by Barry Lyga
Iris was leaning against Joe’s shoulder, pulling off her shoes. “These cost a month’s pay. Worth every penny, but I’m not getting them mucky down there.”
Joe recoiled, horrified. “I’m not letting you go down there!”
“You can’t stop me,” she said sweetly, “unless you plan on arresting me.”
“Don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind many, many times over the years,” he grumbled. “I’ll go down.”
“I’m smaller, Dad. I can fit into places you can’t. Don’t worry—I won’t go far. I’m just looking for clues to where Wally is.”
As he helped her navigate the ladder into the close and fetid depths of the sewer, Joe couldn’t help thinking: Of all the stupid things you’ve done in your life, Joe West, is this the stupidest?
Not terribly far from where his father and sister were arguing, Wally West lay panting and pleased in the darkness. Yeah, it sucked to be stuck in a sewer, but stuck in a sewer without a million hungry rats was a step in the right direction.
Now he had to figure out how to get out of there. Superspeed was no good in this case: Without light to guide him, he’d go smashing into walls, careening off pipes. His head would be bashed in by his own speed before he made it ten feet. Even if he somehow managed to avoid collisions, he’d still be trapped in a pitch-black maze, running blindly for who knew how long.
Light. Light. He needed light, and his phone was busted and lost somewhere in the water.
We had light before electricity, he reminded himself. It’s not as if Caveman Ogg and Cavelady Ooga didn’t have romantic candlelight dinners of mastodon steak, right?
So, fire. In the wet. Without any matches. Easier said than done.
He slumped against the wall and did his very best Barry Allen impression, not that anyone could see it or appreciate it. Wally wasn’t stupid, but Barry was a genius, and if anyone could think of a way to square this particular circle, it would be Barry.
At his speed, he could create enough friction to make fire from two pieces of wood rubbed together . . . but there was no wood at hand, no way to find any in the dark, and it would be wet, besides.
OK, so . . . what about stones? Flints were struck against rocks to create sparks. He could get some loose chunks of concrete and maybe hit them together fast enough against the wall to create a spark . . .
Which, again, would have nothing to burn. Because everything down here was wet, wet, wet.
Except . . .
A thought occurred to him. Standing, he unzipped the chest piece of his costume down to the end of his sternum. Inside, the uniform was still dry. Maybe this could act as tinder?
He probed around inside the costume for a seam, somewhere to rip out some fabric. His probing fingers found not a seam but rather a tear, no doubt from one of his spills during his fight with Earthworm. Something fibrous puffed out from the rip. It felt almost like steel wool but extremely fine. Almost soft. Cisco had probably used it to cushion certain tech built into the suit.
Steel wool . . . A memory flickered for him. How you could set steel wool on fire even if it was damp. All you needed was . . .
A battery! And this whole suit ran on batteries, right?
He probed around some more, unlocking the chest symbol. All sorts of electronic goodies lurked in there, including a small battery nestled in the center of the circle. He pried it out and held it in his teeth as he slowly ripped out some of the steel wool.
Carefully, he wrapped the wool around a piece of concrete that had come down when he’d vibrated the rats away. It was long and slender, more a splinter than a chunk. He put the wool at the thicker end, held the slim end, and then—before he could lose his nerve—ran the battery terminals over the steel wool.
He expected an explosion of light, a big, catastrophic fireball. But instead he got a disappointing spattering of sparks that quickly died.
Wait. Disappointing? Heck, no! He’d just made light. Now he only needed to refine it.
Back into the costume. He had a source for fire; now he just needed something to keep it going. He finally found a seam and ripped away half the inside of his left sleeve. He wound that around the makeshift torch and touched the battery terminals to the steel wool again.
This time . . .
Oh, yeah!
The sparks leaped to the fabric, lay there for a moment, glistening, and then the fabric went up in flame. Wally shielded his dark-adjusted eyes until his pupils contracted. Slowly panning his torch around, he could make out the perimeter of the chamber and even perceive a shadow that just had to be a tunnel out.
