Keystone City. Today.

They patrol the city, running figure-eights around Keystone, streaks of light against blue cloudless sky.

The sound of two men slapping each other high-five well beyond the speed of sound rolls in with the thunder. They are Wally West. They are ...

	The Fastest Man Alive: "The World of Two Flashes"
Flash #2 - February, Year One	by Bill Kte'pi

It took him three passes around the city to notice her, and when he did he considered ignoring her -- but stopped anyway. "Hey," the Flash said, coming up along Karen Starr, his former Justice League Europe teammate, in the midst of the park. "What's shakin, bacon?"

She leapt nearly a full story -- and that wasn't an exaggeration; with her Superman-like strength, that was nowhere near her limit for a standing high jump. The coffee she'd been carrying would've spilled all over if he hadn't snatched the cup and recollected every drop, lending the drink a fraction of his speed to heat the molecules back up to steaming. "Good Lord, Wally!" she hissed under her breath when she landed, disturbing a group of pigeons and looking around for bystanders. "YOU may not have a secret identity, but I'd just as soon keep mine, thanks."

He grinned. Same old Karen. Same old Power Girl. Maybe not EXACTLY the same -- her demeanor was a little different, and he'd heard through the spandex grapevine that she'd regained her full powers at some point. "No one was looking. I checked. Faster than the eye can follow, remember?"

She grunted, adjusting her clothing and taking a sip of her coffee. "Hot," she said. "Your doing?"

Wally grinned again. "Yep. You're welcome."

"It was iced coffee." She took a seat on a green painted park bench, crossing one leg over the other and smiling at him. Karen's smiles, in the past, had always been code for "fornicate thyself," phrased less delicately.

By the time she had the cup back to her lips, he'd iced it over -- stolen the velocity of the agitated molecules of coffee and partially emulsified milk and dissolved sugar, leaving the concoction cold and frigid. "And so it is again."

She groaned. "Leave it, all right? You're like a kid with a new toy. Where'd you pick up that trick, anyway?"

"Speed Force. Don't you watch television anymore? I'm all about controlling velocity. I've diversified. I'm not the only one with a new passel of powers, though."

"Eh. Old powers back, you mean, in my case -- unless you're talking about Animal Man. Do you talk to Buddy anymore? He's still on my Christmas card list, but I pretty much stopped answering his calls when he got all nutty religious ..."

"Buddy never forgave me for my metabolism. I eat twenty-two cheeseburgers a day. If I had to stick to roughage, I'd deforest the Amazon in a weekend."

She grinned. "Same old Wally."

"Same old Karen. So what're you doing in Keystone, anyway?"

"So where's the rest of you?" Linda asked as she came out to the patio where Wally was grilling up a dozen steaks and a bushel of hamburgers. Most were for him.

"The other me? Patrolling. We're trading off. Actually -- tell you the truth, he's been doing most of the patrolling this week. Seems to like it more."

Linda shook her head, holding her elbows in her hands and shivering. Not entirely because it was cold outside. "So whenever we've been ... together ... it's just been you?"

He looked annoyed for a moment. "It would've been me either way. But yeah, it's been this me."

"Wally ... hon, this is spooky, you know? I mean, do you even have a name for ... him ... yet?"

If Wally were a normal guy, he would've stopped flipping the burgers so that he could look up at her with that serious look on his face. Wally wasn't a normal guy. He looked up at her without stopping his burger-flipping -- she knew that he was returning his attention to the grill in the spaces between seconds, but little enough that she couldn't tell. It was like those "subliminal messages" people said they put in advertising, the ones that went by the screen so fast that your eye couldn't catch the change in the frame. Once in awhile his lips blurred while he talked, or his hair seemed to be in two places at once.

"His name's Wally West, Lin. Just like me. You talk about him ... like he was some kind of creature or something. He's the Flash -- just as much as I am. We don't even know which one of us is the 'original' and which is the 'clone' -- or if that's even how it works."

"All you know is that you were running really fast and when you stopped there were two of you."

"Well, yeah."

"Wally, that's NUTS. What if it's Professor Zoom?"

"Dead."

"Sure, in the future. He's a time traveller! Or it could be the Mirror Master -- c'mon, it's GOT to be the Mirror Master, this is just like him!"

"The other Wally's not a reverse-image of me. We're both right-handed."

"So MM got a new trick! Wally ... I can't believe you're accepting this."

"Look, Superman's been through stranger things. Remember when there were four of him?"

"But that's what I mean -- none of them WERE him! It was just a clone, and Steel, and ... whatever the other two were. What if this is something similar? What if he's an evil doppelganger from a parallel dimension, or your evil twin? Or what if --"

"What if I am?" This time Wally DID give her his full attention; the burgers stopped moving.

She didn't answer for a minute, and then said quietly, "I called Jay and Max. They're going to be here soon. Put on extra burgers."

The look he gave her broke both their hearts.

"Godspeed, brother," Fiona said, smiling at the man who greeted her at the warehouse. He was a few years younger than her, and his head had been shaved until it shined.

