Nuklear Age (82 page)

“Heating the fires of heat for fire to heat is not wanted. Dead or a living.”

“Ghk!” Angus sputtered. “Where the bleedin’ hell did you learn to talk?!”

“Engrish the Shiro from regular American Joe movies.”

“You learned English from American movies?” Norman asked. “Were you…paying attention?”

“Hai. The word play from Engrish then over French then over Chinese then over on Japanese under-titles for the eyes to listen.”

“Well. That explains that,” Angus huffed. “Now let’s get that haggis.”

“Y’mean Burgers.”

“Conceptions of thought’s you intended, Sushi!”

“Bah! If’n Ah wants raw fish wrapped up in seaweed, Ah’ll dunk me head into the ocean!”

“Heh. I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Angus. Remember what happened the last time you went to the beach?”

“Nay!” Angus snapped. “Nay, Ah don’t.”

“Really? ‘Cause there was this giant crab, I think Ima called it a Crushtacean, and it seemed to really like the sound of your Iron: Bagpipe Thrusters. It liked the sound so much in fact, that it—” The Tungsten Titan’s words came to a halt due to an unexpected Enemy-B-Smote held threateningly just in front of his face.

“If’n ye value ye stinkin’ life, Ah’d suggest shuttin’ ye trap, laddie.”

“Ahem. Sure thing. No problem. That was the end of my story anyway.”

“The timing from now. On Sushi Junction!”

The massive club swung down to block Shiro’s progress. “Oh, no ye don’t.”

“Yeah. We already agreed on Burger Junction.”

“Fasting ball, leg puller on the Shiro-kun don’t know that.”

“It would seem we’ve come to somethin’ of an impasse, gentlemen,” Angus said. His beady little eyes shifted from Shiro to Norman.

“If only we could come to some sort of compromise,” Norman mused aloud.

“Diversion the onlookers. There’s the point to been!” Shiro exclaimed with a point directed behind his cohorts.

They turned.

“Hm. Who would’ve thought…?”

“Well, Ah’ll be a Frenchie’s uncle.” Angus’s brow furrowed for a second. “Step-uncle.”

Before them, the Sushi Stuffed Haggis Burger Junction seemed to give off a divine glow.

“They oughta turn down the wattage on their gaudy neon sign though.”

“Aye.”

“Hai.”

__________

“Uh, like. Next?” the Sushi Stuffed Haggis Burger Junction semi-literate high school drop out cashier said.

“Next he says,” Angus, who was indeed next in line, grumbled. “How am Ah supposed to order when there ain’t a menu to choose from!”

“Uh, like. Sir?” the cashier asked Norman who was, to his sharpened senses, the next customer in line.

“Hm? Oh, no. They’re in front of me.”

Blink. “Uh, like. What?”

“Logistically difficult overcome the angle,” Shiro suggested while motioning at the counter that towered over he and Angus and completely blocked their view of the illuminated menu on the wall behind the cashier.

“Oh, Ah sees how it is. ‘Oh, lookit wee Angus. What’s the matter, laddie? Ye say ye hungry? Well, ye could just go right on over to that Sushi Stuffed Haggis Burger Junction if ye was only three feet taller, but ye ain’t!’” The idiot cashier could see Angus’s whirling fists at the peaks of the Surly Scot’s enraged hops. “‘Ye be too short for food eatin’ folks! Why don’t ye just crawl under some rock and die like the midget freak ye are?!’ Ah’ll tell ye why, ‘cause
Ah’m too busy bashin ye brains into pulp!”

“Uh, like. Do you want fries with that?”

Angus’ response was incoherent gibberish. It was the verbal equivalent of cracks racing across the face of a dam like little gouts of anger pushing from behind the crumbling barrier of sanity.

“Uh, like. That’ll be $8.75?”

Angus leaped up onto the counter and kicked the register into the neighboring Pie Junction. “Ah ain’t even ordered nothin’, yet arsewart son of a donkey-faced whore!”

“Uh, like. Please drive thru?”

Angus’ body shook at around nine point six on the Richter Scale. It sounded like a pot of water was boiling over. A kettle’s screeching wail pierced the air as Angus’ face flushed bright red.

The manager at the neighboring Tea Junction took the kettles off their burners.

“Uh, like. Next?”

“Must. Destroy.
Arsewart
. Laddie.”

