by Lucas Flint
“I tire of your antics,” said the Dread God. He raised a fist above his head. “I will finish both of you off now and then move on to restoring my empire and crushing my foes.”
The Dread God’s fist came crashing down toward them like a falling meteorite.
That was when a hand grabbed the back of Bolt’s costume and yanked him back. A second later, Bolt found himself in a completely black realm, feeling someone pulling him along, and Beams was being dragged along beside him as well.
In another instant, Bolt and Beams were back in the light of the Dread God’s chamber. This time, however, they were on the other side of the room entirely, near one of the doors, with the Dread God’s back to them. The Dread God had smashed his fist into the floor, completely decimating it, yet he had missed both Bolt and Beams.
“What happened?” said Beams, sitting up and looking around. “Who saved us?”
“That would be me,” said a familiar feminine voice above them.
Bolt and Beams looked up. Shade stood behind them both, her arms crossed in front of her chest and a smile on her lips. Captain Galaxy and Hypno stood behind her, Captain Galaxy wielding her sound blaster, Hypno looking as if he wanted to be anywhere but here at the moment.
“Shade!” said Bolt. He scrambled to his feet. “For the first time ever, I’m glad to see you! I thought you’d never get here.”
Shade frowned. “First time ever? Come on, Bolt. I thought you and I had something. Are you telling me every time you’ve ignored my flirting you were serious?”
“How did you guys get here?” said Beams as he rose to his feet, dusting off his pants. “I thought you guys were being delayed by the Darzen guards.”
“They were a little tricky to deal with, true, but they weren’t that hard,” said Shade. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at Captain Galaxy. “Galaxy here has a nifty little barrier device that is really useful for killing a whole bunch of Darzens at once. I asked her if I could bring one back to the G-Men, but she said it’s for IEA members only.”
“Our tech isn’t for general use by anyone,” said Captain Galaxy, shaking her head. “Only approved IEA agents are allowed to use them, and for good reason, due to how powerful and advanced they are.”
“Personally, I think you’re just trying to keep the good stuff from us,” said Shade. “Don’t want us to become more powerful than you, because then we might challenge your little organization’s power, right?”
Hypno looked at Bolt and Beams with desperate eyes. “The two of them have been like this the whole time. It reminds me why I don’t like working with women. They argue about everything.”
“We do not argue about everything,” said Shade.
“He’s not wrong,” said Captain Galaxy flatly, “though it’s not my fault you don’t know how to take no for an answer.”
“Everyone, shut up,” Beams snapped, causing everyone to look at him. “The Dread God is alive and he’s going to kill us all if we don’t get out of here in time.”
Captain Galaxy’s eyes widened in horror. “Wait, that thing over there is—”
“Indeed,” said the Dread God. He had turned around to face them and he looked even angrier than ever. He spread his massive arms. “Gaze upon my physical form, gaze and despair, for it is the last thing any of you will ever see.”
“How do we kill it?” said Hypno, who was trembling in his boots.
“That’s the thing,” said Bolt in a grim voice, “I’m not sure we can.”
The Dread God chuckled. “Wise words, especially coming from you. I am the immortal Dread God, ruler of Jinkopa and soon to be god of the multiverse. No mortal can kill me, for I would never allow it.”
“Wasn’t he killed once a long time ago, though?” said Shade, scratching the top of her head. “I’m pretty sure I remember being told that, which is why he had to be resurrected.”
“Does it matter?” said Beams. “We don’t have the weapons necessary to kill him. We need to run and regroup.”
“But we can’t just let the Dread God get away,” said Captain Galaxy. “We need to kill him here and now. If we let him get away, he’ll destroy the multiverse itself.”
“You’re acting like we have a choice,” said Beams. “Fact is, we don’t. And trust me, I know the Dread God better than anyone. Our best chance at beating him is to retreat and try to beat him again another time.”
Captain Galaxy hesitated. “But if we don’t kill him now, I’ll have failed my mission and will have to pay Space money due to a bet we made.”
