by Barry Lyga
Joe shrugged. “I’m out of my jurisdiction. Not reporting to anyone. We both know that sometimes it’s best to go around the usual procedures instead of straight through them. Am I right?”
She gazed at him unnervingly, not blinking, for what seemed a very, very long time. Joe began to wonder if time had frozen, and he was about to say something when she relented. “OK. I’ll give you something to go on. Are you familiar with the Bug-Eyed Bandit?”
Stifling a groan, Joe nodded. Brie Larvan. Tech genius who’d invented artificial bees that did her bidding. She’d been fired from Mercury Labs back in Central City when her higher-ups discovered that she was weaponizing the bees instead of using them for peaceful purposes.
In her rage, she’d used the bees to kill two of her fellow scientists, Lindsay Kang and Bill Carlisle, and she’d been about to murder the head of Mercury Labs, Tina McGee, when the timely intervention of the Flash and the Atom saved the day.
Was there a lesson in all of it? He figured there was, and it was probably something like, “Don’t tick off the woman who is weaponizing a swarm of robot bees.”
“I thought she was in the hospital,” Joe said. He’d heard that Larvan had ended up in Star City after escaping from jail but that her own bees had turned on her, stinging her into a coma.
“She is,” Lyla said, nodding. “But we had possession of her swarm.” She hesitated. “Keyword being had.”
Joe nodded, catching on. “Got it. Thank you for your help. We’re on it.”
Lyla returned the nod curtly and turned to leave. Before she could walk away, though, Joe called out to her.
“I have to know—what do you have in your pocket?”
Lyla offered him a thin, brittle smile and withdrew her hand. In it, she held a partly used tube of lip balm.
Joe heaved out a breath. “I can’t believe I fell for that.”
“It’s a very strong peppermint flavor, Detective. Don’t discount its power.”
15
Barry allowed Caitlin to give him a medical once-over, but then immediately dashed away from S.T.A.R. Labs, heading for the baseball stadium. It had been something like sixteen hours since he’d fought and defeated Rainbow Raider and the Seven Deadly Tints, but it felt like sixteen years. The world had been turned inside out since then.
Still, his exhaustion and the aches and pains stitched along his hamstrings, quadriceps, and trapezius faded as he stretched into the run. He took a leisurely pace to the stadium, arriving there after a five-second jog.
A series of fireworks exploded overhead just as he arrived. He ran up one of the ramps to the upper decks, emerging into the bowl of the stadium just in time to catch the last of the fireworks. Sure enough, Oliver was standing on the edge of one of the loge tiers, his bow in hand, having just launched a fireworks arrow into the sky.
Now that he had the attention of the stirring, chattering refugees below, he called out, his voice magnified by the stadium’s public address system.
“I know you’re all scared,” he told them. “I know you’re confused and worried. We’re going to help you. You’re safe now. The biggest threat to your safety is you. Please don’t use your superspeed—you could hurt yourself or someone else. We have refugee services coming in to bring you food, water, and blankets. We’ll be figuring out lodging logistics shortly. Thank you.”
“Good job,” Barry said, approaching from behind.
Oliver hopped down from the railing. “I sounded a lot more confident than I felt. Central City isn’t set up for a refugee horde like this.” He considered. “Back when it was Starling City, we had some experience dealing with massive numbers of displaced persons. After the Glades imploded. I’ll have Felicity grab some of the relief plans and shoot them over to your mayor’s office.”
“Thanks, Oliver,” Barry said, his voice suddenly clotted with gratitude. “I don’t know where we’re going to put all these people. Where they’re going to live.”
Oliver seemed puzzled. “Aren’t we going to send them back to Earth 27? After we take down . . .” He hovered one flat hand as high up as he could reach to indicate the towering Anti-Matter Man.
With a tremulous sigh, Barry told him the harsh truth about Earth 27 and its environment. “So they’re here to stay,” he finished. “And we’ll need to find a place for them.”
