Nuklear Age

by Clevinger, Brian

  “I saw this on ÜCÜÜF Wrastlin’ one time!” he called out to Atomik Lad, as if that would make everything crystal clear.

  It did not.

  A golden aura flared around Nuklear Man. “PLASMAAA POWER BOMB!” He leaped toward the Crab. Atomik Lad could only assume it was to perform this alleged power bomb.

  The Crab smacked Nuklear Man out of the sky. He landed next to Angus with a poof of sand.

  “Typically impressive,” Atomik Lad mumbled.

  A silver blur shot from the horizon. Crushtacean scuttled to one side as the huge bullet barely missed its mark and kept going. Atomik Lad watched it disappear beyond the oceanic horizon as the waters settled back down from the speeding intruder and the words, “MAGNOSMA—Hey! Don’t move!” finally caught up to the locale a second or two later.

  Atomik Lad rubbed his temples. “This just keeps getting better.”

  Hmm. I wonder what kind of food lives in that weird coral out there, Crushtacean thought to himself before moving to investigate.

  “Ow, ow, ow, ow!” Nuklear Man uttered from a face full of sand as Crushtacean scuttled across him.

  “Um,” Atomik Lad said as the Angered Arthropod stomped over the dunes, past the highway, and headed straight for Metroville. His Atomik Field twitched nervously. He landed between his defeated comrades. “Come on, that crab’s gonna destroy the city. I can’t handle this on my own, I’m only the sidekick!”

  Angus raised his head. It was wobbly from the loss of consciousness and the Enemy-B-Crushed lodged in his helmet. “Ah eats crabs like that fer breakfast.” His eyes rolled back as he passed out again.

  Atomik Lad clawed at his face and grumbled to himself. “C’mon, Nuke. Wake up already!”

  The Hero raised his head, face covered in sand, eyes crossed. “No more for me, thanks. I’m driving.” His head flopped back into the beach.

  “Sometimes I hate this job,” Atomik Lad told the universe. It said nothing in reply. He chased after the enormous abomination. Someone had to.

  __________

  So much food, so little time. Look at all of them scurrying around underfootpod. They’re so adorable I could just gobble them up. Like this! Crushtacean swiped at a screaming crowd of innocents that seethed below him. In a city with overheroes, citizens are little more than spectators, many of whom are trying to get away. They were desperate to escape his presence and the carnage that flowed from it. A pincerful of the soft screaming things were stuffed into Crushtacean’s footjaws.

  Their muffled screams were silenced. Crushtacean paused. He gave a few more thoughtful chews, each one eliciting a few more anguished—albeit muffled—cries from his jaws. Crushtacean grimaced as only crabs can and spat out his mouthful of food. Ick! Those were worse than seaweed! Blech! I’ve got to get that taste out of my mouth! Crushtacean picked up a nearby overturned car, shook the foul tasting creatures out of it, and chowed down.

  __________

  “At least the news people aren’t out here to document my incompetence,” Atomik Lad told himself. It did little to console him. He stood on Crushtacean’s wide, smooth, armored back. The beast devoured a few automobiles. Their owners would not be compensated since a Giant Crab isn’t a villain or an act of a god. Atomik Lad kicked the thick carapace with a Field-empowered foot. The sensation barely reached Crushtacean’s brain and it certainly didn’t hamper his feeding frenzy. Atomik Lad heard a bugle call. “What in the...?”

  “Beware, evil-doers!” A voice amplified and slightly garbled by what must have been a cheap bullhorn boomed above the fading screams of the last innocents fleeing the area. “The Minimum Wage Warriors are on the scene! Warriors, Clock In!” A quiet sigh and, “We have got to get a better rallying cry,” escaped the bullhorn before it was shut off.

  “Delivery Boy!” yelled a long-haired youth with his head out the window of a jet propelled Suburban Assault Vehicle. It loosed a volley of missiles that expertly struck their targets. Unfortunately, none of them happened to be Crushtacean. “Nuts!” Delivery Boy charged the SAV’s close proximity wave pulse attack as he skidded to a halt in front of the Angered Arthropod. His car gave off a light green hue.

  Ugh, I can still taste them. Maybe this glowing rock will do the trick.

