Nuklear Age (65 page)

Rachel opened her mouth to retort but could only muster an, “Uh.” Her grip on the gun’s handle loosened without her knowing it.

Dr. Menace snatched the gun from Rachel like a cobra strike without ever taking her eye from the scope. “Now sit down, girl. I have work to do.”

“But...” Rachel stepped back. “Wait. What’s going on out there?”

“Thiz iz what I have been talking about. Now quiet down while I—
no!”
She craned around the eyepiece, but her vision was met with nothing but rain-soaked darkness. Back to gazing through the scope, she exclaimed, “What iz that fool doing! I can’t get a clear shot!”

“Who?” Rachel leaned over the ledge. She peered into the bleakness beyond, pushing wet strands of hair out of her eyes in the hopes it would have a positive effect on the view. It did not. “I can’t see. Who are you talking about?”

__________

Atomik Lad slammed into an invisible wall about a foot in front of Superion. It was the all too familiar resistance of a Negaflux field. The sidekick strained against the unseen barrier. “Stop it! You’re killing him!” he screamed at the Sinister Scoundrel.

Superion cackled. “Yes, my boy. That’s the idea, you see!”

“I won’t let you!” Atomik Lad grunted, pushing with all his might. His Field had begun expanding without his knowledge like it was looking for a weak point.
Superion let out a guffaw. “You don’t have a choice!” He made a backhand motion and Atomik Lad was slapped against the unforgiving street like a giant phantom club had swat him from the air. He lay limp, half in and half out of the crater. His Field flickered and disappeared.

The pulses hammering down on Nuklear Man accelerated into a continuous stream.

__________

“What’s happening down there!” Rachel demanded.
Dr. Menace tightened her grip on the cannon and held it snugly against her body. “It doezn’t matter now anyway,” she solemnly reported.

“Why not? What happened? Is John hurt?”

“No time to explain! I muzt—” The Negaflux Sensor display in the cannon’s eyepiece went completely silly. It spit out a series of nonsensical data before shutting itself off. “Well. That muzt be what happenz at the Negaflux Critical Point,” she said, her voice an equal mixture of interest and dismay. “It iz too late. No power on Earth can stop it now.”

“What are you talking about?”

__________

Due to its own gravitational pull on itself, the Negaflux shell around Nuklear Man shrank to half its size in an instant. It should have imploded completely, but something stopped it from collapsing further. Inside, Nuklear Man was balled up in a fetal position, pushing his Plazma Power beyond anything he’d ever known before. “Can’t...give up...” he told himself. “Winner...writes...history books...newspaper articles...magazine interviews...the talk show circuit...” The normal sparkling azure of his eyes now burned like flames of gold.

__________

Dr. Genius sat immersed in a cocoon of monitors that streamed new KI data from Nuklear Man and Superion’s battle. She gasped. “A gravitational singularity in the middle of downtown Metroville? KI manipulations of that severity aren’t possible!” She scanned the monitors for a few more seconds. “It appears to be localized within its own realm, like it somehow completely curved its own space upon itself, essentially creating a pocket universe encapsulated by our own. Such incredible power,” she marveled. “I can’t imagine. There shouldn’t even be enough energy in the galaxy to generate this kind of effect. Should the bubble of reality that separates our two universes somehow break, it would destroy everything for millions of miles. Wait. Monitor Nine, intensify information spread inside the black hole.” She scanned her readouts again. “This doesn’t make sense. Monitor Ten, cross reference Nine’s data with Nuklear KI data.” She waited for the computers to comply. “Come on, come on. Just as I thought, raw Plazma energy. But Nuklear Man is the only source of Plazma and he couldn’t possibly survive in there. The astronomically powerful gravitational forces have to be more than he can endure.” Monitor Nine alarmingly beeped its alarm. “The bubble. It’s losing integrity.”

__________

Atomik Lad’s mind stumbled out of its unconsciousness and into the rain that soaked him thoroughly without his Atomik Field in the way. “Well this has been a swell damn day,” he grumbled while rubbing the back of his throbbing skull. He had a vague impression that something was going on around him as his senses started reporting in from their brief vacations.

He became aware of the Negaflux prison as it quaked relentlessly and pressed down upon itself with ever-increasing force.

