Billy said, “Captain Marvel.”
He could as easily have said something else. Careful, Bruce. Edge into the room. “Of all of us, he had the hardest time adapting to the grim new world around him. One sad day he spoke his magic word for the last time and vanished inside a scared little boy. Maybe it was because Superman left. Or maybe because things just changed too much and it was too crazy. Maybe…”
“Too crazy, yuh,” Billy said.
“… maybe you thought all these bad things these young guys, guys like you, were doing, made you a bad person, too, but they didn’t, Billy. Luthor took you under his wing and told you so, but Luthor lies. He lies, Billy.”
“Mr. Luthor.”
“He’s a criminal, Billy. Always has been. And he never let you forget that deep down you were something big and hard and super. He told you the same thing the world was telling you. That super heroes were monsters. Terrible, repulsive beasts. Don’t think like that, Billy. He’s twisted your brain around that insanity. The worms. He found a way to engineer those worms to secrete certain chemicals into your mind, right?”
“Mr. Mind.”
“Well, they’re eating away at your brain—driving you mad. Breaking the synapses, I’ll bet. But they can’t beat you, Billy, because of what’s deeper inside you. Billy or Marvel, either one. The world depends on you. You can fight—”
“No, he’s bad. He’s bad!” Billy hollered and bolted out of his corner.
Bruce Wayne stood his ground in the doorway, and Billy did not want to slam by him. He took a step backward. He turned, flailing. Billy remembered a key to the far door in a drawer somewhere and bolted to the right, toward a cabinet.
“Billy, look out!”
The big glass-encased electrostatic generator whose inner walls crawled with inchworms was in his way, but he did not see it until he shattered it.
Batman lit into the room just as Billy tumbled on the floor in a pile of glass and worms. Now Bruce Wayne could not trank him; if a worm got into Billy’s ear, there was no telling what effect the mix of chemistry would have on his body.
The worms were all over him: on his clothes; on his hands; on his hair and face; crawling toward his eyes and ears. He was terrified. Pain and suffering, to what remained of this big boy of a man, took the form of a worm.
“Billy, stay calm. I can help. Stay calm. It’s all—”
There was only one way to protect himself from the pain and the fear of the pain:
Billy Batson said, “Shazam!”
And the genie was loose.
A thunderous clap of cold light shattered the Batman’s ears, and he fell backward onto the floor. By the time he rolled up again on his titanium framing, he was alone in the room and there was a new man-sized hole in the far wall.
“Damn it,” Batman said.
Zatara was the first in the room. Then came Nightstar dragging Xu’ffasch by the hand. Then Ollie Queen and his daughter.
“Batman, are you all right?” Zatara wanted to know.
“For the moment,” Bruce Wayne said, brushing himself off and gathering his thoughts. “What about Luthor and his men?”
“In custody, every one,” Zatara said. “What about Marvel?”
“No longer a wild card, unfortunately. He’s under orders from Lex Luthor. There’s no telling what the specifics of those orders are, God help us.”
More of them came in. Batman did not need to explain. His face had grown more scrutable over the years.
“To the cave,” he said to Zatara, “take me to the cave. Now.”
“Enoyreve ot eht evac,” Zatara said, “won!”
And they were gone.
CHAPTER 26
The Sword of Hephæstus
Superman found the first report from Green Lantern discouraging. He found Wonder Woman’s reaction to it more so. With the insurrection almost a day old, Comet, Barda, and Scott were putting out fires and loosing their limited supply of containment bubbles from their floating command stations in elaborate hovercraft outside the Gulag structure. These they reserved for people who actually made it out through the gaps in the walls. Green Lantern, the Flash, and Power Woman were inside, everywhere at once. They needed to be. Captain Comet ran out of containment bubbles and used this as an excuse to indulge his impatience at being detached from the action itself. He anchored his floating command station to a point in space and jettisoned out. As, on the New Oa satellite above, Wonder Woman took her red-white-blue-and-gold shield from its cabinet in her temporary quarters, Captain Comet negotiated his way through the jagged hole in the artificial sky of the Gulag.
“Watching you dress for battle is almost indecent,” Superman said to Diana as she affixed the golden eagle wings to her back. “Yet another side of you I’m not comfortable with.”
“Get used to this one,” she snapped. “A soldier unprepared has no business calling herself a soldier.”
He walked into the room and idly lifted the sword from the sofa and ran his hand down its length. Its blade, on its point, would reach from the floor to her shoulders. “Where’d this come from?” he began to ask her before he said, “Ow!” and looked with great surprise at where he’d caught his thumb and found the tiniest droplet of blood.
“You always were a bit vulnerable to magic. Be careful,” she said, taking the sword from him by the hilt. “Hephæstus made this as a gift for my mother. It’s thirty-five hundred years old if it’s a day.”
“I hope she was impressed.” He went to press his thumb to his teeth but found it was already healed.
“She was. It can carve the electrons off an atom.”
“Amazons invented atoms, I’ve heard,” he said facetiously.
“Only atomic theory.” She was not facetious.
