Somebody turned on the lights, and the boys got to work. They started up the generators, climbed into the cabs of the parade floats, and quickly began to inflate the pitifully withered giant balloons.
No, this wasn’t going to be a dull daytime parade. This parade was going to march down Broad Avenue in the middle of the night! His announcements had been playing on Gotham City television sets for hours—come see the parade! And make a few bucks besides! He expected quite a turnout, even at the witching hour. People always wanted something for nothing.
Too bad he’d forgotten to mention those other little dividends he intended to give the crowd as well. He was such an absentminded Joker! Ah, well. He was sure they’d all be very happy with their newfound wealth, in the few minutes they had left to enjoy it.
Generators growled to life, powering giant searchlights. The doors of the warehouse opened, and the trucks started for Broad Avenue, towing their searchlights and floats and giant balloons. The Joker’s favorite float was the one with the throne and the giant banners that read “200”
The last of the trucks rumbled through the warehouse doors. The Joker waved at all of them. This was going to be the most perfect parade ever! And it was only the beginning.
“I’m prepared to rule the world!” he screamed.
Then he started to laugh and laugh. After tonight, he didn’t think he would ever stop.
They lined Broad Avenue—first hundreds, then thousands of curious citizens, waiting for a midnight parade, and all that free cash. And the Joker wasn’t about to disappoint them.
One of the searchlight trucks came first—a parade’s no good unless you can see it, after all. Amplified rock music blasted from huge speakers mounted on either side of the light.
Boom shakalakalaka. Boom shakalakalaka.
The citizens—a trifle cautious before—started to get into the spirit of things. Some of them were dancing, others cheering. But all watched as the searchlight’s beam focused on the leader of the parade, a giant balloon above them all, a fifty-foot-long cartoon clown leering contentedly at the crowd below. Then the truck towing the balloon turned the corner onto the parade route. The crowd gasped as they saw the float, full of historical figures—one of whom might of been John T. Gotham—and those wonderful banners: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GOTHAM CITY!
How appropriate, the Joker thought, to have the birthday parade at night, when the real city came to life!
And there was more to come. A dozen floats, showing the finest details of this fair city. And the giant balloons!
Boom shakalakalaka. Boom shakalakalaka.
The citizens were having a good time now. And it was about to get even better!
That’s when the money started to fall. The air was filled with thousands of dollar bills.
The citizens were amazed. But where was it all coming from?
Yes, there! Look up, in the middle of the swirling money, look carefully, citizens, at the float in the lead. There, in the middle of all the historical figures, including even John T. Gotham, was a throne. And on that throne was the Joker, surrounded by some of the best of his boys. Bob—good old Bob—handed the Joker bundles of dollar bills. The Joker pitched the bills up, up, and away, right into the path of a giant fan, conveniently located for maximum circulation.
Boom shakalakalaka. Boom shakalakalaka.
The greenbacks fell from the air. People realized that there was real money coming down. Now the citizens got really excited.
The amplified rock music had a vocal on now. The Joker sang along.
Boom shakalakalaka. Boom shakalakalaka.
This was the best! He had only one more thing he wanted to know.
Have you ever danced with the devil by the pale moonlight?
This time, he could ask all of Gotham City!
“Welcome, everyone!” the Joker’s amplified voice announced. “Enjoy yourselves. Open those hungry wallets!”
Vicki Vale couldn’t believe what was happening here on the streets around Gotham Square. Corto Maltese, in the middle of a fire fight, was not as chaotic as what was going on in front of her. The crowd was pouring in from everywhere, people climbing over each other, trampling others underfoot, all grabbing for the money falling from the sky.
She kept back on the sidewalks, against the buildings, away from the worst of the melee, trying to get a few good shots for the Globe. She remembered what she thought, a few days ago, about the Joker wanting to start a war. Well, now the war was here, but the combatants were all of the people of Gotham City, fighting themselves.
A car horn blared behind her. Was the Joker after her again? She turned quickly, ready to run or fade into the crowd.
“Vicki!” It was only Allie Knox, calling to her from his car.
She jumped into the passenger seat. Allie looked over at her.
“You think Batman will show for this?”
Vicki looked out at the anarchy that reigned across Broad Avenue.
“He’ll be here,” she replied.
Knox nodded and grinned, like a young boy running through a playground. He started the car and drove slowly into the crowd.
It was well after midnight. Most of the city was dark beneath him. But in the middle of it all was a streak of blazing light.
He banked the Batwing, sliding the aircraft between the skyscrapers. He’d have to land on Broad Avenue.
That’s where the Joker would be waiting.
Knox’s car had pushed through the crowds to the end of the parade. Vicki leaned from the window, taking pictures of the madness.
“Look at that!” Allie yelled.
Vicki looked around. He was pointing straight ahead, where one of the floats had jumped the sidewalk and crashed into a lamppost, bringing it to a stop. People swarmed over the float, fighting with the Joker’s goons as they grabbed for the floating dollar bills.
Vicki started snapping pictures through the front windshield.
“Pull over,” she instructed.
Knox eased his car to the side of Broad Avenue—not that, in this crowd, it made much of a difference where they left it.
