Kingdom Come

by Elliot S Maggin

  “Fail to do what?”

  “To judge properly.”

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake. I’ll just order you to stop time when the world’s about to end, so it’ll never happen.”

  “You can do that, but it would make no difference. It would be akin to watching a very slow-motion projection, prolonging the period of greatest pain.”

  “Stop it now. Get us out of this lousy moment. I don’t like it here.”

  And time resumed again, though I was not sure that was what I wanted.

  *

  I was certainly sure that this was a pile of steaming karma in which I did not want to step.

  *

  In Kansas, the Gulag was no longer recognizable as an object that once had walls. Superhuman blood flowed over the desert the way water once flowed over the prairie. Captain Marvel said “Shazam!” and blurred out of the way and said it again. From a thousand miles and a moment to the northeast, the Batman approached by air with reinforcements representing three generations, and only God knew on whose behalf they would join the battle.

  CHAPTER 30

  Faster than a Speeding Bullet

  Leonard Wyrmwood had the charge of the President of the United States, the consent of the United Nations Security Council, and the conviction that this was as proper a thing to do as anything anyone could think of. He needed two more things: (1) to inform the United Nations General Assembly, who did not have to consent; and (2) to convince three of the most courageous, best trained, and least contemplative fighter pilots on the planet to carry it out. These pilots did have to consent, and he believed he had a solution to that problem: Colonel Nelson M. Chan, the commander of the Blackhawk Squadron.

  The Blackhawks were an elite international corps of fliers whose ties with this body went back to the old League of Nations and the days before the Second World War. Nelson Chan represented its third generation of leaders and commanded fliers of the fourth and fifth. If there were airmen on Earth as skilled or single-minded as Howard Hughes or Chuck Yeager, they flew with the Blackhawks.

  Once upon a time, when his grandfather had been chief of the Blackhawk Squadron, nineteen-year-old Nelson had wanted to show the old man that he was good enough. He’d copped a Flying Wing and taken it on a joyride along the East Coast, not harming a fly. Unfortunately he’d logged an Air Force transportation bill—airline charter fare, field use permits, restricted airspace fees billed at the commercial rate, custom fuel, interference with air traffic control at an inflated hourly rate per inconvenienced controller, that sort of thing. Paying off the bill for his joyride had occupied his career for years thereafter. Nelson had to become a Blackhawk, become more valuable to the Squadron than the amount of his outstanding fees with interest, or else he never would have gotten out of the hole.

  With his grandfather’s retirement a few years before, Nelson was the obvious successor, and a good thing too. The United States government had wiped clean his debt and added a sizable termination bonus. He went to work for the New United Nations commanding a collection of fliers who were unsettlingly similar in temperament to himself. Nelson Chan was perhaps a week from becoming a grandfather himself, and, finally, he felt, there was something to this life in which he had a stake. When the red phone rang, it could only be bad news.

  “Mr. Secretary?”

  “Yes, Colonel Chan.”

  “Something to do with the Kansas crisis, no doubt.”

  “Yes, Colonel, and unfortunately it’s gotten bigger than that. I need you to scramble yourself and for your other two best pilots to pick up three packages at the General Assembly chamber immediately.”

  “And the delivery?”

  “You’ll know when you get the packages,” Wyrmwood said, and hung up.

  *

  “You’re kidding,” Nelson Chan told the helicopter pilot who escorted him from the pontoon carrier off the southern tip of Metropolis to the United Nations heliport on the roof of the Secretariat Building. “Right here on the roof?”

  “Where else would the United Nations keep its nukes?” the ’copter pilot asked, rhetorically. “It’s not like the UN’s got large tracts of national territory to pepper with silos like we used to do.”

  It took Chan and the pilot—a colonel as well, retired from the United States Marines and with extraordinary security clearance—less than a minute to load the three unarmed nuclear warheads from their storage into the belly of the helicopter. It was a matter of entering their respective security codes onto a punch-pad, waiting for a ramp to assemble itself from the innocuous-looking rooftop shed, and watching the three blunt-faced bombs—code-named “Abraham,” “Martin,” and “John”—deposit themselves where they belonged.

