by Barry Lyga
“Herbie?” Cisco said incredulously. “There’s a Love Bug joke in here somewhere, and I can’t believe I’m missing it.”
“I can’t believe Caitlin is on a cute-nickname basis with a sewer-dwelling serial killer,” H.R. said very matter-of-factly.
With a toss of her head, Caitlin sniffed at him. “I haven’t seen him in years. Last I knew, he was still at CCGH. When I moved over to S.T.A.R. Labs, a lot of things changed for me. I lost track of my old friends.”
No one spoke for a moment. They knew that “a lot of things changed” included Caitlin becoming engaged to Ronnie Raymond, who had worked as an engineer at S.T.A.R. Labs. Ronnie had been thought killed in the particle accelerator explosion that had set off a wave of metahumans, but he’d actually ended up merged with a man named Martin Stein to become the hero called Firestorm.
Sadly, Ronnie perished saving Central City from the singularity formed by Team Flash’s first major victory, the defeat of Reverse-Flash. Ronnie died a hero again, and his death weighed on everyone at S.T.A.R. Labs every day, none more so than Caitlin.
“He was a truly brilliant surgeon,” Caitlin said, breaking the silence. “I can’t imagine what would have driven him to . . . this.” She gestured to the screen, where Earthworm glared out at them.
“He was . . . pretty far gone,” Wally said as gently as possible. “Dude sicced a million rats on me, you know?”
“I think you have to prepare yourself for the likelihood that your friend Herbie is gone forever,” Iris said. “Earthworm’s all that’s left.”
Caitlin nodded. “I know.”
Cisco strummed his fingers on his desk for a moment. “Spell his name?” he asked.
Caitlin did so, and Cisco punched it into the computer. A moment later, a photograph of Dr. Herbert Hynde came up on the screen. He was in his late twenties, with a receding hairline, flyaway brown hair, and bags under his eyes. He was the same guy Wally had seen, just not yellow and not as haggard looking.
“This is his ID photo for CCGH,” Cisco said.
“Did someone not tell him it was picture day at school?” Wally joked.
“We worked twenty-hour shifts,” Caitlin told him. “There wasn’t a lot of time to pretty up.”
“Sorry,” Wally mumbled.
“According to the personnel database at CCGH,” Cisco said, scanning the screen before him, “Dr. Hynde was put on suspension about four years ago, then terminated shortly thereafter.”
“Is there a cause listed?” Iris asked.
Cisco shrugged. “A whole lot of legalese and medicalese.” He cocked his head in Caitlin’s direction. “Dr. Snow? Wanna take a crack at it?”
He surrendered his chair to Caitlin, who sat down and scrutinized the text Cisco had pulled from Hynde’s employment file.
“Well,” she said after a few moments, “reading between the lines, it looks like he stopped showing up for work. So they suspended him. Hospitals don’t like firing doctors, if they can avoid it. It makes it look like maybe something untoward was going on and maybe gives people ammunition in lawsuits. But when he didn’t show up after six months, they fired him and revoked his security pass.”
“Wait.” Joe came over to the computer and looked over her shoulder. “He never went back to the hospital? They fired him sight unseen?”
“Yeah. Seems like.”
Joe skimmed the text, too. “Oh, man. Look.” He pointed to the screen.
Caitlin followed his finger and smacked her forehead. “I can’t believe I missed that.”
“Missed what?” Cisco asked, looking as well. “Oh. Oh!”
The last time anyone at the hospital had seen Herbert Hynde was three days after the explosion of the particle accelerator.
“He is a meta!” Cisco breathed.
“Makes sense,” Wally said. “I mean, I’m pretty sure he was actually talking to those rats. And not like we might talk to one. I think they listened to him.”
Iris started ticking things off on her fingers. “So, one: Hynde gets hit by the dark-matter wave and develops superpowers.”
“Creepy, icky superpowers,” H.R. amended.
“Two,” Iris went on, “he spends a few days trying to live his old life, but . . . something happens. Which leads to three: He stops going to work and heads for the sewers.”
