Supergirl's Sacrifice, page 15
And something inside Kara Zor-El broke in that moment.
She’d been sent to Earth with one mission, one task: To protect her baby cousin, Kal-El. A glitch in the plan had seen her in suspended animation in the Phantom Zone for years, and by the time she’d arrived on Earth, baby Kal-El was already a grown man, renowned the world over as a hero.
But still—she was supposed to protect him, and now she’d just watched as that beast from the antiverse slapped him like a gnat. Her cousin. Superman.
“No. Freaking. Way,” she growled.
J’Onn had already slackened his grip on her. It was easy enough to slip out of his grasp. She poured on the speed, flying straight toward Anti-Matter Man.
“Kara!” J’Onn yelled, and flew after her.
“No one hurts my family while I’m around! And you especially don’t get to hurt Superman!” She didn’t know if she was talking to J’Onn or to Anti-Matter Man. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to stand by as Superman rose from his deathbed, only to be smacked down again. Nope.
Anti-Matter Man sensed her coming. Maybe it was the perturbation of the winds caused by her flight. Maybe it was just his ability. She didn’t know. He turned toward her, focusing those enormous eyes in her direction. His expression did not change at all. It was impassive and emotionless. Remorseless.
If you’re just a thing, I will break you, she thought. And if you’re alive . . . I’ll kill you.
32
“Now, look, there’s no need to do anything foolish,” Ohiyesa said, his voice rock-steady and very calm.
Cisco had the impression that this wasn’t the first time the sheriff had had a gun pointed at his head.
For that matter, it wasn’t the first time Cisco had had a gun aimed at him. But he couldn’t find it in him to be so unperturbed. It was a gun.
“I’m not in the habit of doing foolish things, Sheriff.” The woman’s voice betrayed no nervousness or agitation. She might have been asking him to pass the salt at dinner. Did they pass the salt in the Old West? Cisco wondered, then snapped himself out of it.
She went on: “But I’m also not in the habit of letting the long arm of the law dictate to me. I can’t let you stop me from getting back to Mesa City.”
“And I can’t let you get there,” Ohiyesa said mildly. “You stole from the Clanton family back in Elkhorn. If I let you get away with that, they’re gonna take away my star. And then I go back to being called ‘Pow-Wow’ Smith.”
“That seems kinda racist,” Curtis commented.
“The past is not a good time to be a person of color in this country,” Cisco added.
Curtis snorted. “Wake me up when it is.”
Cisco pondered that for about half a second. “Good point.”
Ohiyesa shrugged with a casualness that belied his situation. “White people,” he said with a What are you gonna do? tone in his voice.
“White people,” Cisco and Curtis agreed in sync.
“Hey!” the woman shouted.
“No offense!” Cisco said hurriedly. She did still have a gun trained on him, after all.
“I’m not talking about that!” she exclaimed. “But in case you haven’t noticed, I’m the one with the guns. Typical men—not taking a woman seriously even though she’s in the position of power.”
“Man, when did the Wild West become so woke?” Cisco asked.
“I’m going to need your horse, Sheriff,” the woman went on, ignoring him. “Seeing’s how you were inconsiderate enough to shoot mine out from under me. And then I’ll tie you all up. But don’t worry—I’ll let the folks in Mesa know you’re here.”
“That’s mighty kind of you,” Ohiyesa said, “but by the time you get there and let them know, we’ll be dead.”
“Maybe,” she said, and shrugged.
“I’ve never known Madame .44 to kill a lawman,” Ohiyesa said.
Madame .44? Cisco couldn’t suppress a frisson of excitement. That was such a Wild West name.
“You’re not giving me much of a choice,” Madame .44 told him, and jabbed the gun at him threateningly. “You should have stayed back in Elkhorn and just let me go on my way.”
“Well, like I said—the people of Elkhorn frown on their lawmen letting crooks get away with robbery, grand theft, and the like.”
“Your dedication is admirable,” Madame .44 admitted. “I hope they put it on your tombstone.”
