Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King (9 page)

There was nothing there.

Superman's brow furrowed. He'd caught only a glimpse of the light, but that had been sufficient for him to realize it was neither natural nor man-made. He hovered a few feet higher above the tarmac surface, his eyes flickering back to the rocket and its precious cargo. What he saw there made his blood run cold.

The shuttle's massive engines were just igniting in a sea of white-hot flame that blasted down into the thick concrete silo and came spilling back up over the edges. But a shimmering blue globe had materialized on the giant gantry that kept the craft upright. The same light he'd seen only moments ago.

Superman took off again, cleaving through the air with great speed. As he flew, his superhearing picked up distant shouts and comments from the press area "What the hell is
that?"
"It's some kind of UFO!" "I can't get a focus on it!"

As Superman flew closer, the light turned in the air and bobbed, as if acknowledging his presence. He could see a fine tracery of electrical force rippling within its confines, the lines brightening as they converged at the globe's center. Without warning, a jagged streak leaped from the globe, zigzagging through the air at the speed of thought.

Before Superman could avoid it, the lightning streak struck him full in the chest. A hundred thousand volts seared through his body, throwing him backward as if he were a rag doll and not the mightiest man on Earth.

At least it's declared its intentions,
he thought grimly, fighting to regain his balance against the shocks that continued to rebound off his invulnerable body. Then the lightning ceased, and the bluish orb seemed to sink into the metal of the gantry, as if it were being absorbed.

The gigantic rocket was starting to lift now, hovering a few dozen feet above the silo's strengthened base, preparing for its leap into the atmosphere. In disbelief, Superman saw one of the gantry's huge steel beams bending and twisting like a living thing. Suddenly, it recoiled and with incredible speed bounced back to slam into the side of the rocket. Swiftly it drew back again for another blow.

Laserlike beams of heat sprang from Superman's eyes. As they struck the section of gantry, it began to glow red, then white with fiery heat. Then there was a silent explosion as it disintegrated in huge drops of molten metal.

But the blue light's destructive work wasn't finished yet. Even as the rocket started to rise, so gradually it looked like it was moving in slow motion, the blue light reappeared. It dropped like a stone toward the casings of the rocket's huge engines. As it fell, the roiling electrical energies inside the ball of light grew fiercer, spinning faster and faster.

Superman flew headfirst toward it. He could see that the temperature in the silo beneath the rocket was climbing, as if the globe was magnifying the engines' discharge. It was only seconds away from a catastrophic explosion.

No! I won't allow it . . . I can't allow it!

Superman filled his lungs with the hot night air, then expelled it swiftly as a long, cool stream of frozen superbreath. For almost a minute he hovered there, locked in a life-or-death struggle with the orb, trying to cool down the massive amounts of heat that emanated from it.

I'm not going to beat it this way,
he realized with a sinking heart. For every few degrees that his icy breath managed to cool the silo, the globe merely heated it up again.

Kicking into forward flight, Superman swooped as fast as he could. At almost the speed of sound he careened into the sphere of light, his hands grabbing for some kind of hold on it. Its surface was smooth, almost plasticlike in its consistency. But beneath the exterior he could feel the power of concentrated energy.

He carried it a hundred yards away from the silo in a fraction of a second. Then, as if becoming conscious that its schemes were being thwarted, the light orb began to pulsate in his hands.

"Sorry, but I'm not going to see what else you have in store," Superman snarled.

With an abrupt movement he tossed the spinning, throbbing light ball high into the air. As it reached the apex of its flight, Superman blasted his heat vision into it with as much power as he could muster.

The ball spun faster, striving to absorb the energy of his Kryptonian vision. But in vain. Its motion ceased totally, and the roiling energies in its core glowed incandescently. For an instant it flared intensely–

And then it was gone as suddenly as it had arrived.

Superman watched as a hundred tons of rocket regained its equilibrium and went shooting high into the air, trailing flame. He just hoped that Jimmy Olsen had managed to get the photograph he wanted.

