by Barry Lyga
“Hardly. We’re the thinkers. The planners. And we’re the ones who remember that even when everyone is jumping around the Multiverse, there are actual people at risk. People who matter. People who can’t leap tall buildings or travel through time. Sometimes, with all the superpowers flying around, it’s too easy to get caught up in winning the fight, and we forget what we’re fighting for. For them. For the people who can’t hurl lightning bolts or walk through walls. We do it for them, and we are living reminders of that.”
Dig pursed his lips, considering, then gave a slow, thoughtful nod.
“Hard to make science with all the pontificating going on!” Curtis Holt said from his workstation. Slender and intense, with a lanky, energetic vibe, Curtis had joined Felicity at one of the Bunker’s worktables, where they hunched over to examine the bomb the Flash had recovered. They’d meticulously disassembled it down to its raw components and now were painstakingly identifying a chain of ownership for each piece, trying to determine how it had been built . . . and by whom.
“Just keeping it real,” Dig told him.
“As he said,” Oliver said equably.
“Could you keep it down while you’re keeping it real?” Felicity snapped, engrossed in a microscopic component. She gave a little gasp and flipped up the microzoom goggles she was wearing. “I meant to say,” she said sweetly, “could you keep it down, my dear husband, light of my life?”
Oliver chuckled dryly. “How long are you two going to be pawing through that tech? Maybe Dig and I’ll grab Rene and go get some dinn—”
He broke off as the Bunker filled with a loud, piercing shriek; red lights pulsated overhead. Dig’s hand went for his weapon, but Oliver waved him off.
“That’s the Flash’s emergency beacon. He’s never used it before.”
Just then, the main monitor flickered to life. Iris West-Allen loomed over them all. “Team Arrow! Sorry to break in like this . . .”
“That’s why we installed the system in the first place,” Oliver told her. “What’s up?”
“Barry says—and I quote—‘Time for Green Arrow to pay back that favor I just did for him.’ We’ve got a Multiversal breach in the middle of the city, a bunch of panicked speedsters running around, and at least three people with the power of flight and the power of bad attitudes. Can you guys lend a hand?”
Oliver turned to look at Dig, who’d already grabbed his Spartan gear off a nearby rack. “Felicity . . .”
She nodded curtly, all business. “Take Curtis and Rene with you. Grab Dinah, too. I’ll stay here and work on the bomb stuff.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Maybe Curtis could stay.”
She shook her head firmly. “They’re going to need all the help they can get. Go.”
Oliver snatched up his bow. “Suit up and roll out!” he said.
“It should totally be called the Arrowplane,” said Curtis Holt as he strapped into the pilot’s seat.
“We’re not calling it the Arrowplane!” Oliver yelled from the main cabin.
They were a hundred feet underground in a concealed launch facility that had once been a Queen Industries subway extension project. The project had been shuttered when the Glades sank into the bowels of the earth, and Oliver had repurposed the facility, figuring it would come in handy someday. Now it was a massive, hangar-sized space with an elevator as tall as most skyscrapers.
Curtis Holt was one of the smartest, most accomplished human beings alive, with doctorates in more than a dozen fields of study. He had lived up to his code name—Mr. Terrific—and done some, well, terrific work down in the hangar. He’d built a supersonic jet capable of vertical takeoff like a rocket, needing no runway space. It could jump into the upper reaches of the atmosphere and cut a parabolic arc over the curvature of Earth, letting it traverse great distances in incredibly brief amounts of time. It wasn’t quite Flash-level speed, but it was the next best thing.
Curtis was in the pilot’s seat, with Dig next to him. In the back was Oliver, of course, along with Dinah Drake—the Black Canary—and Rene Ramirez, Wild Dog.
“Is this more superhero junk, hoss?” Rene asked. He was more at home with the street-level justice at which he excelled. Super-stuff felt perpetually out of his league. When Oliver first met him, he’d been armed with nothing more than a few guns and a suit of homemade “armor” that included a hockey goalie’s mask. Now he was decked out with serious tech, but he remained a street brawler at heart.
