“Do you fear it after all?” Nihel asked. He approached Atomik Lad with slow steps that took him into Angus’s spilt life.
Nihel paused. He examined Atomik Lad cowering against the thoroughly broken door with his legs gathered up against his chest. The blood was just short of touching him. His eyes were focused and yet far away and with absolutely no regard for Nihel’s existence.
“What do you care of that? You won’t even fight for your
own
life, yet you weep for this one?” He shook his head. He reached down and picked up Atomik Lad by the collar. “Absurd little creatures.”
Atomik Lad stared into the sky. It was too bright. The sun was directly above them. It filtered through a massive cloud that seemed to amplify the light into a giant blinding whiteness. He did not look away. He did not blink or squint. No red here. Not now. Just deliverance from it. Warm light cleansing him of his bloody sins.
He was weightless. And then the burden of the Earth crashed against his back. He was on the sun-warmed concrete again. He sat up. Angus had removed the club from his gut and begun a new assault against Nihel’s kneecaps.
“Admirable.” Nihel commended.
Angus was ghastly pale. He strained to remain conscious. His hands were soaked in blood, one covered up what must’ve been the massive stomach wound while he wrapped the other tightly around the blood stained handle of his club. His breath was irregular and ragged.
“But futile.”
Angus wobbled groggily. He spat blood onto Nihel’s foot. “Don’t start what ye can’t finish!” He reared back and swung his club through another strike.
Nihel caught it. He sighed. “You have already lost. Be gone.” The club lost its solidity. It became amorphous like a liquid that somehow maintained its club-like form. It unraveled itself into a serpent of metal that wound over Angus in seconds. He stood there, a statue of himself cast in his own iron.
Nihel gave a sinister grin.
The iron skin contracted into a sphere the size of a baseball with a horrible sound. Blood seeped from it and covered the whole of the tiny orb with liquid redness.
“No,” Atomik Lad’s voice resounded like a cat’s footfalls. “No more. No more red.” He closed his eyes. He could see blood pumping red-orange through the flesh of his eyelids; could feel it rushing through him; burning like wildfire with red, red flames.
“No!”
Nihel faced him. “Taking your own life is arbitrary to you, but these others,
that
hurts you?”
Atomik Lad felt the air press against the whole of his body like a great bear hug from the atmosphere itself. A block of solid rock suddenly encapsulated his body with only his head poking out the top of it. Nihel glared at him. “I loathe you things. Now, I will show you just how much.” He shoved the block through the remains of the glass door. He followed with footsteps like the march of death.
__________
Issue 56 – The Fall of Nuklear Man
N
ameless Technician and Random Extra were inside one of the Überdyne Mobile Command Units along the barricaded perimeter of Nuklear Man’s now finished battle. Nameless and Random each manned a console inside the van’s cargo area. The dark interior was only lit by their computer monitors, blinking lights, television displays, and a radar screen that was there just in case. Just in case of what, exactly, no one knew.
“Nameless!” Random yelled over his shoulder.
Nameless Technician spun around in his Scientific: Swivel Chair. He had a bandage on his forehead from his work in the field earlier that day. “Report,” he said.
“There’s a massive KI disturbance at the Mall,” Random reported as ordered. He shook his head in awe of the readings that streamed through his computer. “Our sensors can’t handle it. It’s like, like someone is warping reality itself.”
“Great Kopelson’s Ghost!” Nameless blurted. He jumped out of this chair and climbed into the driver’s seat with all the grace of a botched trapeze act. He started the motor and gunned it. Random had to hold on to his console to keep from dropping to the floor. Nameless picked up the Scientific: Mobile Unit Radio Wave Communications Transmitter. “All units, this is Field Commander Technician. We have an unidentified aberration in sector G-7. Presumed to be comparable to a Nu-Prime level event. I repeat, a Nu-
Prime
level event as been detected in sector G-7. Placing a Media Cap on this new event is now our top priority. Auto Units, de-barricade and roll out.” He pulled into traffic with even less grace than a botched trapeze act.
A fleet of Inconspicuous: Vans soon followed.
“Sir?” Random asked as he buckled up. “What about Nuklear Man? He’s still at the previous site. I don’t think he was debriefed. What if he talks to the media?”
Nameless took a left turn from the far right sidewalk. “Do you think it really matters? Nothing he says makes sense anyway.”
