by Barry Lyga
“Get out here for crowd control and to hunt the Bug!” Joe ordered Dig. He knew that in mere moments, Diggle, Dinah, and Rene would be out of the Bunker and out on the streets. The speedsters could handle the bees, but Joe wanted to be the one to bring down Ambush Bug. He’d been mocked and made a fool of too much.
As the swarm thinned under the aegis of the speedsters, Joe checked the complicated gee-whiz science gadget strapped to his wrist. They still had the satellite tracking data that could track the Bug as he teleported. According to that telemetry, the Bug had just teleported nearby.
He rounded a corner. Ambush Bug was pop!ing from bee to bee as a speedster fruitlessly zipped around in an ever-tightening circle, trying to get his hands on the Bug. Teleportation was still faster than superspeed, though, and the speedster was clearly flagging. Ambush Bug teleported right over the speedster, dropped onto his shoulders, bearing them both down to the ground, then teleported across the street, then back again to kick the speedster while he was still down.
“Ambush Bug! Freeze!” Joe leveled his weapon.
“Joe West! Thaw!”
Pop!
Joe struggled as the Bug, who’d teleported to his side, grabbed his gun.
Pop!
Joe winced as the gun was torn from his grip. Ambush Bug was gone, returning an instant later without the gun.
“Where’d you leave my gun?”
“Rooftop,” Ambush Bug explained, then frowned. “I seem to have a lot fewer places to go right now. Say, Joe, are you up to something nefarious?”
The speedsters were doing their jobs—eliminating the bees and reducing Ambush Bug’s possible teleportation targets.
Pop!
And Ambush Bug was behind Joe, who spun around to confront him. “Give it up. With every second that passes, we’re winnowing down your escape routes.”
“Winnowing? Did you say winnowing? You never hear winnow anymore these days. It’s a good word. Why don’t people use it more often?”
And then Ambush Bug waved goodbye, took a step to the left—
Nothing.
“Hey!” the Bug complained. “Nothing? Really? C’mon, this is a moment of existential crisis* for me and all I get is nothing.?”
He took another step—
“I get it already!” he shouted. “I take another step, try to teleport, and it doesn’t work! I got it the first time. Don’t make me look like an idiot, Lyga. I’m crazy, not stupid.”
Joe advanced on Ambush Bug. “You’re under arrest.”
Ambush Bug looked up. “I seem to be under the sky. Under the Tuscan Sun. Underworld Unleashed. (Hi, Mark!) Don’t mind me—I’m just free-associating because there’s nothing else to do.”
Joe sighed in deep relief and strode over to the Bug.
“Oh man, there’s some space before the bottom of the page. Is this the end of the chapter?”
“It’s the end of your story,” Joe said, and happily punched Ambush Bug into unconsciousness with a single blow to the jaw.
* * *
* Ooh, I said crisis! Red skies! And look—a footnote! Cool!
45
Superman landed on needle’s surface, suddenly grateful for the Legion transsuit he’d worn for its communication abilities. He’d lost his powers before, been under red suns before—he knew the signs and the portents. The first one was this: cold. The sensation of cold. It was unfamiliar to him, but when it came, he knew what it meant. It meant that his powers were fading. His invulnerability was going away. He needed to breathe now.
Just like a person.
It’ll be OK, Clark, he told himself. You’ve been powerless before, and you’ve always made it through.
Behind him, the Time Trapper loomed enormous and impossible. He hoped Heat Wave and the Flash could hold him off, or at least distract him. There was too much to do here and now.
The Time Trapper’s machinery was enormous—a massive, metallic Gordian knot of impossible-to-follow cables, tubes, and conduits. Energy crackled around it, black spots vibrating and sloughing away, bleeding off into infinity. He knew the fundamentals of Kryptonian technology, so much more advanced than Earth’s, but this technology was as beyond him as a cell phone was beyond a caveman.
He didn’t really need to understand it, though. He just had to destroy it.
