#144: The Flight of Dr. Braindead!

Trent Phloog’s third-person flashback continues … (Part 6 of 6)

The Marketable Universe, July 4, 1976

Megaton Man and the Human Meltdown traded blows in midair over the Statue of Liberty, knocking the other back hundreds of feet with each one, and more than once coming perilously close to crashing into the monument. Still aloft, whoever was struck would blasted back, come to a stop, hover for a moment as they recovered, then fly right back at the other one to throw another punch in return. It was a very inefficient way to fight.

#143: The Bicentennial Battle of the Millennium!

Trent Phloog’s third-person flashback continues … (Part 5 of 6)

The Marketable Universe, July 4, 1976

The City Room of The Manhattan Project, nerve center of that great daily newspaper, was empty on the sweltering summer afternoon except for the lone figure of Trent Phloog. The unpaid cub reporter, his padded Robert Mitchum suit soaked in perspiration, snoozed at his desk, his snores in concert with the rattling sounds of the window fans and the smooth murmur of ceiling fans, neither of which did anything to combat the sultry New York City heat.

#142: The Quantum Quest Quartet

Trent Phloog’s third-person flashback continues … (Part 4 of 6)

The Marketable Universe, May 1976

Meanwhile, in a midtown skyscraper, a megahero team was scrambling to an alarm.
        “I’m afraid we’ll have to cancel our regularly-scheduled vacation to Bug-Eyed Island, See-Thru Girl!” announced a bulbous, sloshing, elderly man in blue leotards with a white “Q” on his chest. Rex Rigid’s bloated face stared opaquely at a bank of computer monitors arrayed from floor to ceiling, his gloved hands turning knobs and pressing buttons. “The Quantum Tower’s elaborate defenses systems have detected an emergency!”

#88: The Quantum Tower

Since my visit to the Forbidden Future, I swore off any form of transportation that was faster-than-light let alone temporal or dimensional, and decided to fly myself to New York as Ms. Megaton Man. So, one morning I suited up, with the class ring my father had bought me for graduation snugly under my yellow glove. Kozmik Kat, who could probably fly but was too chicken to try, had to settle for being uncomfortably crammed into my backpack. The digital readouts on my visor kept me out of the air lanes—it even provided me a good public domain book to read, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White—and we made it in a couple of hours, although Koz clawed me once or twice when I wasn’t paying attention and we hit turbulence.

#81: Views from Olympus

“What up doe, Banky?” I said as I entered the Troy+Thems hall.
     Few people get my sense of humor to begin with, and my white colleagues weren’t sure they had permission to laugh at a black woman doing her impression of a racial stereotype. But Rubber Brother loved it.
     “Ha! Buckwheat from The Little Rascals,” he chortled. “Clarissa, that breaks me up every time you do it!”

#62: This Fairground, This Battlefield

I wasn’t wearing my Ms. Megaton Man uniform under my clothes for extra insulation as I usually did this time of year, since I was wearing my nice dress again to visit Mama. So, I had to race back to where Avie had parked her Pacer. There, in the back seat among the groceries and gifts, I had stowed my book bag, just in case. I stripped right there, in the parking lot behind Mama’s apartment building, hoping none of her neighbors happened to be looking out their back windows at just that moment to see her daughter turn into a megahero.

#36: Sex and the Single Megahero

It was strange for me to realize, but considering the variety and sheer number of sexual experiences I’d had in the two years since I'd lost my virginity to Yarn Man, my relationship with Nancy—that is to say, Agatha—was the closest thing to a normal, dating relationship I’d ever had. This was due, in part, to her being a civilian—as opposed to being a megahero or former megahero. But it was more because most of the sex I’d had up to that point in my life had been impromptu hook-ups: I shagged Yarn Man the moment I’d laid eyes on him, and later we shacked up in the basement rec room my Daddy built and seldom went out thereafter. That summer, when I became Ms. Megaton Man, I spent a couple of weeks binge-partying with every college athlete on the Arbor State University campus—male or female—just before the fall semester of my repeat junior year began. At the very end of the school year, I finally did it with Trent, whom I had gotten to know from living in the same house as him over the previous two and a half years; we certainly had never gone out on a date.

#29: Megaton vs. Meltdown

As I caught up to the Q-Mobile, I could feel the heat rising from the open top; even though the winter air was frigid, the Human Meltdown was giving off considerable body heat. Chuck was on top of my sister in the back seat, her body underneath his. She was screaming and pounding him with her fists.
     “Get off me!” she shouted, her arms flailing. “I don’t want this!”
     “Just relax, honey,” he replied. “Enjoy the ride. You wouldn’t want to hop out now—it’s quite a drop into the drink.”
     I had no real fear that he would drop my sister from the Q-Mobile, but it was also clear he was overpowering her; her jacket and shirt were ripped open, and her pants were pulled down. Chuck had the lower half of his red and yellow costume also pulled down; he was obviously readying himself to penetrate her.
     That’s when I grabbed his hair.

#28: Everything But the Kitchen Sink

The next morning, I decided to take up Dana—Domina—on her offer from a few days earlier to throw me into the deep end of the Y+Thems’ Devastation Chamber. After Avie and I hit the showers together—to avoid another incident with Chuck Roast—I suited up in my Ms. Megaton Man uniform while Avie dressed.
     “Where’s my shoulder bag?” asked Avie.
     “I don’t see it around here,” I said. “Did you leave it up in the Q-Mobile? After Bing parked on the roof, I remember you bringing your blanket down. But I don’t remember the shoulder bag. Why, did you need something from it?”
     “Nothing important,” said Avie. “I’m sure it’ll be safe for the time being.”

