by Barry Lyga
The Tornado Twins screeched to identical halts at his side. “Wow!” Dawn breathed. “You did it! You got him to leave!”
“Casualties?” Barry asked.
“None,” Don told him. “We were fast enough. No one’s hurt.”
Barry nodded. “Good. Look, kids, this has been fun, but it’s time for me to go. No pun intended.”
The Tornado Twins sighed at exactly the same moment for exactly the same length of time. “Yeah, we know,” Dawn said with a note of sad resignation in her voice. “C’mon. We’ll get you to the future.”
21
Wally blinked, then blinked again. His vision was blurry. All he could see was a smear of white.
Or maybe . . .
Am I blind? Is this what it’s like to be blind? I thought it was darkness, but maybe it’s this.
He blinked again, furiously, and his vision cleared. The white smear resolved into a familiar acoustic ceiling. S.T.A.R. Labs. The medical bay.
Sitting up, he experienced a vertiginous moment of nausea and unsteadiness. A hand grabbed him and kept him on an even keel.
“Easy,” Caitlin said. “Easy.”
Wally looked around. Caitlin stood to his right, one hand holding a portable medical scanner, the other helping to keep him upright. Iris sat on the other side of the bed and took his left hand in both of hers.
“If anyone ever doubted Kid Flash was a hero,” she said, “those doubts are cleared away for good.”
“What happened?” he asked. “I just remember the bomb . . .”
“You saved us,” Caitlin said. “You and Cisco, really, but it was your idea and quick thinking.”
Wally almost couldn’t believe it. He’d saved a lot of people since becoming Kid Flash—it was pretty awesome, saving people—but the idea that he had managed to foil a super villain’s plot and save his friends and family? The idea that he’d beaten Earthworm, at least temporarily?
And then it started to come back to him. He remembered seeing the bomb. The timer. Three seconds left. And then two . . .
Two seconds was a ridiculously long time for Kid Flash. But it wasn’t only Kid Flash who was needed for this rescue. Just finding everyone in the darkened tumult of the storage unit would eat up a second, maybe a little more. That didn’t leave enough time to phase everyone through the door and far enough away to be safe.
So Wally burned three-tenths of a second thinking of a better way and realized he would need Cisco. He’d shouted:
“Cisco! You gotta open a breach!”
Now saving everyone was a manageable task. He didn’t need to sweep up Cisco and Joe; he just had to find his sister and Caitlin and get them to Cisco. Hopefully, Cisco had heard him, had understood, and had opened the breach already.
He dashed back along the route he’d taken to the bomb in the first place, now not caring if he jostled things out of position or sent boxes crashing down around one another. This whole place was going to be ash and fire and debris in a few seconds, anyway.
He stepped over, around, and—once or twice—on rats along the way, the furry little knife-toothed beasts frozen in his path. Caitlin and Iris were right in front of him when he emerged from the boxes, standing back-to-back as Joe had taught them to do in crisis situations. Made it tougher for bad guys to sneak up on you.
When the “bad guys” were a billion rats, though, it was less helpful. Wally plucked a rat from Iris’s hair, tossing it over his shoulder. When he turned to watch it spiral off into the darkness, he noticed a burgeoning yellow-gold light behind him.
The bomb had gone off. He figured he had maybe a second and a half before it engulfed the storage unit. Rat patrol would have to wait.
He grabbed Caitlin and Iris by their wrists and ran. It wasn’t the most delicate way to handle things, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
On the ceiling, he could see a flashlight beam, calcified and pinned to the roof. Bullet holes glimmered there, still steaming with impact heat. That was where his father and Cisco had to be. Right under there.
Cisco, if you didn’t open a breach, they’re not gonna be able to peel what’s left of us off a wall.
He raced ahead. Off to his right, the blossom of the explosion was nearly in full flower. Heat and smoke and ash burst forth at him. Tightening his grip on Caitlin and Iris, he ran forward, shouldering aside boxes and crates. Assuming they survived, Caitlin and Iris would probably have serious bruises on their wrists and quite possibly dislocated shoulders, but he figured they’d prefer that to the alternative of being blown to smithereens. His own shoulders were already aching with the strain of dragging two full-grown adults behind him.
