Countdown (40 page)

“Wow.” Mary grinned at her victim. Her electrified hair settled back down over her shoulders. The azure sparks surrounding her svelte form slowly flickered away. “What an annoying pest!”

Jimmy stared in horror at Forager’s collapsed body. She was moving, at least, which meant she was still alive, but just how badly had Mary hurt her? Worse than Bernadeth back on Apokolips?

He couldn’t believe that it was really Mary Marvel who had done this.
She’s Captain Marvel
’.v
sister for Pete’s sake!
he thought.
It’s like Supergirl going bad!

“You’ve become a monster!” he accused her.

“Oh, whatever, Jimbo.” Turning her back on Forager, she strode calmly toward Jimmy. “It’s not like
I’m
going to kill you.” There was no trace of mercy in her eyes or voice. “Just hang tight until Darkseid finishes up with your pal, so
he
can kill you. Cool?”

Jimmy backed away fearfully.

“Not cool!”Donna Troy declared as she leapt down into the gorge. Her boots slammed into Mary’s back, smacking her facedown into the ground. Looking up in relief, Jimmy saw Jason Todd standing on the ridge above him. Jimmy guessed that Donna had flown him here. “Sorry not to get here sooner,” she apologized. “But you try keeping up with Superman!”

Mary threw Donna off her and clambered to her feet. She shook the grit from her hair as she faced off against Jimmy and his latest defenders. Her irate face was caked with powdered stone, but wasn’t even bruised. “You should’ve stayed out of this, Donna!”

“No way, Mary.” Donna raised her fists as she got between Mary and Jimmy. Jason scrambled down the side of the ridge to join them. “This is it. We tried to talk sense into you, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“Yeah, you’ve got this coming, bitch!” Jason added. Mary snickered. “You think you and the Boy Wonder there can take me down?” She wiped off her face and clapped the dust from her hands. “Okay, prove it!”

She charged at them with murder in her eyes.

Another
punch got past Darkseid’s defenses. Superman smiled grimly as the vainglorious New God went flying into a mountaintop several miles away. Solid granite shattered like glass, sending thunderous echoes through the wooded valley below. Superman’s super-hearing detected a stampede of panicked wildlife racing madly away from the hillside.
Good,
he thought.
There’s no need for any innocent animals to get hurt by this conflict.

Darkseid slid down the side of the peak before rising to face Superman again. Despite the hero’s best efforts, his foe seemed as arrogantly confident as ever. “That’s it,” Superman taunted him as he flew at Darkseid. “Get up. Keep fighting.” The wind whooshed past his ears as he aimed his bare fists at the villain’s skull. “I’m not ready to call it quits yet either!”

“I won’t deny I’ve found your moralistic petulance amusing,” Darkseid replied, his arms crossed boldly across his barrel chest. “But, frankly, this sort of rank barbarism is beneath me. I grow weary of it.” He yawned theatrically. ‘Time to put your interference to an end.”

Twin Omega Beams shot from his eyes. Soaring toward Darkseid, Superman braced himself for the agonizing touch of the death rays, but, at the last minute, the parallel beams suddenly executed a sharp turn, veering around Superman and heading back toward ... Jimmy!

Jimmy
gently eased Forager’s helmet off as he knelt beside her. To his relief, he found her breathing steadily.

Her multifaceted eyes fixed on his as she gradually regained consciousness. A trickle of turquoise blood escaped her lips. He placed his hand against her neck and tried to take her pulse. It seemed a bit rapid, but how was he supposed to know what was normal for her? She wasn’t exactly human after all....

/
don’t care,
he thought.
She’s the only good thing that’s happened to me since this whole mess began.

The blare of gunfire, as well as angry grunts and curses, rang out behind him. Despite his concern for Forager, he couldn’t resist glancing back over his shoulder at the heated battle going on only a few yards away, as Donna and Jason fought furiously to keep Mar}' away from him. Unfortunately, even though they outnumbered her two to one, they seemed to be losing ground at the moment; whatever Darkseid had done to Mary' had obviously amped up her powers to a frightening degree. Jason fired round after round of ammo into the indestructible super-vixen, while Mary grabbed on to Donna’s throat and yanked her off her feet, just like Captain Vyle had done to Jimmy in the slave pits of the Armagetto. He winced in sympathy. “Jeez. They don’t have a prayer, do they?”

“Jimmy?”

