“The world?”
“Of course. Gotham City is only a necessary beginning. The worst parts of us Homo sapiens are now dominant, destroying both what is good in the race itself and the planet that sustains it. For the sake of what can be noble in humanity, the many must be destroyed so that the few can survive to evolve and grow, to fulfill our potential.”
“And slaughtering millions . . . no billions—that doesn’t bother you?”
“Do I look as though it does not bother me?”
He did not. He looked like a man maintaining his bearing under a tremendous weight.
“Stand with me?” he whispered.
“I’m standing right where I belong—between you and the people of Gotham.”
“No one can save Gotham. When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is natural, and inevitable. Tomorrow the world will watch in horror as one of its great cities destroys itself. The movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time.”
“You’ve tried to attack Gotham before?”
“Yes. Over the ages our weapons have grown more sophisticated . . . with Gotham we tried a new one . . . economics.”
“You created the depression twenty years ago?”
Rā’s nodded. “Create enough hunger and everyone becomes a criminal. But we underestimated certain of Gotham’s citizens . . . such as your parents.”
Bruce felt anger surge through him and he neither could control it nor did he want to. His jaws clenched, his muscles tightened. He knew that Rā’s was aware of his reaction and that Rā’s was playing him. He remembered how to relax and he did.
“Unfortunate casualties of the fight for justice. Slain by one of the very people they were trying to help. Their deaths galvanized the city into saving itself, and Gotham has limped on ever since. We’re back to finish the job.”
Rā’s looked back at the ballroom and nodded. His men began to emerge into the corridor. Bruce mentally counted and confirmed his earlier estimate: there were indeed a dozen of them.
“Proceed,” Rā’s said to them and they fanned out and pulled lighters from their pockets. They began to ignite drapes and furniture.
“Is this necessary?” Bruce asked.
“Perhaps not. But its symbolic value pleases me.”
The flames lit Rā’s’s face and danced in his eyes. “This time, no misguided idealists will be allowed to stand in the way. Like your father, you lack the courage to do all that is necessary. If someone stands in the way of true justice, you simply walk up behind him and stab him in the heart.”
Bruce was caught by surprise as a ninja descended from the rafters above him. He spun and grabbed the ninja’s throat and as he did Rā’s slid a long blade from his cane.
The corridor was filled with smoke that stung Bruce’s eyes and scratched at the back of his throat. Flames had ascended the walls and were licking across the ancient ceiling beams. He had experienced something like this once before, when he had set the monastery afire. Then, it had been a disadvantage, but now . . . He knew every inch of this house and his opponents did not. If seeing became difficult, or impossible, that could be a help . . .
Bruce struck the ninja on the base of the skull and as the man crumpled Bruce pivoted toward Rā’s. Rā’s thrust with his blade. Bruce took the point near his abdomen, felt it slice into tissue and hit bone. He remembered something an instructor at the monastery had said: Fighting with sharp edges, you will be cut. It is inevitable and it will hurt. True, it did hurt, but nothing vital was damaged. Bruce twisted his arm to the right and slapped the blade with his palm and the sword flew from Rā’s’s grasp.
“Perhaps you taught me too well,” Bruce said.
“Or perhaps you will never learn . . .” Rā’s struck a supporting column with his cane, as he had once struck the ice beneath Bruce’s feet. Bruce raised his eyes in time to see a flaming beam falling toward him, but too late to avoid it.
Rā’s’s next words were almost lost in the crackle of the fire. “. . . to mind your surroundings as well as your opponent.”
Bruce tried to rise, tried to push the beam off his body. He got his hands under it and strained; it lifted an inch, two . . . and he felt as though his muscles had suddenly emptied. The beam slipped down on top of him. He could not move.
Rā’s bent to pick up his sword. He slid it into the cane and regarded Bruce. “Justice is balance. You burned down my house and left me for dead. Consider us even.”
But Bruce did not hear Rā’s’s final words. He had lost consciousness.
