C H A P T E R     O N E
People think I’m a joke. They hear my name and they say, ‘Oh, God, here he comes.’ Superman hates me. Superman! Superman doesn’t hate anyone, but he hates me. Not that I really blame him. I bug him.

That’s just what I do, though. I’m a bug. I’m Ambush Bug.

And I’d like to tell you a story. I’d been investigating something that could’ve thrown the doors wide open on the entire space-time continuum. It wasn’t easy. Not when the world around me was changing all around me.

Too many ‘around me’s’ in that sentence.

As I was saying, things had been changing around me. A few days ago, I woke up in a world similar to my own, but at the same time very different. It was like that episode of Star Trek. You know the one. The one where William Shatner sings ‘Tambourine Man’.

But I should go back to the beginning. I guess it all started with Jesse…

---

DC Anthology Presents

Countdown to Infinite Relaunch

(or, The ERIK Project)

By Joe Grunenwald

- - - - -

For Keith Giffen

And with a nod and a smile to
Johns, Winick and Rucka

---

I should go back to the beginning. But I think I said that already.

I had been the star of a wildly popular, terribly written miniseries that had only seen one issue actually released. It was called The Ambush Bug Paternity Special. In it, I was hired by Jesse Quick to determine the identity of the father of her child. A simple job, you would think. Not if you knew Jesse Quick.

Jesse, it seemed, got around. She gave more free rides than a pony at the circus. Thing is, Jesse was also a superhero, or at least she pretended to be. She’d been The Flash for a few months, while the other Flash had been in the future for some reason that no one ever really understood. So, basically, not only was Jesse giving it away like it was water, but she was giving it away to the entire superhero community. I had my work cut out for me.

Cheeks and I had been through the first round of questioning, and nothing was coming up. We decided to start over, start with the big guns before moving on to the second-tier characters. It was a haphazard plan, but then, we were haphazard kind of guys. We would start tomorrow. Tomorrow was a few days ago.

I woke up that day with a headache the size of Aquaman’s electric bill. I mean, think about it, he’s got the whole ocean to keep lit and air-conditioned. You think that bill’s gonna be cheap? That’s how big my headache was. I didn’t think anything of it at the time – I used to wake up with migraines all the time back in Arkham. The Joker used to beat me over the head with a mallet, though. Those were good days, the kind of days a guy can never get back. By God, if whoever’s behind this takes those memories away from me, I…well, I won’t do anything about it. I won’t remember it happened. But if I did remember that I’d been forced to forget, I would be pissed.

Cheeks was up early sorting files. The kid was a workhorse. Never failed to make sure the agency was running smoothly. I always joked with him that he was the brains of the operation, but I think we both knew it was true.

I fell into the desk chair with a thud, my arms lying flat on the desk. I looked towards Cheeks. “It’s gonna be one of those days, buddy,” I said to him with a heavy sigh as I loosened my tie and unbuttoned the gray suit jacket I was wearing. I could tell from his blank expression that he understood exactly what I was saying.

We decided it would be a good idea to call our client first, to give her a status report, let her know what was going on, tell her what we were planning to do, run our ideas by her, throw spaghetti against the wall and see what stuck. I thumbed through the Rolodex to the letter ‘C’. ‘C’ for Chambers. Chambers as in Jessica Chambers.

The ‘C’s were empty.

No Jessica Chambers.

No Chambers comma Jessica.

No nothing.

“Cheeks,” I said carefully, “did you do anything with our client’s telephone number?”

His silence spoke volumes, and I knew he was innocent of any tampering. The question still remained: how could I have lost the phone number of the only person I know of who was willing to pay my partner and I to sit around, eat nachos and watch classic episodes of Night Court – the pre-Marsha Warfield episodes?

Then a thought struck me. What if I hadn’t lost it? What if it had been stolen? What if…

What if it had been erased?

How did I come to this thought? I don’t know, but it seemed logical, of course, to assume that my being unable to find a phone number in our Rolodex meant that that phone number had been erased from existence. It was the only possible answer.

I thumbed through the Rolodex again, randomly flipping cards in the hopes that something might catch my eye. It was in that moment that I realized:

I had filed her under ‘Q’ for Quick’.

A wave of relief washed over me as I pulled up her number. Nothing was erased, everything was as it should be. “Another crisis of infinite proportions averted, Cheeks!”

Cheeks worked silently – the work ethic on that guy – while I called Jesse. The phone rang twice, three times, four times, five times, six times before she…seven times before she answered.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Chambers, this is Irwin Schwab with the A. Bug Detective Agency, how’re you doing today?”

