“Jeez Louise!” he exclaimed.
The guards ignored Jimmy as they hurried to secure the prisoner. “Cuff him before he recovers, boys!” their leader ordered gruffly. He scowled at the bloody remains of the unlucky guard. “And don’t be gentle about it!” “Jimmy? What’s happening?” An anxious voice emerged from his dropped cell phone. “Jimmy... !”
Climbing unsteadily to his feet, he quickly retrieved the phone from the floor. “Lois? I’ll have to call you back...He wasn’t sure he was up to telling her the whole story, even if he understood it himself. Now that the danger was over, he felt drained, exhausted, and more than a little confused. What was all that freaky stretching about?!
The guards dragged Croc into a waiting cell. Satisfied that the monster was under wraps for the time being, their leader finally checked on Jimmy. A badge on his front ’ pocket identified him as Lucas Sevick, Chief of Security. Jimmy wondered idly if he let his men call him “Chief,” unlike a certain editor in chief he knew.
“Mighty brave, standin’ your ground like that,” Sevick commented. Glancing again at what was left of the unfortunate guard, he sounded surprised to find Jimmy still alive. “How’d you keep Croc from shredding you?” Jimmy fingered his neck experimentally. It seemed to be in one piece, and back to its usual proportions. “Uh, I kind of thought he did.” He glanced down at his arms and legs. They certainly felt like rubber at the moment, but they looked perfectly normal. Did I just imagine them stretching like that? Maybe all that adrenaline was messing with my head....
He decided not to mention his inexplicable elasticity to Sevick. Jimmy was a visitor to Arkham, not an inmate, and he intended to keep it that way. The last place you want to sound crazy is a lunatic asylum. Jimmy couldn’t wait to get out of the creepy madhouse.
If he hurried, he could still catch the six o’clock train back to Metropolis.
NEW Till CITY.
“Shazam!”
Mary whispered the magic word. Once upon a time, this would have summoned an enchanted lightning bolt, transforming her into Mary Marvel, the World’s Mightiest Maiden, but now nothing happened. No thunderclap boomed overhead; no flash of lightning lit up her private hospital room. Her everyday clothes were not transmuted into a super heroine’s colorful costume. No symbolic thunderbolt adorned her chest. She was still just Mary Batson, an ordinary teenage girl.
Where did the magic go ? she wondered for perhaps the thousandth time. Ever since waking from a coma a few weeks ago, she’d said the word dozens of times a day. Sometimes she’d even wake herself up by shouting it in her sleep. But always with the same dispiriting results. Nothing.
She sat on the edge of her hospital bed, a small bundle of personal belongings packed by her side. With her auburn hair, blue eyes, and slim figure, she looked like the proverbial girl next door. She wore a bright red Wind-breaker over a beige sweater and blue jeans. Bernice, her friendly physical therapist, appeared in the doorway. “Time to go, kiddo,” she said cheerfully. “You must be excited, finally getting out of this place after all your recovery time.”
According to the doctors, Mary had been in a coma for nearly three months. Ever since that big battle with Black Adam, in other words. Adam, the evil counterpart of Mary’s brother, Captain Marvel, had declared war on the whole world, and the entire Marvel Family had joined forces to stop him. The last thing she remembered was Black Adam striking her hard enough to knock her all the way from Sydney, Australia, to northern India. She had crashed to earth in front of the Taj Mahal—and woken up in this Manhattan hospital ten weeks later. Her powers had been AWOL ever since, along with her friends and family.
“Yeah, sure.” Clutching her bag, she joined Bernice in the bustling corridor outside. Doctors, nurses, patients, and visitors hurried past them as they strolled down the hallway. Directional signs pointed the way toward Checkout and Radiology. A loudspeaker paged doctors whose names Mary didn’t recognize. Antiseptic suffused the air. A family of visitors, bearing flowers and gifts for a loved one, provoked a familiar pang in Mary’s heart. “I have to ask you again, Bernice. Are there any messages for me?” The physical therapist shook her head sadly. “We’ve been over that, honey.”
