by Barry Lyga
The arrow sailed through the vacuum. Without windage or friction to worry about, it traveled in a straight line, unerringly headed at the black space in the opening of the Time Trapper’s hood.
The Time Trapper had no time to dodge. The arrow was already there.
It can’t be this easy, can it? she thought from the ground, where she’d flung herself.
And just before the arrow struck its target, it . . . vanished.
The Time Trapper did not so much as flinch.
Oliver swore. He’d already nocked another arrow and sent it sailing through the air. This one, too, disappeared faster than a soap bubble on hot grass.
“You sent them away.” She picked herself up off the ground, dusted herself off.
“No. The arrows never existed. All of time is at my command.”
Oliver heaved out an annoyed sigh. “Maybe Mick was right.”
“Wait.” Sara held out an arm. Oliver had been ready to charge the Time Trapper and pummel him with his bow.
But the Trapper had just shown them his power. If he could make Oliver’s arrows vanish, he could do the same to them, right? And yet he didn’t. He simply stood before them, passive.
Attacking him would get them nothing. But maybe—just maybe—they could talk to him.
“What do you want?” Sara asked. Behind her, she could hear Oliver’s breath, fast and hot in his transsuit. Ray stood off to her side, fists clenched, waiting for a command. Or an opening.
The hood of the cloak tilted slightly, but she still could not make out a face. “Want? Want is for the short-lived. I have all that I need at my disposal. And soon I shall have everything else as well.”
41
The shortest, quickest path from Central City to Star City cut through two major interstates and a couple of minor state expressways. That day, those roads thundered out of nowhere, shaking as though two competing earthquakes had collided just beneath them.
The rollicking, quaking shock waves blasted along Route 70 out of Central, then along the straightest course to U.S. 90 into Star City. Cars and trucks alike pulled to the side of the road as the phenomenon whipped along like a living, pulsating, hurricane-force wind.
It was more than six hundred miles from Central City to Star City. In a car, without rest stops, a driver could make the trip in half a day. Barry Allen could do it in less than a minute.
Led by James Jesse, the ten thousand Earth 27 speedsters made it in under two hours.
• • •
“Picking up major tectonic activity just outside of town,” Dig warned from the Bunker. “It’s either the Big One or . . .”
Out in the field, Joe wore a protective hazmat suit to stave off attacks by the swarm of bees buzzing everywhere. The air was thick and black with them. He didn’t need Dig’s warning from the relative safety of the Bunker, which was hardened against anything short of a nuclear attack. The rumble of the ground vibrating up through his feet told the tale, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t the fabled Big One, the massive earthquake predicted to sever the West Coast from the rest of the country.
No, this “quake” portended something else.
Pop!
“Joe!” Ambush Bug put a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “You’ve changed! Your face is all flat and shiny now. Your skin is saggy.” He plucked at the loose-fitting hazmat suit. “Your diet is all kinds of mucked up. Wheatgrass, Joe! It’s the wonder food of the next millennium!”
“You maniac! You’re going to kill people!”
Ambush Bug shrugged. “Background characters! No-names! NPCs!”
Joe took aim, knowing it was pointless. Pop! The Bug was gone.
He turned around. Thundering down Weisinger Street came the beat of twenty thousand superfast feet. Joe grinned. Supergirl couldn’t bring the Kryptonian muscle, but she’d come up with something almost as good: ten thousand speedsters.
He’d make do.
42
In the Cortex, Supergirl paced back and forth, furious at herself.
“It’s not your fault you don’t have your powers,” Iris told her.
“Well, technically . . .” Felicity chimed in, “she made the decision to go all super-flare on Anti-Matter Man, so it is her fault. But, uh,” she added quickly at a glare from Iris, “it was totally the right decision to make.”
“If I had my powers, there’d be nowhere on this Earth or any other where Owlman could hide from me,” Supergirl fretted. “I feel useless just standing around here.”
“Mr. Terrific is on his way back from the treadmill,” Iris told her. “Once he gets here, we can use his tech to search the building from top to bottom.”
