No, this Nathan Hale is not the one who regrets that he has but one life to lose for his country. This Nathan Hale is the one who wrote a hilarious series of history graphic novels featuring that Nathan Hale and various other recurring characters.
Apocalypse Taco is one of those books whose plots are so tangled and outlandish they get hard to explain. I'm going to try anyway, and not bother marking spoilers. It's also a pretty creepy book, so you've been warned.
Basically, a mad scientist (who is also a grad student) decided he could make a 3D printer out of radio-controlled bees. To do this, he had the bees 3D print smaller bees, then had the smaller bees 3D print even smaller bees, and so on until he had nanobot-sized bees that would 3D print things for him (using, as a 3D printer, a cardboard tube connected to his laptop). He also turned the bee queen into an eyeball, which he implanted in his head, and added DNA from about twelve other species until the nanobees no longer even remotely resemble bees.
The nanobees were contained inside the mad grad student's 3D printer (i.e. the cardboard tube). However, then they got out when his roommate broke the 3D printer fighting him off (when he tried to implant another bee-queen-eyeball into her head) and started copypasting everything. Except the mad grad student's laptop and his brain and the brains of all the copypasted clones of him don't have enough power to copy everything perfectly and paste it back, plus the nanobees only really 3D print with wax and everything they print is sort of alive. All of which ends up producing a nightmarish living pseudosentient city full of monsters that try to eat people.
And this is where our protagonists come in: two middle schoolers who were sent by their mom to get supper for the crew of their school's stage production of Brigadoon, the high schooler sister of one of them (she's driving them), and the mad grad student's original roommate (whose bee-queen-eyeball has gone insane and keeps copypasting more arms onto her whenever she lets it see anything). They get stuck in the nightmarish pseudosentient city when they try to go to the fictional taco restaurant Taco Bear for the supper they were sent to get.
Oh, and it turns out the nightmarish pseudosentient city is actually just simulated in the minds of the mad grad student and his copypasted clones (sounds like a rock band). It's basically their "clipboard", where anything they copy goes until they paste it into the real world.
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for some body horror (the mad grad student's roommate with the insane arm-copypasting eyeball comes to mind, as does the mad grad student's other roommate who's covered in spikes of dental enamel).
3 stars. The protagonists do escape the nightmarish pseudosentient clipboard city and confront the mad grad student, and if it had just ended there, I'd have given it 4; however, it actually ends with the mad grad student just copying everything back into the clipboard city again. Himself included this time.
(Endnote: My headcanon is that, right after the end of the book, someone from a Men-in-Black-like organization declared the mad grad student a threat to the world and killed his IRL version, dumping everyone back out of the clipboard. I have to have this headcanon because there isn't a sequel, so if I don't headcanon an ending, it's just left hanging unresolved forever.)
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