Kingdom Come

by Elliot S Maggin

  Both hands held fast to the underbelly of the craft, just above and aside the bomb. It was all she could do to hold this place against the wind and friction. She needed to let go one hand. Needed to go for the sword.

  She heard the click. Was it armed, or was it just sending an electronic signal?

  It did not matter.

  She hung by one hand from the clamp of the bomber construction. Her feet dangled against the ripping wind, feeling like they could yank off at any moment. She sliced the Sword of Hephæstus across the bottom of the plane and dismembered the bomb and the tempered structures that held it fast.

  The action tore her loose. She tumbled through the sky, disoriented, clutching the sword by the hilt, its flat against her chest and face, until she gathered her orientation. The bomb, unarmed, fell free of the bomber.

  There was still one more, and it was well out of reach of either Batman or Wonder Woman.

  *

  The pilot in the remaining bomber armed and loosed the bomb and asked God to have mercy on his soul.

  Was it Commander Chan, or one of the others?

  No one cared.

  *

  “Shazam!”

  “Enough…”

  For one frozen instant, the storm cleared. The Captain stood over the Kryptonian now, and looked up at the little flash of red in the sky.

  It was the triggering device that unlocked the end of the world.

  In an instant suspended between two eternities, the Last Son of Krypton wiped a steel hand over the features of the World’s Mightiest Mortal and held tightly to his mouth.

  No words.

  No crippling blast of lightning.

  There were no vestiges of the wisdom of Solomon in this manchild’s shattered mind. But in the recesses there was Billy, who never had the chance to surrender his innocence—as the lucky among us do—of his own accord.

  In the hush, ears that can hear even a cell divide pick out with chilling ease the scream of human rage. A wave of X rays confirms the bomb’s potency. A telescopic glance calculates the seconds before impact. He must act now.

  “Now, listen,” Superman began.

  *

  “It is time,” the Spectre said.

  “For what?” I did not want to know.

  “Judgment has come, Norman McCay. The hour tolls. Our entire journey has brought us to this moment. It falls on you to tell me the names of the guilty.”

  “I respectfully decline.”

  “You will determine the fate of the world. If the bomb falls, then the superhumans will become extinct, but humanity will be spared their violence. If not, they will live on—to fight a battle that will, in time, swallow the Earth and all the lives that dwell therein, including their own. In either case, we face the evil of genocide. And my task is to punish those responsible for evil. But who shall be held accountable? Whose sin is this? The humans’ or the superhumans’? Tell me, Norman.”

  “I respectfully decline.”

  “Judgment, Norman McCay,” the Spectre insisted.

  “Take an action,” I said.

  “Yours is the soul that guides me.”

  “How can I? There is no ‘evil’ here. There is tragedy and bedlam and—”

  “Judge. Carefully.”

  *

  There were a few small but crucial gaps in Superman’s education. Heroes especially need to understand—and he did not fully understand it yet—the value of the things of a life: its artifacts, its ideas, its loves. It is the markers you leave along that road that define you. It is the trees a man plants, the children he raises, and the stories he tells that signify his life. It is the palaces a people build, the heritage they inspire, the art they create that make their civilization.

  All his career he’d recoiled from magic. All his career he’d smashed through things—the things of people’s lives—in order to save people’s lives. Today, if he thought about it—and yes, later on he would—he would learn, finally, the nature of the artifacts around him. He would learn—at long and painful last—the nature of magic. It was moral force—whether for good or ill. Here in the world of spirits it had a nature; it was describable as surely as the dimensions of a box or the sound of a cry. But in the physical realm where humans and heroes lived, it was just an idea. What Superman realized today was that ideas were real.

  When next he touched the Sword of Hephæstus, he would have nothing he needed to heal.

  *

  “Billy,” Superman said, “I don’t know what to do. You can see that, can’t you?”

  All Billy wanted to do was say his magic word, but he could not speak through the grip of a hand dense enough to generate its own gravitation. And perhaps now the magic would not stop even Superman.

