II Crimsonstreak

by Matt Adams

  “Where are we?” DashBoy asks. Despite the lack of a discernible source, white light splashes across his threadbare blue uniform. Actually, no, I’m going to call it a costume.

  My uniform, on the other hand, is also ripped in several places. So whatever we did, we did it together and it was enough to totally muck up our outfits. I get up on one knee and realize how much my leg muscles burn. My ankles are sore, too.

  “I have no idea,” I admit. “But while we’re trying to figure it out, why don’t you share with me how in the hell you’re here at all.”

  “I remember running. No… racing. Against you. I was just starting to pull ahead…”

  My ego screams for me to correct him, but this isn’t the time.

  “… just as the Orange Bands said I would. I went through a gateway and ended up in a world with no Crimsonstreak. It was a different universe, I think. I met the Blue Bands there. They told me I’d become the fastest man who ever lived, but they said I could go even faster.”

  “You tried that, didn’t you?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

  “I hit an incredible velocity—even faster than Perfect Speed. Different realities were right in front of me. I could’ve chosen any one of them, but the Bands told me to keep running. Whenever I wanted to go one place, they told me to go another.” He swallows. “I’ve been running through tunnels for a long time. Constant running. Always running.”

  “I’ve been there,” I say.

  DashBoy looks completely shellshocked, but his face has a hardness that makes me long for the days when he was an annoying tagalong. Back then, it was easy to dismiss him. That’s not the case anymore.

  “They played you, DashBoy,” I say. “They played both of us.”

  “I’m the Bluestreak now,” he corrects me softly, tugging at his ragged outfit. “I’m not him anymore.”

  “Sorry… Bluestreak.”

  “It’s okay,” the kid says. “Just… anything but DashBoy, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Why did they make me run?”

  “The Bands needed to connect their different branches, but they were scattered among a bunch of different realities,” I explain. “Our super-speed gives us the ability to create multiversal rifts to connect different realities.”

  Still mystified, he says, “I’ve never run like that before. I could never keep up with you.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” I reply. I could bring up the Kiltechs and their experiments, but he’s clearly processing too much information right now. Although it’s against my nature, I’ll take this one slow for his sake.

  A few seconds pass before the Bluestreak speaks again. “I felt someone else in the tunnels. Fast, but not fast enough to keep up with us.”

  “That was Miss Lightspeed.”

  “Your mother?” he asks.

  I look down, “Yeah. My mother. I think we lost her.”

  “There are only infinite universes. Maybe you’ll be able to find her eventually.”

  He’s shooting for hopeful, but it comes out forced and condescending instead. I’ll cut him some slack while I worry about my mother.

  He spends the next few seconds running around, exploring the space we’ve found ourselves in. “Infinite blackness,” he says. “No walls. No real ceiling. The ground is just… there’s no ground either. It’s like we simply exist in the middle of blackness.”

  We’ve tried a few things, but we’re not getting anywhere.

  We scattered in different directions and ran as fast as we could toward the edge of this infinite chamber, but it worked out like a Pac-Man board. You keep running far enough in one direction, you end up right back in the center.

  We tried running in tandem.

  Pac-Manned again.

  Disappointingly, no fruit available for bonus points.

  “They’re tearing each other apart,” the Bluestreak says, alluding to the massively multiplayer battle royale going on a few astral planes over.

  “I imagine so,” I respond. “We’re out of the way. The only guys who could stop them, and we’re stuck here.”

  “That means we’re teaming up, doesn’t it?”

  DashBoy’s face shows a hopeful young man older than his years, an unhinged, barely contained insanity dancing behind his eyes. More times than I’d like to admit, he’s tried to tag along on my missions, not caring if someone mistook him for me. A boil. A bad case of acne. Gum on the bottom of my shoe.

  Yet the last few years haven’t been easy on him. Enforcers nearly tortured him to death, an atrocity I could’ve stopped but didn’t. I keep telling myself the fate of the world was at stake, but the same nagging feeling that gnawed at me for leaving the Crusading Comet behind once again claws at the back of my mind. I could’ve saved him if I wanted to. If it had been convenient.