He’d been accused in the past of thinking with his fists. His best friend often chided him for relying too much on his powers, not using his head enough. It wasn’t really a fair criticism, Superman thought. He relied on his powers so much because the foes who came his way tended to have abilities that matched or outstripped his own. But when the time came for outthinking an enemy, he was more than capable of doing so.
And he might have to do it now. His strength flagged. His invulnerability, which would protect him from harm as he smashed the machinery, was almost gone. A chill enveloped him. This is what Lois complains about on cold nights, he thought. And he imagined her, wrapped in a sweater, feet tucked under her as she sat on the sofa, pounding at her laptop, writing yet another exposé. Making the world a better place, one story at a time.
Asking him how to spell misanthrope. Her spelling was awful, and she didn’t trust the computer’s spell-check.
I’m coming back to you, Lois, he thought. I swear it.
He stared at the machine, willing his X-ray vision to work one more time. To show him some weakness he could exploit.
Instead, it showed him Cisco Ramon.
Shocked, he turned around. The Time Trapper had grown even more, now bigger than most skyscrapers. He raised his arms, laughing into the void. How could they hear him, with no atmosphere?
And why was Superman even worrying about such things?
He figured he had one chance to get Cisco out of this contraption. He knew what he needed to do, and he also knew how risky it was. If it didn’t work, he would be rendered powerless.
Then again, even if it did work, he would still be rendered powerless.
Super Flare. It was his last chance. He had a little heat vision, a little flight . . . In short, he had all his powers, but at drastically reduced potency. No single power—strength, freeze breath, whatever—had enough juice behind it to break into the machine and liberate Cisco.
But if he combined all of them, compiled the last dregs of yellow sunlight in his cells, it might make a Super Flare strong enough to crack open the prison.
Even if it didn’t, he’d be left powerless.
Lois always likes to say that the man in Superman is the important part. Let’s find out if she’s right.
He put his hands far apart on the skin of the machine. He focused as hard as he could, channeling all the yellow solar radiation stored in his cells.
With a scream of pain, he allowed the power to explode out of him. His eyes erupted with yellow bursts of energy, sizzling along the surface of the machine. The metallic layer began to bubble and warp, softening beneath his fingers.
For the first time in a long time, he felt heat. His own heat. His fingers burned.
No time for regrets or for pain, Smallville. Lois’s voice in his head. This looks like a job for Superman.
Crying out in anguish, he sank his fingers into the melting metal. It would cool and re-harden rapidly in the cold vacuum of space, so he had to move quickly. With the last of his strength, he clawed the metal apart, opening a gap in the machine’s exterior. His breath came too fast, his heart pounding as he strained mightily.
Something electrical within the machine cracked and sparked. Superman staggered back, his fingers throbbing with pain.
From the smoky darkness of the gap he’d made, a figure appeared, then reached out, probing tentatively.
“So, in other words,” a voice said, “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.”
The hand hung there.
“So, in other words . . .”
Superman grabbed the hand
and pulled. Cisco Ramon stumbled out of the machine.
“. . . messed with history,” Cisco said, dazed, “then remessed . . .”
He suddenly shook all over, then blinked rapidly, as though disbelieving the evidence of his own eyes.
“Whoa! I never thought . . . I never thought I’d get out of there!” He blinked some more. “Wait a sec—you’re dressed like . . . Please tell me that S on your chest stands for Supergirl’s pal.”
Superman struggled to catch his breath. “Actually . . . stands for . . . hope.”
“Well, I ‘S’ there’s a plan, because the Time Trapper is the biggest of the Big Bads.” He looked up into the sky, where the Trapper loomed like God’s older, angrier cousin. “Oh man. I didn’t know he could grow. Why do all the really powerful bad guys have to do that? Is it like an intimidation thing?”
Superman shrugged and put a hand on Cisco’s shoulder to steady himself. “Maybe they’re compensating for the smallness of their souls.”