Oliver grimaced. “Assuming here is still safe. Anti-Matter Man is getting closer to the breach, right? Once he comes through . . .”
“I don’t want to think about it. We’ll find a way to close the breach before then. In the meantime, I’m hoping there’s a specific person among the refugees. I’m gonna go look.”
“I’ll get back to S.T.A.R. Labs and see if I can help.”
Barry let him walk away, then called after him before he got too far. Something was nagging at him, and he had to get it out in the open. “Oliver, would you really risk maiming or killing one of the CSA? Just to get the others to cooperate?”
Green Arrow took a long moment, then threw back his cowl and turned off the gadget that distorted his voice. “That’s the difference between you and me, Barry. I don’t want to kill people. I don’t like doing it. But if it’s necessary, I’ll do it. You . . .”
“I’ll find another way,” Barry said. “Because there’s always another way.”
Oliver shrugged. “If anyone else said that to me, I’d accuse them of sanctimony.”
“But since it is me . . .” Barry said, drawing him out.
“We’re built out of different parts, Barry. That’s all. No good, no bad. No better, no worse. Just different.”
Barry shook his head. “Same parts. Just put together in a different way. Our differences aren’t as fundamental as you want to imagine.”
Oliver gazed at him steadily for a long moment before speaking again. “At the end of the day, you have the luxury of being able to take all the time in the world to make split-second decisions. I don’t.”
It was true. And yet Barry couldn’t help but feel that his way was the right way, the best way. Maybe it wasn’t fair that he had an advantage . . . but unfair didn’t have to mean objectively wrong.
He bade Oliver farewell, then zipped back down the ramps and out onto the field. To his surprise and pleasure, the Earth 27 denizens had taken Oliver’s admonitions to heart. No one was using superspeed, and they all seemed to be settling down as Central City crisis workers wove through them, distributing aid packages of food, bottled water, and blankets.
He threaded his way through the crowd at a speed that usually made him invisible and utterly undetectable to mortal eyes. In this crowd, though, some of the Earth 27 refugees were attuned to the Speed Force just enough that they noticed something among them, twisting and craning their necks as he moved past them. It was an odd feeling, a sudden sense of vulnerability.
Near the third base line, he found the person he was looking for. Sitting on the ground, wrapped in a space blanket, the James Jesse of Earth 27 seemed shell-shocked and bereft. He was the leader of the Earth 27 Resistance, which had spent years fighting against the despotic, murderous reign of Johnny Quick. Once Barry had defeated Quick and imprisoned him, Central City was liberated, and James Jesse had taken on the task of rehabilitating the city and making it thrive again.
Now it was a dead wasteland, stripped of life.
“Hey. James.” He vibrated back into the real world and put a gentle hand on James’s shoulder. It was so odd—the Earth 1 James Jesse was a psychotic killer who called himself the Trickster. Seeing that same face pulled down into an expression of grief and horror shook Barry; his first inclination was to think it was a trap. But he reminded himself: This is James Jesse, but it’s not . . . James Jesse.
James startled and looked up. “Flash? Is that you? But you went away. You . . .”
Barry crouched down. “Yeah, it’s me. You made it to Earth 1.”
With rapid blinks, James tried to process that. “I don’t . . . I don’t understand. Earth 1? I just
ran, like everyone else, from that . . . thing . . .” Shivers wracked his body and he pulled the space blanket tighter around himself.
When Barry had left Earth 27 the previous year, he hadn’t had time to explain the concept of the Multiverse or parallel worlds. Now he gave James a quick primer, forcing himself not to delve into brane theory or quantum strings. Just the facts and nothin’ but, as Joe liked to say.
“So we’re on a world where there are others like us?” James asked. “Except they’re all evil?”
Barry had never thought of it like that before. To him, Earth 27 was the “bad” alternate Earth, where the people he knew as good guys were bad. But to James, Earth 1 was the “bad” alternate Earth. He would get the shock of his life if he ever met the Trickster.
