Andrea Wells awoke in a nervous sweat.  

It was the dead of night and outside her tent a frightful din could be heard.  Howls, she thought, like a dying animal.  Mournful lows, human almost in their agony -- but that was mere fancy on her part.  The howling, she knew, was only the wind.  Another dust storm was whipping its way across the flat, torrid landscape of 32-I, the same as last night and the night before that.  

She closed her eyes and prepared to drift back into fitful sleep, when another sound reached her ears.  A hollow clanging, one almost smothered up in those fierce winds.  This was a man made noise if there ever was one.  No mistaking that.  It was coming from somewhere out in the storm, somewhere in the dead city their encampment abutted.

Several minutes passed before Andrea managed to find her boots and goggles in the dark, then pull up the hood of her tattered green cloak and fasten it tight about her throat.  She exited the tent with a heavy fluorescent lantern swinging in one hand and her laser rifle in the other, serving as a makeshift crutch.  Her left leg was still weak from the injury she’d taken over a week ago.* 

* (Andrea was shot back in M2K Fantastic Four v2 #6 - Al)

No more than three feet was visible through the red dust at any given time as she trailed the feeble light of her lantern, keeping to the newly constructed path that led into the city.  It was one literally beaten into the dirt by the feet of the tribesmen Reed and herself had drafted in their reconstruction efforts.  In a very short time, they had done a great deal to return the abandoned city to working order.  One day, very likely soon, this path would become a road she thought, lit by street lamps and traveled by caravans or even automobiles of some design.  Why not?

The revival of this old science, once the cobwebs were pealed back, would move swiftly she was certain.  However it had been stolen in the past, the light of progress would now return to this world.   That would be her legacy here.  And Reed’s too of course.  More his than hers, if she was to be honest. 

Except he was missing now.  For over a week.  He had gone into the base of the Ghost Gods, the strange mechanical creatures that menaced the people of this world, and he had not returned.  This was Reed Richards though.  Mr. Fantastic.  She was worried but she had not given into anything like despair.

It took longer to reach the city at night than it would have in the daytime.  Andrea had to move slowly, carefully judging each step and double-checking her direction.  It was easy to get lost in the dust storms and the tribe told many tales of wanderers who braved the winds, never to return. 

Thankfully the storm grew less fierce as she entered the city proper, although she felt no less uneasy there.   The same shapes that gave the city its dream-like appearance in the bright sun -- its high silvery domes, sweeping arches, and elevated magnetic railways -- took on aspects of horror in the dark.  Long, impenetrable shadows spread out before her and, under the dim moonlight, the rails looked like so many coiled snakes.

Andrea shivered and continued to track the sound to its source.  It grew louder as she went, eventually leading her to a building they had taken to thinking of as the central power station for the city.  Much of their work had been focused here, attempting to restore the generators and repair what remained of the city grid.  They had enjoyed a great deal of progress and were confident of restoring full power any day now. 

This is where the sound was coming from.  And this is where she found him.  Andrea no longer needed her lantern here, as the interior lights had all been turned on, bathing the plant in a piercing blue neon glow.  For a moment she felt blinded.  Not by the lights but by what she was seeing beneath them.  She couldn’t make sense of it.  There were parts of machinery scattered everywhere on the floor.  Machinery that, she swore, had only recently been repaired by her own hands, now smashed and disassembled beyond hope of scavenging again.

It took a moment before she realized how that could be.  He was destroying it.  All of it.  He was dismantling their work piece by piece.

She finally found him in one of the control rooms, the wires having been torn from the mainframe, diodes smashed and circuit boards crushed savagely under heel.   He was so hard at work he didn’t note her arrival, or perhaps didn’t care. 

“Reed?” she whispered, placing a hand on his shoulder.  “What…what are you doing?”

He didn’t flinch at her touch but he froze.  When he turned to face her, she reflexively stepped back.  His face was haggard and gaunt, a scruffy line of stubble covering his chin.  It was his eyes that frightened her most though.  Bloodshot, red-rimmed, full of exhaustion and despair.  

“Leave.”  She shook her head and Reed repeated that one word, firmly, before returning to his destructive work.  All further effort to get his attention failed.  It was as if she was no longer there as far as he was concerned. 

The dismantling went on for hours and there was no end in sight when she finally crept away.  The storm had stopped but a fine red dust still clung to everything.  The sun’s first rays were already peeking over the horizon.

