II Crimsonstreak
Page 20
Hmmm… a little snark. Perhaps he’s not quite as unbalanced as I thought.
“You left me for dead, and so did the Enforcers. The Kiltechs didn’t, though. They found me and enhanced my powers, ” DashBoy continues. “Unlike the other supers they tried to control, I didn’t blow up. There’s always a voice inside my head, you know? Telling me to do this, do that. I’ve learned to ignore it.”
DashBoy’s head shakes as his right eye twitches like Ed the Hyena from The Lion King. “I’m so fast now, I can open rifts in time and space, just like you,” he says. “And now... I want to stick it to the Kiltechs so bad. I wanna run them right out of existence, and when I hit Perfect Speed—Perfect Blue Speed—I’ll do it.” DashBoy proceeds to giggle like a psychotic eight-year-old who’s just discovered what the sun and a magnifying glass can do to ants.
“Enough talking!” Kilgore snaps, pointing his scepter at us. His scaly green face seems to slither as he talks. “We’re taking both of you into custody. The Orange Bands can’t save you now.”
As soon as he says it, I sort of expect the entire force of Orange Bands to come raining down from the sky, appearing left and right with their insane magical Orange Band powers to swoop in and save the day.
They don’t come. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Kilgore laughs, looking smugly like he’s read my thoughts. “They have other problems to deal with right now.” A wave of his scepter slams both of us on our backs. Let’s just say it stings a bit. Kiltech soldiers tighten their circle around us. We get to our feet.
“Kilgore, I know you and I aren’t the best of friends, but I understand what’s going on here. I know what the Bands want to do. We need to work together,” I protest.
Kilgore appears to consider it for a moment. “You have worked with the Bands. You have supported their cause. What possible reason would you have to change your affiliation so suddenly?”
“I realized they weren’t here to help. They’re trying to use us to distract you,” I explain.
It’s hard to read Kilgore’s facial expression because of the plate that covers his mouth and jaw. Still, it seems like his gaze is softening, his posture less threatening. A second later, he tenses. “We have finally corralled the Bluestreak,” he informs me. “And with him, we can end all of this.”
“You have no idea how right you are about that,” I retort.
“Regardless, both of you are coming with me.”
DashBoy elbows me in the ribs. “We let them take us, we’re never coming back,” he whispers. “Stand back-to-back.”
“What?”
“Stand back-to-back, Fairborne.”
Then I remember.
“We breaking right this time?”
“Left.”
A few seconds pass as Kilgore retrieves two pairs of power-suppressing electro-cuffs.
He takes a step toward us…
“Hooch!” DashBoy yells.
I break left, he breaks left, and we smash into the circle of Kiltech guards at blinding speed. In a flash, we knock the closest soldiers off-balance and create a running lane through the housing subdivision.
DashBoy clears the way.
I follow him, hoping I’ll be able to keep up.
Scenery moves by faster than I’ve ever seen it, but my eyes are trained on the blue trail in front of me. There is some remnant of the idealistic Scarlet DashBoy in the man I’m trying to catch, but that idealism is mostly overshadowed by the psychological scarring left behind by alien experiments and unfulfilled hero worship.
That’s right. I get it. I, Crimsonstreak, am just as responsible for the creation of the Bluestreak as the Kiltechs themselves. If I’d taken a second or two to give the kid a chance, to not overlook him as an annoying horsefly on my horse’s ass, maybe he wouldn’t be insane right now. Or maybe he’d be insane, but harmlessly insane, instead of taking his Ray Finkle obsession with me and turning it on its head.
Laces out, Dan.
The dude is fast.
I mean, fast.
I’m having trouble keeping up with him, the blue trail fading before me. I tell my legs to churn even faster, urge my feet to be even lighter, and the blue trail darkens just a bit. The ribbon thickens, and I’m making up some ground.
Just as quickly as I can think it, DashBoy puts more distance between us.