“The details aren’t important,” Barry said. “We need to act fast. I need to know a couple of things. The Crime Syndicate, to start.”
“I saw them coming through. They broke Johnny Quick out of that prison you made for him. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s OK. I’ve already caught four of them, including Quick. They’re locked up. All of them except for Owlman.”
At the name, James’s eyes bugged out. “Oh, no!” he whispered. “Not him! He’s the worst of them all!”
Ultraman had all of Kara’s powers and couldn’t be stopped by kryptonite. Johnny Quick was a superfast murder machine. Superwoman had a lasso that could choke you at a distance. Power Ring could conjure anything from thin air.
“The worst? What can he do? What are his powers?”
Ferociously shaking his head, James raised his voice. “No! You don’t understand. He doesn’t have any powers. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”
Barry cocked his head to one side. “I’m not following you.”
James shed the space blanket and grabbed Barry by both shoulders, pulling him in close, their noses almost touching. His urgency radiated from him. “He’s totally self-made. An inductive genius. Everything he is, he made himself. There’s nothing to take away from him, don’t you get it? He’s the smartest man in my world, and he’s spent his whole life training to be the best there is at everything. He’s the most dangerous person alive.”
Smartest man . . . “Is his name Clifford Devoe?”
James pushed Barry away and spat out a Ha! “Who knows? Who cares? He’s insane and brilliant and you can’t have him running around your world.”
Great. Something else to add to the tote board. “We’ll stop him,” Barry promised. “One more thing: How did you guys create the breach to our world?”
Blank-eyed, James stared at him. “What do you mean?”
Barry ground his teeth. He was sympathetic to James’s trauma, but he needed answers. “The breach. You opened it on your side when Anti-Matter Man came. To escape. We need to close it before Anti-Matter Man comes through.”
James shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We didn’t open it. It just appeared in the city, and we ran through it. No one knows what it is. Or where it came from. We didn’t open it, and we sure don’t know how to close it.”
16
Near the intersection of Kanigher Avenue and Heck Street, the breach made a sound like a sigh, followed by a sound like a transformer exploding.
Its edges rippled.
It grew.
And Anti-Matter Man drew closer.
17
Joe returned to the Bunker, where Wild Dog, Black Canary, and Felicity waited for him.
“Well?” Wild Dog asked in a tone of voice that said he didn’t expect much.
“Bug-Eyed Bandit,” Joe said.
Felicity dropped her teacup, shattering it on the floor. “Oh . . . great,” she fumed.
First things first: Super-people had a nasty habit of defying the laws of nature on a whim. Just because Brie Larvan was in a coma in a Star City hospital didn’t mean that she wasn’t also somehow behind the explosions and the theft of her robot bees from A.R.G.U.S.
At the top of the agenda was Starling General Hospital, which still used the city’s old name. They had to make sure the Bug-Eyed Bandit was actually, truly in a coma and incapable of masterminding this whole thing. Felicity was back in the Bunker, pulling data on the bees. Wild Dog had stayed behind in case an emergency came up and they needed him to roll on trouble.
Which left Joe with Black Canary. It was a little weird for him to sit in the car with Dinah Drake. He knew that she’d been a cop in Central City a while back. They hadn’t known each other, but he’d seen her around the precinct.
Until the day he didn’t. She disappeared. And no one talked about her. It was like she’d never existed.
Joe knew what that meant: undercover work. Deep undercover.
And then one day she was a Star City cop, just like that. Something had gone down. Something bad, he knew. It wasn’t his place to ask about it, but the silence in the car was killing him.
“Robot bees,” Joe muttered to break the quiet. “My life keeps getting scarier and more ridiculous.”
Dinah smiled gently in understanding, but said nothing.
Joe waited a few more moments, then cleared his throat. “So, look, Barry asked me to tag along, but this is your turf. You take the lead; I’ll hang back and back your play.”
To his surprise, she demurred. “You have a ton more experience than I do,” she said without a trace of ego or regret. “I’ll follow your lead.”
