either. Probably knocked a few screws loose...er.” Atomik Lad put the lid back on. Its dim green glow was completely drowned out by the overhead lights.. “We'll have to throw this out.”

  “But the Cheesie—”

  “Hallucinations, Nuke. Just your little brain playing tricks with you so that it might get you to pay attention to it once and awhile.”

  “The Cheesiediluvians. War. Saved Earth. Me did.”

  Atomik Lad hefted the large and strangely heavy barrel. “Would you stop worrying about it? It's nothing. There are no little cheese people.” He kicked open the back door and tossed the barrel into a nearby dumpster. “Done and done,” he said while dusting off his hands. “Now c'mon, I finished washing the dishes. Let's get Angus and go home, huh?”

  __________

  Issue 8 – Serial Cereal Industrial Espionage...ial.

  They walked into the kitchen and Atomik Lad opened the door to the dining area while waving away Nuklear Man’s insistence that the papers be contacted first thing in the morning to alert them that he'd just saved the world, yet again, from another crisis and large front page photos were called for. Really big color ones.

  “Nuke, I seriously doubt they’d—”

  “Angus!” Nuklear Man exclaimed.

  Angus the Iron Scotsman was going fisticuffs with a green armored stranger no higher than the Surly Scot himself and very definitely not bussing tables.

  “Hey, he’s actually shorter than you are, Angus,” Nuklear Man blurted with a jovial smile.

  The two dwarfish dervishes of destruction instantly halted their assault of one another and shot simultaneous glares of hatred at the bumbling Hero.

  “Uh. Eheh heh.” Nuklear Man gulped aloud. “But, uh, you guys are, um, confident enough about that height thing so you won't be, ah, y’know, beating me within a small increment of my life.”

  Their glares reached a level of contempt that mere mortals would consider impossible without a multitude of genetic alterations made at birth through medical or accidental means.

  “Er...right?”

  “Yeah, right,” they said in unison with their respective accents butchering the words.

  “Whew, I thought you guys were gonna be sore at me.”

  “Someone’s gonna be sore,” Atomik Lad muttered. He took a step away from his mentor.

  “DWARF-A-PULT!!!”

  “LEPRE-CANNON!!!”

  An emerald streak accompanied by a stone gray blur struck the Golden, and soon to be black and blue, Guardian.

  Atomik Lad sighed heavily and fiddled with the kitchen mop as the fight raged on without him. Mr. Manager ran up to the sidekick, “Get these hooligans out of here before they cause more damage!” he demanded.

  “I'm sorry sir, it's just that Angus is really temperamental about his height, and well, I guess that green guy is too and—”

  “Green guy?”

  “Well it’s the armor that’s green, not—”

  “Green armor?”

  Atomik Lad was losing patience with Mr. Manager’s lack of patience which seemed to prompt him to constantly interrupt whomever was trying to explain things to him. It seemed a vicious circle of impatience.

  Mr. Manager glanced at the cartoon-like cloud of smoke. Limbs, stars, curses, battered skulls, BOINK noises, fists, and kicks poked out of it at random intervals. “He’s a customer!” Mr. Manager screamed while pulling painfully at his own hair, “He could sue!” He growled at Atomik Lad, “I’m holding you freaks responsible!”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  __________

  The streets outside the Benny’s restaurant bustled with both foot and vehicular traffic. The setting sun cast violet and crimson waves floating in the clouds that framed the brilliant red sun the way only an artist’s rendition can. The typical street sounds of light traffic and the jumble of conversation melded into a white noise of language were shattered as violently and unexpectedly as the Benny’s Restaurant front window. Seamus and shards of glass rolled along the ground and came to a stop on his side. A beat later Angus was tossed through the window, or where one had been one beat ago. He lay sprawled on his back beside his Irish counterpart. Two and two-thirds beats later Nuklear Man was also expelled from the premises in a similar manner. He landed between the previous two, face first with his cape covering his head. A muffled “Oof” escaped his lips.

  Atomik Lad stood in the Benny’s doorway dusting his hands and looking down at the disposed like a sheriff who just threw some loud drunkards out of a local tavern. His snapping and wildly eccentric Atomik Field surrounded him like red-black fire. With a thought he willed it away, the final sparks sputtered to nothingness. He crossed his arms, leaned on the doorway and smirked.

  “Ah was distracted from the laddie,” Angus defended himself against the unspoken insult that he’d been bested by anyone. “Had that big ol’ orange cape in me eyes.”
>
  “Oh...I let the wee boy-o toss me out. It be building his confidence, ye know.”