  What kind of a hero does that? What hero refuses to help?

  DashBoy gives me a crazy, expectant, wide-eyed stare.

  I take a deep breath and hold out my hand. “Partners?”

  He takes it and grasps it firmly. “Partners.”

  Springfield, Illinois, May 2005.

  “We could be a team, Crimsonstreak!” Scarlet DashBoy says while we power through the streets.

  “I told you, kid. I work alone. I’ve never had a sidekick, never will.”

  “They’d call us the ‘Red Dashes,’” DashBoy says. “It’s a compromise, see, since you’re crimson and I’m scarlet.”

  Scarlet DashBoy has been annoying me for years now, trying to join me in my fight against crime. And every time he makes an appearance, something goes wrong.

  This time, he decided to steal one of my uniforms in a slightly deranged effort to prove he can hang with the big boys.

  Lucky me, he did it just in time for a crisis. A bad guy calling himself JWB just invaded the town of Springfield, Illinois, declaring his intention to eradicate the memory of Abraham Lincoln.

  Just think about the initials for a second.

  Yeah.

  Classy, right?

  Scarlet DashBoy thinks he can preserve history by running down here dressed in one of my speed-suits. Since he took my top-tier uniform, I’m relegated to one of the very first Crimsonstreak outfits, a black one with stripes that look more scarlet than crimson to those with the discerning taste to distinguish between the two.

  “Stealing my uniform doesn’t help your cause,” I tell DashBoy. “In fact, it makes me want to hurt you. If the history of our sixteenth president weren’t at stake here, I’d run you right into a brick wall.”

  We both skid to a stop as we come upon JWB.

  The guy’s wearing a long coat with a stupid-looking cravat. A dark, neatly trimmed moustache gives him a softly roguish appearance.

  “An audience!” he says, his intonation mildly British. He folds his hands together. “Thank you so much for joining today’s performance!”

  “What are you doing here?” I ask him, hoping for a tidy Supervillain-Spills-All-Monologue.

  “I’m going to wipe every trace of Abraham Lincoln away from U.S. history,” he says, reiterating what’s already gone out on every superhero channel. “It starts with his hometown.”

  “This isn’t his hometown,” Scarlet DashBoy says. “He just grew up here.”

  “I had no idea you were so attuned to history, Crimsonstreak.”

  “Not so fast, Lee Harvey,” I say, pointing an accusing finger at Scarlet DoucheBag. “That’s not Crimsonstreak. He’s just wearing my uniform. Kind of a mix-up. By the way, speaking of mix-ups, another correction here: Lincoln was born in Kentucky, Kid Flash. He grew up in Indiana.”

  “He’s from Illinois,” JWB sneers. “It’s the Land of Lincoln.”

  “Really, Lincoln ‘belongs’ to everyone,” I tell him.

  The villain brandishes a weapon—yes, a predictable .44 caliber derringer—and opens fire, destroying the sign for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library. The little gun packs a wallop; I’m assuming it’s
not period-accurate.

  DashBoy rushes the villain and dodges a shot from the souped-up derringer, slamming into JWB and landing a variety of weak, rapid punches.

  “Et tu, Brute!” DashBoy shouts.

  I assume he’s going for “sic semper tyrannis.”

  JWB pushes DashBoy away and levels his derringer at me. I, too, dodge and burst toward the villain, knocking him over. He cracks his head against the concrete and goes limp.

  So here we are, partners for real, the fate of everything resting on our shoulders.

  “I have one more idea,” I say after we end up on our duffs in the center of this existential room for what is surely the seventy-fifth time.

  With some very careful testing, we figure out the boundaries of the room. The Bluestreak stands at the farthest edge on one end. A simple step backwards would instantly transport him to the other side. If he did that, he’d bump right into me. I’m on the opposite edge of the non-linear non-room. If I took a step backward, I’d bump right into him.

  “You sure this is a good idea?” he yells, cupping his hands over his mouth as if that’s really going to help me hear him.

