The Invincibles

by Michael McNichols

  “What happened to the Whorl, Danny?” Hyperman quietly asked.

  “I-I don’t know!” the Spider-Specter replied. “It was confusing! I snuck in there and found these machines injecting him with Diatomite-x!”

  Hyperman’s brow furrowed. “Diatomite-x?”

  “Yeah! He was getting shot up with it. All kinds! His freaking skin was glowing this scary shade of blue! I freed him and got him on a gurney and went to get some medical supplies, but he was jabbering all this nonsense and fidgeting too fast for me to hold him down. Then he threw me down and ripped through the whole building!”

  “How, Danny?” Hyperman asked. “How did he do any of that? He was sedated! He didn’t have legs!”

  “He didn’t need legs!” the Spider-Specter replied. “Something changed him! He was different. Faster! Faster than he was before even! I couldn’t even really see him. It must have been the Diatomite-x, man. That shit’s crazy!”

  Hyperman nodded and gave the Spider-Specter a cold, appraising stare. “Thank you, Danny,” he said. “I think I know where to get further answers. I don’t need you anymore.”

  “Wait!” the Spider-Specter yelled.

  Hyperman shrugged and shook the Spider-Specter off his arm. The Spider-Specter fell, screaming down through the foggy, vaporous clouds. While flying off, Hyperman watched him crash down onto a plane below and cling wildly to its wing using his wall-crawling powers. The plane somehow righted itself and resumed its course with Danny now hitching a ride. Hyperman let him be for now. The Spider-Specter wasn’t much of a threat to him on his own, and Hyperman had more important matters to address.

  ***

  Hyperman darted across the ocean to the MorsWorld Building in New Daedalus. In his office, Alexander Mors sat at the desk with the lights off, sipping from a bottle of old Irish whiskey. He wore a trim blackish-blue suit with gray pinstripes but no tie. His lush black hair curtained down around his head. He kicked his feet up onto his desk and took a big slug of whiskey.

  Wanting to make a dramatic entrance to get Mors’s attention, Hyperman appeared in his window and threw a long shadow over the office. Dried blood and ash from the battle on Mars still covered him. Black rot still ate at his skin and many of his cuts hadn’t healed. He thought his rough, bloodied appearance would impress upon Mors the seriousness of their business together.

  Unfazed, Mors held the whiskey bottle up. “Care for a drink?”

  “No, thank you,” Hyperman sternly replied, floating on in.

  “Are you certain? No offense, but you don’t look well at the moment.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Hyperman scanned the entire building floor by floor.

  “The whole building’s empty,” he said.

  “I sent everyone home,” Mors replied. “In fact, I sent everyone in every office home.”

  “I checked our labs too. All of our Diatomite-x is gone.”

  “Yep. He took it.”

  Mors slurped back some whiskey and hiccupped.

  “Who took it, Alex?” Hyperman asked.

  “The Whorl, of course,” Mors said. “Who else?”

  “Why would he want it?”

  “To seed the world with Diatomite-x and give everyone super-powers! He’s hijacked our idea! He even took all our plans and machinery. While he’s no super-genius, he’s smart enough, and we already did most of the hard work, so I’m sure he’ll figure it out eventually. Having super-speed to read through and test everything will probably help too. I bet we don’t even have that long before he pulls the trigger.”

  “But the Diatomite-x is unstable! You said we needed at least another week of testing! If the Diatomite-x is used now, it might turn everyone into monsters or kill them!”

  “In all likelihood, yes.”

  “How could you let him do this?”

  “How could I stop him? Where were you?”

  “I was…distracted. How could this happen? How could he have even gotten this far? I burned off his legs!”

  Mors chuckled. “Maybe he doesn’t need them anymore. Maybe he made up himself a little cart that he can super-speed around in.”

  “You think this is FUNNY?” Hyperman asked.

  He sped across the office and brought his hand down, chopping Mors’s desk in half. The force of the blow knocked Mors back out of his swivel chair and he spilled across the floor. As he did so, the whiskey bottle flew out of his hand and shattered against the wall. Shiny droplets of liquor dribbled down.