Allie whistled. “Man, this is sick!”
Vicki tried to open the door against the press of the mob. She wanted to get a better angle on what was happening in front of them. She’d have to stay close to the car, though, or she’d get swept away by the crush of people.
“A girl could get hurt in a place like this!” Allie yelled as she pushed herself from the car. She leaned back against the fender, letting the crowd go by. She looked above the damaged float, up to a gigantic balloon that bobbed and weaved above the crowd. She took a quick photo, then reached into her camera bag for a telephoto lens.
She rapidly changed lenses and tilted the camera up to get a closer shot of the balloon. She noticed something else up there besides the balloon in the searchlight’s glare—something green—as she focused the lens. It was like smoke, leaking from one of a number of large metal cylinders attached to the underside of the balloon—a cylinder that must have crashed against a building when the float went up on the sidewalk.
Smoke, she thought, or gas. The heavy green cloud drifted down toward the crowd.
She looked down at the Joker’s henchmen on the float. They saw the cloud, too, and quickly donned gas masks. So she was right! Some of the other people on the float weren’t so lucky. She looked back through her telephoto and saw a couple of them gasping for air. One of them collapsed onto the float, his mouth twisted into a rictus grin.
It was gas, then, made from the same chemicals the Joker had used to sabotage all the prepared foods and beauty aids. What did he call it?
Smylex!
The deadly green gas settled over the float, then spread through the crowd toward Vicki.
“Those balloons are full of Smylex gas!” she yelled in at Knox. “He’s going to kill everybody!”
Allie leaned over and forced open the door on the passenger side. He held his hand out to Vicki. Some of the crowd in f
ront of them realized there was something wrong. They started to panic, pressing into the other half of the mob still trying to reach the floating money.
“Get in!” he screamed over the crowd noise. “Close the door!”
There was a noise overhead like a jet engine, even louder than the crowd. She looked up. Some sort of black aircraft blotted out the moon.
Vicki stuck her head in the door.
“We’ve got to cut those balloons loose!” She took a deep breath, trying to quell the panic she now felt rising in herself. “I think I saw Batman. We’ve got to warn him!”
Knox grabbed Vicki’s shoulder and pulled her the rest of the way into the car. She leaned back in the passenger seat, trying hard not to hyperventilate. He leaned over her and slammed the car door.
“Don’t move,” he told Vicki.
He jumped out on the driver’s side.
“Allie!” Vicki began. What was he doing? He’d get himself killed.
He ran quickly around to the trunk and pulled out a toolbox. Vicki realized he hadn’t used the key to open the back—the car was still running with the key in the ignition. This old rattletrap of Knox’s probably didn’t even have a lock in the back. He lugged the toolbox up past the driver’s seat and placed it on the hood of the car. He grinned at Vicki as he opened the box. She could hear tools clatter as he rummaged around inside.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
He tied a white antidust mask over his face, then picked up a wicked-looking pair of wire cutters. Vicki started to open the door.
“Stay here!” he yelled at her through the mask. “Let me do this one thing!”
Vicki let her hand fall from the door handle. The panic had exhausted her completely. There was no way she could move fast enough to stop Allie from doing whatever he damned well pleased.
The closest part of the crowd had stampeded out of the way, leaving a clear path to the float. Allie tossed the toolbox into the backseat and ran toward the spreading gas.
“Allie, please—be careful,” she called.
Knox rushed to the float, dodging those people still fighting for the money or struggling with the effects of the gas. The Joker’s men were busy kicking bodies out of the way. Nobody noticed Knox as he leapt up between the miniature re-creation of Gotham City Hall and the cathedral. He reached the corner of the float and started to work on one of the balloon’s moorings. On the third try, he cut through the cable. Half of the balloon started to rise, lifting the deadly gas along with it.
That’s when the Joker’s men noticed him. Knox dodged the first hail of bullets, moving toward another of the moorings. Then someone shot from behind him. One of the bullets connected. Knox went down.
Vicki had had enough of this. The bullets had started her adrenaline flowing all over again. Nobody was going to be a dead hero when she was around. She jumped into the driver’s seat and floored the accelerator.
The car screeched to a halt at the edge of the float where Knox quickly rose and dove for the hood.
Miraculously, for the few seconds this took, nobody shot at them.
The spell was broken by the time Vicki had regained the driver’s seat. Bullets flew from everywhere. She stamped on the accelerator as the rear window shattered in a shower of bullets. The rear window on the passenger side went next.
She got the car around the corner, but the bullets had hit something vital. The engine died. She pulled the decimated machine up on the sidewalk, so the bulk of Gotham Cathedral was between them and the goons with the guns. Still, they could get picked off in a second if they stayed in the car. Vicki got out and cautiously walked around to the passenger side. There was no gunfire. They had made it far enough around the corner so that they could no longer see the float—and, more important, the gunmen on the float could no longer see them.
Knox groaned as he slid off the car hood. He tried to walk as she supported him, but his legs kept collapsing underneath him. There was blood flowing from his forehead.
Breathing heavily, blood streaming down his face, Knox looked up at her. He tried to grin.
