Truly, the applause would be deafening.
Pocus’s lips twitched into a smile. Finally. Finally, he would enjoy the acclamation he so richly deserved. An entire city, subject to his whims, crying out his name, cheering his every action.
And perhaps, someday, when he tired of Central City, he would move on to a different city. He’d heard good things about Star City, which had a plethora of masked do-gooders he could control. And then another. And another. Someday, indeed, the whole world would know his name. Know it and scream it in joy at the top of its lungs! All he ever wanted. Crushing the dreams of his own master and taking his place . . .
A gasp from the crowd. Pocus looked up. There, upriver, a blur of scarlet and crackling yellow zipped across the river, hooked a sharp left-hand turn, and raced down the pier toward him.
“STOP!” Pocus commanded.
The blur resolved into the figure of the Flash, standing ten feet from Pocus. The crowd started booing.
Pocus allowed the booing to continue for a few more seconds, drinking in its delectability. As much as he enjoyed the Flash’s humiliation, though, he felt that a proper hero and savior should project a certain magnanimity, and so he raised both hands and bade the good people of Central City to cease their jeering.
Behind him, over the water, fireworks exploded into the night sky. The gathered crowd oohed and aahed as dread-locks of light spilled out of the sky and melded with their watery reflections.
He regarded the Flash with a cruel leer. It was too easy, he thought. Too easy to win this way. And yet he would take the comfortable victory. He took pleasure in the approbation of the crowd, not in the challenge of combat.
“PEOPLE OF CENTRAL CITY!” Pocus said, knowing his words would carry through the phones and the cameras to every corner of the city. “IT IS, TRULY, SO SAD WHEN A HERO FALLS! THE FLASH WAS ONCE YOUR SAVIOR, YOUR VERY OWN HOMEGROWN HERO. YET ALL FLESH EVENTUALLY ROTS. NOTHING GOOD LASTS.
“FORTUNATELY FOR YOU, I AM HERE! HOCUS—” He broke off and smiled to himself. “I AM HERE: ABRA KADABRA, YOUR NEW HERO!” The name sounded good and right to him. He liked the sound of it on his lips. It belonged to him. “I AM YOUR FAITHFUL AND POWERFUL BENEFACTOR. AND I WILL RESCUE YOU FROM THE CORRUPT, CORRODED REMAINS OF YOUR OLD ONE.”
He looked down on the Flash. “Are you ready?” he asked rhetorically, knowing the Flash couldn’t answer.
And then, to his shock, the Flash moved.
It was just a single step, but that was enough. One red-booted foot came up, hovered for an instant, then moved forward and planted itself on the pier. A step. One step.
“Impossible . . .” Pocus whispered.
The Flash took another step, just as slow, just as deliberate.
“I ordered you to stop!” Pocus howled. “Stop moving! Stop moving right now!”
But the Flash took one more step toward him. Then another.
“Stop it!” Pocus ranted, flushing purple with rage. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop moving! I command you!”
One more step, almost infinitely slow, but it was forward movement, and that—was—impossible!
With a strangled cry of outrage, Pocus pointed his wand at the Flash. “I command you!” he yelled, and fired a burst at his foe.
And then . . .
Well, then things happened really fast.
Suddenly, in a vermilion blur, there were two Flashes. One of them peeled off from the other, dodging to the left as the blast from Pocus’s wand closed in.
The second Flash stood completely still, and the zap from the wand hit him full-on. At that moment, the second Flash started to move.
Pocus realized in an instant what had happened. “Oh no!” he whispered in horror. “Oh no!”
24
Back at Star Labs, Cisco thumped his fist against the desk. “It worked!” he shouted. “It worked!”
Caitlin impulsively hugged H.R., who grinned and accepted it. “Nicely done, everyone,” he said. “Now it’s all about the speed again.”
At the pier, Barry wished he had a moment to exult in the fact that he was once again in control of his body, but even for the Flash, there was no time to spare. Their gambit had worked; Cisco’s gadget had worked; the plan had worked.