Andrea returned to her tent, puzzled, upset, and most of all frightened. 

Frightened by that awful haunted look in her old friend’s eyes.

“…and then I left.”

“But what happened to Reed?”

“I’m so sorry, Susan, but I don’t know.”

Three weeks had passed since that night if Andrea’s timeline could be believed.  Susan had no reason to doubt her yet still found doubt her first instinct.  She knew very little of this woman, after all, and it was her distress signal that had called them to the Negative Zone so many months ago.  Now she’d returned with wild stories about her husband gone half-mad.  Stories that didn’t sound like the Reed she knew at all.

Her husband didn’t destroy.  He simply didn’t.  It was antithesis to the man she loved.  She’d quicker believe her brother kept a notebook full of poetry under his bed.  Which is to say she struggled to believe it at all.

Why would Wells lie though?  Everything had seemed well in hand when the team had departed 32-I.  She’d disliked the thought of splitting up at the time but Reed had been insistent.  They were needed back on Earth and he was needed there.  Simple enough.  Unspoken was also the fact it provided him a chance to get away from the intense criticism he’d been suffering of late, ever since the publication of Unnatural Acts.*   He could do what he loved in peace while the worst of the media blitz blew over.

* (A critical exposé on the unforeseen applications of meta-science in the MU, first appearing back in M2K Fantastic Four v2 #1 - Al)

If Wells was telling the truth, could someone else be involved, Susan asked herself.  Had one of their enemies set a trap?  Gotten Reed alone and then sprung it while his family was literally a world away?  His behavior as Andrea described it could easily fit the MO of the Puppet Master or the Hate-Monger.  There were plenty of other maniacs who called the Negative Zone home too, and many had grudges against her husband.

So a trap was very possible, she knew.  Anything was really.  Membership in the Fantastic Four had taught her that years ago. 

Equally possible is that it wasn’t as simple as a villain this time.  That worried her most of all.

“I couldn’t stay, Susan, I just couldn’t.  Reed was already gone by the next morning and the tribe had disappeared as well.  I tried to find them, I did, but with my injury…” 

Andrea paused to sip unsteadily from a mug of warm tea, her eyes focused downwards to avoid meeting Susan’s own.  This woman was a scientist not an adventurer, she had to remind herself.   While she couldn’t quite bring herself to tell Andrea that leaving her husband behind was okay, she could at least try to understand.    

“Without them I had no source for food or water.  I tried searching but when my supplies ran low, what else could I do?  Maybe I should have left even sooner, contacted you right way.  I didn’t know the proper move.”

“And you have no idea what happened to Reed beforehand?  No idea what brought this on?”

“Only that he disappeared into that bunker for several days without contact.  Whatever he found inside must made him regret everything we’d done and…”

“And?”

“And possibly more, Susan.  I’d never seen him like that.  Not while we were students together at least.  I don’t know what it all meant.  Only nothing good.”

Funny.  It was funny, he thought.  Life.  The twists and turns it took, how you never really knew where you might end up.  Just when you thought you had things figured out -- if you managed to even reach that point -- something new would come along to change it all on you.

At least that’s what Griffen Gogol was thinking as he slipped his flashlight into his belt before starting the evening shift.  He was not, by nature, given over to philosophical musings.  It’s just that there was something about security guard work that seemed to encourage introspection in him. 

Probably the routine and isolation, he figured.  A Rousseau or Nietzsche could have constructed and laid waste to entire worldviews within the empty hours he passed in an average week.  Griffen had no such ambitions.  He did, however, enjoy chasing the occasional idle thought. 

Like this one now.  About life’s funny twists and turns.  The funny part being that with all the strange twists his own had taken he’d somehow ended up here.  A paunchy middle-aged security guard who put in an eight hour workday and then went home to a tiny apartment and two demanding toy terriers.   And he wasn’t unhappy.  In fact, Griffen rather liked the arrangement.  It was far better than anything he’d ever done up until now, including working as a plumber or even briefly wearing a cape.    

Griffen was in the midst of such deep thoughts when he rounded a corner of the warehouse and found himself facing his second worse fear.  An actual intruder.  In theory always a possibility, but it wasn’t really supposed to ever happen.  He wasn’t quite sure if he should take this one seriously though.  After all, the man was sporting a top hat, black bolo tie, white gloves, and the sort of pointy waxed mustache made famous by Snidely Whiplash. 