__________
“Nuklear Man!” Erica yelled as she and her beleaguered cameraman ran up to him from the fringe of the dissolving Überdyne perimeter.
He nonchalantly posed. “Yo,” he yelled as he made his way out of the arena of a construction site. Several Überdyne employees ran past him and hopped into a van that then peeled out onto the street.
She finally reached Nuklear Man. The cameraman flipped a few switches, set the camera on his shoulder, and aimed its lens at the Golden Guardian.
“Nuklear Man!” Erica said into her microphone. “Can you tell us about your latest battle?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Janice,” he took the microphone from her before she could correct him. “It was a dark night. Dark like the heart of a
demon
, I say!”
__________
Nihel slid his hand along the smooth top of the cube he built out of molecules and thought that encapsulated Atomik Lad. “Beautiful, isn’t it, boy?” he said.
“Stop it,” Atomik Lad pleaded through his tears.
Nihel smiled like the devil. “But don’t you see? That’s exactly the problem. I
can’t
stop. This is Fate at work. But I’m trying. Oh, how I’m trying.” His eyes scanned the crowd of fifteen terrified strangers who were united by the whimsical nature of tragedy. They clung to one another like loved one’s in mourning. There had been two more in their pack, but they served as Nihel’s first two lessons. “Pick one,” he told Atomik Lad. “Pick one for me.”
“Me, take
me!”
Atomik Lad said.
“Just stop it!”
“Always the same answer. Don’t you see how that would be counterproductive? I’m teaching you! Your time here on this Earth is short, we must make the most of it.” Nihel’s cold gray eyes focused on a man in the group. “Yes, him.” His was a face in every crowd. The Undecided and Other in every poll. The fair weather fan. “Your name.”
“J-Jason Murphy,” he said without looking at Nihel. He was cowering as much as a man could and still be considered standing.
“Nothing special about Jason,” Nihel said. “Nothing unique or spectacular. A consumer. An anchor on his fellow man. A drag on the evolution of the universe.” Nihel walked up to him. They stood toe to toe. The man was a head shorter than Nihel. “And yet even
he
possesses that which
I
am denied. Freedom,” the word was a snarl.
Nihel turned back to Atomik Lad. “In a twisted way, I am at
his
mercy. His choice brought him to me. Here. Now.
He
is now no doubt rather nonplussed for said decision. But at least he was given the opportunity to choose!”
“Please…don’t.” Atomik Lad said. He tried not to look at what was left of the previous two lessons. “Stop it!”
Nihel shook his head solemnly. “No. I’m afraid I can’t stop. This is Fate, you see? Everything I’ve ever done has led me to this single moment in space and time. Everything that has ever happened occurred for this.” He turned back to Jason. “I’m going to kill you. You have no choice in the matter. How does that make you feel?”
“I don’t know,” Jason blubbered. His sobs were the sounds of his calm shattering.
“You don’t know,” Nihel slowly repeated. “I tell you that you will die, that your pathetic, unfulfilled life is racing to oblivion at my hands, that there’s nothing you can do about it, and you stand there, sniveling that you don’t know how it makes you feel!”
Jason fell to his knees, “I don’t know!” he managed to grovel through deep, body-shaking sobs.
“I’m going to kill you, Jason Murphy! It is Fate. How does that make you feel!”
“I don’t know!” he blubbered.
“Enough of this,” Nihel said. Jason’s hemoglobin disappeared. He collapsed to the floor, quivered for a minute gagging, and died.
“You!”
Nihel said to another man in his dwindling collection. “Your name.”
“Bill Greenwood,” he said. His shoulders squared. He looked like he might’ve been in the military.
“I’m going to kill you, Bill Greenwood. You have no choice in the matter. How does that make you feel?”
“Angry.”
“Now imagine being angry as long as time itself!” Nihel snapped. He stalked over to Atomik Lad. He held his head with firm hands. “Don’t look away. This is anger, boy,” he whispered.
The man shivered. His body convulsed like he’d been kicked in the gut. He crumpled into a fetal position, his face twisted in agony.
“First it infects you,” Nihel said. “Then it eats away everything inside of you. Like acid.”
Bill let out a scream that choked on itself as his skin took on a pale green quality.
“It doesn’t just transform you.”
Wet fleshy clumps, sizzling and green, fell from Bill’s limbs.
“It
consumes
you.”