"Godspeed, sister." He bowed, pointing that shiny cueball at her, "The Temple has been prepared for you. I have even begun assembling some of the faithful."

"Already?" She raised both eyebrows coolly. That was presumptuous of him.

"Already." He smiled, taking her accusation as skepticism at his success. "This is His home. It was not difficult to find willing believers. Please, come inside. Come see the Temple of Triumphant Velocity."

The "Temple" was, at the moment, little more than an abandoned warehouse which had been spruced up so that the roof no longer leaked, and there was power in one room where a coffee maker and a hotplate had been set up. No lights yet except flashlights and oil lanterns, and no heat. The dwellers inside -- the faithful -- had, by the looks of them, been recruited from soup kitchens, bus stations, and park benches.

A week ago, when she'd arrived in Keystone, she had planned on going directly to Wally West's home, to proclaim her obedience to and worship of Him in His incarnation as the True Flash, the Avatar of Speed. After speaking to some of the people she'd run into at the train station, though -- random flotsam and jetsam, the travellers of the world, the itinerants like herself -- she had seen the error of that. The proclamation of a lone soul? That could not matter to the Flash.

She would build His church. She would proclaim His word. And then -- when they were ready -- she would bring the multitudes to Him.

"Jay!" Linda said, smiling, as she hugged the original Flash.

"Hi there, Linda." Jay returned the smile and the hug, although tension colored his face -- how could it not, considering the reason she'd called him?

"Max!" A hug for Max Mercury, the guy Wally called the "Zen Master of Speed" -- a man who'd been bounced through time by the Speed Force, who knew more about it than anyone living.

"Good to see you again, Linda. Oh ... and I couldn't find a babysitter ..."

Something blurred and zipped around Max, something with wild hair, wild eyes, and enormous shoes. "HI Linda! Where's Wally? Is he grilling? I can smell burgers. Hang on." A burger showed up in his hand and disappeared in his mouth. "Not done yet. Ugh. Unless you like em rare. Really rare. Not-quite-dead rare. Hmm, maybe now." Zip. Another burger. Gone. "Nope. How are you?"

"Hi ... Bart." Impulse -- the 30th century descendent of Barry Allen. Wally's nephew or great-nephew or something. Two years old with the body of a fifteen year-old, raised by a television set. Well, more or less. Before she could think of something to say, something to distract Bart -- and maybe hide her immediate distaste at seeing him -- Wally came charging in.

"Hey! Who took four of my burgers?" Four?! He'd been taking them two at a time, apparently. "Bart! Hey, I didn't know Max was bringing you along, kiddo. You know those burgers weren't done yet, right?"

Bart belched. "Uh, yeah ... And you know, you should mix some onions and chili sauce in with the meat. Max mixes onions and chili sauce in with the meat. It's really good. And sometimes when I make em, I mix the ketchup and mustard and pickles in too, see, that way it's quicker and you don't have to stop to get it ready, especially if you don't want a bun, and -- "

"All right, Bart, all right. Chill, okay? And -- hey!"

"What?"

"You think I didn't see you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Bart..." Wally's voice took on a tone of warning.

"Oh, um."

"You messed with my burgers."

"Nah ..."

"Bart! I'm the FLASH. You can't run faster than I can see you. You just mixed relish in with all the burgers!"

"I was trying to help!"

"I don't LIKE relish!"

Max sighed. "Bart. Go outside and play. Out of sight of the street. The grown-ups need to talk."

"But Max --"

"NOW, Bart."

In a flash which everyone but Linda could probably follow, Bart was gone. Jay coughed, and gestured to the living room. "Linda, do you mind if we sit?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. Jay, Max, please, make yourselves at home. Can I get you a --"

Bottles of grape soda materialized in Max and Jay's hands. "Got it covered, hon," Wally said. Of course he did. And undoubtedly he'd even used his control over velocity to "unshake" the soda inside the bottles, so they wouldn't burst all over everyone after being carried at hyperspeed into the living room. Because he could do that. He was the Grand High Master of Speed, and HE knew just about everything, and HE would never do ANYthing wrong, and --

Splurt.

Purple foam all over Max and Jay.

"Oh geez," Wally said, "I forgot to -- Linda, what's so funny?"

Karen Starr's bedroom was still filled with boxes. She hadn't finished unpacking yet. He'd carried her over and around the boxes, and had even commented on how nice her sheets were. They were just plain cotton, but they were soft, and the particular shade of blue wasn't available most places -- they matched her eyes and the curtains perfectly -- and --

Good God, what was she doing? Why was she LIKE this?

She could hear him in the kitchen. Preparing himself a snack. "I get hungry easily," he said. In the morning she'd send him out to replace the peanut butter he was polishing off, and another gallon of milk.

In the morning.

Oh mighty Poseidon and the cerulean lords of Atlantis ... had she REALLY taken Wally home with her? After all those snarky comments she'd made about "the fastest man alive ..."

"Hey ..." she called out to the kitchen, shifting the sheets to cover herself in case he came back in. "Aren't you ... engaged or something ... ?"