Beams threw his hands up into the air. “Really? That’s why you want to get yourself killed? Because of a bet? Maybe the Dread God is right that we mortals are stupid.”
“Hey,” said Captain Galaxy warningly, “you’ve never met Space. When he wins something, he never stops gloating, not—”
A huge shadow fell over them again. The Dread God stood over all five of them now, his hands spread above him like a puppeteer controlling the strings of a puppet.
“I have you now,” said the Dread God. “You shall not escape me, not this time.”
Captain Galaxy pointed her sound blaster up at him. “Then we won’t run. We’ll fight, and we’ll kick your butt at the same time.”
The Dread God suddenly grinned, which disturbed Bolt far more than his normal angry scowl. “Destroy you? Why destroy you when I can … scatter you?”
The Dread God pointed a finger at them. All of a sudden, three dimensional portals opened up all around them. The portals immediately began sucking at the five of them. Bolt slammed his feet into the floor to keep himself from being sucked into the nearest portal, but Beams went flying away. He reached out and caught Beams, but Hypno ended up getting sucked into the portal Beams was supposed to go into. Shade, who stood nearest Bolt, wrapped her arms around his neck, but she was already being dragged toward the portal behind him. Captain Galaxy also got sucked into another portal, yelping in surprise.
“Hold on, Beams,” Bolt said through gritted teeth. “Don’t … let … go …”
But the sucking force of the portal was too powerful and Bolt’s grip broke. Beams flew backwards into the portal which Hypno had already disappeared into and the portal closed with a pop.
“No, Beams!” Bolt cried.
But that was all Bolt said before the sucking force of the portal behind him suddenly increased. He was torn out from the floor and he and Shade went flying backwards into the portal.
The last thing Bolt saw, before he passed through the portal, was the Dread God’s grinning face. And then the portal closed and Bolt saw nothing else.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Beams wasn’t sure what happened. One moment, he was clutching Bolt’s hand, trying not to get sucked into the portal which the Dread God had summoned. The next, he let go and passed through the portal and found himself falling, for a brief moment, through an endless void of strange colors and textures that he knew existed in no universe.
And in the instant after that, Beams hit solid ground and gasped in shock. He sat up and tried not to throw up, clutching his upset stomach as he groaned in pain.
“Oh my … god …” Beams said in between breaths. “What … where …”
A groan behind him made Beams look over his shoulder. Hypno lay on the ground about a foot behind him, curled into a fetal position, his face pale.
“Oh my,” said Hypno in a slightly shuddering voice. He coughed. “Dimension-hopping does not settle well with my stomach.”
“You can say that again,” said Beams. He looked around. “But where are we? Are we … are we back on Earth?”
It took Beams a moment to realize that they had landed in a park of some sort. They were sitting on soft green grass, with a small pond of crystal clear water shimmering not too far behind them. Ducks were quacking in the pond, while a couple of pigeons had landed on a nearby bench. They took off into the air as soon as Beams looked at them, however. Somewhere in the distance, Beams thought he heard the
honking of car horns, though it sounded very far away.
Hypno slowly pushed himself up and looked around. “This looks an awful lot like Central Park in New York City. I should know, because it’s one of my favorite places in the whole world. Went to it all the time as a child, though I haven’t visited it much this year.”
“Weird,” said Beams. “Why would the Dread God send us to Central Park, of all places? I’ve never even been here.”
“Perhaps the Dread God wants us to enjoy nature’s beauty,” said Hypno, looking up at the bright, sunny sky. “It is certainly a beautiful day today, isn’t it?”
Beams jumped to his feet. “Who cares? We need to get back to Jinkopa. Also, we need to find Bolt, Shade, and Captain Galaxy. Can you contact Shade?”
Hypno raised a hand to the earcom in his right ear and paused. “Hmm, no signal. Either Shade is out of the range of my earcom or she is in another universe entirely.”
