"Bleepin' blizzards!" yelps Orphan Agnes.
In spite of Molly's pleas, I leap again just the same. Because finally, we've reached the end. My whole purpose in leading her on this chase through the Underfunnies.
I swoop through the currents and burst free at our last stop. This time, I appear as myself, not disguised as some comic strip prop. She does the same, returning to her familiar form in the silver spacesuit and bubble helmet.
Finally. Here we are. In a child's darkened bedroom.
"What is this?" She stares at the black-haired boy on the bed between us. "Who is this?"
"His name is Little Nino," I tell her. "And he's a dreamer."
Even as I say it, Little Nino stirs and sits up in bed. He rubs his eyes, and then he looks at me, and smiles.
"Oh!" he says. "You are here!"
Grinning, I tousle his hair. "Just like we talked about, Nino. Are you ready?"
He smiles and nods.
"What's happening here?" Molly scowls. "What are you talking about, Everett?"
"Little Nino's been having a crazy dream," I tell her. "Haven't you, Nino?"
"Why yes, I have." Little Nino crawls down off the bed and pads across the room in his fuzzy white footie pajamas. "I have been dreaming about the music in my closet."
As we watch, he opens the door of his closet. Beams of rainbow light stream out around him.
At the same time, a sweet piping song skirls forth--the sound of flutes and chimes and strings weaving in delicate harmony.
Little Nino smiles back at us. "Do you hear it?"
"Yes, we do," I tell him. "Let's have a closer listen, shall we?"
"That will be fine." Without hesitation, Little Nino shuffles through the closet doorway, disappearing into the rainbow light.
"Come on." I take Molly's elbow. "I want to show you something."
She frowns at me. "That song. I know it, don’t I?"
I just shrug and pull her toward the closet.
As soon as we cross the threshold, the doorway disappears behind us. Suddenly, we're standing on a beach at night, facing a bonfire that burns in rainbow colors.
At first, we're alone there with Little Nino. "I remember what comes next," he says. "Would you like to see the rest of the dream?"
"Yes, we would." I let go of Molly's elbow and take her hand. "We would like that very much."
Little Nino waves his arms, and figures descend from above, floating down one at a time from the starry sky. They are comic strip women, all of them, descending like wingless angels to land lightly on the wet sand around the rainbow bonfire.
There's Potpie's girlfriend, Olives...Ragwood's wife, Blonder...Li'l Asner's gal Dandelion Meg...Rick Tracer's true love Bess Bluehart...Allie Hoop's cavegirl Moolah...and so many more. Every woman you can think of from the funny pages, every one of them from the sublimely beautiful to the utterly ridiculous. Dozens of them, hundreds of them.
This is it. This is what I've been working for; this is why I summoned Molly.
Because this is where the impossible can happen. Here in a child's dream in a flip side place where things don't happen the way they should.
Only here could I do what had to be done.
Hand in hand, Molly and I walk to the fire. We stand before the women, their faces and forms flickering in the dancing rainbow light.
"Oh!" Suddenly, Little Nino runs forward and gazes into the flames. "There is something inside!" Without hesitation, he plunges his arms into the fire.
When he pulls them back out again, unburned, there's a bundle in his hands. Something wrapped in a comic strip blanket, all black ink and wooly cross-hatched texture.
Grinning, Little Nino turns and offers the bundle to Molly. "Please take this," he says. "It is for you."
"From all of us," says Olives in her nasally voice. "Every last one of us."
That's exactly what it took--the combined power of several hundred female icons projected together. Merged with my own hopes and memories in one supreme act of will.
Not sex, but creation nonetheless. The ultimate surrogate motherhood.
Molly peels back the blanket, and a tiny face looks out at her. The face of a comic strip baby boy, eyes big and dark and shining.
This, then, is my secret son, a child conceived in the panelography. A child of pure hope and imagination--an homage to the son we lost.
And perhaps much more than that.
"Think of Henry," I tell her. "Remember everything you can about him. Every detail."
She looks at me with tears rolling down her face. "But that won't...this isn't..."
"Trust me." I lift the helmet from her head and kiss her wet cheek. "Think of Henry."
She casts her eyes up at me with a look of anguished disbelief. I brush the dark hair back behind her ears and shake my head.
"I can't do it myself," I say. "I need you. Your half of the memories. Your half of who he is." I kiss her cheek again. "Please try."
