by Barry Lyga
“Why did you save us?” Dig asked.
“How else were you going to get out of this? You were totally outclassed. I’ll be going now.”
“Wait!” Dig shouted.
“One twenty-five!” Ambush Bug shouted back and pop!’d away, just as Dinah let loose and hit nothing but empty air.
27
Barry had time-traveled before. More than once, and via more than one method. He’d used his own speed, magnified by Kid Flash’s speed, and he’d also used the futuristic Cosmic Treadmill. Each time, he’d experienced the thrill of the run, the pound of his feet, the stretch and burn of his sinews as he raced through the time stream.
But this was the first time running with the vibrational frequencies and energetic waveform of ten thousand speedsters at his back. He did not so much run as find himself propelled forward, churning his legs in order to keep his balance and direction stable. It was the difference between swimming in a pool and surfing a tidal wave.
He ran, trying to stay just ahead of the throbbing wave of vibrational energy that the Earth 27 speedsters had generated for him. It buffeted him and pulsated against him from behind, shoving him unrelentingly forward. Nothing could stop him, he knew. With this much power behind him, with such impossible velocity at his disposal, he could run to the End of All Time, tear through the Iron Curtain of Time . . .
At his side, Superman flew at top speed as well, holding the Time Sphere above his head.
“How are you managing to keep up with me?” Barry asked. For that matter, how am I managing to speak in the time stream? Some things, he decided, were better off unexplored.
It was a good and valid question, though—other than the occasional speedster, Barry had never encountered anyone who could keep up with him.
“I’m pretty fast myself,” Superman said with a grin. “But truthfully, I’m drafting off your speed and using the vibrational wave behind us to push me ahead and pace you.”
Barry nodded. As with the time he’d run to the thirtieth century, the time stream appeared to him as a wildly wavering tunnel of rigidly set-off concentric circles in rainbow colors. Also as with that time, he imagined that the numbers of the years whipped by him as he ran: 2058, 2199, 2207 . . .
Faster than before. Everything was faster than before. He had entered into that rarefied aerie of reality where rules no longer applied, where the speed of light was just a good idea, not a law. He’d transcended mere corporality and mortality. He was speed.
3010
3581
Wait. Had they already gone through the Iron Curtain of Time? Rond Vidar told them it was in the year 3102.
Maybe this will be easier than we thought. . .
He kept running.
4983
5879
Millennia crushed beneath his feet. Every stride a thousand years or more. Sweat beaded under his cowl, dripped down into his eyes, wicked away into the heat-chill of the time stream, where friction burned but had no time to scald. To Barry’s horror, he stumbled, his right foot coming down at an odd angle. For a nanosecond, he thought the universe blurred into place around him and he caught a glimpse of the Spires of the sixty-fourth century.
“You can do it, Flash,” Superman encouraged alongside him. “Kara told me you’re the bravest man she ever met. She believes in you, and so do I.”
Reinvigorated, Barry slapped one foot down after another. They were well into the 9000s now, then the ten-thousandth century. The techno-magical era of Abra Kadabra was long behind them.
One hundred centuries down. Hundreds of millions to go.
He kept running.
28
“So, in other words, the TV Barry Allen screwed up, messed with history, then re-messed with history, and we’re the ones who get punished for it? Not cool.”
Cisco was tired of hearing himself say it over and over again. He had managed to press forward a little bit before—though he didn’t know what before really meant when he kept reliving the same seconds. He had to try again.
This time, he tried reaching out differently. Not forward toward the Trapper, but to the side, for his own TV doppelgänger. The Time Trapper had said that TV Cisco had regained his powers. Maybe there was a way . . .
And then he saw it.
He saw the Crisis.
At the same time he was struggling through his own Crisis, the TV Multiverse was suffering its own. But the TV crew’s Crisis had led them the other way, chasing a villain to the Dawn of Time, not the End.
“Ah, you see it, do you?” the Time Trapper interrupted. “They have re-created their Multiverse from the beginning. They’ve merged universes that once were separate. This has destabilized their timeline, though they do not realize it. Making it ripe for the taking.”