New York

The domed glass roof of the Manhattan Museum of Ancient Art gleamed dully in the feeble moonlight that managed to penetrate the city's neon electric glow. The doors had dosed to the public many hours ago, and now the building was in darkness except for the moonlight and the occasional gleam of the patrolling flashlights of the security guards.

"Geez, this place gives me the spooks!" Don Bradley breathed quietly.

His flash beam played over the display cases full of artifacts in the Neolithic Hall: stone axes, hammers, flint scrapers, animal bones. He gave an involuntary shiver as the light picked out a replica of a shaman's mask hanging on the wall, its mouth distended in an ugly snarl, the deep eye sockets black and mysterious.

"That thing's uglier than me!"

"You only been here a week," Don's fellow guard, Louie Beltrani, pointed out. "You'll get used to it. Me, I been here eighteen years. It's all water off a duck's back."

"Yeah . . . but can you imagine what it would be like to
wear
that thing? You'd have to be some sort of psycho to begin with."

Louie Beltrani pursed his lips in disapproval, blowing out through his mustache. Ever since he was a kid growing up in Rome, Louie had loved the lure of the ancient world. Surrounded by the remains of emperors' palaces, the Colosseum, and the Via Appia, he felt a bond with the past that Don, New York born and bred, would never really be able to share.

"Different folks"–Louie shrugged–"different strokes."

He ambled off down the marble floor, heading for the life-size diorama of a tribal group and their dwelling during the last Ice Age. Louie always liked to stand mere for a few moments alone, just thinking about what life must have been like for these people. Short, brutal, dangerous, and perishingly cold. And yet, against all odds, they'd survived. Without them, there would be no civilization now, no New York, no museums.

Thirty yards behind him, Don Bradley was still staring at the mask as if mesmerized, unable to tear his eyes away. For even as he'd started to walk on, he'd seen the mask's eyes light up with a brilliant cobalt-blue flare. Don opened his mouth to call to Louie, but he felt suddenly dazed and disoriented, unable to remember what he was going to say.

Slowly and deliberately, he reached out and unhooked the grotesque wooden mask from its hanging. The blue light shone hypnotically. Trembling slightly, knowing he was about to do something he shouldn't, Don turned the mask over and held it in front of his face. Vaguely wondering why he was doing this, he tied the plaited reed fastening behind his head.

Instantly, a ripple of energy surged down to flood through his body. His thoughts seemed to float a vast distance away, so far that he couldn't tell what they were. He felt his heart throb thunderously in his chest A terrible rage grew out of nowhere, filling his mind, so strong it turned the edges of his vision red. A low, guttural snarl escaped his lips as he snatched up a large flint-headed ax from the neighboring display table.

"What'd you say?" Louie Beltrani called over his shoulder, his attention still wandering back in the misty depths of human history.

Hearing a clatter behind him, Louie turned to see a figure from a nightmare leaping toward him, eyes blazing, stone ax raised high above its head. Then the razor-sharp flint edge sliced down through his skull, cleaving it in two.

Louie was dead before his body hit the floor.

Snarling and growling, Don Bradley held up the bloodied ax. His tongue reached out through the mask's mouth, licking off blood and flecks of gray matter. Then, with surprising delicacy, he used the ax to shave off several splinters of wood from the desktop. Piling them together, he struck the ax against a stout flint grinding stone. Sparks leaped from the impact

A dozen blocks away, Kyle Rayner was kicking back, taking it easy.

Stretched full-length on his living room sofa, a can of soda on the table and the football game on cable, Kyle felt life didn't get much better. Unless he had a commission. As a freelance artist, Kyle never felt secure unless he had at least three jobs lined up.

Or, of course, unless he was wearing his Green Lantern duds, using his power ring to blast some threatening supervillain.

Even super heroes deserve a night off,
he told himself, quickly amending it to:
Especially super heroes deserve a night off.

Kyle held the chilled soda can against his cheek for a moment, glad that he wasn't in Florida but here, where it was more than twenty degrees cooler.

On-screen, the cheerleaders had left the field and the players were running on. Kyle pointed the remote control and turned up the volume.