We twist and turn and dart and dodge through towns and cities and schools and office buildings; corporate headquarters, skyscrapers, and city squares; water towers, barns, and cornfields. In my estimation, we’re zig-zagging across the United States.
Then we hit a body of water.
It’s said Jesus walked on water, yet we’re running over it. If we were to stop, though, we’d hold up a “help me” sign and do a Wile E. Coyote into the ocean. I’d say the Son of God wins this one.
Water appears to slow down Scarlet DashBoy and I gain a lot of ground, enough to pull even with him. I’ve run on water before, but I guess he’s not used to it; you have to make some accomodations, plant your weight differently. But then we hit land and DashBoy finds his groove once more. We move through vineyards and squares and run through streets where cars are on the wrong side of the road.
Seconds later, we’re running over mountains and sucking in thin air.
Barren fields, old cities, snow. Mountains. Even older cities.
Another ocean.
We loop around, do some island-hopping.
A sad feeling of war and chaos, jungles touched by human life.
We keep going, hitting another stretch of water. I close my eyes and roar past Scarlet DashBoy, opening cracks in the sky and surface. I’m going so fast now that I’m almost going too slow, like I’m in bullet time.
The cracks in the sky and surface crystallize, laying out before me the possibilities of all things.
Morty as the Crusading Comet…
Morty as a mech-warrior…
Morty as a mad industrialist who’s taken over the world.
Miss Lightspeed alive…
Miss Lightspeed dead, but never to come back…
Miss Lightspeed married to someone else...
The endless possibilities are opening to one another, just as Morty said they would. DashBoy catches up and tries to pass, but he can’t. No one can catch me.
I’m Crimsonstreak, the Fastest Man on Earth.
Hell, the Fastest Man on Earths.
All realities, shimmering around me in cracked glass, close enough for me to touch them. I reach toward one showing a steam-powered ship with the Crusading Comet emblem on the side. Before I can touch it, the crystalline image shatters and fades away.
Another reality to my left.
The mirror rift reveals a tranquil world. There is no war, no fighting. No pollution. A utopia.
I reach toward it, but a ship materializes and decimates it. The dark, chitinous hull is streaked with veins of yellow and orange energy.
Four more realities are ahead.
In this one, the Sanctum Cometus lacks the sophisticated tech and gear I’m familiar with. Old books and bubbling potions sit in the main chamber instead. Robes with moons and stars and comets hang on floating hooks.
I reach toward it, but the glass cracks and the mirror fades away.
Another mirror…
Dark streets, criminals whispering with a sense of foreboding, of fear. They proceed, cautiously, but what they fear most of all never arrives.
The mirror cracks and fades away.
Another Sanctum Cometus, this one glowing with bright blue energy. Tables laden with metal arms and legs and shells replace the crime lab. Holographic displays sit where large monitors once hung from the walls.
The mirror cracks and fades away.
DashBoy comes up hard on my right and tries to push me into one of the fissures in time and space. He yells something lost in this perplexing interdimensional subway station, and I realize he’s not trying to push me. He’s trying to hold me back and get the edge.
While I gawk at the headline, DashBoy pushes past me. I yell for him to stop, but the words are lost in the swirling echoes of the multiverses’ infinite chorus. He flashes me a grin—or at least I think he does—and he heads through the portal. I try to follow, but he’s too quick, and the mirror shatters.
Above, the shard of another reality.
My eyes are drawn to a billboard that says “Kensington Media Properties.” As soon as I see the sign, the mirror fades away.
The glittering realities are intoxicating.
“Give me more!” I shriek, again uncertain if the words carry.
I feel the gaze of infinite eyes on me and it sends a chill through my entire body.
I try to slow down, but another reality beckons. My muscles burn as I power my way through, smashing through the reflective surface into blackness.
I end up on my knees, palms flat against cold ceramic tiles. I feel the disorientation of multiversal displacement, though it doesn’t seem as jarring as before. Perhaps Morty wasn’t lying after all; it’s getting easier.