  Nuklear Man mumbled into the sidewalk. “Wouldn’t be so tough without that mop,” but it was difficult to tell the exact wording due to his cape being flopped over his head and the proximity of his mouth to the ground.

  “My window!” Mr. Manager dashed past Atomik Lad. His face was red enough to deserve a colorful metaphor.

  “Mr. Manager,” Atomik Lad gave him a look of concern. “You’ve got to calm down. You'll give yourself a heart attack if you keep this up.”

  “Oh no you don’t!” Nuklear Man shot to attention with his cape still covering his face, “That was my idea!”

  A definite simmering sound could be heard coming from Mr. Manager. Something akin to a pot overflowing while a tea kettle's piercing whistle shrieked. “Get. Out,” he said through tensely clenched teeth. Hs voice was a faint and strained whisper of anger.

  “But we are out,” noted Angus as he and Seamus stood up.

  “Leave. Now.” He was barely audible.

  “But what about the window?” Atomik Lad asked, genuinely worried about the damages.

  “Just. Go.” He slowly raised an anger-quaking arm and pointed down the street.

  A gust of wind returned Nuklear Man’s cape to its natural state of billowing ever- dramatically behind him, “But the Silo is that way,” he said, pointing in the opposite direction as Mr. Manager.

  “Go.” He stated it so quietly it seemed that he merely mouthed the word.

  Seamus whispered to Angus, “He be movin’ on to single syllable sentences. Tisn’t a good sign, boy-o.”

  “Aye,” the Surly Scot whispered back.Atomik Lad grabbed Nuklear Man by the arm and pulled him down the street as Seamus and Angus tagged along behind them.

  “Man, what was his problem?” Nuklear Man asked no one in particular. “Oh well.” He tossed a look behind him at his diminutive partners. “Angus, who’s your,” he nearly said “little” but remembered the beating from a few minutes ago and simply ended with, “friend?”

  The Iron Scotsman huffed loudly, “This fortune stealin’ son o’ a French whore ain’t no friend o’ mine!”

  “Where you be getting these crazy ideas, boy-o? Ain’t no one who’d buy ye Scootish Squishies breakfast cereal so I don’t see why you be thinking I stole the formula from ye.”

  “I dunno, sounds kinda yummy to me,” Nuklear Man said.

  “It be made o’ haggis,” Seamus added.

  “Ghak. Never mind.”

  “So’s Kismet Green!” Angus insisted as he hopped madly.

  “Kismet Green?” the Hero’s interests were clearly piqued again. “The secret ingredient in Kismet Krunchies?”

  “The same,” Seamus said with a mark of pride.

  “That's my favorite cereal!” the Hero squealed.

  Seamus immediately began to think of a campaign of commercials starring Nuklear Man himself. He could assault the televisions and young minds of the world with an invincible sales icon!

  Angus shook with rage, “It was my idea, ye fink-laddie!”

  “Whoa, hold it,” Atomik Lad halted their procession and quieted, at least temporarily, the bickering. “We've got some Kismet Krunchies back at the Silo. We can just run a sample of it through the molecular analyzer in our supercomputer and settle this once and for all.”

  The others were silent for almost a full minute as they mulled, compiled, considered, and generally pondered the suggestion.

  “But,” Seamus said. “Then it won't be a secret.”

  “Ah-ha! Why don’t ye want to do it? Because ye know ye ripped me off!”

  “All right! Let’s get goin’, if it’ll be shuttin’ ye up after all these years!”

  Atomik Lad sighed a sigh of relief, “Finally.”

  “It's decided then,” Nuklear Man said to once again assert himself as the alpha of this particular pack. It didn’t matter if he was the only person who believed it. It was only important that someone did. “To the Silo!” He posed purposefully, his cape billowed itself up a notch. “Ha-ho!”

  “DWARF-A-PULT!”

  “LEPRE-CANNON!”

  “...Sheez.”

  __________

  The quartet soared through the sky, though some did so more elegantly than others. Bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly according to the laws of Physics, yet they do. Angus only reinforced this sort of paradox. Apparently if you put enough thrust behind something, then it can sustain flight no matter how embarrassing it is. This was the case of Angus. That and more sound pollution than every one-hit wonder band simultaneously playing every non-hit they produced on every radio frequency at once.

  They’re Iron: Bagpipe Thrusters, people. They’re that bad.

  Seamus stayed aloft by aiming his Four Barreled Clover Cannon (everything Seamus had was Four Leafed or Clovered and green) backwards and firing it whenever the momentum from the backlash began to drop causing him to do the same. This led to a very loud and clumsy flight.

  Nuklear Man and Atomik Lad just flew. That's it.