“Eheh, excuse me,” Norman clamped his hands around Angus’ midsection and put him back on the floor. “Shiro, you keep an eye on him.”

“Hai,” the Tiny Typhoon leaned over and pressed his face against Angus’ Iron: Shoulder.

Angus pushed him away. “It’s just an expression!” he seethed through teeth clenched tight enough to split diamonds.

Shiro considered it for a few moments. “Hai!” He did it again.

“GRAH!”

Norman stood up. “Um, sorry about that,” he said. He scanned the menu over and behind the counter. “Let’s see. We’ll have the, um. The Party Platter.”

“Uh, like. Do you want fries with that?”

“Do you even
sell
fries?”

A dimwitted heartbeat or two later, “Uh, like. I’m going to have to get my manager?”

“Manager?”

The cashier disappeared into the Sushi Stuffed Haggis Burger Junction bowels. A woman of mammoth proportions, and perhaps heritage, waddled out from the back of the store. The walls shook with her every step. Plates, ingredients, and the like fell from shelves. She halted her glacial progression at the counter and leaned on it. The poor structure whined from the strain and the cash registers churned out nonsensical orders due to large amounts of lard pressing most of their buttons all at once.

Then Norman noticed that she wasn’t leaning. Her girth simply oozed that far from its source. She seemed to expand before his very eyes like a cancerous beast of pure fat growing out of control. He and his companions took an unconscious step back while uttering “Neh!” under their breath.

“What do you want?” she mumbled through a mouthful of several Sushi Stuffed Haggis Burgers in various stages of solidity.

“Um, we’d, eheh. We’d, y’know. We’d like a, uh, a um.”

“A
what?”

“A P-Pa-P-Par, Party Pl-P-Pla.”

“A Party Platter?” she rumbled.

“Er. Y-yes. I think so. Yeah.”

Her stubby fat appendages waved and whirled about uselessly. “Chad! Hand me that Party Platter!” she vaguely motioned to the vicinity behind her which was quite a wide vicinity indeed.

“Uh, like. Where?” the imbecile asked.

She wheeled around dramatically. Or rather, her intent was to wheel around dramatically. The reality was that her incredibly fat head moved little more than three degrees. But it was enough. Chad’s dullard eyes could just make out hers. They focused on him. For some reason, footage of sharks bearing down on slow moving prey flashed—rather slowly—through his mind.

“If you don’t hurry, you’ll meet up with Brad.” Her stubby arms of fat waved somewhere in the wide vicinity of her stomach.

Chad was suddenly Hermes. If Hermes was all pimply, stupid, and dressed in the demeaning Sushi Stuffed Haggis Burger Junction uniform complete with the dignity sucking paper hat consisting of a burger with a fish’s head sticking out one side and a sheep’s rear sticking out the other. He practically leaped into action, reached out, and handed the bloated manager a Party Platter.

Her fatty fingers gripped the platter and set it down on the strained counter. Angus winced as she did so. He was convinced it would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Luckily, it was not. The rotund manager had to fight her own vacuous urges to keep her fat fingers from snatching up the burgers into her gaping maw of doom. As it was, Norman struggled against her vice-like grip on the Party Platter until she reluctantly relinquished the dish.

“That’ll be,” she checked the row of registers. “Seven hundred dollars and twelve cents,” she croaked fattily.

Shiro dug into his Tetsu: Pockets for some change. Angus smacked him in the back of the head.

“Look,” Norman began. “The party Platter only costs $10.99 on the menu up there. You’re reading the registers wrong or something.”

She turned the upper portion of her tremendous girth to read from the giant glowing menu behind her. Unfortunately, due to something of a weight problem, the layers of flab restricted her movement because she was such an enormous fatty fat fat who was very fat from being
fat
.

“I’ll have to take your word on that,” she grumbled under her breath.

“Here.” Norman slapped a twenty on the remarkably resilient counter. “Take it. Just leave us alone.” He put the Platter in the eager hands of Shiro and Angus and turned to the dining area.

“What did you do to her!” Atomik Lad’s voice bellowed from the dining area slicing through the clamor of ordinary Mall sounds.

The world screeched to a halt.

__________

Issue 55 – Turning Point

Earlier.