  The Marine stood guard while Nelson Chan ran down to confirm to the Secretary-General in person that he was on the case.

  *

  The Secretary-General was in the General Assembly chamber, rubbing his forehead and listening to one national delegate after another. There were more than four hundred constituent states of the United Nations, now that membership was open to artificial island free ports and independent indigenous tribes within the borders of larger countries. There were three fewer members, however, because of the events of recent months. Three Native American reservations had been destroyed in the Kansas crisis, and their remaining unlucky delegates were now nonvoting members. Here stood Leonard Wyrmwood, explaining why it was necessary to drop UN tactical nuclear weapons on American territory.

  There was nothing any one of these constituent states or its representatives could do, no vote to bring to the question, no parliamentary or political maneuver that could reverse the decision. It was made. It was final. All they could do was hold the Secretary-General in this room and make him account for himself.

  “This is not a rational argument,” Wyrmwood exclaimed, “but these are not rational times. We are at the flashpoint of human existence. My God, you can hear the battle even here. At any moment, it threatens to engulf the world.”

  Few noticed the tall Asian man in uniform as he walked up to the exhausted Leonard Wyrmwood and saluted. Everyone did notice as he took a sealed envelope from the Secretary’s hand. Then Chan opened the envelope, blanched when he read his assignment, tucked the orders into his flight jacket, and left.

  Meanwhile, the ambassador from Baja California continued to try to convince the General Assembly to revise the New United Nations Charter on the spot, allowing the General Assembly to overrule the Security Council. If he could do it—which he could not—it would make no difference. Operation Holy Martyrs was under way.

  The members of the General Assembly were still arguing over it as Chan arrived by helicopter at Fort Dix a few minutes later. Shortly afterward, he and his two handpicked Blackhawks rolled a trio of Boeing-McDonnell Birds-of-Prey onto the tarmac.

  “Courage, men,” he told his Blackhawks. Then they lifted the bombers into the air to carry their deadly cargo, several times faster than a speeding bullet, in the direction of Kansas. Most of the way, Nelson Chan thought about his unborn first grandchild.

  *

  The Secretary-General begged off the General Assembly session for a few minutes, pretending to need a trip to the men’s room. Instead, he went into the next building and up the elevator to his study. He could always think and decompress there. It was like home.

  On Leonard Wyrmwood’s desk in his small private office off the big reinforced conference hall was a picture of the beautiful wife he still felt he did not deserve, their two sons, and their baby girl. Next to it was a white coffee mug, a third filled with coffee the temperature of a comfortable day, with a legend in red across the front: WORLD’S BEST DAD. He was not decompressing here. His unaccustomed anxiety was getting worse. He wondered what going home would be like from then on.

  CHAPTER 31

  Hephæstus’ Children

  The defrocked Amazon Princess wondered what she was doing, trying to back her enemies into a structure whose walls could not n
ow secure a mouse. This was not a fight that would eventually die down. Was this the way the world would end?

  Out of the sky tumbled the Batman, on wings and jets. There was no longer any demarcation between Bruce Wayne the boy who’d seen his parents crumble and the Batman the terror born of that tragedy. No more than the difference between the man of flesh and the hardware that gave him his locomotion and his physical power. The titanium strapping that held together his shoulders and limbs, now clamped onto the streamlined flying battle suit. He was a jet, propelled and steering from the corners of his mortal joints. He was a tank. He was a Dark Knight dropping out of the clouds. He was a man and bat and the ghost of the dread Gotham night. And others came from behind:

  Phantom Lady and Fate floated on the ether. Two Black Canaries rode the bouncing sound waves that the younger of the two generated down to the ground. Steel snatched Wildcat out of the air, and both rode under the power of the armored one’s costume. Zatara caused himself and Green Arrow, dangling from a rope, to waft Earthward. Tula and Samurai flew on the Condor’s wings. A Bat-Monitor, one of the robot urban patrollers, carried Obsidian, Red Hood, and the Creeper, who joined in for his own mad logic. Nightstar, Jade, and the Blue Beetle—getting the first use out of his new battle suit—dropped down and caught themselves under their own power. And there were more: eighty or ninety of them who were there with the purpose of stopping the slaughter.

