Kingdom Come Read online

  THE DREAMER. THE THUNDER.

  THE BAT. THE EAGLE. THE ANGEL.

  WHOSE WILL BE DONE?

  It’s the early years of the Twenty-First Century. Without the guidance and values long championed by the old guard—Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman—a younger generation of super heroes is ravaging the world. But when the Man of Steel returns from self-imposed exile, his very presence could be the catalyst that pushes us all into Armageddon.

  Seen through the eyes of Norman McCay, an aging minister who embarks on a disturbing odyssey of revelation with an angel known as the Spectre to guide him, Kingdom Come is the story of what defines a hero in a world spinning inexorably out of control … of the heroes who adapted to that changing world, and those who couldn’t … of personal battles fought with inner demons, and the final war that would determine the fate of our planet.

  Copyright © 1998 by DC Comics

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  A Time Warner Company

  All titles, characters, and related indicia are trademarks of DC Comics © 1998. The stories, characters, and incidents featured in this publication are entirely fictional.

  Grateful acknowledgment is given for the use of “Ode to a Dream” by Mark A. Semich © 1993 by Mark A. Semich. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

  Aspect® name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: March 1998

  To Julius Schwartz

  He gave me, the boy, a gift of dreams;

  then he taught me, the man, to share it.

  —ELLIOT S. MAGGIN

  To Brian Augustyn,

  who hired me when no one else would,

  without whom today I would be asking not,

  “What will the Flash do this month?” but rather,

  “Would you like fries with that?”

  —MARK WAID

  For my father, Clark Norman Ross,

  the real McCay and the true inspiration for

  all of Kingdom Come.

  —ALEX ROSS

  For a moment, he stirred and remembered.

  He caught a glimpse of a great fortress

  in the frozen wastelands of the north.

  Of a lost paradise on a distant world.

  He saw a time when he had no blood on his hands,

  and never would.

  When the violence of hatred and mistrust,

  the temptation of moral compromise,

  could no more overcome him

  than a droplet of water could conquer the sun.

  But then the memory slipped away

  like the dream it was.

  —MARK A. SEMICH

  Ode to a Dream, 1993

  There came a time when the old gods died! The brave died with the cunning! The noble perished, locked in battle with unleashed evil! It was the last day for them! An ancient era was passing in fiery holocaust!

  —JACK KIRBY

  The New Gods #1

  DC Comics, 1971

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Legends pass from one hand to another, from one mind and set of premises and prejudices to the next, and sometimes back again. I must pay homage, in roughly reverse chronological order, to a number of fabulists and philosophers who—knowingly or not—worked to make what follows possible: Julius Schwartz and Mortimer Weisinger; Orson Scott Card and Isaac Bashevis Singer; Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster; Robert Montana and Stan Lee; Jack Kirby; Otto Binder and William Moulton Marston; Joseph Campbell and Edgar Allan Poe; Walter Elias Disney and Samuel Langhorne Clemens; Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin; Terence Hanbury White and Thomas Malory; Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and John; Aristocles and Homer; and those whose hands and minds have contributed and passed the legends along, and many of whose names we have never heard.

  Thanks first of all to Alex and Mark for noticing and for telling the whole world.

  To Mike Barr for lunch and for Xu’ffasch. To Bill Finger, Sheldon Moldoff, and Bob Kane for Batman and Robin. To Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams for making me notice that it’s possible to do this stuff well. To Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, and Murphy Anderson for Superman. To Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane, the favorite artists of my youth, whose work I came to appreciate properly only after I grew up. To John Broome, Gardner Fox, and Mart Nodell for Green Lantern and the Flash. To Matt Wagner for the Sandman. To Mark Evanier for his contribution to much of the source material. To Clark Ross for being a significant example of the source material. Alfred Bester, of course. Cary Bates and Jeph Loeb for long nights over coffee and cereal and long years of seeing the world as it ought to be. Charles Kochman and Dan Raspler, among the stalwarts of DC Comics—the former for recognizing self-indulgence when he sees it, either in the form of verbosity or dessert; the latter for appreciating a good turn of phrase and a steak. Betsy Mitchell—The Rock—and Wayne Chang of Warner Aspect, and Dana Brass, Chris Eades, Rob Simpson, and Elisabeth Vincentelli of DC Comics.

