Cross Fire

by Michael Kogge

  Copyright © 2016 DC Comics. BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE and all related characters and elements © & ™ DC Comics and Warner Bros.

  Entertainment Inc. (s16)

  SCUS36519

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First printing 2016

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-91710-0

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  To ordinary kids whose little acts of justice make them everyday Super Heroes

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  When the lights switched off inside Doctor Babrius Aesop’s padded cell, he didn’t waste his time wondering what had caused the power outage. He went right into action.

  He tried the door first, but it remained locked, as he thought it would be. A secondary system controlled the doors just in case of an outage like this. What the architects of the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane hadn’t planned for was that someone of Aesop’s engineering skill could subvert this secondary system.

  Aesop stood on the cot that was bolted to the ground. Reaching up, he unscrewed the light fixture on the ceiling and pried loose its socket, exposing a tangled mess of red and black wires.

  Aesop smiled. Perfect.

  Carefully, he twisted the wires around each other, then hopped off the cot.

  He inserted both ends of his wire twist into the thin gap between the door lock and the jamb. Sparks flew, then there was a click. Aesop tried the door again. This time, it opened.

  The power outage had triggered the emergency alarms. Aesop used the strobing lights to find his way down the dark corridor. He passed cells where the inmates shouted, banging against their doors. In another cell he heard maniacal laughter. Aesop declined to help. Better these lunatics and jokers stay locked up here. He didn’t want their competition after he got out.

  One cell he did unlock. The inmate who ran out nearly poked Aesop with his antlers he was so excited. “Thank you, thank you! Jack will work extra hard for you, extra hard!”

  “Shut that big mouth of yours, Jackalope,” Aesop snarled. “You’re louder than the alarms!”

  “Sorry, Doctor Aesop, sorry,” Jackalope said. The short man had gotten his name because he resembled a jackrabbit with antelope horns. Bad genes cursed him with floppy ears, a button nose, and buck teeth. But his antlers were a personal choice. He wore the heavy horns on a headband that was fastened underneath his jaw. He refused to take them off, and any attempts by doctors to remove them triggered a screaming fit that could last for days. Jackalope was, like many of the patients at Arkham, truly crazy—and for the moment, also useful.

  “Follow me,” Aesop said.

  He took Jackalope into the warren of offices where the psychologists wrote their reports on their patients. Since it was after hours, they had all gone home for the day. And the guards who usually were stationed here had left to deal with the fried generator.

  Aesop grabbed a white lab coat from the closet and slipped into it. Searching the desks, he found a pair of glasses with broken frames. He popped out the lenses, taped the frames, and put them on. With a pair of scissors, he chopped off his shoulder length hair and as much as he could of his shaggy beard. He turned to Jackalope. “How do I look?”

  Jackalope squinted. “Where did Doctor Aesop go?”

  Aesop smiled. It wasn’t a great disguise, but if he stayed in the shadows, the guards at the entrance wouldn’t recognize him. “It’s still me, but shhh, you can’t tell anyone if you want to go free.”

  Jackalope shook his antlers. “No, no, no. Won’t squeal or snort. Promise.”

  “Good,” Aesop said. “Now I’m going to need your strength.”

  Appealing to his positive attributes got Jackalope excited. He started to bounce from one leg to another. “Yes, yes, Jack is strong. Very strong!”

  “Which is why I thought you could open those doors.” Aesop pointed at a set of metal doors. This was one of the few exits that wasn’t connected to the secondary security system. A thick chain and padlock did the job.

  Jackalope’s eyes lit up. He started to scuff his feet on the linoleum floor. “Yes, yes, Jack will open it for you!”

  “Just give the padlock a yank and—”

  Jackalope didn’t listen to his suggestion. He was already leaping toward the door, his antlers lowered in front of him. Sharp and solid, they pierced through the metal. Jackalope then stepped back, wrenching one of the doors out of its frame. He jiggled his head and freed his antlers. The door remained standing, with the padlock chaining it to the other door, but there was a gap between them.

  “Well done,” Aesop said.

  Jackalope grinned with pride and started to twirl. Aesop blocked him. “Let’s save the celebration until after we get out of here.”

  Aesop squeezed through the gap between the doors into the corridor beyond. Jackalope had a harder time because of his antlers. His bulky headgear was caught between the doors, and, for a moment, Aesop considered leaving him then and there. But the inevitable cries for help it would provoke might alert the security guards. Aesop grabbed one of Jackalope’s horns and pulled him through the doors.

  “Thank you, thank you, Doctor Aesop. More scrubbing and cleaning Jack will do at Gotham Gimbals factory, Jack will!”

  “Quiet about that,” Aesop said.

  “Yes, yes, quiet, quiet,” Jackalope said.

  They headed down the hall toward the main lobby. Hopping along, Jackalope mumbled and grunted to himself, his version of being quiet. Aesop had to find a way to shut him up.

  “You remember the stories I told you out on the yard? Remember the one about the bat and the weasel?”