“Ogg make fire,” he grunted to himself. “Now Ogg get out of here.”
5
“It just brings up some pretty serious existential questions,” Cisco said as he and Barry returned to the Cortex. “Like, if there’s this post-Flashpoint reality out there, where are we? What are we? What’s our purpose? Can you see why I kept it from the others?”
Barry nodded. “Usually, keeping secrets from each other gets us into more trouble than it prevents, but in this case, I think you did the right thing. Let’s keep it between us for now. When I get back from the future, we’ll deal with it.”
“And with Earthworm. And with you keeping your job.”
They stepped into the Cortex. “One crisis at a time, please,” Barry said.
“Had your mystery talk?” Caitlin asked, sounding a bit wounded.
“It was boringly technical,” Barry told her. “When we start talking mitochondrial DNA and recombinant cytoplastic cell structures, you and I will step out and spare ourselves Cisco’s glazed-over eyes.”
That seemed to mollify Caitlin a bit, but H.R. still seemed miffed, arms folded over his chest, not a drop of coffee in sight. “What about me? What earns me a secret B.A. convo?”
“When I need the very best coffee the Multiverse has to offer,” Barry said with great sincerity. “For now, though, I need to get to the future.”
Cisco launched into lecturer mode again, turning to the dry-erase board. “OK, so there are a couple of ways to do this. I’m thinking we treat Hocus Pocus’s wand like a source of reverse carbon-14 dating.”
Radiocarbon dating—also known as carbon-14 dating—was a technique used by scientists to determine how old something was, Cisco explained. Most living things contained the isotope carbon-14 (also notated as 14C). As time passed, the amount of 14C diminished, decaying into nitrogen. The rate of decay for 14C was constant, and since the ratio of 14C in a thing and the amount of carbon-12 (12C) that exists naturally in the atmosphere was normally the same, you knew that when it differed, it was because the living thing had died, changing its 14C content.
“So when you measure the difference in 12C and 14C, you can come up with a date of when the living thing stopped living. Ta-da!” Cisco held out his hands, waiting for applause. Or maybe just acknowledgment that the others understood him. All he got was blank stares.
“What I’m proposing is almost the opposite,” he continued. “Hocus Pocus’s wand is from the far future: more than five millennia. Thanks to my vibe, we know exactly how many years will pass before the wand comes into being.
“This means,” Cisco said, writing in great, looping characters on a new dry-erase board, “that we can calculate exactly where/when you need to travel. The wand has a specific set of vibrations, analogous to—”
“Wake me up when this is over,” Caitlin complained.
“Not. Enough. Coffee. In the world . . .” H.R. slumped at a desk.
“Ignore them,” Barry said. “I’m following you. The wand is like one end of a magnet. It’ll draw me to the proper era.”
“And to the proper alternate timeline out of the possible infinity of them,” Cisco said with a significant arch of his eyebrows. “There are two problems, though. One I have a solution for.”
“Hit me.”
“Every object and living thing has a vibrational signature that aligns it with a time period and a universe. We
travel to Earth 2, for example, by using the breaches or my vibe power to temporarily recalibrate our personal frequencies. But if you’re going so far into the future, you’re going to need to be disconnected from the present for a long time. I can handle that, I think. I give you a little vibe-boost with extra added Cisco Ramon flavor crystals, and your frequency should be all loosey-goosey and let you slip into any other time period for as long as you need.”
Barry nodded. “Great. What’s the other problem?”
Cisco wiped half the board clean and wrote in enormous letters: SPEED.
“Speed, my friend. This isn’t one of your little side trips to yesterday. You’re going to the long tomorrow, and for that, you need speed. You need lots of it. You need to sustain it. And you need more of it than you’ve ever had before if you want to run a few millennia into the future. And even H.R.’s most caffeinated of concoctions won’t give you that kind of boost.”
“I don’t need it,” Barry said confidently. “I learned a little trick on Earth 27, and it’ll give me all the speed I need.” He hesitated a moment. “You guys might want to shield your eyes. Sometimes things get lightning-y.”