  Wayne and Alice King, keeping the heat on in New Hampshire. Hoyt Robinette and Joanne Edward. Pam, my patient wife, and Jeremy and Sarah, our obstreperous but inspiring children. Thanks to John Matthews, Gordon Fellman, Max Lerner, and Philip Slater, especially for the time they spent at Brandeis. Mom and Dad and chapter five. Rabbi Aaron Kriegel, who told me to read Andrew Greeley. Alan Moore, especially for “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” and the dignity it made me feel. Larry Ganem for saying I should do it and acknowledging that he said it for all the wrong reasons. Thanks to Suzanne Fix and to Justin Alexander for being astute. Thanks to my Confirmation students, for listening. To my second-funniest friend and support system, Karen Maurise. To Richard Narita and Irene Yah-ling Sun for New Year and feng shui. To David Weiss, still looking over my shoulder, for the cigars.

  Jeez, after all that, I hope you guys like it.

  ELLIOT S. MAGGIN

  The Big Valley

  PART I

  Our Mission

  Is Clear …

  CHAPTER 1

  City of Dreams

  I had lost my faith in an interesting way. I believed in the existence of everything: Heaven, Hell, the Angelic Host, demons and possession, redemption and growth, the value in spiritual terms of the suffering of the innocent, our place in the Universe and the Universe’s place in Creation. I believed in God and all His glory. I believed in the Immaculate Conception and Original Sin. I believed in something I called Original Sainthood. I believed in Santa Claus and that men had walked on the Moon. I believed that an educated man who does not believe in miracles is not a realist. I bought it all. Always had. Still do. My loss of faith derived from the continual reminder, on a moment-to-moment basis, to me and everyone I ever loved, that we were insignificant. It was about my realization that the imminent possibility of the loss of our lives and even our immortal souls did not matter a damn, either to God or to His emissaries on Earth.

  It was a world without a Superman.

  *

  It began with an ending: that of Wesley Dodds, my friend. Wesley was challenging and smart and the kind of man I hoped to be someday. He was much older than I and was most of the reason I’d come to Metropolis a little over ten years before. It was thanks to Wesley that I took the part-time position in the pulpit of the old Presbyterian church on Jefferson Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street.

  The century was young in those days. It amazed me how short a time it took for the notion of living in the Twenty-First Century to become passé. I took on this job after I ostensibly had retired to collect my pension and enjoy whatever golden years God held in trust for Ellen and me. The congregation was down to just a few do
zen families, though that number worked its way as high as a hundred again for a brief time in the years just after I’d arrived. The church could not afford, nor did they need, a full-time pastor, and for that matter I was not even Presbyterian.

  Wesley told me, and I suppose he told all his fellow congregants who would listen, that Dutch Reformed was close enough to suit my new flock. Wesley was far and away the most influential member of the congregation in those days. He praised my preaching and counseling skills to such an embarrassing degree that my interview with the search committee was no more than a perfunctory conversation with a pleasant group of people over tea and fresh strawberries in a midtown apartment that smelled of mildew and rust. It was the home of one of the committee members, a lovely man in his eighties who passed on soon afterward. We spoke about the change of seasons, and a little bit, as I recall, about the comet that decorated the evening skies that month.

  Superman flew by the window toward the end of our meeting, passing not twenty feet from where I sat. He seemed close enough to touch. He was more floating than flying, not at all in a hurry to get wherever he was going. His body language, even in flight, said, “I have power and glory to spare.”

  Of course I had seen people fly before at one time or another. That was not uncommon in America after all, even in those days, but it was the first time I’d seen him.

  “Gee,” I think I said.