I watch as she cradles the squirming bundle in her arms. As she closes her eyes and frowns, reaching deep to dredge up those memories.
The comic strip women huddle close, caught up in the moment. I can practically see the pen-and-ink waves of hope ripple out from their exaggerated forms.
Maybe it's the force of their collective willpower. Maybe it's the power of the dream we're in, a dream within a dreamlike realm where human disbelief is suspended. Where comic strip life works in reverse, so harsh human reality can change direction, too.
Or maybe it's just her memories and love for him. Our memories and love pouring into a vessel of India ink. Pulling him back from the vanishing point--pulling all three of us back.
Whatever the reason, a new strip debuts tonight, a full color single-panel above the fold in the Sunday pull-out section. Here's how we kick off the run:
A mob of famous comic strip women stands around a rainbow bonfire. At panel center, classic child character Little Nino stands on tiptoe, gazing at a swaddled babe in the arms of a woman in a skintight silver spacesuit.
Little Nino says, "Oh my! Look at his eyes! They're not black anymore!"
The woman in the spacesuit weeps with joy. The square-jawed man beside her bends down to kiss the infant's forehead.
We can see, in the firelight, that the baby's eyes are the brightest blue that the four color printing process will allow.
The caption at the bottom of the panel reads as follows: "Welcome back, Henry!"
About the Author
Robert Jeschonek is an award-winning writer whose fiction, comics, essays, articles, and podcasts have been published around the world. His young adult fantasy novel, My Favorite Band Does Not Exist, won the Forward National Literature Award and was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten First Novels for Youth. His cross-genre science fiction thriller, Day 9, is an International Book Award winner. He also won the Scribe Award for Best Original Novel from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers for his alternate history, Tannhäuser: Rising Sun, Falling Shadows. Simon & Schuster, DAW/Penguin Books, and DC Comics have published his work. He won the grand prize in Pocket Books' nationwide Strange New Worlds contest and was nominated for the British Fantasy Award. Visit him online at www.thefictioneer.com. You can also find him on Facebook and follow him as @TheFictioneer on Twitter.
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The Story:
The bigger the bug, the bigger the gun! Exterminators Pass Candle and Nona Stiletto keep space safe for humanity by mowing down hostile alien lifeforms. Cyborg implants and badass attitudes make these warriors unstoppable, but a distress call lands them in the battle of a lifetim
e on a postapocalyptic alien world. Stalked by hordes of unimaginably savage creatures, Pass and Nona fight a war for survival against impossible odds. Their only hope: an abandoned alien child who might be the last of her species left alive, and the only key to a terrible secret that might end the carnage...if she can stay awake long enough to figure it out.
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Chapter 1
Corporal Solomon Scott held his gray-plated Mark VI Battlenaut armor perfectly still in the thick white mist. Around him lay the broken armor of two opponents, dead pilots who'd fought to the last for the cause of the Rightful rebels. Scott had killed them both just moments ago in a firefight that had left his own armor damaged.
Unfortunately, the larger battle going on around him was nowhere near finished. According to comm traffic and the telemetry displayed on the visor of his helmet, dozens of Battlenauts were still smashing the hell out of each other in all directions. The battle for the Commonwealth outpost on planetoid Chelong III was still raging, the outcome up in the air.
But the big picture wasn't the main thing on Scott's mind at the moment. He was more concerned about where the next attack on his own armor would come from and how he'd survive it with a breach in his belly plating.
Tapping buttons on the left armrest keypad, he switched views on the visor, superimposing the telemetry data over feeds from the onboard cameras. As far as he could tell, there was nothing nearby...but the mists of Chelong swirled with crystalline particles that played tricks on sensors as well as eyes.
As he stared at the feed from his aft cameras, the smell of sweat and metal in the cockpit grew sharper, and the hairs on his neck stood up straight. He thought he glimpsed a flicker of movement and gripped the stick tight, ready to fire his rear-mounted guns.
But nothing bounded out of the mist back there, and he didn't shoot. No problem; he was good at keeping a cool head.
Not that anything else in the cockpit of his Mark VI was cool at that point. One of the topside cooling vents had taken a hit, and the whole rig was overheating like crazy. Sweat ran down his sides and soaked every part of him. At least the padded halo mount inside his helmet kept the sweat from running into his eyes and burning the crap out of them.
