Arrow - A Generation of Vipers Read online

  “Cisco, shut it down.”

  “Okay,” came the reply. “See you in an hour.”

  The door closed and locked. This was the only way he could keep to the plan, and he wanted to do it. He trusted Oliver Queen. The man had been the Green Arrow for years, and had suffered enormous tragedies but kept working. Barry had only the slightest idea of what had happened on the island where Oliver spent five years. He had seen the terrible scars on Oliver’s body. There was no telling what scars the man had on his mind.

  Barry sat in the middle of the floor, feeling a little silly folding his legs into the lotus position. Meditation had never been his kind of thing. These tricks—not tricks, Oliver would chide him, techniques—had enabled him to shift his focus in moments of stress, slow his mind, calm the fight-or-flight reactions. By slowing the flood of cortisol in his system, the plasma became less aggressive. He had actually stopped several blurring incidents when he felt them coming on by using the mental trigger that Oliver had provided him. Barry smiled thinking of his old childhood microscope. Oliver had asked him for something that Barry associated with serenity. Nothing came close to that old microscope for dredging up warm memories of excitement, comfort, and discovery; days when Barry had everything to look forward to.

  He settled into his breathing routine. Predictable. Repeatable. Effective. Like science. His heartbeat slowed. He felt himself sitting in the cell, but the environment didn’t matter. He could’ve been anywhere. And soon he was.

  Barry saw himself in his laboratory at the Central City police headquarters where he worked as a CSI investigator. His lab was crowded with folders and evidence bags of cases waiting to be worked on. The tools of science that would allow him to find answers, to discern knowledge out of chaos, also surrounded him.

  The lights were low. He sat at his desk, eye pressed to the lens of a microscope. The familiar steel and plastic smell filled his nose. He adjusted the knob to bring a simple hair into focus. The textures and lines fascinated him. So complex and intricate. A world of sophistication hidden in a haze of simplicity. Those mysterious relationships drew Barry to science the way some were drawn to poetry. Everything had meaning. Everything had value.

  “Hello, Mr. Allen. Hard at work?”

  Barry spun in his chair to see a man in yellow leaning against the counter.

  Reverse Flash. Eobard Thawne.

  Or Harrison Wells.

  Barry resisted the urge to attack the man in the yellow version of his own Flash costume. Any time he saw that yellow suit, he instantly went into fight mode. The face of Harrison Wells made it worse. Wells was the man young Barry had idolized, and who had then trained him to use and manage his speed. It nearly broke Barry when he realized Wells wasn’t trying to make the Flash better, only faster to suit his own purposes.

  Barry kept one hand on the microscope, realizing with dread that he was in a blur. The plasma had seized him. It was happening despite his exercises, despite his calming trigger.

  “Nowhere to go, Mr. Allen?” Harrison Wells smiled. “Your little mind trick won’t work now. Oliver Queen might be helpful if you need to learn to shoot an arrow into a target of concentric circles, but if you think he can save you, you are mistaken.”

  Barry lunged at Wells…

  …and clutched nothing but a handful of papers. The man in yellow stood next to the window with the skyline of Central City behind him. Barry was now in his red Flash costume.

  “We’ll beat you,” he said. “We’ve beaten you before.”

  “No, you haven’t. Remember, I’m not Wells or Thawne or Reverse Flash or whatever you think of me as. I’m you. I’m a creation of your mind. I am the singularity plasma tearing through you. Soon, you’ll lose control of your mind, and then your body. You will blur out forever and vanish from your world.” Wells held out his hand, palm up, to reveal a small sphere of energy like a crumpled ball of lightning. “I’ve got your life in my hands. They can’t save you, only you can do that. It’s just that simple. But you don’t know how.”

  The Flash streaked at him again, swung a fist that swept through the empty air and obliterated half the glass in the window. A heavy wind sprang up inside the room and poured out of the broken glass as if in a pressurized airplane cabin. Loose objects went airborne. Books and papers slapped against him and flew through the hole in the glass. Barry tried to grab them, but they moved too fast.