“It’s going to be fine,” Oliver said, double-checking the buckles on his restraints. They’d never actually flown the plane before—it was still technically an experiment. A beta product, Curtis called it. There was a slight chance they’d all blow up on takeoff.
“It goes up in the air,” Curtis was saying, “and then arcs and comes down. Like an arrow shot into the sky. So: Arrowplane.”
“Not. Calling it. Arrowplane,” Oliver insisted. “Just get us to Central City.”
Curtis shrugged and flipped some switches. “Engaging main thrusters. Felicity, do you read me?”
“Read you.” Felicity’s voice crackled through the speakers. “I show nothing in your flight path. You’re cleared for launch, Arrowplane.”
“It’s not—!”
Oliver’s protest was swallowed by a thunderous, crashing roar as Mr. Terrific engaged the thrusters. The ceiling yawned open as the ground shook and the plane vibrated all around them. And then, in an instant, they were airborne, blasting over the horizon, heading east toward Central City.
6
Nearly out of breath, Barry paused for half a second at the event horizon of the breach. Here, the imbalance of atmospheric pressure between Earth 1 and Earth 27 caused a foul wind to blow in from the parallel world. It carried the stench of death, of scorched brick, of something else he couldn’t identify but which made his fingers tremble. Even the light on Earth 27 looked different, corrupted, decaying. And there was still that figure, so far away yet so threatening, so huge, moving relentlessly forward.
Barry had spent the last half hour moving people out of harm’s way and trying to corral the speedsters. They weren’t evil or even merely bad; they were just average, frightened people with a superpower. Fortunately, most of them were on the slow end of fast. None of them could even get close to Mach 1. Barry was able to round a bunch of them up and point them to the best evacuation routes. With speedsters leading the way, people were now moving in a more orderly fashion up Kanigher, then splitting and heading for the safety of uptown along Larocque and Lampert Streets.
Up above, Ultraman and Power Ring were beating the snot out of each other. Barry thanked his lucky stars that these guys apparently didn’t have the brains to go with their incredible powers—he’d tricked them into colliding with each other while they were trying to zap him, and now they were zapping each other instead. Ultraman’s eyes blazed a sickly red and beams of heat vision lashed the sky, narrowly missing Power Ring. Ultraman seemed to have all the Kryptonian powers of Barry’s friend Kara—Supergirl—from Earth 38. Barry had no desire to tussle with that kind of power.
The other guy, Power Ring, lived up to his name. He wore a green ring on his right hand that flashed and flared and seemed to conjure whatever he could imagine. Fortunately, Power Ring’s imagination seemed to be severely limited. He was just firing blasts at Ultraman and whipping up shields for himself. If he really understood the power of that ring, Barry thought with a shudder, it would be all over. With that kind of power at his disposal, he could—
“Urk!” Barry’s hands flew up to his throat, clawing there. He’d been caught out, and now Superwoman’s glowing lasso was wrapped around his neck, choking him.
She tightened her grip and yanked him closer to her; he stumbled over on legs gone weak from constant, uninterrupted running. Her lips curled into a cruel smile. “My mystical lasso makes you my slave, little runner. I never managed to get it around Johnny Quick, but now I have a pet speedster, just like I always wanted.” Her smil
e ratcheted up a notch. “Assuming I don’t just kill you, that is. That’s always been my problem: I keep killing the men who should be serving me.”
As Barry struggled for breath, he flashed back to more than a year ago. Abra Kadabra—then going by the name Hocus Pocus—had come to the twenty-first century from the sixty-fourth with the express purpose of killing the famous Flash. To start, he’d used his nanotechnology to make Barry his puppet, controlling his every move and action. For the first time in his life since becoming the Flash, Barry had been completely helpless, utterly unable to fight back for himself or for the people he’d sworn to protect. It had been a nightmare, a painful, terrifying part of Barry’s life, and there was no way in the world he was going to relive it at the hands of this Earth 27 psychopath.
He tried vibrating through the lasso, but something in its composition absorbed and counterbalanced his vibrations. He remained depressingly solid, and oxygen was becoming a scarce commodity in his lungs.
You’re not gonna die this way, Allen. No way, no how.
