Like all other superheroes, Cockroach-man had a special power, which was the power to endure. He could endure the worst trials, and even when his enemies had been swallowed up in the mists of time, he would scamper along the broken ground and find his way back into the light while poignant violins wept in the background. Oh yeah, he also had a talent for crawling into tight places, which explains how he ended up in a hole on the back forty of his mom’s farm. He’d done something he shouldn’t and was running away from The Hound when he slipped under the root of a big maple tree and down he went. What started as a crevice turned into a burrow turned into a tunnel turned into a cave. Cockroach-man slid all the way down, falling the last ten feet onto a bed of rocks beside an underground aquifer. The fall had bunged his knee so it hurt to walk, but he didn’t need to walk; all he needed was to endure.
Hound The Bounty Hunter arrived for his wedding in the specially outfitted jeep he drove on his reality TV show. He had asked the rest of the cast to be in the wedding party and they followed him just like on the show, roaring up the drive to Harriet’s farm in their pickup trucks and SUV’s and skidding to a halt in front of the old farm house. The wedding wasn’t for another three hours, but Harriet had invited them all for a brunch where they could exchange gifts and sing songs and tell stories, the usual yokel stuff that people on farms do. They’d all been whooping it up around the big harvest table when Hound remembered that he had a present in the jeep. It would be nice to give it to Harriet when everyone was watching. He excused himself from the table and went outside to get the present. The windshield was smashed. The tires were slashed. The whole jeep was spray painted in graffiti and signed above the right rear wheel: COCKROACH-MAN.
For as long as Greg could remember, he had been moved by intimations of greatness. He would be the next Stan Lee. Everyday, he had practised drawing Spider-man, and after he mastered all the poses—swinging, crouching, kicking, punching, brooding—he moved on to stories, working cell by cell through five-page sequences. Then he read somewhere about copyright and trademark infringement and how Stan Lee and Marvel Comics had been bought by Disney Corporation which might not take kindly to Greg doodling with their property. That was the inspiration for Cockroach-man, a way to keep drawing action heroes without getting the pants sued off him. The first step was the backstory: the hero was an ordinary guy named Johnny Montana who grew up on a farm in Nebraska but moved to the big city to work as a young lab technician at Manosnot Inc., the world’s leading manufacturer of genetically modified organisms. Their main product line was bug-resistant crop seeds. But there was a problem: the seeds worked. The bugs couldn’t eat the crops and so they starved to death and the farmers didn’t need their product anymore. To keep from going out of business, Manosnot developed the myth of the superbug. They said that bugs had adapted to the genetically modified seeds and were resistant to the resistance. Therefore they had to develop a new strain of seed that was resistant to the bugs that were resistant to the resistance. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as evolution; it’s just a story made up by liberals to sell more text books. But in this case, the story of evolution was useful because it gave Manosnot some cover. They could say superbugs had evolved, and then they could secretly introduce their own genetically modified bugs to create a demand for a new line of seeds. One night, while working late at the lab, Johnny accidentally pricked himself with a needle that had been exposed to a virus being used in a delivery mechanism for newly manufactured superbug DNA. The virus replicated the DNA inside Johnny’s medulla oblongata and the result was Cockroach-man with the power to endure and to squeeze into tight places.
Hound The Bounty Hunter was fair-haired and fair-skinned which meant that when he was angry, he turned the colour of a beet soaked in tomato sauce. He wanted to grab that skinny little twerp by the throat and squeeze the life out of him. Harriet called to him from the porch and he tried his best to pretend that he was the master of his anger. He showed her what Greg had done to his jeep and said that all he wanted was a good step-fatherly chat with the boy. Harriet confessed that Greg had been having troubles adapting to their marriage plans. Hound promised he’d track the boy down—after all, tracking people down was what he did for a living—and then they’d sort everything out. By “sort everything out” Hound meant that he’d chain the boy to the rear bumper of his jeep and drag him to Tennessee and back, but he kept that to himself. Hound started by gathering his posse in Greg’s bedroom. Like any good tracker, he’d begin the hunt by getting to know his quarry. That’s how he discovered Cockroach-man vs. The Hound, twenty pages, six cells to a page except the cover which was a full colour drawing of someone who looked a bit like Greg (apart from the cockroach suit) with one foot on a prone figure who looked a bit like The Hound (apart from an almost canine snout). The comic told the story of a mild-mannered farm boy protecting his mother from an unscrupulous suitor who professed his love but only wanted to marry the woman so he could get his grubby paws on her land and turn it into a Monster Truck Extravaganza. The Hound looked up from the comic and laughed. Monster Truck Extravaganza! Quelle blague! He had no idea what the boy was talking about.
Cockroach-man might endure, but he hadn’t anticipated how boring it would be to wait for the enduring to end. And damp. And dark. And uncomfortable. His knee was beginning to throb. It didn’t feel like it was broken, but he’d given it a good wrench. Maybe something to do with the cartilage or the ligaments. Touching his knee in the dark, it felt like there was a grapefruit growing under the skin. Grapefruit. Now there was a weird word. Why would anybody think a big yellow ball looks like a grape? It doesn’t look anything like a grape; more like an anemic orange on steroids. Greg’s stomach rumbled, and in the dark, the rumbling sounded like an earthquake. That was the flaw in his plan: he should have waited until after breakfast before he decorated Hound’s jeep. With an empty stomach, he wouldn’t be able to endure as long as he’d hoped. His mom made great flapjacks and, slathered in butter and maple syrup, there wasn’t anything better, except maybe the final scene of Cockroach-man vs. The Hound when good confronts evil and the truth is revealed and the naïve mom is saved at the last minute from making a huge mistake. After the final confrontation, when evil has run away with its tail between its legs, good goes home to his mom and she makes him flapjacks and bacon and eggs overeasy and fresh squeezed grapefruit juice.
