#3 - An Arrow Is Stopped In Flight

By Bill Kte'pi

I woke up dying.

Have you ever woken up suddenly because of something that happened while you were still sleeping, something you were never consciously aware of and so can't remember? Thunder crashes, you jolt up from the pillows, but there's nothing to wake up to except a cold, quiet, empty house. You wait for the next roll of thunder, and know that's what woke you. You put to rest your fears of intruders and cats getting into the cabinets and crying babies and raccoons in the corn. You go back to sleep.

I woke up suddenly and sharply, because my heart had stopped in my sleep and my higher brain functions were failing. My eyes flew open faster than sonic booms, and I knew I was dying. My muscles were sore, as if they'd tensed up forcefully and abruptly; my skull pounded; there were unfamiliar pains in my abdomen, my ears, behind my eyes. My skin felt wrong, like someone else's leather.

The fastest man alive woke up dying, and his life caught up to him. That bit about your life flashing before your eyes, I don't know if it's true or not. I didn't wait to find out.

When you're as fast as I am, time is putty. The moment I woke up my perception kicked into high gear, with the echo of my last heartbeat long since gone, my blood turned still in my arteries, and sparks still clinging like staticky fireflies to my skin. Sparks from whatever it was that had killed me.

The guy, my murderer, was in the room, but he had his back to me, the heel of his shoe and his cheap disposable pants and baseball cap all bland and anonymous. He thought I was dead, and from his perspective, I was: I could feel death pushing at me, feel the blackness at the edge of my vision. The tiny slice of time between the moment when I woke up and the moment when I would be dead was so small that from his perspective it did not exist: just like your hand can't feel the empty spaces in the atoms of a rock, he couldn't see the emptiness of my life ballooned up in front of my death.

In his subjective time, in his slow world, I was dead, because subjective experience of time rounds off to the nearest moment. In mine, where if I'd had keen enough eyes I could have watched electrons spin around nuclei, I had a long ways to go and nothing I could do about it. Bart had compared it to Zeno's paradox, something he'd gotten from Max Mercury. Not the paradox itself -- he learned that in VR -- but the application to the ... unique lives of we in the West and Allen families.

Zeno's thing goes like this: whenever an arrow occupies a space the size of the arrow, it's at rest; at any given moment that the arrow is in flight, the arrow occupies a space the size of the arrow; therefore, at any given moment that the arrow is in flight, it's at rest. Aristotle took it to pieces, saying that the flaw in Z's reasoning is in assuming time is composed of indivisible instants.

And that's the point, right there. Time isn't indivisible. Time is infinitely divisible. And the Wests and Allens, we live just on the crux of infinity. We slice time. We divide instants. At any given moment, all motion -- compared to us -- may as well be at rest.

So I had time to solve my own murder. Time Iris hadn't had because the guy who'd killed her had taken away her speed first. Time Wally wouldn't have had because a Psycho-Pirate had taken his speed, too.

Start there. Iris is dead. Wally's depowered. I'm dead. Barry Allen's been dead for decades and Bart's sterile. So I'm the last of the line, for the next thousand years, until Barry's kids pick it up in the 30th. The last of the Wests and Allens.

Not that the Wests seem to matter any, when you look down the line. Wally was the most powerful of any of them, but for some reason it was Barry Allen -- not the first Flash, not the best, not the longest, just one of em -- whose descendents took up the mantle. When Iris died, I assumed that was why: maybe, I'd figured, my kids would have super-speed, but I wouldn't be like Wally, I wouldn't push costumes on them. They'd be normal kids. Very, very fast, normal kids.

But back on track. This guy, this anonymous guy, who was he working for, assuming he wasn't the big shot? Who's got the motive to kill as many Flashes as he can?