“Hey!” a familiar voice shouted. “Get off! He’s mine!”
Barry managed to swivel just enough to see the owner of the voice: Eddie Thawne. The Eddie Thawne of Earth 27, to be exact. Unlike his Earth 1 counterpart—who’d nobly sacrificed his life to save the world from Reverse-Flash—this version was petty, venal, and thoroughly evil. He was also, unfortunately, a speedster with the name Johnny Quick. During his time on Earth 27, Barry had defeated Quick and liberated that version of Central City from his despotic reign. Someone must have broken him out of the special cell he’d been put in, just in time to let him run through the breach and into Barry’s nightmares.
Thawne sped over to Barry’s side and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Thought you were gonna leave me in that stupid prison you made, did you? Thought you could win?” He kneed Barry in the gut and laughed when Barry sank to his knees; the lasso had just barely enough slack to allow it. “You thought you could beat me? I’m Johnny Quick! I always win! Not so smart now, huh? Got nothing to say, slowpoke?”
“Busy . . . dying . . .” Barry managed to croak out, still trying to pull the lasso away from his throat so that he could recapture some precious air.
Johnny Quick’s eyes narrowed. As though seeing it for the very first time, he stared at the shining, glowing, golden noose around Barry’s neck, then followed it with his eyes back to Superwoman, who stood about ten feet away.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Lay off, Superwoman! I want this one!”
“Possession is ten-tenths of the law!” she snapped back. “Go get your own toy.”
“I want this one!” Johnny Quick growled and took off like a rocket. In half a blink, he was at Superwoman’s side, grabbing her wrists and trying to wrench the lasso out of her grip.
“Slow-witted buffoon!” she shouted.
“Treacherous harpy!” he shouted back.
As they struggled over the lasso, it loosened the tiniest bit on Barry’s end. He could breathe just a bit . . .
. . . and then the two villains grappled with each other and took off, half flying, half running, dragging Barry behind them.
Oh, this is gonna suck . . . he predicted.
Bam! He slammed into a parked car. Smack! Right into a mailbox. Crash! “Sorry!” Colliding with a cluster of panicked evacuees.
Superwoman and Johnny Quick traded blows and insults as they blazed a trail up Kanigher Avenue, then veered to the right and smashed through the heavy glass doors of a nearby building. Superwoman seemed impervious to the shattered glass, and Johnny Quick vibrated through it. Barry, still unable to vibrate, got hit with dozens of shards of flying glass. Most of it was deflected by his costume, but he did take a few cuts across his exposed face and one just above his eye.
One centimeter lower and they’d call me One-Eye, he thought mordantly as blood dripped into his field of vision. He was being dragged through the lobby of the building, smashing back and forth against marble columns, his entire body battered and bruised. How much longer could he withstand this? How much longer could they go on? And what about the people out in the streets? Without him out there, there was no one to guide them to safety or protect them from Ultraman and Power Ring, who surely would stop fighting each other and turn their attentions groundward again soon.
All in all, it was shaping up to be a lousy showing for Central City’s favorite hero.
C’mon, Barry. You can do this. You ran a thousand years into the future. Defeated a space pirate. Saved the sixty-fourth century from a clan of warring techno-wizards. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and make it happen!
He wrapped his legs around a nearby post and took the lasso in both hands. It was time to pull instead of being pulled. Maybe while Superwoman was distracted by Johnny Quick, he could yank her end out of her hands . . .
Just then, there was a sudden ear-splitting screech that drowned out everything else. Barry gritted his teeth against it, but it stopped as abruptly as it had started.
“Sonics detected,” a soothing voice said in Barry’s ear. “Countermeasures deployed.”
Thank God for Cisco Ramon, he thought. They’d faced enough enemies with sonic powers that Cisco had built a gadget into his suit that detected metahuman sonic frequencies and used a digital signal processor to broadcast an inverse opposing frequency to cancel it out. He was momentarily deaf, but at least his hearing was protected.
A lasso length away, Superwoman clapped her hands to her ears, dropping her end of the rope. Johnny Quick dropped to the floor, protecting his ears, too, clearly screaming in pain.
