II Crimsonstreak

by Matt Adams

  So this is what helplessness feels like.

  A crash from above spills a column of light into the Kiltech lab, and a loud thump shakes the floor, knocking Kilgore back down.

  “Are we too late?” a modulated voice asks.

  Iron Comet. The Five.

  “We’re under a minute here,” I tell them.

  Iron Comet sends out blasts of white light that clear the area around us. Steampunk Comet launches into the air, leaving behind a cloud of smoke. Shots hiss all around. Mystic Warren, having apparently exhausted his powers, leans on the shoulder of Dark Comet, who still manages to unload a few smoke grenades in the general direction of some Kiltech soldiers.

  Tour de France Comet settles in beside me and takes a crack at slowing down the machine. “The software is advanced, but I recognize the basic structure.” He makes several precise keystrokes and dodges the blast from a Kiltech rifle without missing a beat. “I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.”

  The display again reads three minutes.

  “I can’t find the killswitch,” he explains, bearing down on the interface. “I’ll keep working on it.”

  Back on his feet and looking pissed, Kilgore stalks toward us, but Jaci swoops in from above to distract him. She darts out of his way before he can clobber her, and Dad steps into his path. Depowered and de-Banded, he’s no match for the Kiltech leader, who delivers a punch that splits Dad’s chin. Colonel Chaos is bleeding—a sight few have ever witnessed. He somehow keeps his balance.

  “Back off, Dad!” I scream. “Get out of his way!”

  If my punch-drunk father hears me, he chooses to ignore it. I swear he’s in slow motion as he pulls back to strike Kilgore’s midsection. To my surprise, the blow staggers the armored figure. Dad doubles over. Kilgore holds a hand over his stomach as he continues to move in my direction. Dad reaches out for him, but he’s too slow.

  “This is in motion and cannot be stopped,” Kilgore bellows over explosions, laser blasts, and bird caws. A blur of white lands next to him—Miss Lightspeed. She knocks the big bad in the jaw, denting his mouthpiece, but he shrugs it off and tries to send her careening across the room. She gains control of her flight powers in mid-flail and manages a gentle landing before returning to the fray.

  I turn toward Tour de France Comet. “How’s it going?”

  Frustrated, he shakes his head.

  Tick, tick, tick…

  Kilgore lands another punch and my mother staggers back. She rallies again, rage in her eyes, as Kilgore draws out his scepter and swings. She snatches it away and snaps it over her knee. With blinding speed, she grabs Kilgore’s mouth guard and rips it off. Almost simultaneously, she hits him again. A squishy sound follows. Kilgore goes down.

  No time to linger on that. Although Tour de France Comet continues to work the controls, I don’t think he’s going to pull it off. The Bluestreak runs faster, picking up even more speed. There’s only one way to save us all.

  “Open it,” I tell Tour de France Comet.

  “You can’t go in there,” he warns. “It’ll kill you.”

  “Just open it.”

  After several electronic beeps, the door to the enclosure opens. With a deep breath, I prepare to go through, but Miss Lightspeed spins me around. Kilgore writhes on the floor, yellow-green blood pouring from his face and chest. More explosions rattle the deck plates.

  “You’re not going in there,” she says.

  “Somebody has to stop this,” I tell her. “It might as well be me.”

  He expression hardens. “Listen to me, you little—” She takes a deep breath, and her face contorts, showing the strain she’s under. “I can’t control this.” She taps her forehead. “Don’t you understand?”

  “We can talk about this when I get back,” I say, trying to step past her. “Now let me through.”

  “Christopher Gregory Fairborne. This isn’t how it ends for you.”

  “I’m not losing you again,” I tell her. “You came back for a reason.”

  The vulnerability in her eyes rips my heart out. “Yes. And this is it.”

  I let her pass, and she steps into the enclosure as the timer ticks down to zero.

  Round and Round She Goes, Where She Stops, No One Knows—But It’s Probably in the Wrong Reality

  Kilgore disappears, then reappears.

  Dad does the same.