  “Hey!” Delivery Boy yelled as Crushtacean picked up his SAV. He crawled out the window and fell into the rubble of a mattress outlet. His admirable automobile was devoured. “Well I’m fresh out of ideas.”

  From a distance, “Librarian!” A little old lady cybernetically bound to a Battlewheelchair of Justice rocketed over the Crushtacean. She brandished a mighty cannon. “Eat card catalogue annihilation, you gargantuan monstrosity!” Six barreled death spun at a thousand rounds a minute. A shaky line of small index cards spattered across Crushtacean’s armored shell. Atomik Lad flinched as a few bounced off his Atomik Field. She soared over the scene and mumbled about her medication as she disappeared over the horizon.

  “Postman!” announced the hero of the same name at the end of the street. His trigger fingers twitched out of his control. One got the impression he did a lot of things that were out of his control. His muscles were tensed from some unknown mental strain. He carried two mail sacks, one draped over each shoulder. The bags bulged with baseball sized objects. “Alright, you’ve just pushed the wrong button here, buddy!”

  Atomik Lad scratched his head. “They’ve got to have some kind of medication for that guy.”

  “The lines never end, the piles get bigger and bigger, at least half of those packages have to make it to their destinations, and do you have any idea how hard it is to make change for stamps?”

  Even if Crushtacean had been paying attention to Postman, and could then understand what he was saying, and knew a thing or two about economics, it still would not have known, in fact, just how difficult it is to make change for stamps.

  “But now, now I have the answer!” The Postman reached a hand into each bag and yanked out what appeared to be a pair of hand grenade pins. Hundreds of other pins were linked to them. They tinkled quietly in the wind. He lobbed the bags at Crushtacean while laughing in the insane bliss of having discovered The Answer to a Question no one Asked.

  The bags erupted into balls of flame in midair long before striking their target.

  Crushtacean coughed from the smoke.

  Postman’s eye twitched. “Well darn.”

  “Meter Maid!” A small voice said from among Crushtacean’s footpods. She scribbled in a pad, tore off a sheet of paper, and slapped it against the giant crab’s foot.

  __________

  Among the pristine highways leading into and out of Metroville, a force was awakened. “I sense a disturbance in the Traffic.” A purple and green blur soared into the air.

  __________

  “Beware the power of RADAR!” Something roughly the size and shape of a purple or green man crashed into Crushtacean’s hide like a missile. The impact sent cracks creeping across The Crab’s shell in a radial burst like a carapace snowflake and the force of it tossed Atomik Lad into the rubble-strewn street.

  Crushtacean struggled to his feet. There were eight of them, so it took a little while. He shook the shock away as the cracks across his shell began to heal themselves. He charged a Giant Crab Eye Beam blast but was interrupted by a devastating purple uppercut that knocked the beast back by several giant steps. Atomik Lad’s Field flickered away as he scampered into the doorway of a half destroyed building for protection from Radar’s assault. Radar continued his relentless attack with an overhead hammer blow. Crushtacean’s footjaws slammed into the pavement and it nearly lost consciousness.

  “This is what you get for obstructing traffic and eating automobiles!” Radar scolded. Crushtacean pushed itself up. Radar rushed under the beast and quipped, “Time to take out the trash. No, wait. Time to visit Cap’n Salty’s All Day Buffet Bar. Yes, much better. Less cliché, more fitting to the given circumstance.” He heaved Crushtacean into the sky, likening himself to Atlas, when h
e felt a quiver in his arms.

  A strain in his chest.

  A horror in his heart.

  Crushtacean’s feet dangled above the streets. No traffic laws were being broken.

  “Oh no,” Radar managed to utter before the strength was completely drained from his body and the massive crab crushed him.

  Atomik Lad shook his head and sighed despondently.

  A battle cry best described as the pure vocalization of rage echoed against the battered buildings. “YYYYYYYYYEARGBLBLBLBLBLE!”

  Atomik Lad looked into the sky. “Angus? But I didn’t hear any Dwarf-a-pult.” Nuklear Man soared into view. He was wielding Angus’s patented Enemy-B-Crushed with Angus still lodged in the business end, his tiny limbs flailing like mad.

  “Don’t ye even think about it, laddie!” Angus protested as Nuklear Man reared Bertha and her small but enraged cargo back like a baseball bat. “Ah’ll cram ye cape where the sun don’t shine by way of that Atomik Laddie’s nose!”