Her voice was quiet and cracky. It sounded as if she hadn’t spoken in a while. “Who is this?”

“Irwin Schwab, ma’am, you hired my associate and I to uncover the truth about your child’s parentage?”

“Child?” She was clearly disoriented, which, in retrospect, is probably understandable. Calling people at 4:30 in the morning, perhaps, wasn’t the best of plans, but it was the only way I could ensure they would be home when I called. “I’m sorry,” she said groggily, “I don’t…is this Wally?”

“No, ma’am, it’s Irwin Schwab.”

She sighed heavily over the phone. “I’m sorry, Mr. Schwab, not only have I never heard of you, but…I don’t have a child.”

Now it was my turn to be disoriented. Did she genuinely not remember who Cheeks and I were? Or was this all just a clever ruse to get out of paying us any more money for doing the important work of studying the evolution of Judge Harold T. Stone’s obsession with Mel Torme? I apologized quickly to Ms. Chambers and hung up the phone, those questions and more on my mind.

I relayed to Cheeks what our client had said to me. He didn’t say anything, but the expression on his face betrayed his confusion and disappointment.

We sat in silence for an hour, unsure of how to proceed. There must be some evidence somewhere to indicate that Jesse Quick had hired us to find the father of her baby…a baby that she now claimed never to have had. Something was rotten in the state of Wisconsin. And it wasn’t all the expired Cheeseheads.

Finally it struck me: she had direct-deposited us our paychecks. The bank would have to have kept records of the money transfers from her account into ours.

Thankfully Cheeks had finished installing our DSL the day before this had all happened. I turned the computer on and went to the website for the Keystone City National Bank. I typed in our username and password and clicked ‘Login’.

Nothing happened.

I waited for a long ten seconds for something to happen. Nothing did.

Something was very seriously wrong here.

Then I realized: the caps lock was on, and the password was case-sensitive.

Clever, I thought as I pressed the Caps Lock key and was forced to reenter my username and password. Devilishly clever.

A screen came up with our account information on it. Immediately I knew something was wrong. Not wrong like the last few things that have been wrong. This was something that was actually wrong.

There was, indeed, evidence that Jessica Chambers had transferred us money over the past month or two. However, for every transfer she made, there was a corresponding withdrawal made. The information listed the sites for ATM withdrawals, and these withdrawals were all from a location that I did not recognize. It was a four-letter word, and while it wasn’t as offensive as some other four-letter words, it still made my stomach turn when I saw it.

Next to each withdrawal, in the ‘location’ listing, it read: ERIK.

“Cheeks,” I said, leaning back in my chair, my hands folded in front of my mouth, my antennae hanging loosely off the top of my head. “What’s an ERIK?”

Cheeks was silent. It was a disturbing, knowing silence, as if he was worried to tell me something he knew I didn’t want to hear.

I stared at the screen for another hour, absorbing what this website was telling me. I stared at those four letters until they stopped being letters, stopped representing any concept other than one that told me I was in big trouble. They lost their meaning, and in doing so, gained another meaning entirely.

I knew then that I had a mystery on my hand. Luckily, mysteries are my specialty. Now I just needed to find some way to solve it, and that meant going to the one man who I knew could solve any mystery. A certain Dark Knight Detective…

…

I’m talking about Batman. C’mon, that one was easy.

---

C H A P T E R     T W O
The cave is damp. It always is, though, and it smells, like oil and guano and, sometimes, blueberry pie.

I know he’s home because the car is here…and because I can see him. But mostly the car thing.

I realize now that I have switched narrative tenses. The anticipation of talking to him, combined with the stress of the ERIK situation, must have me more nervous than I thought I was. I shake my head and take a deep breath, and the tense returned to normal. I just needed to relax, if I could. When you’re on the trail of something as big as what I was trailing, though, it’s hard to relax.

Batman sat facing a large computer screen. As I walked past the trophy and costume cases towards him, I saw a large picture of me appear on the screen. I stopped in my tracks, looking up at my own handsome visage. It was an older picture of me and I couldn’t help but notice how much I had aged. My antennae didn’t stand as straight as they used to.

“Ambush Bug,” Batman said without turning to look at me. Oh yeah, he was that good.

I resumed walking towards him, coming up behind the chair in which he sat. “How did you know I was here?”

“The ‘pop’ from your entrance is still echoing.”

“Oh,” I said, immediately ashamed to have asked the question in the first place. “Sorry about that.”

“What do you want?”