  “Not really,” I mumble in reply. I find myself cupping my hands over my mouth as I shout my real response. “Can’t say for sure. Just run as fast as you can. Remember, this isn’t a game of chicken. We want to run into each other.”

  In the distance, the Bluestreak’s tiny pinhead bobs up and down in agreement. He instills more confidence in me by giving a hasty thumbs-up. Even from this distance, I can sense his nervousness.

  I can’t explain our connection, only that the Kiltech experiments on DashBoy unlocked abilities he wasn’t aware of, and that somehow punched some buttons in me. When he pushed himself to his limits, my natural instinct was to try to run even faster because I’m the Fastest Man on Earth. I like that title. Don’t really appreciate anyone trying to take it from me.

  I mean, Dad and Mom can fly. They’re super-strong, nigh-invulnerable like The Tick. Mom’s smart, a born diplomat, and Dad’s a freaking genius. All I’ve got is speed, and I’ve tried to get the most out of what I have. A long time ago, the world thought Miss Lightspeed was the fastest being on the planet. Once I hit puberty, that went out the window. A few baddies also managed to edge out Mom in races over the years, but I never, ever lost.

  Not until meeting the Bluestreak.

  On some indefinable temporal plane, I’ve got Morty shouting at me, telling me I can beat out this speed-obsessed interloper who turns out to be Scarlet Freaking DashBoy, a kid I always considered the Linus Caldwell, Junior Varsity, of super-speedsters. I imagine an uncontrolled Bluestreak-Crimsonstreak collision may be just the thing to break us out of the Phantom Zone here. I will do anything to get us out of this featureless, formless room where the Rolling Stones dumped the rest of their paint.

  The Kiltechs and Bands are hammering each other, with the fate of infinite worlds hanging in the balance. I don’t want to be on the sidelines for this. It’s unbecoming of a hero. I should’ve been cited for dereliction of duty for leaving DashBoy to those Enforcers. I could’ve at least gone back to check on him. But I didn’t. Instead, I sat on my hands and did nothing.

  Not this time. Not again.

  I put my right hand up in the air and whip it down to my side, exploding forward as the Bluestreak comes at me with his head lowered. I slide to my left to run into him, and all it does is succeed in making us fall flat on our butts when we collide.

  “That didn’t work,” he says. “I don’t think we picked up enough speed.”

  “I had to slow down to hit you,” I say.

  “Yeah, thanks,” he replies while holding his head.

  On the second attempt, the Bluestreak doesn’t lose his nerve. We smash right into each other and I drive him into the ground. A long time ago, I would’ve found it immensely satisfying. Things have changed.

  “There’s not enough distance to work up the right speed,” he points out.

  ”You’re right.” My eyes scan the black expanse that currently contains us. “Maybe if we make a big loop around the corners we’ll pick up enough speed to make this work,” I suggest, waving my arms in wide arcs to emphasize the point. I give the signal and we run around in predefined patterns, meeting in the center and smashing into each other once more. This time, he tackles me.

  “We’re gonna have to make more passes,” I say. “We need to hit all the corners and then come around.”

  “No, we don’t,” he replies. “We need straight-up speed. Straight-line, reckless, no-holds-barred speed.”

  “We tried that already,” I remind him. “We’re not covering enough ground to get the velocity we need. I’m certainly tired of the Oklahoma Drill.”

  DashBoy holds up a hand. “We’re not thinking about it right. We’re thinking three-dimensionally, and the rules don’t apply here. You said the sides worked like a game of Pac-Man. You run through one side and end up on the other. What if we just keep running over and over through the sides until we make several passes and then meet in the middle? There would be no corners to turn, no changes in direction to make until impact. Nothing at all to slow us down.”

  His idea is brilliant.

  I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself. With the room’s odd behavior, we have an infinite track to run on. We can just keep running and running through the side of the thing, picking up speed until we collide.

  The first time we try it, we accidentally smack into each other during the third pass. We’re going fast, but not fast enough yet.

