by Barry Lyga
“Easy . . . for you . . . to say . . .” Joe panted. His tie flapped against his chest as he dug down deep for some more energy, slamming one leaden foot after another on the Star City sidewalk lining the north side of Hester Avenue. Why in the world was he still dressed like a detective? What madness had inspired him to leave on his suit jacket and tie in order to run like a lunatic through the city? He should have put on sweats and sneakers.
According to the S.T.A.R. Labs satellites and some convenient hacking by Felicity, Ambush Bug had just teleported to a spot one block east of here. Joe, Wild Dog, Dig, and Black Canary had previously spread out through the city, waiting for a ping from the Bug’s teleport tech. Joe was the lucky/unlucky one to be closest. Where closest was defined as a five-block run.
“Hurry!” Felicity shouted. Joe growled under what was left of his breath and resisted the urge to claw the bud out of his ear and hurl it into a nearby sewer.
Dancing between pedestrians, who glared at him with all the outrage and ire that were hallmarks of the world-famous Star City “charm,” Joe stepped off the curb, bolted between two cars—to horn blares of annoyance and curses shouted from driver’s-side windows—and charged across the street.
“He’s gone,” Felicity said. “Ping shows him near the stadium. Anyone nearby?”
Joe pulled up on the sidewalk outside a bodega. “Hold on. Don’t panic yet.”
A woman came running out of the bodega, shrieking. Joe caught a glimpse of fur, then spun to watch her. A cluster of animals—three of them, he counted—snarled and snapped around her shoulders. The woman stopped just short of running into traffic, howling at the top of her lungs as the critters capered on her.
They were minks, Joe realized. Still catching his breath, he loped over to the woman and knocked one off. The little fur ball hissed as it dropped to the sidewalk, then skittered away down the street.
Managing to sustain only a couple of scratches and scrapes in the process, Joe wrestled the other two minks from the woman’s shoulders. They came loose reluctantly, ripping out ribbons of her shirt, but Joe freed her, tossing the nasty little creatures off to one side, where they scrambled away toward a pile of trash bags.
“Are you OK?” Joe asked. Without waiting for an answer, he moved on to the question he really cared about: “Was it Ambush Bug? Did he do this to you?”
“I was just in there to buy a soda,” she said, gasping, eyes wide. “I heard a pop! sound behind me . . . He . . . he was in green . . . I was wearing my coat with the fur collar . . . It’s fake fur.” She repeated it, grabbing Joe’s lapels. “I don’t get it. He said, Fur is murder! And then . . . And then he said, Fur? Murder? I guess that’s furder! I made up a word! I’m a writer, too, Lyga! And then he stuck out his tongue, ripped off my coat, and dropped those . . . things on me.”
“Let me guess,” Joe said. “Then he just popped away into thin air.”
“Joe,” Felicity said in his ear, “he’s already gone from the stadium. Wild Dog couldn’t get there in time.”
“There’s crazy traffic on Smith Boulevard!” Wild Dog complained. “Ain’t my fault!”
“Hang on,” Joe said. He guided the woman to a nearby bench and helped her sit down. No doubt the Star City cops would be by to take her statement. In the meantime . . .
He slipped into the bodega, opening the door as narrowly as possible and closing it immediately behind him. There were no customers, just an employee at the register. Four rows of snacks, chips, and sundry household goods lay before Joe, ending at a wall of coolers resplendent with a rainbow of soda and juice bottles.
The guy behind the counter wore a plaid flannel shirt, a black cap, and a suspicious expression that relaxed when Joe flashed his police badge. It was the wrong city, sure, but no one ever looked closely.
“Ambush Bug was just here?” he asked.
“Yeah, but he’s gone,” the guy at the register said.
Joe twisted the lock on the front door. “Got any open windows or back doors?”
The man frowned with his eyebrows. “Nothing open. Why?”
Joe shook his head and waved his hand for silence. The bodega was quiet, the only sound the slight hum of street noise from outside.