I explained the situation to him, from Jesse Quick up to and including ERIK, whatever that was. “You don’t know what ERIK is, do you?”

Batman grimaced. “No. But whoever he is, it should be easy enough to get your money back.”

“I don’t think it’s just a money thing,” I said, perhaps a bit too eagerly. He still wasn’t looking at me and I nearly shivered from the coldness of his shoulder. “I think this ERIK is somehow behind whatever’s wrong with Jesse’s memories.”

“Hnn,” Batman said quietly to himself. After a long moment of silence, he turned and looked in my direction, though I don’t think he was actually looking at me. If he was, he made it seem like I wasn’t even there. “Interesting.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Batman replied. “Just that I can’t believe I’ve actually had a conversation with you, and that I found what you had to say remotely interesting at all.”

Batman sure knew how to make a guy feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

“What about ERIK,” I asked him.

“I’ll look into it,” he said, again turning away from me.

That was enough for me. I knew, between the two of us, that Batman would solve the case without a problem. At least that was what I thought at the time.

“Thanks,” I said, turning to leave. The Batcave had always impressed me, so it was no surprise that I lingered for a few minutes to look around. He hadn’t told me to leave yet, so I figured there was no harm. I walked back the way I had come, looking again at the costume display cases. I saw various Batsuits, all the familiar blue and grey color. Behind those were costumes for Robin, Batgirl and the other members of Batman’s family.

As I looked over the costumes, I felt like something was missing. An important part of Batman’s past was conspicuously absent from these mannequined displays. I turned towards Batman again. “You got rid of it.”

He did not respond, so I continued. “The brown costume, I mean. You got rid of it. I always liked that one. Thought it was a nice change from the regular old blue.”

“Brown…” He stopped typing and turned to look at me again. “I have never worn a brown costume.”

“Sure you did. I think you even teamed up with Green Arrow in that costume.”

“You’re wrong,” he said squarely. Then he repeated himself. “I have never worn a brown costume.”

My stomach turned at that moment. This ERIK thing had tampered with Jesse’s memories and somehow erased her child from existence. Whoever or whatever this ERIK was had obviously gotten to Batman, too. His brown costume was a pivotal point in Batman history, and now, it had been wiped from existence. This was far more serious than I had originally thought. Who had the power to alter the mind of The Batman?

Besides Zatanna, of course. Think about it. If she can say it backwards, she can do it. She could destroy the world if she could figure out how to say that backwards. Htrae edolpxe! There. I just figured it out. I should tell her that next time I see her. I’ve always wondered that about Zatanna. Does she just have a dictionary of words that she has memorized backwards? Or does she know every word there is, but backwards? Whatever it is, she’s a lot more powerful than anyone gives her credit for.

Could Zatanna be part of this ERIK?

I smiled at Batman and laughed a bit. I couldn’t let on that I knew what had happened to him, or how much trouble it meant I was in. Hell, at the time I didn’t even fully understand it all. “You know what, I think you’re right,” I said to him. “I must be confusing you with someone else.”

“Yes,” he said, turning back to the computer. “I’ll look into ERIK for you, Ambush Bug,” he said.

I knew, as he said it, that he was lying to me. Cheeks and I were on our own. This was our fight, our investigation, our way of life that was on the block. Batman thought I was crazy. To be honest, at that point I was beginning to doubt my own sanity a little bit. I popped out of the Batcave and took Cheeks out of my front pocket. He had listened in on the whole exchange. “Am I crazy, buddy?”

Cheeks looked up at me with those big doe eyes of his, and I knew then that I couldn’t be crazy. In fact, it seemed at that moment like I had somehow become the most sane person in the world.

As I stood there, talking to Cheeks, I laid out the facts for him. ERIK had tampered with Jesse Quick’s mind, erasing her memory of her child. ERIK had also tampered with Batman’s mind, erasing his glory days in the brown costume as if they were chalk on a blackboard. Not only that, but all evidence seemed to indicate that ERIK had somehow altered reality to remove Jesse’s child and Batman’s brown costume from existence. Who or what could do that? Who or what possessed the power to make sweeping changes to the timeline?

It seemed hopeless. “I dunno, baby boy,” I said, looking down at Cheeks. “It just seems hopeless.” It really did seem hopeless. So hopeless that I needed to repeat that three times. That’s really hopeless.

Unless…

There was only one person left I felt like I could turn to. Aside from Cheeks, he was my best friend. We’d shared some great times together. Surely he would remember not only Jesse’s baby but the brown adventures of Batman as well. He would see that I wasn’t crazy, and he would help me bring down this ERIK once and for all.