  “You’ve gotta keep in your running line until we hit Perfect Speed,” I tell him. “We both have to hit it or else this isn’t going to work.”

  “How will we know?” he asks.

  He makes another excellent point. I have a certain spatial awareness that becomes less and less coherent as the world speeds up. The faster I go, the less “sharp” everything seems. Perfect Speed, however, is another story entirely.

  “You hit it, too,” I remind him. “You tell me.”

  The Bluestreak shrugs. “We open up a rift. It feels like you’re not running anymore, like you’re somewhere else. Somewhere higher.”

  “You’ll see the rift when it it when it opens for me and I’ll see it when it opens for you. Then we have to smash into each other,” I say.

  “This is kind of a like a supercollider, isn’t it?” DashBoy asks.

  “Never think about the science,” I tell the kid. “It’ll just make your head explode.”

  Another attempt.

  Faster.

  Faster.

  Faster.

  Even faster.

  The blue ribbon that zips by in the black abyss becomes thinner and thinner before white light spills into the room.

  Everything speeds up, yet simultaneously slows down. A second flash of white erupts just in front of me (or is it behind me?) and a wall of white lies ahead (or behind). I wait another second and adjust my position ever-so-slightly.

  Contact.

  Cue Europe… It’s the Final Countdown

  Words and voices echo and whisper as the world fades back into view.

  Explosions.

  Energy blasts.

  Concussive beams.

  The piercing war screeches of a mad man-bird.

  A blue sky blurs into view; it’s full-on double rainbow all across the sky…

  Flying in formation?

  Shining, rounded balls of tinfoil hang in the air…

  Shooting lasers?

  The ground shakes.

  “It worked,” a voice says. It seems familiar, but I can’t place it.

  Someone grabs me by the shoulders and powerful arms jerk me to safety.

  “We won?” I ask, the memory of a battle between someone bad and someone bad fading even as the words spill out.

  “Not won. Not even winning, but fighting. We need you for the final push, son.”

  Cobwebs.

  My mind is cobwebs.r />
  I try to wipe them away.

  Kiltechs.

  Bands.

  Multiverse.

  A man bathed in orange floats before me. My father wears an Orange Band.

  “What’s the situation?”

  “The Bands had you and the Bluestreak trapped, but you broke free. The battle broke away from the astral plane to Earth. The bulk of it came to our Earth, I’m afraid.”

  “The ‘bulk’ of it?”

  “The multiverse shattered. Some of the Bands and Kiltechs were transported to other realities. Most of us ended up here.”

  “Who’s winning?”

  “At the moment, no one. The Bands and Kiltechs are pounding one another, but we’ve rallied our forces against them.”

  Dad and I are crouched behind some rocks in an area filled with trees and foliage. Even here, I’m unsteady. A squadron of Miss Lightspeeds runs headlong into a cluster of Red Bands. Crusading Comets in different armors and crests break off into small commando units and plant explosives on ground-based Kiltech fortifications. Multiple iterations of multiple heroes.

  “It’s just what the Kiltechs and the Bands wanted,” I realize. “Except the Bands are too busy fighting to rule us and the Kiltechs are too busy fighting them to realize what’s happening.”

  “Their confusion won’t last long,” Dad says, rising to pepper the sky with mighty blasts of orange. “We’re back on Earth, and things are getting hairy.”

  I hear footsteps behind me. I spin to find the Crusading Comet watching the battle. His right arm hangs limply from his side.

  “We’re reading another power surge,” the Comet informs my father. “They’re getting ready to set it off again. If they do, I don’t think I have to tell you the consequences.” He looks me up and down, saying, “You’ve had a rough day, Craig.”

  “Craig? Who’s Craig?” I ask. The Comet frowns at me, then looks at my father. “I’m not—” I say before Dad waves me off.

  “Gather your Comet Commandos and get them in position,” Dad orders. “Don’t just stand there! Move!”

  The Comet gives a sharp salute and sprints away.

  Scratching the back of my neck, I say, “So that’s not…?”