Nihel landed on the hot asphalt of the Mall parking lot. His cape settled behind him and draped itself over his shoulders out of habit. Shoppers flowed in and out of the Mall, in and out of their cars, and in and out of the parking lot. He stood among the churning clockwork of it all. Parking spaces, right of way, 4-way stops, and—

“They’re called sidewalks! Look it into it!” an angry voice yelled from behind him. A horn blared. “I swear, just because you guys go around wearing capes doesn’t mean you can make up the rules. Move it!”

Nihel turned around. A thick-necked gentleman was leaning out of the driver’s side window of a sports utility vehicle. The man seethed with every breath.

“What could be so important that you must become irate?” Nihel calmly asked.

“Get your ass out of the way!”

Nihel gave an apologetic nod. “You don’t have to yell.” He stepped to one side and motioned for the driver to proceed.

“Goddamn fruits,” the man muttered as he drove past.

Nihel watched him cut off another motorist, park, get out of his SUV, take three steps, and fall to ground like a marionette puppet with suddenly cut strings. And in a way, it was an accurate description. Nihel had turned off his brain on the cellular level.

Nihel looked at the Mall. He could see dozens of people smiling, chatting, and eating inside a greenhouse looking enclosure. “Interesting.”

__________

Atomik Lad and Rachel found a big round table with enough chairs for their party. They claimed it as their own with the bright orange Game Junction bag as a flag of their conquest and sat down next to one another.

Rachel’s hands shot into the bag and pulled out the video game. She tore off the vacuum sealed plastic like it was not an impenetrable sheen of aggravation and carefully opened the case. She practically ripped the instruction booklet out and began absorbing its alphanumerically encoded information. Her brown eyes scanned each line, each picture, each button configuration, tip, combo, every last iota of data printed within the tiny tome.

She felt a pinprick of concern twitching at the edge of her consciousness. She turned to Atomik Lad. He was leaning on the table, looking at her with amusement in his eyes and a wide smile that he was trying to hold back.

“What?” she asked.

He shook his head lightly. “Just you.”

“Oh yeah? And what of it?” she asked playfully.

He breathed deep. They were bathed in light flooding in from the huge windows of the walls and high arched ceiling. There was a warmth, more of life than heat, permeating the air. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek gently, like she would crumble if pushed too hard. “You make me happy,” he replied just over a whisper.

“I try.”

“And succeed miraculously.”

They kissed.

“Okay,” Rachel said. “That takes care of the sexual urge. For
now
.” She winked. “Let’s do something about that food urge. Where be them friends of yours, hm?”

Atomik Lad craned his neck to see into the vast expanse of Food Court Junction Hutts. “For a seven foot tall black guy and two midgets in full suits of armor, it shouldn’t be this hard to pick them out of a crowd.”

Rachel laughed.

“Ah, there they are,” Atomik Lad said.

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know, can’t read the Hutt’s sign from this angle. Looks like they’re paying though. ‘Bout damn time.”

“What the hell?” Rachel asked herself aloud.

“What?” Atomik Lad turned around and followed her gaze to the Food Court Junction’s exit toward the parking lot. “…The hell?”

An imposing figure walked through the automatic doors. Dressed in spandex the color of storm clouds and a cape that just barely defied black for an intensely dark red, the man reminded Atomik Lad of Superion.
He’s escaped
flashed across his mind as adrenaline streaked through his veins like lightning. Villains often escaped in his experience, and they often wore darker outfits as a result of it. He didn’t know why.

But then he saw it. “Nuke’s N?” Atomik Lad’s heart became weightless from the after-effects of his chemical bravery. His stomach, as if to reach an internal equilibrium, felt like it was filled with lead.

Nihel was only a few feet inside the glass house of dining. He made a quick survey of the surroundings.
Blind things. They waste their free will on deciding between this inane assortment of mundanity. And they don’t even know. They flaunt their obliviousness like a badge! They built a Galactic civilization out of it! There is no choice here, there is no freedom. They have shirked their ultimate power for idle comforts. They hold the power to change the universe, yet they wallow in their own stagnation because it is easier to consume than to create. This, this is the epitome of my torture, my nemesis. Earthim. I hate the word.

He growled aloud at a passing shopper who was burdened by several stuffed Gorge Junction bags. She fell over and was no longer burdened by anything.

Atomik Lad shot to a stand. “What did you do to her!” he demanded, his voice echoed in the large glass dining hall like receding thunder. The Mall screeched to a halt. Rachel squeezed his hand.

Nihel turned to him with a deliberate control. “This.”