"Oh." He was in the doorway like that, before she finished her sentence. "Well. That's complicated. There's something I should tell you."

Oh no, the speech. He was going to give her the speech. He's married, or engaged, or gay, or becoming a priest. Or he wants to call her Mommy. It was like an episode of Sex in the City.

"I'm not Wally West."

"All right," Jay said, his voice gravelly and rich like an aging movie star. "Let me get this straight. There was just one of you ..."

"Right," Wally said.

"And then there were two of you."

"Yep."

"One of you saved Linda, the other stopped the bad guys. Then you both zoomed off so fast neither of you saw the other one until you got home for dinner."

"Yeah."

"But one of you was late."

"Right. The other one."

"Where is he now?"

"Patrolling."

Jay looked at Linda sympathetically for a moment, then to Max, who shook his head. "I'm sure the Speed Force is involved -- you said you were close to the barrier -- but I'm stumped. I don't know. Are you SURE it's not the Mirror Master?"

"Heis --" Zoom. A whoosh of air went past Linda, and relish appeared on her shirt. "-- en --" The zoom circled the room, eating the unfinished bits of everyone's burgers, dripping a little more relish here and there. "-- berg."

Max's hand shot out, grabbing Bart by the ankle. More relish went flying. She'd have Wally clean up later -- making Bart do it would probably destroy the house. "Slow down, Bart, and swallow your food, and THEN try to talk."

He did. "Heisenberg's theorem. It's one of those uncertainty things. You know. Quantum stuff."

Everyone looked at him blankly, although Wally and Max both seemed to almost know what he was talking about.

"See," Bart said, "Wally, you were making a decision when you split, right? It's like alternate universes. Does a particle bounce to the right or the left? Both. It goes to the right in one universe, and the left in the other. Every time more than one possibility exists for the outcome of an action or a decision, all the possibilities occur in different universes. Rip Hunter wrote a long treatise on how this applies to time travel and alternate histories, or what they used to call counterfactuals. What's relevant here, though, is that Wally didn't enter an alternate universe, and apparently an alternate universe wasn't created -- instead, both possibilities occurred simultaneously, and that simultaneity, that co-incidence to use the term literally, is the heart of the problem. If it's even a problem. I mean, personally, I'd love for there to be two of me. That would rock the hizzouse, you know? One of me could go to school -- the other me -- and this me, I'd just watch television and play video games and fight crime and lead the Justice League and live on the moon and drink milkshakes all day and have all the hamburgers I wanted and --"

Everyone stared at him.

"Bart," Linda said slowly, "Could you try to say something ... more slowly? That came out as a high-pitched whine."

"I clocked him at five-seventeenths of a second," Wally said, "Although I caught most of it. One more time for the slow-timer, Bartman. Normal speed, please."

So he did. Linda wasn't sure she quite got it the second time -- oh, she understood the idea, but things like that happened in the real world? It sounded science-fictiony. But Bart had been raised by an educational computer/entertainment center in a virtual reality environment -- a thousand years from now, quantum physics was part of the core curriculum, like learning about gravity now.

"How do we know that's what happened?" Jay mused.

"A race," Max said, and Wally raised an eyebrow with interest. "A race between the two Wallies -- to see if they're equally fast, and if either of them has lost any speed. If Wally's aura has been split, they should both be at half-speed; if one of them is faster than the other, then they're not true duplicates. If they tie -- then Bart might be right."

"A race," Wally repeated, considering. "Hey, I like it."

***

Next: "The Race"

Express Mail

Letters! We've got letters! We've got stacks and stacks of letters ... letters!

All right, just one letter, from Russ "Green Lantern" Anderson:

Bill,

You mention in the afterword to Flash #1 that you're a big fan of the better parts of Waid's run. I can see that, but I can also see a lot of new Flash writer Geoff Johns in your work--the establishment of Keystone as a character in itself, the feelings toward Wally by some characters as a religious symbol, the re-introduction of old supporting cast. I like Johns' work on the title even better than I liked many of Waid's issues (particularly, as seems to be the case with you, almost everything he wrote on the title post-hiatus), so that observation is intended as a compliment.

The only other work I've read by you is Defenders over on Av2000, and I have to admit that, as much as I like Defenders, I'm enjoying this title a lot more. There's a feeling of focus here that is the vital element missing from Defenders. Other than that, you've carried over the sophisticated storytelling and rhythm of script I dig so much in those pages.

Russ,

You know, it's interesting that you should bring Geoff Johns up, because believe it or not, I've never read his work on the Flash -- I stopped reading Flash around the time of the Cobalt Blue storyline, for various reasons (mostly financial, and the desire to read other comics instead). I really disliked Johns' work on Day of Judgment, so I haven't looked into his other work ... although I do remember reading that he did something with Fiona, and since I read Previews, other ideas may have come in by osmosis.

Either that, or Johns and I liked the same comics and are drawing from them :) Probably a combination of the two -- but thank you, either way!

Bill Kte'pi