1
That night they camped in a large clearing two miles west of Research Lab B. The east side of the clearing and the adjoining woods were littered with two-foot-high cubes, most of which were the bright primary colors of children’s toys: fire-engine red, grass green, banana yellow, royal blue. A few were white. All glowed with a faint but steady light, which made them look simultaneously eerie and festive.
No one knew what they were, but Freud’s scanners showed that their surfaces were hard plastic laced with tiny cells that stored solar energy, which was no doubt the source of their luminescence. To make sure nothing was hidden within them, Adam smashed three randomly chosen cubes with a large rock. All three turned out to be hollow, their walls only an inch thick. Despite the cubes’ apparent harmlessness, the group set up camp on the western edge of the clearing, as far from the weird glowing boxes as possible.
While the others built a fire, Dagmar and Kukalukl sat off to one side conferring quietly. They hadn’t said much about themselves except to explain that they were pursuing the Marauders for reasons of their own and had decided it would be wisest to join forces with Adam’s group, whom they had learned of when they arrived in Sweetwater a few hours after the quartet had left. They had spent the next day and a half hurrying to catch up.
“Do you think she’s really a queen?” Bob said in a low voice as he fed another twig into the fire.
Adam glanced at the girl, who sat on a log with her back erect as she spoke to Kukalukl.
“She certainly possesses the bearing of one,” Adam said. “Very regal and imperious.”
“And kinda snotty, if you ask me.”
Maggie tutted. “Be nice.”
“As opposed to being honest, eh?” Bob said with a grin.
She raised her eyebrows as if to display her lack of amusement, but a hint of a smile broke through anyway. “That is hardly what I meant. I am merely suggesting that there are more polite ways to make your point.”
Adam watched this exchange with a frown, noting the brightness and animation in Maggie’s eyes as she spoke to Bob and the way Bob’s gaze never wavered from Maggie’s face. Was something starting to develop between the two of them? If so, he didn’t like it. As he got out the pork and potatoes for tonight’s dinner, he envisioned a bleak future in which both Maggie and Anna had moved on, having discovered handsome normal humans whom they wished to wed, leaving Adam alone in a world that loathed him. He imagined spending the rest of his days living in a filthy cave far from civilization with nothing to comfort him save the memories of the smiling faces he had known long ago.
This wasn’t the first time he had entertained such fears. And while he knew they were selfish and childish (and, irritatingly, corroboration of Freud’s diagnosis of “abandonment issues”), this awareness did not make them feel any less real or painful. Besides, his eventual loss of Anna and Maggie was guaranteed, for they aged normally while he seemed not to age at all. One way or another, the twins would someday be gone, and he would no longer know their lovely faces and charming company and most importantly their kindness toward him, a kindness no one else had shown.
No one? That wasn’t true, he realized with a start. Despite some initial suspicions—justifiable ones to be sure, given Adam’s long shadow in history and literature—Bob seemed to have developed a favorable attitude toward him. Perhaps, then, he should not look too harshly upon the growing closeness between Bob and Maggie…
“Is that what we’re eating?”
It was Dagmar. She stood next to Adam, her outraged eyes fixed on the pork and potatoes in his hands.
“What is wrong with them?” he asked.
“That can’t be all we’re having. Do you want me to die of boredom?”
“If you insist on behaving in such a manner, that might not be my poorest option.”
“How dare you talk to me like that!” she cried. She looked offended and a little scared, as if she feared he might not be kidding. It made him feel sorry for her. Queen or not, she was just a child.
He bowed as much as his kneeling posture would allow. “I apologize for my hasty words. But this is indeed all we have except for some cereal, which we reserve for our breakfasts, and—”
Her eyes lit up. “Cereal? What kind?”
“We have several kinds: Grape Nuts, Chunky Rice Balls, Count Chocula—”
Dagmar squealed with delight and clapped her hands together. “Count Chocula’s my favorite!” She bestowed a forgiving smile on Adam. “I suppose I can overlook the boring pork and potatoes, then.”
“You are most kind,” said Adam, hoping the sarcasm he felt wasn’t too evident in his tone.
