Joe's phone buzzed in his coat pocket. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen — Barry — and turned the sound off.
"Not picking up?" Jude asked.
Joe pocketed the phone and accepted the burger Jude was holding out. Today had been a normal day at the cart: burgers, standard fast food setup, the kind of thing every street vendor in Central City was doing. The patties and sauce were homemade, because some habits were non-negotiable, but the format was as ordinary as it got.
"It's Barry." Joe took a bite and shrugged. "He gets excited about case developments and ends up rambling. I'll hear it when I get home." He looked at the device hanging from the side of the cart, white and slightly industrial-looking. "What's that?"
"New vacuum cleaner." Jude kept his expression pleasant. "Bought it today. High-powered, good battery life — supposedly excellent suction. These things cost enough that I had to set up down here by the mall just to offset the expense."
Joe finished his burger, paid, and got back in his car.
He'd pulled about half a block when a voice cut through the window.
"Detective."
Joe rolled the window down, expecting someone he vaguely recognized from the precinct. What he got was a bald man in a dark trench coat smiling at him from the sidewalk with the specific smile of someone who has been waiting a long time.
Kyle Nimbus. Who was supposed to be dead.
"You should be dead," Joe said.
"Not quite yet." Nimbus tilted his head. "You, on the other hand—today's the day."
His body came apart.
Joe had his weapon out before the green smoke had fully filled the space outside the window. Three shots, fired through the glass. The vapor rippled and ignored them.
"You deserve to die, detective."
A face coalesced in the cloud — furious, half-formed, surging forward toward the window.
The vacuum cleaner kicked on.
The sound it produced was not subtle. It was the sound of a very serious machine doing exactly what it was designed to do, amplified roughly three times beyond what anyone would expect from a residential appliance. Jude had positioned it well.
The green cloud screamed.
It wasn't a metaphor. Kyle Nimbus, mid-lunge toward Joe's car window, discovered that his gaseous form was being pulled sideways with a force that his current body was not equipped to resist. He fought it. The suction didn't care. His form stretched, attenuated, and was drawn into the canister in approximately four seconds, at which point a significant portion of him was already inside and transforming back was no longer an attractive option.
The vacuum cleaner hummed. From inside it, muffled and increasingly angry, came the sounds of a man reconsidering his morning.
Joe sat in his car for a minute and a half. Then he got out.
Jude was standing by the cart, vacuum cleaner in hand, looking mildly satisfied.
"I think your caseload might be getting to you," Jude said.
"In ten years on the job, I've never had someone who turns into smoke try to kill me." Joe looked at the vacuum cleaner with a mixture of gratitude and bewilderment that was difficult to express in words. He settled for a thumbs up. "Buying that burger was one of the better decisions I've made recently."
"He can't get out of there, right?"
Jude considered the canister. "The airtightness on high-powered units is pretty solid. Unless he can transform back to human form from inside and manually force the housing open — but I'd estimate the interior volume isn't quite sufficient for a full-sized adult. If he tries to reverse the process, the outcome might be..." He paused. "Compact."
Joe didn't entirely follow that, but Barry, arriving at a jog from across the street having apparently already changed clothes, did. So did everyone in the S.T.A.R. Labs earpiece network.
"Cisco, was that you—"
"No. Wasn't me. That was Caitlin."
"It absolutely was not—"
Barry walked over to the cart, where the vacuum cleaner was now producing muffled, escalating profanity from its interior. The voice of Kyle Nimbus, deadly assassin, currently at the mercy of a domestic appliance.
"Jude." Barry kept his face very neutral. "What happened?"
"You may have missed it — Joe had a run-in with a meta criminal just now, but he's fine." Jude indicated the canister. "The criminal is in there."
Barry stared at the vacuum cleaner for a long moment.
"That's breathtaking," he said, with complete sincerity.
The cursing from inside had grown louder, taking on an increasingly creative quality. Jude looked down at it with the patience of a man who had seen worse.
"Let me offer you some perspective," he said, to the canister. "Life is short . In any story, the minor villain gets maybe three lines before the plot moves on. It doesn't matter how impressive the ability is. The script has already decided." He patted the side of the canister gently. "This little box is your permanent home. Make peace with it."
From inside: several words that are not printable, growing slightly less forceful.
"His mental state isn't great," Jude said to no one in particular. "I should have bought a slightly smaller unit."
Joe and Barry looked at each other. Then at Jude. Then at the vacuum cleaner.
Barry, who had spent the last ninety minutes running across the city trying to solve exactly this containment problem, opened his mouth and then closed it again.
"Barry." Wells's voice in the earpiece, measured and calm. "Have you checked on Nimbus's condition in the last minute or so?"
Barry looked at the canister. The cursing had gone from loud to intermittent.
"He's running out of oxygen," Wells said. "Airtight containment with no fresh air supply. The current trajectory puts him unconscious in a few minutes, and past that—"
"Right." Barry straightened up. "Jude, I need to borrow the vacuum cleaner."