  My interviewers looked out the window and somebody said, “Oh,” catching on to the fact that someone from out of town might be in awe of this sight.

  “I’ve heard that Metropolitans consider it good luck when he flies by,” I said.

  “It’s good luck if the windows hold up,” someone said, and laughed. “But don’t you worry about luck, Reverend McCay. You’ve got the job already if you want it.”

  “Norman, you might have noticed”—Wesley grinned, leaning toward me as we gathered up our fellowship and carried it out of the search committee meeting—“that the average age of the congregation is dead.”

  It was an amazing church nonetheless. It took up the entire ground floor of the LexCorp Building, which had risen at the height of the city’s last great building boom. The company founded by Lex Luthor, the industrialist and sometime felon, had acquired the square block containing three large pay-by-the-hour parking lots and an old Presbyterian church. It had not been a historic building by any means; the church had burned or fallen in or decayed and been rebuilt half a dozen times in the previous two hundred years. The congregation went back to the Eighteenth Century on that site, and there was always someone or other paying homage to the Creator on that corner.

  Luthor had gotten tired of waiting for the last of the congregants to give up or die. One day at a news conference on the street outside the old church, he’d made a big show of promising that if the elders gave the go-ahead, he would build a finer church on that site than Metropolis had ever seen. The congregation—those awake enough to know what they were voting on—had said sure, and Luthor proved good to his word. The new church had opened for worship even as LexCorp’s skyscraper-in-progress had risen above it, and construction crews had adjusted their schedule to accommodate that of the Presbyterians of Jefferson Avenue.

  The church was more than thirty years old by the time I came to take my job as part-time pastor, and it was by any measure the finest building in which I’d ever served. It was marble, granite, and steel, like the rest of the building above it, but with hardwood paneling inside. The main floor of the sanctuary sat about a story and a half below ground level so that a battery of large stained-glass windows decorated eye-level on the Jefferson Avenue side for passersby. It had a stunning pipe organ like none I had ever seen or heard elsewhere, taking up the eastern wall and reaching up the entire three-story height of the sanctuary. A balcony and a choir loft sat around ground level, with doors to classrooms that we used only for storage. I do not think that in the time I was there we had a single regular congregant under sixty, and certainly none of Sunday School age.

  People around the country—as well as the local municipal boosters—still called Metropolis the City of Dreams in those days. A fellow named Ellsworth once had lost an attempt to get reelected Mayor using “City of Dreams” as a campaign catch-phrase. The Mayor had gone the way of all historical footnotes, but the catch-phrase grew roots. The City of Dreams was where the Man of Steel made his life and found his friends and his enemies and forged his legend, but it was more than that. Metropolis was the image people all over the world held of America. Metropolis was the city Americans envisioned when they thought of the future. This was where ideas were born and where trends started their sweep across the culture. Finally, it was where the ruination of it all began.

  When my wife, Ellen, and I came to Metropolis, Magog—the self-styled heir to Superman’s mantle—had already made a few appearances. It was clear to everyone, it seemed, except Magog himself, that Superman was above such sophomoric balderdash and was hardly in the market for a successor. Magog was young and brash and wore a golden horned helmet and carried a sceptre through which he focused his superpower the way rock music stars of my youth carried their hair and their attitudes. Superman, by contrast, was well into middle age by then. The veteran was enormously accomplished and enjoyed the admiration of all but his most irredeemable enemies. Enjoy it he did, too. Swimming through the air on patrol in the evenings, he grinned as boyishly as the blood brother of the wind could grin. A local news outlet had once caught footage of him scooping a woman with a carriage of twins up from in front of a bus racing a yellow light through an intersection. He saw to the mother and children’s health and gravely delivered a gentle rebuke to the contrite bus driver. Then the camera had caught him unloading a bit of a laugh at his own solemnity while retreating up into a cloud. When we all had seen him last, Superman was graying around the edges and looking a little weathered, but he was more powerful than he had ever been before and cut an astonishing figure across the sky.

