Infinite Valentine 2017

Coast City
The five-stack from Big Belly Burger was a cheeseburger lover’s dream. In all likelihood, it wasn’t a normal girl’s dream. Lin kept giving Wally a look that she was about ten years too young to be sending in his direction. Every so often, she’d glance up from her phone completely disgusted over the way he attempted to mimic a snake by trying to dislocate his jaw in order to fit a single bite into his mouth. Then she’d go back to focusing on the screen, swiping and texting.

Wally shrugged and relished in the gloriousness of the taste. It wasn’t a good life choice. He’d wager it was a very poor life choice to eat five patties of questionable origin – still delicious– in front of a pretty girl. Not good for his body either despite his rather impressive metabolism. However, he reasoned, he risked his life at least once on a weekly basis. At any moment, he could possibly die and if his time was up then he didn’t want to regret passing this limited offer from his favorite franchise. The five-stack needed him and Wally needed the five-stack.

Ketchup fell onto his shirt at exactly the wrong moment.

“Yes!” Lin hissed excitedly.

Could he clean it up before she saw him?

Nope. Her eyes rolled in disbelief.

“Yes what exactly?” he asked, setting the burger of burgers down as if nothing was amiss.

“Axel Walker is up to his old tricks in Central City while another Rogue has the Flash busy in Keystone.”

Whatever it was that made this a “YES!” moment went over Wally’s head.

“You’ll never be accepted as a proper Flash unless you catch him.”

Wally was wary of this for proper reason. Other heroes didn’t like it when you inched in on their territory. That’d been some of Guy’s first advice on the Dos and Don’ts of being a superhero. That’s not even mentioning Wally had experienced that fact first hand last weekend. It’s not fun being chewed out like you’re some inexperienced rookie that only makes things worst… Never mind that he was a rookie.

Then he had to factor in that his Pop-pop was there and probably on the case. Things were tense in the West household for understandable reasons. His grandfather was all work these days…

“I don’t know…”

“Wallace.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Wallace Rudolph West,” Lin’s tone was very strict. He hated that tone. She was about to convince him to do something he’d regret… Nevertheless, he wouldn’t give up without a fight.

“I never told you my middle name.”

“Oh,” her smile was completely innocent. She stole one of his fries and popped it into her mouth. “Your mom and I had a lovely chat when I called your house last weekend to see if you were home. She was happy to hear all about her little Wally adjusting to a new school and that he had a nice girl to rely on. We just chatted. I talked about my mom and Julie Madison. She promised to show me baby pics whenever you grow up and invite me over. Your middle name got mentioned somewhere. It's all a blur. You know how it is. Girl talk.”

The girl was pure evil. Evil incarnate. A goddess of mischief in the flesh of a cute teen girl.

“You knew I had training…”

“I know a lot about you now such as a mole – “

“Get your camera, I’ll clean up.”

It was good to be back in Central City. True, Wally had been born and raised in Keystone but many weekends and holidays were Central City occasions. He knew this city. It was his. Best of all, it had an actual winter. Back in Coast City, he’d been in shorts and flip flops. Here, his breath fogged in front of his lips. Lin had already made him run back so she could pick up a jacket and pants before she froze to death. For all her cleverness, she forgot that it was supposed to be cold in places other than California.

Green and blue lightning sparked off his uniform. His ring picked up police chatter saying that Walker was heading towards Ruby Bridge. Wally’s heart jumped a little when he heard his Pop-pop’s voice. The barricades were failing as they always did to stop Walker’s tricked out car and the Flash had a bigger threat to deal with across the way. They were trying to cordon off all other avenues, leading the criminal into the other city where the Scarlet Speedster would be nearer.

“You know the plan?”

“Yeah, lead him towards the river,” Wally recited by rote. Not that he had any intention of following that direction. He would stop the trickster before they reached that point if he could safely. “I’ll be back in a flash.”

“Nerd.”

Wally smiled and vanished in emerald light.

Central City
Walker was five or six years older than Wally he thought. Either way, his life hadn’t changed all that much since he became the original Flash’s first collar. Older, deadlier, more at odds with the MAN and the world. Anarchy, baby. Wally phased his way into the passenger seat.

“What the f–“

Wally’s punch to the side of the face shut him up.

“Language.”

God, Walker had a horrible fashion sense – says the guy who had multiple uniforms of various shades of blue and green and anything inbetween. The yellow jacket had seen better days. His striped blue and white shirt was freshly pressed though. And damn, his hair looked ridiculous with that undercut featuring black streaks. This guy… This guy knew he wanted to be a supervillain even if he was a joke.