Wait, what? Cisco’s mind spun. This wasn’t even about the Multiverse he called home? The Time Trapper was trying to take over the TV Multiverse all along?
“And now, back to your torment. . .”
“So, in other words,” Cisco said, “the TV Barry Allen . . .”
29
Mr. Terrific blew out a relieved breath that he’d been holding in. According to all the data on the screen before him, everything had worked to perfection. The treadmill had done exactly what it was supposed to do, and the strike team had absorbed and channeled the energy. The Earth 27 speedsters were already headed back to their temporary refugee digs, their jobs done.
Now he just had to wait.
He mentally fist-bumped himself in congratulations, then turned to Owlman, who’d walked over from his own control pad. “Nice work. We’re done!”
Owlman craned his neck from side to side. “Well, you’re done,” he told Mr. Terrific, and then casually punched Curtis into unconsciousness with a single precision blow to the jaw.
He cracked his knuckles and began tapping at the control pad.
30
Joe and Rene both reached for their guns in the same moment, a reflex born of necessity and honed over years of training and time on the streets.
Before they could even take aim, Larvan gestured and his bees shot forth, covering the distance between him and the two cops in a hot second. Joe’s wrist burned at multiple stings, and he couldn’t keep his fingers closed—his gun clattered to the floor, as did Rene’s.
“Bert!” Joe cried. “Think this through! A couple of beestings aren’t gonna stop us. I’m about two seconds away from picking up my gun—”
“Ever been stung on the eye, Detective?” Larvan’s lips jerked into a twisted smile. “Oh, you’ll recover. Eventually. After a week or so of blindness.”
Joe had been halfway into a crouch, reaching for his gun. Two of the bees hovered just a few inches from his face. Waiting. Patient. It was wholly unnerving to see them like this. He was used to bees fleeing if he moved too fast, but these were quite willing to outwait him.
“Uh, Joe?” Rene’s voice had risen to a note of panic Joe had never heard before. “Is this when I’m supposed to mention that I’m allergic to beestings?”
Joe groaned. Off to his side, Rene was staring at his own wrist, which had swollen like a baseball.
“Let me get medical attention for him, Bert! For God’s sake!” He didn’t know how allergic Rene was. A massive anaphylactic reaction could occur at any minute and close off Wild Dog’s breathing passage. Or he could be fine for hours.
“Did you really think I would help you with nothing to gain for myself or for Brie?” Larvan sneered. “I only inveigled my way into your clique so that I could gain access to Ambush Bug’s bees for my own purposes.”
“To get revenge on the world for what it did to your precious sister, right?” Joe sighed wearily. “I’ve seen this movie before, Bert.”
Joe figured he might be able to bat away one of the bees before the other one stung his eye. Could he recover the gun, aim one-eyed, and fire before another bee could get to his good eye?
Yeah. Yeah, he thought he could.
The idea of bein
g stung in the eyeball did not fill him with joy, but he couldn’t see another way out of the predicament. He figured he’d let his left eye get stung—he fired his gun right-handed and would need to sight down the barrel with his right eye.
I can’t believe these are the kinds of things I have to think about. Man, I’m actually starting to miss the days when Gorilla Grodd would kidnap me for a while.
“Think carefully, Detective.” Larvan gestured and the bees quickly crossed paths, switching eyes. “I am in complete control of the situation. Your life and the life of Wild Dog are in my hands.”
Yeah, definitely feeling nostalgic for ol’ Banana-breath. At least he didn’t try to monologue me to death.
Without so much as a word, Joe slapped out with one hand, knocking a bee aside, sending it spiraling off against a wall. At the same time, he lunged for the gun, squeezing both eyes shut, hoping that the thin flesh of his eyelids would provide some protection from the sting.
The sting never came.
