by Barry Lyga
“Who uses oral thermometers these days?” Cisco wondered. “Use one of those infrared zappers that you just aim at the forehead—”
“Barry’s unique physiology throws off infrared,” Caitlin reminded him, “giving inaccurate readings. This is much better.” She popped out the thermometer. “Perfectly normal.”
“You sound disappointed,” Barry told her.
“You’d think something would be wrong with you after jaunting across the Multiverse,” she said, scrutinizing the readout from the costume. “What’s the medical expert supposed to do if you can just bounce around reality and still have a perfect ninety-eight-point-six temperature and a BP of one-seventeen over seventy-one?”
“You can step back and let physician become physicist,” said Cisco, brushing her aside. He handed Barry the plastic case he’d brought in with him. “Here. You’ll need this on your trip to the future.”
Barry looked down at the wand tucked into his belt along with the torn-off cowl. “Why? And what about fixing my costume?”
“No time!” Cisco bellowed. “Take this!” He shoved the case at Barry until Barry relented and accepted it.
“If I already have the wand, what do I need this for?”
Cisco opened his mouth to answer, then looked around, embarrassed. “Well,” he said, lowering his voice. “I packed you a lunch.”
Caitlin smirked and stifled a chuckle. Barry stared at the case, then pried it open. Peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat, from the looks of it.
“Lunch,” he said. “Why? Do you think they don’t have food in the sixty-fourth century?”
“Who knows?” Cisco threw his hands into the air in frustration. “I’m trying to think of every angle. Maybe they’ve evolved past the need for physical sustenance. Maybe they just swallow a pill. Whatever you do, if they offer you some Soylent Green, DO NOT EAT IT.”
“Got it.” He wrestled the cowl into place. It didn’t quite fit perfectly, having been torn at the neckline by Johnny Quick, but it would do for now.
“C’mon,” Wally said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Barry hesitated. Iris was on her way. She was on her way right now, and he yearned to see her, but . . .
But he would be right back. In less time than it took to go, he would be back.
He ambled over to the desk that Iris used when she was in the Cortex. A playing card lay there. When he flipped it over, he immediately recognized it as the card he’d received from Madame Xanadu. The one piece of evidence he had that the woman existed at all, that she wasn’t merely a figment of his imagination.
After a moment’s thought, he tucked it into a safe pocket in the tunic of his costume. It wasn’t much, but it was a connection to home right now. And it was pure mystery and maybe even magical. He didn’t believe in magic, but he was willing to accept that it might help him.
“Let’s make this happen,” he said.
8
They returned to the particle accelerator deep under the S.T.A.R. Labs complex. A day ago—or two days; Multiversal travel was messing with his internal clock—Barry had run this circuit wearing the quantum harness and flung himself sidewise along the fourth dimension into the Multiverse and crashed headlong into what he still thought of as Earth 27, home of the evil speedster Johnny Quick but now home of a coterie of benevolent Rogues learning to harness Johnny’s speed for good.
On the night he’d gone into his lab and been struck by lightning and chemicals, he never could have imagined anything remotely like that. Never would have even tried. Yet here he was.
“OK,” Cisco said, “so Wally starts off with a run, then Barry—”
“I get how it works,” Barry said. “Wally picks up speed. I come in behind him and let his wake carry me, boosting me up to his speed without using my own. Then I cut around him—”
“I duck out of the way,” Wally added.
“—and the combined speed of two Flashes sends me into the future.”
If Cisco was hurt at being interrupted, he didn’t let it show. Much. He checked the electronics on Barry’s suit one final time, then secured the wand and the lunch with a new buckle he’d installed on Barry’s left thigh. “Whatever you do, don’t start running until I give you the vibe-push, got it?”
“Got it.”
“Wally. Go.”
The words weren’t even out of Cisco’s mouth, and Wally was gone.
9
Wally’s guilt and shame had superspeed, too. They followed him along the circular track within the particle accelerator.