  “Bat and weasel—bat and weasel!”

  “Then you can’t make a sound so I can tell it to you.”

  “Please tell, Jack. Please tell. Jack won’t make a sound, no sound at all.”

  They turned a corner, nearing the entrance to the asylum. “There once was a bat,” Aesop whispered, “who was snatched by a weasel. This weasel loved the taste of birds and was ready to eat the bat. The bat squeaked that he wasn’t a bird, but a mouse. For did not a bird chirp? Did it not have feathers and a beak? This weasel released the bat, since he hated the taste of mice.”

  “Mice, yuck,” Jackalope said, with a scowl. “Yuck, yuck, yuck.”

  The lights started to flicker. The power was coming back on. They didn’t have much time. “But the wease
l’s claws had injured one of the bat’s wings, so the bat couldn’t fly away,” Aesop said, continuing to hold Jackalope’s attention. “A second weasel grabbed him. This weasel loved the taste of mice and thought the bat was one. The bat chirped that he wasn’t a mouse, but a bird. For didn’t a mouse squeak? And what mouse had black fur and wings? This weasel released the bat, since he hated the taste of birds.”

  “Birds, eww,” Jackalope said, his nose and eyes pinched in disgust. “Eww, eww, eww.”

  “Do you remember the moral of the story?” Aesop asked.

  Jackalope nodded eagerly. “Always turn bad situations into good ones.”

  “Precisely,” Aesop said.

  He halted before the entry to the main lobby and barred Jackalope from going farther. Peeking around the door, he saw two guards at a desk, speaking into walkie-talkies.

  Aesop leaned down to Jackalope. “The guards. Can you distract them while I open the door?”

  Jackalope’s nose puckered. “Those guards are never nice to Jack. So Jack will not be nice to them.”

  “No, don’t be nice.” Aesop gave him a nudge.

  Jackalope sprang into the lobby and let loose a deafening howl. Reflexively, the guards dropped their walkie-talkies to cover their ears. Aesop shielded his own as he darted through the shadows, past the guards, and toward the glass doors that led to the outside.

  It only took a moment for the guards to recover. As Jackalope continued to scream, one guard risked a hand off an ear to reach for her Taser. As she fired on Jackalope, Aesop slipped through the front door.

  Coming outside, he breathed freedom for the first time in years. The doors clicked shut behind him. He couldn’t hear Jackalope anymore. But through the glass he could see the little man had fallen to the ground. One guard threw a heavy sack over Jackalope’s sharp antlers while the other handcuffed him tightly.

  Wriggling on the floor, Jackalope looked at Aesop in desperation. Aesop shrugged and ran.

  When his alarm clock buzzed, Rory Greeley got out of bed and ready for school as he did every morning. He brushed his teeth, making sure to floss. He doused his head under the shower so he could comb down his cowlick. Sifting through his drawers, he dug out a Metropolis Metros T-shirt and pulled it over him. He wiggled his legs into a pair of skinny jeans, and then rolled on his socks. Last but not least, he packed the science project he’d been working on into his backpack, and slipped in the latest comic book issue of Robot Force he hadn’t finished reading.

  Before going downstairs, he peeked into his mother’s bedroom, on the vague hope that she had come home during the night. She had not.

  In the kitchen, Rory made himself a bowl of cereal and turned on the television. He had stopped watching cartoons recently in favor of MNN, the Metropolis News Network. The news anchor was interviewing the top reporter from the Daily Planet newspaper, Lois Lane.

  “Any developments in the rescue mission?” asked the anchor.

  Behind Lane lay the ruins that used to be central Metropolis. Less than two weeks ago, the unbelievable had happened. A giant, clawlike spacecraft had appeared in the sky above Metropolis. But the aliens aboard had not come in peace. Instead, they had razed a path of destruction through the city. Skyscrapers had toppled. Vast chasms had opened in the city streets. Electric grids had been demolished, causing an outage that spread all the way to Gotham.

  Worst of all, people had been trapped in the rubble. On the day of the attack, Rory’s mom had been downtown for a meeting at Wayne Tower. That tower was now reduced to a pile of bricks. But Rory was sure his mom was still out there—and he had a plan to find her.

  “Some families can rest easy today,” Lane said, “for three more survivors were dug out of the rubble last night.”

  Rory raised the volume on the television and leaned closer to the screen as if that would help him see better. But his mother was not among the two women and man who joined Lois Lane. He sat back, disappointed. But Lois Lane did have more good news. As more and more cell towers have come back online in Metropolis, survivors stranded in emergency shelters have been able to contact family members. It seemed like it would only be a matter of time until he answered the phone and his mom would be on the other end. But Rory wasn’t just going to wait around for his mother to find him.

  Rory hadn’t told anyone that his mom had gone missing. He feared if he alerted the authorities, they might take him away from his home and the project he was building to find his mom. He had to pretend everything was normal.

