Who: The Flash and Kid Flash Where: New York City When: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 [backdated, slightly] What: The two speedsters run into trouble, quite literally. Rating: R for violence and graphic injury.
The rest of his comrades were busy, also exploring for evidence against the president. But Raven had insisted that Wally keep company while on these small missions, or at least kept checking in. Really, Wally didn’t understand the big deal. He was used to working on his own. But then, Bart did need to practice, and it had been a while since he’d ran with him in anything serious.
He supposed it was just as well. Wally didn’t want Bart running by himself. The legal forces had stepped up their brutality in arrests. No one he knew had died yet in the black capture ops, but he understood the Black Canary had come close, and everyone was edgy with the news of Stark.
No one was immortal.
He touched the lightning earpiece. “I know it seems kind of sacrilege, but nothing flashy this time. We’re checking out the grounds, faster than any detectors can pick up on us in case there are any, and hightailing out if we see anything out of place.” Bart was improving, at least. He still had the attention span of a gnat, but he was a bit more mindful, especially when reminded right before what the task at hand truly was.
Besides, they had done this a dozen time already, even zapping past prisons and gathering stats that Wally reported to the Bat. They had mapped out dozens of holding places for mutants, managed to photograph the real layout of the schools from their construction on, given very specific ins and outs of the power going into the places and every little span of security. All before anyone knew they were there. This place in particular seemed yet another strangely abandoned warehouse area by the docks that Batman had somehow scoped out as having too much money spilling into from less savory sources. So of course they were checking it out.
“All right!” he said as the area with its set of despondent seeming warehouses loomed over the horizon, the two of them eating distance over the bay in a few brief seconds, one slap of a foot against the water barely discernible from the next. “Ready! Set!” Then the two parted ways, their pace freakish as the world slowed and they rushed around the expansive ground, over, about...
The high pitched sound barely offered any warning and he tried to put the brakes on his speed. Wally was in between the fence grounds on the North side--and wrecked. Badly. Before when he had run into the high-speed sensory blocker, he had been on a roof, and not booking it at nearly such a speed. This time he hit the brakes, and still the velocity carried him almost 600 feet.
He knew he had blacked out, but not for how many seconds. When he woke up he was mentally scrambling to remember where he was and numbly trying to move in his shock. He inhaled a breath sharply, biting down the scream that wanted to burst out as it all hit him. Wally forced his head to lift to scan his surroundings, vision blurry.
There was a ring of the high-speed perception disruptors that had popped up out of the ground all around the complex. Worse, there were also armed guards with their telling black, swat-like gear and guns starting to pour out of the warehouse. “Hey Bart,” he whispered as he tapped his earpiece. “Run away.” A pain shot down his finger and he pulled it back, looking at how weirdly it was bent.
Least he could move that arm. He looked at the other, saw the bone sticking out, groaned even as he tried to move his legs. One of his knees was skinned to the bone and hurt like crazy. “Not again...” he complained. Up! UP! The skin would grow back soon. Always did. He was more worried about the breaks. The collar bone, the twisted arm, his neck felt horrible and there was pain all down his back. But he could move, and he was starting to stand. If he could do that...
Then the ground came out from under him and sent him toppling over, ears still full of the awful ringing. Wally rolled clumsily, trying to keep off his incorrectly-healing arm. Short, concrete walls with thin, tall metal arcs were expanding out of the ground. One before him, one behind, and he wasn’t able to tell there was a much taller one on the very outside of the grounds. If that wasn’t enough, the metal arcs made an electric crackle. A net was forming overhead, made of barely viewable electricity.
What the hay is this? Worse, he realized. He was stuck between walls. A perfect sitting duck for target practice.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The sound was the worst part. It wasn’t an explosive noise that erupted through the night and alerted everyone of their presence, it wasn’t even the squealing tire noises that most people associated with car accidents- it was far more like the dull, crunchy impact noise the followed.
Except in this case it was a sickeningly wet noise- like someone slapped a brick wall with a water balloon which, by all rights, should have popped entirely instead of just springing a few gooey leaks.
“Wa--Flash? You okay?” Bart asked. He himself had made enough ugly plop noises to know what was going on. Or at least, most of it. He was already doubling back to see what he could do to help when Wally’s message came through.
He should probably have run to get help. Go to Gotham and grab Batman and run him back over here and sic him on who or whatever had Wally. Or maybe if he darted to Metropolis he could get Kara’s cousin to help him still (or kick his butt, the odds seemed pretty much even). Those probably would have been the smart things to do. But Bart wasn’t going to leave his older cousin- not even for a second.