Adam, Granite, and Maggie set to work preparing dinner. Dagmar watched with complacency, not offering to help. Her eyes kept returning to the wedge of Bob’s costume visible beneath the half-unbuttoned front of his safari shirt. It seemed to fascinate her for some reason. Kukalukl lay on the edge of the clearing, rhythmically licking his left front paw with his thick pink tongue.
“Um, is he gonna want some of this?” Bob asked Dagmar with a nod at the jaguar.
“No, I am most certainly not going to want some of that hideous crap you call food,” said Kukalukl, not even deigning to look up from his paw. He extended his claws and turned his paw this way and that as if admiring his ability to gut someone. “Any meat that has been cooked, salted, or in any way modified from its natural state of rawness is an abomination in my sight.”
“You know, that’s kinda funny,” Bob said. “I once got told almost exactly the same thing by this super‑villain I fought a couple times. Beastmaster, he called himself. He—”
“I knew it!” Dagmar cried, her eyes alight with excitement. “I knew you were a superhero!” She jabbed a finger at Bob’s chest. “That’s your costume under there, right?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Bob, surprised. So far hardly anyone he had met knew what he was. They generally assumed he was an acrobat, as the Frankensteins had, or worse, a mime. “You’ve heard of superheroes?”
Dagmar nodded. “Sometimes…” She hesitated, then frowned slightly and looked down at her hands in her lap. “Sometimes my parents—the king and queen—they would give me comic books they’d found somewhere. This was when I was younger, of course. Littler.”
“What’re comic books?”
She gaped at him in astonishment. “You’ve never heard of them? They’re, like, floppy little cartoon books that tell stories about guys—and sometimes girls—who dress like you and have weird powers and fight bad guys who also dress like that and also have weird powers.”
“And…these are fictional?”
She cocked her head. “You mean, like, made-up?”
“Yeah.”
“I think so, yeah. Here, hold on.” She dug around in her backpack and pulled out a battered comic book. Its cover, which was creased and dirty and attached by a single staple, showed two grotesquely muscular men in skin-tight costumes grappling with each other. One of them wore a brown and white costume with eight-point antlers sprouting from the cowl. The other had four arms and wore a dark gray costume and a slate-gray helmet that tapered to a point on top and sported two black glassy bug eyes. In the background a nubile young woman was tied to a rocket that had started blasting off. The title of the comic was The Incredible Caribou. A box in the bottom right-hand corner proclaimed, “The Millipede is back! And this time—it’s personal!”
Bob stared at the comic, dumbfounded.
“Are you familiar with anyone named the Caribou?” Adam asked. Though he wouldn’t admit it, he felt relieved that Bob now understood the existential uneasiness one experiences upon learning that aspects of your life are believed by others to be fictional.
Bob shook his head. “There were plenty of guys who named themselves after animals—Gray Fox, the Lynx, the Dove—but no Caribou. And no Millipede either, though there was a four-armed villain named the Centipede. But he didn’t look anything like that. In fact, he was one of the few guys who didn??
?t wear a costume. He was more of a scheming businessman. Always dressed in tailor-made suits. They had to be tailor-made, what with his extra arms.”
“This is most interesting,” Freud said. “Do you mean to tell me that where you come from individuals possessed of remarkable abilities utilized those abilities in gratuitous public displays of altruism or criminality while disguised in colorful skin-tight costumes that often had animal themes?”
“Um, well…yes.”
“Fascinating. I must ruminate on this further. I sense a unique psychological complex at work behind it all. Possibly repressed libido energy manifesting as an odd exhibitionistic fetish. A desire to be seen. But why the animal themes? Perhaps there is some atavistic totemic significance…”
“Geez, why does everything have to be sexual with you guys? Can’t you just say our costumes are a sort of uniform each of us personalizes, and leave it at that?”
“I most certainly cannot ‘leave it at that’! Your so-called explanation only begs the question: Why do you choose to personalize them in that particular manner?”
“Yeah, that is a good question. Too bad all the psychobabble in the world won’t provide a decent answer.”