“That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense,” Caitlin said. “Herbie was a great doctor and an empathetic one. Not all doctors are so compassionate. If he got superpowers, why would that cause him to go underground?”
“Literally!” H.R. put in.
“Something happened in those few days,” Joe mused aloud. “Something changed him from Dr. Kildare to Dr. Frankenstein.”
“Dr. Kildare?” Cisco asked, baffled.
“Who?” said Iris and Wally at the same time.
“Is he an MD or PhD?” Caitlin wanted to know.
“Is he a villain, like Dr. Kill-Dare?” H.R. asked.
Joe threw his hands up into the air. “Fine! I’m old! Is that what you all wanted to hear?”
Iris and Wally grinned at each other. “It helps.”
“Smart-aleck kids,” Joe grumbled. “Look, he went from good guy to bad guy. There’s got to be a reason. Caitlin, you had gone to S.T.A.R. Labs by then, but he had to have had other friends, right? Someone must have noticed something.”
She closed her eyes tightly. “Nathan Markson. Denise Bernstein. That’s all I’ve got, guys. Like I said before, residency is brutal.”
“We’ll start there,” Joe said. “Iris, you and Cisco take one. Caitlin and I will take the other.”
“Hey! What about me?” Wally demanded.
“And me!” H.R. demanded, a little less angrily.
“Wally, we need to hold you in reserve, in case Earthworm strikes again. Wait here for a signal. And, H.R., someone has to be here when Barry gets back.” Joe looked around the room, settling at last on Iris. “Because he is coming back.”
18
A small round, metallic pad was tucked discreetly between two trees partway into the campus. Don went first: He stepped on the pad, and a holographic user interface immediately fuzzed into existence around him. He gestured at the floating images and then suddenly hovered, rising in the air, disappearing into a gap that opened in the building above him.
“Well, that’s a lot more interesting than a revolving door,” Barry commented.
Dawn gestured for him to stand on the pad. He did so and steeled himself, but nothing happened.
“You need guest access,” Dawn said, and she joined him on the pad. There was just enough room for two. The holograms popped into existence then, a swirling ring of virtual buttons and sliders. Dawn’s fingers poked and prodded at the lights, and then Barry’s stomach dropped as he found himself floating gently up into the air.
The underside of the building irised open, and Barry and Dawn drifted inside. The floor closed under them, and gravity returned, depositing them gently on their feet.
Barry had a million questions. About the holographic computer interface. About the antigravity. About everything. But he kept them to himself. There was no time.
Don was nowhere to be seen. They found him a moment later in what appeared to be a combination office/laboratory, where he waited with an older man with gray hair and a gray handlebar mustache. The older man wore a light purple tunic with a flared collar and a square of white fabric stitched over his chest.
The technology was amazing, but Barry had to admit that thirtieth-century fashion left something to be desired.
There was someone else in the room, he realized—a young man perhaps as old as the twins. A bit portly, he had an unruly thatch of black hair and wore a skintight blue one-piece with white accent bars at the collar, waist, and arms.
“Professor Giffitz,” Don said, “may I introduce—”
“Our visitor from the past,” the older man said. “It’s a pleasure.”
They shook hands. “The twins said you might be ab
le to help me with my costume.”
“Of course, of course,” Giffitz said, nodding vigorously. “I was just in the middle of something. One moment, please.”
He looked over a table and selected a flask, then gestured to the boy in blue. “My assistant,” he told Barry. “Charles Taine.”
So they did have last names in the thirtieth century.
“Call me Chuck,” the boy said amiably.
Giffitz handed the flask to Chuck. “Deliver this new discovery of mine, an instant, super-plastic fluid, to the Science Council, at once!”
“Yes, sir!” Chuck said. “Right away!!”
Once Chuck left, Giffitz leaned back on the table and stroked his jaw. “So, there’s obvious damage to the cowl. I can fix that easily enough.”
“Great.” It was a minor thing, but it would be good to race into action with his costume intact. “I appreciate that a lot. Not to be ungrateful or anything, but what I really need is to get to the sixty-fourth century.”
Giffitz blinked rapidly several times. “Young man, I specialize in hyperelastic materials science, not chronophysics.”