“Could be. Well, go get ’im, Man of Steel!” Cisco jabbed a finger at the sky, now filling quickly with the form of the still-growing Time Trapper.
“Wish I could. But I used up my power to rescue you.”
Cisco tapped his foot on the ground, his nervous energy stirring up clouds of dust. “Usually I’d tell you you made a bad decision, but since it was me, I’m going to hold off. C’mon.”
He gestured and a breach opened. Cisco helped Superman step through.
46
“Anything, Kara?” Iris asked.
Supergirl sighed and touched the comms bud in her ear. She was two floors down and halfway across the building from the Cortex, in a dark and silent corridor. “Nothing new in the last two minutes, which was the last time you asked.”
With the tiniest fraction of her powers returning, Supergirl felt pretty confident in her search for Owlman, but she knew Iris worried about her friend putting herself in harm’s way. Especially when that could mean standing between a menace like Owlman and whatever his ultimate target happened to be.
But Supergirl couldn’t just stand by and do nothing while a threat potentially stalked her friends. Her X-ray vision was wobbly and her super-hearing wasn’t the greatest right now, but her senses were still sharper than any of the humans at S.T.A.R. Labs. In one more day, she’d be all powered up again. Right now, she’d make do with what she had.
“Sorry,” Iris said. “I’ll stay off comms so you can focus.”
Supergirl opened her mouth to thank Iris, but then thought she heard something. She couldn’t be sure. A breath? A heartbeat? Just a mouse in one of the walls?
Impossible to tell. She stopped moving, turned a slow circle, ears prickled, listening . . .
There it was again. A . . . hush? A shush? Wow, how did normal people live with such a small range of hearing available to them?
Was it behind her?
No. Nothing there. And she’d just come from that direction. She would have . . .
Oh man, she thought, realizing, I can’t believe I fell for the oldest trick in the . . .
She ducked to one side just in time as Owlman pounced from where he’d been lurking above her. He landed on the floor in near silence, making not a sound.
“Heard you coming a mile away,” Supergirl bluffed. “Super-hearing.”
“Ultra-hearing,” said Owlman, then sniffed. “Hh. I’m familiar with it.” He looked her up and down. “There’s something about you, though . . . Something about the way you stand . . .”
Supergirl tightened her lips and struck her most powerful and threatening pose, the one she used to face down fellow Kryptonians, Daxamites . . .
Owlman grinned. “I’ve spent years watching him. Studying him.” She knew who he meant—Ultraman. Kal’s evil doppelgänger. “He has a way of standing . . . Like he could take off at any moment. But you . . . You . . . Gravity got you down?”
He knew.
Supergirl went on the offensive, hoping to take advantage of the element of surprise. With any luck, he wouldn’t expect Non-Supergirl to attack, and that would give her a second to—
KRAK!
Her head seemed to explode with pain as he backhanded her with a solid, well-placed blow to her temple.
She shoved the pain aside and lashed out with a spin kick that Alex had taught her. It caught him off guard, and she enjoyed the momentary expression of shocked pain that flitted across his face.
“More to you than the powers,” he said, taking a step back. “Nice.”
Then, with a snarl, he leaped at her. She dodged to the side and let fly with a punch that should have flattened him, but he brought up his arm at the last second to block it. Supergirl used her cape, twirling it to distract him, then tried a front kick at his chest.
Owlman grabbed her ankle in midair. She was slower than she thought.
“Nice try,” he grunted, and swung her to one side, smashing her against the wall.
That wall was the last thing she saw before crumpling into unconsciousness.
• • •
Mr. Terrific returned to S.T.A.R. Labs just as Iris’s worry about Kara devolved into absolute panic. She hadn’t responded to comms hails in several minutes, and now Iris was beyond worried. Curtis immediately sent a coterie of T-spheres through the corridors, each of them equipped with infrared and ultraviolet sensors, as well as radar and heightened noise detection. “Don’t worry,” he told Iris with confidence. “My little buddies are on the job. They’ll find Kara, and if Owlman’s in the building, you can bet they’ll find him, too.”
