by Barry Lyga
“We’re not gonna be able to find anything in here,” he complained.
“Hang on,” Wally said. “Look.”
There was a little open space between two piles of boxes. He was the smallest, so he squeezed through it, the towers on either side of him swaying dangerously.
“Don’t knock anything over!” Joe warned him.
“I’m Kid Flash! I’ll be fine!”
“I’m worried about evidence.”
“Your concern is touching, Dad,” Wally called back, his voice fading as he moved farther into the forest of boxes.
Joe snorted and nudged aside a box, peering deeper into the storage unit. “I think I see something up ahead.”
With Cisco, he pressed farther in. The floor sloped a bit more here; Joe played his light down at his feet and saw a grate set into the floor. Cheap storage unit. Rather than have waterproofing around the doors, just put in a sewer drain and let the water run on in and then run on down and out.
Meanwhile, Iris and Caitlin had stripped a sheet away from a large lump off to the left of the door. It turned out to be a gray-green futon that had seen better days. They both pinched their noses at the mildew odor that erupted from it and looked at each other.
“Definitely a boy’s furniture,” Caitlin said.
“You should have seen the easy chair I made Barry throw out,” Iris said. “Ugh.”
At the same time, Wally was prowling through a stack of plastic tubs stacked high atop one another. They were barely translucent, and he could just make out endless piles of books within.
“Anyone find anything?” he called out. A chorus of “No!” came back to him from various points in the storage unit, so he kept pawing around.
Meanwhile, Joe and Cisco pushed aside a set of cheap, stacked dining room chairs and found a smallish pressboard desk. Desk was actually a strong word—it had four legs and a warped surface atop them, along with a busted drawer that hung partly out of its socket. It resembled a desk, but calling it one was being charitable.
On the rickety top was an older-model laptop trailing a power cable. Connected to the laptop was a small external hard drive.
“Wait a sec.” Joe stopped Cisco from moving forward. “This doesn’t make any sense. Why pack up everything else, but just chuck the guy’s computer onto a piece of furniture and leave it here?”
Cisco shrugged off Joe’s hand and advanced. “Who cares?” He lifted the laptop and was surprised when the screen lit up right away. He followed the cable with his eyes: It snaked to the floor, then up the wall and into the ceiling.
“Oho! I see!” Cisco pointed up. “This is why the overhead light didn’t work. Someone spliced into the wiring and rerouted it to the computer.”
Joe grabbed Cisco by his elbow and pulled him back. “Don’t be an idiot, Cisco! You know what this means! Someone’s been in here. Someone’s using this stuff.”
Even as he said it, Joe’s spine crawled with cold tentacles. He remembered the sewer drain set into the middle of the sloping floor. “Oh, no . . .” he said.
Suddenly, there was a creak and a rattle from overhead. The door! It was moving!
Before anyone could react, the door slammed shut, trapping them inside the storage unit.
The little room was utterly dark, save for the spots of illumination from cell phones and Joe’s flashlight. It wasn’t much darker than it had been before, but the closing of the door made it feel so.
“There’s someone in here!” Caitlin shouted from close to the entrance. She and Iris immediately stood back-to-back.
“Ya think?” Cisco cried.
“Guys, chill!” Wally called from somewhere else. “Don’t panic!”
“Who’s panicking?” Cisco demanded, panicked.
“Wait!” Joe this time. “Hear that?”
“Hear what?” Iris asked, her back pressed to Caitlin’s.
They all fell silent for a moment. From somewhere distant came the sound of . . . chittering. And the minute click of paws on asphalt.
“Oh, no!” Wally yelled. “Not again!”
Cisco felt something brush against his leg. He jerked back instinctively and shrieked in a high falsetto when he looked down to see an enormous rat running past him.
“OH MY GOD!” he screamed.
Joe spun around, his pistol drawn and elevated. “Everyone go quiet!” he commanded. “Keep your lights on!”