“Joe, what are you doing?” Felicity asked. He pulled the comms bud out of his ear. He needed nothing obstructing his hearing.
Ambush Bug was gone, yes, but he’d teleported inside a building. There was a chance that the bee he’d used as his teleport target was still in the bodega. If Joe could find it and catch it . . .
A sound caught his attention. Jerking to his left, he spied a black shape cutting the air against a backdrop of yellow laundry detergent boxes. Flailing by reflex, he missed it entirely.
“Are you on something?” the guy behind the counter asked. He didn’t sound overly concerned at the prospect, more amused than anything.
“Quiet!” Joe ordered. Arms held out at an angle, he turned a slow circle, ears pricked up, attendant for the telltale buzz . . .
When Iris and Barry were kids, Joe used to astonish them by catching flies out on the back porch on hot summer nights. Barry had been fascinated by bugs—budding scientist, even in single digits—and Iris had been afraid of anything that crept, crawled, slithered, or flew. So Joe took the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: Snagging a fly out of the air let him examine it with Barry, and seeing it pick careful steps across his fingers without harm demystified the insect for Iris.
It had been a while, but he figured it was like riding a bike—you never really forgot how.
A sound to his right. Joe snapped out his hand. Clenched a fist. Came up with nothing.
“Dude, is this, like, performance art?” the guy at the register asked.
Joe hissed another order to be quiet while still turning in a slow circle. He could hear the muted buzz of the robot bee’s wings as they thrashed the air.
“Because if it is,” the guy went on, “it sorta sucks.”
“Man,” Joe said, exasperated, “what part of be quiet do you not understand?” To emphasize his point, he threw back the tail of his jacket to reveal his holstered weapon.
“Sure thing, Grampa—” the guy started to say, then jumped back in terror as Joe rushed at the counter.
The bee had landed on the edge of the cash register, right next to a plastic box holding a chain of lottery scratch-offs.
Joe pounced, bringing down his hand, careful to cup it so that he wouldn’t smash the thing. The cash register let out a ring at the smack of his hand, and the drawer sprung open.
“Got it!” he crowed excitedly, more to himself than to the guy at the counter. Under his hand, he felt the bee shifting and testing its boundaries. Steeling himself for the inevitable sting, he turned to the cowering employee, who’d pressed himself back against a wall of cell phone chargers.
“Hey, man, go get me a box or a cup with a lid or something.”
The guy flattened himself further against the wall. A couple of chargers fell off their pegs and clattered to the floor.
“Come on, man. Get a move on.”
Licking his lips, the employee sidled away from the counter, toward a soda machine. There, he grabbed a clear plastic cup, a lid, and—amusingly—a straw. He set them down on the counter near Joe and backed away.
Joe grabbed the cup with his free hand and moved quickly, slapping it into place as he pulled his other hand out of the way. The bee buzzed and clicked angrily against the side of the cup. For a heartbeat, Joe expected it to break through the thin plastic, but the cup held.
He put the lid on before the bee could escape.
It looked like a normal bee. Joe would have worried that he’d wasted his time, but when he put his eye right up against the cup, he could just barely make out the glint of metal along the bee’s antennae. This was a Bug-Eyed Bandit special, all right. Modified by Ambush Bug himself.
Joe felt around for his comms bud and slipped it back in his ear. Dig, Dinah, and Rene were all c
alling out to one another as Ambush Bug pinged around the city.
Aware of the presence of a civilian, Joe was careful to use Felicity’s code name. “Overwatch, this is Joe West. I have a bee.” His chest swelled with pride, and he could not hold back a self-satisfied smile.
“Good for you, dude,” the guy at the counter said without a trace of sarcasm, and lifted a thumbs-up as Joe headed out the door.
10
With Owlman once again locked up, Iris, Felicity, Mr. Terrific, and Oliver gathered around and peered down at the Time Courier strapped to Barry’s wrist.
“This is it?” Oliver asked. “This little gizmo is going to beat the enemy who cracks open moons and unleashes living weapons?”