I had to see Wally West.

---

C H A P T E R     T H R E E
Cheeks and I went over to the West house the next day. The experience of talking to Batman was as different from talking to Wally West as watching a Shakespeare play is as different from watching those dancing hippos from Fantasia. You know the ones. They wore those little tutus. Frankly, at that point, having faced disappointment after disappointment, Cheeks and I were ready for some hippos.

Wally’s wife, Linda, answered the door and escorted Cheeks and I into the house. It was a nice place, as suburban on the inside as it was on the outside. What I really liked about Wally and Linda was the fact that this was their life. If you took away the superspeed and the rogues and all of that, you would still have this very well-adjusted, very happy couple.

Actually, now that I think about it, that’s probably not true. They only met because of Wally’s superspeed, and Wally grew up with the speed anyway, so to say how well-adjusted he would be without it would be like trying to guess the weight of a palette of king-sized Snickers bars: not an easy task.

Still, the fact remained that I liked their house.

Linda led Cheeks and I into the kitchen. We sat down at the oval-shaped table, and Linda left the room. I heard her call her husband’s name, and then I heard his voice. “Who was at the door, honey? Was it those Jehovah’s Witnesses again? Honestly, how many times are they going to try and—“

He had followed Linda out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. He stopped talking when he saw Cheeks and I. He turned to his wife quickly. “Save me,” he said.

Linda smiled. “Irwin and Cheeks have something they need to talk to you about,” she said happily. She stepped towards the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water. She offered similar bottles to Cheeks and I; we declined.

Wally sat down across the table from me. “How’re you doing, Ambush Bug?”

“I’m sorry, Wally,” I said earnestly, “but I don’t think we really have time for pleasantries today.”

Wally sat back, a slight look of shock on his face. Usually I was as ready to joke around with him as he was with me, but this time was serious and I could tell it surprised him. We were best friends, and when your best friend is in trouble, you have to get down to business. “Okay,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

I explained to he and Linda the Jesse situation, as well as what I believed had happened to Batman as well. I told him about ERIK and the connection I was making between all of the incidents.

At the end of my story, I looked at Linda. “I believe I’ll take that bottle of water now, Linda.”

“Sure,” she said and she retrieved one for me. Cheeks was still in no mood for anything to drink.

Wally sat quiet for a long moment. He was sitting forward, his hands folded in front of his face, his elbows resting on the table. He stared down at the table.

“Jesse hasn’t said anything about having a baby to either of us,” Linda finally explained. “If she was pregnant and had a baby, she never bothered to mention it. I would think that would be something she would share.”

Wally’s silence troubled me, but I couldn’t quite place why. I chose to ignore it for the moment. “Wally, do you remember the time Batman spent wearing a brown costume?”

He looked at me and lowered his hands. “Honestly, no. He might have and I just don’t remember it, but offhand, it doesn’t ring any bells.”

“Try and remember,” I said, pressing him further. Sometimes it was hard to be a detective and a friend at the same time. It meant pushing people you didn’t want to have to push. It meant asking questions you didn’t want to have to ask.

I knew this was one of those times.

“You never talked to Jesse about her baby, Wally?”

He shook his head. “She hasn’t said anything about it to me. I talk to her probably twice a week now since she agreed to become The Flash, and she hasn’t said anything about having a baby.”

I stopped him. “You said you’ve been talking to her since she agreed to become The Flash…”

Wally nodded. “Right, once Linda has her baby.”

I could feel a pang of something in the back of my brain. I wasn’t ready to think the thought yet, though. I pulled out a notebook and flipped through the pages to find what I was after. “What you’re telling me,” I said plainly, “doesn’t mesh with the already-established facts that I have. According to my notes,” I said, “Jesse became The Flash when you went into the future to train with a future version of yourself. When you came back with your new skills, you went back to being The Flash.”

“I…” Wally stumbled over his thoughts. Linda just looked at him, dumbfounded. I took a sip of my water. “Wait,” Wally said, “what?”

I repeated what I had just said.

Wally looked confused and the pang in the back of my brain grew louder. “I went into the future to train with a future me?”

“That’s how I understand it, yes. That’s how Jesse told it to me.”

“Well, and I hate to say this, but Jesse lied to you.”

I glanced at Cheeks. He was listening, stone-faced, absorbing everything. It was his greatest skill. I sat back in my chair. “Go on,” I said.

“Jesse hasn’t become The Flash yet. She won’t…Linda’s not even pregnant yet, so it’ll be at least nine or ten months before Jesse’s The Flash.”