“He might not even be in the building,” Felicity put in. “He could be halfway to Opal City by now.”
“He’s not going to Opal City,” Supergirl snapped a little more harshly than usual. Being a mere mortal grated on her nerves. “He sent all that energy here. He’s got a reason for that. A purpose. And it has to do with something in this building. Which means he’s already here. I guarantee it.”
Iris pursed her lips and rested her hand near the emergency sanctuary switch. Once pressed, it would lower blast shields over every entrance and exit into and out of S.T.A.R. Labs.
“I can close off the building, cut us off from the outside world entirely . . .”
Supergirl shook her head. “No. That would just alert him, give him a heads-up that we’re onto him. I’m going to go find him.”
She spun on one heel and headed for the door.
“How are you going to do that?” Iris asked in disbelief.
“Any way it takes,” Supergirl said defiantly.
43
“Over there!” Superman called. “He’s with the others!”
The Man of Steel pointed to Egg. Barry, having just emerged from the sphere, cursed himself in terms so vociferous that even Mick blushed.
They hadn’t breached the Iron Curtain of Time after all, Barry realized. They’d been lured through it.
They’d walked right into a trap. They’d split their forces poorly, sending their weakest members right into the Time Trapper’s grasp.
“And every second that passes, Superman’s powers fade more and more,” Barry said. “The Time Trapper has us just where he wants us.”
“Guys, it’s a trap!” Sara’s voice crackled over their comms channel. “Cisco isn’t—”
And then nothing.
“They’re gone,” Superman said, his voice hollow. “Even my limited telescopic vision would see them, but . . . They’re gone.”
“He killed them? He killed them?” Mick’s fist clenched. The ring glowed a green so intense it was hot. Heat Wave’s eyes began to take on a greenish hue that Barry recognized from fighting Power Ring.
“Don’t do it, Mick!” Barry grabbed Mick by both shoulders. “Don’t give in to the ring. Control it; don’t let it control you.”
Sweat beaded on Mick’s forehead and dripped down his cheeks. “But. . . But he says . . . He says he can get revenge. All I have to do is let him . . . let him . . .”
Superman put a calming hand on Mick’s shoulder. “Vengeance is a poor reason to lose yourself, Mr. Rory. I have a good friend who’s spent his entire life proving that. The easiest thing in the world is to find the biggest weapon and lose yourself in it. But there’s another way. A path outside of revenge: justice.”
Hyperventilating, Mick darted his greenish eyes this way and that. His lips curled back; his teeth gnashed. The struggle with Volthoom was etched into every line in his face, the hollows of his cheeks, the rivulets of sweat collecting along his jawline, the crow’s feet around his eyes.
“Take the ring,” Barry said quietly. “Take it away from him.”
“He can beat it,” Superman said confidently. “I believe in him.”
Barry opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment, he heard a soft groan. Wally was waking up. He dashed to his brother’s side.
“Barry . . . ?” Wally’s eyes too
k a moment to focus. “What are you doing here?”
In literally half a second, Barry explained everything that had happened since Wally had gone missing in the 1960s. Only a speedster could keep up with that rapid burst of speech.
“Oh man, just when I thought things were freaky with the Legends . . . Then this stuff happens?”
“No one ever said being a superhero would be easy,” Barry told him, and grinned.
Wally chuckled softly. “You got any power bars? Maybe a chocolate milkshake?”
Barry produced two soft gumdrops and held them out. “I have a couple of Caitlin Snow specials. They’ll have to do.”
To keep up with speedster metabolisms, Caitlin had developed the gumdrops, which were gelatins made up of hyper-condensed glucose, proteins, and carbohydrates. They had an absolutely insane calorie count, with each gumdrop being roughly equivalent to a steak dinner with mashed potatoes, gravy, and creamed corn. Unfortunately, they tasted like motor oil sweetened with honey, but in a pinch, there was nothing better, nothing packed with enough energy to top off even a speedster’s metabolism.