“I know,” Mary said. “It’s just that I was here so long. I thought one of them would have called.” She didn’t understand. Where was her twin brother, Billy, and their best friend, Freddy Freeman? Why hadn’t they come to visit her? The boys’ continuing absence filled her with anxiety. Had something terrible happened to them? According to the Internet, which she had searched from her hospital bed, Black Adam had been defeated eventually, but neither Captain Marvel nor Captain Marvel Jr. had been seen or heard from since. Had they lost their powers too?
Feeling lost and abandoned, Mary let Bernice escort her to the checkout desk, where a gray-haired administrator presented her with a sheaf of documents. A plaque on her desk identified the older woman as Helen Powell. “I have your release papers ready to go, Ms. Batson.” “Thanks.” Mary sat down opposite the older woman. She had been fretting about this moment for weeks. “But I—I’m afraid I can’t pay. I have no money or insurance...
“Don’t worry,” Ms. Powell reassured her. “Your bill was settled by your brother.”
“Billy?” Hope flared in Mary’s heart. She knew that Billy had survived their clash with Black Adam because he had apparently arranged to have her transferred from
Agra to New York, but she had started to fear that she was never going to see him again. “He’s here?”
“Not anymore,” Ms. Powell said. “He stopped by this morning just long enough to make the payment.”
“But he must have left something for me,” Mary insisted, more confused than ever. “A note, a phone number, anything?” She had already tried calling home to Fawcett City, only to discover that Billy’s old number had been disconnected. Ditto for Freddy’s. Both boys seemed to have vanished and left no forwarding address.
Helen Powell handed Mary a folded piece of paper, “Just this.”
I knew it! Mary thought jubilantly. Billy would never just disappear on me. Her spirits sank, however, as she opened the note and read the terse message inside:
'' Mary. Don’t try to find me. B.
“No,” she whispered hoarsely. This wasn’t like Billy at all. She desperately wanted to dismiss the note as a fake, but she recognized her brother’s handwriting. Deep in her heart, she knew it was true. For some unfathomable reason, Billy had ditched her, perhaps for good.
I’m on my own.
Still in shock, she made it out of the hospital to the sidewalk outdoors. New York City rose up around her, huge and intimidating. The brisk fall weather was startling. It had been springtime when Black Adam had sent her crashing to earth like a fallen angel. I missed an entire summer. A cloudy gray sky vaulted above the towering skyscrapers. The lofty clouds called out to Mary, reminding her that once she had been able to soar among them. She couldn’t resist trying the magic word one more time.
“Shazam!”
A boom of thunder raised her hopes, but a sudden cloudburst doused them a second later. Rain poured down from the sky, soaking her to the skin. Mary chuckled bitterly at the cruel joke Fate seemed to have played on her. The thunder was just thunder. There was nothing magic about it anymore.
Just like me.
Wet, cold, and alone, she left the hospital behind and began walking.
36 and COUNTING#
■ HETHNIIS.
“lot me get this straight,” Perry White growled. “I do a photographer a favor by sending him on a reporter’s assignment—I send you all the way to Gotham City—-and you come back with nothing?”
The surly editor in chief of the Daily Planet glared at Jimmy from behind his cluttered walnut desk. A fuming stogie was clenched between his teeth. Venetian blinds and a closed door concealed the interior of Perry’s office from the bullpen outside. File cabinets and bulletin boards lined the walls. A mug of black coffee sat atop the page layouts on t
he desk. An old-fashioned manual typewriter occupied a spare desk in the corner.
Jimmy winced at his boss’s irate tone. “Like I told Lois on the phone, Chief, there was nothing to get. The Joker just babbled like a crazy person.”
“What about all that commotion I heard when you called?” Lois Lane asked. The Planet's star reporter leaned against a filing cabinet by the door, sipping a cup of coffee. She had graciously offered to provide Jimmy with some moral support when he filled Perry in on his fruitless trip to Arkham. “What was that all about?”
“Oh, that,” Jimmy mumbled. He wasn’t sure what part of yesterday’s close call bothered him the most: the fact that Killer Croc had almost eaten him, or how he had stretched out of the way just in time. Probably that last part, he decided, reluctant to divulge all the weirdo details to either Lois or Perry. He didn’t want them to think that he had snapped under the pressure and hallucinated the whole thing. “Nothing ... nothing important.”
