Wally’s eyes flicked open but he couldn’t see anything
except for black spots flickering in front of his eyes. His memories
started to filter back in as his eyes adjusted to what was before him.
Red coated fingers pushed his weak form from the floor as he looked
about frantically for the others.
“Max? Jay? Jessie? Anyone?” he rasped, pulling himself to
his knees. He jumped, his vision still very blurry, as a hand slapped
itself onto his shoulder.
It was Max.
“Wally...I think something’s terribly, terribly
wrong,” he growled, his voice like gravel.
“Why? What happened? Have you found Jay or Bart?”
“Not Yet. Wally, it’s more about Keystone...and us.”
He said, pulling Wally to his feet. “Have you not noticed
something that should be blaringly obvious at this point?”
“No? Should I?”
“Why, can you still not see very well?” Max asked.
Wally’s eyes widened and he turned. “It’s the Speed Force,
Wally. We’ve been disconnected.”
Jessie rolled onto her back and looked up at the sky. Her hands on her
chest, they reached up only to remove her visor. Jay was gone, Bart was
gone and her Dad had risked his life to make sure that she could save
Wally. Tears flowed down the side of her cheeks and she felt something
even more essential and intricate to her being had been lost.
She felt heavy and slow and weak. The Speed Force was
gone. Rolling onto her front, the ache in her muscles made her gag,
spitting onto the concrete below, before fetching a quick glance over
her shoulder to Max and Wally.
The duo stumbled over to Jessie, Max crouching to his knees and pulling
her into a hug.
“It’ll be all right, Jessie. We’ll fix everything, I
promise you. I promise. We’ll make it alright again.”
“HEY! MAX!” the voice was faint, but unmistakable. It was
Johnny.
“Stay here, Wally, while you recover.” Max moved away with
suprising speed, casting his eyes up at the sky, where the glowing
energy still hung, spitting rain and thunder onto the city below.
“What is it, Johnny?” His costume torn, the high collar a
memory, Max tore his mask off and rubbed a hand over his blood-stained
face. They all looked worse for wear, Max more than anyone as his
features were old and haggard, as though this event had put years onto
his face. Blood pooled and coagulated in his wrinkles.
“Well...look,” Johnny said, gesturing towards the street.
Within the street, people were running around, speeding through the
asphalt, their super speed feet pumelling the concrete to pieces while
other members of the public had fear on their features as they
desperately tried to move above a snails pace. It appeared that
something had gone desperatly wrong.
“What’s happened, Max? Seriously, what the hell has happened.”
Johnny’s shoulders hung loosely as he tried to gain some kind of
scientific vantage point on what had occured.
“I think...well, I’m only guessing, that this is something
to do with the Speed
Force.”
The duo walked in silence, unable to call upon their speed even as
Johnny repeatedly whispered his mantra under his breath. Max put a hand
on his shoulder as they both stopped before an enormous metal block.
“What’s this?”
“Well, if my supposition is correct, I’ve long thought that
other cultures or aliens would use the Speed Force for
something other than we do. In this case, a super speed
Spaceship?” Max shrugged as they tried to walk around the massive
construct.
“A freaking space-ship?” Johnny asked, a smile breaking
over his wet features. The rain continued to pour down, as people
powered past him, moving faster than they should be able to. Max put
his hand against the side.
“Man, first you tell us we're all connected to the Speed Force and
I don't really believe you, and now you're telling me that aliens use
this thing as well? Come on, Max!”
“Please, Johnny, you believe in a God; what honestly makes you
think what I'm saying isn't possible?”
“Why a square?” Johnny asked, scratching his forehead.
“Well, I guess if you’re tapping into the Speed Force then
you don’t need to worry about friction or aerodynamics since
you’ve got yourself an aura, right?”
The hatch dropped open, nearly crushing Johnny, who managed to deftly
leap to the side, landing heavily on his ribs.
“What the hell is
that?” he asked from his position on the ground.
As the two older men looked on, they saw a number of figures stumble
from the burning contents of the ship.
“I have no idea, Johnny,” Max said, kneeling to help his
friend up. “No idea at all.”