Besides, he’d never been very good at listening.
Acting on impulse rather than thought, Bart stopped in the bay and pivoted. With the surface tension of the water broken, he immediately started to sink, but it was like running on maple syrup- Bart simply tapped into the Speed Force, pulled each foot out of the the water and started on his way again. After 2.43 seconds of running, his boots weren’t even wet before.
He was back to Wally in a matter of nanoseconds, all of his hair following behind and adjusting separately from his body like the Roadrunner’s plume. He cocked his head to one side, looking at the Flash and the containment field around him.
“Ewwwwwwwwwwww.” He said, making an appropriately disgusted face. “You’ve got a little... thing... here...” Bart pointed at his own collarbone as if trying to point out a stain on Wally’s costume rather than the bone protruding at an awkward angle. “And a couple other little... you know what I’ll get you out of here.” He said, changing directions with all the mental precision and dedication of a hummingbird.
Experimentally, Bart scooped up a stick and threw it at the electrified netting. The stick caught outside of Wally’s pseudo-cell and fried almost instantly only to be spit back onto the ground as a stick of charcoal.
Unfortunately, the stick throwing had unintended consequences, and alarms began to ring out across the base.
“Uh. You stay here! Act broken or something!” He “whispered” to Wally, suddenly vibrating his molecules to blur from human vision. Maybe the soldiers responding to the alarm would show him how to turn the net off-- or if nothing else, if they tried to shoot Wally, well then at least Bart would know it was possible to pass through the netting without getting fried up.
Honestly, in Bart’s professional opinion, Wally was in just about the safest place in the world!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There was no acting about it. He was broken. Wally was up to one knee, setting one of his feet flat with a grimace. There was a small crunchy feeling in his ankle, but at least that was healing very quickly. The skin was almost through growing back over his bared knee bone as well. He set his hand to his arm. If he let that go another second, he wouldn’t have an opening left to push the bone under anymore.
“Kid, I mean it! Get away, now! You can’t use your powers in this...!” The alarm cut him off. Honestly, if Wally were not busy shoving his arm somewhat into place, he would have facepalmed. “Goshdarnit...”
The people pouring out of the warehouse were also, unfortunately, having little trouble navigating his direction. There were keypads on some of the poles, and these opened small doors in the dangerous buzz of the electrocution net. Also, the gaps between the electronic arrays were wide enough they could easily shoot through them, which he quickly discovered as two of the ops in the innermost area started firing toward him. Wally hit the ground behind the concrete divider.
If he had his speed, no problem. He could zip around the bullets, find those keypads and guess at the code and zip out. Instead, he was stuck. Taking out the small power dampening towers was going to take priority. It had worked before... but then, that time he had been out of its range, and there had only been one. Plus these looked a little tougher in design.
“This... sucks...” he growled, starting to swiftly army crawl toward the nearest tower, the ringing in his ears increasing. “Would you go get help already!? And don’t talk so fast! I can’t understand you.”
Heck, he was almost in reach of one of the little blinking towers. He could make it. He could do something. It’d be fine!
Except that the ops caught up when he was just seven feet from it. “Freeze!”
Really, what choice did Wally have? He rolled onto his back, smiling at the four guys with their helms covering their faces. “Uh, hi! Can you fellas give me directions to Lady Liberty? I seem to have lost sight of her.”
They weren’t listening to him. They were listening to their coms. “New orders,” one said grimly, leveling his gun at him.
“Oh, come on! AUGH!” Wally rolled when the bullets hit him. They were already healing, though. “Cripes...” he gasped, starting to struggle from off his side. Okay, that had stung. That had stung a lot.
“He’s a speedster, you idiots,” another op said, striding up behind the four. This guy had a patch on his chest, a higher officer. And worse, he had a shotgun which he leveled toward Wally’s face. “You have to take them out hard and decisively.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A noise came out from nowhere- a sound not unlike a shout, but far too fast to make out the words and suddenly a 5-foot-nothing blur of red hair was in the way, holding a disassembled shot gun and dropping the pieces on the ground, the heels of his yellow boots dug into the dirt in front of the Flash with crazy crackles of static lifting and sparking through his mess of red hair.
Of course it hadn’t happened like that to Bart.