“You don’t expect to use that thing, do you?”
“I expect to be a soldier. And a soldier unprepared has no business on the battlefield.”
“More Amazonian wisdom. Isn’t it possible that we’ve already won the big fight? Once the rioters are calmed, we can instill—”
“What makes you think they’ll get calmed? And what makes you think once they’re calmed they’ll want to listen to us? Have you seen the receptivity graph in the study the Education Committee did last week?”
“Well, of course I saw it. It’s not a significant sampling, and—”
“And you’d be crowing from here to Thanagar about it if it’d come out the way you wanted. Right?”
“I will not sanction lethal force against rioters. I’m uneasy with the blade,” he said.
“Not all of us have heat vision,” she shot back, and walked away. Superman followed her into the conference room, where Earth hung through the window and eighty-five Justice Leaguers in full battle array stood awaiting an order.
“There are lines we do not cross,” Superman said to this woman who, so help him, had not looked better than she did in this moment since the day he met her and promised always to be her friend. “We have rules.”
“Show me the line.”
“We don’t murder.”
“You’re the writer, Kal. Know the difference between murder and killing?”
Eighty-five Justice Leaguers who fairly worshipped the ground Superman flew over heard it all, and more were swarming in, both from below and from other points on the satellite.
“Our prisoners don’t see that line, Kal. That’s why they’re prisoners. And if they don’t remain our prisoners, your world is going to look a lot different tomorrow from the way it looks today. You made the decision to put them away—for the good of humankind, remember?”
“And maybe that was my mistake. I won’t make this one. Maybe we should have let the human community decide how to deal with them.”
“You and I joined the ‘human community’ for lunch at the White House yesterday, Kal. How equipped did they seem then to deal with our problems?”
“—for the love of God, can you hear me?” a voice thundered through the room louder than any
one’s inclination to outyell it.
“Lantern? Alan!” Superman answered. “Is that you?”
“Hello? Somebody answer!” and a face like the great and powerful Oz appeared against the big window and rolled and bubbled like the image on a dying television. It was Green Lantern’s face, spattered with blood.
“Alan! It’s Kal. Can you receive?”
“Hello? Send help. I can only assume you may be getting this message,” Alan Scott said. “We’re … we’re in trouble. The fight at the Gulag goes worse than we expected. The prisoners have already begun to breach the walls. They can’t hold much longer, nor can we. There have been casualties.”
For all Green Lantern knew, even the power of the battery encased in the body of his armor was unable to transmit through the waves of the conflict that gathered around him. Nevertheless, every face in this conference hall was fixed on him.
“It is my duty to report that Captain Comet has been killed.”
“Excuse me?” somebody said.
“Dr. Adam Blake was murdered by Von Bach, his neck snapped, in full sight of a hundred or more people.” Green Lantern’s face flicked to the right, as if something out of our sight assaulted him, but he turned back to face us. “Please send help if you can hear me,” he said. “I have to go.”
And he faded away.
“No!” Wonder Woman bellowed and slammed down her fist, shattering the big green table.
“Gone?” Superman said, his hand out and his face blank as all of his followers looked for a sign.
“What?” she took the moment to ask him. “Captain Comet? Or your preconceptions? So your world’s finally turned completely topsy-turvy. How do you want to handle this, Commander?”
“I … don’t know,” he said.
“Then, I do,” she answered.
The others did not look to him for even tacit assent.
CHAPTER 27
China Syndrome
“A warrior,” Wonder Woman told him as she stepped into the airlock, “is someone who never lets a friend go into battle alone.”
“Diana. Wait.” Superman reached out.
“What?”
“What will you do?”
“Give them an ultimatum. They must surrender.”
“And if they refuse?”
“Then, it’s war.”
“But you can’t have a war without people dying.”
Wonder Woman knew that. So did everyone else in the room. In his desperation, Superman hoped this was news.
But she did wait. She stepped out of the airlock and kissed his mouth. Marble scraped steel, and she was gone. It was a kiss completely devoid of passion. It was a farewell.
Superman stood watching his former supporters follow her out the airlock. He looked at each of them in turn, without a word to any of them. Most of them looked back.
*
Superman stood alone. Then, alone, he left.
He smashed through the wall of New Oa in the direction of the Earth, and to hell with the internal life support systems. Below him was India, and to the east he could see his destination through the bending mantle of the Earth.
And he made a smear of space.
Smash! Into the ground at an acute angle beside a Southeast Asian formal garden.
Through the crust of the planet.
Through the bedrock of its mantle.
Through the molten, heated core.
Back through mantle.
Crust.
Limestone.
Up through the floor of the cave and into the face of a man who ought to have known better.
There were others here, also preparing for battle, preparing transportation as well.
He did not bother to avoid noticing who they all were. He was not surprised by any of them. He was through being surprised.
*
“I need your help,” Superman told Batman.
Bruce Wayne stood, his back to Superman. The crash of molten matter against limestone notwithstanding, Wayne rhythmically leaned back and forward, exercising the artificial spinal column that held up his shoulders, looking for comfort.