Caitlin stomped down with her heel as hard as she could and felt a sickening crunch beneath her foot. She swallowed hard, stifling the urge to vomit. Behind her, Iris sucked in her breath and then did the same, crushing another rat with her foot.
“It’s crawling up my leg!” Cisco howled in the darkness.
“Look up!” Wally yelled. “Look up!”
Iris wanted to look down because the idea of a rat getting close enough to climb up her leg had her heart pumping like a firefighter in front of a ten-alarm blaze. But if Wally was saying, Look up . . .
She aimed her phone up. There, on the ceiling, she caught a glimpse of something yellow, trailing bedraggled, threadbare black cloth.
Earthworm! Oh my God, it’s him! Right here!
“Holy—!” Caitlin gasped, and Iris knew she’d seen him, too.
“He’s gone!” Iris exclaimed. “So fast—!”
And then she jerked her leg back and kicked, connecting solidly with another rat.
Wally winced as gunshots echoed loudly in the confines of the storage space. His dad was trying to shoot down Earthworm, which Wally knew was pointless. The villain moved like a shadow, like oil on water. A gun in the dark was no good against him. From bitter experience, Wally knew that they’d have to think their way around Hynde.
“Stop shooting!” he yelled, but he could barely hear himself over the din of the gunshots echoing in the confined space. He put his hands over his ears, trying to block out the noise and the knowledge that the rats would soon be on him, trying to think . . .
And that’s when he saw . . .
Joe emptied his clip at the ceiling and received only a ringing in his ears, a patchy drift of gun smoke, and the smell of cordite in return. If he’d hit anything other than the joists overhead, he’d be amazed.
He and Cisco had backed up to a wall. Cisco had recovered enough from his initial shock to use his vibe powers to keep the rats away, but he was still new to the powers, and it wasn’t something he could keep up forever.
Fumbling to slide a fresh clip into his gun, Joe tried to force himself not to think of Iris, not far from him but far enough, with a legion of rats sinking their teeth into her ankles, crawling through her hair . . .
Sweat dripped down Cisco’s forehead and into his eyes, but he didn’t dare blink to clear them. He was trying something different: Instead of focusing his vibe energy in a single, intense, instantaneous blast, he was letting it flow out of him in a slow, continuous flux, fanning it out into an arc. It had less potency along its length but had greater overall area, holding off more rats at once.
He couldn’t keep it up forever, though. No one could. Someone had to do something. Fast.
Overhead, there was a hiss. Cisco didn’t dare look up, but he heard Joe suck in his breath in shock, then raise his gun again. Cisco braced himself for the pounding of the gunshots against his ears.
“Upworlders,” a voice hissed. “Soon to be no more. Good-bye . . .”
Joe fired ten rapid shots. Cisco momentarily lost control of his vibe, and a rat slipped through. He shook it off his leg and refocused on the vibe.
Wally blinked. Unlike Barry, he wasn’t an expert in munitions and explosives, but he was pretty sure he knew a bomb when one was right in front of him.
Like, say, right now.
Sitting on a slightly tilted crate before him was a block of grayish putty that he was sure was C-4 explosive compound. At some point in the past, Barry had told him that C-4 was a combination of explosive, plasticizer, rubber, and mineral oil, and also that it was completely stable by it
self—you needed a shock-wave detonation to set it off.
There was a black stick poking out of the C-4, which Wally was pretty sure was the detonator. And a set of twisting wires going from the detonator to the faceplate of a digital clock, which was counting down from—three seconds.
Well, make that two seconds now.
“Cisco!” Wally screamed at the top of his lungs. “You gotta—”
A moment later, the bomb went off, and the storage unit erupted, filling with fire and light and the thunderous crashing sound of an explosion.
20
Barry spent an impatient fifteen minutes waiting in Giffitz’s office with the Tornado Twins as Giffitz puttered around behind some sort of nearly opaque force field, occasionally chuckling to himself in satisfaction. Don had scrounged for Barry what was apparently the thirtieth-century equivalent of a lab coat from a locker; it was bright blue, nearly skintight, and had a flaring collar and enormous epaulets. It felt ridiculous, but he reminded himself: When in Rome . . . or in the future . . .