Bart had been on the other side of the netting, trying to find a way in when the guards came up on the Flash and cleared space where they could shoot through the electrical netting. Time slowed as Bart watched the holes opening, studying the pattern and finding the rhythm that the soldiers weren’t aware that they had fallen into. It happened too quickly for anyone to take advantage of it.
Well. Maybe not any one.
He took his mark, waited a fraction of a heart beat, then-- like Mario leaping through a moving wall-- dove through one of the holes. This was when being smaller than the majority of other boys his age had its definite perks. He landed in a roll on his shoulder, skinning it a little- but the only damage that lasted was the dirt he kicked up and a scratch in his costume. Once inside the netting, Kid Flash charged, shouting to draw the soldiers’ attention away from Wally,
“DON’T YOU TOUCH MY COUSIN!”
In an instant he had the shotgun in his hands, snatched away from the commanding officer as if he were nothing more than a slow moving baby with a piece of candy and, recalling the books he’d devoured, Bart found in his memory a diagram of this particular gun. He followed the diagram in his mind to the letter, taking out every screw, bolt and clasp, breaking the gun down into its component parts in less than five seconds before he dropped each and every part on the ground.
Wally would only need a few more seconds until he would be right as rain again-- and until then, Bart just needed to keep these guys from shooting them Wally.
This time when he spoke, it was much more slowly and with exaggerated annunciation and frantic hand signals, as if speaking to someone who didn’t know the language, “Heeeey. Didn’t your mothers teach you not to play with guns?”
He made another pass through the soldiers, coming out on the other side with an AK-47 that he took apart just as quickly, absently moving his feet, shoulders and hips from side to side as if dancing to a song no one else could hear.
“Cripes you guys are slow. Slooooooow. Anybody know that Maroon 5 song? I’ve had it in my head for like four days. ‘something something Mooooooooooooooovess like Jagger’.” With this last bit, he turned and dig a proper moonwalk a few feet back, sprinkling the ground with AK-47 parts as he did.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bart was moving too fast for Wally to even see. For once, he was getting a good taste of why people looked at him disapprovingly every time he just appeared. He wanted to ask how in the world he was doing it, but one of the soldiers beat him to it.
“How is he...?”
The officer whose gun had been scattered pulled out his handgun. “Doesn’t matter.” And the shots started ringing.
Now Wally was up, grabbing one of the men from behind and pulling his gun up against his throat even as he kneed him in the back. He was slowed, not helpless! Now they were just treating him like chopped liver?
“I told you to go get help!” he shot toward Bart as he elbowed the guy against the side of his helm, pulling his gun from him and swinging the handle of it hard enough to crack the protective face shield. But even as he snapped at his cousin, he wondered why he was bothering. He really could not have dealt with a shotgun blast to the head. Wally was also sure help would never have come in time. His option would have been to try to run blind, and likely fry himself. Still...
One of the ops was focused on him again, gun swinging about. “Yikes.” Wally did a handspring to the side over the bullets, then rolled in close. He wasn’t nearly as good as Dick or Roy, but they had taught him quite a few moves and he was better than average. He only took two more shots in the shoulder as he came up in an uppercut. Which hurt. Two of his fingers were still sore from breaking and not being set properly on that hand.
“Show off...” he muttered at Bart after he had the other op on the ground. “But... thanks.”
~~~~~~~~~
“Ta-dah!” He shouted with a little soft shoe routine, throwing his arms out wide. “I am your help. D’uh.” Wasn’t that in his job description anyway? Help the Flash and do other awesome things? C’mon Wally, get with the program.
One of the three remaining agents came after him, swinging a right hook. Bart stood for a loooooooooong time, head tilted to one side, watching the fist move sloooooowly towards his face. At the last second, he took one step to the side. With all that momentum behind the punch, it was impossible for the unarmed man to correct his balance, and he fell head over heels into the dirt.
Bart tried not to snicker.
Of the two remaining, one was the brutal commander, but it was the other that had Bart’s attention first-- he had been disarmed earlier but was now taking up a weapon from one of his downed teammates.
“Ah-ha-ha! You didn’t say the magic word.” Kid Flash quipped wagging one red gloved finger, Jurassic Park style. Before the soldier could even level the gun on him, Bart had the gun out of his hands and was busily taking it apart.
Which was why he didn’t see the C.O. coming up behind him.