  The gleaming towers of steel and glass that made up the aesthetically pleasing Metroville cityscape fell behind them. The barren expanses of dirt that were the defining characteristics of Irradiated Flats, a great expanse of what used to be farmlands situated between Metroville and its Nuclear Power Plant, stretched out before them.

  “Almost there,” chimed Nuklear Man. He motioned to the brown and fetid fields below with a smile, “No yard work.” He gave a wink to Seamus and Angus to indicate that he was a genius.

  They followed Nuklear Man until he altered his course nearly ninety degrees straight down to a fifty foot wide silvery metallic disk lodged in the ground with a big Nuklear style N painted on it. He made a little finger gun motion toward it. A hairline fracture appeared across the diameter and the disc split into two thick semi-circles that crept apart. The golden blur zipped between them just milliseconds after they were far enough apart to admit him without destroying anything.

  Seamus and Angus decided it would be in their best interests to follow Atomik Lad who gradually decelerated as he made nice comfy circles, each spiraling a little lower than the last. Unfortunately, neither Angus’s nor Seamus’s modes of thrust were built with the kind of sophisticated instrumentation or, indeed, anything that might make such a maneuver possible. Both propulsion systems were intended to make short, fast, and potentially deadly human projectiles and not for longterm flight. The gist of this is that both fell to the ground with all the grace of a skydiving humpback whale.

  The two heavy WHUMPs sounded like two giant melons, or more accurately, two large sacks full of normal melons striking the hard, none-too-comforting ground. Atomik Lad gently floated into the fully opened entrance. It took a great deal of self control not to give them both biting quips, but the memory of what Nuklear Man had endured from them earlier gave him the determination to let the moment pass.

  “Lousy clear air turbulence,” Angus grumbled just loud enough for Seamus to hear.“Where’d you learn to fly, boy-o? Ye got me all caught up in ye back draft,” Seamus said.

  “Come on fellas!” Nuklear Man’s voice had a distant metallic echo to it as he called to his comrades from within the depths of the Silo of Solitude.

  They grudgingly stomped to the gaping hole and hopped inside, their respective modes of propulsion cushioned their descent. Machinery hummed as the doors began to close above them.

  Inside was a realm of wonder. The hideout was a huge cylinder about 50ft wide and several hundred feet down into the Earth. A catwalk wound up and down its interior wall. Things that wouldn't have seemed to serve any purpose at all if they weren’t adorned with randomly blinking lights abounded. Doors labeled with titles like “Danger: Room” dotted the rounded walls. The entire complex had a feeling of being about a decade ahead of the rest of the world.

  Seamus and Angus landed side by side in front of Nuklear Man at the very bottom of the deep complex
. His arms were stretched wide as if to encompass the entirety of the grounds. Artificial lights flickered to life and the huge doors above them finally boomed to a close.

  “Welcome to the Silo of Solitude,” the Hero said proudly.

  Atomik Lad stepped out of a door marked Danger: Kitchen holding a tray with cups on it, “Juice?”

  Angus shook his head “Nay” while Seamus motioned “Aye.”

  Nuklear Man smiled even wider, “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Well, uh,” the Iron Scotsman tugged at his armor’s metallic beard. “It’s not exactly very solitary if ye both live here.” He sipped at his complimentary drink. It dribbled down his armor.

  “Well not solitary in that sense,” Nuklear Man said. “But living in the middle of the aftermath of the Dragon’s Strike means there’s the persistent threat of radiation poisoning that keeps the solicitors to a minimum.”

  “Yeah, twenty miles of irradiated ex-farmland will do that,” Atomik Lad said. “Though we do get the occasional diehard,” he added. “But the radiation doesn’t bother Nuke or me because he absorbs it and I deflect it thanks to my Field. And you guys have those fully protective suits of armor, so the trip here was safe. And once you’re inside, everything is shielded.”

  Angus ripped off his dribbling helmet. “Enough with the science lesson!” he snorted. “Let’s get on with testin’ the haggis!”

  “I be tellin’ ye, it’s not haggis!”

  “Atomik Lad!” Nuklear Man barked as though several thousand lives depended on it. He tried to evoke that effect with any order he gave. “Fetch the Kismet Krunchies and warm up the supercomputer!”

  Atomik Lad shrugged and set the drink tray on a nearby table that was already cluttered with objects covered in lights that did a lot of blinking for no apparent reason. “Sure.”

  “Meanwhile,” the Hero posed yet again. “I'll find out what the heck is going on with these two.”

  And so Seamus and Angus told unto Nuklear Man the story of their glory days.

  __________