Something jabbed Wally’s lower half after Walker pressed a button on the steering wheel. He felt it bend and break. Kinda made sitting uncomfortable.

“Did you seriously install spikes in the cushions?”

“How’d you little cu –“

Another punch.

“I said language.” Wally gave him another punch that drew a bit of blood and caused Axel to swerve into a trashcan that flew back over the hood, hitting the police cruiser chasing them. Oops.

“There’s a proper sequence of events. I ask you to turn yourself in – “

“Fuck y – “

“Thought so.” Wally pointed left. “Turn here. Ruby Bridge is not where you want to go. At all. Two cities worth of SWAT teams and the other Flash are there.”

Axel glanced over. “Seriously?”

“I could catch you at any second so why would I lie?” Wally leaned heavily into the other man, forcing him to turn the wheel in reflex and head down an empty road. “Now, you see, my goal is to get you stop on your own. You know the CCPD goes easier on you when you do.”

“I have a rep. Can’t.”

“Yeah… about that…” Another heavy lean from Wally channeling his Lantern powers forced Axel to take another turn he didn’t desire. Damn. He could see the river ahead. Lin was getting what she wanted but these were the only empty roads and alleys. His ring picked up the patrol car signals and barricades. He wanted to avoid those just in case Walker had something worse still left in his bag of tricks.

“You little…”

The waterfront was straight ahead. Pedal to the floor, Walker picked up speed and pushed another button. Strange silly putty exploded out of the dash from where the airbag was supposed to be. The smell was grosser than catsick. Wally tried not to gag as it spread over his abdomen, entrapping his arms. Vibrating and phasing through it wasn’t working. Not a good sign.

Walker laughed and yet another button made multiple seatbelts erupt out like whips from behind Wally, encircling him, tightening against him, attempting to choke him. Okay. Had to give credit when it was deserved… this was a pretty decent death trap.

“Don’t worry,” Walker comforted him, unlocking his door and grabbing his backpack off loot, “it’ll dissolve any minute now.” He opened the door. They were nearly to the river. “Blows to be you, you little cocksucker, the compound breaks down into acid. No more late night fapping in your future.”

Walker jumped out of the moving vehicle as it careened over the edge. Strangely, he took off skipping across the water without a worry in a world, going in the opposite direction of all the things Wally had warned him about. Thaaaat was a rookie mistake. He’d own up to it.

Now to wait as the car filled with water. He didn’t even bother to breathe deeply before he was submerged…

A green and blue blur stopped Walker in his tracks. He glanced back to bubbling water hundreds of feet behind him. “How?”

“Flash of Central City,” Wally pointed towards the shore, “not invulnerable.” He pointed to himself. “Flash of Coast City… mostly invulnerable. Thought you understood that when the chair spikes didn’t work.”

Walker ran directly towards the closest boat. Wally was already there with his arms crossed.

“Cool shoes but as you can see, I don’t need them.”

“You c—“

Wally’s uppercut sent him flying up into the air and then splashing into the river. It was an interesting sinking effect to observe. Walker’s feet didn’t move all that much. His upper body, however, began falling under until he was standing on the surface of the water except from below.

That was new.

In an instant, Wally had him out of the frigid river and back onto shore, zooming past Lin with her camera and her smirk. He delivered the wily trickster with his bag off loot straight to the nearest CCPD precinct all tied up. For good manners, he stripped Walker of his soaking clothes so that he wouldn’t catch a cold and left a note taped to his chest:

Gift wrapped by the new, improved, and more handsome Flash.

Coast City, The Next Day

Big Belly Burger… Again.

Wally reread the article for the fifth time with a sinking feeling that had nothing to do with the salad Lin had bought for him.

“…I’m trending.” This was not heroing.

“You should totally let me create official Twitter and Instagram accounts for you,” she smiled angelically when he handed her back her phone. “And Tumblr. You have a ton of fans already. Fangirls too.” There was a flicker of a scowl across her features as she said that last bit. “I know someone who can make it completely untraceable.”

He didn’t have a reply. His mind was too focused on what would happen if Guy found out about this. And he would. If not from Jessica then from Kyle who had quickly become a friendly contributor to Watchtower with his art. Wally wouldn’t get any rest during their next training session now. It’d be all threats of burying him to his neck in sand and dirt until he could make a construct larger than a football.

Lin watched his crestfallen face closely before leaning over the table to give him a kiss on a non-ketchup stained cheek.

“Hashtag Flashlighting,” she whispered in his ear.