  “YOU WERE SHOOTING DON UP WITH DIATOMITE-X!” Hyperman shouted. “You were experimenting on him with it! I scanned the wreckage! I saw the settings you programmed in!”

  Down on the floor, Mors shrugged.

  “We needed to know what the Diatomite-x did to individuals who already had super-powers,” he said. “Even if we went out of our way to isolate your friends from our Diatomite-x, they had their own and were being exposed to it. I needed to know how it might have affected them.”

  “I could have taken all their Diatomite-x away!”

  “Nightshadow and Paul Wrath have been studying and weaponizing it for years, because they were afraid of you, I might add. I don’t know how much they worked with it hands-on or whichever of their costumed friends they had in the mix, but that’s a massive amount of exposure right there. Who knows what it did to them? Besides, did you actually think you could lock all of your superhero friends up when we transformed the whole planet? At least one would get away! One always does! That’s what you hero types inevitably do. I just wanted to be prepared.”

  Hyperman shook his head. “You never stop, do you? You just have to plot and backstab. It’s your nature. And you tortured my friend! You experimented on him like…like he was some kind of animal!”

  “The friend whose legs you burned off?”

  The words gutted into Hyperman. Guilt clawed and gnawed at his very heart. He shuddered thinking about it and burned with shame.

  “Don’t worry though,” Mors said, brushing away some of his desk’s wreckage and picking himself back up. He brushed off his suit and stretched his neck. “I understand. I’ve betrayed friends too. We do as we must.”

  Hyperman looked at him, seeing the self-assurance glowing flush blue in his aura. Even in the face of a Diatomite-x apocalypse, Mors was utterly certain he’d done everything he could and felt no regrets. Hyperman envied his self-confidence. At the moment, he felt lost and small.

  Mors patted him on the arm.

  “You have to be off now, don’t you?” he asked. “You do need to try and stop the Whorl, yes? I think you’re too late. In fact, I’ve done the calculations in my heard that say so. Still, you’ve proven me wrong before.”

  “Right,” Hyperman muttered. “Of course.”

  Mors offered him a quaint, sad smile. “Get going then and good luck. If you need anything, I’ll be with my whiskey. I have nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.”

  Hyperman nodded and skulked back out toward the window to fly off, unable to keep looking that man in his eerie, placid blue eyes.

  ***

  Again and again, Hyperman blazed all across the world, scanning, listening, and letting his hyper-senses take in a deluge of information. A whirling mishmash of faces, numbers, and colors flooded his perception, and he needed to concentrate to separate it all into people, places, and things. Still, he found no trace of the Whorl or the Diatomite-x. He feared that Don might have somehow left the planet, but if he wanted to infect the world with Diatomite-x, he had to be here somewhere. Therefore, Hyperman had to examine other possibilities.

  In the past, Don had often spoken of running so fast he felt like he was almost touching another realm that co-existed with this reality. Hyperman himself had glimpsed it when super-speeding about years ago during the Mirror Mysterion Crisis and had thought long and hard on what he had experienced.

  He and Don had discussed it and theorized that they were crossing over into a realm of pure super-speed that existed between f
ractions of nanoseconds and attoseconds. Anyone that dwelled there would be moving so fast in actual reality that they’d be literally everywhere at once on Earth proper. However, anyone in this speed realm would perceive everything as flowing at a slower, more understandable pace due to their minds adapting to this new reality and making sense of it.

  The Diatomite-x could have evolved Don to the point where he moved so fast that he permanently resided in this higher reality. Hyperman had never known just how fast he himself could go. No matter how hard he’d ever pushed himself, the Whorl had always managed to inch out ahead during their races. Still, Hyperman had never let completely go before with his super-speed, afraid that he might lose control and others would suffer because of it.

  Yet now he had to catch up to the Whorl. He had no choice but to test and then overcome his limits. He had peered into this speed realm before, but had been flying faster than ever to toss a Phanto-bomb out into space. Could he be that quick again? Did he have a choice not to be?