Maybe this is why Eobard Thawne went nuts, he thought. Having to wear crazy futuristic clothes.
The twins made excited conversation with him while they waited, asking questions about his twenty-first century life and especially about his relationship with Iris. It was just starting to get uncomfortably personal when Giffitz emerged from his work space with the costume. It was all in one piece again and looked shiny and new. It was also a much brighter shade of red and somewhat less bulky.
“Thanks,” Barry said, taking it. “Now we—”
“Wait, wait.” Giffitz shook a finger in a hang on gesture. “Your ring. Open it.”
Barry shrugged and twisted open the top of the lightning ring. In less than the blink of an eye and with a soft ssssssh sound the costume in his hands vanished, shrinking and suddenly being sucked right into the ring.
“Wow!” Despite himself and despite the urgency of his situation, Barry couldn’t help but be impressed. “How did you do that?”
Giffitz shrugged. “Your ring is a standard model collapsing storage system. Invented about five hundred years ago and based on some ancient Palmertech. Very old, very reliable, and stable technology. All I did was treat your costume to be compatible with it.”
Barry stared down at the ring, which had closed itself automatically once the costume was inside. The scientist in him had to know: “How does it work?”
“The material of your costume has been impregnated with a chemical that reacts to nitrogen; hence, the change in color. In the absence of nitrogen, the molecules of the costume contract, shrinking down so that it will fit in the ring. The ring itself strips away nitrogen when it’s empty.”
Barry nodded. He got it. Nitrogen was common in the atmosphere. In fact, most people thought of oxygen when they thought of the air they breathed, but nitrogen made up almost eighty percent of the earth’s atmosphere. Oxygen was only about twenty percent.
“When I open the ring with the costume in it,” Barry said, “the presence of nitrogen causes the costume to expand. When I open it empty, it sucks the nitrogen out of the costume, shrinking it.” He stared down at the ring admiringly. “Awesome.”
Giffitz harrumphed. “Hardly, young man. Extremely basic and—as I said before—old-fashioned technology. A child could do it.”
Barry opened his mouth to tell Giffitz that maybe the man needed to consider someone else’s perspective, but at that moment, the building shook, then kept on shaking, as though something enormous were pounding it.
Earthquake! was Barry’s first thought, but then he remembered: The entire building was suspended in midair. A massive earthquake could rip a fault line open right below them, and the building wouldn’t budge an inch.
Giffitz staggered with the ongoing tremors, stumbling across the room as a floating desk bounced off a wall and careened toward him. Barry zipped over at superspeed and pulled Giffitz out of harm’s way.
“What’s going on?” he shouted.
Dawn rushed to a wall. Where she touched it, it went transparent, revealing the sprawl of buildings outside. Now he understood why there were no windows. The buildings were all fabricated from some kind of polarized substance or alloy. There could be a window wherever you wanted or needed one.
“What’s going on here?” Barry asked her. “Did something hit us? Is the building stable?”
Dawn squinted, peering out onto the campus.
“Oh,” she said after a moment. “It looks like we’re under attack by space pirates.”
There was a protracted moment of silence, during which the building shook again. “Space pirates?” Barry said at last.
“It happens a lot these days,” Dawn admitted. “No one’s really sure why.”
The building shook again.
“We have to hold tight until the Science Police get here,” Don said. “They have to scramble from the Weisinger Plaza precinct. Should only take them about five minutes to get here.”
Barry stared through the “window.” Hovering over the city’s fusion powersphere was a large vessel that looked something like a submarine with gigantic fins. As he watched, bolts of sizzling blue energy shot out of the vessel and slammed into buildings and the ground. Everything shook.
“ATTENTION, EARTH IDIOTS!” a voice rang out. “I AM ROXXAS, AND YOU ARE NOW MY PRISONERS!”
“Roxxas!” Don whistled. “Last I heard, he was headed for Trom. Wonder what brought him back to Earth.”