  “Every choice I’ve made so far,” Superman said, “has brought us here. Has been wrong. I can no longer trust my own judgment. I have to trust yours. So listen to me, Billy. Listen harder than you ever have before.”

  To their side the battle raged. A few looked up and saw the red burst that turned on the trigger, and fewer knew what it was. Few of them knew that Captain Marvel was here somewhere. Fewer realized that Superman was here. All of them fought. Some of them fought to stop the fighting. Kryptonian ears now bled. Indestructible white antibodies seeped into the biosphere. Thousands of single threads of a red cape lay over the battlefield and wafted through rising air.

  Superman’s palm spasmed around Batson’s jaw, and Batson whimpered. The clock was racing. Only moments remained before the blast.

  “Look around us,” Superman said. “Look at what we’ve come to. There’s a bomb falling. Either it kills us, or we run rampant across the globe. I can stop the bomb. That much I’m sure of. What I don’t know is whether I should be allowed to. Superhumans or humankind. One will pay the ultimate price. And that decision is not for me to make. I’m not a god. I’m not a human. But you, Billy, you’re both.”

  Seconds ticked. Physics continued along its inexorable path: gravity, fission, and soon fusion.

  “More than anyone who ever existed, you know what it’s like to live in both worlds. Only you can weigh their worth equally. I’m going to let go of you, Billy. I have to save these lives, worthy or unworthy, because they’re lives. You can let me go. Or with a word you can stop me. I don’t know what you’ll do. I want you just to stand here and think, okay? Fight the brainwashing. Do you understand the choice that can be made by you alone?”

  Another second.

  Soon I would have a judgment to make as well. I had to exact blame. This was most assuredly out of my line. I had no more idea what I would decide than I knew what Billy would do.

  Billy’s tears answered for him.

  “Ready, Billy?” and Superman removed his hand and he said, “Then decide. Decide the world.”

  Superman lifted himself into the sky and Billy Batson whispered, “Shazam.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Judgment

  And when he cried…

  “Shazam.”

  … seven thunders uttered their voices.

  “Shazam,” he said. And again, “Shazam.” And louder, “Shazam!”

  Superman, shaky but sucking in the strength of the sun the way a thirsty root sucks at the dew, was already a mile in the sky and rising. That brain-dead misanthrope said it again, but the Kryptonian blew out of the bolt’s way in search of a bigger blast to fry. He gave Marvel the chance to make the decision, but Superman would be damned if it was not the decision he wanted to hear, and what he did not want to hear again was “Shazam.”

  Concentrate. Concentrate. Gather the speed, he told himself. Millions die by fire if I am weak, he told himself again.

  And something tugged at his foot.

  With the strength of Zeus and the speed of Mercury, Captain Marvel flung the Kryptonian out of his course. Superman snatched at his opponent’s midsection. That was his mistake. All he came back with was the white-and-gold cape from his adversary’s back. Superman did not realize how little
he held in his hand until his own enormous bulk dumped a crater onto the desert crust. The impact’s consequent temblor gave the desperate combatants downwind a taste of the imminent shaker to follow.

  *

  It was not until later that Superman realized that his wresting of the cape from the back of this magical being was a new breakthrough for him. It should never have ripped off in Superman’s hand. Superman always had supposed that things like Marvel’s cape were protected from the likes of him. Just now, the Man of Steel was preoccupied with the more immediate.

  What was Marvel doing? Superman wanted to know. There was no time left. The only remaining card was in the hand of the deluded giant who pressed against the monster from the sky. Marvel had the nose of the bomb in his hands, flying upward, even as Superman from below saw the red flare of the bomb’s ignition blast.

  Does Billy know anything about nukes? Superman wanted to know. Does he know anything about anything?

  The Captain was pushing so hard and traveling so fast that the bomb was several miles higher in the sky—as far off as he could get it when he summoned a magical bolt—

  *

  —and it blew.