“No, it’s just going to give us a fair shot at beating him,” Barry said. He explained that the Time Courier was a personal temporal teleportation device that could transport the user anywhere and anywhen. “I’ll set it for the End of Time and . . .”
He made a magician’s poof! gesture.
“I’m not on board with this,” Iris said. “I get that the Big Bad is using Reverse-Flash to power some kind of machine that’s causing all of these . . . crossovers to happen in the present. But you can’t just show up at the End of Time without any kind of reconnaissance. You could be running right into a trap. Say . . .” Iris gnawed at her lower lip for a moment, thinking. “You’ve got the Time Courier, right? Why not go back to Earth 38, jump forward a few days, and grab Supergirl from when she’s healed?”
Flash shook his head. “Too risky. There’s still a lot of antimatter contamination over on Earth 38, and that could interfere with the Time Courier. And before you ask, we can’t go grab her from the past, either—if something horrible happened to her, it would create a time paradox.” Barry hooked a thumb over his left shoulder, where Superman stood with his arms crossed over his chest. “Besides, have you met my secret weapon? More powerful than a locomotive. I think between the two of us, we can handle whatever’s lurking at the End of Time.”
“Between the three of us,” Green Arrow said, stepping over to join them. “I’m coming with you.”
Barry opened his mouth to protest, but Superman put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “Don’t be so hasty, Flash. Green Arrow’s a lateral thinker and an accomplished strategist. On my own Earth, I have a good friend who’s the same, and while he may be only human, his skill set and perspective make him a force to be reckoned with. I get the same feeling from Green Arrow.”
“How is it that you say something like only human, but you do it in such a way that I don’t take offense at it?” Oliver asked in a tone of true wonderment.
Taken aback, Superman knitted his brows together in concern and apology. “You took no offense because I meant no offense. Some of my very best friends are only human, Green Arrow.”
“You know, you can call me Oliver if you like.”
“The names we assign ourselves are important and powerful,” Superman said. “It’s a measure of respect to use them.”
Green Arrow shook his head. “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
“I wish I did. I don’t know who or what is waiting for us at the End of Time. But I know this: We’ll encounter it and defeat it together.”
Everyone in the room went silent as the Man of Steel’s words and emotions washed over them.
“Oliver,” Felicity said into the solemn moment, “I love you dearly, but if you don’t come back, am I allowed to marry him?”
11
In one of the deepest chambers in the S.T.A.R. Labs complex, Flash, Superman, and Green Arrow prepared for their jump to the final moments of the universe. They did not know what might happen when using the Time Courier to move so far into the future, so they isolated themselves in a room four stories belowground, surrounded by steel and concrete walls.
Barry adjusted the Time Courier, following the instructions Ava Sharpe had given him. “According to her,” he said, “there’s nothing at the End of Time except for what’s left of the headquarters of an organization called the Time Masters.”
“Maybe one of them is our enemy,” Oliver speculated. “Or maybe they’ll have some sort of records or information that will lead us in the right direction.”
Superman nodded. “Good thinking. Let’s go, Flash.”
Barry triggered the Time Courier. A rectangle of light fizzled into existence, opening neatly like a window through the air itself. Its edges crackled with energy. Within, they saw only a swirling gray boil of mist and fog.
“Is that the End of Time?” Oliver sounded both perplexed and incredulous.
“My super-vision can’t penetrate whatever that is,” Superman reported, his brow furrowed and his lips set grimly. Clearly, he was used to being forewarned in every situation, and the opacity of the doorway to the future concerned him.
“No one said this would be easy,” Barry told them. “Our enemy is incredibly powerful. Powerful enough to yoke a wily speedster like the Reverse-Flash and use him as a tool. If anyone is having second thoughts, now’s the time for them.”
Green Arrow snorted. “I’ve never backed away from a fight.”
Superman said nothing. He simply smiled and stepped into the gap in reality carved by the Time Courier.
Barry didn’t even give himself time to blink; he dashed in on the Man of Steel’s heels.