He didn’t want Barry to know that he’d failed so badly at the one thing Barry had asked him to do: Track down Earthworm. He’d bearded the weird creep in his own den down there in the muck and had nearly become rat chow for his troubles.
Faster and faster he sped around the accelerator. Maybe I can redeem myself. If I can get Earthworm before Barry gets back from the future, then it won’t matter how badly I bungled the job the first time. All that will matter is that I finished the job.
He pushed a little faster, eking out that last drop of speed.
——
Cisco put one hand on Hocus Pocus’s wand and the other on Barry’s shoulder. Through some ineffable and unquantifiable process he couldn’t explain (which drove him crazy), he could feel the different harmonics of the wand and of his friend. He closed his eyes, imagining two pebbles thrown into a still lake, one larger than the other. Two sets of concentric ripples moving at different speeds and with greater or lesser gaps between the wavelets.
In his mind, he forced those ripples to slow down, then to still, to freeze.
That was the easy part. The ripples represented Barry’s frequency and the wand’s. He’d “frozen” them both temporarily. Now to restart them, but with the same gaps and speed and ripples.
He gnashed his teeth and groaned. In his mind, the water started moving again, this time in perfect rhythm, the two splashes moving toward each other at the same time, about to overlap.
“Run,” Cisco said, his voice hoarse. “Run, Barry, run.”
Barry sped into the particle accelerator right behind Wally. It was the strangest feeling; he was going so fast, and yet he was hardly using any of his own energy. Wally’s wake was pulling him along, and all he had to do was move his legs enough to keep from falling.
He felt untethered from reality. His personal vibrational harmony had been reset to match the wand’s. He was in the twenty-first century, but his body yearned to be in the sixty-fourth. Something—the Speed Force, the time stream, the universe itself?—tugged at him, urging him on.
He let himself take another six hundred turns around the accelerator (it only took a couple of seconds), letting Wally’s speed bear him along. Then, just as he and Wally came around a bend, Barry tapped Wally on the shoulder and peeled off to the right.
Kid Flash immediately juked to the left, getting out of Barry’s way. Barry pumped his legs in earnest now, giving it his all. He channeled every last bit of speed in his body, adding it to the incredible momentum he’d already picked up thanks to Wally’s run.
The world went invisible in an instant. Lights exploded all around him. A crack in the wall of reality split open before him, spilling out energy and power and colors no human eye had ever seen.
Without a picosecond of hesitation, Barry ran straight into it.
10
Iris nearly collapsed inside S.T.A.R. Labs, her heels dangling from the nerveless fingers of her left hand. H.R. ran to catch her before she fell, but she waved him off, leaning against the doorjamb.
“Just . . . catching . . . my . . . breath . . .” she said. “Ran here.”
“Sucks to be mortal, doesn’t it?” Caitlin said with real empathy.
Iris nodded, gulped, and waved her shoes. “And I’m giving up on heels. I swear. Look at my hose.” She lifted a foot to show a ragged hole in the heel of her tights. “I go through more pairs of these, running around this city . . .” Limping, she foun
d a chair and dropped into it.
“Dad’s securing what we think is Earthworm’s latest crime scene. I came back here to see Barry.”
“Just missed him!” Cisco announced cheerfully, striding into the Cortex with Wally at his side. “We just shotgunned him five millennia into the future.” He frowned. “Or did we slingshot him?”
“I thought we boomeranged him,” Wally said.
Iris struggled to her feet and stomped over to her brother and Cisco with as much outrage as her poor, battered soles could sustain.
“Are you crazy?” she demanded. “We almost lost him on Earth 27 already, and now you just let him run off to the future? Have you lost your minds?”
Cisco held his hands up defensively. “Hey, he’s the Flash. It’ll be fine. He’ll be back in a second.”
Iris planted her fists on her hips. “One,” she intoned.
