Nuklear Age (9 page)

“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
WHUMP
s 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.

__________

Back in the wondrous days some call “the sixties” and others call
“ARGH!”
there were two close friends who just happened to be millionaires. To be honest, there was quite a bit more, but as far as this story goes these two are the only things we really have to worry about. The first was a Scottish cereal industrialist, Angus McDougal, while the second was an Irish industrial cerealist, Seamus O’Riley. The two pooled their talents and resources to create some of the most fascinating breakfast theory and sugar filled cereals known to man. Their ultimate creation, Seizure Pops, contained a reality breaking 112% sugar and put them on the map of breakfast food companies.

Then Angus had the idea of combining his proud and rich Scottish heritage with his proud and very rich cereal company. He designed a new cereal, Scottish Squishies, with haggis as the main ingredient. He was immediately laughed out of the business. Seamus, wanting to help his friend, asked for the recipe to see what he might be able to do.