Bill’s body was eating itself alive. His skin was sickly green with mottled black splotches all over it. And melting.
“Then you die.”
What was left crumbled into an acidic pile of burning and gurgling meat.
“Look at it, boy!” Nihel yelled.
“That
is what is left of you. That is what becomes of your soul, a dead thing.” He let go of Atomik Lad’s head and paced back to Bill’s dead mass. “You wonder how I can do these things?” He ran his fingers through the rotting green. “Look on this and know.” He scooped up a handful. “This is what I have become. Dead. Rotting.
Stagnant.”
Nihel took wide, powerful steps to his student. He slapped the stinking meat in front of Atomik Lad’s face. “This is what I have become because of you things. Look at what you things did to Bill! All of you!
Look!”
He smacked the glob off the cube and it splattered across the floor. “You, you
things!
You have brought this upon yourselves!”
Atomik Lad’s face cringed. He looked away with his eyes closed and tears streaming down his face. “Stop it!”
“We’ve been over this!” Nihel ranted. “I can’t stop. This is Fate. Everything I do has already been determined. It’s maddening, isn’t it!”
But Atomik Lad wasn’t listening. His eyes opened. There, by the only table still standing, lying next to a metal chair with an orange plastic bag on the floor near it was Rachel.
Rachel’s dead body.
Rachel’s dead.
Rachel. Is. Dead.
It’s my fault. My fault. I loved her. I killed her. I did it. She is dead because I loved her. Nothing but dead matter now.
All I wanted was to drown in her being and never breathe again.
Never breathe again.
Dead. I can still smell her. Like vanilla candles and a canvas with fresh paint on it. Beautiful, creative, organic. I killed it all. Everything she would ever do. Dead. Because I loved her.
__________
“Shiro the back space to go at!” he insisted from Norman’s left shin.
“I can’t let you go, Shiro. It would slow us down and we’ve got to get Nuke back to the Mall before—” his voice trailed away.
Angus must’ve known none of us had a chance against that guy. He got Shiro and me out of there to save our lives. He knew there’d be no way he could last long enough
. “—before we’re too late,” Norman finished with a catch in his throat. “Ahem. Look, there’s the construction site now.”
“From dragon’s height eyes, the looking at there from now is devastator!”
“Yeah, must’ve been some fight.”
Shiro clung to Norman’s tungsten leg as they landed. The impact dug two small trenches into the ground before Norman took to a run to bleed off the momentum. Shiro felt like he was being rattled to death.
“So there I was, a lone bastion of justice and good looks against an insurmountable wave of vileness and depravity and fangs and pointy edges when—”
“Nuke!” Norman said as he ran up to the Hero and Erica who, at this point, wasn’t interviewing so much as waiting to get her microphone back. They’d run out of tape some time ago, but Nuklear Man refused to be held back by technological limitations.
“Ah, another of Metroville’s finest,” Erica said. She managed to wrestle the microphone from Nuklear Man. “Mighty Metallic Magno Man, how were
you
impacted by—”
“No comment,” he said. “Nuke, we’ve got to talk. It’s serious.”
Erica held the microphone between them out of habit even though she knew it would do no good.
“I’m in the middle of a very important interview here, Norman,” Nuklear Man said. “And no matter how serious whatever you have to say is, I can already tell its less important than me talking about myself. Ain’t that right, Kim?”
“Hm?” Erica said. “Oh. Er. No. We have enough footage. Yes, more than enough.”
“You sure? It’s been my experience that there’s no such thing as enough of me talking.” He posed and flexed a few times for emphasis.
“No, we’re fine. Bye.” She turned to her cameraman.
“Run!”
They did. Quickly.
“They don’t know what they’re missin’.”
“Nuke!” Norman grabbed him by the collar. “Listen to me.”
“We’re gonna be friends for a lot longer if you let go of the threads. Catch my meaning?”
“Nuke, fine. Whatever. You’ve got to come with me. There’s, there,” he had to force his composure to remain composed.
“Get on with it, man!”
“Rachel’s dead!” he blurted out. “Probably Angus and Sparky too,” he held back tears that Shiro could not. “Oh, God. This guy, he just took everything Sparky had and it didn’t even slow him down. We both saw that kid disintegrate over twenty floors of The Dragon’s high-rise office building just by yelling at it. This guy, he just brushed it off like it was nothing.”