“You’ve exceeded my greatest expectations, Nuklear Man,” Superion said. “But you cannot resist the infinite power which I possess!”

The field holding Nuklear Man imploded at last. Atomik Lad was amazed by the complete lack of fanfare. Movies had trained him to subconsciously expect an explosion of lights and thunder, but there wasn’t even a pop.

The rain where the field had been wasn’t pulled into the now present singularity. The space the rain occupied was being warped toward an infinitesimal point and the rain had no choice but to continue along what seemed to it a perfectly straight path.

Relatively speaking.

Not that anyone could tell this was happening anyway due to the rapidly expanding ball of ultimate darkness created by the singularity’s existence. And besides, all this only took place in a span of time best measured by Planck.

The dark orb evaporated in a display of blinding white light, like a supernova. Superion turned away from the blast and the whole city trembled in its wake. Atomik Lad’s Field wrapped around him just before the shockwave did. He was carried away with it for a second like just another piece of tumbling rubble. But then he managed to stabilize himself in mid-air. “What the hell?” he exclaimed while hovering in a storm of fire outside his own. And then everything was back to normal as the wave expanded away into the night. Everything that was left standing in the area was blackened with scorch marks and splintered with cracks. Half-melted cars and broken glass littered the streets. The wall of flame rumbled into the distance.

__________

“Brace yourzelf!” Menace yelled. She swung the ungainly cannon up and around, keeping herself between it and the encroaching wave.

Rachel’s eyes widened as the blast radius expanded, coming closer to them despite the many huge building-like obstacles in its way. She dropped to the roof’s rough and filthy surface. It was her hope to use the raised perimeter along the roof as a shield even though the wave itself was dozens of stories below. The wave struck their building rattling windows out of their frames and into the street. Menace clutched the cannon so tight her fingernails went white as the roof shook in several directions at once.

That’s it
, Rachel thought matter-of-factly.
I’m going to fall over a hundred stories with a few hundred tons of this building and that damn Dr. Menace until we all come to a sudden and painful stop at the bottom
.

The Venomous Villainess had similar sentiments with the added regret:
I’ll never fix things
.

And then it stopped. Little pieces of gravel rolled and skipped along the roof at Dr. Menace’s feet and Rachel’s face. Rachel lifted her head and a rain drop made a direct hit in her eye. “Well,” she said, rubbing at it. “That wasn’t so bad.”

Dr. Menace shifted her weight and fell to her tush. She leaned against the perimeter’s rise and caught sight of the moon floating between thick clouds of black. “Odd.” She craned around to look over the rise and caught sight of the street far below. “We are now leaning. It seems the shockwave haz damaged our building. But, on the bright side, we are still alive.” She set up the cannon once more and aimed for Superion. “We probably haven’t much time.” She scanned the night vision green soup of the cannon’s scope for any sign of Superion.

“So what
was
all that?” Rachel asked.

“The short story iz that Superion created a black hole with Nuklear Man’z mazz.”

“And the explosion?”

Dr. Menace shrugged. “I guezz it didn’t take.”

__________

And then it happened. The light of a thousand stars screamed into life where Nuklear Man had been. The air split itself apart and thunder caught in the apex of its crash roared across the Earth. The light, an amorphous blob of boundless power receded into itself. Gathered under the voice of a single consciousness, it coalesced into a familiar form. Into Nuklear Man. Or what one had to assume was Nuklear Man. His distinctive Plamza Aura, usually a dim glow, had flared so intensely that he appeared to be made of pure white heat. His cape was a sheet of flame. “Superion!” he bellowed the way the sun would if it had the inclination. “Stand, coward!”

__________

Rachel and Dr. Menace’s shadows were splashed along the length of the roof. “Well, Doc. I think that’s them.”

“So it iz.” Her finger caressed the trigger as the scope compensated for Nuklear Man’s sudden radiance.

__________

“My God,” Dr. Genius whispered in a rare moment of true awe. Her monitors reported the impossible. “It’s, it can’t be. More power than an entire star gives off in a
week
is just sitting there. Right there. The planet itself should have been vaporized by such close proximity to energy of that degree.” She checked her monitors. “Amazing. It’s Nuklear Man. He’s actually holding the energy back, localizing it to himself. If this doesn’t confirm his role in saving the city from the radiation of the Dragon’s Strike all those years ago, then nothing will,” she said. A few rapid keystrokes and every remote KI Sensor in range of the Hero was pointed at him. “More. I need more data.”