"–just joining us, this is Mike Dare live from the–" the commentator was saying, but the rest of his words were completely drowned out by the scream of sirens out on the street below his window.

Kyle groaned. Just one of Manhattan's constant irritants. He counted three fire engines and at least a half-dozen cop cars as they sped past a dozen floors below.

Something big,
he thought, already mentally bidding farewell to two hours of sports.
Maybe they could use my help.

Kyle strode across the room and hauled back the thin curtain across the window. Leaning out, he saw the flashing lights fade into the distance. A burning red glow lit up what little he could see of the night sky.

As fast as he took to think it, Kyle was soaring up the concrete canyon after them. Only now he was dressed in the dark, verdant costume of Green Lantern, his eyes masked, the power ring glowing emerald on the middle finger of his right hand.

He felt the air rush past him as the ring's limitless power carried him down the street fifty feet above ground level. Now that he was outside, he could hear the sounds of angry flames and cracking glass. Blazing sparks were drifting high into the night.

The ring reacted immediately to Kyle's mental impulse, carrying him over a block of higher buildings where he could actually see the burning museum for the first time.

The place was an inferno, the flames roaring like a maddened mob as they sucked in air from the surrounding streets to feed their growing intensity.

Instantly, Kyle sent a thin green beam shooting down from the ring to probe the conflagration for signs of life. Nothing.

Not surprising,
he thought No
human could survive in that heat.

Fire crews were already spilling over the pavement as police grouped to hold back the gathering crowd of evacuees from neighboring buildings, along with the usual assemblage of nosy spectators. Swiftly the firefighters advanced as close as they dared to the blistering heat before their hoses started to gush.

Kyle knew it would take them hours to bring this fire under control–and that was assuming they managed to prevent it from spreading to the rest of the block.

Another thought flashed through his mind, and his alien power ring produced another miracle. The entire museum was suddenly sheathed in a bright green bubble. As the flames licked in vain against it, a hole a yard in diameter opened near the bubble's base. The blades of a fan took shape in the hole, flashing emerald as they spun faster and faster, sucking out all the air inside the containment area.

With no oxygen to fuel its growing hunger, the fire died back as if the heavens themselves had opened and the Deluge descended. Green Lantern held the dome in place by force of will, opening windows here and there to allow access to the firefighters' hoses. It was all too easy for the embers of a fire to flare up again as soon as its oxygen supply was restored.

Kyle Rayner had never wanted to be a super hero. In fact, he'd never wanted to be much of anything. He thought he was happy just living his life, doing his own thing, getting by with whatever commissions his artwork brought him.

Until one night he met an alien in an alley behind a dance dub.

The weird little blue being in red had spoken to him, though Kyle was so bemused he could scarcely take in its words. Something about being the very last of tine Green Lanterns, the galactic peacekeepers, and that Kyle was chosen to be his successor. The Guardian then handed Kyle his green, glowing power ring, making him promise he would use it wisely.

Then he was gone, leaving Kyle wondering if he was the victim of some practical joke. Or maybe even the unsuspecting stooge on one of those hidden-camera TV shows.

But when he tested the ring–which is limited only by his imagination and willpower–Kyle discovered precisely what it was capable of, and the tremendous energy it contained. Soon his whole attitude changed. He found that doing good made him feel good. For the first time, his life seemed to have a purpose. He could help people who needed it. He could be a hero.

Suddenly, something crashed into Green Lantern's back. The ring automatically protected him from attack, but even through its force field he felt the impetus of the blow. He turned to look over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of a large stone ax as it plummeted toward the street.

A misshapen figure balanced on the flat roof of the building beyond. It was obviously humanoid, but something about the way it held its body reminded Kyle of a great ape. Its face was covered by some kind of horror mask with protruding fangs and bright blue light blazing from its circular eyes.

Even as Kyle watched, the figure launched itself at him from thirty yards away. As it soared effortlessly through the air, Kyle stole a glance at the museum. All of the flames had disappeared, but smoke drifted up from still-smoldering rubble. If he took away the shield now, the firefighters might perish in a reawakened inferno.