He felt the cold steel of the pistol’s handle, closed his fingers around it. Momentum carried him bodily to the floor and he rolled once, thinking, This used to be easier, knowing that he’d need a day in a hot tub and a ton of ice packs for his back to feel normal again. He popped open his eyes, somewhat amazed that both of them still functioned, took aim—
Bert Larvan was already on the floor, struggling with Dig, who had a headlock on the putative Bug-Eyed Bandit II.
“His ear!” Joe yelled. “In his ear!”
The bees buzzed around them, zeroing in on Dig. Spartan’s body armor would protect most of him, but Larvan could still direct them up under his helmet and to his eyes or ears. They had to remove the control bud from Larvan’s ear.
But they had a weapon that Larvan couldn’t take away.
Dinah opened her mouth to let loose with her Canary Cry—but at that very instant, a bee darted between her lips. Dinah’s eyes bulged out in shock and pain as the bee zipped out of her mouth.
“I ung!” she cried in pain, clapping her hands to her mouth. “I ung!” My tongue! My tongue! The bee had stung her tongue, and right now the thought of using her power was furthest from her mind. Her mouth and throat clogged as the bee’s apitoxin swelled her tongue to three times its normal size.
Dig had Larvan pinned down, but the bees were getting closer, now buzzing around his head, looking for a way under the face shield as Dig jerked his head back and forth, evading them.
Joe scrabbled along the floor on all fours, releasing the gun. His knees protested with blunt, hard claps of pain down each leg, but he forced himself along until he was a body length from Larvan. Then he launched himself at the Bug-Eyed Bandit, landing with a painful thud, the air propelled from him as his belly hit the floor.
Still, he was close enough to reach out and grab Larvan by the ear, which he did, twisting it until Larvan cried out in pain. The little bud lay nestled in the ear canal. Joe’s fingers were too thick and too clumsy to reach in there, so he kept twisting and pulling at Larvan’s ear. He suddenly remembered a time when Barry—age ten, maybe—had come down with a terrible ear infection. Joe had had to put drops in Barry’s ear and then tug at Barry’s earlobe to get the medicine to travel down into the ear canal properly. Barry hated the sensation and fought him every time.
Absurdly, it felt the same now, tugging and twisting at Larvan’s ear. The major difference was that he didn’t really care how Larvan felt about it. He would rip the ear right off Larvan’s head, if that’s what it took.
Finally, the earbud fell out. Joe croaked out a bark of triumph, and Dig slapped away the last bee, now rudderless and buzzing randomly through the air. Together, he and Joe wrestled Larvan into submission and slapped cuffs on him.
Wild Dog, meanwhile, had managed to scrabble over to one of the workbenches, where he grabbed his messenger bag and dragged it down onto the floor. Gasping for breath, he rummaged inside, produced an EpiPen, and jabbed it into his thigh. A moment later, he inhaled a huge gulp of air, then shot Joe a thumbs-up.
“Man, we can’t leave you guys alone for five minutes, can we?” Dig asked.
Joe rose from the floor, dusting himself off, then helped Dinah to her feet. “Thanks for the concern, Dig. How do you feel?” he asked Dinah.
She shrugged and pointed to her throat. She could still breathe, but talking was going to be difficult for a while.
Just then, Joe noticed another presence in the room. Handcuffed to Oliver’s salmon ladder was a woman who looked suspiciously like Dinah, with meta-dampening manacles clamped on her wrists.
He sighed. “Care to introduce us to your friend?”
Dig gestured vaguely at the woman. “Meet the so-called Dark Canary. Claims to be the Seamstress of—”
“The Screamstress!” Dark Canary interjected with truly aggrieved pique.
“Right. That. Of the Royal Northwest Collective,” Dig finished wearily. “It’s an Earth 32 thing, apparently.”
“This is not good,” Joe said. He gestured to the main monitor. On the screen, the swarm was bigger than ever. Time was running out. “We have to make something happen. Fast. And we just lost our expert.”
With a diffident grunt, Joe turned back to the screen. Ambush Bug’s swarm would soon hit a critical mass, and the bees would descend.