Cockroach-man vs. The Hound? What kind of a loser spends all his time holed up in his room drawing comics? That’s what Hound wanted to know, although he kept the question to himself because Harriet was watching from the doorway. Instead, he laughed at the part about the Monster Truck Extravaganza and acted all chuckle jolly and pretended no such thought had ever entered his head. He promised he’d bring the boy back in time for the wedding. Tracking the boy was just about the easiest thing Hound had ever done. What with a club foot and a tendency to drag it behind the good foot, the boy might as well’ve drawn a line in the dirt and left a note saying come get me. When the posse reached the big maple and saw where the boy had fallen down the hole, Hound changed his mind. He wasn’t going to throttle the kid, or even manhandle him. The whole business was too pathetic. Instead, he’d rescue the kid like he’d promised and take him back to the farm and get him into the tuxedo they’d rented for him, the one they’d had to get fitted special. Hound motioned to his second, the guy they listed in the credits as Weasel, and told him to look down the hole with a flashlight. Weasel knelt in the dirt and stuck his head under the root, but he couldn’t see anything.
When Greg heard voices murmuring overhead, his first impulse was to cry out. Then he remembered that they were the enemy and not to be trusted. A sliver of light jittered across the roof of the cave and a voice called his name. He yelled that his name was Cockroach-man, not Greg, and he’d still be crawling over the face of the earth long after they’d all turned to rot. The voice said that was fine; all he wanted was to make sure the boy was okay and to tell him that his mom really hoped he’d make it back in time for the wedding. As the voice spoke, clods dislodged from the roof and splashed into the aquifer. The voice gave a whoop and something big came down with a splash and whump. Other voices called out from above: Weasel, Weasel. Cockroach-man snatched the flashlight from the water and shone it first at the roof, which showed him nothing, then at the riverbed, which showed him Weasel, or what used to be Weasel. Something bad had happened in the fall and now Weasel’s head was twisted all the way around, like in the movies when a person’s been possessed by the devil. Only Weasel wasn’t possessed by any devil. Weasel was dead. Cockroach-man had never seen anybody dead, excepting his dad, and that had been a few years ago and had seemed clinical and far away. This was messy and close up. The shock of it stunned Cockroach-man into silence. He shone the light at the dead eyes and stared. He heard two voices overhead wondering what had happened. They called again, Weasel Weasel, and added Greg Greg, but neither Weasel nor Greg existed anymore; there was only Cockroach-man and, like all true superheroes, he was inclined to silence. Next came the one they call the Rabbit, and when the earth gave way, Rabbit fell onto the rocks beside the aquifer, just as Cockroach-man had fallen. But Rabbit wasn’t as lucky as Cockroach-man and couldn’t move except for one arm which he used to drag himself over the rocks. Cockroach-man put an end to that with a well-aimed rock to the temple. The last thing he needed was a one-armed rabbit dragging itself through the dark.
Hound had never encountered anything like this. The silence, first of Weasel, then of Rabbit, spooked him. Most of the time, these two gave a commentary on every last thing they did and saw. Hound understood that they were playing to the camera, but sometimes they got so obnoxious he wished they’d shut up. Maybe that’s what had happened. Without a camera, they had nothing to say. Hound hollered into the hole, then again, but got nothing back from either of them. He shone a light into the hole but couldn’t see a thing. As a former WWF heavyweight champion of the world, Hound was too big across the chest to fit into your average hole in the ground. Even so, if he took off his shirt, let out his breath, and sucked in his gut, he might just squeeze underneath the maple root. He gave himself an extra shove by taking a run at it and leaping head first into the hole. He got himself wedged in up to his navel, legs kicking at the sky, arms pressed flat against his sides. After he spluttered to get the dirt out of his mouth, he called into the dark: Son, you down here? A flashlight flicked on and shone in his eyes: I’m not your son. That was true, but the kid was being a bit literal about things. After all, they called him Hound, but he wasn’t an actual dog. Which reminded him: Where’s Weasel and Rabbit? Cockroach-man shone the light on Weasel’s twisted neck, then moved to Rabbit’s bashed-in skull. (Because this ebook is on a seven-second delay, Hound’s next statement has been *’d. Needless to say, he registered considerable shock at what he saw.) Now, son, we’re gonna get you out of here. Cockroach-man didn’t say anything. My arms are kinda smushed against my sides; actually, I think I’m stuck. Cockroach-man didn’t say anything. You don’t suppose you could give me a shove, do you? Cockroach-man didn’t say anything. Oh, come on, your mom’s expecting the two of us for the wedding. At last, Cockroach-man said: Open wide. When Hound asked Huh? Cockroach-man jammed the butt of his flashlight into Hound’s open mouth and with his free hand, squeezed Hound’s nostrils shut. Cockroach-man almost lost his hold as Hound thrashed to free himself, but it wasn’t even a minute before the thrashing subsided and Hound’s body fell limp. Cockroach-man pulled out the flashlight and wiped off the spittle. He clambered over the bodies of Weasel and Rabbit and followed the aquifer into the darkness. He didn’t know where he was going, but it didn’t matter. He was Cockroach-man. Whatever happened, he would endure.