Wally was fairly certain that if Kyle was here he’d make a funny
comment. Although they originally rubbed each other off the wrong way,
what with Kyle replacing Wally as the ‘new guy’ in the
League, they ended up being pretty close friends. They faced death with
each other on many occasions and, while Wally had a lot of superheroic
friends, the death of one was always something that hit him deep and
cut him more than any villain could.
He needed a bit of humor now. He looked over at Jessie and offered her
a hand.
“I'm sorry, I don't know what’s going on anymore,” he
offered her, with a cough.
She rolled her eyes and sat up, her eyes glazed over with sadness. She
felt truly empty, as though she was starving for a part of her soul.
“You're not helping, Wally. You never were any help and you never
will be to me. I don't think
you're good enough for this city, even if you've fooled my Dad and
Jay.”
“Jessie, please...give me a ch...”
She held up her hand, lifting herself to her feet and charging forwards
to try and run. She simply fell over at normal speed and landed on her
front.
“It's true, then. That feeling I had was my speed leaving me. I
thought so.”
“Boy, nothing gets past you,” Wally replied sarcastically,
offering her a hand to her feet, a gesture she ignored as she sat up
and undid the headband holding her pony-tail together.
“I need to see what's going on in the city, Jesse. I know you've
lost your speed, but I haven't. I don't think,” He paused for a
moment, trying to feel it out. “I can't feel the Speed Force
anymore but...”
“Just GO!” Jesse growled, getting to her feet and dusting
herself off, examining her bruised and scraped legs.
“Going,” Wally replied as he sped off, leaving a trail of
dust blowing in Jesses face. He shot back towards her, skidding to a
halt and offering her a super-speed wave, before shooting off again.
“Jerk.”
“The Anti-Bow Wave is coming for us.” A response came from
the man opposite Jay, who held his helmet against his chest as he
observed the lapping shores of an ocean of speed. He felt it's pull, as
he had felt the pull of the Speed Force so
long ago. Only this time, he knew that it was artificial.
In the future. Jay knew he was in the future. He'd been shot around
time enough to realize that when things sounded different or they
smelled different, it was probably the future.
He replaced his helmet and took a deep breath, looking at the coming
surge of pure speed-liquid.
“Watch out everyone.” He pushed through the grouping,
flicking the side of his tin hat to produce a resonating pinging sound
to get their attention.
“This looks like a job for the Flash!”
The alien ship, however advanced it was, had not been prepared for an
unannouced departure from the Speed Force. The
aliens inside, humanoid at least, with ten fingers on each hand, and
four legs, almost like a horses body, had been killed, their organs
ruptured from their bodies as they exited super-speed and hit Earth
with all their artificial momentum. Most had burns over their bodies
where friction had seeped through and scorched their frames.
Johnny and Max had opted to leave the area in search of something else.
The others were trying to sort things as best they could. It was manic
in Keystone. Johnny had managed to hotwire a car, lord knows how he
knew how to do that, Max wondered. They’d driven, in full
costume, which was a bit of a departure from the norm, around Keystone.
The bridges were out, so the rivers had created a natural barrier for
the Speed Force.
The power was down in the city and buildings were wrecked. There were
no windows in the city either, as everything had come to a crashing
hault.
The Keystone City Police Department was run ragged.
Max was following something; he wasn’t a trained detective the
way the police were, but he was following something much more integral
to himself. He could feel the reins of the Force all around
him. He’d been attached to it so much longer than Jay, or Wally,
or anyone else. He couldn’t lose it, not when it was such a big
part of himself. He felt sick thinking about it. He wiped the sweat and
blood from his forehead and bent down to follow the scorch marks.
Johnny had headed off in the opposite direction, something to do with a
collapsed building, not exactly a novelty at this point in the storm.
It was close by and he needed to get into it, or to have it inside of
him. He swore under his breath; if Bart could see him now, scrabbling
about in the dirt, on his hands and knees like some drug addict looking
for the last remaining scraps of whatever fix he could get his dirty
and bloody fingers on.