“We’ll be dealing with the time travel stuff,” Don said hurriedly to Barry.
“Don’t worry—we have something in mind,” Dawn added. “We just thought you might want to have your costume fixed first. And, well . . .” She drifted off and looked away, almost embarrassed.
Barry did his best to tamp down his annoyance. The twins were trying to help, in their own way. But their priorities were way out of line.
“And what?” he asked.
“Show him the ring,” Don said.
The ring? Oh, right. Barry slipped off his right glove and held up his hand so that Giffitz could see the lightning insignia ring he wore. “I don’t see what this has to do with anything, though.”
Giffitz nodded thoughtfully, studying the ring. “I think I see what you want. Give me a few moments.” He cleared his throat. “And your costume. I’ll need that, too.”
19
Joe and Caitlin struck out with Denise Bernstein, a former friend of Herbert Hynde’s. She hadn’t seen or heard from Hynde in years, since the time of the particle accelerator explosion.
“Lot of that going around,” Joe had told her.
Now, leaving the woman’s apartment building, they paused on the sidewalk and avoided looking at each other for a moment. Finally, Caitlin turned to Joe.
“So, I’m an amateur at detective work, but my gut feeling is that this isn’t going well.”
Joe pursed his lips, considering. “Nah, it’s not so—OK, yeah, it’s not going well,” he admitted.
Just then, his cell beeped. Joe glanced at the screen. “It’s Wally.” He answered, put the phone to his ear, and listened.
“For real?” he said, his voice rising slightly with excitement. Caitlin clenched and unclenched her fists in anticipation. Joe nodded to her, his eyes alight.
He pocketed the phone. “No time to waste!” he told Caitlin. “Let’s go!”
Iris stared at the phone in her hand. “What’s up, Iris?” Cisco asked.
They had just spent twenty pointless minutes talking to the second of two people Caitlin could remember being friendly with Earthworm back in his pre-meta days. Nathan Markson was a surgeon now and had precisely no information for them.
“We had a rare night off and got drinks together,” the surgeon had said. “That was the day before S.T.A.R. Labs blew up in the town’s face. Saw him around the hospital a couple of times later that week but never had a chance to talk with him. Next thing I knew, management had suspended him for not showing up, and then he just dropped off the grid.”
And now, as they emerged onto the street, Iris was staring at the phone in her hand. A phone that, Cisco realized, wasn’t her own but was, instead, Barry’s.
“News?” he asked.
“Frye,” she said. “It doesn’t look good. His texts are getting more and more cantankerous, and the guy wasn’t particularly sweet to begin with.”
Cisco sighed. The sky was darkening. The day was already fading into night, and the next afternoon was Barry’s disciplinary hearing. So far, Barry had done absolutely nothing to work with his union rep, Darrel Frye, to mount a defense and keep his job. He’d been distracted by Flash-y things, true—Hocus Pocus, Earth 27, the future—but Cisco didn’t think the disciplinary board would take that into account. Because they couldn’t know that police scientist and sworn upholder of the law Barry Allen was also the vigilante the Flash. A lovable and kind and good-hearted vigilante, to be sure, but a vigilante nonetheless.
“This doesn’t look good for Barry’s job,” Iris said in that tone of voice that meant she wanted Cisco to contradict her.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t think of anything to say that was encouraging or uplifting, so he said nothing and felt like a complete heel as Iris did a very good job of not crying. It was an occasion when one good friend would put his arm around another good friend. Cisco was never very good at that sort of thing, but he figured he should start learning now, and just as he lifted his arm, his phone went off.
His arm never did find its way to Iris’s shoulder.
His phone beeped. It was Wally.
“You guys shouldn’t have left H.R. and me home alone,” Wally said when Cisco answered. “We’ve been up to things.”
“Wally, if you touched any of the electronics in Lab 4A, there’s a chance you’re contaminated!” Cisco shouted. “You both need to quarantine yourselves immediately and—”
“Chillax, Cisco! We just did our Herbert Hynde homework. We found his last known address, and when that didn’t pan out, we found out where his stuff is stored.” Wally paused for a dramatic beat. “I gave the address to Dad, too. Wanna see if you guys can beat him there?”