His plan.
Getting Pocus to blast him with the wand again seemed impossible; there was just no reason for the magician to do so. But then Barry realized—if Pocus could be made to think that the Flash had somehow thrown off his control, then maybe the magician would try to zap him again to reestablish dominance.
So he had Wally dress up in a fake Flash costume and blur his face. In that outfit, he looked just like the Flash, especially to those who didn’t know Barry or Wally personally. Then Wally followed Barry to the pier and phased, keeping pace with him as he ran. They were so fast that no one would notice.
When Pocus ordered Barry to stop, Wally did, too, staying phased and just slightly in front of Barry. And of course, Wally could move whenever he wanted.
When Pocus saw the person he thought was the Flash moving without permission, he freaked out. He panicked. And he did exactly what Barry hoped he would do: He fired off another blast of nanites designed to enslave the Flash once more.
That was the most dangerous part of the plan. If Wally jumped aside too soon, Pocus would realize he’d been fooled and hold off on the blast. If Wally jumped too late, he’d be hit by the nanites, and Pocus would have two speedster puppets to control.
Fortunately, Wally jumped at just the right time. The blast missed him and hit Barry, where it was captured and altered by Cisco’s unnamed gadget, which had been installed in the cowl of Barry’s Flash costume. The nanites in Barry’s thalamus instantly switched off, and he regained control of himself.
Barry grinned at the horrified expression on the magician’s face. “Presto changeo! Hey, Hocus Pocus! How’d you like that magic trick?”
Pocus’s answer was a snarl and a complicated motion with his wand. For about half the crowd, gravity stopped working.
Uh-oh, Barry thought.
After dodging Pocus’s blast, Wally had run at superspeed into the crowd and then started to make his way around to Pocus’s flank. He figured he and Barry could catch the magician between them, giving the guy nowhere to run.
But suddenly he was in the air, along with a few hundred other people, flailing his arms. They were already over the tree line. If they kept soaring up at this rate, they would be in the upper atmosphere in no time. Wally was pretty sure he could vibrate enough to maintain his body heat, but everyone else would freeze to death.
Well, if they didn’t suffocate first.
Cheerful thoughts.
“Kid Flash!” It was Barry, on his earpiece. “You OK?”
“Oh, sure, just ducky.” They were talking to each other at superspeed, so fast that only they could understand each other. The whole conversation would take perhaps a second. “How do I get down from here?”
“You don’t.”
“That’s comforting.” Wally’s casual tone belied the thrill of panic that made his heart play leapfrog. “I guess I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”
“The nanites he’s using to reverse gravity will wear off at some point,” Barry reminded him. “Your job is to keep everyone from drifting off and make sure they land safely when the time comes.”
With a heroic effort, Wally managed to contort himself and twist in midair to look around. The air was thick with panicking innocents—bodies thrashing and shaking. And rising. Hundreds of them.
“Got any suggestions on that?” he asked, rotating so that he could look down on the pier. The Flash was about to launch himself at Hocus Pocus.
“About to be busy,” Barry replied. “You’ll figure it out. Think hydrocarbon!”
“What?” Wally asked, but Barry had signed off already, ready to fight Hocus Pocus.
25
On the ground, Barry raced toward his foe. He had to stop Hocus Pocus at all costs, and it had to
be done now.
Before he got there, though, the magician whipped his wand in the air again. There was a crackle of electricity—that, for once, didn’t come from Barry—and a reek of ozone, and then the old, mothballed Ferris wheel a block or so up the river shook loose from its moorings and began rolling toward the end of the pier. There was no way the people in its path could move in time.
“This is your plan?” Barry yelled at Pocus. “To kill your audience?”
Pocus tossed off a single-shouldered shrug. “There are other cities. Other audiences.”
If he’d had a moment to pause and let the horror of that philosophy sink in, Barry would have taken it. But he would need every microsecond if he was to save everyone from that Ferris wheel.