#27: A Side Trip to New Jersey

A couple thousand feet in the air now, Yarn Man took a left, which became a wide U-turn; soon we were heading south over the Bay of New York. To the west was New Jersey; below us were Ellis and Liberty Islands; the Statue of Liberty lay dead ahead. Beyond that, as my visor readout labeled for me, were the large gantry cranes loading and unloading container ships in the Port Jersey Marine Terminal. Beyond that was Bayonne, a New Jersey town long industrialized to the point of toxicity, and already past its peak in terms of economic output and population.

#26: The Hole on Fifth Avenue

The next morning I woke up with Avie standing over my lower bunk, soaking wet and wrapped in a towel, in a total panic.
     “I was taking a shower down the hall,” she said, gasping for breath. “And who walked in but that Chuck fellow.”
     “Stella’s half-brother?” I asked. “Chuck Roast? The Human Meltdown? The one you’d cast as America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero?” This was probably no time to rub it in.
     “I don’t think so any more,” said Avie, almost crying. “He barged in on the ladies’ shower, dropped his towel—he’s drop-dead gorgeous, by the way—but then he claimed it was all a mistake.”
     “He was putting the moves on you?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

#25: The Devastation Chamber

Avie and I went downstairs to the Observation Booth. Koz was already there; some of the Y+Thems who knew him were glad to see him and were petting him. Ordinarily, Koz abhorred being petted, but he was basking in the limelight. “My God,” I said. “This is just like show business.”

#23: Dining Room Diagrams

Back on Ann Street, a couple evenings later, I calmly spread a paper map of downtown Ann Arbor and the campus of Arbor State University over the dining room table. Over that, I spread sheets of tracing paper—the biggest I could find was a pad from a stationary store, so I had to tape sheets together. On this surface, I drew the coordinates my visor had calculated based on my cape’s tour through the underground network of Megatonic University.

#22: Dr. Joe’s Lab

I still had no idea where Megatonic University was located. I only recalled Preston Percy saying he had relocated to Ann Arbor to oversee several projects “around and under” the Arbor State University campus. He denied that these had anything to do with any fabled Megaton University, but they must have been important for a secret agent to abandon his perch on the Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning orbiting satellite and relocate from New York besides.
     But I was no closer to knowing exactly where Dr. Joseph Levitch’s secret laboratory was.

#20: Campy, Coverless Comics

I went back to the van and put on my civvies, then the four of us—Samson, Preston, Koz, and I—met at an outdoor table in front of the bookstore to compare notes.
     Preston reported that at that very moment agents from ICHHL were investigating Mervyn Goldfarb’s apartment. Sure enough, he was formerly employed by Dr. Joe Levitch’s lab years before when it was still located in Ann Arbor, and recently had taken to cooking up batches of homemade Mega-Soldier Syrup in his bathtub and selling it to unwary college students at a huge profit. Notes located already seemed to indicate it was an obsolete formula and the Mervyn hadn’t been too particular about following the recipe precisely.

#18: Origin Secrets

Kozmik Kat and I couldn’t agree whether he was now my sidekick or I was his—just in case we were ever officially called into action for some mission. We didn’t come to blows over this, since it was mostly hypothetical; as soon as the fall semester started, I planned to put my Quarantinium-Quelluminum mesh-fiber Ms. Megaton Man uniform in its garment bag and consign it to the back of the closet. The hard part was learning to put my cape into hibernation, which I could only do through some complex instructions on my touch-screen visor. But before I could do that, I still had one personal mission of my own to perform.

#17: Body by Nuke

What took place on my virgin flight and immediately thereafter has been greatly exaggerated in the media, most notably in that aforementioned scandalous “novel,” Megasomething. If you believed everything in that account, you’d be persuaded I had gone on a tear with every student athlete returning to the Arbor State campus for late-summer training camps—and taken on scores of lovers besides. The precise number bandied about is one hundred and twenty-seven men and thirty-one women—which was totally made up. I should know, because I made it up.

#16: Ms. Megaton Man Breaks Out!

That summer following my delayed junior-year freshman crisis began quietly enough. Duly chastened by the academic catastrophe of my own making, I begged and got myself hired back as a waitress at the Drowned Mug Café; all seemed forgiven and forgotten. I worked my ass off there for the entire month of May; when June rolled around, I went off again to Camp Michi-Fo-La-Ca again. So far, this was my typical summer routine.

#15: Yarn Man’s Hippie Crash Pad

The next morning, I phoned Avie and told her not to come out to Ann Arbor to pick me up. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You don’t have any incompletes or anything, do you?”
     “No, of course not,” I said.
     “They don’t need you at the Drowned Mug, do they?” she asked.
     “No,” I said. I didn’t mention I got fired.
     “You met some guy!” she said.
     “No, I did not meet some guy,” I replied. During the entire Thanksgiving weekend at home in Detroit, I had never mentioned once that Yarn Man had shown up and was being held a virtual prisoner—for his own good—in our Ann Street basement. Nor had I mentioned he was still there. “I just like the snow better in Ann Arbor.”

#14: Thanks for the Use of the Safe Room

The object descending upon us was egg-shaped, with a flat bottom; it sprouted retractable landing gear with disc-shaped pads from its underside as it descended from the night sky over Ann Street.
     Pammy and Matt, who by now had come out onto the porch, were also gazing up at the sky.
     “Looks like one of those old-fashioned beauty shop hair dryers,” said Matt, “like old ladies would sit under in hair curlers.”
     He was right—that’s exactly what it looked like.
     “It’s just Preston,” said Pammy, “making a big, show-offy entrance, as usual.”
     “Preston?” I said. “Secret Agent Preston Percy? What’s he doing up in outer space?”