  Their mission was to stem the conflict, and for a moment—when the coherent among the battlers realized that the Batman was there—it might have worked.

  “If you get in a fight that lasts more than five seconds,” Wesley once told me, “you’ve lost.”

  It took far more than five seconds for the Batman’s troops to land. By the time they all did, their presence was just another element of the chaos. Ultimately, the difference it would make was that there would be more here to die.

  *

  There were casualties. Zatara fell on the ground in the darkness of a cloud of dust. He looked around him and up just in time to see Von Bach, holding the shattered torso of Blue, one of Luthor’s trio of android moles, over his head, and about to bring it down.

  His throat—that magical instrument that could make dreams come real—was frozen by the moment. The moment was too long. Zatara knew before he could gather his speech that it was too long. But Wonder Woman was already in motion.

  “Du wirst wie eine Wanze zerquetscht!”

  As Von Bach was about to bring down the android carcass and smash Zatara’s skull, he felt a prick in his back—

  —and saw the bloody point of the ancient sword that could carve the electrons off an atom pierce his chest from behind and hang there for a moment like an orphan limb.

  Wonder Woman withdrew the weapon, and the would-be murderer went down backward in a pile of tattooed slag.

  “Diana?” the Batman said in awe and horror. The dust cleared for just the moment it took for the battle-armored Bruce Wayne to see his old friend save the life of his ally—to see her kill a man who had killed before in order to do it.

  “He left me no choice. They began this war. I will finish it.”

  “She killed him!” 666 whispered, then found the breath to yell, “She killed Von Bach! Did you see that? Get her!”

  And a dozen, two dozen more of the malefactors who’d tumbled these walls collected into a living ring of fire around Wonder Woman.

  Zatara rose and tossed spells of force shields, sweeping many away as they came.

  The Batman leapt to the Amazon’s side, back to back with her to protect her from the ravening horde, yet appalled at what she had done.

  She swatted them to the ground with the flat of her sword. She tossed them hither and yon with a yank on her golden rope.

  Batman used his winged armor to slice through their ranks, to make them retreat. He exploded pellets from his belt in their faces, and when they continued to advance, he cracked the mallets of his fists into their faces.

  But he would not kill.

  “Who do you think you are, Diana, taking life like that?” he demanded of the woman he defended. “Some helpless victim on a dark street who has to fear from her assaulter for her own life?”

  “I’m a warrior and an Amazon, Bruce,” she said. “I will finish this without you. Your people are out of their league here. Take them home.”

  “And let you ‘force peace’ at the point of a sword? We’re here to save lives rather than take them. I came to stop you more than I came to help you.”

  “We’re left with no choice. If you stand in my way, Bruce—I will remove you too!”

  “Spread love and understanding”—Bruce said through a cloud of dust and a haze of bloodied knuckles; he wondered what they now looked like under the gauntlets—“but don’t be afraid to bust a few heads to do it. You still subscribe to that bleeding Amazon paradox?”

  He fought. She gritted her teeth and fought as well. Steam rose from the body of Von Bach. Opponents went down but no more died on this spot.

  “I’ve heard rumors that the Amazons relieved you of your duties and heritage for not being strident enough,” he bellowed over the din. “Face the truth, Diana. You won’t win back your royal station by overcompensating.”

  “You aristocratic bastard!” she spat.

  “The Princess accuses me of being a patrician. I’m cut”—he slashed at a low-life called B’wana Beast, who went down—“to the quick.”