He took off. The wheel was turning clockwise. Barry made some quick calculations in his head, estimating angular velocity and speed of rotation around an axis, and then he remembered that the nanites were in control, not physics, so he chucked the formulas out the window. The wheel was weaving a drunken path down the boardwalk, crushing anything before it. For now that meant planters and park benches and the occasional trash can, but pretty soon it would mean people.
Nope. Not on my watch.
He considered a few different ideas: He could rip up part of the boardwalk and let the increased friction slow down the wheel. But that might not be fast enough. The wheel might plow on through anyway or fall over on someone. And besides—with Pocus controlling it, the wheel might just keep going.
He contemplated the river. Could he run fast enough and with enough precision to whip up a waterspout that would knock the wheel off course? It was theoretically possible—and had the added advantage of looking very cool—but he didn’t think it would work in practice. Getting the spout to “jump” from the river to the pier with enough force would be difficult, if not impossible.
So he got to the Ferris wheel and, without thinking it through, ran up its side counterclockwise. Once he was at the wheel’s apex, he slowed down just enough so that his velocity matched that of the wheel, running in the same direction.
This wasn’t a question of complicated math. It was actually pretty simple: The wheel was moving at X speed forward, and Barry was running on it like a treadmill at X speed as well. He was running forward, but his feet were moving the wheel in the opposite direction—like a logroller. Running forward pushed the wheel backward, which meant he canceled out all of its forward momentum.
In other words, the Ferris wheel stopped dead in its tracks. It teetered there, like an egg standing on its wider end.
Barry permitted himself a brief grin and moment of self-congratulation. He was in control again. Saving people again.
He started running faster, and the wheel began rolling back toward its original location. He looked up, checking for Wally, and smiled at what he saw.
Hydrocarbon, Wally knew, was a compound of hydrogen and carbon. He knew it well from his days as a street racer, because it was a primary component of oil and gasoline. He didn’t think Barry wanted him to rev up an engine, though.
The other thing he knew about hydrocarbon: It formed a chain, the atoms of hydrogen and carbon interlinked like this:
Or, more graphically, like this:
That’s what Barry was getting at: a chain. A human chain.
Wally couldn’t walk or run while floating upward, but he could move laterally by kicking his legs fast enough to create friction that resulted in propulsion. It was almost like swimming in the air, only not nearly as graceful. He sort of looked like a toddler trying to walk for the first time, kicking and lashing out with all his limbs, but it worked—he was able to get to the person closest to him and grab her hand.
The woman looked at him with sheer terror in her eyes. “My son!” she managed to say through lips stretched wide in a rictus of horror.
“I’ve got him,” Kid Flash assured her. He reached up and grabbed the kid’s ankle, pulling him down until the mother could grab it, too. “Hold on tight, OK?”
“We’re gonna die!” she said.
“Not on my watch,” he promised her.
The wind roared just then, as though to mock him. Wally gritted his teeth against the buffeting gusts. They were more than a hundred feet up, way above the tree line. The air was already colder, or maybe that was just his imagination. Either way, he wasn’t about to let this woman or her son or any of the others sailing up to the stratosphere die.
He kicked some more and stretched out to his utmost, barely snagging the hand of a man in a business suit who was screaming in a high, trembling voice barely audible over the wind. Wally tugged the man, spinning him around. Without gravity, moving people was both easier and harder at the same time. No one weighed anything, but they still had mass and area, so it wasn’t like slinging around feathers; it took strength and muscle and work. There were wind resistance and friction to consider, too.
Barry probably had all the formulas memorized in his cache of handy-dandy Flash Facts, but Wally would just have to go on gut instinct.
He’d always been pretty good at gut instinct. His gut had kept him alive in situations where he probably should have died.