__________

Superion’s laugh was pure madness. “How...?” he asked between gasps of air.
Nuklear Man hovered, an immolating figure of pure light. “Does it matter?”
Even with his Field, Atomik Lad had to shield his eyes from Nuklear Man’s brilliance.

Superion pondered the question in silence. The madness appeared on his countenance like cracks across a marble surface. “No, it doesn’t. Eheh...heh, bwa hahahaha!
It doesn’t!”

The Golden Guardian lowered himself level with the Sinister Scoundrel, and though he still remained several inches from the crater’s surface, the exposed earth beneath him burbled into molten rock. Dozens of white hot sparks appeared in front of Nuklear Man. They gravitated toward a center in front of the Hero’s chest. Slowly at first, and then in a flash, they were one pinpoint like every star in the night sky was aligned into a single bright speck. It siphoned the Aura from Nuklear Man to reveal the pissed off Hero behind it.

A singularity of mass, as we’ve seen, is a black hole.

A singularity of energy, on the other hand, well maybe that’s something like a, “NOVAAA RAGE!”

The giant beam ripped through reality, a ferocious light speed demon obliterating everything in its path. A backlash of light and energy enveloped Nuklear Man. It dissipated as it passed him and he reabsorbed it, but the sheer force of its presence was more than enough to shatter what remained of the nearby buildings like they were made of brittle sticks. Superion could be seen as a vague blotch within the massive beam’s path.

The Nova Rage could be seen traveling south along the Eastern Time Zone as it left the Earth at a tangent’s trajectory straight to nowhere.
And then nothing.

__________

Rachel recoiled from the beam’s light as Menace cursed, her target lost in the light show. Their building shook like it had been punched by God. “What the hell was
that?!”
Rachel growled while holding onto the ledge. She leaned over it to inspect the damage, if any. “I don’t mean to rush things here, but it looks like that last blast just took out the left half of the bottom ten floors.” The building shuddered, its remaining girders moaned from the separation anxiety they experienced from the loss of their most cherished load bearing walls.

Dr. Menace hefted the Nega Cannon and held it in the crook between her chest and shoulder. She found her target, the sight reported a LOCK. “Enough.” She pulled the trigger. The cannon’s exposed innards breathed purple light and hurled an orb of concentrated Negaflux energy into the night.

__________

Superion hovered, his feet barely above the molten ground carved out by Nuklear Man’s attack. The Sinister Scoundrel wavered slightly. He had endured what he hoped was equivalent to the ravages of hell because the thought that something else could be more painful, even if it was theological, was unbearable.

“Don’t you see, Nuklear Man?” He repressed a giggle. “For all your self- indulgent pyrotechnics, I remain. Un!
Scathed!
You can’t hurt me, I’m invincible! I am the inevitable march of time,
I
am fate’s
chosen! Nothing
can stop me!”

The Nega Cannon’s shot splashed against Superion’s spine. He thrashed like a spear had pierced his heart. Back arched, arms desperately clawing at his skin, he fell to his knees, the liquid-hot rock oozed around him like mud. Violet energies swirled and washed over his body.
“Nothing can stop me!”
he screamed in defiance. “
Nothing can sto
—” and Superion was a statue locked forever at his knees silently declaring his arrogance to all the world.

The rain had become nothing more than sparse drops. Thunder rolled in the distance.

Nature’s punctuation.

Nuklear Man touched down on the rapidly cooling rock of the crater he and Superion had made in their melee. He walked to the Sinister Scoundrel and kicked him like he was testing the tires of a used car. The Would-be Usurper fell over like a toppled statue.

“Heh, piece of cake,” Nuklear Man said and dusted off his hands.
Atomik Lad rushed over, held aloft by his Field because he didn’t quite trust the light glow of heat coming from the crater. “Nuke! We did it! We stopped Superion!”

“No, no, no” Nuklear Man said like he was patronizing a child.
“I
stopped Superion.”