“Makes sense,” said Beams. “The Dread God doesn’t want us working together, so he probably scattered us across the multiverse. That jerk.”
“How are we supposed to get back to our universes, then?” said Hypno, slowly rising to his feet and dusting grass off his behind. “Neither you nor I have dimension-hopping powers or technology like that Galaxy girl does. It would seem to me that we are stranded here, wherever ‘here’ is.”
“You’re probably right,” said Beams, looking around. “Still, we can’t give up. Let’s figure out where we are, what universe we’re in, and if this universe has any dimension-hopping technology.”
Hypno opened his mouth to say something, but without warning, Beams heard rustling sounds in the bushes around them. He and Hypno immediately took fighting stances, but then a girl suddenly burst out of the bushes around them and ran smack dab into Beams, knocking him over and sending the two of them falling onto the grass.
“Ow!” said the girl, lying directly across from Beams. “Sorry! I didn’t see you there.”
Shaking his head, Beams raised his head to see the girl better. She was young, probably barely as old as him, and quite pretty, with long blonde hair that reminded Beams of Greta, his old girlfriend. She wore a tattered leather jacket and torn jeans at the knees and had very odd, violet eyes that gave her an exotic appearance. She was also quite thin. Not quite anorexic, but certainly thinner than most girls he’d seen.
“Why, hello there, young lady,” said Hypno, holding out a hand toward her. “May I help you up? It is only what a gentleman like myself would do, after all.”
But the girl didn’t seem to hear Hypno. She scrambled to her feet and looked from Beams to Hypno and back again with a mystified expression. “Who are you guys? Are you superheroes?”
Slowly rising back to his feet, Beams slowly nodded. “Sort of. I’m a sidekick, technically-speaking, while Hypno is a government agent with superpowers.”
“G-Men are superheroes, too,” said Hypno, pouting slightly. “We just work directly for the federal government, rather than running around causing collateral damage that the government has to clean up later.”
Beams glared at Hypno, but the young girl was trembling. She looked over her shoulder, as if she was being chased, and said, “You guys need to run. Now. If you don’t, they’ll capture and jail you both. Especially if they find out you have powers.”
“Who will capture and jail us?” said Hypno. “Are superhumans hunted in this place?”
The girl shook her head. “Worse. They’re reeducated.”
Beams was about to ask her what she meant when, without warning, he heard something softly cut through the air and felt something sting his arm. He glanced down to see a thick dart stuck in his arm, which he immediately removed, but it did him no good, because a sudden drowsiness came over him. He fell to his hands and knees, but Hypno—who was also struck by a dart—just collapsed into an unconscious heap on the ground. The girl also collapsed, her blonde hair splaying out around her head like a pool of water, another dart sticking out of her shoulder.
Blinking hard, Beams tried to fight off the drowsiness, but it was hard. Whatever was in that dart had been designed to put him to sleep.
He heard footsteps coming out of the nearby trees and looked up. A black man in military fatigues was walking toward him, but Beams’ eyesight was becoming blurry due to the poison in the dart. The most he could make out was that the man was carrying some kind of gun in his hands, but that didn’t help him know who he was.
“Hey …” Beams’ words became slurred and stilted. “You …”
The black man stopped in front of Beams and looked down at him, a frown on his lips. “Odd. If you’re a super like these two, then the serum in the dart should have knocked you out instantly. I hope your kind isn’t developing some kind of immunity to the serum, though I suppose we could just solve that by killing you to make sure you don’t breed and pass your bigoted ideas down to your children.”
“Bigoted ideas …?” Beams repeated. “What do you mean …”
The black man scowled. He lashed out with a kick suddenly, striking Beams in the jaw and sending him crashing back onto the ground. The blow nearly knocked him out, but Beams clung to consciousness nonetheless.
