Nuklear Age (16 page)

“Isn’t this the pot changing its tune?”

“What?”

“Er. The canary calling the kettle, uh, two birds with one egg before it’s hatched?”

“Hands on the wheel!” Atomik Lad yelled.

“Gah!
Where?!”
Nuklear Man recoiled further from the steering wheel.

“No!
Your
hands on the wheel!”

“No they're not, silly. See?” He waved his unoccupied hands in front of the sidekick's face.

“Argh!” Atomik Lad screamed as he dove across Nuklear Man's lap, and yanked the wheel back and forth to keep the mortality rate where it had been before their outing.

“Sparky! What’re you doing, trying to kill us?” Nuklear Man shoved Atomik Lad back in his seat with little effort and shot through a busy intersection despite the red light advising otherwise. Blurs of sound and screaming sights assaulted Atomik Lad for a terrifying instant. He felt the adrenaline drain from his body and looked at the world through crimson hued eyes. His Atomik Field nearly manifested but, luckily for the Nukemobile, it did not. Atomik Lad’s Field gave him the advantage of near invincibility, but it did this by destroying or, in the case of very strong things, brutally mangling whatever else came into contact with it.

They had made it through the intersection relatively unscathed. For reasons neither passenger fully understood, they were now facing the wrong way.

“Nuke?” he asked groggily, like waking up from hell.

“Yo,” the Hero responded from the back seat. He popped up with his cape over his head. He had all the dignity a drunk man does not.

“What happened?”

The Hero tossed his cape aside. The road was a sea of tortured metal twisted and broken from intense forces imposing their wills at the most inconvenient times. It was a massive pile up. One car was mounted atop another, teetering back and forth with a calming rhythm.

Nuklear Man pointed, “And you said they were made in factories.”

“You’ve caused a wreck.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions. It could be true love.”

“We can’t just leave. People could be hurt, we’re Heroes. We have to help them.”

“No one’s hurt. Let’s go, I’m hungry.”

“There must be twenty cars piled up back there!” Atomik Lad said.

“Mr. Worry-wart,” Nuklear Man teased. He stood up and leaned on the windshield. “Hey!” he yelled at the vehicular amalgamation. “Everybody okay?” He cupped his hand to his ear and waited for a reply.

A medley of affirmations rose from the massive wreck as drivers crawled from their ex-cars.

“See?” Nuklear Man said as he climbed back into the driver’s seat. “Now if you’re done goofing off, we can stop by Cow Butt Burger Hutt for some Breakfast Triple Quarter Pounder Bacon Cheese Burgers.”

“What’s the difference between a normal one and a Breakfast one?” Atomik Lad asked.

“You can’t buy the Breakfast Triple Quarter Pounder Bacon Cheese Burger after eleven o’clock.”

“Just drive, we still have to pick up Rachel.”

“Who?”

“Drive.”

“Right-o.”

__________

Vroom.

“Go Nukeracer, go Nukeracer, go Nukeracer
goooooo!”

“Could you stop singing that?”

“You don’t like?”

“It makes me want to commit crimes against humanity.”

“Yeah, stupid humanity. So ripe for the plucking.”

“What?”

“So trusting, so weak....”

“Nuke?”

“Wah?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Ooh, ooh, we’re here!”

The Nukemobile leapt across the median, over several lanes of busy traffic, and careened into a mostly vacant parking lot with squeals and screeches from the tires and a few innocent bystanders as they dove out of the way.

“We'll hit the drive through, it’s faster.”

“That’s a nice theory, Nuke,” the sidekick managed to say as he released his death grip on his seat. “But they’re not very reliable.”

“Pshaw. Just you watch.”

The Nukemobile missed running over the exaggerated cow’s ass drive-thru interface. Atomik Lad reluctantly took his hands from the wheel. “‘Hit the drive through,’ huh?”

“You want somethin’?” Nuklear Man asked while scanning the menu on the off chance that something had been added despite its reluctance to change that was long even by geological standards.

“No,” he said. “And if you’re eating, then maybe I could drive. You know, for practice.”

“Practice, eh? That’s not such a bad idea.”

“Whew.”

“This’ll be the perfect opportunity for me to practice my no-hands driving!”

“What!”

“Well, you never know when you might go paraplegic all over the place. We’ve got to be prepared for that sort of contingency.”

“Where’d you learn such a big word?”