  The laboratory bends and warps and reforms as blue and white light erupts from the bubble holding the Bluestreak and Miss Lightspeed.

  The floor is gone, then returns.

  The Bluestreak, his uniform in complete tatters, lands at my feet as he breaks free from the contraption.

  “Karen! Karen!” my father screams.

  I try to yell, but nothing comes out. I am momentarily paralyzed by a thought: it should be me inside that thing. Not my mother—whatever’s she’s become.

  I realize I never gave her much of a chance, not really. I’ve abandoned too many people in recent years while playing hero.

  Running.

  Always running.

  I think of Jaci and all our troubles, then recall the strained relationship I shared with my father. I remember leaving the Crusading Comet at Clermont and ditching DashBoy in Chaopolis.

  No more. Bill and Karen Fairborne saved the world enough. Now—with not just the world but entire universes resting on my shoulders—it’s my turn.

  The seams of the multiverse unravel as the Kiltech machine picks up more and more power. To my left, my father disappears and reappears. One moment he has a goatee, the next moment it’s gone.

  Warren’s armor shifts, sometimes in subtle ways and other times jarringly. For a second, he has long, auburn hair and curves. A second later, no cowl and a crew cut. Various members of the Five, still mopping up Kiltech soldiers, change as well. Dark Comet’s armor turns bright blue; nightsticks replace the shurikens in her hands.

  One moment, the Bluestreak’s lying on the floor. The next, he’s DashBoy, all dressed in red and running in place. After that, questionably-hemmed Richard Simmons shorts and a dark scarlet tank top.

  Through it all, Kilgore remains a big, green, and overwhelmingly ugly lump on the floor.

  He finally struggles to his feet and tries to grab me, but his hands pass right through me.

  Now I get it.

  Not only are the people around me changing places and realities, this time, I’m doing it too.

  My father stands at the enclosure, pounding against the glass while my mother runs in circles. He wears a cape. A bathrobe. A New World Common Wealth uniform.

  “Stop her. Save her!” he yells. Subtle variations mar his features: full beard, Clark Gable mustache, shaved head, Nick Fury eye patch, bionic red Terminator-style eye. In each case I can see the urgency on his face, a wild flicker of raw emotion barely contained within him.

  Not just my father, but all my fathers.

  The love for a woman.

  His love for my mother.

  He shouldn’t have to tell me to stop this. I’m a flippin’ hero. I crash through the glowing bubble, promising myself I’ll catch Miss Lightspeed or die trying.

  She moves so fast that I can’t see her, can’t tell if she’s experiencing the same shifting effects that have overtaken everyone else.

  I blast into Crimsonspeed, taken aback by the difficulty of navigating around the cylinder. Keeping myself from hitting the sides of the enclosure is harder than I expect. High-speed maneuvering is usually elementary for me, but this time it seems exceedingly difficult. After a few failed attempts to keep from hitting the walls, I work into a groove and catch a fleeting stream of light in front of me. Slowly, it begins to coalesce.

  My mother.

  “What are you doing?” The words spill out of my mouth in an ethereal shriek that has more in common with a whale song than actual human speech. I clear my throat, but the sound takes on the same viscous, wavering melody.

  Faster.

  Now, I don’t even see any wall
s. On this higher plane of existence, I urge my feet onward at an even faster pace. The streaming alabaster light darkens and stars appear around me.

  Miss Lightspeed, straight ahead.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. This time, the words normalize. She looks in my direction, hesitates for a millisecond, and keeps going.

  As if she can stay ahead of me for much longer.

  Windows of light open and close as I narrow the gap, and the infinite realities of infinite worlds come to life. We now run shoulder to shoulder.

  “Stop this,” I tell her. “You’re powering this thing.”

  “It’s scrambling every reality, mixing them all up. I have to reverse the process,” she insists.

  “We can sort it all out later,” I respond.

  “No, we can’t,” she says, ducking to avoid a random asteroid.

  Yeah, an asteroid. Really.

  “I’ve seen what you’ve seen,” she reveals, continuing her torrid pace. “These precious little realities, all so alike, yet so different. They’re all starting to converge.”