  Atomik Lad took a step back into his doorway. “Ew.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Angus. I’ve got this all planned out.”

  “Ah’ll plan ye, ye blasted haggis brained—”

  “DWARF-A-SMASH!” KLONG WHAM THWACKITY-THWACK CRACK SPROING!

  Nuklear Man ceased his attack. “Sproing?” He inspected the Enemy-B-Crushed’s business end. He scratched his head and looked around confusedly. “Angus? Yo, Angus? Where’d ya go?”

  “Ah can see Scotland from here,” he cried before entering a far off cloud bank.

  “Oh well.” Nuklear Man turned his attention back to the crab who, as it happened, was intently staring back at him. “Um. Hi.”

  Crushtacean answered with a pair Giant Crab Eye Beams that sent Nuklear Man crashing through the executive offices of the insurance company headquarters that contained, at its base, the doorway that Atomik Lad had been using for shelter. He counted to three and opened the front door. Nuklear Man shot out like a golden bullet right through a panoramic window next to the wide open door. Atomik Lad shut it with a sigh.

  Nuklear Man floated up to be eye to eye with Crushtacean. Or thereabouts. A crab’s face is a thing of nightmares and locating its eyes in that mess isn’t the easiest thing to do. “All right, Crab boy. You’re gross and weird and freaky, so you’re evil. Thusly, I’m gonna kill you.”

  Crushtacean blinked, completely ignorant of what was going on.

  “PLAZMAAA—” WHAM! Crushtacean swiped the Hero out of the air. Nuklear Man carved a canal through the street until he finally stopped several blocks across town.

  “Okay. I see how it is,” Nuklear Man said. He stood up and dusted himself off. “You’re an even worse cheater than Danger: Computer Lady. You don’t announce your attacks and you stop me in the middle of mine. We’re living in a society here, y’know! You can’t just rampage through a city and disregard all the rules of heroic etiquette!”

  The wind kicked up clouds of dust. Nuklear Man’s cape billowed against his back. The end whipped in front of him to his left as the other end did the same at his right.

  “Other end?” He grabbed one end in each hand. He contorted, twisted, turned, and spun himself around to inspect his fashion situation. His cape was torn straight down the middle from the bottom all the way up to the classy electron-orbited “N” near the top. He tossed the ragged ends from his grasp and they thrashed in the wind.

  Nuklear Man’s breathing became harsh and strained.

  “You.” His eyes exploded with a golden fury

  “Tore.” They burned with the strength of Hell’s flames.

  “My.” Two stars in the throes of death.

  “Cape!” A Plazma Aura so bright it nearly obliterated Nuklear Man from view burst to life around him. The Aura flared like footage of an inferno viewed in fast forward. Nuklear Man let loose a primal scream and the Aura doubled in size and intensity. It scattered nearby debris, shattered windows, and splintered the road with a shockwave of energy. The Aura rushed into the Hero’s fists. His face was an inhuman twisted visage of hate. “NOVAAA BEAM!”

  “Nova beam?” Atomik Lad said. In ten years, he’d never heard of such a thing.

  Something akin to a Plazma Beam’s older brother just out of boot camp and hopped up on enough steroids to kill an elephant erupted from Nuklear Man’s hands. It spontaneously combusted the air around it with a thunderclap. Clouds of dust and small bits of rubble blasted back. A wave of heat shot through Atomik Lad’s body like an enormous nerve impulse as the Nova Beam seared through the air past him.

  Crushtacean covered its crabby face with his huge pincers and uttered the Giant Crab version of “Eep”. The explosion sent Crushtacean tumbling through the air and several hundred million dollars worth of buildings which, thanks to the lunch hour, were devoid of any possible casualties.

  Nuklear Man floated over the concave dent the Nova Aura’s intensity melted into the street. It subsided into his typical Plazma Aura and that then fizzled out into the light glow he always emanated. He called that “idling”. He dusted off his hands. A cascade of small sparks fell from them. “Well that was easy.” He touched down in front of his crater. The asphalt in it was still bubbling slightly. “What’s next?”

  Atomik Lad ran out to him. “What the hell was that?”