  *

  Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow, saw the red flare in the sky, and something in genetic memory told him what it was. He had the time to dive across the injured form of Lady Marvel, to grab his Dinah. Oliver pressed his Pretty Bird—wounded by a stray round to her waist—close to him. He held her face to his chest and looked up through his final tear as his flesh melted into hers.

  *

  The Creeper, his mad heart changing for the third time in the past day, had just decided to switch sides to that of the Justice League when he saw 666, the tattooed man, elbowing aside Tokyo Rose, the martial artist. Rose was already injured with a blow from a heat beam in the side, and 666 wanted to get a clear shot at Robotman, the liquid metal cop he thought was a particular pain. Creeper grabbed 666 by the head from behind when the first shock wave hit. What might have happened next is lost to history.

  *

  Hawkman, wielding spear and mace, was offended to be here at all. This was land made profane first by the crippling exploitation of its natural wealth and finally by the mindless expense of destructive power for its own sake. When he looked up at the sudden light—in the second and a half that he saw the growing wave of displaced air bulge down from the sky—his thought was that dying here was, at last, a proper use for this land.

  *

  Professional escape artists have a kind of second sight when it comes to traps. That was the reason Superman had asked Scott Free to design and build the Gulag. Scott was never a person that a trap could take by surprise. To his credit, Scott spent the time from the moment he saw the trap springing to the minute before the sky ignited, trying to track down his wife and daughter.

  The one-time Mr. Miracle had dodged bullets before they were fired, lightning bolts before they were thought of, slashes of swords and claws and fangs before their wielders appeared out of dust or smoke or shadow.

  Avia knew the design of the Gulag as well as anyone alive save her parents. She ran through the tumbling labyrinth of what was once the maximum-security section. She blew missiles and potential opponents out of her way with the protection devices in her bio-armor. She scanned the darkest corners of the lockdown city for those who might be trapped in the dark. She detected a life form behind a hidden panel in a trembling wall. She looked for a latch to open somewhere but could not find one. Avia was about to vaporize the wall panel when it opened from behind and, to her surprise, her father stepped out.

  “Do you have Tube access?” he asked without saying hello.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Your mother’s on her way. Fire it up.”

  “You can’t mean we should desert the fight, Dad.”

  “Now.”

  Avia pressed a switch on her lower thigh just above her knee as Barda stormed through a hallway behind Scott.

  “I got your homing signal, Scott,” Big Barda told her husband over the din of the battle that raged outside and above. “What’s this about?”

  “He wants us to abandon the battlefield,” Avia said as the rising hum of the Boom Tube gathered gradually in this small place.

  “Is that true, Scott?”

  “We don’t have time to discuss this, but it’s not going to be a battlefield much longer,” Scott snapped, grabbing for the control dial woven into the leg of his daughter’s clothing. He turned it to the maximum, far past the safety slot. “Avia, how many more times do I have to say ‘now’?”

  The tunnel to another dimension of reality rippled into being and snaked its way between two worlds. Scott grabbed the arms of the two most important and assertive people in his life—both physically larger than he. Rustling them into the Boom Tube, he shut down its Earthside egress precisely as the walls of the innermost chambers of the Gulag grew white-hot. Behind Scott, Barda, and Avia was the awful scream of metal and bone twisting and melting into nothingness, but only the sound followed them to the place called New Genesis.

  “How did you know?” Avia asked her father as he grabbed his hips and twisted his head down to his knees to catch his tortured breath.

  “He always knows,” Barda said.

  *

  Early in the battle Red Robin turned in a reflex and flung a leg deep into the midsection of a stealthy figure coming up on his right. If he had known when he telegraphed the kick that it was Tokyo Rose, he probably would have done the same thing.

  She was down for the duration, and that was probably what saved her life.