  More possibilities open up over the horizon and I start to wonder about my sanity and the physics of the whole thing. After all, we’re no longer dodging walls within the bubble enclosure. In fact, we’re not even running on solid ground.

  A portal shimmers into view and I catch a flash of Samson Knight. Surrounded by Bands, he spins his electro-mace in his right hand, throwing it in an arc that clears out only a handful of enemies. Another gateway shows a bronze memorial statue of the Heroic Legion’s leader.

  Is that the future or another reality? I can’t tell.

  “What’s going on here?” I wonder.

  “The machine isn’t just splitting dimensions anymore,” she explains. “It’s splintering time and space as well. If I stop, and you stop, we’ll drive a wedge between spatial dimensions and time from which Earth will never recover. Someone has to keep going.”

  “Then it should be me,” I counter. “I’m faster.”

  “This isn’t about speed. I don’t want to abandon you again, Chris, but I think you realize I’m not who I was. And when I am, I can’t hold onto it. Memories come and go… I can’t remember people’s faces. It’s not the way I want to live.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” I argue, knowing it’s just lip service. When my mother makes a decision, she makes it.

  “You’ll have to bring everyone back together,” she says, looking at something in the distance. “It won’t be easy, but you can pull it together.”

  “Mom… don’t… ”

  “Don’t argue,” she says sternly. “Tell your father I love him. I always will.” With that, she lowers her shoulder into me, gently easing me aside.

  The mighty Miss Lightspeed, my mother, truly herself one last time.

  White light turns to black.

  She whispers, “I am the master of my fate… ”

  “… I am the captain of my soul,” her voice echoes.

  Explosions in the distance snap me out of a trance. I hear the rat-tat-tat of gunfire.

  Those aren’t Kiltech weapons.

  I’m inside, lying down on a… stretcher? Make that a cot.

  Several people crowd around me. I try to single them out, but it’s too dark. Someone turns on a lantern. Light flashes outside.

  Ghostly images float before my eyes, one slight in stature with perfect posture.

  “Morty?”

  “My dear Crimsonstreak,” he says, adjusting his glasses. He’s clean shaven, too. “It seems neither time nor space nor death can keep us apart.”

  This isn’t just a Morty, I realize. This is Morty.

  “How…?”

  “Such questions are for another time,” he says. “We find ourselves in a unique situation.” He offers a hand to help me up.

  “It’s been a ‘unique situation’ all the way around,” I tell him. “An interdimensional battle, a couple of alien forces duking it out. You would’ve loved it.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” he says, leading me toward the edge of a tent. He pulls back the fabric covering the doorway. The sky is pitch black, but bursts of light flicker in the air. “This is something else entirely.”

  Planes zoom overhead. Large ones.

  “So we’re stranded in a World War II picture? Fantastic,” I say. “This is our prize for winning?”

  “Winning is such a… relative term,” Morty offers.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Winning a battle does not always guarantee an end to a war,” he explains. “From what I understand, we did win the last battle. Or rather, your mother did. You ended up here, in this version of reality.”

  Another blast rattles the lantern inside the tent, and unsteady light falls across several other people in the space, including Jaci, Falcon Gray, and the Five.

  “We’re glad to see you,” Morty says. Dark Comet spits on the ground. “Well, most of us. A contemporary of mine called them the Five. They appear to be… echoes of young Master Warren.”

  I exchange handshakes with all the alternate Comets except for Dark Comet because, well, you know. Falcon Gray, wearing an Army helmet and puffing on a cigar, wraps me in an ash-filled birdman hug.

  Morty dusts me off and Jaci hands me a glass of water. I drink greedily. “Jaci, what happened?”

  “You tell me, hotshot. We were in the Kiltechs’ lab, and then you jumped into their machine. A split second later, Mortimer’s a self-appointed Infinite Commendatore and we’re fighting Nazi zombies in Europe. Three months later, you finally show up.”

  “Nazi zombies? Fourth-Reich Rich?”

  Jaci takes the glass away from me. “Yeah. Who else?”