Ahead, he saw his dad and Cisco, and right behind them was a beautiful, gorgeous, coruscating whirl of blurry, distorted light. A breach. Cisco had heard.
Wally plowed straight ahead without hesitation. He bodychecked his father, knocking him into Cisco, the two of them tumbling into the breach as Wally, with the last of his strength, swung his arms forward and used his momentum to shove Iris and Caitlin into the breach, as well.
The explosion was all around him now. He heard its heat sizzling the ends of his hair. His back was smoldering. He didn’t think he would make it to the breach himself, but at least he’d saved everyone else . . .
“I made it,” Wally said in wonderment. “We all made it.”
“Thanks to you.” Iris patted him on the arm. “Caitlin says you—”
“Caitlin says you have some minor burns on your back and shoulders,” Caitlin interrupted, “but nothing your speedster metabolism won’t quickly heal.” She dropped the hand holding her medical scanner to her side and smiled broadly at him. “Thanks, Wally. Good job.”
Wally leaned back against his pillow. His satisfaction fled as quickly as he’d gotten everyone out of the storage unit. “Good job? I guess. But we lost all the evidence. If I’d seen the bomb sooner or been just a little bit faster . . .”
Iris chuckled. “Does the guilt complex come with the superspeed, or was it there all along? With you and Barry, I’m never sure.”
“He must have had a motion sensor on the door,” Wally said. “So he’d know if anyone broke into his place. And then he came up through the sewer . . . to make sure we’d never get any clues.”
“Well, he failed at that,” Caitlin told him. At his surprised expression, she crooked a finger at him. “C’mon. As your doctor, I’m pronouncing you in good-enough health to get up and walk to the Cortex.”
22
Barry kept pace with the Tornado Twins as they led the way through the streets of the future version of Central City. Overhead, the sky was going dim and purple, the sun setting somewhere beyond the bulk of the fusion powersphere. As night fell around him, he wondered: Was night falling back in his present Central City, too? How much relative time had passed back at S.T.A.R. Labs?
It didn’t matter, he realized. When he was done with Hocus Pocus, he would just return to the twenty-first century a second or two after he’d left. Still, the falling of night reminded him that time was passing, for him if not for the crew back home. What would be a second to Iris and Cisco and the others was already a few hours to him. He yearned to be done with all this time travel business and get back to what passed for normal.
Don cut left and phased through a wall. Dawn followed, and Barry joined them. He found himself inside a dark alcove with the twins.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Security?” Don asked Dawn.
Dawn shrugged and touched the wall closest to her. A holographic interface lit up there. She tapped a few glowing pads and dragged a slider from one extreme to another. Somewhere outside the alcove, lights came on.
“Uh, guys? Are we doing anything illegal here?” Barry asked. The tech was futuristic, but anyone could tell that Dawn had just disabled some kind of security system. As the Flash, Barry indulged in vigilante justice, which, technically, was against the law, but he’d convinced himself that as long as he
remained within certain parameters, he was doing more good than bad.
Breaking and entering—even in a future long after he would be dead and buried—crossed a line.
“Nah,” Don said. “Our, uh, family contributes here. We’re allowed in when it’s closed.”
Barry thought he was a pretty good judge of character; he didn’t think Don was lying, and so far the twins hadn’t steered him wrong. He left the alcove, peered around a corridor, and turned to his left.
“Nope,” Don said, grabbing him by the elbow. “This way.” He guided Barry to the right.
At the end of the corridor, a door opened at Dawn’s command. Beyond lay an expansive, dimly lit chamber with paths among large floating display cases.
“What is this place?” Barry asked as they wended their way through the chamber.
“It’s sort of a museum,” Dawn said.
That made sense. Everything he saw seemed preserved like an exhibit, right down to floating holographic “plaques” written in a language he couldn’t decipher. The telepathic earplug Dawn had lent him could translate speech but not the written word, apparently.