  “That, my dear Sparky, was style.”

  “No, I mean that Nova Beam crap.”

  Nuklear Man posed and pinched his bicep. “Check out these guns.” He flexed. “Heh, more like cannons.”

  “Nuke, are you listening to a word I’m saying?”

  “Of course, I am. How else would I know when to ignore you?”

  “Ugh.”

  Nuklear Man admired himself in the broken window of a nearby office building. “Did I say cannons? I meant nuclear arsenal.” He considered it for a few seconds. “How very fitting. I’m such a deep thinker!”

  A crab-battered citizen nervously approached the Heroic pair. His clothes were ragged and covered with dust. He bled lightly from several superficial scratches. “Nuklear Man,” he said with a meek voice. “You can’t resort to violence to soothe this beast.”

  “Wah? Buddy, there ain’t nothin’ a whole lot of violence can’t answer. Why do you think we’ve got war? Sheesh!”

  “You have to teach the Crab how to love!” he pleaded.

  “PLAZMAAA—”

  “Whoa there, Tex,” Atomik Lad said with an intervening swat at his mentor’s hands. “What’re you talking about, Mr...?”

  “Jameson. Dr. Jameson,” he said. “I’m an animal psychiatrist.”

  Nuklear Man leaned down to whisper to Atomik Lad. “Can’t I just blast him on principle?”

  “Shh. Ahem, go on, Dr. Jameson.”

  “That Giant Crab was demonstrating classic symptoms of a broken heart. Its misdirected anger against the city is a sure consequence of a love gone wrong. His confidence has been shattered, his sense of self is torn to bits, he can only fill that void by belittling, hurting, and destroying major metropolises, and such like. It’s so sad, really.”

  “It’s a frickin’ crab!” Nuklear Man said. “It’s emotional life consists of ‘Food?’ Get this quack outta here,” he snapped before walking away.

  “Er, thanks for your input, Doctor. We’ll look into it.” Atomik Lad trotted over to Nuklear Man.

  Dr. Jameson stumbled over the rubble and back into the fur shop he had been using for shelter during the attack.

  “Nuke, you’ve got to learn to treat people better. We’re international figures, role models to—your cape!”

  Nuklear Man stopped. “I think all this crab business has finally gotten to you, Sparky.” He spoke deliberately, over-patronizingly. “We. Are not. Role models. To. My cape. Okay?”

  “No, you dolt. Look at your cape!”

  Nuklear Man did so. “Gasp!”

  “Well?”

  “Lousy dust.” He beat the fashion accessory a few times. “There. Much better. Good thing you noticed that.
You get twelve superpoints.”

  “No, it’s one piece again. It’s not torn any more.”

  Nuklear Man pondered for just over one second. “Must be like in the cartoons. Everything heals up when you step off screen.”

  “Off screen? What are you…? That doesn’t make sense!”

  “Of course it does. You just don’t watch enough cartoons.”

  __________

  Crushtacean was sprawled across his topside with his pincers lying half inside a couple severely damaged office buildings. He had tipped over a butter truck on impact. The Nova Beam had broiled a fair portion of the Angered Arthropod’s main body. The smell was delicious.

  __________

  Angus was sprawled across his back atop a random downtown skyscraper. He awoke with a jerk, blinked his bleary eyes in the sun, rubbed his throbbing skull, and suddenly got very angry. “That blasted Nuuklear haggis brained nimrod! Ah’ll have his pretty boy Frenchie blond locks and stuff them down that smug face o’ his fer this! DWARF-A-PULT!” The hideous mutation of sound echoed through the calm of post-crab Metroville.

  __________

  Crushtacean awoke. The haunting melody of the mating call roused his aching body from the verge of death. His eyes opened to an upside down world. The exoskeleton was already healing the damage dealt to it. The mating call was no dream. Crushtacean sprang to its eight feet and scuttled through the city, heedless of buildings or whatever else might obstruct his path.

  She will be mine. Oh yes. She will be mine...

  __________

  Issue 22 – Planning for Failure

  Librarian, Mail Man, Meter Maid, and Delivery Boy, The Minimum Wage Warriors, posed among the wreckage which had, minutes before, been a few rather bustling and productive blocks of Metroville. “Our job here is done,” Mail Man said with a salute.