Cisco lowered his shades. Caitlin and H.R. each dutifully raised their hands, though with expressions of doubt.
Barry grinned and spoke the formula he’d learned on Earth 27, the one that made Johnny Quick a speedster and made Barry Allen an even faster speedster. The key to Hyper-Heaven and greater speed!
“3X2(9YZ)4A!”
Nothing happened. He felt no faster. The world did not slow down.
“Waiting for the impressive stuff,” Caitlin deadpanned.
“I was told there would be no math,” H.R. complained.
Barry corkscrewed his lips into focused concentration. “Let me try again.” He spoke the formula one more time, this time immersing himself in its nuances, in the way it described the multidimensional path to and from the Speed Force. “3X2(9YZ)4A!”
Still nothing.
“It’s supposed to work!” he blurted out, suddenly terrified. How would he run so far into the future without the extra speed?
“I hear it happens to all speedsters sometimes,” Cisco cracked, peering over the rims of his sunglasses. “Let’s get real, shall we?”
6
Wally didn’t want to explode around any corners in the sewer because he had no idea what lurked there. Hanging pipes could decapitate him or take out an eye, or even just mean a wicked headache if he bonged off the wrong outcropping.
With his makeshift torch blazing nicely, he tried to retrace his steps. A few turns led to blank walls, but he took a deep breath, backtracked, and tried again. The next thing he knew, he spied a glimmer of light up ahead . . . and a slender, shadowy figure within it.
Earthworm?
But no. The figure was moving too slowly and too humanly to be Earthworm. A moment later, he realized it was Iris, carefully picking her way through the garbage water toward him. She was so intent on watching her footsteps that she hadn’t seen him yet.
“Iris!” he shouted.
She looked up and stumbled. “Wally?”
Before she could say anything more, he zipped to her side, caught her around the waist, then whisked her back along the tunnel and up the ladder, placing her safely next to a quite-surprised-looking Joe.
“No time to talk,” Wally said. “See if you can seal this area off. There’s a chamber down there where I saw Earthworm—get CSI down there. I’m headed back to S.T.A.R. Labs.”
Joe didn’t even get the chance to shout, “Hey! I’m the cop, not you!” before Wally had sped off into the distance.
Iris and Joe exchanged glances. “You ain’t never allowed to get superpowers, baby,” Joe told her very seriously. “I can’t handle all three of you running around like crazy.”
“That’s sexist, Dad.”
“Sexist? God, no. Practical. I’m just trying to stay alive.” He dug into his pocket for his cell phone and started dialing CCPD numbers.
7
“So, on this other earth . . .” H.R. mused aloud.
“Earth 27,” Barry said.
H.R. waved him off. “Until we get an official ruling from Francisco as to what this Earth’s number should be, I’m not calling it Earth 27.”
“When did I become the keeper of the Multiverse?” Cisco demanded.
“About ten seconds ago?” Caitlin opined.
They all grimaced at one another. None of the banter was helping. On Johnny Quick’s Earth, the speed mantra had made Barry faster than ever before. Now . . . nothing.
“There must be some difference in the way our Earth interfaces with the Speed Force,” Cisco said. “Something about our local physics renders John Quickie’s—”
“Johnny Quick,” Barry interrupted.
“—formula inert.”
“In other words, it only works there, not here,” Caitlin said. “So Barry is back to Slowpoke Rodriguez speed here on Earth 1.”
“Hey!” Barry protested.
“She’s got a point,” Cisco told him. “With just your own velocity, I don’t see how you’re going to be able to work up the necessary speed to go almost five thousand years into the future.”
Barry gritted his teeth and bounced on his toes. He wanted to get to the sixty-fourth century now. Hocus Pocus was too dangerous and had been on the loose for too long. There was no time to waste. “I could draft off Wally’s speed. If he were here.”
“Someone say my name?” Kid Flash asked as he blew into the Cortex. “You guys bad-mouthing me behind my back again?”