  She spun and faced Bruce and smashed the flat of her bloodied sword against his armor. She dented the framework, but he did not go down.

  “How dare you condemn me?” she demanded, and could have been demanding it of her sisters as well. “You will not judge me.”

  And in the instant he needed to regain his footing, she snatched him by the armor’s chest and put handholds in it with her slicing fingers. She lifted him up, up, up, hollering into his aghast face: “Do you hear me? Do you understand, you son of a sire?”

  Flashes of magic lightning swarmed by them as they rose in the sky, hitting the same spot on the floor of the desert beside the raging battlefield. Neither noticed it. Neither knew that Superman was here.

  “After all these years, you have the nerve to swagger out of your cave,” she cried in his face, “and expect us all to bow before your precious wisdom? Before your divine right? Well it’s too late for that, Bruce.”

  If they had looked down, they would have seen what I saw: The smoke rose from the battle and fell across the expanse of the land. The fighting receded into the dark smear on the sands of two ant colonies vying for territory. The rumbling gathered. The lightning fell and crashed and fell again.

  And they rose over the level of the highest clouds, armlocked in the frozen grimace of philosophical subtlety.

  “We tried to hold order—but it’s too far gone! Our only option now is war! Our only answer is—” and Wonder Woman stopped shouting.

  In the distance, three specks moving across the bending skies of the continent slowed in lockstep formation.

  He knew what they were before she did. She knew only when he went limp with certainty that, finally, the frightened world at large was coming from out of the distance with something bigger than they.

  *

  “Marvel! In the name of heaven, wipe that empty smile off your face,” Superman pleaded. “You were a friend once. How can you do this? How? Look at the horror you’ve let loose! Damn it—say something for yourself.”

  “Shazam!” the boy-man said, and the big man went down.

  And the Kryptonian rose with eyes flashing heat.

  “Shazam!” and Superman went down again.

  *

  On the ground where once the Gulag had stood, the race of metahumans threatened itself with extinction.

  *

  “Shazam!”

  *

  Diana’s fist tightened around the bending plate metal of Bruce Wayne’s armor.

  He said, “Open your eyes, Diana. Your answer flies on
metal wings. Those are nuclear carriers. The ultimate warbringers.”

  She looked with understanding and growing horror at the approach of Abraham, Martin, and John.

  “Our war is not one act of violence at the cost of some lives. Our war ends in extinction,” Bruce Wayne said. “All the lives below. And all life.”

  Wonder Woman loosened her grip on him, finally let go, and they both hovered, facing each other, looking at the winged bullets approaching in the distance.

  “The fearful sent the brave to stamp us out,” he said. “Only Blackhawks can fly a mission like this. They’re just like us, those pilots, and they’ll probably die today, too, if their mission succeeds.

  “If you’re that devoted to your Amazon honor that you’re willing to die and kill and your soul genuinely longs for atonement according to your own narrow cultural definition, then keep fighting, and let the planes do their work.”

  She fell away from in front of him, facing the oncoming bombers.

  “Me? I’ve got a killer to stop,” was the last thing he said to her until it was all over.

  *

  At precisely the right moment—there were no other moments—a pair of close-contact lasers from the Batman’s Utility Belt sliced through the clamp carrying the bomb under the sweeping plane. The minion of death tumbled away, impotent, a moment before the pilot sent the signal to arm the weapon and let it go.

  The bomb tumbled to the desert floor, where it kicked up only its mass in dust. There it sat, its deadly critical mass of radiation inside, still locked under its shield and unarmed, until weeks later when the golden figure of a man came through irradiated air and carried it away.

  There were still two more.

  *

  The Amazon Princess gathered her speed as she never had before, flying in the same direction as another oncoming bird of prey.

  Like a relay racer lunging for a baton, the big bomber caught up to her, caught her by her extended hands, and yanked her along at a slowing pace that was still breakneck speed, even for this warrior.