Dawn considered. “I heard the Brande gate near Alpha Centauri is glitchy. Maybe he decided to stick around here.”
“Guys!” Barry snapped his fingers to get their attention. “Focus, please. People could be getting hurt down there, and you said it’ll take the cops at least five minutes to get here.”
Don and Dawn exchanged a twin-look, then looked at him. “What can we do? We can’t fly up there and stop his ship from attacking.”
Barry fumed. He turned back to the window, scanning the situation. In an instant, the solution occurred to him. But he couldn’t do it alone.
“C’mon,” he told the Tornado Twins. “I’m deputizing you into the superhero club.”
The three of them abandoned the university building and hit the ground running. Literally.
Barry had given the twins their marching—well, running—orders: Protect civilians. Scour the area at Superspeed and help anyone in trouble. Don and Dawn had rushed off, both of them flushed with excitement and a little bit of fear.
Before they left, though, they asked him: “What about Roxxas?”
“I’ll handle Roxxas,” Barry said confidently, and he ran off to do just that.
The twins had told him that it was illegal to run on top of the fusion powersphere. Barry had great respect for the law, but these were extreme circumstances. He ran around the powersphere a couple of times to build up momentum, then ran up its slope.
It was sort of slippery, and his feet seemed to crackle where they touched the surface. He knew that fusion power was safe, but it still unnerved him. He hoped he wasn’t doing any damage to himself by getting so close.
Oh, well. No one could live forever, right?
He ran up the powersphere until he was at its top, where he ran around and around in a circle until he’d built up the appropriate amount of speed. And then . . .
He flung himself headlong into the sky, right at Roxxas’s spaceship. The thing had looked pretty small from the ground, but now that he got closer, it was massive. One of those blue bolts of energy crisped the air nearby, its heat and force nearly throwing Barry off course.
At the last possible second, he vibrated his molecules, slipping through the molecular structure of the ship and emerging inside. A group of motley-looking aliens and humans gasped in surprise. They all reached for weapons, but they stood no chance. The Flash disarmed them all in less than a second and knocked them out cold.
Except for one.
“Where’s Roxxas?” Barry demanded. The only conscious pi
rate was a blue-skinned guy who looked to be in his late teens. All his bluster and bravado had vanished along with the weird futuristic gun Barry had snatched from him at superspeed.
“Through there!” the guy cried, pointing to what Barry imagined was a door. “On the bridge!”
Barry shook the pirate into unconsciousness and vibrated through the door. No time to figure out how to open it.
On the other side was a little less Starship Enterprise than he’d expected. The bridge was cramped and dirty, with just enough room for a large command chair and two support stations. Barry took out the aliens at the support stations first, then spun around to confront Roxxas himself.
Like the rest of the thirtieth century, he was a fashion disaster: skintight gray pants, blue boots that came to the knee and flared, a black shirt that was open all the way down to his navel. He had a wickedly sharp mustache and a pointy little goatee, both of which reminded Barry—with a shiver—of Hocus Pocus.
“Your pirating days are over,” Barry told him.
Roxxas looked him up and down. “Who in the Nebula do you think you—”
He never finished the sentence. Barry yanked him out of his control chair and threw him to the floor. “I don’t have time to figure out your controls. Set a course off this planet, and don’t come back, got it?”
Roxxas snarled and reached for a weapon clipped to his belt, but by the time his hand got there, the weapon was gone. Barry juggled it for the pirate’s benefit, enjoying the look of shock on the man’s face.
“I . . . think I’ll go elsewhere,” Roxxas said with a gulp.
“Good call. Earth’s off-limits. Got it?”
“Got it.”
As the pirate scrambled back to his control chair, Barry vibrated through the deck of the ship, then went into free fall above the city. He had planned well, though: He dropped right back onto the apex of the fusion powersphere and ran down its curvature to the ground.
Looking up, he shaded his eyes against the setting sun and watched as Roxxas’s ship turned and blasted off over the horizon and into outer space.