Cisco looked around and chuckled. “So, call it two seconds, then.”
Still nothing. Iris’s neck muscles vibrated in sheer rage. Cisco backed up. Wally took a few steps to the left, trying very hard to blend in with a wall.
“Give it a few seconds. There’s, uh, always the possibility of relativistic noise perturbing the fourth-dimensional medium due to mismatched quark flavors.”
“You just made that up.”
“I might have. You can’t prove it.”
They waited.
Five minutes passed.
Nothing.
An hour passed.
Nothing.
11
“Now what?” Iris asked.
Cisco pursed his lips. “It’s said that a good scientist is not afraid to say I don’t know.”
“And?”
“And I guess I’m a good scientist.”
12
Barry was awash in color, bright pastel ribbons banding around him, as though he were dashing through a warped tunnel lit by a cult of neon worshippers. The hues repeated at predictable intervals: bright reds, then glowing orange, followed by shimmering green and pure blue and sultry indigo and vibrant violet, then back to red. He imagined there were numbers—dates—inscribed on the bands of color, that he could read the years whipping by as he put one foot in front of the other.
2034
2098
2173
2287
2300
He didn’t know what he was running on. What surface could there possibly be in the interstitial instants between instants themselves? The mere ideas of “surface” and of “running” had become metaphors; he was part of the quantum foam of the universe, using his personal vibrational harmonics to retune the universe around him into a new chord on the scale of reality.
The colors washed over him.
2319
2399
Years fell to his footsteps. Decades crunched underfoot.
2421
The twenty-fifth century. Birth time of Eobard Thawne. Barry was winded and not even half a millennium into the future. His lungs burned with whatever pretended to be air here in the time stream. Sweat ran down his forehead and cheeks, wicking away and sizzling in the impossible heat of time travel.
2501
2527
2540
He was definitely slowing down. Missing a step here and there. With a groan and a clench of his jaw, he pushed forward. Hocus Pocus had ordered him to kill an entire baseball stadium of innocent people! Only luck, quick thinking, and slow movement had saved the day and stayed his hand.
Slow movement . . . His hand drifted to the pocket where he held Madame Xanadu’s card. No time for slowing down. No time for anything but running faster, farther, harder. He had to reach the sixty-fourth century. He had to learn the secrets of Hocus Pocus and make sure that that lunatic could never again threaten Central City.
2600
2610
2615
Barry cried out loud and forced himself forward, one foot in front of the other.
Just one foot in front of the other, Joe had said. A long time ago. Barry was starting to hear Joe’s voice now, and he wondered—was he merely remembering this, or by running pell-mell through the time stream, was he somehow reliving it?
“You’ve got to beat the ball to first base!” Joe told Barry, who crouched in the dirt of the Little League field. Barry held up a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. Out there on the mound, the pitcher would soon go into his windup. Barry wasn’t afraid of the pitcher. He had a good eye, and he could get the bat on the ball pretty well.
But he never made it to first base.
“You know how I always tell you to keep your eye on the ball?” Joe said. “Well, as soon as you feel that bat go shaky in your hands, as soon as you feel the impact, you forget all about keeping your eye on the ball. All that matters at that point is where you go. And how fast.”
“I’m not fast enough,” young Barry said, and in the time stream, the same words formed on his lips. Exhaustion was setting in. His legs felt as though someone had pumped liquid lead into their veins. The pain was excruciating and never-ending.
“You are fast enough,” Joe told him. “You do it the same way everyone else does. One foot in front of the other. Forget the ball. Put your head down, and charge right up that baseline. One foot in front of the other. You get me?”
The thin crowd of parents and siblings was starting to get restless. Joe had called a time-out to buck up Barry at the plate. The umpire cleared his throat meaningfully.
Joe grinned and did that deep throat chuckle that Barry always associated with dumb jokes, old shows on TV, and ridiculous comments from Joe’s CCPD partner. “You got this, son,” he whispered, then straightened Barry’s ball cap and stepped back.