“Forager!” He temporarily forgot the fight as he turned back to his alien sweetheart. “You’re awake!” Placing one arm beneath her, he tenderly lifted her head from the ground. He felt a nasty bump beneath her silky purple hair. “Great, ’cause we gotta—”

“Jimmy!” she exclaimed. Her golden eyes looked past him at something above them. “Coming for you ...!’* His head pivoted in time to see Darkseid’s Omega Beams zipping toward him. Hoping to lure them away from Forager, he jumped to his feet and ran away from the sizzling scarlet rays as fast as he could. He zigzagged madly across the uneven terrain, trying to shake the beams, but they copied his every turn. “Yikes!” he shouted. “They’re following me!”

Forager tried to get up, but, lacking the strength, collapsed weakly back onto the ground. “Forgive me, my Olsenbug! There is no escape for you!”

A jagged stone cliff blocked his path. He frantically tried to scramble up the side of the ridge, but the loose gravel kept sliding out from beneath his feet. He fell, scraping his knee on a sharp-edged boulder. Blood soaked through the knee of his grimy coverall. “Ouch,” he yelped, but the pain was nothing compared to the excruciating agony that transfixed his body as the Omega Beams struck him from behind.

“No!” Forager cried out in despair. “JIMMY!”

He expected the souls of the New Gods to explode from his chest, leaving a smoking corpse behind, and yet, to his surprise, the intense pain was over in an instant. Jimmy stared down at himself in confusion, wondering why on Earth he was still alive. His skin tingled all over.

' “Huh?”    ”

A Boom Tube heralded the return of Darkseid, who teleported back into the gorge, only a few paces away from Jimmy. A moment later, Superman came flying back onto the scene. He looked equally baffled by Jimmy’s survival. His X-ray vision checked his friend out from head to toe.

“What have you done to him?” Superman demanded. “Nothing, really,” Darkseid said smugly. “I’ve merely unlocked the fail-safe I installed in him when I made him into my cosmic vessel.” He waved his hand at Jimmy, and a queasy feeling came over the perplexed reporter. “Say good-bye to your super friend, Olsen!”

Jimmy’s joints locked up. His pink skin took on a bright emerald hue, and a luminous green aura suddenly enveloped his body.

No!
he thought.
What are you doing to me now?
Superman gasped out loud and crashed to the earth, as though he had suddenly lost the ability to defy gravity. A sickly green pallor came over his face. Bulging veins protruded from beneath his skin as he writhed in torment on the rocky floor of the gorge.

Ohmigod!
Jimmy realized.
I’ve turned into kryptonite!

Superman tried to crawl away, but Darkseid casually zapped him in the back with his searing eye-beams. “Oh no, Kryptonian. You aren’t going anywhere.” He turned to smirk at Jimmy. “And neither are you, Olsen.”

His emerald brow furrowed in concentration, Jimmy strained to reverse the transformation, but without any success. Waves of killing radiation spilled from his body, making Superman weaker and weaker. He tried to get away from his friend, only to find himself frozen in place. An anguished grunt escaped his lips, but otherwise he couldn’t move a muscle.

“It’s useless to struggle,” Darkseid informed him. “I control you now.” His arms clasped behind his back, he strolled over to where Superman lay dying. “Besides, don’t you want to be at your dear friend’s side as he breathes his final breath?”

This is a nightmare,
Jimmy thought. Paralyzed, he could do nothing but stand by while Darkseid used him to execute the greatest hero on Earth. Jimmy didn’t want to die, but, at the moment, he would have gladly traded his own life, not to mention all his newfound superpowers, just for a chance to save his best friend.
Please, don’t let this happen!

Darkseid savored Jimmy’s misery. “There is nothing you can do, Olsen. Darkseid pilots you now and the controls are embedded deep within your very core....”

5 AND COUNTING.

< JIMMY’S BRAIN.

The
cerebellum, the “little brain,” was tucked away in the hindbrain, below the much larger cerebrum. Synapses sparked between clusters of neurons linked by branching dendrites and axons. Fatty layers of myelin protected the neural fibers, while pulsing veins and capillaries throbbed with every heartbeat. An eerie green radiance lit up a convoluted maze of grooves and folds leading through the cerebellum’s twin hemispheres. Overlapping lobes quivered like jelly. Dripping neurotransmitters smelled like brine. The temperature inside the brain was hot and feverish.

“Ow,” the Atom moaned, slowly stirring to consciousness. He found himself sprawled atop a bed of damp, sticky glial cells, where he must have collapsed when zapped by a sudden burst of intense brain activity. His own microscopic nerves still felt fried from the jolt.
Would it have killed whoever rewired this brain to properly insulate it,
he thought crankily,
so that minuscule people like me don’t get electrocuted when it fires up?