“Hey, ah, you’re not supposed to be in here…?”  For some reason, Griffen phrased this as a question.

The dapper figure, tall and angular in his absurd dress clothes, bowed and displayed both of his hands palms up.  They were empty.  He then removed the top hat from his head and spun it around, exposing the inside to Griffen.  Also empty.

“Um, sir, did you hear me…?”

The man smiled slyly and plunged his hand down into it.  His arm sunk almost up to the elbow, which seemed improbably far to Griffen given the hat’s dimensions.  When he pulled it back out, he was holding a fluffy white bunny rabbit by the ears.   

“Say, that’s pretty neat.  But, seriously, this is breaking and entering, you can’t just waltz in here and…”

The man held the rabbit out to Griffen. 

“No, no, I can’t take that!  It’s cute and all but…”

The rabbit’s eyes, so small and shiny, latched onto his own.  Red, he thought with a sudden start.  They were very, very red, and they flickered.  In fact, the longer Griffen stared into them, the more he became certain that there was something inside of them.  Flames.  There were tiny flames dancing within the heart of its eyes and they began to grow in intensity until he realized he smelled something burning.   They licked out him with a crackle of heat and he did what came natural.

He screamed. 

The man in black watched calmly as Griffen fled in terror, a fluffy bundle of white fur bounding after him, wisps of smoke trailing in its wake.  He bowed theatrically to the now empty hallway and carefully placed his hat back on his head.  Picking up a large bundle in a burlap sack at his feet, he then strolled towards the warehouse’s exit. 

An exit marked with an enormous ‘4’ and the unheeded warning:  ‘Property of the Fantastic Four.  No trespassing allowed.’

Susan sat in the living room of the Baxter Building long after Andrea left, thinking.  A whole range of thoughts crossed through her mind, some connected, some seemingly random.  Mostly about Reed, of course, about herself, but also about mundane things like what her children would want for dinner tonight.  The practical could never be completely dismissed from her concerns.  She was a mother as well as a hero.  She prioritized the former over the latter most of the time.   When she could.

That troubling duality was among her thoughts, in fact.  How tiresome this life could get.  Always worrying about her family, never able to relax, or focus on just the one thing.  Someone was always missing or in peril or in crisis.  How could someone live like that?  How had <em>she</em> lived like that?  Or had she really?

Sometimes it felt like things were just one loose thread away from unraveling.  The right pull at the right time, be it from Doom or even something as trivial as a muckraking book, and it would all come apart at the seams.

It wasn’t until she heard Namor gently clearing his throat behind her that Susan realized she wasn’t alone.

“God, you scared me.  How long have you been standing there?”
 

“I don’t know.  Before that other woman left.  I heard what she told you.”

“You should have said something Namor.  Do you know I’ve been trying to contact you ever since you ran off?”*  She sighed.  “I really don’t need additional stress right now.”

* (last issue - Al)

“I do understand, Susan.  I required time to think, as you did just now.”

Think about what, she wanted to demand, but her upbringing held those words back.  That would be insensitive.  Namor was going through trauma of his own, having recently left his home in Atlantis, perhaps for good.   He was no longer a king there and part of his identity had been stripped from him. 

Nor was Namor fitting in well here.  He never had.  A small part of her felt for him, when she allowed herself that luxury.

“And what did you decide?”

“I hadn’t decided anything until a few moments ago.  If fact I’d returned here even more confused than before.  I thought I might travel the globe but I have done that before and it did not interest me then.  Now I know what my purpose is here.  First, however, I need to hear what you’ve decided.”

“I think that’s obvious.  I have to gather the team and go find Reed.”

“But the Negative Zone is a very large place, Susan.  There’s no telling how long it may take.”

“I don’t have any other option.”

He sat down on the cushion beside her and took her hand in his own.  She allowed this but with a wariness in her eyes.  Namor had long ago accepted that she’d married another man, but never with the best of grace.  No was a very hard word for the prince of over two thirds the globe to understand. 

Former prince, she reminded herself. 

“Let me go.  Let me find your husband and bring him back to you, Susan.”

She wasn‘t sure how to respond.  This offer wasn’t what she expected.   “That’s…kind, Namor.  It is.  I can’t though.  We’re his family.”

“Yes, exactly.  A family.  A family with responsibilities at home.  I’ve lived here long enough to see that.  Your children need you.  Your world needs you.” 