The stock of the shotgun he’d picked up from one of the downed soldiers hit the boy across the temple, rattling his brain around but- more importantly- it knocked him off balance. His ankle rolled a little at the force of the hit, and Bart tripped over his own giant feet, dropping towards the ground at an awkward, sideways angle. He managed to get his hands out in front of him and turn enough that he’d hit the ground with his butt instead of his face... but it wasn’t the ground that he fell into.
It was a very surreal moment for the young speedster, for his entire muscular system to stop working all at once as volts of electricity bounced through every water molecule in his body. From scalp to toes, every muscle seized up all at once. The fence, luckily, bounced him off before he could sustain any fatal injuries, but he did have some burn marks in his costume, his hair was covered in static sparks and he was more than a little stunned.
It would only take him seconds to recover-- which was exactly why the C.O. took full advanatage of the opportunity. He cocked the shot gun and pressed it against the teenager’s left knee cap.
“Let’s see you run now.” He said callously, pulling the trigger without a second thought.
The cartridge raced down the barrel of the gun just as Bart was coming out of his electricity-induced stupor. He started to move, to push the gun aside, to get up, to get away and opened his mouth to yell, “Fla--!”
Bart couldn’t say if he actually managed to get the rest of the word out. All he did manage to do was clutch his leg towards his chest and squeeze his eyes shut tightly in an attempt to block out the pain when he fell onto his side, holding his decimated knee with both hands.
~~~~~~~~~
“Kid, stop playing around.” Honestly, they were still in a bad situation. Wally was still dizzy and his bones were not healed nearly as straight as he knew they should be. There were still guys pouring out of the warehouse, and Wally was frustrated in that he couldn’t think of a good resolution for how he was getting out of this pen, and he was used to being able to think very, very swiftly. Bart seemed able to, but...
Then there was a loud crackling BZZZZZAT! from the fence, and Wally only had enough time to turn to look as the big-footed teenager fell, his hair spitting with sparks even more than usual. Then the shotgun pressed to his knee. Strangely, Wally didn’t hear anything in his shock. Bart’s lips moved. The trigger squeezed. The barrel kicked. Blood sprayed across the ground and the teen immediately recoiled in pain. It was all strangely silent, as though it might not be real. Except it was, because now he could hear the gunshot chock again as the op aimed for Bart’s head.
Shock turned to rage in a heartbeat.
At first Wally had been terribly confused at how Bart was still moving so freely within range of the high speed perception dampeners. Bart, blessed with Barry’s blood as he was and born with the Speed Force, didn’t think about the gift. It was there. He used it. Consequences be damned. Fear be damned. That little quick brain of his worked off of instinctive impulse much of the time. He wasn’t like Wally, who had to try to keep track of his feet still, who had to tell where he was going, who had to see things slowed to coordinate with his environment. Bart just did it, a truly reckless rider of the lightning.
Wally now felt reckless.
The speed force had not left them. His perceptions couldn’t decipher things with near the lightspeed quickness, he couldn’t tell where his feet were, and he realized it didn’t matter. He knew he wanted from point A to point B, and suddenly he was there, even if unable to stop as he wanted. The shotgun discharged into the air. The op gave a sharp cry as he struck the fence and bounced off as well when Wally skid past him. But there were other ops to consider, all starting to hurry through the fences in their clumsy manner to give backup and gain clean lines of fire.
The Flash ran to the blinking device that kept his perceptions jammed. When he knelt, he started vibrating. It was slow to build, seeming just a tremor, and then his whole body seemed to be blurring before he shoved his hands into the metal armor of it. It blew him back, and it mattered little. There was still buzzing from the overlaying pattern the devices made.
Point A. Point B. A little faith was all he needed, and he needed to have it now. Trust his big dumb feet and get Kid out of there. There was nothing else. Even so, he tumbled, which was just as well, because the bullets missed him when he did. Again the vibration...
But this time he wasn’t thrown. This time he felt the wave stop, the irritating high pitched sound dying away. He saw the spark of the explosion slowly kindling and blowing out past the metal shell and spreading in a quickly expanding plume of destruction. Wally stood, glaring at the complex before taking off. His hand was more of a blur than he was as he ran it down the concrete base walls, slipping past bullets as though they were standing still. One smooth scoop and he had Bart against his chest and raced away as the entire wall blew apart around the complex.
Wally got a good look at Bart’s knee even as he ran, and the angry seriousness faded to gut-wrenching worry. The kneecap was barely hanging on by a tenuous flap of sinew, and what was underneath that...
The Flash left a high spray of water in his wake as he sped across the bay.