“Can we stay on point here?” Perry said impatiently. “I’ve still got a paper to put out, and we need a new angle on—” A sudden boom from outside the building cut short his tirade. The deafening blast rattled the window behind him. “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” he exclaimed. The cigar tumbled from his lips. “Now what?”
'' All three journalists raced to the window, which offered a spectacular view of downtown Metropolis. Only seconds ago it had been a clear fall day, but now ominous black clouds obscured the sun. Bright golden flashes lit up the roiling clouds from inside. For a moment, Jimmy thought that maybe it was just a freak thunderstorm, but then coruscating bolts of shimmering yellow energy blasted down from the sky, wreaking havoc on the city below. A destructive beam tore through an elevated billboard for Sundollar Coffee, setting it ablaze, while another ray blasted apart a rooftop water tower. Gallons of spilled water instantly evaporated into steam, adding to the turbulent atmosphere. More beams lanced through the air, barely missing vulnerable skyscrapers and clock towers. Thunderous booms accompanied the devastating fireworks.
“Olsen!” Perry shouted. He stomped out the fallen stogie while still keeping his gaze glued to the fearsome spectacle outside. “Get down there with your camera!” Jimmy was already out the door. Eschewing the elevators, he raced down the stairs to the first floor, thirty-seven stories below, and dashed across the lobby to the sidewalk outside, where he encountered a scene of utter pandemo-eaiiMTiaw n
nium. Frightened citizens ran for shelter, looking back over their shoulders at the lethal pyrotechnics overhead. Their panicked cries were all but drowned out by the cacophonous din. Drivers abandoned their vehicles midtraffic as they joined the stampede on the sidewalks. Jimmy backed up against the Daily Planet Building’s granite fagade in order to avoid being trampled. He was anxious to capture the chaos on film, but first he took a moment to activate his signal-watch. Superman probably already knows about this emergency, he figured, but it can’t hurt to alert him just in case.
Raising his digital camera to his right eye, he snapped off some quick reaction shots. Most everyone around him seemed to be running for safety, but he was startled to see a shell-shocked family of three standing frozen in terror right in the middle of the sidewalk. Baseball caps, disposable cameras, and souvenir T-shirts marked them unmistakably as tourists, new to the Big Apricot. A white-faced mother clutched a pigtailed toddler to her chest, while her husband stared aghast at the tumult all around them. Unlike the seasoned natives of the city, who knew what to do when Metropolis was under attack, as happened twice a week or so, the clueless trio looked like they didn’t know which way to turn. They were practically asking to be collateral damage.
“Hey!” Jimmy shouted at the family, concerned for their safety. “You can’t just stand there!”
Sure enough, a sizzling bolt of energy slammed into the skyscraper behind them. The southwest comer of the roof exploded, blasting a heavy stone gargoyle into pieces. Shattered rubble rained down from the blasted cornice, plunging straight toward the defenseless family, who were only seconds away from being pulped. Letting go of his camera, Jimmy instinctively ran to their rescue even though he knew it was already too late to save them.
Or was it?
To his amazement, he put on a sudden burst of speed that instantly ate up the distance between him and the en-29 unit! cox
dangered tourists. He grabbed on to them with both arms and whisked them down the sidewalk only a second before the plummeting debris crashed into the pavement behind him. Shards of broken masonry exploded into the air, leaving deep fissures in the sidewalk, but Jimmy had already carried the potential fatalities safely clear of the flying shrapnel. Over half a block from the smoking wreckage, Jimmy slowed to a stop and let go of the unscathed tourists, who looked dazed and confused by both their brush with death and their unexpected rescue.
“Mother of God,” the woman whispered in shock. She stared at the shattered stretch of sidewalk where she and her loved ones had been standing only moments before. It took her a minute to fully grasp what had just occurred. She hugged her daughter like she never wanted to let go while gazing thankfully at Jimmy. “You saved us!” "“Wow!” the husband exclaimed. He scratched his head in confusion as he contemplated the distance they had covered in a matter of seconds. He looked at Jimmy. “How’d you do it, buddy?”