“‘Psychobabble’?” The robot’s voice rose a few decibels in outrage. “Psychoanalysis is anything but ‘babble.’ It is based on exacting research and observation, followed by incisive and rigorous reasoning—”
“And virtually none of it’s scientifically testable.”
Freud remained silent for a moment as he regarded Bob with his orange-litten eyes. Then he said, “I think you are trying to bait me, to rouse my ire in an effort to divert me from performing my analysis. I suppose I shall have to wait until you are in a more receptive frame of mind for my well-meant scientific endeavors.”
Bob snorted. “Gimme a break. Most psychology isn’t scientific at all. It’s a lot of hogwash.”
“So I take it wearing skin-tight costumes in public is not a form of exhibitionism?” said Maggie with a teasing smile.
His face reddened. “It’s…it’s just the way we do things. I mean, okay, there might be a little exhibitionism involved. But that’s not the main reason we do what we do. We do it because it’s right. One way or another we received these amazing gifts, and it’s only fitting that we share them with the world.”
“How did you receive your gifts, if you do not mind my asking?”
“Yeah, tell us your secret origin,” Dagmar said.
“My what?” Bob said.
“Your secret origin. All the superheroes in my old comics had secret origins.”
“Well, geez, if I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore, now would it?”
“Uh…”
Bob chuckled. “I’m kidding. I mean, the only reason we kept our origins and identities secret was so the bad guys wouldn’t find out who we were and come after our families. But now…well, things are different. None of that really matters anymore. So, yeah, I’ll tell you.
“Simply put, it was a freak lab accident. I’d just landed a great job right out of grad school, at a geochemical research laboratory in New Jersey, where they were working on a big government-funded project that was trying to find ways to instantly petrify objects. They’d developed some chemicals that looked promising, particularly something called Lot C, which had been whipped up by Dr. Platt, one of their best scientists, right before he got murdered by commie spies. The secret of how he made Lot C died with him. The other scientists studied it like crazy, but no one was able to replicate it.
“Late one night I was working alone in the lab, trying to isolate certain components of Lot C and compare them with other petrifying agents we’d come up with, when a massive electrical storm swept down on the area. I tried to hurry up and get my work done before the power went out, but before I could finish, a bolt of lightning struck the building. For a second I felt a weird tingling sensation throughout my entire body and saw little tendrils of electricity snaking off the ends of my lab equipment, and then everything went nuts—light-bulbs burst, the windows blew out, and every beaker full of chemicals on the table in front of me exploded, drenching me in Lot C and all the other petrifying agents. At the same time, electricity swept through me in one massive surge, and I fell unconscious to the floor.
“When I came to, I found that the combination of chemicals and electricity had had a remarkable effect on my body: My skin appeared to have turned to stone, yet I could still move. You might think I was overjoyed, but the truth is, I was scared out of my wits. I had no idea I could change back to normal. I thought I was stuck like that. And when I tried to pick up a phone to call for help, the receiver shattered into splinters in my hand because I hadn’t learned to take my new strength and hardness into account.
“So there I was, freaking out, when dozens of police cars and fire engines screeched into the parking lot. They’d gotten a vague report about an explosion at the lab, and after the murder of Dr. Platt, they weren’t taking any chances.
“Thinking they could help me, I raced outside. Not the smartest move on my part. I mean, when the cops saw what looked like a living statue screaming and running right at them with its clothes falling apart from all those stone muscles rubbing against the fabric, they opened fire.
“In a way, that was the best thing for me. When I saw that police officers were shooting at me and that the bullets were ricocheting off my body and could hit someone, I came to my senses. I just stopped right there and held up my hands.
“To make a long story short, I explained to the cops what had happened, and they acted all stern and tough, but frankly I think they were kind of tickled that Heartland City now had its own home-grown super-hero. And as for me, once I started calming down, I discovered that with some concentration I could switch back and forth between my human and stone forms.”
“You say that your clothes remained fabric,” Maggie said. “How then is it that the costume you wear changes to stone too?”