He was flipping between camera views again when Captain Rollins got on the horn. "Echo Charlie Bravo!" The man's gravelly voice burst from the comm speaker. "Stop standing around, Scott! Dewar and Shen need backup! I just flashed you the stats!"
As promised, Dewar and Shen's telemetry appeared on the visor. They were thirty meters to the right, both taking heavy hits...but from what? It didn't look like there was anyone else in their immediate vicinity. Was the mist screwing with their sensors?
Damnit, Scott," snapped Rollins. "Get your ass moving!"
Suddenly, something caught his eye on the feed from the rightside camera. He played the armrest keypad, clearing the telemetry data from the visor screen and punching the rightside feed to maximum magnification. "Stand by, sir." He saw nothing...nothing...
Then something. A glint, a spark, a flicker in the fog.
"The hell with stand by!" Rollins' voice became a roar. "Shen just went down!"
Scott brought the telemetry back up and saw Shen's specs crashing hard. She was alive, but her armor was fried.
And whatever had fried it was out there somewhere in a rightside direction, exactly where Scott had seen the glint.
Rollins was still roaring over the comm, but Scott blocked him out. His neck hairs were still up, his gut was twisting; telemetry said nothing was out there, but his instincts told him otherwise.
Jaws clenched, he ran spectral overlays on the feed, scanning the full range of infrared and ultraviolet frequencies. Still nothing.
He cut his audio mic so he could talk to himself. "Come on, you piece of oosh. I know you're out there."
Scott threw all five feeds on-visor at once--rightside, leftside, frontside, backside, topside--and hit them all with the spectral overlays. Still, he saw no telltale signs of an enemy Battlenaut in any direction.
His instincts were usually good, but maybe they were off this one time. He'd been in battle before; even without actual fog, things could get confusing in the thick of it.
Just then, something Rollins was shouting broke through. "Dewar is down! Get over there now, you son of a..."
Grabbing the stick, Scott brought his Battlenaut back to life. He was just about to turn it toward Shen and Dewar when he spotted a blip on the radar. It only lasted a split-second, but it was enough to jolt him into action.
The monitors tracking his vital signs pinged faster across the board. The radar blip had appeared not to the right of him, but the left.
Whatever was coming, whatever had taken out Shen and Dewar, it had managed to circle around him.
Instead of turning right, Scott swung his Battlenaut left. At the same time, he played the armrest keypad, jumping all weapons out of standby mode.
That was when he saw the Red Battlenaut for the first time.
It burst out of the mist with guns blazing, marching straight toward him. It was bigger than his own Battlenaut armor--twelve meters tall compared to ten for the Mark VI--with skin that gleamed bright red from tip to toe. And there wasn't a mark on it that Scott could see.
Without thought or hesitation, Scott opened fire with his main guns. At the same time, he threw a half-dozen missiles at the Red. He needed to hit it hard and fast, not give it a chance to get at his damaged belly plating.
Slugs from the Red's guns peppered the Mark VI, pocking the shielding over the cockpit. His own missiles hit the Red's chest in a cluster, exploding with shuddering force.
But they didn't slow it down or leave a scratch.
"What the flux?" Scott opened up with his lasers and sonics at the same time, focusing on what he hoped was a weak spot--the backward-flexing knee joint of one leg. The armor narrowed there and lacked any visible shield plating.
Unfortunately, that didn't mean it was any weaker. The searing crimson beam from Scott's laser tagged the joint, accompanied by waves of oscillating vibratory force...but the Red didn't slow down a bit.
Scott clenched his teeth and stepped his Battlenaut back, then leaped forward, propelling his armor's shoulder toward the Red.
He was met by a shower of heavy slugs thudding into his plating, but they didn't stop him. His Mark VI covered the distance in seconds and slammed into the Red with its full weight and momentum.
Collision alarms wailed, and damage reports flashed on his visor. His vital signs spiked, and his head swam from the powerful impact. It had been a hell of a hit.
And apparently, it hadn't done any damage. The Red stood firmly in place; according to Scott's sensors, its armor hadn't buckled or ruptured in the slightest.
But that wasn't the worst of it. As Scott tried to push his Battlenaut back, he quickly realized it was stuck. He couldn't break away from the Red.
*****
What happens next? Find out in Battlenaut Crucible, now on sale for your favorite e-reading device!
The Spinach Can's Son Page 2