“As long as it doesn’t say ‘Pow-Wow,’” Ohiyesa said.
While the two of them were talking, Curtis and Cisco had been swapping a series of gestures, eyebrow movements, and flicks of their eyes in certain directions. Cisco was pretty sure he understood the plan and it made sense. It should work.
Then again, the last plan he’d made that should have worked had sent him here. So who knew?
Still, a criminal in any era was a criminal, period. And he was a superhero. So . . .
“Look!” Curtis shouted.
Madame .44’s lower face was covered by the bandanna, but Cisco thought he detected a smirk from the way her eyes narrowed and crinkled. “How stupid do you think I am?”
“What in the—?” Ohiyesa gasped.
That made Madame .44 turn just the slightest bit to her left. There, gently pulsating, a breach undulated between her and the copse of trees, its blue light wavering. Cisco’s forehead furrowed with the effort of the breach. He couldn’t just make a breach without knowing where it led, and this one was headed straight to the Grand Canyon. So great a distance, though, took its toll on him. Sweat began to gather at his hairline. He wasn’t sure how long he could maintain this.
“Go,” he said to Curtis. “Now.”
Mr. Terrific bounced off the balls of his feet, launching himself at Madame .44 while she was distracted. He shouldered her with a perfect body check, knocking her to one side. At the same time, he stiff-armed her right hand, knocking her aim askew to protect Cisco and grab the wrist of the other hand, the one pointing a gun at Ohiyesa.
That hand jerked and her finger tightened on the trigger. Curtis braced himself for the report of a gunshot, but nothing happened. Just a dry click. Misfire. They’d gotten lucky.
The plan called for him to knock her into the breach, but just as they toppled toward it, it shrank into a bright pinprick of light and vanished. In the same instant, Cisco cried out in pain and frustration.
“Sorry!” he gasped. “Couldn’t maintain it!”
Madame .44 crashed to the ground with Mr. Terrific on top of her. He pinned her down, holding both her arms away from her so that she couldn’t aim her guns. Ohiyesa stepped over to them and bent down, prying the weapons from her hands.
“Well, well,” said the sheriff, standing over her. “Madame .44, the Outlaw Queen. This looks like the end of your reign, Your Majesty.”
33
Chinese seismologists in Beijing couldn’t believe their eyes—according to their instruments, a 2.1 magnitude earthquake had just broken out in the Nepalese mountains. Just as quickly as it had begun, it subsided.
No one knew that what their instruments had detected wasn’t actually an earthquake. It was the crash impact of Superman’s invulnerable body smashing into Mount Everest at roughly two thousand miles per hour.
The impact crater erupted, a gash measuring nearly as wide as a football field. In the center of it, the Man of Steel did not move as an avalanche, triggered by his collision, dumped more than two tons of snow on him.
Kara had never measured her speed against J’Onn’s. She’d always suspected that he was just a tiny bit faster than she was, but she had a head start and the potent fuel of determination. He was yelling at her telepathically, urging her to stop, to retreat, to make a plan with him, but she was beyond listening. And she had a plan.
Anti-Matter Man’s reaction to Kal’s heat vision had been to lash out. Clearly, the heat vision had hurt the creature. Now that she knew how fast it could move and that it could grow beyond its already enormous height, she had the workings of a strategy.
She glided to a stop just outside the creature’s reach and fired off her heat vision at Anti-Matter Man’s shoulder. Before Anti-Matter Man could react, she shot ten feet to the left and forty feet straight down, then—as Anti-Matter Man lashed out where she’d been a second ago—exhaled a super-cold blast of breath at the same spot where she’d used her heat vision.
What are you doing? J’Onn asked, hovering out of reach.
Alternating extremes of hot and cold, she told him, dodging Anti-Matter Man again and zapping his shoulder with heat vision for the second time.
I see. Rapidly switching between attack methods could confuse his defenses.
Exactly.
Good idea. I’m very proud of you.
Kara couldn’t grin because she was puckering up for another run with her super-breath, swinging in a high arc over Anti-Matter Man, her eyes locked on her target—his left shoulder. She inhaled deeply—
Kara! Look out!