With a huge grin, Barry held out his arms and hugged his younger brother, managing to ignore the sewer stench wafting from him. “I thought you were down in a hole somewhere.”
“Came up for air.” There was something too blasé and too calm about Wally’s tone, but Barry allowed himself to ignore it for the moment. The sixty-fourth century beckoned. The defeat of Hocus Pocus. He could deal with whatever was bothering Wally when he got back.
“Now that Kid Flash is back,” Cisco said, “this might work. Let me run some numbers and . . .” His voice faded as he disappeared down the corridor, still talking to himself.
“You’re good?” Barry asked Wally.
“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine.” He shook off Barry.
“Earthworm?”
Wally waved away the question. “You’ve got bigger fish to fry, right? Don’t worry—I’m on the Earthworm thing. Getting close. Got some leads. What do you need from me? A boost? Is that what I heard on my way in?”
Barry’s suspicion spiked. Wally was being a little too calm. He knew Kid Flash had gone into the sewers in pursuit of Earthworm, a killer who had left bodies all over Central City. And then S.T.A.R. Labs had lost contact with him. Joe and Iris were out in the field right then, looking for clues. And yet here was Wally.
“Iris to S.T.A.R. Labs.” Barry’s heart thrummed at the familiar voice coming over the Cortex comms system. “I’m on my way back. Any news from Barry?”
“I’m here!” Barry called. “I’m back!”
Iris’s relief was palpable even over a cellular connection and a speakerphone. “Thank God. Is Wally with you?”
“Right here, sis,” Wally said. “We’re figuring out some stuff.”
“Don’t move too fast, you two. I’m on my way.” She signed off.
“. . . got it all figured out,” Cisco said, rambling back into the Cortex as though he’d never left. He held a plastic container in one hand and gestured wildly with the other. “I use the wand to pick up the necessary vibrations from the sixty-fourth century and sort of ‘preload’ them into your bodily frequency. Then you run like mad, drafting off Wally, until you pop-goes-the-weasel into the future. Here’s the important part: Once you’re there, you have to maintain the vibrational frequency of the wand. Otherwise, you’ll slip back through the time stream to the present, and we have to do the whole stupid thing all over again.” He looked around the room. �
�Everyone got it?”
H.R. nodded gravely. “Perfectly!”
“Don’t take this personally,” Cisco grumped, “but no one cares if you get it.”
“Is there a way not to take that personally?” H.R. asked, perplexed.
“I want to run some tests first,” Caitlin said. “Make sure his time on Earth 27 didn’t leave any lingering medical issues we should know about.”
Wally and Barry and Cisco exchanged a look.
“C’mon,” Wally said.
“Buzzkill!” Cisco taunted.
“I feel fine,” Barry said. “I really do. And the sooner I get to the future, the sooner I’m done with Hocus Pocus and can help you guys with Earthworm.”
“And maybe work on keeping your job?” Caitlin said with a little more snark than was necessary.
Oh. Right. His job. Barry had almost forgotten.
“The hearing is tomorrow,” he said. “If everything works out as planned, I’ll be back in the present mere seconds after leaving.” It would be as if he was never gone at all. He would stop Pocus, come back to the twenty-first century, put his head together with Wally and Iris to stop Earthworm, then spend a relaxing night at home poring over CCPD rules manuals to figure out how to convince the disciplinary board to keep him employed the next day. Piece of cake.
“We handle the most dangerous case first,” Barry said.
“Team Flash triage,” H.R. agreed from the corner. He had located his drumsticks and now tapped them lightly together.
Barry shivered for just an instant, thinking of what Cisco had told him—that in an alternate timeline, H.R. had sacrificed his life to save Iris from the evil speed god Savitar, who’d turned out to be none other than Barry himself. It was enough to give him a headache on top of a headache.
“You just shivered,” Caitlin crowed, leaping up. “‘Feel fine,’ my butt!” She approached him and jammed a thermometer into his mouth, then connected a medical gadget to a port under the Flash emblem on Barry’s chest.
“Uh rurry fee fih!” Barry protested around the thermometer.