With a combination of kicking at superspeed and windmilling his arms, he propelled himself through the air like some sort of spasmodic kite caught in a windstorm. It was difficult, so it took him almost a full minute, moving at his best speed, to get to all of the hundreds of people floating above the pier and get them to grab one another’s hands, elbows, ankles, feet, and shoulders in order to form a human chain. With everyone’s light sticks and bracelets glowing, it looked like a brand-new constellation lighting up the sky.
He was exhausted, but his job wasn’t over yet. Below, he could see that Barry had managed to stop the Ferris wheel, and then—in a feat so mind-boggling that even Wally was blown away—run it backward along its path like the world’s biggest hamster wheel, until it settled back into the grooves of its original framework.
If he can do that, I can do this!
Wally had saved a big, strong-looking guy for last. He positioned the guy toward the center of the big human loop he’d created, then had a grandmother-looking type grab the big guy’s ankles. He spared a half second to smile at her reassuringly. “You can do this,” he told her.
“I raised five kids and ten grandkids,” she snapped. “Worry about yourself.”
Wally was so shocked, he didn’t even laugh. He drifted up (or fell downward, depending on how you look at it) until he hovered just over the group, then told the big guy to grab his ankles.
“And whatever you do,” he said, “don’t let go! Otherwise, everyone’s gonna keep falling up until they hit the ionosphere, and then things get radioactive and ugly.”
The big guy gulped and clamped his hands around Wally’s ankles like giant lobster claws.
Kid Flash was exhausted from his aerial maneuvers, but he knew that was only the first part of his task. Now he had to keep everyone from floating off into space.
He raised his arms above his head and started pinwheeling as fast as he could. Twin tornadoes whipped into existence, pointed upward.
Wally gritted his teeth. Sweat gathered on his brow and dripped along his cheeks. As long as he could keep the air moving above them, the people chained up to each other would stay in a sort of stasis, not rising, not falling.
If he stopped, they would all fly up into the upper atmosphere and be obliterated.
26
The Flash sighed with relief as the Ferris wheel jittered into place beneath him. His legs ached with the effort of running the multiton ring of metal back to its moorings. He used a hundredth of a second to glance up and smile. Wally had come through, just as Barry knew he would.
Pocus, clearly realizing that he was now outmatched, was pushing his way through the remaining crowd of people, who were scattering in a panic, making it tough to move forward. As Barry watched, Pocus fired off rounds from his wand, zapping people back ten or twelve feet at a time
.
Barry ran down the arc of the wheel and launched himself at full speed toward Pocus. As he did so, Barry dodged and weaved through the crowd, helping people move out of each other’s way as he went. A mother, jostled, dropped her baby. Her face was frozen in absolute fear as Barry ran by. He scooped up the baby before it could hit the ground, put it back in Mom’s arms, then gently straightened her out and pointed her in the safest direction.
He did this and helped a hundred other people in the seconds it took him to get to Hocus Pocus. The magician was trying to shove his way through a particularly tough knot of bystanders. When he realized that the Flash was headed his way, Hocus Pocus waved his wand in a circle over his head. A storm of flaming rocks appeared and rained down on the crowd. The Flash’s first instinct was to pull the old whirlwind trick, racing around in circles so that the rocks would end up suspended in midair until everyone down below had managed to get away.
But there were too many people running about in a panic for him to be able to build up the speed he needed. And those rocks were falling fast.
He cast about, looking for anything that could help, and his gaze fell on the Gardner River itself. Without missing a beat, he hopped over the railing that kept people from toppling off the boardwalk and started churning his legs. Soon, he’d kicked up a massive wave that rippled up and over the railing, then collided with the falling, burning rocks, extinguishing them.
People got wet, and a few had bumps on their heads, but no one was seriously injured. They seemed pretty appreciative, too—a nice round of applause spontaneously erupted, and Barry knew that it was genuine.
The acclamation was nice—especially after the last few days he’d had—but he didn’t pause to bask in it. Glancing around, he finally located Hocus Pocus, catching sight of the villain’s cape just as he disappeared through a door into . . .