Crossover Earth '98

by Paul Cocker

"Mommy, mommy, look! It's Blur!" The little girl hopped excitedly as she pointed.

"What the...?" Jessica looked down at herself -- she wasn't in costume. How did that girl know who she was? I'd better get out of here...

Jessica turned to walk away and stopped short. She stared in front of her, then started craning her neck frantically. I'm at the airport, she thought. What am I doing at the airport?

"Look, it's Blur!"

Jessica stared with surprise as the baggage handler pointed at her. She turned away, confused.

"Look, it's Blur!" the woman said, looking up from her laptop computer, raising a finger to point at Jessica.

"Look, it's Blur!" the man in the suit said, pointing...

What's happening? Jessica asked inwardly. She brought her hands to her face, to hide from the all the people, but her features suddenly twisted in terror as she noticed her hands were soaked in blood.

"Look, it's Blur!"

Jessica looked up, frightened now. The people, they were all looking at here, pointing, staring with dead eyes...

"Look, it's Blur!" Jessica shuddered as an explosion rocked the airport, as glass and shrapnel sprayed into the crowd, as the people's flesh boiled and charred all the while staring her down with accusing eyes...

"Look, it's Blur! Why didn't you save us, Blur? Why? Why?"

Jessica choked back a sob. She had nothing to say. They were right, she should have saved them...

...and she lurched from her bed, the sweaty sheets falling from her chest. A nightmare, Jessica thought as she gasped for breath. The nightmare... again.

Jessica sat up in her bed. They wouldn't let her sleep. A corpse in the corner of the room accused, "This is your fault." She squeezed her eyes shut and listened to her heart race. When her eyes opened the body was gone. For the fourth time that early morning, she began to sob.

She stood finally. It was obvious that a peaceful sleep wasn't going to come today either. Sleep hadn't come for three days. Lack of sleep was starting to take its toll on the sixteen-year old girl with the hyperspeed metabolism.

Jessica fumbled to pull on her costume. The visions still left her sweating and her heart slamming against her ribcage. The accident on the plane. Apocalypse Now’s invasion of LAX. Every time she tried to sleep, or even rest, victims of terrorism plagued her in nightmares. There seemed to be nothing she could do to remedy it.

She finished pulling on her costume, all except her glasses and shoes, and took a few breaths to ease her nerves. From the next room she could hear her grandparents sleeping peacefully. She’d been out doing chores with them all day, no wonder they were sleeping so well. How she wished for such peaceful slumber. The clock on her bed stand said she slept for only three hours, but that was the most rest she had this week.

She walked to the bathroom and stared into the mirror. A battered face soaked in blood stared back. "You should have saved me." She opened the cabinet and retrieved a handful of Vivarin tablets. When she closed the mirrored door, the only face there was her own. Sunken eyes and hollow cheeks made her look like a junkie.

"I need to get the hell out of here," she muttered as she threw the pills down her throat. "Look at me, no wonder grandma and grandpa ask me about drugs at school."

She splashed a handful of water on her face and then took a deep breath. But the vision of death still scourged her thoughts.

Jessica put her cyclist glasses on and slipped into her running shoes, making herself think about her actions to again repress the nightmare. Sometimes it worked, but not today. God, Zephyr probably never feels like this, she mused.

She wandered out of the washroom and headed towards the front door. As she grabbed the doorknob, she took a deep, sighing, shuddering breath. She eased the door open and stepped outside.

Zephyr sat up as he saw Jessica running toward him. "You're late," he noted easily. She didn't respond, she merely removed her glasses and sat down a few feet away. He stood and walked toward her with a water bottle.

The label, she thought, it’s Swiss. He must’ve went to the Alps to get this water.

"What is it?" the athletic man asked.

Blur thirstily drank the entire bottle and glanced behind her quickly. "Nothing."

Zephyr decided not to press her. It was his experience that young girls could be very fragile sometimes, and Blur was still a young girl, despite her heroics. She would talk when she was ready. "Alright then. Are you ready to train?"

She stood and dusted the sand from her outfit. "Ready," she said as she put her racing glasses back on.

"I want you to take a deep breath. Good. Now again, and hold it." She did as she was told but was unable to concentrate. She exhaled after twenty seconds. "No, that's no good. You're not even trying. Do it again."

Blur inhaled deeply, coughed, and exhaled in a rush. "What are we doing? I'm really not into that meditation stuff. And this isn't gonna help me get any faster." She looked behind her again and began to pout.

"What's chasing you, Jessica?" He tried to sound fatherly without pushing too hard.

"Oh, it's just...nothing. Don't worry about it." She fidgeted with her foot in the sand, kicking a small rock away from her.

"Look, it's that thing in the plane, isn't it?" Zephyr said, his face softening a little.

Blur shrugged.

"Oh, great," Zephyr replied, "the standard teen 'shrug'. I can't wait til you're old enough to just say ‘yes’".

"Shut up!"

"C'mon Blur," Zephyr says, "don't be so hard on yourself. If an old pro like Captain Infinity couldn't stop those terrorists, what were you supposed to do?"

"Captain Infinity isn't a speedster!" Blur cried. "If I hadn't dawdled and played around and had just been faster I could have saved them!"

Zephyr laughed. "Give me a break, Blur... What, you think if you run fast enough you can save the world? Run fast enough and you can stop every crime, every terrorist act, every evil on the planet? Bad things happen -- that's the way life is. You do what you can to help, but don't blame yourself for your failures. Just learn from them."