  He floated over the beautiful, bright world he called home. Below him, clouds drifted. Oceans stirred. Continents shifted. Closing his eyes, he forced himself to completely relax and dangle there, emptying his mind of all thought. Deep inside of himself, he fueled and channeled his power. Then he slammed back down toward Earth, picking up more and more snarling, electric-hot super-speed as he went.

  The world lit up and blurred around him as he darted here, there, and everywhere all at once. Every place and thing became one and jumbled together into a mess of flickering lights and ghosts with sights, sounds, and tastes all twisting together. Lightning flash-flooded and super-charged his perception. His invulnerable skin tingled and twitched. His vision faded and exploded back, brighter than ever.

  Hyperman crashed, burned, recovered, and found himself stumbling across a lush, shifting, whispering cloudscape that seemed to stretch on and on forever. Chrome metallic silver and blue colored him and everything else around. Haunting sounds seeped up from the real world. Shouts, grunts, groans, the whine and shriek of machines at work, and cars trying to brake all hollowly echoed.

  He’d done it. He’d entered the higher speed realm!

  Doing so had made him feel disoriented and massively motion-sick. Everything was blurring together before him into a blobby mess and he needed to focus to properly perceive anything on this plane of existence.

  Ahead, he sighted the Whorl. Don had ground all the Diatomite-x down into a fine dust that he’d spread out in a flummoxing mist that sifted and mixed into different color combinations. Glassy, static-flickering force fields kept it all fenced in. Lopsided towers of computer processors bulged up beyond the force field parameter, filled with buttons, dials, and levers, and flashing with hurtful-looking lights. Monitors moaned and blinked with infinities of numbers. Power lines swept about, connecting all the computers and sparking with hot green electricity.

  Hyperman saw how Don had altered his and Mors’s process in a way only a super-speedster could. He only would have known how to do that if the Diatomite-x had increased his intelligence to a super-manic level as well as super-charging his speed. Don’s process seemed to involve shutting off the force fields and letting the dust seep into the clouds and stain them, which would infect the entire real world with Diatomite-x almost all at once. It’d all come down in a fine mist everywhere, but not in the precisely calculated combinations and increments Hyperman and Mors had planned.

  The Whorl whisked back and forth from the different machine towers to tinker with their settings. Even here in this place, he moved so quickly Hyperman needed to squint and concentrate to see him as anything but a blur. Don’s skin burned a demonic electric-blue and his eyes had turned into chaotic white vortices. A dark, misty bloody-bright red aura foamed over him.

  Most shockingly of all, he’d regrown his legs!

  The new flesh still shone wetly and dripped with glistening fluids. His bare feet slapped down and sparked against the solid, slippery-wet cloud surface wherever he ran.

  Don noticed Hyperman but continued his work.

  “Cal!” he shouted with a distorted, echoing voice. “I know what you and Mors were trying to do with the Diatomite-x. I felt it firsthand! I lived it! You were right! EVERYONE needs to feel this way! There doesn’t have to be sickness or loneliness or death for anyone! We can all conquer it! Like I have!”

  “You have to get looked at, Don!” Hyperman replied. “We need to know what exactly the Diatomite-x did to you. It wasn’t ready yet. It still needed to be tested.”

  “I am the test, and it’s working! I’m a god now, Cal. I’m more than a god. I think that this must be what it feels like to be you.”

  “You don’t know the science or the equipment! Not like I do! You don’t know what’s been done to you!”

  “I’ve looked over all your work and run every possible figuration. I know what I’m doing. I wouldn’t have before, but I do now.”

  “Don, remember El Dorado, Mutagen, and everyone else altered by Diatomite-x? The process always went wrong! Their genetics went bad! They went crazy!”

  “They couldn’t handle it! They didn’t have powers beforehand and couldn’t adjust like I could!”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing, Don! You’re not thinking right!”

  “I’m not thinking right? You’re telling me that? I’m taking your plan and making it right! You would have killed everyone, Cal! You and Mors!”