Jimmy had no idea. What’s happening to me? he wondered. Yesterday I was Plastic Man; today I’m the Flash? He was at a loss to explain it. “Uh ...”
“It’s like those stories you hear,” the father theorized, “about old ladies gaining super-strength to lift a car off a baby!”
“Yeah, that must be it,” Jimmy agreed hurriedly, even though he didn’t buy that explanation for a second. This was way too weird for that. But before he could give the unsettling mystery any more thought, a high-pitched keening, almost like a scream, drew all eyes upward. The scream grew louder by the second—and seemed to be heading right for them. “That sound! Something else is falling... !” He barely got the words out of his mouth. The shrill keening gave way to an earth-shattering explosion as something slammed into the middle of Shuster Avenue with the force of a meteor strike. The impact felt like an earthquake,
eiSUSfBBiff! 21
almost knocking Jimmy off his feet. Abandoned cars and trucks were tossed into the air like Tonka Toys, their windshields blown out by the shock wave. The uprooted vehicles crashed down onto the shattered asphalt and each other. Clouds of dust and pulverized concrete billowed up from the crash site.
Holy cow! Jimmy thought, his head ringing. What was that?
Thankfully, he didn’t think that the unidentified falling object had landed on top of anyone. Plus, also on the bright side, the tremendous crash had kept the puzzled family from asking any more questions about how exactly he had saved them. Checking on the tourists, he was relieved to see them scurrying toward the lobby of the Planet Building. They’d be safer there than on the streets, even though the worst of the crisis seemed to have passed. Glancing ’upward, Jimmy saw the stormy black clouds dispersing. Sunlight and blue skies poked through the smoke from countless small fires throughout the city. As the ringing in his ears faded away, he realized that the thunderous booms had ceased as well. No more energy bolts stabbed down from the heavens. The sirens of racing emergency vehicles blared in the background. Whatever had transpired overhead, it appeared to be over.
Or so Jimmy hoped.
Holding a handkerchief over his mouth and nostrils to keep out the airborne dust and grit, he crept cautiously toward the lip of the enormous crater carved out by the something’s crash landing. The dust clouds began to settle, offering a clearer view of the devastation. As Jimmy made his way over the rubble, he had no idea what he expected to find at the bottom of the pit. A giant glowing meteorite? A crashed alien spacecraft? Bizarro? Here in Metropolis, anything was possible. Camera in hand, he peered over the edge of the precipice.
“Ohmigod.” His blue eyes widened in shock. “Lightray!”
the New Gods, a race of vastly powerful alien beings who dwelt on the distant planet of New Genesis. Cosmic legend had it that when the primordial gods of antiquity perished in some bygone cataclysm, the universe gave birth to a new breed of gods who reigned from two eternally warring worlds, the heavenly New Genesis and the hellish Apoko-lips. Lightray, whom Jimmy had first met a few years ago, hailed from New Genesis. Eternally cheerful and optimistic, he had always struck Jimmy as the friendliest and least intimidating of the New Gods.
But what had happened to him now? Despite possessing literally godlike power and immortality, Lightray looked more dead than alive. He lay sprawled upon his back, the cracked debris beneath him fused to a glassy sheen by the heat of his arrival. His skintight white uniform, which was usually spotless from head to toe, was tom, shredded, and eVen scorched in places. The golden headdress that framed his once-handsome features was dented and barely holding together. One eye was swollen shut, and his lips were split and bleeding. His wavy red hair had been burnt and tom away in spots, exposing the raw scalp underneath. A formerly radiant smile now lacked several teeth. A leg was twisted at an unnatural angle. His breathing was ragged, and he seemed to lack the strength to even lift his head from the glazed concrete. He looked barely conscious.
Who could do this to him? Jimmy wondered. Darkseid? Doomsday? His affable manner notwithstanding, Lightray was no pushover. Along with the superhuman strength and endurance of a New God, Lightray also possessed the unique ability to harness all the various frequencies of the light spectrum. Jimmy had seen Lightray repel squads of vicious Parademons with the blinding beams that had inspired his nom de guerre. He could be a tough customer when he had to be. So how did he end up beaten to a pulp?
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