#1 - The Second-Fastest Man Alive

By Bill Kte'pi

It's amazing the kind of clarity you get on television these days. The crispness of the digital transfer. The seamlessness of motion, the way the image responds instantly to the remote control. When you watch it in reverse, thumb rolling over the pause-and-rewind wheel, you can watch her get put back together, atom by atom, from the outside in, blood flowing back into veins, skin flapping back over muscle, flashburns healing.

When you watch it in reverse, you can undo Iris's death. With the remote control in your hand, you're the fastest man alive -- fast enough to change the past. Fast enough to outrace death.

But eventually you hit the beginning of the disc and it starts to play forward again. Hours of convenience store tedium you can recite by note. Even the hot chicks in the short skirts have lost their appeal by now. You don't know how many times you've watched the disc. Enough that you had the sense to make a backup so you won't wear out the original. Enough that you've worn out five such backups.

Do you know how many times you have to watch a disc before it stops working?

A lot.

Do you know how many beers you burn through over the course of it, how many bottles of whiskey your metabolism soaks up without letting you have more than a mild buzz, just a mild one, enough to dull the edge?

A lot.

Do you know how badly you would smell right now if you didn't shower yourself with friction every so often, shaking off the detritus of your beery whiskey sweat as you sit here in the same pair of boxers and the same bathrobe, stubble flaking off in your lap when you rub an idle hand across your face with fingernails that would be curling towards your palms if the heat didn't keep them trim?

A hell of a lot.

How much do you hate yourself today, Barry? Is it enough to kill yourself yet? Is it? Are you almost there? Have you figured out how you're going to do it? Do you think you'll manage to force yourself to hold still for the bullet this time? Will it be a poison your metabolism can't match, or a death by drowning that takes forever because you can count the scales on a fishbelly in the eyeblink of a millisecond? Will you hang yourself on the bathrobe's ratty terrycloth belt?

How much do you hate your father? Do you want him to be the one to find the body? Or will you spare him that?

You're only the second-fastest man alive, Barry. He's the fastest.

He didn't get there in time. He didn't know.

He isn't beating himself up about it, is he? Not that you could tell if he was. No one sees the Flash anymore. He's a scarlet blur mending fences and catching milk before it spills.

Iris would've been next. Pretty much was already: your father may be the Flash in name, but Iris was the public side of the family, the approachable one, the human one, the one who stuck around to be thanked and talked to the cops instead of just stopping their crimes for them.

Now it's just you and him. Your mother never would have let him do this. She never would have let you do this. Iris wouldn't have died. Your father would have been human, would have been there, would have stopped it, she would have had less to prove, she wouldn't have been there to begin with, she wouldn't have been a target, a target in a goddamn convenience store, for ...

For what?

Who killed her?

Maybe your father knows. Maybe he found out. Maybe it didn't occur to him to tell you. Maybe he's running so fast that common sense can't catch up.

There she is on the screen, the only light in your dark apartment.

She's in her civvies. Sixteen years old. Jeans and the Jazz Lightning T-shirt you got her because you like the band -- sax-heavy post-bop covers of turn-of-the-century trip-hop -- and she liked the logo. Gotham Knights throwback ballcap. Total teenybopper cheese. She may as well be snapping gum. This is a superhero?

She asks for a Ruby Sprite and a bag of pretzels and you rewind it over and over just to hear her voice. It's the only thing she says the whole time. You know the key and intonation and enunciation perfectly. You can hear her voice in your sleep, when you sleep. "Ruby Sprite? And a bag of pretzels, yeah those. Thanks."

And you watch.

It's a family curse. Barry always gets to watch Iris die. Except this time there's no time travel to save the day. Your Iris isn't a refugee from ten centuries in the future. And she isn't your wife. She's your sister.

Down another beer. Open another bottle of whiskey.

In order to be the second-fastest man alive, your senses have to work at levels humans could never muster. In order to see what's in front of you when you're running at the speed of light, your eyes have to work in ways that shouldn't be possible. When you're standing still you can see dust-motes clinging to the head of a pin.

When you're watching a videodisc you can see every instant of Iris's death. The moments between the moments. The guy shows up with his back to the camera, Iris's back to him: just appears out of nowhere, head-first. Kills her as simply as you can imagine. Smacks her on the back with something like a metal spider, something that clings there, legs burrowing, leaving holes in the T-shirt. She freezes: to a normal person she wouldn't look any different, but you see the way her skin changes, the way her hair isn't swaying that little bit anymore. She's lost her speed.

If you'd been there you would have felt it, would have felt her being cut off from the Speed Force. Your father should have felt it. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't notice. Maybe he thought it was you. Maybe he didn't care.

The bastard shoots her with a ray gun.

What the hell is that? What is he, Buck Rogers?

He shoots her in the back with a ray gun just as she realizes she's lost her speed, and she dies, and you can see every moment of it, as the impact balloons her stomach in front of her and her skin unfurls from the wound like a popped balloon and she lurches forward as if she's going to catch herself on the countertop before the energy, whatever it is, consumes her, leaving nothing to bury, nothing but fine ashes.

And the whole time, you were across town, trying to get stoned with some girls you met when you crashed a college party.

How much do you hate yourself right now, Barry?

Enough to kill yourself?

Enough to watch it again?

Enough to --

What's that? Someone's coming. You can feel them through the Speed Force. They're coming fast. Signature's familiar. Oh, crap. No.

Turn off the screen, toss the remote to the couch, hide the porn, toss the cans and bottles into the trash bag, tie it off. Just in time.

A whirlwind vibrates through the door, a splash of silver and red and hair and boots and goggles, and you're about to yell something nasty at him, something to hurt, whatever it takes to make him go away, when he cuts you off.