Unnamed Moon, Sector 2814
The barren moon stretched out as far as the eye could see, featuring hills, valleys, and the occasional crater except in the one direction John was looking. Beneath him, hidden within one of those very same craters, was an extremely old factory that had undergone recent renovation. It had strange curvature to its construction that fascinated the Green Lantern at a professional level. In theory, it was originally an entirely autonomous facility that had no living beings manning it. His experience – study back on Earth and recent knowledge gained by exploring the far ranges of the galaxies – made this quite the exception.

Machines had no need for beauty. Everything was done for a reason. That meant the efficiency of angles, of hard lines, of other designs that represented strength and durability. Robots had no desire to come off the assembly line and appreciate unique architecture. Stylish.

It was a marvel to behold. He filed it away to try his hand at drawing up the blueprint when he got back home.

“Sweetie,” a voice came out of John’s ring, streaming directly into his ear via the then comm-link line he designed, “when you explained your Terran concept of a honeymoon, I expected relaxing days of Tamaraneans in barely any clothing giving us deep tissue massages or handing over our rings to spend our nights gambling on Ogyptu only to stay awake until morning and watch the sun rise over the desert. I did not picture it investigating an abandoned Manhunter base.”

Through the scope of his rifle, John watched his wife – it sent a tingle up his spine to think of her as that when barely a day ago, Mogo had escorted her down the aisle – stealthily making her way down the crater’s edge opposite of him. Katma was the best at this. She could throw Gardner on his ass without him knowing what hit him. And she had at the reception to the laughs of all. Invisible to the naked eye. She should be invisible to him too but something happened between two users of the Emotional Spectrum that allowed them to sense each other. Nobody knew why. The Guardians refused to explain it. According to Tomar-Re, the forbidden thesis papers written by Atros of Ryut held some of the answers but they had been outlawed for whatever reason. The Guardians refused to explain that too.

He could just barely make the outline on the moonface as she scrambled down, keeping her energy close so as to not be detected if this place wasn’t quite as empty as it was supposed to be.

“I’ve never been able to go on a mission with you before,” he explained for the third time since they had snuck off Mogo with only Katma kissing Sinestro’s cheek goodbye and asking him to handle the rest, “all our romantic rendezvous were in the bedroom, watching a supernova, seeing a sunrise over a frozen vista that happened once every two thousand years… We’ve never actually worked together. It’s something new. Potentially exciting.”

He had willed a cloak into creation over all his body, leaving only the barest of hints of his rifle barrel exposed as scooped up moon dust transformed him into an indistinguishable mound on the surface. How he would have loved to have been able to be this imperceptible during his last tour in Kahndaq. No sniper’s perch was perfect but this one came pretty damn close.

“Bored of me already?”

“It’s not that…”

Katma had made it to the crater base, silently entering the unmanned building. Focusing, he switched his scope to see through the walls and keep track of her progress. Everything he had heard about the Manhunters – mostly stories about stories – said they were efficient, unrelenting. Their factories would hollow out whatever asteroid, moon, or planet they were on until there was nothing more. And then they would move onto the next planet, making more. This place still had resources galore beneath them as detected by their rings. It had been switched off long before it could come close to reaching its maximum potential.

Until someone supposedly started it back up.

He saw the robots hanging there. Just hanging. John panned his scope over the rest of the building for the fifth or sixth time. Still no life signs.

“Check for DNA markers.”

“This is not my first rodeo,” Katma replied dryly with the colloquialism she had to have picked up from Jordan. She risked a deep scan, the green light from her ring quickly encompassed all the surfaces, from the ceiling to the floor, from the unfinished Manhunters to those hanging on racks above, “Spider Guild, as expected and… huh.”

“What did you find?” he watched her trail a finger over the open chest piece of one of machines.

“Krolotean. This… This makes no sense. They deal with genetic modification, not robotic. And the insides have been hollowed out as if someone is meant to pilot these.

“Exosuits?”

“Experimental. I’m seeing multiple designs for all body types.” she found a computer interface her ring quickly bypassed the security for. “This is strange. There are files for nanomachines that can grant enhanced strength, durability, regeneration…”

Her emotions spiked between their bond as he felt her surprise.

“Some of this is Kryptonian design. That’s impossible.”

“Kryptonian?”

“Dead planet, dead race. Highly advanced yet somehow the epitome of stupidity.”

“Arrogant people that wouldn’t work with a criminal guild and tiny gremlins you mean.”

“Exactly.”