He opened his mouth to decline but realized that she wasn’t just acting out of some kind of false humility or reverse psychology. She meant it. A good cop, then. A smart cop.
“It must have been bad,” he said.
Her knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. Joe didn’t know the city, so of course she was driving.
“Pretty bad,” he went on. “Whatever it was that sent you out of Central, here to Star. It must have been pretty bad, is all I’m saying, and I’m sorry you went through whatever it was. The Job . . .”
She relaxed the slightest bit. “The Job is the Job,” she said, finishing his sentence.
“Yeah.”
They pulled up at the hospital just then. She parked the car at the curb, and they went inside, heading for the Coma Care Unit.
The unit was colder than the rest of the hospital. Was that some intentional effect of the heating-and-cooling system, or did it just feel colder because Joe knew who lay in beds behind all those doors flanking the corridor? The lights were dimmer here, too, and the whole place felt funereal.
A young doctor with bags under her bloodshot eyes yawned and didn’t even blink when they asked if Brie Larvan was still in her bed.
“Brie Larvan is always in her bed,” the doctor told them, then led them to a smallish, darkened room. Lit by the phosphor of a brain monitor, Brie Larvan seemed horribly shrunken and withered. Joe knew she’d murdered two people and tried to kill many more, but he couldn’t help experiencing a swell of pity. A life sentence in prison was one thing—a life sentence frozen in your own body was quite another.
“She gets moved twice a day,” the doctor said with another yawn, “like all the patients. To prevent bedsores. But otherwise . . . This is it.” She gestured down the length of Larvan’s body. “What you see is what you get.”
“And she hasn’t left the room?”
The doctor opened her mouth to speak, then sighed and shook her head. Joe felt her resignation come off her in waves. If he weren’t a cop, he was pretty sure she would have snarked something back at him.
Instead, she snatched up a clipboard from the bedside table and waved it at him. “Patient log. We notate every six hours. She’s never left the room. Certainly not under her own power.”
“Does she ever have any visitors?” Joe asked.
“Just one. He never stays very long. Just sits with her. I think he’s family, but we’ve never really talked.”
As Joe skimmed the clipboard, the doctor gestured to the monitor connected to Larvan. “The brain scan shows only limited
activity. She can’t generate the mental focus to sit up in bed, much less get up and walk away. Even if she could summon the willpower to do that—even if she woke up right now—her muscles have atrophied to the point that she’d collapse once she got out of bed.” A pause. “Assuming she could get out of bed in the first place.”
Touching Joe’s hand to indicate that they should leave, Dinah said, “Thanks for your help, Doctor.”
Joe grunted in agreement and handed the clipboard back. But just as he was about to cross the threshold into the hall with Dinah, he stopped and turned back. “Do you record the data from that thing?” He pointed to the monitor, which registered Brie Larvan’s brain activity.
“Of course. It goes to a hard drive.”
Joe whipped out his notebook and flipped through. “Can you check the following dates and times for me?”
The doctor’s eyes widened for the first time, and she seemed to come awake. “Detective, I don’t mind helping the police, but this is getting ghoulish.”
Dinah agreed. “Joe, come on. It’s a dead end.”
Joe shook her off. “It’ll just take a second. Four dates and times. Please, Doctor.” He’d been a cop a long time. He knew when to get tough, when to bully and to bluster. He knew when to turn on the charm, to drop his voice an octave and purr like a kitten. But more importantly, he also knew when to beg. When to let his vulnerability and his need show through. Like now.
It usually worked on doctors. They wanted to help people.
“Doctor, please. We’re in a tight spot and people could get hurt. We don’t want to disturb your patient or cause her distress. I’m just asking you to look in your records and tell me if there was any unusual brain activity on these dates, at these times.” He held out the notebook, where he’d transcribed from Felicity’s notes the dates and times of the three bombings plus the one Barry had foiled, as well as their concomitant break-ins.
The doctor hesitated.
“Please,” Joe said again, infusing the word with all the anxiety and thirst he could muster.