He snorted and tried to clear his head, pinching the bridge of his nose
in thought. If he was an abstract concept based on the human invented
idea of velocity, spatial migration and acceleration in a world where
special reletivity was no longer relevent, where would he be hiding?
Max wiped some sweat and rainwater from his brow and took a deep breath
again. The Speed
Force was here somewhere, wrapped up on itself like a bolus
inside some cosmic throat.
Lifting up a piece of rubble, between the body of a woman crushed in
the collapse of the building and her shopping lay the remains of the Speed Force. A
cone distended and stretched into a flat almost one-dimensional line,
Max knelt down, a smile rippling over his face.
Picking it up in his arms, he held it like a baby, lifting it into the
air to get a better look at it.
“You shouldn't be out in the elements like this,” he said
to the pointed end, holding it against his chest. “Let me look
after you.”
In reaction to Max's words, or through some kind of anthropomorphic
response to what was going on, a glow began to form around the Speed Force
cone. Slowly it began to build in intensity before it finally blinded
Max, who released it from his grip.
Only it didn't fall, it slid into him, impaling him with a mainline
into the understanding of the universe, particularly the understanding
of Speed and Velocity. When Einstein came up with his theories on the
Universe, he completed, which was mathematically perfect if you removed
Acceleration and Gravity.
Acceleration was what the Flashes were about. A Force unknown to
the weak forces of the Universe, like Gravity, something beyond human
understanding until this moment. Until the moment that Max Mercury
BECAME Velocity.
God, thought Wally as he ran
through the streets of Keystone. The
entire city's changed.
It had changed he observed as he ran through the streets, noticing that
there was no glass in the windows or electricity running through the
buildings. These were purly cosmetic effects on the city, of course;
there was something else, something different, burning through the city.
There was only one explaination that Wally could come up with. The
massive energy tunnel, the lightning, people running almost as fast as
him, vibrating through solid objects or moving so slowly it appeared as
though they were living statues to Wally.
The Speed Force has empited itself into Keystone.
As this dawned on Wally, speeding through the streets, he observed the
almost complete split of the City, a vibrational Quarter though it
wasn't a true Quarter, an area where only Speedsters were found and,
just past that, an area where the living statues were. The police
station was right in the center of this area, half the station super
fast, the other, super slow. The officers would have real trouble with
that one.
As Wally continued down, he noticed other people in costumes tear past
him. Crimson masks, Black, Gold, Yellow. All colors tore past him.
Other Flashes...
As he turned his head he noticed he was running next to a man with
floating triangles around his head. The man nodded to him. “Hey,
Wally,” he said before shooting off into the distance.
“Who was...” Wally skidded to a halt, shifting chunks of
asphalt into the air. The city was more open here, an intersection in
roads with levelled buildings everywhere, alien technology mixed into
human buildings. It appeared as though alien buildings had been thrown
into the buildings of Keystone, as well as large ships.
At least Wally thought they were ships. As the other speedsters tore
around him, Wally looked across the street. Ships, buildings, humans
and aliens (there were quite a few aliens, running around in colorful
costumes as well as climbing out of the rubble of the buildings and
their spaceships) all collected and crashed together in the center of
his city.
As Wally looked on, he rubbed the back of his head. This wasn't his
city anymore, this was a city overtaken by Speed. This was
a city that had been home to the Flash Family and was now part of that
legacy. An entire city run on the Speed Force,
undiluted and unfiltered.
“Man, I think Keystone is going to need a new board,” was
all he could muster in the way of humor.
Another reason why he needed Kyle.
“Faah!!” he skidded to a halt, his feet burning with the
friction of finally touching the ground again. He lost his footing in
the rain and hit the ground, rolling. As he rolled a few more feet, he
hit a metal pole and came to a complete halt.
He looked at his burnt feet, red and raw from the friction against the
concrete. He spat blood onto the ground and saw a thousand footprints
run in front of him, as a thousand lives played out across his features.
This was not his first visit to Earth, or to Keystone either; this
wasn't anything close to that. He'd been to Earth so many times on his
travels, even before he was joined to the Speed Force,
ever since he’d crashed through the barriers on his final journey
through this world.