“Did it work?” I ask, unsure if anyone is even near me.
Footsteps click against the floor, and a gloved hand helps pull me up.
“Did what work?” Morty asks. He’s shed the Crusading Comet uniform and now wears white gloves and a topcoat with tails, just like old times. Mercifully, the mustache is gone.
“You look different, Morty,” I say.
“Different? Why, Master Chris, I’m dressed no differently than this morning. Sir, are you all right? You look positively fatigued.”
“Morty, did it work?”
“I’m not sure what you’re referring to, sir. Are you talking about your father’s anti-gravity restaurant?”
“Anti-gravity restaurant? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I would appreciate it if you would uphold the usual decorum, Master Chris.”
“Master Chris? Wait, since when do you call me...”
Morty and I look at one another, tilting our heads like puppies looking at themselves in a mirror.
The butler stabs me with an accusatory finger. “You’re not Master Chris,” he says. He moves his hand in a diagonal slash across his face. “You’re missing the scar SiniStar gave you. And your outfit...”
“You should be wearing armor,” I say.
“Armor?” Morty scoffs. “Who do you think I am? The Crusading Comet?”
Now This Is What It’s Like When Worlds Collide
“I don’t understand,” my father says. His face is smooth, the twin stresses of losing Mom and enduring his doppelganger’s ruthless takeover erased from it. “You’re Chris, but you’re not?”
My mother sits to his left at the kitchen table with a concerned look on her face. They inform me that we are not in my hometown of Williamsburg but rather a suburb of Chicago. Talk about your jarring reality shifts.
“I’m an echo of the Chris you know,” I try to explain again. For a super-genius, my father doesn’t seem to have a good grasp on the concept of a multiverse.
“The multiverse explanation again? Listen, son, I’ve done the calculations and met with some of the top scientists in the field. We all agreed that such a phenomenon is impossible. The amount of matter that would need to exist for all of those possibilities to coexist is prohibitive. And for every choice to spin off into a reality of its own seems infinitely cluttered.”
My mother looks so beautiful right now, the strain of dying and coming back gone, as if Dove sold tranquility in a bottle and she used it to wash her face this morning.
“Bill, the scar is gone,” she says. “Perhaps the other scientists were wrong? They’ve never liked your more outlandish theories.”
Dad reads the confusion on my face. “A long time ago, I proposed that the universe exists as you described, but we studied it and concluded there was no way it could be true. I tried to build a gateway once to test the theory, but it didn’t work.”
I proceed to tell my parents about the Kiltechs and my interdimensional travel and how screwed up it is that Morty is our butler when he should be the butler for the Kensington family.
“Alien invasions? Alternate dimensions?” Dad says, giving Mom a sideways look. “We shouldn’t have let you read so many comic books as a kid.”
“You guys mentioned a scar,” I remind them. “How did I get that?”
“A while back, a villain named SiniStar kidnapped you and held you for ransom,” Mom explains. “You tried to use your burgeoning super-strength to outmuscle him, but SiniStar sent a laser beam searing across your face. Your invulnerability hadn’t developed yet, so it stayed.”
I remember getting kidnapped by SiniStar when I was a really little kid—he was after ransom or something. He was big and nasty, and I was just too small to challenge him.
Undisclosed villain’s lair location, May 1988.
“Do you understand why I am doing this?” SiniStar asks. His oil-black armor shines in the dim lighting; his red eyes project thin beams of light as he surveys the room.
I shake my head.
“Of course you do not understand. You are but a child.” His voice is a modulated nightmare that reminds me of Boba Fett.
Put Captain Solo in the cargo hold.
I try not to think about the words and what they mean, but I’ve seen all the Star Wars movies so many times that I know all the lines. The villain’s tone is flat and emotionless just like Fett’s. I’d like to see him launched into the Sarlacc.