“So you haven’t gone into the future to train with yourself yet, then.”

“No, no, I have no…no,” he said. “That doesn’t even make any sense. Train with myself? I wouldn’t do that, it’s just ridiculous. The paradox that that would create would literally tear time apart.”

“Are you sure you heard what she was saying right?” Linda was trying to help me, God bless her. By this point, though, it was fairly obvious to me what was going on.

ERIK.

Tampering with the memories of Jesse Quick and Batman was bad enough. But ERIK had crossed the line when he, she, it, whatever decided to mess with my best friend and his wife.

I looked at Cheeks. He knew as well as I did. We had to get out of there.

“Are you feeling alright,” Wally asked with what I wasn’t entirely sure was genuine concern. What if ERIK had erased his memory of our friendship? What if? What…if…

I excused Cheeks and myself from the room, and Wally escorted us to the door. As I walked away from that house, a house that belonged to two who seemed more like shadows of people I had known than actual people, I had to bite my lip. I had been sure that Wally would be able to help me. Without him, without Batman, Cheeks and I were completely, desperately on our own.

Or so we thought.

I walked down the street, my hands in my pockets, Cheeks on my shoulder, my head hung low, my antennae dangling limply. I felt like I was about to die. It was unexplainable, but I had the strongest feeling that my existence was wrong and that the problem was about to right itself.

“Ambush Bug!”

I turned slowly at the sound of my name. There was no point in rushing – this wasn’t a world I wanted to live in anymore anyway. A world where Jesse Quick wasn’t promiscuous or a mother to a bastard child. A world where Batman never wore his classic brown costume. A world where The Flash never went into the time stream to train with a future version of himself. Put simply, a world gone mad.

Behind me, a short woman was walking towards me. Her arms and legs were spindly, while her football-shaped head sat atop the DC bullet logo which acted as her body.

I recognized her instantly. And in that instant, everything I thought I knew changed.

Her name’s Jonni DC. She’s a continuity cop. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but for the slow-witted among the readership, basically Jonni patrols the DC Universe, looking for inconsistencies in continuity. Once she finds them, she either corrects the inconsistency or erases it from the continuity altogether.

I had a pretty good guess of which she was going to do to me, and at that point, I didn’t mind.

Jonni stepped up to me and grabbed my hand. “You need to come with me, Buggy.”

Her curly red hair bounced as she walked and I followed. “What’s going on, Jonni?”

“Major continuity reshifting. Trust me, I’ll explain it all on the way.”

With that we were off to God knew where. I wasn’t fully prepared for what Cheeks and I would find once we got to wherever we were going. How could I have been? I glanced at my partner, and now, it seemed, my only friend. “You ready for this, baby boy?”

Cheeks’s silence and confident smile were all I needed to hear and see.

---

C H A P T E R     F O U R

WHEN LAST WE SAW OUR HEROES…

The Challengers of the Unknown were trapped in a wormhole somewhere in the dimension known only as “Zerox”! Challengers Ace and Rocky were struggling desperately to keep from killing each other after a drunken romp through the mysterious Zeroxian netherworld left the two men in several compromising situations! The wormhole was collapsing around the arguing Challengers and their sturdy interdimensional craft at an ever-accelerating rate! Can the Challengers escape with their sanity and lives intact? All this, plus June’s in her period! We now return you to…

Prof – Rocky – Ace – June

In

THE DEEPEST CREVACE IN THE UNIVERSE!

I stood back in astonishment. I didn’t even know who the Challengers of the Unknown were, much less why I was suddenly looking at them. Next to me, Jonni DC stood with her arms folded across her DC Bullet chest. I leaned towards her and whispered, trying not to disturb the scene. “What the hell is that?”

“An unpublished continuity abberation,” Jonni explained calmly. “Don’t worry about disturbing them, that’s all there was to the scene. Pretty crazy, huh?”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“Exactly,” she replied. “That was the point. It’s from the second issue of your miniseries.”

“There wasn’t a second issue to my miniseries.”

“There was on your writer’s hard drive. He just never published it. Eh,” she said with a shrug, “it’s a moot point now anyway. That series never happened.”

“What?” I stepped in front of her and knelt down to her height. “What do you mean it never happened? I remember it! I was there!”

“Just calm down, Buggy Bug Bug,” Jonni replied with a snark. Before every other female character in comics was snarky, Jonni DC invented the art form of the snark. She was the original and still the best. She might even have coined the term ‘snark’, but I don’t know for sure. “You’ll find out everything when we get to where we’re going,” she said.