  Through the broken panes, Barry saw a swirling black mass outside like the singularity that had churned over Central City. The wormhole that infected him with plasma. However, when he looked through the glass that remained in the window, it appeared to be a beautiful summer day. Green leaves. Blue sky.

  The detritus of Barry’s science, of his reason, roared past him into the void. Harrison Wells stood by the desk with a yellow finger pressed down on the microscope, anchoring it against the gale. Papers and files flew. Posters and charts ripped from the walls and slipped out the window. The evidence board he had used to trace his mother’s murder case ripped apart. Wallpaper tore free. No, it wasn’t wallpaper. It was the paint itself. In fact, all the color bled from surfaces and swirled in the air. The actual shapes of normal objects were pulled from the moorings of their reality and thrown into the tumult. The very concept of Barry’s laboratory spun before his eyes and funneled out into the churning anomaly.

  Harrison Wells smiled, looking at his index finger still pressed down on the microscope.

  “It’s getting heavy,” he said.

  The Flash stared into Wells’s eyes, silently pleading for him not to let go. But the man in yellow lifted his finger and the microscope shot for the window.

  “Run, Barry.”

  The Flash flew after it. His hand bumped the lens tube, fingers scrabbling awkwardly as it hung for a second. The microscope elongated in the air and turned into a black spiral in the emptiness. Barry tried to catch it but it was like gathering the wispy seeds of a dandelion floating free. The microscope disappeared through the hole in the glass.

  The Flash spun on Wells. His red and the other man’s yellow were the only colors left against the black mass. He gathered his muscles to run, thinking only of pummeling Reverse Flash to a pulp. The figure in yellow transformed into a line of color vanishing into the distance. The Flash gave chase.

  Barry slammed into the door and crumpled to the floor of the cell. On instinct, he leapt to his feet, ready to fight.

  He was alone inside the small chamber in the Pipeline. He was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. His hand came away wet and red from his mouth. Black veins pulsed under the skin. He staggered back against the wall, catching his breath, slowing his heart rate.

  He dug his phone from his pocket and clicked to check the time. It had only been twenty minutes since lockdown. He was trapped until Cisco opened the door. Barry slid down the wall and wrapped his arms around his knees.

  * * *

  When Barry shuffled into the Cortex, Caitlin looked up from the computer, expectant, intent on asking how his meditation session went. The look on Barry’s face must’ve told her everything she needed to know.

  “What happened? Did you blur?”

  “Yeah.” Barry sank into a chair. “While I was meditating. I couldn’t stop it.”

  “Let me take some blood.” Caitlin tapped him on the arm.

  “Don’t you have enough blood by now? What more can it tell you?”

  “I won’t know until it tells me. Now come on.”

  Barry really didn’t want to go through any more testing, but he followed her into the med lab and dutifully hopped on the table. Caitlin went through the routine with practiced speed. Within a few minutes she had three vials of blood and went to a microscope to prepare a slide. Barry stared at the instrument as she put the slide under the light and pressed her eye to the lens.

  “How’s it look?” Barry asked after a minute. When she didn’t straighten immediately, he turned to the dark monitor on the wall. “Put it on the screen.”

&nb
sp; Caitlin hesitated, but her finger touched a toggle on the microscope and the display flickered onto the monitor. Red blood cells were easy to see. Unfortunately so was the colorless plasma from the singularity.

  “Did you treat that sample with cortisol?” Barry asked.

  “No. The plasma is now visible without the catalyst.”

  “That’s not good.” He breathed out in suppressed concern. “It’s really growing, isn’t it?” Barry pretended to study the screen with detached objectivity.

  “I won’t have numbers until I analyze these samples.”

  “We don’t really need numbers to know.” Barry offered Caitlin a smile. “I’m not sure these exercises are really helping anymore.”