Rā’s strode to a door and opened it. Followed by a billow of smoke, he stepped outside the house.
A group of his men were awaiting his orders.
“No one comes out,” Rā’s said. “Make sure.”
The men in tuxedos dispersed, each going to a different door of the manor. Most of the windows were glaring redly and a column of smoke rose into the sky. Eventually, someone, a neighbor, would notice and call for help. But the nearest fire department was fifteen minutes away. By the time it arrived, the old building would be gone and anyone inside it would be ashes.
Rā’s murmured, “We would have been magnificent together.”
He went to a SWAT van parked on the lawn and to the open doors of the trailer hitched to it. He climbed inside. He stood beside a large, industrial-type machine, which he patted, as though it were a cherished pet.
Jonathan Crane felt something drop into his lap. He lifted it and stared at it: his mask. He thought this delightful, and put on the mask, and looked around for someone to thank. Two men in uniforms stood in the open door of his cell.
“Time to play,” one of them said.
Crane—or the Scarecrow, as he now thought of himself—followed the uniforms out into the corridor. There was a loud clang and all the doors of all the cells swung open. Slowly, the inmates stumbled out, wide-eyed, some of them obviously dazed. They stood, some in small groups, some alone, backs pressed against the cell bars. A lot of them were mumbling.
“What are we waiting for?” the Scarecrow asked, and nobody answered him.
The uniformed men left Crane and hurried outside to their van. They got several bags of plastic explosives and detonators and began placing them on the walls surrounding the grounds.
Alfred found the keys to Rachel Dawes’s apartment in her purse. It was in a converted brownstone near the theater district, an old dwelling without a doorman, so Alfred had no trouble getting inside and not much trouble hauling Rachel up the stairs, into her rooms and onto her bed. Although she occasionally mumbled in her sleep during the drive from the suburbs, she did not awaken. He wondered if he should leave her a note but decided not to. He was not sure what, exactly, had transpired between her and Bruce and so he did not know the appropriate thing to say. In the end, he simply went back to the limousine and began the return to Wayne Manor.
The trip was quick and easy, until the last two miles. At this time of night, traffic was sparse, especially once he was away from midtown. The freeway was deserted for miles at a stretch, and driving was a pleasure. He wondered if there would be any partiers left. Probably. Some of Gotham’s elite tended to stay as long as there was a morsel left to eat or a drop to drink.
As he was turning off the down ramp and onto the access road that led to Wayne Manor, Alfred noticed a glow in the sky. A false dawn? No, not this early, and not to the north. Then what?
A fire!
Rachel did not know how long her eyes had been open, how long she had been staring at the pattern made by light from outside her window shining on her bedroom ceiling. She was lying on her bed in her darkened bedroom, fully clothed. She tried to remember how and when she had gotten here and found herself confronting a phantasmagoria of images:
. . . a scarecrow with wormy eyes . . .
. . . a flying automobile . . .
. . . a corridor that had no end . . .
Then she had the most disturbing thought of all: Had she been drugged? That had happened
once before, in law school, at a party, when a classmate had slipped an hallucinogenic into her lemonade and for the next fourteen hours she saw things that were not real. And she hated things that were not real, hated the very idea of them.
She stood, on wobbly legs, and snapped on a bed-table lamp and looked at herself in her dressing-table mirror: her clothes were mussed but intact and a few strands of hair had pulled loose from her ponytail and strayed across her face, but there were no visible cuts or bruises. She mentally scanned her body, kicked her legs, waved her arms: nothing broken, no unusual sensations, everything apparently intact.
“So I fell asleep and had the mother of all nightmares,” she said aloud and somehow the sound of her voice was reassuring.
She looked at her alarm clock: ten in the evening. So when had she dropped off . . . And then she saw them: two small syringes.
In the nightmare, she had been given two small syringes by the bat man.
No nightmare: in a rush, she remembered everything—the trip across the bridge, the asylum, Crane, the rescue, the chase. Everything.
She sat on the bed and picked up her phone. There was work to do and Rachel Dawes had always been at her best when she was at work.