Iris and Cisco beat Joe and Caitlin to the chain-link fence surrounding the storage facility by less than a minute. They were elated at this small victory on a day that was all about defeats, then crushed when Wally waved to them from inside the fence.
“No fair using superspeed!”
“All’s fair in love, war, and tracking bad guys,” Wally said, unlocking the gate from the inside. “C’mon. It’s storage unit 12F.”
As they threaded their way through the maze of low, one-story buildings that made up the storage facility, Wally explained how he’d found Hynde’s belongings: He and H.R. had used the information in the CCGH personnel file to find out where Hynde had been living when he’d gotten his powers. They went to the building, where H.R. used his facial transmogrification device to mimic the appearance of Hynde from his hospital ID badge.
“The landlord was surprised to see him, to say the least,” Wally told them. “He said he’d evicted Hynde years ago for not paying his rent, so we figured we’d hit another dead end. But then we got lucky. Turns out the landlord packed up Hynde’s stuff and stashed it in a storage unit.”
“That’s . . . really nice for a landlord,” Iris commented.
“‘I useta just toss it or sell it off,’” Wally said in an eerily landlord-esque voice. “‘But these days you get lawsuits for everything, so . . .’”
“Let’s hear it for lawyers and a litigious society,” Cisco cracked. “So all of Hynde’s stuff is stored here, and we can plunder it for info.”
“Plunder?” Joe said. “You sound like a pirate.”
“Do not say, ‘Arr, matey’ or anything involving ‘Arrr!’” Caitlin warned, much to Cisco’s chagrin.
“So, anyway, we, uh, redirected some cash from the S.T.A.R. Labs operating budget to the landlord to pay for back rent and fees, and he told us where the stuff is. H.R.’s holding down the fort back at S.T.A.R.”
“Truly, this is the first time in history we’ve used money to fight crime,” Iris marveled.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could just pay off the bad guys?” Caitlin mused aloud.
Cisco opened his mouth to comment, but just then Wally brought them up short. They had
turned down a short alley in the maze of storage units. Before them was a squat, square structure with three corrugated doors set into it. The middle one, in faded blue paint, read 12F.
“Earthworm’s history!” Wally said. “Abracadabra!”
Cisco shivered. “Never, ever say that again, please.”
“Too soon?”
“It will never not be too soon.”
The door was securely padlocked, but the landlord had given them the key. Joe took it and inserted it into the lock. He grimaced as he turned it, slowly. “This thing is almost completely rusted inside. It hasn’t been opened in forever.”
Eventually, he was able to get the padlock open. Together, Joe and Wally managed to heave open the door, which rattled and clanked up into the ceiling with a sprinkling of rust.
They peered within. It was getting dark out, the sun setting, and no light came on in the storage unit. Joe produced a flashlight from his coat pocket and played the beam within the confines of the little room.
It was maybe twenty feet by thirty feet but crammed full of boxes and sheet-covered furniture. Cobwebs filled the spaces between boxes, and everything was coated in a layer of dust so thick that it seemed to be solid. The floor was plain asphalt, continued from the alley they’d entered from, sloping gently toward the center of the room.
There was a light switch mounted on the wall just inside the unit, but when Caitlin flicked it, nothing happened.
“Looks like Hynde’s landlord economized,” Cisco said.
“No heat or A/C for the unit,” Joe commented. “No electricity. Nothing to keep rain from coming in under the door . . .”
“Well, he was just trying to keep from getting sued, not win Landlord of the Year,” said Wally.
Except for Joe, who already had a flashlight, everyone else dug out their cell phones and switched on the lights. The unit lit up a bit, but the haphazard arrangement of furniture and the stacks of boxes threw out scads of shadows in every direction.
“Let’s get our hands dirty,” Joe said, and he stepped inside. The others followed.
There wasn’t much elbow room in the unit. The light spilling in from outside was weak, but at least it supplemented their phones. They huddled together. Cisco sneezed mightily at the profusion of dust.