  We loved him. Even my congregant who complained that the Man of Steel rattled the windows when he breezed by loved him. Even those whose petty fantasies of confidence and criminality he thwarted, and whose reform he inevitably embraced and championed, loved him. Even those of my colleagues who saw his enormous temporal power as rivaling their monotheistic teachings, and who then heard with what eloquence he accounted for himself—especially to the children—loved him. It seemed the right thing to love him. God seemed to love him so.

  Then something must have happened in his life. For a little while no one saw him smiling or laughing as he went about his never-ending battle. And finally he took offense at us—for good cause, but, after all, we mere mortals had certainly offended him in the past and he’d never made a pretext before of folding in upon himself—and this time he was gone. And he did not return.

  Soon afterward I lost Ellen in the most useless of accidents. Perhaps Superman could have prevented it. Perhaps if he had not left the city, the public carelessness that had brought it about never would have caught her. Perhaps not. Nonetheless, I thought all the world was gone to gray and stillness and death, but I was wrong. It was only the City of Dreams that had died. The world throbbed on relentlessly, and the city where dreams withered continued to scream, as cities do, at the top of its marble, granite, and steel bellows. It was different, is all.

  *

  I was afraid toward the end of his life that Wesley Dodds was suddenly a little unbalanced. By the time he left us I had no doubt of it. But after he had gone, it became clear that he was the sanest man I ever knew. Yet that was not how it started. This was how it started:

  “So the question of truth in the Bible thus becomes irrelevant,” I put forth to the congregation, and most of them listened and nodded as they always did. Or slept. The big sanctuary had about thirty people in it this Sunday morning, more than I was usually getting these days. The only one who had any particular reaction at all to what I was saying was Wesley, and I perceived his rea
ction only because he was my friend.

  “In the context of the Scriptures,” I went on, “the most important element, I feel, is the way the story is told. This is not to say that events as the Scriptures describe them are not literally true. I expect that generally they are. But the real value of the Scriptures is in how we understand them. The metaphorical truth of the Scriptures is absolute. Often, art is a lie that tells the truth.”

  With this, Wesley eased over the edge.

  “Woe unto them,” Wesley said, almost under his breath.

  I ignored him at first.

  “Woe unto them!” he said louder.

  “Excuse me?” I asked from the pulpit.

  The other folks sitting near Wesley shushed him, but he got up to his feet—stiffly, as though against his will—and with an almost embarrassed expression on his face, declaimed, “No no no, Norman. This is not metaphor. This is not apocrypha. Moses did not scale Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Suggestions. This is truth, unconditional and immutable. There is a right and a wrong in the Universe, and that distinction is not difficult to make. Woe unto them that sow iniquity with seeds of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope.” Then he sat down. He was in his nineties by then, and never before had I seen him spring up and down with such agility. “Excuse me, Pastor,” he mumbled into his prayerbook, and after a moment both he and I gathered ourselves, and I finished my sermon.

  That was the first time.

  Wesley was the sort of fellow one would expect to live to outlandish maturity. We had met at the exercise club in Wilmette where Ellen and I used to go twice a week. He’d been in town for a chemical industry convention; he’d finally retired, I think, when he hit ninety. He bought a weekend pass to the gym to keep up his regimen, his custom for out-of-town trips lasting more than a few days. Ten minutes of stretches to warm up; ten or fifteen repetitions of moderate calisthenics alternating muscle groups on the various iron and chrome weight gadgets that in my previous experience only the washboard-bellied young people had dared tackle; a brief rest, and then twenty minutes of light aerobics on the rowing simulator, the step machine, or the treadmill. A performance with which I probably could have kept up on a good day. Then again, I was nearly two decades younger, and by all accounts the elderly Wesley had done it every day. The first time I’d seen him do this, I retreated to the sauna, which served the purpose of making me sweat enough to fool my aging body into believing it was sufficiently exercised for the day.