He had taken refuge inside Jimmy’s brain during Mary Marvel’s sneak attack outside the Hall of Justice, hoping to get to the bottom of Jimmy’s on-again, off-again powers. Exploring carefully, he had made his way through the cerebral cortex down to the hindbrain before being knocked out cold by ... what?

Something happened to Jimmy; that’s for sure.

Lifting himself from the gooey brain matter, the Atom took a moment to get his bearings. Jimmy was obviously still alive, although his blood was pumping at an alarming rate. He could hear the posterior inferior cerebellar artery beating loudly deep beneath his feet, like a subway car shaking the pavement above. The synapses were still firing like they were supposed to, creating a strobe effect inside the brain’s muggy interior, but how come everything was so ... green?

Contrary to popular wisdom, the “gray matter” of a living brain was usually flushed red with blood. Ordinar-iiy, hiking through the brain on foot was like spelunking through caves of spongy red jello, but now everything around him was suffused with a strangely familiar emerald effulgence that seemed to emanate from every cell and fiber of Jimmy’s brain. Looking around in confusion, it took the Atom a second to recognize the distinctive green tint.

It’s kryptonite,
he realized in shock.
Jimmy’s radiating kryptonite?

The Atom didn’t know how that was possible, but he guessed that Superman was somewhere nearby—and in serious trouble.
All the more reason for me to figure out what Darkseid’s done to Jimmy’s brain and shut it down, pronto!

The bouncy glia beneath his boots felt like a children’s moonwalk ride as he investigated a network of metallic filaments intertwined with Jimmy’s own ganglia. The Atom had been tracing the path of the artificial-looking circuitry right before he had been shocked unconscious. Crystalline flecks glinted amidst the filaments, which were intricately wedded to the pulsing brain matter. Ray was a physicist, not a neurosurgeon, but he had shut down enough evil telepaths’ brains to know his way around, and this bizarre biological circuitry was like nothing he had ever seen before.

It’s like H. R. Giger meets RadioShack,
he thought.
How in the world am I supposed to get a handle on this?

The cerebellum played a crucial part in controlling the human body’s senses and motor controls, so he knew he had to be careful what he did here. One mistake could render Jimmy blind or paralyzed or worse. Yet he knew he had to do something about the alien apparatus infiltrating Jimmy’s brain. Beneath the toxic glow of the kryptonite, he cautiously reached for an array of blinking crystals that looked like they might be a transformer of some sort.

Maybe if he cut the current... ?

ZZAKT!
He yanked back his hand as emerald sparks stung his fingertips. “Okay, so much for that plan,” he muttered. Getting electrocuted again wasn’t going to help Jimmy any, let alone save the universe from Darkseid’s malignant designs. The Atom paced back and forth before the baffling technology. Even though he had no idea what was going on outside Jimmy’s skull, he couldn’t help sensing that time was running out. He remembered Darkseid gloating over his master plan back in his fortress on Apokolips. Who knew how much longer they had before the arch-villain turned the entire Multiverse into a living hell?

Think, Palmer!
He concentrated with all his might on the insidious improvements to Jimmy’s “green matter.” Gritting his teeth, he scrutinized every nanometer of the corrupted neurons, looking for some clue as to how to disable the arcane circuitry without killing or crippling Jimmy. He would have killed for an instruction book written in any earthly language.
You’re supposed to be a genius, so figure this out!

“fire
you enjoying your last moments, Kryptonian?” Darkseid gloated. “I know I am, although I admit my attention’s been usurped by young Mary.” He turned away from Jimmy and Superman to admire Mary’s lopsided battle against Donna and Jason. “Look at her fight. Such power. Such vigor. Such
anger
P* He chuckled in approval. “When the Fifth World dawns, I just might let her live.”

Her opponents, on the other hand, were unlikely to last that long. Running out of ammo, Jason holstered his gun and tackled Mary head-on. A twelve-inch knife appeared in his hands and he jabbed it straight at the golden thunderbolt emblazoned on her chest. Darkseid admired his ruthlessness, but not his lack of common sense. The tip of the blade shattered against Mary’s insignia, leaving him defenseless before her superior speed and strength. A backhanded slap dropped him like a sack of potatoes. He landed flat on his back amidst the rubble and didn’t get back up again. Blood seeped out from beneath his skull, staining the floor of the gorge.