“Oh, my favorite.” Wally grimaced as he took the two gumdrops and put them in his mouth. Chewing, his face contorted into the expression of a man eating a live rat.
Checking over his shoulder, Barry saw that Superman had managed to talk Mick down from his near dive into the evil embrace of Volthoom. Heat Wave still trembled with rage, but his eyes had returned to their normal color.
“Did I hear right?” Wally asked. “Are Sara and Ray dead?”
“And Oliver,” Barry said soberly. “We knew there was a risk, but I didn’t think . . . I didn’t think it would get so bad so soon.”
“We need a plan,” Wally said. “And we need it now.”
“The Time Trapper has left his machinery,” Superman pointed out, gesturing across the void to Needle. “We don’t know what that gadget does, but if the Trapper was working on it, it can’t be any good. I say we strike while he’s gone and destroy it.”
“Sounds good to me,” Barry said.
“We’ll need a distraction,” Superman said. “The Time Trapper isn’t just going to let us—”
“Distraction?” Mick growled. “Consider it done.”
“Wait!” Barry yelled. But Mick was already flying off into the night.
“I’ll go to the machine,” Superman said. “I still have enough power to get there on my own and destroy it.”
“And what am I supposed to do?” Barry demanded. “Sit around and twiddle my thumbs?”
“You need to figure out how we’re going to defeat the Time Trapper once and for all,” Superman told him. “And I know you will.” With that, he took off.
Mick soared through space, so focused on his target that he couldn’t even take a moment to marvel at what the ring allowed him to do. Volthoom was still screaming at him, still wheedling and insisting, but Mick pushed it away like a bad headache. His back teeth hurt from clenching his jaw so much.
There, just ahead on Egg, he beheld the Time Trapper, standing alone. As soon as Mick came into range, the creep turned, tilting that blank, black, hooded face up, as though out to watch some birds.
“You made a big mistake, pal!” Mick roared. “You pissed me off, and I’m your worst nightmare, a pyromaniac with the biggest flamethrower in the universe!”
And then, indeed, Mick had the biggest flamethrower in the universe. Volthoom complained, but Mick shoved him aside and forced the ring to do his bidding, assembling a massive flamethrower the size of a battleship. The thing glowed green and hung in the void like the world’s most twisted, violent Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Mick built it from memory and loaded it with the most volatile mixture of flammable chemicals he could imagine.
“Eat heat!” he screamed.
The fire that blistered forth from the flamethrower was, of course, green, but it still burned hotter than hot. It was as though Mick had unleashed part of a sun on the Time Trapper. The sky lit up green for miles in every direction. Heat—almost absent from a Multiverse where even particles had slowed to a crawl and begun to condense—flared to life once more, one final gasp of life in a near-dead reality.
The heat was vaster and more fervent than anything Mick had ever experienced before. His breath came quick and hard as the flames licked the planetoid, scorching the surface, swallowing the purple hooded figure whole. Mick figured he could die happy now. He’d made the biggest fire the universe had ever seen, a fire to rival the sun itself. He cackled into the void as sweat poured off him. The ring felt like a band of molten lava on his fist, but he didn’t care.
The flamethrower ran out of fuel. Mick took in a deep breath and heaved it out. Volthoom was offering more power, but Mick didn’t think he needed it. He’d just thrown a planet’s worth of hot hell at the Time Trapper.
“That oughtta do it,” he whispered to himself.
Below, the vacuum made short work of the green flames flashing and flickering on the surface. Egg had been charred in its entirety, its surface gone black, crumbling and flaking off pieces like a log turned to charcoal.
And in the midst of it, a spot of purple.
The Time Trapper.
Impossibly, still standing.
Barry tended to Wally as best he could, given the lack of medical supplies available. He had a second transsuit with him and had put it on Wally before Mick raised him out of the sphere, and according to their emblem-to-emblem connection, Wally’s vitals were improving. No doubt thanks in part to Caitlin’s speedster confections, which were doing a good job replacing electrolytes, boosting amino acids, and just generally replenishing Wally.