The Rival, Trinities Blue, Red, and Black, the Professors Zoom, the Captains and Lieutenants and Commander Cold, the Cobalts Blue, the Captains Boomerang, Heat Wave, Mirror Master and his kid, the other Mirror Master, the Weather Wizard, the Top, the Tricksters, Dr Alchemy, Rainbow Raider, Blacksmith, Girder, Magenta, Murmur, Plunder, Abra Kadabra, Brother Grimm, the Turtle, Chillblaine, Cicada, Chronos, Dr Shrivel, the Grey Ghost, Kulan Dar, Prometheus, Amazo, Anti-Matter Man, Blacksnake, Dr Destiny, the Calculator, Kang, Felix Faust, Queen Bee, Woodrue, Luthor, Imperiex, Bizarro Flash, the Combine, Fallout, the Fiddlers, Grodd, the Icicle, Kobra, Neron, Peek-a-Boo, Polaris, Replicant, Speed Demon, Vandal Savage, Ra's Al Ghul, the Thinker, Mister E, Eclipso, and any number of enemies Wally or Iris might've picked up from the League or the Titans. Factor in unknown villains from the past, future, or hypertimelines, and the possibility of an ally pulling a Parallax.

Okay. Some of those guys were dead, supposedly. Most of them weren't clever enough to pull this off, but then again, Wally used to say that about the Rogues, too.

I ran through everything I knew about every villain or suspicious character Wally, Iris, and my costumed uncles had ever mentioned. Problem wasn't coming up with suspects. It was narrowing down the list. I didn't have enough data: Iris had been killed with a ray gun, like those weren't a dime a dozen in Supervillains R We. Wally'd been zonked by Psycho-Pirate, but who'd goaded him into it? Pirate couldn't be behind all of this, could he? Bart said he'd caught him, put him in a prison hypertimeline. Me, I'd been killed with electricity of some sort. I could feel it making my hair stand on end, when I increased the inertia of a neuron or two to carry the sensation signals to me.

Okay, forget about the suspect list for now. Dig the crime scene. Can't take it easy and wait for the scene to change, wait to see the guy's face or any identifying features -- I'll be dead by then. So take a look at what's there.

I spent subjective hours -- a few hundred orbits of the electron -- studying what I could see. I assembled a mental image, taking details from the partial, flawed, distorted reflections in the trapezoid of window exposed by curtain. I examined the subject's shadow, taking into account the angle at which the light struck him, in order to reverse-engineer further information from that. I looked at the patterns of dust-motes in the air to gauge his mass based on his position and inferred rate of speed.

He was either a redhead or had very light brown hair. Slouching, average height or just above, the medium build of someone with no body fat but no sculpted muscle tone, and I'd bet my life -- ha -- he had a slight, almost imperceptible, limp in his left knee. The kind of thing that twinged when the weather was right but that he wouldn't notice otherwise -- his leg was canted ever so slightly, like he was favoring the knee, but the position of his spine and shoulders suggested he wasn't aware of it, so he hadn't just banged it against anything. Old injury, the kind that fades until you forget it.

That told me nothing. He was almost certainly a hired gun. Probably got some kind of electro-Flash-a-zap-a-tron to take care of me. Fuck. I'd wasted all that time. That precious time like grains of sand I couldn't reach for and take back.

Try another tack. Rev up the inertia in his skin cells. Force him to leave a sample behind, even if he's a DNA-hole who's been smart and sprayed himself with grey-market dermaglue designed to prevent the trail of biological evidence. Focus, focus. As much inertia as I can muster -- even if the friction burns him, fuck it, good, even better -- now --

"You're talking to yourself, you know."

I swear I heard the voice, soft and gentle, an undeniably female voice, but when I directed my attention to the photons coming from that direction, it wasn't a woman. It wasn't anything human at all.

It was the Black Flash. A skeleton in a twisted black mock-up of the Flash costume.

Wally had never talked about it, but I'd heard Jay tell my mother what Wally had told him, which pretty much sums up my childhood. The Black Flash was death for speedsters, literally: a manifestation of the Grim Reaper, or what the fuck ever, that came for the very very fast when it was time for the permanent stoplight. "It's what waits at the end of the race."

But I wasn't done yet.