“Never you mind. From now on, I want you to practice writing with your feet for one hour every day.”

“Uh, like, welcome to Cow Butt Burger, like, Hutt?” the cow’s ass said through a butt load of static. “That’ll be $5.50, please drive thru.”

The duo gave each other uneasy looks. “Did he just say it like they spell it?” Nuklear Man asked.

“I think so.”

“I'm scared.”

“I know, so am I. Just order quick, we’ve got to get away while the getting’s good!”

“I’ll have one number three to go,” Nuklear Man said into the cow's posterior-speaker.

“Three number two’s, that'll be $8.90, would you like anything else?”

“No, I ordered one number three to go.”

“Two number ones, that’ll be $15.20, would you like anything else?”

Nuklear Man’s Plazma Aura flared briefly. “Listen very carefully.”

“That’ll be $17.80. Anything else?”

“Grah!”

“$20.65. Anything else?”

Atomik Lad clamped his hand over the Hero’s mouth and made a shush motion. He removed his hand with glacial slowness. “Just take it. We’re late as it is, we can put the extra stuff in the Danger: Port-a-fridge for later.”

Nuklear Man nodded in agreement and turned to the cow’s ass like he was in the middle of delicate negotiations involving the lives of all humanity. Or at least some food. “No, that’ll be all, thanks.”

“Your total comes to $24.50, please pay at the first window.”

“Bu—”

“Just do it!” Atomik Lad hissed.

“My, what a pro-active thing to say,” Nuklear Man said as he drove to the first window. “Makes me want to spend way too much money for no reason.”

“Good, because that’s what we’re about to do.”

A slack jawed human stupid with youth blinked numbly at the world outside his window. He considered the presence of customers with all the importance of a particular pebble at the bottom of some distant gorge pictured in someone else’s geography textbook from the latter 1800s.

“Hey,” Nuklear Man said to deaf ears. “How’s it, uh, how’s it goin’?”

Nothing.

He waved his hands wildly. “Yoohoo, coma-boy. Over here! Food people is us.”

The burger-slave blinked one eye at a time.

“We’re in trouble, Nuke,” Atomik Lad whispered through the side of his mouth.

“I’m scared again,” Nuklear Man said.

The drive through window creaked open like a medieval portcullis. “Uh, like, that’ll be, uh, thirty, um, dollars?”

Nuklear Man mumbled incoherent insults about the employee’s mother and a goat without making any particular connection between the two. “Here. And I hope you choke,” he spat, handing over the money.

“Uh, like, please drive thru—”

“He did it
again
,” the Hero cringed in terror.

“—to the, like, second window?”

Atomik Lad looked ahead. “There
is
no second window.”

With the kind of speed one doesn't associate with economics lectures, the employee leaned out of his window and checked for himself. He saw no window. “Uh, like, I have to get my like manager?” He disappeared into the depths of Cow Butt Burger Hutt.

“But. Food. Me want now.” Nuklear Man’s head thumped rhythmically on the steering wheel.

“We’re going to be late,” Atomik Lad groaned.

“What’s the problem?” someone barked from the window. It sounded like years of heavy smoking, binge drinking, and overeating had been given a voice.

The manager was, to put it kindly, a wildebeest of a woman.

“Ah!” Nuklear Man hopped in his seat as far as his safety belt would allow. The effect was far from pleasant.

“
Well?”
she demanded. Her brutish face book up most of the drive-thru window.

“Don’t ask me,” Nuklear Man cowered. “He’s the troublemaker, talk to him!” he pointed to his passenger. “I hardly know the guy, picked him up just outside of Burgsville, no tellin’ what kind of junk he’s hopped up on right now.”

“Stool pigeon,” Atomik Lad said under his breath.

“Probably riding the wacky-tobbacky train.”

“Nuke?”

“Taking a walk down Crank Lane.”

“Nuke.”

“Making a deposit at the Heroin Bank.”

“Nuke!”

“I’m waiting,” the mastodon—er—manager growled.

“Well,” Atomik Lad began nervously. “One of your employees said that we had to go to the second window to pick up our food.”

“And?”

“And,” he cleared his throat to avoid further squeaking. “There is no, um.... There is no second, you know, window.”

She huffed like a buffalo would if it were that large. She tried to squeeze her mammoth face through the window, but found that certain laws of physics weren't agreeing with her. “I’ll just have to take your word on that,” she grumbled. “Eddie!” she hollered into the kitchen. “Give these circus clowns their food!”

