"You ever see anyone so gross, Darryl?" Kevin asked.

The old man on the couch was huge. Not just tall, I'd seen him standing and he was almost two foot taller than me, but massively built and with long grey tangled hair and a three-day beard, too.

"Shh!" I said, "He's your uncle, what if he threw us out?"

"Ah, he couldn't hear a cement mixer over his snoring," scoffed Kevin. And it was true; Uncle Steve's snores had a sound that made you think any moment someone would shout 'Timber!'

"Well, we don't have to try to wake him, do we?"

"Not that we could," said Kevin. "But no, we can find something to do outside, I guess. He's got the blasted old Super-Action show on again."

I kind of liked Super-Action, but I didn't say anything. Kevin got bored with anything that felt like news or didn't have a story to it or music or dancing and interviews with old time supers on a morning show didn't interest him at the moment.

This week, Dan Corey had some of the guys from the Vietnam unit, Company O. Not the Protector of course, but The Volunteer who was explaining how he had actually been dead for years and years and missed the start of the Vietnam War.

"That fella running around in my costume in the fifties, that wasn't Mrs. Rochambeaux's little boy Vincent, me. That was some other fella, in fact, it was four other fellas. They kept getting kilt," The Volunteer was saying.

"That wasn't you?" Dan Corey asked. He stroked his pet moustache and pretended to look surprised, though he had to have known this.

"Nope. I was still dead then. The Ubermann Korps had my body in a meat locker from 1946 to 1962, in Switzerland," The Volunteer said in a voice that made him sound like a blond Elvis impersonator. He didn't look old enough to have been in Vietnam, let alone World War II. Maybe being dead for nearly twenty years had something to do with that.

How could somebody be dead for so long but be alive and get interviewed by Dan Corey on Super-Action? I wanted to hear that. Supers fascinated me anyway, and The Volunteer had been around almost since the beginning of the Promethean Age, other than having been dead for part of it.

But Kevin didn't share my enthusiasm, at least, not at the moment. Ordinarily, he liked supers as well as I did and between us we subscribed or bought off the newsstand all the best super-fanzines, slicks and the cheap pulps, too. My favorite was Alien Eye Zed, 'cause the editor there had such a sense of humor, but Kevin preferred Action and Marvels, two of the slicks.

We used to buy the superbooks, when we were younger. Comic strip-like stories about supers, some real, like The Protector and Ramnor and Sensation, some just made up like Superman, The Invisible Girl and Spiderbob. The stories about the real people were sometimes made up, too and Kevin and I used to have some great arguments about which stories were real and which weren't and could Archimedes beat the Hulkatron.

Right at the moment, though, Kevin seemed too irritated at his uncle to sit still and listen to The Volunteer talk about what it was like to be dead. "Why don't we just stay and listen to this?" I asked.

He grabbed me by the arm and literally dragged me out the door. "If we stay here, we'll wake the old man up and he'll have something to say about all those other old guys on the TV. Like how they wouldn't have survived if they had to live off of carrots and ersatz kerosene like he did getting out of Rooshya." He meant Russia; Uncle Steve pronounced it funny.

"All right," I said, giving in. "I'm coming, don't drag me backward."

"Didn't you get cold?" Dan Corey asked just as we left, I guess about the sixteen years in a meat locker. Since Rochambeaux, the real Volunteer, didn't show up again until 1964, I wanted to know about the missing two years. Whether he felt cold while he was dead wasn't the first question I would have asked.

I didn't get to hear any answers right then, though. I turned around and hurried to catch Kevin up, out through the big dining room and into the huge kitchen. We'd been staying with Uncle Steve for two days already, and I still hadn't gotten used to how much bigger the old farmhouse was than the apartment where my sister and I had grown up.

Kevin's mom had gone into the hospital for some minor something, and Kevin had gone to stay with his uncle over Easter Vacation. At Kevin's invitation, I'd been glad to go along; anything to get away from my own home life.

This was Spring Break of our first year in high school; Kevin had just turned fifteen and my birthday was still ten weeks away. We were old enough to take care of ourselves but not old enough to be trusted to do so.

Our moms had some sort of connection to each other; they grew up knowing one another. Like that. And my sister, Tanya, four years older, had married Kevin's brother, Mike, six years older.

We even looked a bit alike, as did our moms. All of us with light brown or blond hair, blue or gray eyes, high cheekbones and small noses. Mom and I had pointy chins, Kevin's more square and his mom's kind of round. Uncle Steve's chin, on the other hand, looked massive, his jaw blocky and hanging open while he snored and drooled on himself. Also, his hair was gray, almost white.

"You sure he's related to you?" I asked as we headed toward the gigantic refrigerator in the corner of the kitchen. None of us were really big people, though Mike was a bit over six feet tall.

"All I know is he's supposed to be Mom's grandfather's older brother, or something."

After raiding the fridge for some milk, we went outside, through the odd little screened-in deck that Uncle Steve called a porch and into the wide backyard of the old farmhouse outside of town. We could just barely hear the rumble of freeway traffic about two miles away, but nothing disturbed the county road that ran past the place. To two kids from the suburbs, it looked pretty desolate.

There weren't many such places left within fifty miles of Los Angeles, but Steve had told us that it was the same farmhouse he and his brother had grown up in, back before television even. He said he had eleven acres, all that was left of two square miles of fruit trees, cattle pastures, truck gardens and a small vineyard.

"We should have brought your computer," I commented.

"That antique probably wouldn't survive the trip," grumbled Kevin. "Never thought it would be this dull out here, dang that old man for falling asleep in front of the only TV in this dump."

"He's your uncle; you ought not say such things about him."

"He's just a stupid old drunk, and he's my mom's uncle not mine. Besides, we didn't wake him up with a big bucket of cold water, did we? We showed him respect." He grinned and I just shook my head smiling.

I'm not sure how it happened, boredom obviously, but we ended up exploring the outbuildings behind the old farmhouse and discovered an unlocked door in the most stable and solid-looking one. "What do you suppose is in here?" Kevin asked as he opened it.

"Spiders? Stinky old hay? Rusty tools?" I guessed.

Kevin stuck his head in then opened the door wide. "You got to see this," he said.

The barn, or whatever you might call it, had one big central room with doors opening off it. And the biggest thing in the room had to be the car. It was almost the biggest car I had ever seen, not counting a Hummer or something. Deep metallic blue with tinted windows, it looked like it might have been used in a movie – bigger and realer than life.

Dust and maybe bits of hay covered everything in the room but lay lightly on the car, as if someone came out once in a while and dusted it off. Uncle Steve?

Our teenage facility with swearwords deserted us as we examined the dream car. "This thing must be worth a mint!" I said after we had both circled it and seen that yes, it was a real car, not some mock-up. It had lights and tires and we could dimly see seats and a steering wheel through the darkened windows.

"It's locked," said Kevin.

"Well, if I owned it, I'd sure lock it!" I said.

"After hiding it in ...whatever this place is? Why?"

But that got us looking at the rest of the room. The first thing we noticed was that one whole wall was a big map. A map of the county apparently but an old one, it didn't show some of the cities that we knew existed and it only had two freeways, the two oldest ones.

"Look at the map," I said. "Right in the center."

"Huh," said Kevin. He saw what I had seen; the very center of the map was the turn-off from the state highway onto the little county road that ran past Uncle Steve's farm. He reached out a finger and touched the map, "We're right here," he said.

"Yes, you are," said someone who must have entered right behind us.