“Game on!” the ump shouted.
“Game on,” Barry whispered in the time stream.
2662
2670
Pumping legs. They were nerveless now, just wooden appendages dangling from his hips. He forced them to bend and flex through sheer willpower.
And somewhere/when in the past, somewhere/when in the eternal now, young Barry Allen swung the bat. The crowd’s breath sucked in as one with the resounding thwack of the bat striking the ball. Not far enough for a home run or even a double. Not for Slowpoke Allen. But a single, surely. A base hit, right?
He threw the bat aside and ran, charging up the baseline, head down. The baseline blurred beneath him, and he imagined it had somehow become a rainbow of colors.
Barry focused on his feet. One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. That’s all it was. It was nothing complicated. It wasn’t math or science or even lying awake at night, trying not to think of his father, locked away in Iron Heights for a crime he didn’t commit.
He thought only of his feet.
2700
2743
2758
Forward.
Faster.
One foot in front of the other.
In the time stream, he was done, he knew. He’d gone as far as he could go, as fast as he could go. But back in the past, back in his personal history, he knew he had fewer than sixty feet from home plate to first base, and he was going to make it. This time, he wouldn’t let Joe down, wouldn’t let the team down, wouldn’t let himself down.
“I’m gonna make it, Joe,” he heaved into the soundless, airless void of the time stream. “If it kills me, I’m gonna make it.”
The next thing he knew, he had collided—hard—with the first baseman, plowing through him, knocking the other kid over. He thought his numb legs felt something different, something not-dirt, send a shock up his bones, but then he heard the first-base ump shout, “Safe!” and he kept running, pumping his arms, his breath hot and raw, kept running, kept running into the outfield, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, until at last he could run no more and he collapsed in a dark, senseless heap.
Barry opened his eyes. Every part of his body hurt. Two blurry figures loomed over him. For an instant, he thought they
were his team’s first-base coach and Joe. Then one of them spoke:
“Whoa! Did you see that? What a wipe-out!”
13
Wally sidled over to Iris subtly, just in case he had to stop her from murdering Cisco with her bare hands. Cisco had superpowers, but Iris had angry on her side. It was a toss-up, but he would give the edge to Iris. And he liked Cisco; he really didn’t want to see the guy die.
“I can’t believe this!” Iris ranted, fists clenched at her sides. “We literally just got him back—due to absolutely nothing any of us did, by the way—and now you’ve lost him again? You’re telling me there’s nothing we can do?”
“It’s time travel!” Cisco pleaded, hands up in defense. “Come on, Iris! It’s not like there’s a copy of Time Travel for Dummies we can consult.” Cisco suddenly got that faraway look in his eyes that meant either a vibe or an idea.
“Time Travel for Dummies,” he murmured. “I bet I’d make a mint.”
Iris growled and flung out a hand. She picked up H.R.’s coffee mug from a nearby desk and hurled it at Cisco, who ducked, yelping. H.R. yelped, too, even more loudly. “My Moroccan blend!” he shrieked. “My Moroccan blend!” He rushed to where the mug had shattered against a wall, a dripping brown stain marring the pristine S.T.A.R. Labs paint job.
“Sweet, bitter baby,” he moaned. “Daddy’s gonna miss you. For the six to ten minutes it takes to brew a new cup.”
Meanwhile, Iris had stalked to Cisco, backing him up against a wall. “I get it, Cisco. We do super-things here. We do mad science. But when did common sense and responsibility get thrown out the window?”
“Barry wanted to go . . .” Cisco said, shrinking back farther.
“And if Barry wanted to jump off the Novick Bridge, would you give him a shove?”
Wally put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, Iris, calm—”
She spun around and slapped his hand away. “Don’t you dare ‘Hey, Iris’ me, Wallace West! You helped shoot Barry into the future. I’m not exactly thrilled with you, either.”