“We’re not circus clowns,” Nuklear Man said. “Stupid college entrance exam.”

The massive manager’s maw was replaced by Eddie. “Uh, like, that’ll be uh, forty dollars?”

“But we just paid!” Nuklear Man roared.

Eddie gave his dim blink-blink. “I’ll have to like, uh, get my manager?”

“No, no, no!. Here! Take it, take it all, just don’t open her cage again!” He tossed fistfuls of money at Eddie.

“So this is, like, uh, your food?” he said, handing a bag adorned with the Cow Butt Burger Hutt logo out the window.

“Yes, good. Food now. Bye is me!” Nuklear Man barely enunciated. He snatched the bag, tossed it to Atomik Lad, and sped off in one fluid motion. Eddie was left with a plume of smoke stinking of burnt rubber

Atomik Lad peered into the bag as they raced through the streets of Metroville. “Hmm. Refried beans?”

The Nukemobile screeched to a halt. It rocked back and forth as its momentum and inertia figured out where to go. “What?” Nuklear Man asked with a slight twitch in his left eye.

“Refried beans. All that's in this bag is an order of refried beans.”

“Refried beans,” the Hero repeated, his eye twitching fervently.

“I don’t think they even
make
refried beans.”

“You don't say.”

“You're taking this very well.”

“Well, Sparky.” He put the car in park and turned off the engine even though they were in the middle of the street. “There are times when reason works better than screaming like a lunatic and committing acts of incredible violence.”

“Wow, I really am surprised, Nuke. Looks like you’ve been reading those Panels of Morality in the back of your Captain Liberty comics.”

Nuklear Man unbuckled his seat belt and took the bag from Atomik Lad. “This, however, is not one of them.”

“I should have seen that coming a mile away.”

Nuklear Man shot into the sky with a golden comet’s tail streaking behind him. Atomik Lad noticed that he had taken the car keys with him.

“I’ll, um, just wait here then.” Atomik Lad got comfortable and tried not to look too awkward. He had the awkward suspicion that he was failing miserably.

__________

Issue 15 – Today’s Lunch Special: Justice!

“Uh, like, come back like, again?” Eddie said to a customer who was already driving away and far out of earshot.

An explosion rocked the world just outside the drive through window. When the smoke cleared, an angry Mad-Plazma glowing overhero stood like some god deposed of his heaven and ready to make the world shake with his loss.

Eddie looked into Nuklear Man’s intense eyes, two tiny suns burning with the fires of rage, and slammed the window shut. “Uh, you’re not in a car, I don’t know what to do.”

Nuklear Man’s Plazma Aura fizzled impotently. His flashy effects were extinguished. “What did you say?”

“I’ll have to like, get my, uh, manager?”

“For the love of all things holy—
NO!”

Her bloated face filled the window once again. “What’s the problem? Oh, it’s you again.”

Nuklear Man whimpered to himself.

“So what do you want this time, circus-boy?”

“My food.”

“What’s in that bag then?”

“You gave me refried beans.”

“We don’t even sell refried beans.”

“Yeah, and the funny thing is I didn’t
order
any either.”

She scowled.

“Eheh, yeah. Well, could I just have my food now?”

“No.”

“Thanks, I—what?”

“You’re not allowed at the drive thru unless you’re in a car.”

“Well I’m here now. You could just give me my food and then everyone’s happy. Especially me.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“You’re not in a car. You might try to rob us.”

Nuklear Man blinked. It was the only possible response from the vast Fishbowl of Responses that society offered him at this time.

“And if I were in a car, there’d be no chance I’d rob you?”

“Correct.”

“Even though it would be easier to get away and driving up to or away from a drive-thru window wouldn’t carry an iota of suspicion whereas walking up to one is very unusual?”

“Right.”

The Hero’s left eye twitched. It twitched and spasmed with a ferocity most people would applaud as being an award winning special effect in a horror movie. His eye twitched so severely that it looked like it would escape its cranial confines at any moment.

The twitch spread to encompass the Golden Guardian’s entire face, raced down his neck to his body where it rapidly infected his limbs, and took a stranglehold of the total entity that was Nuklear Man. The space containing him became occupied with yet another explosion and decided this had been its most exciting day in recent memory. Nuklear Man was already half way to his abandoned car before the smoke cleared.