Batman 5 - Batman Begins

by Dennis O'Neil

  The air became cooler and Alfred could again breathe normally. The elevator jolted to a stop and as it did, Alfred heard a deafening crash. Fragments of dirt and stone rained down around him and he realized that the house must have collapsed.

  Bruce stirred and, leaning against the side of the elevator, got to his feet. Alfred helped him to the workbench. Bruce looked up at the ceiling. There were tears in his eyes.

  “What have I done, Alfred? Everything my family . . . my father built . . .”

  Alfred was tugging off Bruce’s jacket. The white shirt beneath was stained with blood. Alfred tried to speak, but could not. He coughed, and tried again: “The Wayne legacy is more than bricks and mortar, sir.”

  Alfred tore Bruce’s shirt off and peered at a gash on Bruce’s side, sticky with congealing blood.

  “I thought I could help Gotham,” Bruce said. “But I’ve failed.”

  Alfred ripped a long strip from the shirt and began to wind it around the wound. Without looking up from his task, he asked, “And why do we fall, sir?”

  Alfred knotted the improvised bandage and answered his own question. “So that we might better learn to pick ourselves up.”

  “Still haven’t given up on me?”

  “Never.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  At first, Rachel had wondered if she was in any condition to drive. She still could not separate what was real from what was imagined about the wild drive and chase through the city, but she had vivid and accurate memories of everything that had preceded it. And she remembered the cavern and the masked man who had saved her: that was clear in her mind. But she had been drugged, twice, and maybe she was still suffering after-effects, not fit to be behind the wheel. No, she had been given an antidote and, besides, she felt okay. Better than okay; she was rested and her senses were sharp and clear.

  And she had to find Gordon.

  She needed transportation, desperately, but her car was still parked near the asylum in the Narrows, miles away. But her mother’s wasn’t. No cabs on the street, not this late, but her mother’s condo was only a mile and a half away and Rachel ran in the park as often as her schedule permitted.

  She began to jog and, after two blocks, quickened her pace to a run. Eighteen minutes later, she was talking to a graying woman in a nightgown, her mom, who was at first angry at being awakened and, when she had finished rubbing her eyes and splashing cold water on her face, worried, Rachel assured her that, no, everything was okay, she just needed to borrow a car for an hour or two. Five minutes after that she was driving her mom’s ancient gas guzzler from a garage beneath the condo.

  It was almost midnight by the time she arrived at the Narrows. From several blocks away, she saw police flashers clustered around the bridge to the Narrows. As she approached it, a red-faced cop with a beer belly held up a warning hand. Rachel braked and rolled down her window.

  The cop put a forearm on the car’s roof and leaned toward her. “Look, lady, we’re about to raise the bridges. You won’t have time to get back over.”

  Rachel fumbled in her purse and found her ID, which she held in front of the cop’s face. “Officer, I’m a Gotham City district attorney with information relevant to this situation, so please let me pass.”

  “Let me talk to my sergeant,” the cop said. “You’ll have to leave your car here.”

  For an hour, Gordon, Flass, and two uniforms had been prowling the streets and alleys of the Narrows, aware that citizens were peering at them from windows and porches. Then Gordon’s flashlight beam hit a man dressed in Arkham Asylum coveralls, cowering behind a Dumpster. The inmate began to hop away on one foot and Flass said to Gordon, “Keep your light on him.”

  Flass brought the inmate down with a tackle.

  “Harassment, I see harassment,” someone yelled from a backyard.

  Flass pointed his gun at the nosy neighbor. “Wanna see excess force?”

  Gordon pushed Flass’s gun down. “Flass, cool it!”

  Gordon stood the inmate on his feet and cuffed him.

  The inmate began to whimper.

  “Take it easy,” Gordon told him.

  “Hey, Gordon,” one of the uniforms shouted, “somebody to see you.”

  Gordon flashed his light up the street and saw Rachel Dawes, from the D.A.’s office, coming toward him.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked her.

  “Our . . . mutual friend sent me with this.” She took the two syringes from her purse. “These counteract Crane’s toxin. One is for you, and the other is to start mass production in case things get worse.”