  The problem was, it wasn’t. He shook the cereal box over his bowl. Only crumbs fell out. It was the last cereal box in the pantry, and he wasn’t going to be able to afford another. He needed to buy an accessory for his project this afternoon with what remained of his lunch money. Food was going to have to wait until he found his mother.

  On the television, the news anchor spoke over video of a man in a blue bodysuit and a red cape flying through the falling buildings. “I heard Superman was helping the rescue workers.”

  Lois Lane appeared in a small box. “That’s right. Superman has cleared away rubble and rescued trapped civilians all over Metropolis. He’s doing everything he can to help.”

  Rory watched as the footage cut to Superman helping pull a foreign cruise liner safely to port. “Yet if he’s an alien,” said the news anchor, “how is he any different from those who operated the spaceship? Can he really be trusted?”

  “As a reporter, my job is to simply inform the public of the facts, not tell them who they can or can’t trust,” Lane said. “What I can tell you is that the mayor of Metropolis has declared his full support for Superman. He even wants a statue built to commemorate Superman’s heroic efforts. You can read about it in my exclusive interview with him in today’s Daily Planet.”

  “Thanks, Miss Lane,” said the anchor. “And to all our viewers at home, be sure to catch the MNN telethon tonight—”

  Rory switched off the television. He refused to let the report depress him. No news was good news as far as he was concerned. The rescue workers were still searching, and the shelters were full of people who still hadn’t been able to call home. He was sure his mother was still out there. And when he came home today, he would finish his project and start his own search.

  Slinging his book bag over his shoulder, Rory went out the side door and locked it behind him. He hid the key in the hollow of the oak tree in their yard, catching a glimpse through the branches of what looked like a man flying in the sky.

  When he moved out from under the tree and looked up, he saw only clouds.

  In a vast underground cave, its entrance hidden by a waterfall, Bruce leaned back in his chair, exhausted. Crime was much on his mind. He had just returned from a busy night patrolling Gotham City’s streets. Though he’d been stopping criminals for the last twenty years, the streets had never had been so bad as they had been within the last two weeks. Crime had quadrupled since the so-called alien invasion.

  But aliens weren’t what concerned Bruce. What concerned him were the criminals from Metropolis who had moved to Gotham City. He didn’t know how he could stop them all. He felt like one man against an army. Fighting the kind of war that never ended in victory.

  Alfred, his family’s longtime confidant and Bruce’s lone friend, took the elevator into the cave. He brought with him a freshly pressed tuxedo on a hanger. “Time to get dressed in your other suit,” he said in his upper-class British accent.

  “I’ve attended too many galas this month. I can’t do another one,” Bruce said. His body ached from a particularly difficult fight with one of the robbers. He was getting older.

  “This one’s a must,” Alfred said.

  “Museum or library?”

  “Those are next month. This is the MNN telethon for the victims of the attack.”

  Bruce felt ashamed for complaining. He’d lost people when Wayne Tower in Metropolis had fallen. He almost hadn’t survived himself.

  “How much do you think I’ll b
ring in?” Wayne asked.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you broke someone’s bank,” Alfred said. “From what I hear, there are more than a few real estate developers who are eager for a private meeting with the president of Wayne Enterprises. There are rumors they want to build fancy condominiums where Wayne Tower once stood.”

  “How awful. They should know better than to capitalize on this tragedy,” Wayne said. “They should be donating money to help the survivors, not trying to score a deal with me.”

  “If the world worked that way, Master Wayne, then there wouldn’t be a need for Batman.”

  Bruce bandaged the cuts from his night’s work and put on his tuxedo. Alfred folded his pocket square and tucked it into his jacket. “Very sharp, Master Wayne. Very sharp indeed.”

  Bruce looked at himself in the mirror. He preferred his other suit. If he wore that, he could give these greedy businessmen a real run for their money.

  It was just another typical day at Lewis Wilson Middle School. Rory met up with Ajay and his buddies before first period, read his comic book after he finished his math quiz early, and did what he had done ever since his mom hadn’t come home—he pretended everything was normal. It wasn’t hard when all the other kids were pretending. It had only taken a couple of days before everyone at school had gone back to their cliques and stupid jokes and bullying on the PE field. It was as if Metropolis hadn’t been attacked by aliens at all.

  Then again, none of them had a missing parent.

  There were distractions that helped get his mind off his mom. In history, Ellie sat two seats in front of him. She had long brown hair and wore thin black glasses and was a whiz in math, too. She seemed to Rory to be exactly as the glittery letters on her T-shirt read: #Fabulous. Whenever she turned, he put on a smile. She smiled, but it was never to him. In fact, she didn’t seem to notice Rory. Her friend Mina sat between them and whenever the teacher turned his back, the two girls were always showing each other photos of Superman on their phones.

  Sitting across, Ajay rolled his eyes. He had a crush on Mina. “All they want to do is talk about Superman,” he whispered to Rory. “I bet he’s not even that good-looking. Why else wouldn’t he let himself get photographed?”