“Your parents are special,” SiniStar says, circling me as he talks. “They are powerful. But even the powerful have their weaknesses.” He puts a gloved hand on my shoulder, squeezing hard enough to make me cringe. “I would have imagined that the son of two great champions would have been kidnapped before.”
Mom and Dad once told me that the bad guys had a fascination with kidnapping me when I was a baby, but those days were past. Then one day I’m on a school field trip and SiniStar grabs me. No amount of chaperones could stop that. I should’ve known something was up when Mom left to respond to a mysterious disaster.
When we left the bus, SiniStar pounced.
Now, I sit in his lab among ominous devices, a dark reflection of my father’s own laboratory. Dad’s is a lot more fun. He actually has cable and a big screen perfect for playing Nintendo.
SiniStar doesn’t look like he even knows what Castlevania is. He just stands, scans the room, and stares through me with those horrible red-laser sights.
Boba Fett didn’t have laser sights.
Put Captain Solo in the cargo hold.
“If you are important to your parents, they will see things my way. They will convince the government to pay your ransom. Your father will help me complete my device.”
I want to ask him what it is, but I’m too scared, petrified by fear.
Mom and Dad will get here soon.
Mom and Dad will get here soon.
Mom and Dad will get here soon…
Mom and Dad eventually showed up, kicked SiniStar’s ass into next week, and put him away in a maximum-security cell. We never heard from him again, although his son did show up in our basement once. Now, Colonel Chaos and Miss Lightspeed tell me that’s not how it happened. Alternate universes, right?
“Super-strength? Invulnerability? Those are two things I’ve never had to worry about,” I tell them. I point at my mother. “All I got was your super-speed.”
When I return a second later, I’m holding a couple of hot dogs and two Cokes, which I place on the table. “Fresh from New York,” I say. “Dig in.”
“Super-speed?” Dad asks. “Hmmm.” He grabs a hot dog, then looks at it suspiciously. “I can’t eat this. It’s got ketchup on it. Who in their right mind eats ketchup on
a hot dog?”
His voice has a kind of Blues Brothers feel, as if my father learned English from Jake and Elwood Blues. He holds out his free hand and I take it.
“You can squeeze harder than that, son,” he says.
I grit my teeth and squeeze as hard as I can. “That’s all I’ve got.”
“That’s enough, Bill. The vein on his forehead is popping out,” Mom says.
I take my hand away and thank my father for choosing not to break it.
“No super-strength. No scar. Outlandish tales of Mortimer working for those insipid Kensingtons. Impossible or not, I’d say Chris here isn’t the Chris we’re familiar with.”
“The multiverses do exist,” I say. “I’ve seen them, I’ve traveled them, and I thought I’d saved them. Something is wrong here. You’re telling me we’ve never had contact with extraterrestrials? We’ve never had visits from aliens?”
“Just in TV shows and movies,” Dad says. “We’ve sent out some deep space missions, but nothing has come of it. I flew scouting missions to several different galaxies that didn’t find anything friendly or threatening. It’s just space dust and empty planets.”
Out of the corner of my eye, something on TV catches my attention. The image shows Miss Lightspeed surrounded by police and firefighters, the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. Distressingly, the news anchor boasts that this is live coverage.
I hook a thumb at the screen. “You guys believe me now?”
My mother covers her mouth. “How am I in San Francisco when I’m right here?”
It’s a fair question.
Her confused look turns to anger as the Miss Lightspeed on TV hurls a police cruiser at a group of officers. “We’re getting to the bottom of this, Bill.”
She takes me by the arm, and we’re off.
When we land, a Crown Vic flies right toward us, but my father catches it and sets it down on the cracked pavement. There are enough emergency vehicles here for the finale of a Roland Emmerich movie, and a brick warehouse burns in the background, the black smoke reaching miles into the sky.
A crackling, over-modulated voice fills the air. “Miss Lightspeed! San Francisco Police Department! Stand down! Repeat, stand down!”