The Arkham inmates stumbled into the exercise yard, which was lit by mercury-vapor lamps arrayed on the walls and fences. Some stood numbly, slowly surveying the area, obviously waiting either for something to happen or someone to tell them what was going on. Others moved quickly into the shadows or to the gates.
There was a sudden, deafening explosion and a chunk of the rear wall spun across the yard and shattered against the building. Debris swept over everyone. Some of the inmates rubbed their eyes with their fists, trying to clear them of dust and smoke. When they could see clearly again, they were looking at a gap in the wall, large enough for six men to pass abreast through it.
A few of the men, those who had gone to the gate and into the shadows, ran to the gap and on to the street outside. The rest followed more slowly, and a great deal less certainly, to freedom.
Gordon had been in the head nurse’s office, which he had commandeered, sipping cold coffee from a cracked mug and trying to reach Flass by cell phone, when he heard the explosion. Through the window he saw the gap in the wall. Yanking his gun from its holster, he ran for an exit. By the time he reached the yard, at least half the inmates had passed through the gap and were dispersing into the city outside. Gordon hesitated: he could shoot a few of the escapees, maybe drop even a dozen or so. But that would be wholesale slaughter and he had no stomach for it. So what else? He grabbed the nearest man and handcuffed him to a drainpipe.
“At least one of you is staying put,” he said.
Then he got out his cell phone again and speed-dialed headquarters.
Flass and a dozen patrolmen arrived ten minutes later. They examined the hole in the wall, an absolutely useless waste of time in Gordon’s opinion, and flashed their lights around the yard, presumably searching for anyone who had not yet fled.
Flass joined Gordon. “They’re all gone?”
Gordon nodded yes and both men stared through the gap into the dark street.
“How many were in maximum security?” Flass asked.
“Dozens . . . serial killers, rapists, assorted sociopaths. I called the city works office and asked them to raise the bridges, maybe keep some of the nutcases on the island. I’m still waiting for an answer. By the time I get one, it’ll probably be too late.”
“Yeah, probably. So we got a whole lot of homicidal maniacs running loose in Gotham, that what you’re telling me, Gordon?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
Alfred accelerated. He skidded through the manor’s front gate and his worst fears were confirmed . . . No, not his worst fears. The house was afire and that was terrible, but his worst fears concerned the location of Bruce.
First things first: get help. He braked and picked up the car phone. No signal, not this far from downtown Gotham. To be expected.
He drove toward the house and saw something that did not belong, a tractor-trailer truck parked on the lawn, on top of a flower bed. There were no cars in the driveway, which meant that the guests had already gone, but in the glow of the fire, he could see strange men standing at intervals around the blaze. Guards? Almost certainly. But they were looking toward the house which meant . . . ?
Which meant that their job was to prevent anyone from leaving the conflagration!
They would not welcome the Waynes’ sixty-something butler, of that Alfred was certain. No, were he to appear, they would do him harm. But their position meant that someone was still in the house and that someone very likely was Master Bruce. He might already be dead but Alfred refused to make such an assumption. Therefore, he must get past the guards. But how? He was not a violent man, nor an especially athletic one. True, he had played cricket effectively as a youngster back in Nottingham, but that was long ago, in another country, before he had met Thomas Wayne and his life had really begun.
No matter. As always, he would do what must be done. He was probably no match for the intruders in hand-to-hand combat, about which Alfred knew extremely little, and without doubt they were armed. A weapon was in order. There were a pair of eighteenth-century dueling pistols in the library, alleged to be those used by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in their fatal encounter, but they were hardly of any use to Alfred here, assuming they could be made to function. And there were no other firearms on the estate. But guns were not the only weapons. There were arrows and swords and cudgels . . . Cudgels? Now that was a thought! Of course, he had no access to an actual cudgel, but perhaps he could employ a substitute. And he knew just what it would be! He stopped the car beneath a beech tree and pulled a golf club—a nine iron—from the bag in the backseat.