  “What’s with the ’tude?” Cisco leaned in the door. “Everything we’re doing is helping. And once we get that Markovian tech, it’s game over for the plasma. Felicity said that tech was designed to generate temporal anomalies. We only need a wormhole to create a reservoir for the plasma inside you. We can exploit the plasma’s diffusion matrix and channel it out using our magnetic field inducer. So between Felicity and Caitlin and—hello—me, we can make that puppy siphon the plasma out of you like a singularity Hoover.”

  “If we can secure the tech that is currently housed in the mountain castle of the terrorist Count Wallenstein in Markovia. If we can make it work. And if it actually does what Felicity thinks it does.”

  “Dude, that sounds like a first semester problem where I went to engineering school. Or the plot of a really cool comic book.”

  Barry smiled briefly. “I just keep wondering that if someone had come up with a wormhole generator, don’t you think we’d know about it? Yet this thing went into mothballs.”

  “Nah. Successful projects disappear every day. The everlasting light bulb. Cold fusion. Calorie-free ice cream.”

  Barry laughed and shook his head.

  “What happened here?” Caitlin stepped up to Barry, peering closely at his face. “Where’d you get that bump?”

  Barry touched a painful knot on his forehead. “Oh. That must’ve been when I ran into the cell door chasing Reverse Flash. During the blur.”

  “Thawne Reverse Flash or Wells Reverse Flash?” Cisco asked.

  “Wells Reverse Flash. He always looks like Wells in the blurs.”

  “What did Reverse Flash do this time?” Caitlin asked while she retrieved a bottle from a drawer.

  “He… um…” Barry shoved his hands in his pockets. “He let my microscope fly out the window.”

  “Wow!” Cisco whistled in amazement. “Sounds like there’s quite a party going on in your head.”

  Barry bristled. “That microscope meant a lot to me.”

  “I totally understand.” Caitlin daubed ointment on the bump on Barry’s forehead. “When I was eight, I got my first Zeiss Axioskop. What did you have?”

  “I don’t remember the brand name.” Barry looked a little embarrassed. “It came from Sears. It wasn’t a Zeiss, I can tell you that. Aren’t those things thousands of dollars?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t pay for it. I loved that scope!” She stood quietly with a smile of bliss on her lips. “One summer I tried to sequence my gerbil’s genome. I couldn’t finish it, but it was a wonderful summer.” She collected herself self-consciously and picked up a vial of Barry’s blood. “The gerbil was fine.”

  “I will never understand you biology types.” Cisco rolled his eyes. “Weirdos.”

  A shadowy figure appeared behind Cisco. It towered over him, staring down. The engineer jumped with a shout of alarm.

  Oliver Queen stood behind him in the door.

  “Holy cow, man!” Cisco put his hand over his heart. “Make a noise or something before you roll up on a guy.”

  “I just heard from Felicity.” Oliver looked past Cisco to Barry. Everyone tensed with anticipation. “There’s trouble. I’m going back.”

  “Okay. I figured something like that.” Barry caught his breath, feeling his stomach turn. “Let us know something when you can.”

  “You’re coming with me.”

  “What? I have a job. I can’t just—”

  “Find a way. Take a vacation. Detective West will cover for you. We might need the Flash.”

  “Oliver, I’ve lost some of my speed.” Barry ran his hand over his hair, head down. “And I can blur out at any time now.”

  “We’re running out of time.” Oliver turned and walked away. “Pack a bag. We’re going to Star City.”

  6

  The big windows in the apartment meant the sun came roaring in as it crested the neighboring skyscrapers. Oliver Queen turned his face away from the light with a groan, stretching out his arms above his head. His eyes opened gradually to squint at the woman lying against him. Felicity Smoak smiled. She was always smiling. How was anyone that happy this early in the morning?

  Her fingers trailed across his skin and her smile faltered for just a moment. She didn’t say anything but he knew what was going through her mind. So many scars crisscrossed over his flesh. Knives. Guns. Acid. Whips. Arrows. Shark bite even.

  She leaned over and kissed the newest one, still aching but healing. Her lips barely touched it but his muscles reacted even so. He drew in a sharp breath, though it was hardly from pain.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him quietly.

  He lifted her chin. “Don’t be.”