  *

  Wallace West, the Flash, shimmered in and out of dimensional reality, his existence unbound by the norms of Newtonian physics. Newton, however, never accounted for the behavior of lightning bolts. The Flash caught one on the back of his calf, a stray from a flurry emanating from half a mile away. It was Lightning—the jagged-figured woman with the static-electricity aura I’d seen in the rumble on the streets of Metropolis the day of the first Kansas disaster—who tossed off the bolt. Flash was on the ground and barely vibrating among the dimensions, nearly a solid figure.

  When the metal started melting, the Flash ordinarily would have been able to save himself—and perhaps a few others. His injury made it possible for his daughter Park—Flash IV, who arrived with the Batman’s group—to save him. Park West carried her father on a pillar of air to the edge of the battleground. There, the injured Green Lantern was summoning a shield to protect anyone within the range of his flagging concentration. Lantern had three of Oliver Queen’s wooden arrows lodged in the energy armor of his arm and legs. They sapped energy and altogether too much blood from the limbs underneath.

  Park West, not nearly as fast or prudent as her father, went into the battle to find more people to save. With her speeded-up perceptions, she saw the shock wave touching down. She turned to outrun it, but it caught her in midturn. It would have been nice to have told her father in words that she loved him, but words were never central to the West family tradition.

  *

  Nightstar was luckier. Her father, Dick Grayson, lay on the ground wounded, as well. She keened over him for only a moment, then flew him away in her arms, leaving a contrail of mist in her wake. They were eight miles west of Ground Zero when the shock wave caught up to them. She tumbled. Lost altitude. For a moment she lost consciousness. But she held on to Red Robin, her father, until they reached the foothills of the Rockies over the Colorado state line, and safety.

  There, in the woods off the edge of a highway rest stop, Dick awoke hours later to find his daughter shivering beside him, welts from radiation burns all over her face and legs. Now he carried her, staggering, to flag down a car on the road nearby. He was scarred as well, but with the help of a friend they could deal with that. Dick, however, had sixteen broken bones and two popped tendons, and now he was only making them worse.

  Both would suffer the pain of long-term healing, but both would live.<
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  *

  This company of extraordinary people who contended and defended and tried to wrest redemption and rescue from a killing field had, on the average, quite a greater degree of intuition than the common mortal. Though his thuggish, strong-arm superpowers did not include any form of prescience, a dozen years of fighting in the skies and in the streets had left Magog with as heightened a level of perception as anyone. There was a flickering green hope in the corner of his eye.

  Over toward the edge of the battle an old man lay against a radiation-streaked rock slowly growing a green energy field. Magog looked around to see what he could do. Tokyo Rose lay on the ground, doubled up and gripping at her belly. The Manotaur staggered erratically, hit and jangled by something, disoriented. Trix, whose biomechanical abilities formed complex weaponry, leaned against a slowly toppling metal beam. Walking wounded.

  Magog put both hands under the prone martial artist, said, “Rosie, hold on to your spandex,” and slung her unceremoniously over a shoulder. With his freed hand he grabbed Manotaur by the long horn and directed the muddled bovine in the direction he wanted to take him. “Trix!” Magog ordered. “This way. Help is on the way. Come on. All of you.”

  Magog, carrying Tokyo Rose, dragged Manotaur by the horn. Behind him trudged Trix. This procession came through the firelights of battle in the direction of the green glow on the periphery.

  *

  Green Lantern himself snatched the Ray from the sky and encased him in his energy field, even as others huddled inside. If any were to survive the aftermath of this day, then Ray Terrill’s talent for demystifying radioactive ionization would be too valuable to lose.

  *

  Garth, the new Aquaman, would never see the ocean again. Neither would his daughter, Tula.

  *

  Donna Troy, once Wonder Woman’s protégé, and Roy Harper, the Red Arrow whom many considered Oliver Queen’s successor, were gone.

  *

  Power Woman. Hawkman. Wildcat. Zatara, tongue-tied by horror. Darkstar. Hourman. Thunder. Bulletgirl. Golden Guardian. All of them vivid and colorful; all of them and more, gone.

  *