“You were great, Allie,” Vicki reassured him as she? glanced cautiously out at the street. “But don’t try any more heroics tonight.”
Knox didn’t answer her. She looked back down at him.. He had passed out.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Boom shakalakalaka. Boom shakalakalaka.
The Joker tossed another bundle of dollar bills into the air.
“That’s right, folks!” he screamed into his handy portable microphone. “Who can you trust? Me!” He threw even more bills aloft. “Me, I’m here handing out real money. And where is Batman? He’s at home—washing his tights!”
His laughter was cut short by a loud whooshing sound overhead. He looked up above the parade route. There, illuminated by the sweeping searchlights, was some sort of private jet, painted jet black and built to look like the wing of a bat!
Batman did have such nice toys! The Joker leapt up and down and waved.
“Ah!” he screamed into the microphone. “Wing-ed battle flies through the night, and finds me ready!”
He laughed even more loudly than before as he threw a final fistful of bills in front of the giant circulating fan. Now it was time to get down to business.
“Bob!” he yelled to his ever-present sidekick. Good old Bob. “Mask!”
Bob handed him the gas mask, standard World War II issue, except that it had thoughtfully been painted with purple, gold, and green Joker colors.
Boom shakalakalaka. Boom shakalakalaka.
“Hey!” a fellow asked angrily from the base of the float. “What is this stuff?”
Oh, dear. The fellow was upset because the green dye was coming off the money and getting all over his hands! Or maybe he was miffed because all the money underneath the dye was Joker money, with the Joker’s handsome face right there on the one-dollar bill in place of dull old George Washington!
The man was still down there screaming, throwing the funny money back at the float. What did the fellow expect him to do, give away real greenbacks? Hey, the Joker might have been crazy, but he wasn’t stupid! Nobody ever gave money away—at least nobody the Joker knew.
That fellow was a real troublemaker. Now he was getting other people in the mob out there to look at their money, and they were all getting upset! Cries of “Cheater!” and “This stuff is fake!” drifted in over the rock and roll.
Boom shakalakalaka. Boom shakalakalaka.
What could you do with a crowd like that?
Oh, well. The Joker guessed it was time to kill them all.
He spoke into his handy mike one more time:
“Now comes the part where I relieve you, the little people, of the burden of your failed and useless lives. But, as my plastic surgeon always said—when you gotta go, go with a smile!”
He reached beneath his throne and pulled out his handy remote control. He pointed the control up toward the balloons above, pressing the handy big red button at the control’s center. The dozens of canisters started to release their deadly green gas into their respective balloons, making all the Saturday cartoon favorites bloat and extend themselves as they prepared to explode.
Bob—good old Bob—finally handed him a gas mask. The Joker screamed with laughter as he fitted the mask over his nose and mouth.
The balloons upstairs were getting more swollen by the instant, developing some unsightly bulges around the seams—seams that looked, temptingly, as if they might rip at any second. And when they ripped, that lovely Smylex gas would blossom forth—enough gas to cover half of Gotham City.
Oh dear, the Joker realized. He hadn’t thought about what to do with the other half.
Citizens were starting to scream out there. At last, a few members of the crowd were getting it into their poor, dim brains. They were all going to die—and die in a very special way, with big, cheerful Smylex grins. Funny money fluttered to the ground as the mob trampled every which way.
Batman might never have seen the leaking gas if one of the guy wires on the balloon hadn’t gotten loose. But, because one of the moorings was gone, the balloon was bobbing and weaving in an erratic fashion, caught in the wind-tunnel effect between Gotham City skyscrapers—almost as if it was waving to him.
It was enough of an oddity that he turned the Batwing around to investigate. A moment later, he had seen the green fog leaking from the metal egg strapped to the figure’s stomach, and the Joker’s henchmen wearing gas masks down below.
Smylex gas! It had to be. The Joker couldn’t kill Gotham City with his subversion of household products, so he had decided to take a more direct approach. He probably had the gas pumped into all the balloons. Knowing the Joker, mixing the poison gas with helium might even make the Smylex more deadly.
But it was only deadly if it could reach the crowd below.
He was beyond the parade again in a matter of seconds. He pulled the Batwing into a tight loop, then dove for Broad Avenue, leveling out thirty feet above the street.
His computer told him what he needed to know. He flipped a pair of switches on the controls, one to angle the razor-sharp edge of the wings, the other to open a trap to catch the severed ropes and hold them fast.
He threw the Batwing forward, beneath the balloons.
The Joker couldn’t believe it.
The Batman’s plane was slicing through the wires that held the murderous balloons to the floats below, then carrying the balloons along in the jet’s wake, a bright, bouncing, multicolored bunch of misplaced death. What was he going to do—let them out over the ocean?
“My balloons!” the Joker screamed. “Those are my balloons!”
The Batman didn’t answer him.
Sometimes, the Joker decided, the other guy’s toys went too far.
He was going to crash.
That was his first thought when he looked back out of the nose of the plane and saw the ruin of Gotham Cathedral looming before him. He had been paying too much attention to the balloon gathering, and now the end of Broad Avenue was coming up fast.
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