We walked in silence for a while. I saw strange images, pictures of me that I didn’t remember posing for. I was in Charlie Sheen’s bedroom with a blacklight. I was in the Batcave reading a list of women Batman had slept with that included but was not limited to Carol Channing and Shirley Temple. I was in the apartment of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, and Clark was telling me about a time when Jesse Quick gave him a quickie while he was on monitor duty. Seeing that, it was easy to see why this story never happened. Superman would never cheat on his wife.

Maybe with Wonder Woman. But c’mon, can you blame him? She’s Wonder Woman! I bet Lois would cheat on Clark with Wonder Woman if she had the chance.

“Are those all scenes from the second issue?”

“Yep,” Jonni replied. “I would offer to show you all of it, but some of it is pretty awful, and other parts of it, while fantastic, are just too raunchy to be published anywhere. There’s a Hostess Twinkie parody ad that’s…well, it just is.”

I smiled quietly to myself. Given the Jesse Quick that I was used to, I could only imagine what she might be able to do with a Twinkie.

“Honestly, and I’m not really a critic, but that Challengers thing is probably the best bit from the whole issue,” Jonni said. “There’s some dialogue between Joe and Erik that’s pretty good, too, but we need to keep this story moving.”

“ERIK!” My breathing became frantic. “Jonni, you have to tell me if you know: what is ERIK?”

Jonni laughed. “A team of world-class scientists have been trying to figure that out for years, Buggy Boy. No one knows.”

“Jonni, please…”

“Alright,” she said, “but you’re going to find out soon enough anyway, you can’t just be patient? Ahhhh, whatever. You were right. Erik is behind everything that’s happened to you and to the people you know and their memories.”

We stopped walking. Jonni snapped her fingers, and from seemingly out of nowhere an elevator appeared in front of us. The doors slid open, and Jonni stepped into the car. She looked out at me. “You coming?”

I stepped into the car, and Jonni pressed a button marked ‘DCA’. “What is that?”

“You’ll see,” Jonni said with a smile. “All will be revealed.”

We rode in silence the rest of the way. My mind raced as I tried to process everything I had just seen, flashes of memories that never existed and memories of other things that had existed but that now were gone from history. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. My stomach was turning and churning more than it had that time when I ate two burritos that were covered in mold. Cheeks had been with me for that, and I could feel him on my shoulder now. He wasn’t worried. If he could be strong, so could I.

The elevator stopped moving. Jonni smiled. “We’re here.”

---

C H A P T E R     F I V E
The doors slid open slowly. Beside me, Cheeks was shaking now, his formerly calm demeanor giving way to frantic anticipation. I put my hand on the top of his head and whispered to him. “Calm down, buddy, it’ll be okay.”

The truth was, I was just as scared as he was, if not more. I didn’t know what to expect from this. Jonni hadn’t warned me about any sort of danger coming up, but then, she often had a way of leaving out little details like that.

She stepped off the elevator casually. I wondered if she’d ever been here before, wherever here was. She looked into the car at me. “Relax. C’mon.”

I followed her carefully, Cheeks in tow, ready for anything. My shoulders were tensed, my hands sweating. I shoved them into my pockets.

The elevator opened up into a large, white room. The centerpiece of the room was a long, white table, surrounded on both sides by chairs, with a single chair placed at the far end of the table. The chair was large, leather and, I imagined, pretty comfortable. I thought then that I could go for a good sit-down.

Though the chair sat with its back to me, I could see that someone was in it. It rocked slowly, and a hand was visible on the armrest. It reminded me of ‘Inspector Gadget.’ How you never saw Dr. Claw beyond his hand on the armrest. All that was missing from this scene was a cat in the person’s lap.

Jonni walked down the side of the table, stopping before she got to the very end. “He’s here,” she said to the mystery person.

“Thanks,” I heard him say. It was a male voice, not as deep as Dr. Claw’s, but still somewhat imposing. Or at least it felt that way at the time. I was so nervous that Kerri Strug’s voice probably would’ve been imposing at that point. Thinking about it now, the voice was kind of scrawny.

“Do you need me to stay,” Jonni asked him.

“If you want to. If not I don’t mind.”

“I’ll stay,” she said. She walked back towards me and smiled. “Come on,” she said, motioning for me to have a seat.

I moved towards the table and saw that the chairs were labeled. ‘bartallenii’, ‘labontaeb’, ‘superprimas’, and ‘bhyphen2001’ were just a few of the random words written on the chairs. I noticed one marked ‘ambushbug5’ near the far end of the table, away from the seated mystery man, and sat there.