  “Don, please! I don’t want to fight you again! Don’t make me!”

  “Then don’t fight back!”

  At a speed too fast for Hyperman to even respond, the Whorl raced up with a powerful roundhouse punch. His momentum alone could have cracked the world in half, but the Diatomite-x had also enhanced his strength. Hyperman felt his cheekbones and jaw break with the impact. Two of his front teeth flew out of his mouth. The punch sent him flailing backwards. The Whorl caught up to him in mid-air and began drilling into him with rapid-fire jabs all over his body.

  In response, Hyperman spat out a freeze breath. It swept the Whorl up and tossed him across the clouds. He landed and skidded across the cloudscape. Ice glittered across half of his body, but he quickly shook it off. That minute amount of time still gave Hyperman the chance to charge at him. However, the Whorl nimbly slipped out of the way at the last fraction of an attosecond.

  At blurring, eye-hurting hyper-speeds, Hyperman and the Whorl proceeded to chase each other about the speed realm, throwing, dodging, and parrying strikes. The Whorl danced away from eye-blasts and Hyperman ducked away from his super-speeding hammer blows. He noticed the Whorl continually luring him farther and farther away from the Diatomite-x and machinery, but he couldn’t bait the Whorl back toward that direction. Nor was he able to keep up with the Whorl’s speed or gain the upper hand. The Whorl was always too fast by a fraction, and the Diatomite-x had rejuvenated him. His injuries had healed, and he seemed to not even feel pain or fear anymore. Don super-sped about and fought like he had realized he had no limits.

  Hyperman, on the other hand, had yet to completely recover from the battle on Mars. Pain knifed throughout his body. He tasted blood in his mouth and felt on the verge of vomiting up his own entrails. Every now and then, a strange light-headedness dazed him. One time, it cost him by making him a step slow, which allowed Don to land a powerful punch that caved in half his face.

  He went skidding across the cloud surface, but managed to twist himself around and take flight. In those attoseconds, the Whorl had already gone back to fiddling with the machinery, probably hoping to set it all off.

  Hyperman let loose with all he had left. Nuclear explosions erupted out of his eyes. Ice age breaths gusted out of his mouth. At the same time, he blazed after the Whorl, throwing hurricane punches. The cloudscape realm flickered blue and white, shuddering and shaking from the onslaught. Whatever damage this did to the real world, Hyperman vowed to fix later.

  Though the Whorl easily danced and dodged away from his attacks, he zi
gzagged in just the way Hyperman wanted him to. It distanced him away from the machines enough for Hyperman to turn his aim onto them.

  “NO!” the Whorl screamed and it echoed all across this strange speed realm. He tried to throw himself in the way of the eye-blasts targeting the machines and their force fields. However, he was half an attosecond too late.

  The eye-blasts, turned up to full power, battered through the force fields, leaving the machinery exposed to Hyperman’s freeze breath. Much of it froze, splintered, and shattered before toppling over due to the gushing storm-strength of Hyperman’s exhalation. Their circuitry then sparked and flared. The resulting explosions caused the Whorl to stumble and fumble before they threw him back into the clouds, through which he probably fell down into the real world. That gave Hyperman precious nanoseconds to act.

  Before the Diatomite-x dust had a chance to mist away and infect the world, he opened his mouth achingly wide and gulped it all down. Immediately, his insides seared and twisted in on themselves. His heart bloated and bulged inside his chest. He felt his blood thickening and his organs twisting and hardening. He coughed, choked, and spewed blood down out of his mouth and eyes. Old and new wounds opened up all over his body and the Diatomite-x burned through him from the inside out, causing him to bleed radioactive flames and light.

  His hyper-senses began fading. Already, he had trouble hearing. His vision dimmed and everything around him meshed and bled together into a dripping, vaporous, cloudy mess. His entire body clenched up, forcing him to hunch over. Somehow though, he kept all the Diatomite-x in, though it sapped and tore at his strength to do so. He shook and fidgeted, trying to manage the overwhelming pain.