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She entered the afterlife the only way a Fury should enter the afterlife . . .

. . . pissed the hell off!

Knockout gasped, a final reaction to the sharp shock of her body hitting the cement a sky scraper’s worth of stories below where she was dropped.

Growling under her breath, she stood. Dropped! Like a piece of Granny Goodness’s trash! It was an insult she would not abide. She was a Fury!

“Man, why doesn’t it surprise me that I’m the best you can do for a welcoming committee?”

Spinning around, Knockout lashed out at the only available target in a foggy sea of white. Superboy, the dead one, The Kid in his black t-shirt and jeans, yelped and backed up a step, hands raised. “Hey! I am so not the person you should be hitting!”

“Barda!”

Superboy shook his head. “Not her, either. Man, I forgot what a genius you were.”

Knockout stopped, staring as she realized who was talking to her. She pointed an accusatory finger. “You are dead.”

“Yup.”

“Bastard killed me!”

“Yup.”

Green eyes narrowed. “Don’t you humans believe in some kind of hell? Is that where I ended up, because I died on your planet?”

“Beats me.” Superboy shrugged. “Look, I had a lot more to say to the last person I greeted, okay? I got no idea what to do with you.”

Knockout crossed her arms aggressively under her chest . . . which was when she noticed the great gaping blood-smeared hole in her chest. Of course. No mere fall could have killed her. “At least I died a Fury.”

His eyes fell to her chest and he smirked. “Looks like.”

Knockout growled. She wasn’t getting any answers!

With what looked like an appreciable effort, Superboy dragged his eyes back up to hers. “You can fix it, you know. Bodies don’t count anymore, so a little bit of will power and you can get rid of all the blood and the hole. And man, I totally would if I were you. It’d be a shame to mess up such a nice, uh, tract of land.”

Knockout seriously considered pounding the arrogant hero into the ground, but, well, there’s no ground to pound him into and she wasn’t angry with him, anyway. She asserted her—her will, she supposed—on her body.

Nothing happened.

Superboy, whose eyes roamed back to her chest, raised his eyebrows. “What, don’t tell me you don’t have enough will?”

“I am a Fury!”

“Prove it.”

She was a whole creature and when she was finished with him she would claw her way back to life if she had to!

The hole in her chest closed, the blood vanished, and her armor knitted itself back up.

Superboy snorted a laugh. “Too bad about the armor.”

Knockout tried to push past her rage to a place where she could deal with the—the dead boy in front of her, that she was dead, somewhere, killed on Earth of all planets and the dammed traitor Barda still alive.

“If this is not your human hell—though I am beginning to believe it is—where are we?”

“We’re dead.”

“I know that!”

“See, ya gotta work on that. You died angry, I get it, whatever, but get this: you’re stuck that way unless you will not to be!” Superboy leaned back and ran his eyes up and down her figure. They lingered a few times, but he met her eyes in the end. “We’re not ghosts but we didn’t move on. We’re stuck here till something changes.”

Knockout resisted the urge to throttle The Kid, since he was currently her only source of information. “That makes no sense!”

“That’s what Bart said. And stop yelling, wouldja? My superhearing keeps going in and out.”

“Then make sense! Or tell me how to get back to the living so I can send the traitor here in my place.” Knockout threw her hands up. She wanted to punch someone, knock over a lamp, trash a room—but the featureless white didn’t have a surface to stand on, let alone solid furniture for her to vent her anger on.

“It so does not work that way, trust me. If I could get back I would not be here to greet you.” Superboy rolled his eyes. “Come on, focus. Female Fury, warrior of Apokolips, I get that you’re all tough and scary-mad like, all the time, but ya gotta control it. It’s not gonna do any good here.”

“Wherever here is,” Knockout growled.

“Look, you being all—” Superboy paused to leer “—you got me off track. Bart—Flash, or, I guess, Kid Flash or Impulse—”

“Impulse is here? This is your hell.” Knockout didn’t have the, erm, history with Impulse that she did with Superboy, but she’d kept vague track of the young heroes he got splashed across the news with, and Impulse seemed like little more than a loudmouthed brat with big hair and superspeed.

“Yeah, well, he’s not the fasted man alive anymore but he’s just as freaky-smart as he was then. He read a whole library and now it’s all in his head. And he thinks we’re not already all moved-on because we can still affect stuff in the real world. Or, well, whichever world with we come from.”

“Apokolips?”

Superboy smacked himself in the forehead. “No, I mean—plane of exits? Something like that. The reality we come from is the one we can change. There’s apparently fifty-two of them, or that’s what Bart says, anyway. So you can change stuff on the Earth you died on, but not the one where, say, Batman’s a vampire.”

Knockout boxed her anger, though she still felt it simmering in the back of her head. She had left behind a world of things unfinished . . . and been killed unduly before her time. As a Fury, yes, but—there was still the matter of the traitor. “How?”

Superboy shrugged. “I dunno.”

“What!”

“Look, it’s just a theory or something that Bart’s got. He hasn’t been here that long. We’re all tryin’ to help, but nobody with any kind of smarts for this has shown up yet. While I guess that’s a good thing . . . Point is, we are stuck here. There’s probably two ways out—one of ‘em is to move on like a good little dead person.”

Knockout stood to her full height and looked down at Superboy. She met his eyes. “Not a chance.”

He grinned back at her, an older version of The Kid’s shit-eating camera-smile. “Didn’t think so.”

“The other way?”

Superboy shook his head. “We haven’t figured it out yet. But we can see what’s going on, so at least we’ll be prepared to get the hell out of here as soon as we figure out how.”

“Who is this ‘we’?”

The Kid raised his eyebrows again, and for a second Knockout could almost see his long-absent sunglasses. “There’s a bunch of us who showed up here who aren’t willing to give up and move on. Sure you don’t want to get out of here? Endless white space is a shitty way to spend your death, lemme tell ya.”

Knockout considered the child before her. He was changed from the boy she knew, but The Kid still lurked beneath the surface. If there was anything The Kid had been terrible at, it was knowing when to quit. They’d shared that particular trait.

“I will return, to see Barda in her grave by my hands,” she said.

Superboy nodded. “Okay then. Come on, meet the Scooby Gang of dead people.” He beckoned, and they headed off into the mist. Vague noises sounded from somewhere in the distance, and Knockout held to her determination to return.

“Scooby . . . gang?” Knockout repeated, incredulous.

Superboy shrugged. “It’s better than “Dead Justice”, which was the other choice.”

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