Blur looked at Zephyr for a moment, then shook her head. "No, Zephyr, I'm sorry but that's just not good enough. I’m not good enough..."

"Fine, fine. You think that way." There was a pause, the silence like a wall separating the two. Finally Zephyr spoke up again. "Let's try something different. Follow me." He led her down into a spall patch of rocky ground. Bending down, he picked up a small stone about the size of his thumb. "Catch this rock," he commanded. Almost faster than she could follow, he spun and sent the rock hurtling in the opposite direction.

It took her a second to realize what he had just said and done, but she quickly focused and ran after the rock, easily catching it before it hit the ground. She ran back to him like an eager puppy returning a stick. "No problem."

Nodding, he bent over for two more stones. "Catch these," he said as he released them in two opposite directions at great speed.

Caught by surprise, Blur lost a millisecond or two in her pursuit of the stones. The first was no problem, but the second was a lot further away than she thought it was. Still, it was something that she was able to do.

As she returned, Zephyr threw three more stones in different directions. "Go." She threw the previous two stones at his feet and took off like a shot. She was starting to breathe hard when she came back.

He looked her sweating form over. "Ready?" She nodded. This was what she needed -- running, exertion, anything to take her mind off of --

The air exploded as he sent twelve stones past the speed barrier in different directions. She gaped. "Waitaminute --"

"Go!" He ordered.

"But I can't --"

"GO!"

Jessica ran after the stones, but she could only catch three before they hit. "Let's try it again. This time, don't stop to argue." The air exploded again. Blur was anticipating his move this time, and caught two before they were a yard away. Still, she only caught up with seven of the other missiles.

Zephyr shook his head. "That was cheating," he smirked. "And you still didn't catch them all."

"Weren't you supposed to go to four next?" Blur panted.

Again he shook his head. "Too predictable. We'll try one more time." Blur got into a ready stance, but Zephyr was instantly behind her and throwing in the other direction. Again, she lost precious time and caught only ten.

After three more attempts, Blur had managed to capture eleven projectiles, but never all twelve. "I'm going to try something different," he said ominously. "Jessica, I want you to imagine that each stone is a bullet." Jessica snapped to attention. "Each one you miss..."

"I get it." She said sharply. "Throw."

Exactly four seconds later, all twelve bullets lay at Zephyr's feet. Her expression had changed to one of grim determination. "Try fifteen." And she did. They made it to twenty bullets when he told her to rest. "How many do you think you can catch?" he asked her pointedly.

"How many can you throw?" she responded. It was a glib response, but the look in her eyes seemed desolate.

"Jessica, let's say that you can stop 25 bullets here. No, let's say 100. What then?" Her puzzled look made it clear that she didn't understand the question. "How many bullets do you suppose there are in the world? In just LA? You can't stop them all, you know. Even I can't do that. What I can do is stop the ones that are within my power. Do you see where I'm going with this?"

Blur scratched her arm uneasily. "But in such a small area, I should've been able to do more."

Zephyr put a hand on her shoulder. "You did what you could, and that's all that anyone can expect. Imagine for a second if you had not been there, what would that have been like? Jessica, we have special gifts, special powers, but we aren't gods. You need to realize that."

"So why even try? There's too much going on, and it goes on whether I'm there or not."

"I didn't say don't try. You do make a difference, and that difference is made stronger by knowing that you did your best. But sometimes, your best isn't going to be enough."

"That really sucks."

Zephyr chuckled lightly. "Yes, yes it does. But it's the way life works."

But Jessica still looked distraught.

Zephyr held her for a few moments, then pulled away a little and looked down at her. He lifted her chin with a finger, and wiped a tear away with his thumb. "God, Jessica..." Zephyr sighed, "I wish I could say something to make it all better, to make it all go away. But I can't, you know? I can't make the world anything more than what it is, I can't make people anything more than what they are. There's always going to be evil out there, no doubt about that. And there's always going to be people like us, who are granted a wonderful gift and have the strength of heart to use it to fight evil."

Their eyes meet, and Blur felt pierced by Zephyr's gaze. "You feel guilty because you care, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Caring is what sets us apart from animals like the Carver, Mastiff, and Skein. Monsters like Apocalypse Now and the Goblin King. But you can't let your guilt control you, or how will you help those you care about then?"

Zephyr let the young girl go, and Blur looked up at him. Her tears have stopped, and she wipes her face with her sleeve.

"I've failed plenty of times," Zephyr said softly, turning away from Blur and gazing into the sky, gazing into his past. "Mistakes I've made, people I could have saved but didn't because I didn't know any better. God! When I was younger, I was such an idiot, I was so full of myself..."

Zephyr shook his head, and turned to look at Blur. "You don't forget, you can't forget... but you use those memories to drive you, to make yourself better, stronger. Not weigh you down like a ton of bricks, not to defeat yourself before you even get started..."

Zephyr hesitated, than fell silent. "I guess I've said enough," he said, lastly. "I'll leave you alone now -- I know you probably want to think about some things. But before I go, I want you to know that I'm proud of you. For the things you've done, for using your powers for the right, for caring..." Zephyr smiled. "You'll be all right. I know you will."

And with a whoosh of air, Zephyr was gone, like the light of a candle that flickered out.

The young sprinter stood and looked at the ground, lips pursed. Alone, she pondered, finally nodding her head in understanding.

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