Kid Eternity! Prose

I don't know why I cried out that word in my final moment. As the debris came crashing down all around me, the gigantic space cruiser raining upon the streets of Metropolis, I felt the pressure of the air rooting me to where I stood. The energy blast roared above me, ripping through the atmosphere, looming like a ball of incinerating death, there was nowhere to run.

"ETERNITY!"

Just a photo editor for the Daily Bugle, got the gig with my pal Jimmy Olsen's recommendation, first day on the job, fresh to the big city, now I was dead. Blown to bits, a casulity in a larger than life battle for intergalactic dominance. I watched the Justice League tear through the skies as my entire being was eradicated by a pulse blast from a Dominion BattleCruiser.

Or at least that's what Deadman called it. Now he's my only friend, floating intangibily alongside me, schooling me in the basics of superherodom as he escorts me to the other side. Boston Brand is his real name, and I go to tell him mine, only I can't seem to remember it.

"Kid.", I say unsure of myself, recalling a nickname that sits alone in my memory.

When I don't cross over to the afterlife he brings me to a floating diamond shaped stone on the flipside of reality. The lightning bolt t-shirt on my chest reminded him of another hero, a family of heroes. He called it the Rock of Eternity, guarded by a bearded hero called Shazam, and the Marvel Family.

***

He slicked back his hair, bound it in a ponytail, and snapped his leather jacket tight to his glowing white chest. He pushed his rounded sunglasses, his goggles from the raw reality around him, up on the bridge of his nose as he grinned. The chaotic swirling tear in reality threatened to swallow the enitre scene.

Cliff Steele could feel the nuts and bolts of his robotic body rattle. Swamp Thing's raw vegetable body began to fall apart, slopping and dripping across the laboratory floor. Shade the Changing Man could hear the cries of infinite madness just beyond the veil of this vertigo inducing reality.

"Later gents."

Kid Infinity, as he calls himself now that he's been supercharged by the Chaos Engines of the Underworld, leaps into the abyss as the heroes reach out towards him in defiance and fear.

He's gone. Infinity has left the building. The universe begins to collapse.