My heart was pounding and I struggled to sit upright. I set Cheeks on the table in front of me. He looked up at me, worry evident in his eyes. “I’m okay,” I said unconvincingly. He just kept looking at me. He didn’t say a word.

“So here you are, Ambush Bug,” the man in the chair said plainly.

He turned in the chair until he was facing me. His face was hideously scarred*, and his head was noticeably too large for his body**. It reminded me of some bizarre version of Hector Hammond.

(*It is not! – EF **Okay, that one’s true – EF)

I struggled to look at him. “Who are you?”

“I’m the one behind what’s been happening to your life. Not just your life, to everyone’s lives. Jesse, Batman, Flash…it was all me. I’m-“

“Maxwell Lord?!?” In that moment, I knew it must’ve been Max Lord. I didn’t recognize him through all the scars and ugliness, but think about it. Who else could it have been? No one else would make sense as the mastermind of a huge plot to reshape the universe. It had to be Max Lord.

Right?

“Max Lord?” His face contorted as he looked at me in shock. “What are you talking about? How completely random would that be? Max Lord…you’re insane.”

I shrugged. “Fine, then, I give up. Who are you?”

“I…” He paused. For effect, clearly. And it worked. This guy was good. “…am ERIK.”

“You!” I began to stand from my seat when Cheeks shot me a look that said ‘you don’t want to do that’. I knew better than to argue with him when he was right. I sat again and took a breath. “You’re the insane villain…”

“I’m not a villain,” he said. “I’m an editor.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Har, har. See, the reason I’ve…we’ve done what we’ve done to the universe is that we want to make it better.”

“We’ve?”

“It wasn’t just me, I’m just the messenger. Everyone at DC Anthology was in for this, I didn’t force anyone to do anything*. We’re just trying to make the world better.”

(*He’s lying! He’s making me give Linda Park lightning powers! He’s a madman! - JG**)

(**Quiet you… - EF)

“But why,” I asked him. “Why are you people doing this to the world that I love?”

“Because the world that you love is bad, Irwin.” He frowned at me. “I’m sorry.”

“How can you say that? How can you say that when such great stories as Jesse Quick inviting random men up to her apartment for ‘coffee’ and Batman skulking through the night in a brown costume and The Flash running into the future to train with himself and the dozens of other stories from everyone’s favorite DC Anthology titles…how can you say that when those great stories are part of the regular continuity?”

Now that I was saying it all out loud, in one clump, for the first time, I knew exactly why they were doing what they were doing. Erik didn’t need to tell me. I glanced at Cheeks, and he just looked back up at me. He had known since before this all began. The world we lived in was insane and random and badly written and it had to go.

Erik sat in his chair, his hands folded in his lap, looking at me through squinty, gnarled eyes*. He knew that I knew. He just frowned again, and I could see sympathy from someone for the first time since this whole thing had begun.

(*Stop it! – EF)

I looked towards Jonni. Her expression matched Erik’s frown. It was then that I realized the full extent of what had to happen.

My role in the universe had been to point out what was wrong with it in a humorous and occasionally self-reflective manner. If they were fixing the universe so that nothing was wrong with it, my role would be gone. I would be, for lack of a better word, obsolete. That’s why Jonni was here.

I was going to be erased from the continuity.

I couldn’t let it happen. Call me crazy, but I liked existing too much.

The room began to spin in my head. I stood from my chair slowly, picking Cheeks up as I did. “I understand,” I said to Erik. I slid the chair in to the table and, in one swift motion, took off running for the elevator door. I could’ve teleported there easily, but running somehow felt more dramatic, and if there’s one thing I’m known as, it’s as a man of dramatic action.

I heard Erik shout “Jonni!” from behind me. I blinked, and the elevator door disappeared. I turned. She was standing behind me, her hands on her hips. I suddenly lost the power to stand. I fell to me knees, Cheeks in my hands. I looked down at him and realized that, not only was I going to be erased, but he would be, too. “I’m sorry, baby boy,” I whispered to him. “I let you down.”

“She erased it, Irwin,” Erik said, referring to the elevator, I think. He was walking towards us now, hands in his pockets, swaggering a bit. “You shouldn’t try to escape.”

My name is Irwin Schwab. When a rocketship carrying intergalactic laundry crash-landed on Earth, I found myself with a costume that allowed me to teleport at will. I used the costume to aide the superheroes of Earth whenever I could. I am the first to be known as Ambush Bug. I hope that I am not the last.