Some of the items looked familiar, which was weird. There was, for example, a S.T.A.R. Labs baseball cap of all things, perfectly preserved and resting on a cushion in a glass case. Near that, he spied a ragged, yellowed front page of the Central City Picture News, mounted and hovering. He didn’t need to read the plaque for this one. The newspaper was in good old twenty-first-century English and read: WHO IS THE STREAK? One of the very first media mentions of the Flash, before anyone knew who or what he was or what he looked like.
“What kind of museum?” he asked. It seemed specifically geared toward his own time period.
“What we’re looking for is through here,” Dawn said, pointing.
“I want to check out more of this stuff,” Barry told her.
“Aren’t you the one who’s in a hurry to get to the sixty-fourth century?” Don asked.
Good point. Barry turned away from another display—what appeared to be a scale model of S.T.A.R. Labs itself—and followed the twins into another room.
This one was much smaller. And even though he couldn’t read the Interlac holographic signage drifting around, he didn’t need to know the exact words to understand the intent: The signs glowed a red that said Danger! Don’t touch anything!
In the center of the room was a contraption that looked something like a conveyor belt with two sleek, shiny posts jutting up from one side, supporting a slender control panel. The more he stared at it, the more he thought it almost looked like a mutant treadmill, with a wide belt to run on and the controls on the side instead of in front.
Dawn confirmed his suspicions an instant later. She gestured to the device and said, “Ta-da! The Cosmic Treadmill!”
Barry smirked. “That’s the kind of name my buddy Cisco would come up with.”
Don chuckled. “It’s your path straight to the sixty-fourth century. No muss, no fuss.”
“Really?” Barry paced around the Treadmill, occasionally walking through one of the holographic warning signs. “It doesn’t look like much. How does it work?”
Dawn came up beside him. “You set your destination time on the control panel. The Treadmill does all the work of figuring out speed vectors and stuff like that. All you have to do is run, and it takes the energy from your velocity and adjusts your internal vibrations for you. Sends you right to where—”
“When,” Don interrupted.
She stuck her tongue out at her brother. “Fine. Sends you right to when you want to go.”
Barry rocked back on his heels. That sounded a lot easier than the method he’d used to get this far. “So you don’t need to work up to light speed?”
“No need. The Treadmill channels energy straight from the Speed Force for you, modifies your internal vibrations, and automatically cuts the energy feed when you’ve arrived at the right period.”
With a frown, Barry crouched, peering at the running belt. “It sounds too easy. If time travel were this simple, everyone would be doing it.”
“Well, you have to have superspeed in the first place to activate the chronometric circuits,” Dawn told him. “Otherwise, you can run on it forever and get nowhere.”
“Like any normal treadmill,” Don said.
Barry extended his hand and lightly touched the Treadmill. I don’t know what I was expecting. It doesn’t feel like anything special.
“This isn’t the original,” Dawn said with a note of regret. “That one isn’t functional anymore. It’s somewhere in the museum’s warehouse, boxed up with some other stuff.”
“But this is a fully functional re-creation, with shock absorbers forged out of maganium inertron,” Don told him. “It’ll get you to the sixty-fourth century, no problem.”
“And then, to get home, you just relax your internal vibrations and zip! You’re back in the twenty-first century!” Dawn smiled broadly. “Simple!”
With a nod and a small grin, Barry agreed. Yeah, sure. Simple. None of this was simple by any definition, but at least it all seemed possible.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s set the destination time for the sixty-fourth century and see how this puppy works.”
Cisco’s “reverse carbon-dating” idea had pegged the wand as coming from the year 6345, sometime in the middle of that year. The Treadmill’s interface was in Interlac, so Barry had the twins set it for him.
“Hocus Pocus came to my time in late September,” Barry told them, and then gave them the exact date. “Let’s assume that he traveled back from the same date in his own time.”