The last time Barry had traveled to the future, he’d been on the Cosmic Treadmill; his jaunt from the thirtieth century to the sixty-fourth century had been as casual and as simple as a jog along the banks of the Gardner River on a lazy weekend afternoon.
The time before that, he’d run on his own power from the present to the thirtieth century, an arduous, punishing race against time itself that had depleted his speed, sucked out his very life force, and left him almost dead.
He wasn’t sure what to expect when using the Time Courier, but Ava Sharpe had described it as being “as easy as falling down the stairs,” so he didn’t anticipate any problems.
The mist enveloped him.
And then his entire body seized, as though flooded with electricity. Somewhere nearby he heard a familiar voice—Oliver’s—doing something very unfamiliar: screaming. Another voice, bellowing in pain and shock: Superman.
Superman was being hurt.
Barry himself had begun vibrating his body into a phase state as soon as the first tingles of pain wriggled along his extremities. Even while intangible, the agony was exquisite, racing along his nerves, exploding in his brain.
And then everything was black.
And then he was falling.
12
Before opening his eyes, Barry felt a pain throbbing along his left side. He hissed in a breath, testing his ribs, which seemed uninjured. A massive bruise, then, along his left flank.
He opened his eyes. He lay on a substance that was both yielding and solid at the same time. Levering up on his elbows, he glanced left and right. Superman lay crumpled next to him, his cape tipped over his head. And there was Oliver, likewise unconscious, sprawled out.
Vibrating to phase must have borne the brunt of the impact, he thought. Whatever the heck it was we impacted with in the first place.
He looked up and gasped. He knew this place. Or at least something like it.
The architecture—buildings without right angles or windows, hovering structures suspended in midair by antigravity—was vintage thirtieth century. He’d been “here” before, when he’d encountered the Tornado Twins on his way to the sixty-fourth century. Dawn and Don were their names. They’d possessed speed almost equal to his own, and they were the ones who’d revealed the Cosmic Treadmill to him and sent him on his way to the farther future.
Dawn and Don. He thought of them often. They’d been a help to him and he’d felt a connection to them, but there hadn’t been enough time to explore it.
He stood up and turned in a slow circle, gazing up at the floating vehicles drifting in synchronous pathways overhead. Wha
t were the odds he’d end up back in the same century as before? Why hadn’t the Time Courier taken them to the End of Time?
He checked his wrist, expecting the borrowed gadget to spit sparks, its surface cracked and permanently damaged. But the Time Courier was intact, in perfect working order.
Why didn’t we get to the End of Time? Why here and now?
With a groan, Superman rolled over and—as Barry watched in amazement—floated into a standing position without any of the typical human confusion of balance and adjusting limbs. “I haven’t felt something that powerful since I faced off against the Galactic Golem,” he said mildly. “Are you all right?”
“I’m OK,” Barry said, “but Oliver might—”
“Just some bruising and contusions,” Superman said, glancing up and down Green Arrow’s unconscious form. “And he has a bone spur on his left clavicle that he might want to look into at some point in the next few years. But otherwise, he’s in remarkable physical condition.”
“Thanks,” Oliver mumbled, rolling over. “I need to tell you both that I think the End of Time sucks.”
Barry laughed and reached down to help Oliver to his feet. “We’re not at the End of Time.” He explained to both of them what era they’d arrived in, though he admitted he couldn’t explain why.
“Wait, did you say the thirtieth century?” Superman asked.
“Yeah, that’s—”
A loud siren sounded a burst for a moment, startling them. Barry looked over his shoulder. A floating metallic disk hovered a few feet above their heads. A railing ran around part of the disk, and a woman held it with one hand while using the other to point a weapon of some sort at the three of them. She wore a two-tone skintight outfit that was gray with a wide, deep blue stripe down the center, as well as a shiny white helmet with green goggles.
“Attention!” the woman said in a language Barry had heard before. It was Interlac. He dearly missed the telepathic earplug that had allowed him to understand it. “Please refrain from moving while I continue to scan you for chronometric anomalies.”