The speed of thought had taken him through barriers that no normal
human could have travelled through. He was the greatest thinker of his
generation, creating things that had been lost for thousands of years,
things that Earth could have used but neglected because the people of
his time thought he was insane, a devil worshipper.
There was no magic involved in being clever.
His final moments were clear, so clear, like crystal glacial water
running across long dry river beds. The light came not from above but
from the inside of his head, washing over every part of his brain as
the logic puzzle became complete within his cerebrum.
He'd died in that moment, but within the picoseconds of that time, he
had reinvented himself, bonded with something that trancended time,
space and reality. He had existed, mentally, as a construct of his own
mental processing within the Speed Force at that exact moment –
the first person to enter the Speed Force
through sheer force of mind, at their exact moment of death.
He became a force of nature that day as lightning exploded the ground
around his body and thunder shook the minds of those who condemed him.
Potentially the smartest Flash there ever was, he looked across his
body at the strange costume he now wore. Not only was his life playing
before him, but every life he had taken since then.
Pulling the black mask from his face, he looked at it and his
reflection in the puddle before him.
He couldn't remember his name, but he knew who he was.
He was the Black Flash.
Just how fast could he go?
As Wally ramped up the speed, he tore through the concrete towards the
bridge to Central City. His feet hit the ground with an ever
increasingly pace, speeding through the new districts created by the
Speedstorm, as rain lashed into his face and lighting and thunder
crashed around his head.
His ears rang with the sounds of above, as another ship crashed into a
building. Wally deviated his path, catching hundreds of pieces of
potentially deadly shrapnel before they impaled anyone, but it was
painfully obvious that he wasn't as fast as he had been. He didn't
manage to catch them all before they even started to move, he couldn't
steal their velocity, and he couldn't prevent the large objects from
falling onto the cars and shop fronts below.
Wally shook his head. He was responsible for this or at least he felt
that way. There must be something more he could do than just play
damage control?
He felt useless. Really useless.
He skidded to a halt at the bottom of the shaking building, watching
the dust spew into the air. Spinning his arms around in circular
motions, he managed to blast the dust backwards, even though the winds
were powerful, pulling the dust in every direction, including the one
Wally was trying to push it, even as the rain emulsified it into a
concrete mixture, seeping and laying a thin layer over cars and victims
alike.
Wally rubbed the bridge of his nose, looking down at his yellow boots,
suddenly finding them to be almost too large for his feet. He steeled
himself, gritting his teeth and turned towards the bridge to Central.
Setting off at speed again, he tore through the streets, towards the
bridge. He skidded to a halt, looking at the twisted metal wreckage
that was the bridge and the constant flashes of lightning that struck
the metal wreckage.
Running out of time...
“Arrrgh!” he pulled his cowl off and threw it on the
ground, balling his fists. How could he get help now?
He tore across the surface of the water, attempting to break through
the low, black, billowy and thick clouds that belched rain in sheets of
horizontal jets, and electrical discharges that exploded and shimmered
across the surface of the river, that had become a torrent of
electrical and raging water.
Wally's feet danced over debris, dead fish and aquatic life (something
that occurred to him would have Aquaman up in arms) and electrical
discharges. As he pulled his arms around himself, he ploughed into the
dark clouds. With a jolt of electrical power, something that Wally had
never felt before, he was thrown through the air and he hit the road,
being thrown across the entire expanse between the river bank clouds
and the destroyed bridge.
Wally blinked a few times and lay on his back, watching the rain fall
from the sky and the clouds roll overhead.
Out of time.
Next Issue: Storm Front Part 3!
More Authors
Notes: So now you see the beginning stages of my Master Plan.
Now Keystone is as important to the Flash Family as the Legacy of the
Flash itself. I thought about this for a long time, after wanting to
contribute something to DC sites (Marvel intimidates me for some
reason). This is my Flash
story. It's a bit long, as with most of the things I do, but I hope
everyone sticks around for the ride and enjoys it as much as I have
coming up with the idea and writing these issues! Hopefully, it will
only get better!