Dawn agreed. “Most time travelers try to do that. If you leave for the past on, say, December 1, it makes sense to arrive in the past on December 1 in whatever year you’re aiming for. It keeps the numbers even and makes it easier to remember when you left and when you arrived. Unless there’s a specific reason to go to another day.”
“He was just in town to cause havoc,” Barry said. “No reason to aim for a specific day or time. At least, I don’t think so.”
“It should be close enough.” Don started tapping on the control panel. “We’ll add in a few days from his departure to take into account how long he was in the twenty-first century before he escaped from your Pipeline. You should arrive in 6345 the same day he got back.”
“Perfect.” Barry licked his lips as Don stepped back. The twins stood off to one side and watched expectantly. They were so antsy that Barry thought there should be a drumroll as he stepped up onto the Treadmill.
“So, I just run?” he asked.
“Yep.” Dawn clenched her hands together as if praying. Barry hoped it wasn’t for him.
He grabbed the side bar and stretched briefly, then started to run.
The effect of the Treadmill hit him immediately. Unlike speeding around the particle accelerator, drafting off Wally’s speed, the impact was instantaneous and almost effortless. The coruscating, multihued tunnel of the time stream appeared before him instantly. In the next moment, it was all around him; the Tornado Twins and the room at the museum vanished as the colors of time itself spun around him.
He looked down. There was nothing there, but he could swear he still felt the belt of the Treadmill beneath his feet.
Effortlessly, the Flash ran to the future.
The Tornado Twins watched as the Flash vanished before their eyes. For several long, silent seconds, they simply stood there, holding hands, gazing at the spot on the Cosmic Treadmill where Barry Allen had been running mere moments before.
At last, Don spoke: “Huh! It actually worked!”
23
There was a broad scorch mark in the center of the floor in the Cortex at S.T.A.R. Labs. Wally bit his lower lip when he saw it. He’d cut their escape extremely close. So close that some of the explosion’s heat and energy had made it through the breach before it closed. The scorch mark, instead of being a starburst pattern, was only half of a starburst, cut off
by the breach. Somewhere on the other side of the now-gone breach, the other half of the blast pattern would no doubt befuddle arson investigators.
“You!” Cisco hollered, stepping into the room, pointing at Wally. “You ruined my beautiful, pristine floor!”
Joe emerged from a side room. “Settle down, Cisco. If it weren’t for Wally, your floor would be spick-and-span, and your body would be charred pulp spread out over a ten-foot radius in storage unit 12F.”
“Yeah. Like, you’re welcome for saving your life and stuff,” Wally told Cisco.
“Life, schmife.” Cisco produced a plastic-coated rubber band from his pocket and shook his head to toss his hair back and forth. “The explosion singed the ends of my gorgeous locks. I’ve cultivated this waterfall of ebon tresses for years, Kid Flash. Now I have to—ugh!—go pony.” He gathered his long hair in a fist and slipped the rubber band over it. Then he quickly checked his reflection in one of the many window-walls in the Cortex.
“Actually, that looks amazing!” he marveled, stroking the hair at his temples. “I guess when you’re this pretty, there’s not much that can ruin your looks.”
“If we can end the hair-care commercial,” Iris said, “and move on . . .?”
“Was anyone else nearby hurt in the explosion?” Wally asked.
“No, we were the only ones in the danger zone,” Caitlin informed him.
“Central City’s Bravest were on the scene in three minutes,” Joe announced. “Had the fire contained and out within an hour.” He shook his head. “Firefighters are crazy,” he said to no one in particular.
“Caitlin said Earthworm failed at getting rid of all of the clues. What’s up?” Wally asked.
“I’m glad you asked,” Cisco said. “What took you so long? Ta-da!” He swooped his hand down over a nearby desk and came up with a rounded rectangular solid cast in silver. It had ports cut into it. Hard drive, Wally realized. An external hard drive.
“Earthworm’s backup drive,” Cisco announced. “I grabbed it off his sad excuse for a desk right before the fire and the jumpy guy on the ceiling and the”—he shuddered—“rats.”