  “He never got that plan to work. That’s why he’s on the supervillian ‘D’ list,” I remind everyone.

  Morty, hands behind his back, stands straighter. “Then we appear to be trapped within the reality where he managed to succeed.”

  I like the fact that he made it singular.

  “The point is, Chris, we have not seen Master Kensington nor Master Warren. Nor your father. And although everyone in this tent tells me that all three were with them before they arrived here, we do not know where they are or if they survived.”

  Everyone looks at me expectantly. Falcon Gray swallows his cigar stub and then appears to choke on it momentarily. “Don’t look at me. I haven’t seen them. I was in the Kiltech lab, then my mother and I were running, and now I’m here. For me, it was bing-bam-boom. You haven’t seen me for three months?”

  “They were the best three months of our lives,” Dark Comet hisses.

  “Calm yourself, Jaclyn,” Mystic Warren says, his moon-and-stars-and-comets getup even more ridiculously out of place here. “At least we have a victory to hang our hats on.”

  “You keep telling yourself that, mage,” Dark Comet growls. “Things are a hundred times worse now than they were before. I wouldn’t call that a victory.”

  “If Miss Lightspeed hadn’t overloaded the Kiltechs’ machine, we would have no reality to go to,” Iron Comet says. “At least Earth survived in some form. That’s enough for me to remain hopeful.”

  “Have you received word from anyone else? Samson Knight? Great Alexander? Exponential? Kilgore? Commander Klem? Anyone?” I ask.

  “I received correspondence from Samson Knight three weeks ago,” Morty informs us. “All it said was that he was alive and that the Orange Bands were trying to find Crimsonstreak. I do not know how he managed to send it.”

  “I do not believe he’s among us,” Steampunk Comet clarifies, jerking his head toward Iron Comet. “We scoured the globe to find any trace of our allies. We could find none.”

  “This town seems to be the only place not overrun by Fourth-Reich Rich’s creatures,” Iron Comet elaborates.

  “This ‘town’ is London!” Morty insists. “Once, long ago, my countrymen and women refused to back down as their city was decimated. We shall do the same.”

  I take a deep
breath. “If we’re getting overrun, let’s get out of here.”

  Morty crosses his arms. Everyone else looks pretty skeptical, too.

  “Hey guys, I’m Crimsonstreak. You want to get out of this reality? I can make a friggin’ interdimensional gateway. It’s old hat by now.”

  Crimsonspeed, go!

  Instead of being halfway across the world, I don’t even get to the edge of the tent. My feet feel stuck in cement.

  Then it hits.

  There is no speed in me to be found. The realization drives me to my knees. Mom could fly. Dad could fly. All I had was speed. I’m Crimsonstreak: the Fastest Man on Earth.

  At least, I was.

  No matter how fast I will my feet to go, I can’t hit Crimsonspeed. Right now, I’m not even sure I could outrace Willie Mays Hayes. Jaci won’t let me sulk about it, but she’s not with me all the time.

  Alone with my thoughts.

  I sit outside our tent, staring again at the black sky. I still haven’t seen sunlight since arriving four days ago. When I asked Morty about it, he told me the sun hasn’t come out in months. The sky is always dark and ominous here.

  What is this place? Where are we? When are we? The questions mount as answers continue to elude us.

  When my father, Warren, and I defeated the High Imperator and his Enforcers outside the Clermont Institution for the Criminally Insane, that meant something. We had a sense of accomplishment. But this? More hollow than Falcon Gray’s bones.

  I went into the Kiltechs’ machine to save my mother, but as usual, she ended up saving the day.

  In my mind, I keep replaying the scene just before she stepped into the bubble enclosure.

  “I’m not losing you again,” I told her. “You came back for a reason.”

  “Yes. And this is it,” she’d said.

  A greater, more capable hero would’ve gone in before his mother could step inside. But who am I kidding? My mother and father would’ve both climbed in to get me out. In that case, the infinite Earths of the universe would’ve collapsed upon themselves, all so Colonel Chaos and Miss Lightspeed could save their boy.