“So this is it, huh?” I snarled up at Erik. “Join you or die time. Fine. Erase me. Just leave Cheeks. He didn’t do anything.”

I closed my eyes and prepared to be erased. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I jumped a little, opening my eyes. Erik was crouching in front of me. “What are you talking about?”

“I know how this works,” I said. “This is how Countdown to Infinite Crisis ended, too. The hero squares down the villain and the villain shoots him in the head. So go ahead. Erase me.”

I took a deep breath and waited for what seemed like the length of the Halle Berry Catwoman movie – an eternity.

“We’re not going to erase you, Irwin,” Erik said.

He stood again and I looked up at he and Jonni. “You’re not?”

Erik smiled. “No! Are you kidding? People love you!”

“Actually,” Jonni said, “I hate you. But…um…in a good way.”

I stood slowly and thought that Jonni wasn’t alone. Superman hates me, too. I said as much at the beginning of this issue. I really did. What, you don’t believe me? Go back and look. I’ll wait. It’s like the first thing I said.

See?

“You’re not being erased,” Erik explained. “You figured out what was going on. We thought you deserved an explanation.”

“So I actually solved a mystery?”

“Yep.”

I looked at Erik for a long moment. I had been a private detective for going on sixty years, and I had never before actually solved a case. Maybe sixty years is an overestimate. It could be closer to seven. However long I’d been doing this, having actually solved a case was a milestone.

I left that room in a giddy stupor. Jonni DC escorted me back onto the elevator and as we descended back to my world, I thought about what she had done. She had erased the elevator from continuity, but she had just as easily restored it. It made me realize that anything could happen. Jesse Quick could remain a respectable hero, or she could go right back to being a slut. Batman could stay in the shadows, a blue-gray wraith, or he could one day decide that ‘fecal matter brown’ is more his color. The Flash could choose to stay in the present and care for his child once it’s born, or he could leave for the distant future for no apparent reason. In the relaunched DC Anthology Universe, anything is possible.

My name is Irwin Schwab. I’m Ambush Bug. And I’ll be waiting, with a pie in-hand, for any bit of bad writing that should fall through the cracks. Consider yourself warned. Cheeks and I take no prisoners.

I wonder if we can go back and make fun of the issue we were just in…

---

E P I L O G U E
Erik: Look at that last chapter, Joe.

Joe: Yeah?

Erik: It got really serious there, didn’t it?

Joe: Uh, yeah, I guess it did.

Erik: Not so much with the funny.

Joe: Uh, well, I think it’s still kind of funny. The humor is less overt, it’s mostly in the ridiculous narration and the-

Erik: IT’S NOT FUNNY, JOE.

Joe: It is if you-

Erik: NO. It’s NOT.

Joe: O…okay. What do you…what do you want me to do?

Erik: Maybe…give Ambush Bug lightning powers.

Joe: Do I have to remind you that superfluous lightning powers are what created the need for a relaunch to begin with?

Erik: Not to mention Scintilla.

Joe: Jesse as a whore.

Erik: Brown Batman.

Joe: ‘Kyle’ Kent.

Erik: Sgt. Rock giving high school kids guns.

Joe: Jokervania.

Erik: Brains splattered across the world.

Joe: A ten-page alien invasion.

Erik: In which none of the aliens had any sort of physical description.

Joe: Or any sort of motivation whatsoever.

Erik: Wonder Woman as the strongest being on the planet.

Joe: Insane Donna Troy.

Erik: Arsenal naked in space.

Joe: Because a glass window shattered.

Erik: JLX in general.

Joe: Brains splattered across the world (really, that’s worth mentioning twice).

Erik: 23.23465761534568% of the police being killed.

Joe: Gorilla Grodd’s amazing exploding arms.

Erik: Broken promises.

Joe: Bending the space/time continuum with superspeed.

Erik: Because the rules of space and time are different in outer space.

Joe: Are they different in Jokervania, too? (I’m sorry, but Jokervania?!)

Erik: Magenta’s hour-long trial…

Joe: …a trial whose jury included Linda Park and Jesse Quick.

Erik: ‘We need more blood!’

Joe: And quite possibly the greatest thing ever…

Erik: Shattering gold.

Joe: How about we just sit here and laugh at all of that for a while and then thank God it’s not part of the continuity anymore.

Erik: Sounds good to me.

Joe: And if that’s not enough humor for you, dear reader, I leave you with this. This proves that Superman doesn’t only hate Ambush Bug – he hates his own son as well.

G’night everybody!