Responsibilities.  He was right there.  Even now Ben and Johnny were out assisting in clearing away the collateral damage from the Avengers recent battle with Kang’s armada in New York City.  There were always things like that calling for their attention.  Early reports had even placed Dr. Hank Pym among the casualties.*  The Fantastic Four were certainly needed here now, but when weren’t they? 

* (Both results of the Kang/Ultron War.  See related mini-series on this site. - Backlogged Al)

Reed was needed too.  By the hero community, by his fellow scientists, and by her and their children most of all.

“Finding Reed may take a very long time, Susan.  For me that matters not.  Time no longer has any immediacy for Namor.  There is no where I need to be.  No one misses my presence.”

“That’s an exaggeration…”

“Is it?”  Namor smiled faintly, something he rarely did.  “I know I must appear foolish at times to surface dwellers.  My ways abnormally brusque.  I am not ignorant nor self-deluding however.  I will be as much a burden to you as an aid if I stay.  In this quest, however, I can serve a purpose.”

“I… I don’t know Namor.  It’s not a question of your sincerity or ability.  I don’t doubt either one.  I’m just not sure I can stand to sit here, not knowing…”

“Perhaps it’s not entirely your decision to make?  You have responsibilities, much I once did in Atlantis.  And responsibilities are demanding things that do not allow people to meet them only at their convenience.  The world cannot be long without a Fantastic Four, whereas the world now finds even one Namor superfluous.  It is clear who can be spared and thus who should go.”

She opened her mouth to protest again and his hand squeezed hers, gently but firmly.

“Let me do this Susan.  Let me help you as you helped me.  I will not fail.”

Two hundred miles from the North Pole, deep within the Arctic Circle, a peculiar man sat on a melting iceberg.   He was small and green with a head like an oblong football and a body so gangly and thin it might have been constructed from pipe cleaners.  He sat reclining in a plastic foldout chair, dressed only in a pair of Bermuda shorts, reading a glossy tabloid magazine.   The wind chill was just slightly below thirty degrees Celsius. 

Nearby, unobserved, a polar bear squatted in the snow, studying him curiously, as a cat might eye an open can of tuna. 

Oblivious, the man licked his finger -- the moisture began to freeze almost instantly -- and carefully turned the page.  His brow was knit in concentration.  He’d come out here today to work on his tan, naturally, and so had not expected to be confronted with Important News.  The ‘i’ and the ‘n’ were, in fact, capitalized in his mind.  

An article, the one directly below a scintillating foray in deceased starlet Virginia Pokes’s varied love life, had captured his full attention.  It was titled:  ‘Where’s Reed Richards?’ and then, as if uncertain anyone could be presumed to care, followed up with the subtitle:  ‘World’s Most Fantastic Couple on the Rocks.’

The man sat up.  The polar bear inched closer. 

Even more terrible words followed.  Reed Richards had been absent from Earth for several months now.  His female partner, Susan Storm Richards, has been seen in the company of Namor during that time.  According to the paper, Reed and Susan were married, a bizarre Earth custom of bonding so fascinating that the man had once even tried it out himself. 

The article, however, seemed convinced their marriage was now doomed.  Speculations were rampant.  Accusations cruel.  Fantasies frankly suggestive.  Clearly someone had to do something.  Someone like --

The polar bear sprung forward at that very instant, clamping powerful jaws around the man’s scrawny throat.  It was a killing blow deadly enough to down a three hundred pound seal instantly.  As soon as tooth touched flesh, however, a jolt of electricity shot through the creature’s massive body, leaving it stunned but otherwise unharmed.  Impossibly, its would-be victim had evolved into a thing of pure energy.

He was still sitting in his sun chair though and finished his thought undisturbed.

Someone like the Impossible Man!

NEXT ISSUE:  With Reed still missing and the rest of the Fantastic Four preoccupied, it’s left to Franklin and friends to investigate a robbery at the FF’s warehouse.  The problem?  The thief appears to be a dead man.

FANTASTIC FORUM

This was a short one but ungodly difficult to actually write for some reason.

Observant readers or those blessed with elephantine memories, might recall my Next blurb in FF #7 hinting at an interlude involving the New Fantastic Four.  That didn’t happen, as I decided to buckle down and finish this one first.  Those issues may still appear in the future as time permits, possibly next year. 

As for ‘09, I’m hoping for at least one more release and possibly a Christmas Special I’ve had percolating for awhile now.  Crossed fingers.

As always any and all feedback’s greatly appreciated.