by Hunter Shea
“Frightening, gripping.”—Night Owl Review
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Chapter One
Tuckerville, NY, 1980
When everything was said and done and the dead were long buried, they would blame Wonder Woman.
While everyone else collected Star Wars (the red, yellow, blue and green series) and baseball cards, Patrick Richards and David Estrada plunked every hard-earned nickel they had on comic books. Oh, and there were also the protective plastic bags they had to buy to keep each issue as pristine as possible.
Their habit was expensive, but the thirteen-year-old best friends found ways to scrape together enough money every month to buy the latest issues of The Fantastic Four, Captain America, The Flash, Marvel Two-In-One (featuring The Thing and a different guest hero each issue), Green Arrow and too many others to count. Well, they could count them. In fact, each could rattle off the total number of comics in their collections at a moment’s notice.
“Three hundred and twenty-five,” Patrick would say.
“Four hundred and two,” David would say, showing off just a bit.
Patrick had a paper route while David mowed lawns for the older people in the neighborhood. Sometimes, they would wait outside the Shopwell supermarket, offering to load people’s bags into their cars for tips. An afternoon at Shopwell could net them enough scratch to buy four or more comics.
And there was always shoveling to be done in the winter, along with raking leaves in the fall.
When you had a comic addiction, you had to find ways to feed the beast.
They found themselves in late May flush with cash, thanks to a visit from Patrick’s grandparents. His grandfather had slipped a twenty-dollar bill into Patrick’s pocket, whispering in his ear, “Don’t tell your parents. That’s comic book money. Get enough to last the summer.”
“You’re really gonna share?” David said, staring at the twenty on the floor between them.
“It’s not like we don’t read the same comics,” Patrick said. “The deal is, I get to add more to my collection. Say we split it seventy–thirty?”
David smiled. “I’ll take it.”
They shook and it was done.
The four-block ride to Blackburn’s stationery store had them both in a sweat. Summer had come early. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun was downright brutal. Popping tandem wheelies, they leaped off their bikes at the entrance, both riderless Huffys crashing to the ground in a tangle of metal and rubber.
Blackburn’s kept the comics in a long rectangular box on the floor under the magazine rack. The boys got on their knees, carefully rifling through the upright stack.
“We have everything,” David said, deflating. His short-cut black hair glistened with drops of sweat.
“Almost,” Patrick said, plucking a Wonder Woman free. His own face was flushed, bringing the cluster of freckles on his cheeks to blazing prominence.
David considered it, then shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s better than nothing.”
They paid forty cents for the issue, getting a ton of change that somehow made it seem like they had more money than when they had started. The boys jumped back on their bikes and pedaled home, anxious to get back to David’s room because it had an air conditioner.
David read along with Patrick, just over his shoulder. Neither was a Wonder Woman aficionado, but neither could argue against the fact that she had one sexy bod.
Sexy for a comic book character. Not as hot as, say, Mrs. Pendleton, freshly divorced and constantly on the prowl. The boys appreciated how difficult she made it for any straight male to not stare at her bulging rack or curvy hips.
They were done in five minutes, the air from the AC making the pages of the comic flutter.
“Well, that was exciting,” David said, rolling onto his back.
“It would have made more sense if we had read the previous two issues.” Patrick flipped through it again. They’d decided they weren’t going to preserve this one. Wonder Woman just didn’t make the cut for the special-bag treatment.
He perused the endless ads for gag gifts, magic kits, body building guides and footlockers filled with a thousand army men.
His eyes paused on the all too familiar ad for the Amazing Sea Serpents! In the ad, a smiling family of creatures that looked like a cross between mermaids and anacondas, with almost human faces, waved back at him from the comfort of their underwater city.
Sea serpents make the ultimate pet! No mess! Low maintenance! Just add water and let the fun begin!
Patrick had always wanted to order the Amazing Sea Serpents, but his parents absolutely forbid him from, in their words, wasting his money on worthless junk.
“All that stuff is a scam,” his father had once said. “When I was a kid, I ordered what was supposed to be a working rocket that could break the atmosphere. What I got was a balsa wood stick and a big rubber band.”
But that was then, in the old days.
There were laws and stuff now about scams like that. If it was in a comic book, it had to be tested and approved. Stan Lee would never pull one over their eyes. Excelsior!
“We should order the Amazing Sea Serpents,” Patrick said.
David had his eyes closed, his hands clasped behind his head. “Huh?”
“They only cost $4.95. You get the serpents, their tank and everything.”
Now David sat up. He’d wanted his own for a long time, too, but his parents felt the same way about the whole business as Patrick’s.
“We have the money,” Patrick said. “And even after that, we’ll still have fourteen bucks for the new comics when they come in.”
“What about our parents?”
“We don’t have to tell them. It says it takes six weeks for delivery. It’ll be summer vacation by then. My mom and dad will be at work by eight every morning. I’ll be the only one home when the serpents come in the mail. We can set them up in your basement.”