What—?
Pain lanced through her body, fire unlike anything she’d ever felt before, and a squeezing, crushing pressure like being buried under a mountain range. She’d been so focused on Anti-Matter Man’s left shoulder that she’d neglected to keep an eye on his right arm, and he’d reached out and snagged her out of the sky like a fielder shagging a pop-up. She screamed involuntarily with the sheer agony of it. It was a pain worse even than kryptonite. As though all the fires of Rao had centered on her. She was an exploding sun.
Kara! J’Onn swooped in a circle, building up speed.
No! she thought to him. Stay . . . back . . . ! Even thinking hurt. She could feel her flesh burning, could smell her hair as the ends of it exploded where it brushed against Anti-Matter Man’s thumb.
Brainy had predicted this moment. No, predicted was the wrong word. He had known. As a little boy on Colu, he’d read in a book (or had had implanted in his memory by a computer) some dry historical fact: Oh, and then there was the day Anti-Matter Man came to Earth and killed Supergirl. This will not be on the test.
The pain made her brain do crazy things. She couldn’t get the thought of little boy Brainy, wearing shorts and a T-shirt that said I MOTHERBOARD, out of her mind. A little green-blue alien computer boy, stowing away that factoid for the one time in history it would actually be useful.
And she hadn’t listened.
All of a sudden, she experienced a great and powerful peace. Even as her skin began to smolder, a wave of comprehension washed over her.
This was the day.
This was the day she was to die. And she understood that. And she knew, in a blinding moment of clarity, what that meant.
I’m so sorry, Uncle Jor and Aunt Lara: I won’t be able to watch over your son anymore.
She wept but shed no tears—they were wicking away and evaporating instantly in the heat of the fires erupting around her.
I’m sorry, Mother. I have to go be with Father now.
Kara? It was J’Onn. Eavesdropping on her thoughts. That was OK. She didn’t mind. Someone should know her last words, her last thoughts.
It’s going to be OK, J’Onn. I know what to do.
With that, she curled herself into as tight a ball as she could manage within Anti-Matter Man’s grasp. She held in her breath for a moment, allowing herself only to feel. Transcending the pain, she felt the strength of his massive hand around her body, felt the power coursing through.
Felt the weak points.
Anti-Matter Man was enormous and powerful, true, but he’d been built by his creators on a human framework. That meant that he had relatively weak points, just like a human being would. His fingers, for example, were weaker at the joints.
Kara whispered a prayer to Rao and then thrust out her arms and legs at the same time, aiming for those finger joints. Anti-Matter Man’s grip slackened just enough that she spilled free, dropping out of his grasp and zipping out of arm’s reach for a moment.
J’Onn was on the other side of Anti-Matter Man. He couldn’t get to her in time, not without coming dangerously close to Anti-Matter Man’s grasp.
Kara! Gods of Mars . . .! Get back to the workshop! Let Brainy—
She must have looked pretty bad for J’Onn to swear by the Martian gods.
It’s OK, J’Onn. I know what to do.
Her lips set in a grim line, Kara pulled away from Anti-Matter Man, putting some distance between them. The creature’s head swiveled toward her, then back to J’Onn, the closer threat.
“Don’t even think of hurting him!” she shouted. “I’m not done with you!”
If Anti-Matter Man heard or understood, he gave no indication. He reached out for J’Onn, who nimbly dodged. But just barely.
It was time.
Time for her to do what only she could do. She was the only one left who could stop Anti-Matter Man. Even though it would mean sacrificing . . . everything.
Say goodbye for me, J’Onn.
Although every inch of her body ached and screamed in agonized protest, Kara thrust her fists forward and zoomed toward Anti-Matter Man at top speed.
Alex had been right. Sometimes, you just had to hit something.
In the Himalayas, the snow from the avalanche finally settled into place, resting in placid, pure white heaps as though nothing else had ever been there.