  “It looks painful.”

  “I’ve had worse.” He shifted closer to her, groaning slightly as some of his other aches and bruises made their presence felt.

  “I know.” Her gaze trailed to the multitude of other scars. “So many,” she whispered. “You’re going to be a stove-up old man at age sixty.”

  “I doubt I’ll get to sixty,” he remarked simply.

  Felicity’s smile fell and immediately he regretted his answer. Watching the light fade fully from her round face made him ache inside.

  “Don’t,” she told him looking him square in the eyes. “You don’t get to joke about that.”

  “You’re right.” He brushed a lock of blond hair from her face. “I’ll live long past sixty and you’ll get to push me around in a wheelchair.”

  “I push you around now.” Her mouth quirked.

  “Yes, you do.” He gathered her into his arms. “And you’re adorable when you do.”

  Felicity curled up against his warm skin, hiding her face against his chest to keep the day at bay a bit longer. An old wound puckered under Felicity’s fingers as they rested across his ribs.

  “I’m just glad you’re home.”

  “Me too.” Oliver’s arm draped over her shoulders. “So tell me about this Jackson Straub you mentioned on the phone.”

  “So much for romance.” Felicity shifted, looking up at him. “The big news is I think Straub may have actually designed a working wormhole generator.” As she turned her head, her hair brushed against his bare skin. “Do you remember anything about Queen Consolidated testing this technology here in Star City?”

  “No. But something that potentially dangerous wouldn’t have been done in town. Regulations and city zoning orders wouldn’t have permitted it.”

  “I’m not sure Queen Consolidated was overly concerned with regulation.” Felicity raised a cynical eyebrow. “But in this case I think you’re right. If the company wanted to conduct very dangerous tests, where would they have done it?”

  “Queen Consolidated owned a lot of property.”

  Felicity reached to the side of the bed and retrieved her tablet. She started typing, or more precisely hacking. He regretted starting the conversation.

  New rule: No work in the bedroom.

  “Let’s see.” Felicity had already called up the defunct records of his family’s old company, subsumed now into Palmer Technologies. “Real estate, gas companies, an old shopping mall. A farm.” She looked at him curiously. “Really? A farm?” She shook her head. “I don’t want to know.” She turned back to her screen. “Oh, wait, a mine. A coal mine
!”

  “We owned a coal mine? Why?”

  “It doesn’t say. But a mine, depending on how deep it was, would be a great spot to test something like a plasma-generating device. It would suppress electrical conductivity and plasma is ionized—”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  She kissed him. “Thank you.”

  “So even if this device was tested in this coal mine, you don’t think it’s still there, do you?”

  “It’s probably not.” She looked back at her tablet. “But every lead takes us closer. The lack of records on the servers means we have to search for information the old-fashioned way.”

  “Tell me more about this scientist, Jackson Straub. Who was he?” Rising from the bed, Oliver slipped into a pair of pajama bottoms, dropped to the floor and began vigorous push-ups.

  “He came to work for your father about twenty-five years ago. A top researcher. Very highly paid for a long time. Until he quit.”

  “Why did he quit?”

  “He retired, technically. He was getting up in age. Straub wrote a final report that I’ve read where he explained how the device simply never operated. He believed the fundamental concepts were unsound. The project was shelved by the company because they’d already sunk a ton of money into it and gotten nothing out of it. And Straub retired.”

  “A failed device isn’t very useful to us. Or do you think there is more to it?”

  “I’m not sure. Straub didn’t leave behind a lot of personal papers. His personnel record is pretty cut-and-dried, standard paperwork but nothing else. The only real glimpse of his personality is the memo I found in his old office that mentions a request for shielding. It had a tone that makes me think he was fighting for it with higher-ups.”

  “Do you think this device is dangerous?”

  “That’s a high probability since it is designed for ripping a hole in space-time.”

  “Strange that it’s left such a shallow footprint.” Oliver positioned his left fist against the small of his back and continued doing push-ups with one arm.

  “Um… yeah, I guess.” Felicity was silent for a minute.