A Savage Return

Chapter 4

Barry had been there for about ten minutes now and was still running around trying to figure out how to stop the nanites. "There has to be someone controlling them from a remote on the outside."

"Can't you block the signal?" Bruce asked.

"I don't know how," Barry said frustrated and ran off to try something else.

"E... EM..." Artemis tried.

Dick went over to her. "What?"

"E... M... P," she gasped out.

'EMP?' His eyes suddenly went wide. "An EMP!" Dick yelled at Bruce and Barry.

Barry hit his head with his hand. "Of course. An EMP will stop anything electronical for a while. That should give us enough time to..."

"Dick!" Artemis yelled.

Dick jerked his head back to Artemis. "What's wrong?" he asked worried.

"C... ca... can't... breath," she gasped out.

"Bruce, do you have an EMP emitter in the cave?" Barry asked.

Bruce ran over to the gadgets he had in the cave then went over to the suffering teens. "This will knock out the computers and phones too," he warned Barry.

"Who cares?" She's suffocating!" Dick yelled.

"We'll worry 'bout that later," Barry replied. "Just hit the button."

Bruce hit the button and an electrical wave made all the lights from the computers go out. Bruce heard Artemis take in a huge breath and all of them breathed deeply for a few minutes.

"How you doing?" Dick asked Artemis as he helped her sit up.

"Better. Thanks," she replied.

"Good thinking on the EMP," Dick said smiling at her.

"Remembered it from the Reds incident," she replied smiling back.

"Ughhh, let's not do that again," Wally said.

"Well, unless we can figure out how to get rid of these things, it may happen again," Barry replied.

"Then we can just use the EMP thing to keep them off," M'gann said.

"But we need the computers to figure out how to get rid of them," Barry said.

"But Bruce had been working on it for three hours and he hadn't even come close," Wally said.

"Yeah, the EMP is the closest we got," Dick agreed.

"They're right. I searched every way i could and nothing worked," Bruce said.

"Then what shall we do?" Kaldur asked.

No one answered. No one knew how to. "We wait for the next letter," Dick finally said sadly. He then walked quietly to the elevator and returned to the house.

Everyone watched him leave, but did nor said anything to stop him. "He's blaming himself for this, isn't he?" Wally asked.

"Steve's attacking him by hurting us," Artemis said.

"And the letter this morning told us that Barbra's not doing any better," Bruce added.

Everyone looked at him sadly. "He knows that the attacks are going to get worse, doesn't he?" Wally asked.

"Yeah, and even though we tried, we couldn't keep you five from being hurt. He's losing hope that we can stop him," Bruce said. "Steve's winning, and if we don't find him soon..."