“Oh, that’s because the costume’s made of what they call chaotic molecules. I don’t entirely understand the science behind it, but the molecules of the fabric somehow recognize the change in the wearer and they change right along with him. It’s one of Dr. Prism’s inventions. He was a member of the first wave of super-heroes who appeared back in the late 1930s. His body had been turned to crystal by aliens, and as a result he could project and refract energy. He was also a scientific genius. He got filthy rich off the patent to his chaotic molecules. In fact, as soon as he heard of me and my abilities, he called me up, partly to congratulate me on my new powers, partly to make sure I wasn’t going to turn out to be a villain, and partly to sell me a costume. I bought one, of course. I kind of had to. By then, after so many years of costumed folk gallivanting around, it was kind of expected for anyone with new powers to adopt that lifestyle.
“And that’s exactly what I did. In fact, it wasn’t long before I was inducted into the League of Super-Heroes, the first and best supergroup there was. It’d been founded by the original batch of heroes during World War II, and most of them were still involved with the group, which meant I got to pal around with Element Man and Athena and The Gray Fox. Of course, the tightest bonds I formed were with the other guys who entered the biz and the League around the same time I did, especially Lightray and the Contortionist. They were pretty much my best friends ever.”
He stared off at the glowing cubes on the other side of the black field as his wistful, reminiscing smile drained away.
“And as far as I can tell,” he said, his voice now low and somber, “all those guys disappeared in the Cataclysm.” He frowned. “Except…”
“Except what?” Adam asked.
“Well, it’s just, for the longest time I thought I was the only surviving super-person from my world. But then late last year, I started hearing about the Marauders, and danged if their field leader didn’t sound exactly like a member of my old Rogue’s Gallery!”
“The Annihilator,” said Ma
ggie. She saw Dagmar stiffen in response to the name.
“Yep,” Bob said. “One and the same.”
“And if he survived…”
Bob nodded. “Then who knows? Maybe others did too. I guess maybe I shouldn’t give up hope just yet.”
“You shouldn’t.” Maggie gave him a warm, hopeful smile. He smiled back.
Adam cleared his throat. “Does the Annihilator possess special powers like you?”
“Nah,” Bob said. “All he’s got is the armor. But that’s all he needs. Well, that and no morals whatsoever. His real name’s Vincent Vetter. He started out as an illegal arms dealer, but then one day he got hired by a scientist in war-torn Karmovia to help smuggle the scientist’s prototype battle armor out of the country. Vetter decided he liked the armor so much he’d keep it for himself, so he killed the scientist and carved himself a new career as a costumed criminal. From what you told me of your encounter with him in Sweetwater, you’ve already seen everything the armor can do. Well, except for the radio receivers in the earpieces, but I doubt those are much use anymore. What worked in the good old US of A of 1988 A.D. is just so much junk here in the crazy land of Erizan in 15 P.C.”
“P.C.?” Maggie asked.
“Post-Cataclysm. Then again, I’ve also heard people calling it A.C., for ‘After the Cataclysm.’ I keep wondering which term’ll be the one that sticks.”
“1988, you said?” Adam asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“It was only 1823 for us.” He pondered this a moment, then turned to Freud. “What of you? What year was it in your…your world, or whatever one should call it?”
“The exact date was March 19, 1023 F.E.”
“‘F.E.’?” Bob asked. “What’s that stand for?”
“Foundation Era.”
“And you?” Adam asked Dagmar. “Obviously you were born after the Cataclysm, but did your parents ever mention the year in which it occurred in their particular world?”
Dagmar frowned. “This is their world. They were the king and queen of this land.”
“Of course. I apologize.”
“‘Were’?” Maggie interjected, keeping her tone as gentle as she could. “What happened to them?” She suspected she already knew the answer and that it would explain why the girl was pursuing the Marauders.
Dagmar blinked at her, surprised by the question. “I…” She glanced at Kukalukl, who simply stared back impassively—or at least with a cat-like feigning of impassivity—and then took a deep breath and said, “The Marauders. They killed them.”
“I am sorry.”
“Geez,” Bob said. “That’s awful.”