But those physical aids were only part of the battle. Wally ricocheted between seeming all right and traumatized. There was no way to know how long he’d been in the Time Trapper’s device or exactly what it had been like in there for him. Barry understood Mick’s urge for revenge very, very well in that moment. If he could get his hands around the Time Trapper’s throat, he would have no compunctions whatsoever about squeezing for what the Trapper had done to his brother.
Speaking of the Time Trapper . . . Barry turned and craned his neck. Mick was a green blur in the distance. An enormous flamethrower—a massive, hulking thing straight from a nightmare—floated nearby, gushing fire onto Egg. Barry thought of a marshmallow left too long over a campfire.
The flamethrower finally ran out of fuel. Barry watched smoke and fire peel away from the planetoid. He half expected the rock to crumble into pieces as he watched.
Instead, something else happened.
Incredibly, the Time Trapper appeared there, growing from a space on the surface of the planetoid to a monumental figure who dwarfed that same planetoid. And then he continued to grow, bigger than Anti-Matter Man. Hundreds of meters tall. Mick was a green speck, a dying emerald ember.
“I am Entropy,” said the Time Trapper, his voice the texture of eel flesh and sandpaper. “The end-death of everything.”
Barry realized he was shaking, ever so slightly. Entropy. The most powerful force in the universe, really. All life and all matter and all energy were the result of movement at various levels: molecular, atomic, subatomic, macro-atomic. But motion could not continue forever; motion could not be perpetual. Eventually, the theory went, energy ran out; systems flagged, tired, died.
And now, billions of years in the future, the universe itself was running out of energy and collapsing into itself, ending all space and time.
It was happening on a Multiversal scale, with the various universes of the Multiverse collapsing individually and then into one another. Meeting in a single point of dying energy. A single point of dying energy that had a name now. A name and a will and a plan.
“I am the End of All That Ever Was. My victory is preordained.”
Then why are you working so hard for it? Barry wondered suddenly. There was the Iron Curtain of Time. The machinery to poke through it. Kidnapping Wally so that he could power the
machinery that liberated Anti-Matter Man. Opening breaches between universes . . .
If the Time Trapper was the logical, natural end point of reality, then why did he have to scheme and scam and build traps?
“Why are you working so hard for it?” This time Barry said it out loud.
“You . . . you think he’s not as powerful as we think?” Wally asked slowly.
“No.” Barry stroked his chin, thinking. “I think he’s probably more powerful than we think. But it’s not about power—it’s about how it can be used. I think his power is enormous but constrained. I don’t think he can leave the End of All Time.”
And something else occurred to him: The Time Trapper had kidnapped Cisco for a reason. And he wouldn’t have merely stood by while Mick turned Cisco into a charcoal briquette along with the rest of that planetoid. So that meant . . .
“If Cisco isn’t there, then the only other place . . .” Barry’s gaze flicked to the central asteroid, Needle, where the Time Trapper had been when they’d arrived. Superman was almost there.
44
After a brief conversation with James Jesse to explain the plan, Joe got out of the way and let the Earth 27 speedsters do their thing. The fastest among them were no more than 10 percent as fast as Barry Allen, but what they lacked in sheer velocity, they made up for in overall numbers. There were ten thousand of them, so each of them only had to grab and crush twenty bees.
Sonic booms reverberated along the concrete and glass canyons of Star City. Shop windows fractured and spiderwebbed. Joe winced. Barry knew how to vibrate his body so that he didn’t create sonic backlash, but the Earth 27 speedsters were still new to their powers. Oh well—a little property damage was better than dead bodies in the streets.
He tried to watch the action, but it was just a series of overlapping, vibrating blurs, a moving, shifting kaleidoscope of flashing colors and bursts of light. The sight nauseated him, so he turned away. The space around him began to unclot as the speedsters plucked bees from the air and crushed them underfoot.