He crept forward. The house was now fully aflame, sending torrents of sparks into the night sky. It was almost beautiful, yet it was the most horrid thing Alfred had ever seen and his stomach churned. He wanted nothing more than to lie down and be sick, but he could not, not until he had ascertained Bruce’s fate and helped, if help was possible.
The truck and another vehicle were at the front of the house. Therefore, it seemed likely that the greatest opposition would be encountered there. Perhaps there would be fewer potential obstacles at the rear, near the greenhouse and the old well. Moving as quickly as his somewhat arthritic bones allowed, Alfred circled the house, keeping just outside the glow cast by the fire. He paused and squinted. He could see only one man, who was standing, arms akimbo, in the courtyard by the kitchen door.
He approached the guard from the rear and swung the nine iron at the man’s back and the metal connected with skin and bone and made a sickening clunk, and the man dropped to the grass. Alfred stared. It was justified, what he had just done, and even necessary, but it was also bestially violent and he was deeply shocked that he had been capable of it, had done it without thinking. Perhaps that was the reason he had been able to do it: He had acted without thought.
But had he killed a man?
He knelt, placed two fingers on the man’s neck, and—thank heaven—felt a pulse.
A bit of flaming debris landed on the grass nearby and smoldered briefly. Well! That reminded Alfred that work had to be done! It wouldn’t get any easier, putting it off!
He ran into the house.
It was as though he had run into a wall, so intense was the heat. The air was sucked from his lungs and he stopped dead in his tracks. Then there was a muffled whumpf and Alfred was flung backward, out through the door into the garden. He surmised that the cooking gas had just ignited and thus the explosion. Through the door he could see what appeared to be a solid wall of flame. No getting into the manor that way, not anymore!
But the greenhouse . . . ?
He went into the glass structure and . . . yes! There were a couple of old blankets, too worn to be used inside, but put here in case some botanical use might be found for them. And he had per
sonally supervised the reinstallation of the plumbing; he knew the water faucets were functioning. And indeed they were! He soaked the blankets until they were saturated, wrapped them around his head, filled his lungs with cool air, and getting a running start, again ventured into the inferno. This time, thanks to the blankets, he was able to penetrate the fiery wall and, choking and coughing, made his way into the long corridor that skirted the ballroom. He tried to call Bruce’s name, but his voice was a thin rasp, inaudible in the roar and crackle all around him. Nothing to do but soldier on!
A few yards farther, he saw the young man on the floor, mostly hidden by a heavy oak beam. Alfred knelt by him, and as loudly as he was able, croaked, “Master Bruce!”
Bruce’s eyelids fluttered and his lips parted. Alfred wrung a bit of moisture from the corner of one of the blankets. The water dropped into Bruce’s mouth and his eyes came fully open.
Alfred began: “Sir, I’m afraid—”
“I know, Alfred.”
Bruce twisted his body. The beam did not move.
“Can’t budge it,” Bruce whispered.
Alfred injected a modicum of exasperation into what was left of his voice. “Sir, whatever is the point of all those push-ups if you can’t even—”
“Can it, Alfred,” Bruce said, and got his palms under the beam. He bent his knees, exhaled loudly, and pushed.
The beam inched upward, but not far enough. Alfred lay next to Bruce and put his hands on the beam. Together, they strained. The beam moved, not much, but Bruce rolled out from under it. The beam dropped to the floor.
Bruce managed to stand, swayed, then fell.
“Very well,” Alfred said. He put one of the blankets around Bruce, grabbed him beneath the armpits, and dragged him to the mirror near the piano. He played the four notes—Thank the stars that the fire had not yet damaged this delicate mechanism!—and the mirror swung on its hinges. Alfred pulled Bruce into the hidden passageway and onto the elevator. Shrugging off the blanket, now almost completely dry, he pushed a button and heard the generator start somewhere. The lights below flickered on. With a creak, the elevator began to descend into the cave.
Batman 5 - Batman Begins Page 18