“We’ve been through this already,” the Batman said, not turning around.
“Shut up,” Superman said, and spun him around bodily. “I don’t have time for your holier-than-thou cracks. There’s a war on and this time you’re not above all this, not now, not with the stakes this high.”
“War,” he said. “Your Gulag, you mean?”
“Yes. My Gulag. We’re racing the end of the world here, Bruce, and you can sit around with your buddies assigning blame to me or anyone else you care to if you live long enough. Meanwhile I’ve got a half-a-second lead on Armageddon, but by all the stars in Heaven that’s not nearly long enough. Even as we speak, Wonder Woman and the League are headed for the Gulag, and they’re past taking orders.”
“You mean to tell me you never imagined it might come to this?” the Batman declaimed.
“I need you. No matter what you or I have done, that’s the way it is right now.”
“Did you ever consider that a war might be for the best? That perhaps humanity’s only chance is to shake loose of this hell your issue—our imitators—have wrought and let the superhumans swallow each other?”
“Don’t give me that. The deliberate taking of human, even superhuman, life goes against every belief I have—and you have. That’s the one thing we’ve always had in common. It’s what made us who we are. More than anyone in the world, when you scratch everything else away from Batman, you’re left with someone who doesn’t want to see anybody die. We can still intercede. Gather your forces. Together we can be the world’s finest team again.”
Bruce was silent. Then: “Do you have any idea how badly you’ve screwed up this—”
“Save it for later! Tell me you’ll help me.”
“I will tell you this one thing.”
“What?” Superman grabbed the front of the vest and pulled Bruce Wayne forward so hard it ripped; the move would have cracked the rib of a lesser man.
“There’s another player you haven’t counted on. Captain Marvel.”
“Marvel?”
“He’s been brainwashed severely. Luthor did it. Once, there was a good kid inside him, but he’s been driven out, and I don’t know how you’d ever find him again. Marvel’s headed for the Gulag, and he’s going to break it wide open onto the Justice League. What do you expect me to do against—”
And as Bruce Wayne ambled at only human speed toward the end of a sentence, the skin on Superman’s face transformed into an expression of surprise—and maybe a little touch of fear—and when Bruce Wayne looked down for a moment at his control panel and then back in effectively no time at all, Superman had vanished from the space he had occupied an instant before.
No sound.
No rippling breeze.
No trace.
“So that’s what that feels like,” Bruce said to himself through that sardonic smile.
Then, at only human speed, Bruce Wayne took action.
*
Without a word, my spectral guide opens all horizons to me at once.
I am in the Batcave, where Bruce Wayne marshals his forces and dons a suit of armor with jets, wings, and bat-ears. The suit is itself a jet plane, most of whose weight is that of its protected pilot.
I am at the Gulag, outside whose crumbling walls the dawning horror in the face of the battle-arrayed Wonder Woman looks suspiciously like a fear that this gallant soul has never known.
I am within the walls. A flying, marching, screaming array of malefactors whose limitations all their lives have been bound solely by their imaginations are now confined there. They thunder against the very notion of incarceration and will not countenance such a thing for a moment more.
I am by the side of the Man of Steel, racing through the sky along the skin of the countryside, faster than thought itself. I see the air scorch in his wake.
Etched over Superman’s face are the m
ost desperate of hopes. He has known enormous loss, and contradiction, and defeat. He has never known failure of the magnitude that he contemplates, a failure that his hope denies.
In the Batcave, a gifted mage named Zatara appears in response to the Batman’s electronic summons. Another mystic, Dr. Fate, appears a moment afterward. In Fate’s wake, dozens of allies pop into existence at Fate’s summons of their spirits. Where the soul goes, I learn from such as these wielders of magic, the body cannot help but follow. Some of the Batman’s allies are disoriented for a moment, some resigned, some grim and ready for business.
At the Gulag walls, amid great rumbling, the Amazon Warrior directs her troops to take assigned positions on and above the ground. I see the dawning horror in Wonder Woman’s eyes.
Inside the Gulag, the flashpoint far behind them, superbeings direct their energies against the immovable object that contains them, and they make it budge just enough.
I see twilight at last unfold.
Approaching the face of the borning battle, the Last Son of Krypton speeds within sight of those who have made themselves his allies and—by the souls of the billions of lost ancestors who made a barren planet live and then died with it—he vows to deliver this world.
And he stops.
Short.
On his back.
I was there to see all these things. All at once. And then I could focus my mind and gaze on nothing but the Last Son of Krypton.
Superman smashes into the desert soil that once was rich enough to feed a world. He crumbles like a beetle under a giant’s thumb. The desperate hopes of one man turn to ash and cinders by a single bolt of lightning.
Groggy, Superman turns his head upward to face the red-and-gold streak that has intercepted his stride. He looks into the smiling face of the World’s Mightiest Mortal.
“Captain Marvel,” he whispers to the man who once was his friend. “Let’s stop this thing. Together.”
But the Captain can hear only the thunder that assaults his mind and chews away chunks of his great soul.
Kingdom Come Page 29