The man appeared in Beams’ vision, his scowl deeper than ever. He pointed his gun at Beams. “Stay right where you are, super. By the orders of President Barnabas Sagan, I arrest you in the name of equality and justice. Any attempts to resist will result in your swift and immediate death.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“Hey, Bolt,” said a familiar voice above him. He felt soft hands shake his shoulders. “Wake up. Come on, now. I know you’ve taken worse hits than that and gotten up.”
Blinking rapidly, Bolt looked up into the face of Shade. She was kneeling beside him, staring down at him with a concerned look on her face. Her short, dark hair was messier than normal and she had a couple of scratches on her face, but otherwise looked fine. Bolt himself, on the other hand, had a splitting headache the second he opened his eyes, though it rapidly subsided as consciousness returned to him.
“Shade?” said Bolt, blinking again. “Is that you?”
Shade smiled in relief. “Whew. I thought you might not recognize me there. You bumped your head when we fell out of that portal and I wasn’t sure if you were going to suffer from a concussion or not. Glad you seem to be okay, because I am not a nurse and I don’t know a thing about dealing with concussions.”
Rubbing his forehead, Bolt slowly sat up and looked around at their surroundings. They were sitting on top of a building in the middle of a city at midnight, though Bolt did not recognize the city himself. His eyes were drawn to the large skyscraper on the other side of the street, which had the words ‘MUNROE ACQUISITIONS, INC’ standing on top of it.
“Munroe Acquisitions?” Bolt repeated, staring at the words again. “What is that?”
“Sounds like a company that acquires things,” said Shade. “My uncle has a company like that, though I’m not sure what this place could possibly acquire.”
Bolt shook his head and stood up. His headache had nearly subsided now, being more of a low, dull throbbing sensation than the deep pain it had been earlier. “Doesn’t matter. We need to figure out where we are. The Dread God is alive and he’s probably going to go to our universe. I’ll see if I can contact anyone via my earcom.”
Bolt tapped his earcom, but he heard nothing but static in his ear. He looked down at Shade. “Can you contact Hypno or someone else from the government?”
Shade tapped her own earcom before shaking her head swiftly. “Nope. Just lots and lots of static.”
Bolt cursed. “Of course. The Dread God wouldn’t send all of us to the same universe. He deliberately separated us in order to make sure we couldn’t work together to bring him down.”
“But if that’s the case, then how can we get back to our universe?” said Shade. “Cadmus needs to know about this so he can get the federal government prepared for the Dread God’s invasion.�
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“The NHA and INJ need to know about it, too,” said Bolt. His hands balled into fists. “But we don’t have the kind of technology that would let us contact someone in another universe. Therefore, we need to find someone or something in this universe which can take us back to our universe.”
“How do we do that?” said Shade. “What if this universe doesn’t even have dimension-hopping technology? I wouldn’t put it past the Dread God to knowingly send us to universes where that kind of tech doesn’t exist yet.”
Bolt shuddered at the thought. “Well, let’s just assume that dimension-hopping tech exists until we know for sure otherwise. What we need to do is find out where we are and what level of tech this universe is at. Best to take this one step at a time.”
Shade nodded and stood. “Yeah, I think you’re—”
Shade was interrupted by what sounded like rubber snapping nearby. Bolt looked to the right just in time to see a huge rubber fist flying toward him. It smashed straight into his face, knocking him flat off his feet, dazed from the blow.
“Bolt!” said Shade, reaching out toward him. “Bolt, are you okay?”
But Shade didn’t get very close to him before a rubbery arm extended out of nowhere and wrapped tightly around her body. Shade yelped in surprise before the arm lifted her off the ground and slammed her against the roof hard enough to stun her.
“Shade!” said Bolt. He jumped to his feet, but froze when a voice said, “Hold it right there, criminal! Or I’ll kill your partner.”
The voice came from behind a nearby water tower, from which a long, rubbery arm had extended to wrap around Shade like a snake. The voice was male and authoritative, though Bolt did not recognize it. But it sounded serious, without a hint of fear in its tone, as if the speaker was used to issuing these kinds of commands and being obeyed every day.