There, in the wrecked doorway of the building lobby, stood the greatest sight for sore eyes Barry had ever seen, a slender woman with a flowing mane of gold-highlighted hair and a sleek black costume with matching black domino mask: Black Canary.
“I have never been so glad to see you,” Barry said. “Or hear you.”
Dinah Drake had the power to generate and project high-frequency sonic waves with her throat. Clutching her signature bo staff weapon in one hand, she gave Barry a thumbs-up with the other but didn’t smile or say hello—she was maintaining the frequencies, her assault rendering Superwoman and Johnny Quick temporarily helpless.
Barry pulled the lasso over his head. He was shaking, and not in the good way that meant he was vibrating through something. His whole body was oxygen starved; his adrenaline was sky-high. He needed a moment to recuperate.
But moments—especially for the Flash—were too precious to waste on recovery. The lasso still glowed in his hands, so he theorized that it had an innate power of its own, rather than merely projecting some sort of energy from Superwoman. On shaky legs, he made his way over to Superwoman and Johnny Quick, who were still on the floor, clutching their ears. Swiftly, he used the lasso to bind their wrists behind them.
Sound filled the lobby again as Black Canary took a deep breath. “Are they . . . ?”
He watched as the two villains struggled against the lasso and made absolutely no progress at all. “They’re done for now,” Barry announced. “Thanks, Canary. What took you guys so long?”
“Supersonic jet,” she said. “What’s wrong, speed of sound not fast enough for you?”
He grinned. “Not hardly.” And then he bounced on his toes to test his legs and ran outside as fast as he could.
The breach had turned downtown Central City into a war zone, and things weren’t getting any better. There were still people streaming out of the breach, though Barry could see that the flow had diminished some, and the crowd on the other side desperate to get through had shrunk quite a bit. He felt a spasm of relief, then a shiver of reproach. If people were in dire straits and needed to abandon Earth 27, he should be hoping for more evacuees, not fewer.
Overhead, Ultraman dipped low and fired a laser blast from his eyes. A furrow opened up in the middle of the street, scattering the fleeing crowd of hundreds as they tried to evade the sudden up-splash of molten asphalt.
“Th
is guy and the one with the ring thing are giving us some trouble.” It was Oliver, rushing over to stand next to Barry. His left cheek was scraped almost raw, the blood still wet and glimmering. He had dirt smudged over most of his face, and Barry saw that half his quiver was empty. Green Arrow had already fired a lot of his arsenal at the enemy.
“Tried explosive arrow, injection arrow, a nanite arrow . . .”
“What about the boxing glove arrow?” Barry asked.
“Smart-ass,” Oliver deadpanned, watching as Ultraman executed a flip in midair. “He’s coming back for another strafing run. This guy reminds me of that evil Supergirl from Earth X we fought last year.”
Barry nodded. He’d thought the same thing. “Got a kryptonite arrow?”
“Yeah. But only one. I can’t risk anything but a perfect shot.”
“I thought you only took perfect shots, Ollie.”
“Don’t call me Ollie,” Green Arrow growled, then leaped to one side as a chunk of concrete dropped from above. Barry vibrated into intangibility as the chunk smashed into the street and sprayed debris in all directions. Up in the sky, Power Ring had created a giant green claw and was using it to rip pieces out of buildings and hurl them below.
“This isn’t going to go well,” Barry said. “We need more muscle.”
Oliver shook his head. “Spartan is trying to draw the ring guy away from innocents, and I’ve got Wild Dog and Mr. Terrific helping with crowd control. There’s no one else.”
Barry tapped his comms. “Wrong. Vibe, do you read me?”
Cisco Ramon winced as he breached from S.T.A.R. Labs to the rooftop of the Great Mark Hotel. He’d misjudged the height of the building by a tiny bit and landed hard on his left foot, twisting his ankle slightly. This is not off to an auspicious start, he thought.
He’d developed his vibe powers a couple of years ago, but they had, truthfully, frightened him a bit. He was a man of science and rationality, and while he understood how superpowers worked, the idea of bending the laws of physics in his bare hands was still a little . . . freaky.