It had taken Barry Allen, Savitar, Johnny, Jesse, Bart's cousin Jenni, and Iris. But Wally had gotten away from it, and I knew how. He'd gone to the place where time, speed, and death had no meaning.

But he'd had a running start. So I had to be smart. Smarter than Wally. Shouldn't be too hard.

I focused everything I had on accelerating every molecule of my body as fast as I could go, in the same direction: out. Ran through my murderer, who'd never see me because I was dancing through photons. Ran through the building and the streets and Keystone, and the Earth was a small slow rock beneath my feet, a humble mountain in the sky, and as it curved, I kept going straight: through the Earth, through rock and crust and magma and core, keeping a straight line because I couldn't spare the slowdown of turning.

The physical world ceased to be its usual self around me. Particles floated in the air amidst a sea of grey rot and black void, and I moved through and between them all.

I'd never gone this fast before. I couldn't feel anything. Not a damn thing. Couldn't spare the inertia for my neurons. I wasn't even aware of my muscles moving: I wasn't running so much as willing myself forward, channeling the Speed Force directly into a constant redefinition of my position in space.

I had to shake this thing and solve the mystery of my death.

"There isn't any mystery."

That voice again.

I kept moving, and everything went black. This must be it. Was this it? The end of time? Where everything stopped, and entropy gave out, and nothing was moving and time was dead.

I stopped along with everything else. There was someone here with me. It wasn't the Black Flash -- or not anymore.

It was a girl, a pale girl, in black jeans and a black tank top, with too much eyeliner.

"There's no mystery," she said again.

"Says you." There shouldn't have been any sound, and I shouldn't have been able to see her, but that's just how these things went. "Do you know what it's like to wake up, realize you're dead, and be able to think about it for as long as a day would feel to anyone else?"

She smiled. "Yeah. In a way, you know, I think I do. And how did you use that day, Barry?"

"I -- how do you know my name?"

"Friend of the family. Answer the question?"

"I tried to find out who did it. Who killed me. And maybe why."

"Would it have made you any less dead? Could you have told anyone?"

"That's not the point."

"Why isn't that the point?"

"Christ, what are you, a shrink?"

She grinned. "No. Barry, you had a day. Have you thought about your life at all? Reflected back on it? Learned anything?"

"I --" -- couldn't think of anything to say.

"There's a poem I like by a woman I like. 'Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me.'"

"But it doesn't make any sense. My life -- it doesn't make any sense."

"Who told you it would?"

"You're him, aren't you."

"You'd think with the tank top, I wouldn't get that question so often."

"You're the Black Flash. You're Death."

"And you're standing in my universe."

I frowned and looked around. "I don't understand."

"Everything's done. The end of time. You reached it, about an electron's giggle short of your death. This is the part where I wrap everything up and close the door behind me. But first, you need to leave."

"If I go back, I'll die."

"You're going to die no matter what. I promise. There's a zen koan -- 'an arrow is stopped in flight.' One of the things it means is that everything dies in motion. Everything dies in progress. Everything dies thinking it isn't done yet -- but it's reached its target."

"What happens if I keep running?"

She didn't say anything, just -- looked as if she was fussing with something. Getting ready to "close the door," I guessed, whatever that meant.

"What happens if I keep running?"

"I don't have an answer to give you." The words sounded carefully chosen. Not 'I don't know,' and not as obvious as 'I can't tell you.'

"Well. There can't be anything worse than death."

She cocked an eyebrow and a hip, and scratched the back of her neck. "You don't know my family nearly as well as I know yours."

I didn't stop to wonder what she meant by that. Maybe I was still in the last agony of death. Maybe I was hallucinating. I'd run out of explanations for things. I ran.

I didn't know what direction to go, so I just kept going the way I'd been headed -- past the pale goth girl and her fiddling with a door I couldn't see, past the blackness, past the pain, past the mystery, past the paradox, and into a place where the darkness went deeper and deeper. I was beyond blur: I was little more than thought directing impulse and motion, a lightning bolt that skittered past tachyons.

And the world became formless and empty, and I came as a burst into the void, and where there had been darkness was chaos and light.