"Barry," Bart says, running a hand unconsciously through the thick mop of his hair, "Something's happened to your father."

You're gonna toss him something flippant, like "What, he grow a heart?" or "Poor Wally turn human?", but the only other time you've seen Bart this serious was at Iris's funeral. Not even at your mother's, and he'd known her since he was a kid. Your father can't be dead: you would've felt it. You do feel something, something different about the Speed Force, a ... the only word you can think of is restlessness. But it isn't what it would feel like if your father had died.

Burn off the last fumes of the whiskey, grab clean clothes from the dresser, the old jeans and the Church of Superman hoodie. Light a cigarette. Screw it. No reason to look anxious, not in front of the brat. He might be older than you, he might've been "Impulse" long before you were even conceived, but he's never managed to grow up, just a thirtysomething teenager. "What's up, Mini-Me?"

It's the nickname you use to piss him off when that's what you want to do, but he doesn't blink. Just grabs your wrist. Pulls you through the wall. Heads across the city, talking a mile a minute on the way. Come to think of it, "a mile a minute" is way too slow for Bart.

"Downtown. Something happened. Don't know what. Guy was trashing a bank, right? Called himself Lex Luthor, and he looked like the ex-Prez, but in this wild green and purple metal battlesuit. And like all these things were different. The live Daily Planet feed on the infodumps turned into newspaper boxes -- remember those? you were just a kid -- selling 'The Daily Star,' whatever that is. This Batman guy's kicking the crap out of the Luthor guy, only Bats is in this, like, suit of armor, with this shield that's got a big black bat on it and a white cross."

"All right." You cut Bart off. Even being able to make out his high-pitched squeal, being able to parse it as he talks fast enough it's making dogs bark, it's annoying. "So some wacky stuff happened."

"No kiddo, that's what we thought, but it started spreading. Street signs started changing. Some of em weren't even English. German. Russian. Latin. These weird guys in plastic togas were walking around. So I'm helping Bat-knight whomp on Mecha-Luthor, right, and Wally sends me a zip across the Speed Force, tells me --"

"He what?"

"Sent me a zip. You know, where he uses the Speed Force to talk to you, see how things are going, organize the tactical plan?"

He's never done that with you. You didn't know he could. "Oh yeah, that."

"Anyway, so Wally tells me he ran into this other him, this guy who was still Kid Flash at age fifty-whatever, cause Barry -- the first Barry, you know, your great-uncle -- never died in the Crisis."

"Huh."

"Yeah, so Wally figures it out, he's all, hey, weird Hypertime thingies zooming in on the K to the C, it's all Crisis-y, right? So that's a known quantity, that's something he can deal with. He knows what the vibrations feel like. So he zips that onto me, the vibratory signature --"

"-- oh, yeah, that."

Bart gives you a sidelong glance. "-- which he'd just figured out how to do, but anyway, he sort of imprints me with the signature so that I can help him look. Only he finds it first, okay. I mean, I was looking. I think -- well, you know Wally, he'd never say anything, but I don't want anyone to think I wasn't looking. I so was. I just -- he found it first. I mean, damn, he's the Flash, right? Of course he found it first."

"Bart --"

"Yeah, yeah, so, he found it, he found the thing, it was a bomb, okay? It was this bomb that was exploding, only the shockwaves were breaking down the barriers between Hypertimelines. The bomb was like this clock, basically, only all weird, too many hands on it and the face was all curved, but whatever, point is, he found the bomb, and ... well, he disarmed it. He figured, I guess what he figured was, it was sending out vibrations, so he'd just key in on that, soak them up, deflect them, you know, whatever. Like he would a regular bomb."

"Right. So?"

"... so it was a trap, Barry. He was supposed to find it. He was supposed to do that. It was totally set up to respond to his signature. That's what I think, anyway. I mean -- well -- here we are, right?"

Downtown Keystone. Things're back to normal now, but you can catch glimpses of conversation on people's lips, talking about the strangeness that's only just passed. And everyone's watching the man in red, the scarlet speedster, the man himself, running down the street.

Check that again: they're watching him.

They can see him.

He's running. And they can see him. Lightning bolts on the head and all. You can see his chest heaving from here. He's panting. Sweating. You can see each and every last drop.

Your father's barely hitting a hundred miles an hour, and he's sweating like a pig, his heart pounding like it's gonna burst. A hundred miles an hour and he's pushing beyond his limit. He's not connected to the Speed Force anymore. At all. Bart can't tell that. Never did manage the kind of connection to the SF that you have. Bart doesn't know.

Right now, Wally West is cruising on stored-up velocity stored in his cells. If he uses it up, he won't even manage to hit a hundred miles an hour. If he uses it up, he'll die.

He's going to realize that soon. He's not stupid. If he can use that velocity, then he's still got something, some kind of awareness. "Yeah," you tell Bart. "I see what you mean."

"Well?"

You give him a look. "What?"

"Barry, he's your father. Do something."

So you do something. You grab your father by the collar of that stupid red suit, and yank him to a stop. Kill his inertia. Look at him. Watch him. Let him see your eyes. Wait until you see realization come to him. That he can't keep running.

"Had to stop sometime, Pops," you tell him. "Wonder what you'll do now. Nowhere to run? God help you, you might have to, you know, have a conversation or something. With people. Regular people. And you know what? Good. If you'd been a normal person, Iris would still be alive."

You let go. Leave the rest for Bart to deal with. He loves this superhero crap.

You go home, and drink what whiskey's left in the apartment, and stare at the ceiling until you can fall asleep.