His ring pinged a warning at the same time as Katma’s. She’d set off an alarm while investigating deeper into the Kryptonian connection. Immediately, he scanned the horizon for any incoming craft while Katma put a hand to the floor, sending out some scanning of her own that he didn’t know how to copy. That’s what happened when he only played Weekend Lantern. He missed out on all the best tricks.

“What’s the play?” she was technically his superior. He knew how to follow the chain of command.

“Manhunters or Krolotean, shoot ‘em all and let dogs sort them out – “

“The phrase is ‘god’ sort them out.”

“Not according to Natu.” Something began to crawl out of grates from the factory’s floor. “Guild, leave one alive. They’ll usually turn on each other and we might be able to find out more.”

John took aim at the first head that poked itself above ground, his targeting reticle focused on the lean face with twin horns sticking out. “I thought we normally tried to take them alive?”

“Manhunters and their allies are an exception.” Invisibly, she moved quickly away from the computer to hide. “The universe doesn’t need these emotionless monsters unleashed again. It always goes wrong.”

That’s how it always went. Never trust the robotic overlords. John fired, the green bullet flying in such a perfect line that it’d be impossible for any real rifle to be that accurate straight through a wall. The Krolotean took the shot right between its three pupiled eyes. He pulled back on the bolt – the classics were reliable – and fired again. Another perfect shot. Another dead Krolotean.

He took aim at another grate. Distantly, his mind rejected this necessity. Kroloteans were small creatures, child-sized. Automatically, he made that connection and had to will himself to overcome the hesitation, reject the urge to protect. Size was no indicator of innocence after all in a universe that came in all shapes. Better to think of them as sallow skinned demons.

Three more fell to his shots. A sixth and seventh were taken by one squeeze of the trigger. It was about that time that Katma took action. Her buzzsaw constructs sawed through the Manhunter racks, dropping them on the swarming gremlins below. A well thrown green grenade turned it into an explosion.

That was his chance to find a different perch. His cloak vanished into the ether and the gray dust from the moon slid down his shoulders. A mad dash took him to a boulder just on the edge of the crater more than four dozen feet away. A dash he had to make while keeping his aura going if he wished to continue breathing. He slid to a halt behind it. Never had he felt so out in the open but thankfully his wife had the scale faced aliens focused on her.

It was a readymade perch that John had prepared beforehand for this very purpose. All he needed to do was think of a drill to bore the last bit of hollow out the other side. He willed a long barreled rifle into existence and stuck it through the hole. Yet another trick he wished he had back on his last tour. The X-ray scope really helped matters.

Katma had it handled below. Weak blaster bolts bounced off her shield. She returned fire with rapid intensity before vanishing invisibly behind pieces of wreckage to find another place to pop out and scatter more green energy.

His shots were far more precise. He picked the Gremlins climbing up the walls, watching them fall onto bodies below. Fire, pull back the bolt, fire again. One was getting a bead on Katma from an angle that he couldn’t cover. The barrel extended and curled. Didn’t change a goddamn thing. Another perfect headshot.

Before he could say you’re welcome, he felt himself being yanked off his feet to stare in the face of his nightmares. That was one big spider with big mandibles and big… big everything. His skin crawled. Childhood trauma flared fresh into his memory. His aura flickered, the rifle disappeared.

So the Spider Guild was made up of giant, sentient, alien spiders. That probably should have been a more pertinent question than inquiring about the Kryptonians.

Deep breaths… focus. He was a grown man. He was a married man with a wife who needed him watching her back. He faced his fear. A combat knife fit perfectly in his hand. He stabbed and stabbed, yellowish, gooey blood covering him. The giant spider screamed and John kept stabbing until all that was left was a twitching mass of far too many legs.

His heart raced from a combination of exhilaration, adrenalin, and the remnants of fear. He clambered back to his perch to check back on Katma. She was already hovering over it, her twin bangs framing her smirk.

“You’re terrified of arachnids.”

John cleaned the disgusting blood off him.

“That’s adorable,” she taunted.

He scowled as the goo stuck to his fingers.

“I seem to recall ordering that we keep one alive…”

“Reflex,” he muttered.

Katma leaned forward for a kiss before thinking better of it. “It’s fine. I caught a couple.”

Behind her floated up two members of the Spider Guild with all their legs shackled and entrapped in the signature Green Lantern bubble. His skin crawled just watching them squirm.

“It’ll be a fun flight back to the Science Cells.” Her grin was almost exactly like Sinestro’s. “I don’t suppose you want to carry one?”

To prove that he could, his ring claimed one of the bubbles while he kept his silence.

“We could have gone to Tamaran…”