“We need to put out an alert. Can A.R.G.U.S. get us access to the Emergency Broadcast Signal?”
Dig nodded slowly. “What are you thinking?”
Worrying at his lower lip, Joe took the question very seriously. What was he thinking? He would get exactly one shot at this. “I’m talking every TV, cell phone, and computer in Star City lighting up, telling people to get indoors, preferably somewhere without windows or outside access. Seal up cracks. People with bee allergies need to have their EpiPens and meds at hand.”
“Won’t that cause a panic, hoss?” Now that he was juiced up with epinephrine, Rene bounced on his toes, ready for action, as though he’d never been stung.
“Probably,” Joe conceded. “But so will that swarm descending on the city. This way we reduce the number of targets for the bees.”
“That’s not sustainable in the long term,” Dig pointed out.
“No, but it buys us some time. And right now, time is the most precious resource we can hoard.”
He looked around the Bunker. Rene nodded. Dig did, too. Dinah shrugged and mimed something that seemed to mean, OK by me.
“I am the Screamstress Dinah of the Royal Northwest Collective!” Dark Canary howled, utterly unbidden. “First of her name, and Dark Canary, Warbler of Horrors, Wielder of the ScreamSong!”
No one spoke for a moment. Shackled on the floor, Bert Larvan giggled into the silence.
“We’ve heard from the peanut gallery,” Dig said. “I think the ayes have it. I’ll call Lyla and get going on that message.”
31
The time trapper sensed the press of tachyons and neutrinos as a phalanx of time travelers neared his realm. The Flash and his compatriots. They smashed through the time stream with all the finesse of a cannonball through a waterfall.
They were coming for him. From the deepest past, his enemies forded the time stream, breaching the Iron Curtain of Time with their makeshift vibrational bludgeon. Brute force arrayed against the Time Trapper’s elegant plan and contingencies.
And now he experienced another emotion for the first time. This one was . . . joy.
Soon it would all come to fruition. The Multiverse would end, as it was fated to do, and the Time Trapper’s plans would culminate in, at last, victory.
And then . . .
And then the Time Trapper would rule the remainder of the Megaverse.
Yes, joy!
Cisco Ramon was his. The final piece of the infinite puzzle.
First had been a speedster’s energies, to power the machinery that released Anti-Matter Man. Which led to the weakening of the vibrational barriers between universes, in order to swap matter and energy from one di
mension to another.
Then, Cisco Ramon’s power to see into the other half of the Megaverse.
Soon.
For a being as powerful as the Time Trapper, his limitations chafed. He could reach through history but not travel there himself. He could summon beings from the long-ago past but not visit them in their own eras. As much as he trapped those who dared rise up against him, he, too, was trapped. Trapped at the End of All Time. Ensnared in the never-ending moment of the finality of all reality. Locked out of the universes, he now trapped them in turn. All to meet his final goal.
Without so much as a flinch, the Time Trapper made a careful adjustment to his machinery. All around him, the dead stars hummed their last radio waves into the void. Scattered hydrogen atoms converged. Everything was coming to an end.
But for the Time Trapper, the end would be the beginning.
32
“Superman,” Barry said, and came to realize that his words, his voice, somehow slipped between moments. He looked over to his left. The Man of Steel still flew beside him, still held the Time Sphere in his hands. His expression was one of intense concentration, grim determination.
Did you feel that? he wanted to ask Superman. There’d been some sort of . . . jostle. A judder. The kaleidoscopic tunnel of the time stream around them had shaken, almost imperceptibly.
“My super-vision caught a glimpse of something outside the time stream,” Superman said, as though he’d plucked the question from Barry’s mind. “We just passed the year 200,650. There was some kind of quantum event . . . I couldn’t really make it out.”
And then in the next instant he said, “I don’t think so.” Perfectly conversationally.
The really weird thing, though, was that Barry had been about to ask: Do you think it had something to do with us? And Superman had answered as though—
In the next instant, Barry was shocked to hear himself say out loud, “Do you think it had something to do with us?”