• • •
Kara sped toward Anti-Matter Man, who was momentarily distracted by J’Onn, who darted and flitted around, shape-shifting into various forms as he did so, baffling the creature’s senses.
It felt as though every cell—every atom—in her body was combusting. At her speed, it took no more than a second to reach Anti-Matter Man.
But her mind moved faster than her body. She thought of all she would leave behind: Her mother, on Argo. Her adoptive mother, in Midvale. Her sister and her friends . . . James and Lena and J’Onn and everyone else. And Kal, of course, who would have to carry on, who would continue being the world’s greatest hero. Because he wasn’t capable of anything less.
Wind blew her tears away.
Rao, guide me.
Kara! J’Onn thought to her. Break off ! Get back!
No! There’s one thing we still haven’t tried!
What?
She grinned despite what was about to happen. Everything!
Anti-Matter Man turned away from J’Onn suddenly, spotting her there, almost atop him. It was too late. For all his power, for all his speed, nothing could stop her now.
With all the strength in her body, with all her considerable velocity behind her, she plowed straight into Anti-Matter Man’s chest at ten times the speed of sound.
I love you all, she thought. And then: Youngest Wheeler-Nicholson winner in history. Not bad.
Her skin ignited again. The world exploded around her. J’Onn’s scream drowned in a welter of eruptions and the sound of Anti-Matter Man’s chest caving in. It sounded like concrete in a blender.
It wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t be enough. He was too powerful.
So she did everything.
And unleashed her Super Flare.
J’Onn watched, horrified, as it happened.
He’d been telepathically linked to Kara as she made her suicide run. He knew what she planned to do. And he’d had a split-second image of the Super Flare—bright and yellow-blue—in her mind just before she actually released it.
Super Flare. The ultimate Kryptonian superpower. Kara had expended the totality of her solar-fueled power in a single, mind-numbingly forceful burst of energy. In that instant, she would lose all her powers.
Including her invulnerability.
He went blind for a moment, staggered and teetering in the sky. When his vision cleared, he beheld a boiling, flaming hell suspended in the sky: a miasma of noisome, choking clouds and surges of fire bursting out in all directions.
Anti-Matter Man’s body had exploded from the inside, his entire structure igniting like fireworks. As his form rapidly dissolved into fire and smoke, J’Onn skipped back a hundred feet or so, beyond the range of the spurts of energy and heat. Anti-Matter Man was no more.
But at what cost? Superman, dead. And Kara . . .
He imagined her, in the middle of that explosion, her powers gone, drained away by the Super Flare . . .
Totally unprotected.
Now he beheld a small figure at the center of the storm.
Kara.
She was falling.
He flew forward. A bolt of black lightning, still crashing across the reddened sky, split the air in his path; he pulled up in barely enough time to avoid being fried by it. The air sizzled and went stale in its wake. J’Onn looked around again. The world was full of smoke, clouded and clotted.
And Kara was nowhere to be seen.
34
Barry looked up. Some distance behind him and quite a distance up, there’d been a massive BOOM that had rattled windows all around him and set off a surfeit of car alarms. He grabbed Oliver, who was nearby, leaning against a mailbox in exhaustion.
“Look!” He pointed to the horizon, above which blossomed a cloud of black smoke and fire.
“I see it,” Oliver told him, squinting into the distance. “A blind person could see it. It’s like another sun up there. Do you think that’s good news or bad news?”
“Good news!” Brainiac 5’s voice crackled over the comms channel. “They did it! We read diminishing quantities of antimatter in the sky!”
“We’re confirming via satellite,” Lena chimed in from the DEO. “The anti-matter decay effect has halted!”
Cheers went up at the DEO, so loud that Barry and Oliver could hear them over Lena’s comms.
“How did they do it?” Barry asked, running to one side to help a young girl and her pet hamster navigate the crowded sidewalk. People were still heading to the local school’s tornado shelter, even though he wasn’t sure that was necessary any longer.
“No idea.” It was Alex this time. “We lost contact with them early on. We’re trying to raise them, but there’s so much radiation and static in the atmosphere that we can’t get a lock—”