Nibbling at her left thumbnail, Iris hoped he was right. Barry and the others had left hours ago, and while she understood that the vagaries of time travel made it imprecise if not impossible to predict when they should return, Kara’s radio silence—combined with the idea that Owlman had mucked with the speedster treadmill—made her more nervous than usual.
“This dude is like the Batman of his world, right?” Felicity asked. “Do you think that means that our Bruce Wayne—”
“Not a chance,” Iris said absently. “Earth 27 is a funhouse mirror version of ours, remember? Our Bruce Wayne is a rich playboy. Theirs is a badass. Opposites.”
“Right,” Felicity said. “But what if the effete-fop thing is an act? What if our Bruce Wayne is a secret badass?”
Iris threw her hands up in the air. “Sure, sure! And the president is a shape-shifting alien, and the guy on the ten o’clock news on WGBS is really a superhero and—”
“Ladies!” Mr. Terrific interrupted. “I have a ping!” He consulted the control module for his T-spheres. “Sphere 10-9-HG has picked something up. I knew it would be 10-9-HG,” he said happily. “I love that little guy.”
“Curtis!” Felicity snapped.
“Oh, right. Anyway, picking up an extra heat signature in the medical bay, near Madame Xanadu’s room.”
Iris smacked herself in the forehead with the palm of her hand. Of course. Owlman had threatened Madame Xanadu once already.
“Caitlin!” she called into the comms channel. “Are you in Medical?”
“Where else would I be?” came the response.
“Are you armed?”
47
A breach spun open next to Barry and Wally. Superman staggered through, looking as though he’d gone fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali wearing kryptonite gloves. Immediately behind him was none other than Cisco.
Barry whooped and threw his arms around Cisco in a massive bear hug. Superman crouched down next to Kid Flash and checked his vitals.
“I’m glad to see you, too, buddy,” Cisco said. “You guys have an escape plan, or am I going to have to Leia this rescue?”
Barry managed to crack a grin. “Let’s say we’re trying to think on our feet and improvise.”
“So . . . situation normal?”
“We’ve . . . we’ve already lost some people . . .”
“Situation much, much worse than normal,” Wally said.
Cisco sighe
d. Up in the sky, Mick fired blast after blast of green energy at the Time Trapper, all to no effect.
In quick, clipped sentences, Cisco filled Barry in on everything he’d learned about and from the Time Trapper, finishing with “. . . so there are two entire Multiverses at stake here. And the poor TV schnooks don’t even know they’re at risk.”
Opening his mouth to respond, Barry was distracted by the glowing green object hurtling toward them. As they watched, Mick pinwheeled through the vacuum and crashed nearby. Barry ran to Mick’s side. Heat Wave was still breathing, and the green cocoon of energy around him seemed to be doing its best to stitch together his wounds.
In an instant so quick that even Barry missed it, the Time Trapper shrank back down to a human scale and stood before them on the asteroid.
“You. Barry Allen. A gnat from the distant past who has dared travel through my realm.”
The voice made his ears hurt. It seemed to vibrate on multiple frequencies at the same time. There was nothing but a black blank within that hood, but it sounded as though there had to be more than one mouth speaking.
“Welcome. To the End.”
“It’s not over yet!” Barry said with more confidence than he actually felt.
“It has ‘been over’ for eons. I have already won. All life across the Multiverse has been extinguished, save for those here. And soon, you, too, will be dead.”
Barry tilted his chin up. “You seem pretty confident, given that we’ve already broken your machinery and rescued your two prisoners.”
The Time Trapper did not chuckle or even move, but something in his demeanor changed subtly, communicating to Barry that it found this argument amusing.
“And yet in so doing, you have brought to me a second speedster. And a verdant omnithought band! How delicious. The last of them were destroyed eons ago during the Gray Crisis, but you have delivered one to my hands. My gratitude.”