David’s basement had been a downstairs apartment until the tenants had moved out months earlier. Until his family found new ones, the place was all theirs. Most of the time, they just read comics on the overstuffed couch that had been left behind, eating from brown bags filled with chewy Swedish fish.
“I’ll get an envelope,” David said, running to the dining room.
Patrick found a pair of scissors and cut the ad out. He would never take scissors to X-Men or Spider-Man.
At least this way, Wonder Woman was serving a noble purpose.
He filled out the order form and David sealed it in the envelope along with a five-dollar bill, licking the stamp. They were going to be out a nickel, but what did it matter?
“I can’t wait to see what they look like,” David said, a grin splitting his face in half. “I bet they won’t be boring as all those beta fish we’ve had.”
On his way home up the street, Patrick dropped it in the mailbox.
Six weeks couldn’t come fast enough.
Chapter Two
Nothing was better than the first day of summer vacation. Nothing, that is, until Patrick checked the mail and saw the box with a return address from the Bakura Corporation. That’s where the Amazing Sea Serpents came from. It took all his will power not to tear the box open. But he’d promised to wait to do it with David.
The box was awful small.
In the ad, it looked like the Amazing Sea Serpents lived in this huge tank surrounded by a veritable underwater metropolis. Whatever was in the box would barely be enough room for a baby hamster to bop around.
Patrick changed quickly out of his school clothes and ran a brush over his teeth. He sprinted to David’s house with the box under his arm.
“David!” he shouted through the screen door.
“Oh hey, Patrick,” David’s mother said, stepping into the hallway. “Come in. David’s in his room.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Estrada.”
“You want something for breakfast? I just made pancakes.�
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“That’s okay. I just ate three cinnamon Pop-Tarts.”
He didn’t bother knocking on the door. David was sound asleep in his room. It was as cold as a walk-in freezer.
“Wake up, lazy ass.”
One eye popped open.
“What the heck are you doing in my room?”
“Look what I got in the mail just now.” He held the box over his face.
David rubbed his eyes and sat up. “Oh damn! I almost forgot about them.”
“Come on, get dressed so we can put it all together.”
They set up shop in the kitchen of the downstairs apartment. Taking turns tearing the brown wrapper and slicing open the box, they carefully extracted the diminutive, oblong plastic tank. Inside it were two packets and a bottle that looked like something eyedrops would come in.
There was a small radio on the windowsill. Patrick turned it on while he shook the box. A folded-up paper landed in his palm. Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” came drifting through the lone speaker.
“Nope,” David said, turning the dial until he hit on “Call Me” by Blondie.
“All the directions are in Chinese or something,” Patrick said, unfolding the square of onionskin paper.
“We don’t need ’em,” David said. “The steps are written on the bottle and packets.”
The bottle was the water conditioner. David read the superfine print on the back of it.
“It says you have to fill the sea serpent home with tepid water.”
Patrick’s eyebrow shot up. “What the heck is tepid water?”
“It can’t mean hot. Or cold. Wouldn’t that kill the sea serpents?”
“Maybe it’s a special kind of water. You ever see tepid water at the store?”
David turned on the faucet. “We’ll just add room temperature water. It works for regular fish.”
“If you say so. You better not kill them before they’ve had a chance to hatch or grow or whatever they do.”
Patrick pinched one of the packets between his thumb and forefinger. It said: AMAZING SEA SERPENTS!
“How the heck can sea serpents be in here?” He shook the packet. It sounded as if it were filled with pepper.
“They’re supposed to grow when they hit the water, bozak,” David replied. He had the water all the way to the fill line. “Now, I have to add three drops to the water and we wait ten minutes.”
The other packet was labeled: FOOD.
There didn’t seem to be much of it. If these things were going to grow to look like they did in the comics, surely they’d need more than that.
Patrick was beginning to feel that his parents were right.
When it was time to open the sea serpent pack, he was dubious at best.
“What the hell?” David said as Patrick emptied the contents—tiny granules that looked like dark sand pebbles—into the tank. They floated for a moment, then sank lazily to the bottom.
“Well, there goes the serpent dust,” David said.
“There’s no way those things are gonna grow into sea serpents.”
“They look more like fish food, not fish.”
Patrick read the food packet, opening a corner and spilling some into the palm of his hand. The red flakes, each so small it could fit in the groove of a fingerprint, smelled like low tide at Orchard Beach.
“It says we don’t feed them until they’ve had a week to grow.”
David pinched his nose. “That reeks! Wash your hands, man. I don’t think we’re gonna have anything in a week to feed.”
Patrick scrubbed his hands clean.
The boys knelt close to the tank, watching the little black balls sit motionless.
“You think we got ripped off?” Patrick said.
“I don’t know. I hope not. Look, we’ll just leave them here and check on them every day. Maybe they’ll surprise us.”
“And where’s the city they’re supposed to live in? I thought we’d at least get some little buildings and stuff.”
David chuckled. “Maybe once they grow, they’ll build it themselves. Come on, let’s go see if Mike will let us in his pool.”
The Amazing Sea Serpents were left on the drain board, but were never far from their minds.