“Indeed,” Freud said. “And though I fear that what I am about to say will be interpreted as egregious self‑aggrandizement, I would be remiss if I did not mention that psychoanalysis can be of great value when dealing with traumatic events of this nature.”
“Oh, put a sock in it already.”
“There is no need for snarkiness. I am only trying to help.”
“Um, thanks,” Dagmar said. She stared down at her battered tennis shoes, lips pursed, then looked up at Adam and said, “2006.”
“What?” Adam asked, perplexed by the seeming non-sequitur.
“You wanted to know what year the Cataclysm happened. It was 2006.”
“Ah. Of course.”
“That leaves you, then,” Bob said to Kukalukl. “Everyone else has revealed their year of origin.”
Kukalukl let out a small huff to indicate his disinterest in the matter.
“I myself have little use for dates. When you live as long as I have, the years blend together into one great mass of tedium. However, I can tell you that by the reckoning of the Incas who worshipped me the year was 36,016, the seventeenth year in the reign of the mighty (and last) (and, in my opinion, vacuous) Incan queen Mango Tutep, all hail her marvelous gloriousness, ho-hum, ho-hum, et cetera.”
“Worshipped you?” Freud asked. “You mean they believed you to be a god?”
“No, they didn’t believe me to be a god. They knew I was a god.”
“That is preposterous. Gods do not exist.”
“Now, I know for a fact that’s not true,” Bob said. “I’ve met a few gods. In fact Athena, who I think I mentioned earlier—she was a goddess.”
“You mean she was literally the Athena from Greek mythology?” Maggie asked. “The daughter of Zeus?”
“The one and only.”
“Bosh,” Freud said. “The Greek myths were fictions invented by a primitive society to explain natural processes that were beyond their ability to comprehend.”
“Well, according to your databanks, Adam here is a fiction, right? And yet there he is.”
Freud looked from Bob to Adam and back again.
“I admit,” he said, “that there are apparent discrepancies between my sensory input and the information in my databanks, but I am working to resolve the issue.”
Bob laughed. “Well, I have to say I for one am very happy that we got into all this stuff about where we came from, since it allows me to trot out one of my pet theories: that the Cataclysm was simply the merging of a bunch of alternate realities into one.”
Maggie shook her head. “I am not sure I understand what you mean by ‘alternate realities.’”
“Well, some folks believe that at various points in time, say at moments where an event has a fifty-fifty chance of occurring, that at those points, the event goes both ways, creating two realities separated from each other by some kind of dimensional barrier. It might help to think of time as a tree. It starts off with one trunk but at a certain moment, when a certain event could go either way, the trunk divides into two branches. And eventually those branches themselves divide at other points, and so on and so on, down through the eons until we end up with a nearly infinite number of alternate realities, some of which are mindbogglingly different from others further away from them. There might be realities where life never appeared on Earth, or where birds became the dominant intelligent species, or where the native people of the Americas conquered the Europeans—”
“But that is what happened,” said Kukalukl. Noting the others’ surprised looks, he added, “Really. I found it quite amazing that there were so many scientifically advanced pale‑skinned people running around after the Cataclysm. I didn’t think they had the brain-power to do more than pick lice from their beards and rape their own daughters.”
“Uh…that’s, um…wow. But, see, that only proves my point.”
“But how can it be that our respective times of origin are so wildly different?” asked Adam. “How could it have been 1988 in your world when the Cataclysm struck, but 1823 in ours, and thousands of years later in Freud’s?”
“Well, I’ve heard theories that in some of these different realities, time flows at a different rate.” He shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure, though.”
“And how can I be real in my own world but fictional in others? The same can be asked, of course, about gods and costumed crime-fighters.”
“Again, I don’t know. Maybe there’s some kind of…of leakage between realities, so that Mary Shelley caught a glimpse of what was going on in a different reality, maybe in a dream or something. Or…heck, I don’t know.”
“Or maybe it was the Cataclysm that made fictions realities,” said Maggie. “Maybe we are all fictions made real.”
And to that strange and sobering thought, no one, not even Freud, had a thing to say.
Chapter 5
Happyvale