Ice Cream and Venom Read Free

particularly now that we've lost our protector. I see a contrail in the pale blue distance above the charred ruins of downtown. It could be Uberlord or Superjunge, or Fille de Pouvoir or one of the other heavy-hitting fliers, if so, it's really disastrous. Or it could just be some also-ran like Flitter or Skythe, who can't do much more than fly. Either way, they're looking for us in the wrong part of town, so if we play it safe, we might have a chance. I note absently that the sun is rising from the east, and not the south, which means that some damn fool or another shifted the earth's orbit again. The gods get bored, I suppose. Or perhaps they're prone to drunken dares. Or maybe they're just showing off, trying to get laid. Who really understands them?
    No one has said it, but in the absence of Blacknight, I'm the leader. I don't want the job, but I did take it seriously in the twelve or so hours I'd had it. No one asks to be Commander Adama, no one asks to be Moses, but it's not like you can refuse the mantle when it descends upon you. I make my way in to the central room, and start rousing everyone, including the guards, who are of course asleep anyway. I haul out my bag full of food pills—one of Professor Retroactive's inventions from a decade ago, intended to end world hunger; He'd gotten the idea while watching a 1930s SF movie—and I pass one out to everyone. I don't bother to count our numbers, but I see that one of the refugees has bled to death in the night, a victim of yesterday's suppertime dust-up with Vox Inhumana in which he lost a leg. I smile—actually, I don't smile, I haven't felt my expression change in days, I don't have the energy or hope, but I feel some little pang in my head that's somewhat related to humor—at the knowledge that though Blacknight is dead, at least he gutted Vox like a trout as his last act. The story of the human race would have ended then and there, but Blacknight bought us another page or two. Maybe, if I'm very, very lucky, I can buy us another chapter.
    Oh, who am I trying to kid? The story of the human race is already over and done. This is denouement. A coda at best, a footnote at worst.
    I note that Deadpan is elderly again. That's problematic. Deadpan was a street-level hero, just like Blacknight: no powers, but unbelievably good acrobatic skills. Blacknight was all about hand-to-hand combat and spooky-good detective skills. He had openly patterned his superhero persona on the comic book character Batman—well, duh—and he was our leader. Deadpan had equally good acrobatic skills, but was a for-suck detective. He was kind of the moral consciousness of superherodom, though, master of underhanded sarcasm, and his own self-invented fighting style, an odd cross between Kendo, Fencing, and Juggling. It was his out-of-the-box thought processes that had kept us one step ahead of the Supers during our long, slow retreat over the past few months. Were it not for him, we'd have gone extinct long ago.
    Mister Bryghtsyde caught him a month in to our exodus. Bryghtsyde had always been fond of erratic and unpredictable stochastic logical constructs, so of course he wanted to experiment on Deadpan. Blacknight made sure we'd escaped, then insisted he go back to rescue 'Pan. I went with him, leaving Toliver in charge of the refugees. There were still around 900 of us at that point. We hitched a hypertube to the planet Eschatelon, rescued our friend against all odds to the contrary, and made our way home again. The whole adventure took less than a week, but by the time we got back, there were only 500 refugees left.
    Our victory was hollow. Bryghtsyde did something to Deadpan, some kind of experiment. The result was that our friend aged down to a newborn baby state, then up to doddering senescence, then back again, about every 17 hours or so. What kind of sick game is that? A week later, while we were skirting past the outskirts of the futuristic wonderworld that used to be Rugby, North