  Gordon accepted the syringes.

  “Hopefully you won’t need them,” Rachel said.

  “I won’t. Not unless the perps have some way of getting it into the air. Okay, Ms. Dawes, thanks. Now you’d better get off the island before they raise the bridges.”

  Gordon motioned to the cop, who led Rachel back into the darkness.

  The word had finally come through; finally, the cops had permission to raise the bridges. Sergeant Harry Bilkie, who had been waiting for an hour, hung his walkie-talkie on his belt and went into the cramped iron cabin that housed the bridge controls.

  A police van tore up the avenue and squealed to a stop. Harry gave it the once-over: regular cop van.

  “You guys gotta get across?” he shouted.

  “In a hurry,” the driver shouted back.

  “Okay, last one,” Harry said, and waved the van on.

  Harry waited until he saw the van’s taillights vanish, then pulled a lever. The bridge split in half and each side began to pivot upward.

  Harry spoke into his walkie-talkie. “South side’s up.”

  There was a squawk and three other voices reported that the north and west sides were up, too, and the tunnel was closed. The Narrows was completely cut off from the rest of the city.

  Someone had finally seen the fire on the Wayne property and made the necessary call. The engines from the nearest station arrived ninety minutes after the blaze had been started and the engines from the second nearest did not arrive until almost two hours had passed. The firemen went through the motions of pumping some water onto the conflagration, but realistically, they knew there was nothing they could do except, as one of them said, “Break out the marshmallows and call the insurance company.”

  In the vast, dim cavern underneath the remains of Wayne Manor, Bruce Wayne was transforming himself. He seemed to be in no hurry. He put on the flexible tunic, the tights, the boots, the graphite cowl, and the cape. He thrust his hands into the scalloped gloves and buckled the wide, compartmented belt around his waist.

  For a moment, he looked up at the bats, barely visible, fluttering among the stalactites. Then he turned to Alfred, who had been watching him, and said, “This might be the Batman’s last ride.”

  “Then I suggest you make it a good one.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Batman strode to the Batmobile, climbed into the cabin, and started the engine. It roared, and the bats swarmed from their hiding places.

  A few seconds later, the vehicle erupted from behind the waterfall and sped into the night.

  Rachel followed the cop down the alley, which ended in a square at the base of a monorail tower. She saw a SWAT van parked nearby and several uniformed, vested men deployed in the area, looking up at the monorail track. A little boy, about six, with blond hair falling in a cowlick over his forehead was tugging at the sleeve of one of the SWATs.

  “I can’t find my mom,” the boy said.

  The SWAT shoved the boy, who stumbled backward and fought to maintain his balance. Rachel ran to him and put a steadying hand on his shoulder.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she snapped at the SWAT

  The SWAT ignored her and as Rachel held the boy’s hand she shouted at the SWAT “Hey, you. Look at me!”

  The SWAT turned, drew a pistol from his holster, and aimed it at Rachel.

  “Gentlemen!” It was a
voice new to Rachel: deep, grave, impressive. She saw a tall man with deep-set, burning eyes under a ledge of brow step from the rear of the van. Behind him, there was a bulky industrial machine of some sort.

  “Time to spread the word,” he said, “and the word is . . . panic.”

  He pressed a button on the machine and—

  Within moments, the reaction spread throughout the Narrows. It was as though cannons were fired simultaneously along every street and alley. Fire hydrants shot their caps into the streets and began gushing. Manhole covers flipped high into the air. Sewer pipes split. Steam pipes burst. Soon there was broken glass and water seeping from foundations and spouting from sprinklers. Avenues were flooded and cars were stalled. Alarms rang and sirens shrieked. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children awakened, blinked, looked first at clocks and then out of windows, and muttered, “What the hell,” and ran to their phones to call neighbors and relatives and ask if any one had any idea what was going on.

  One man in his eighties found his air raid warden helmet, last worn during World War Two, and put it on and told his wife that he knew it would come in handy someday, dammit.

  Some went to the nearest house of worship and many, many more simply prayed wherever they happened to be.

  And others made preparations to begin looting.

  Jeff Benedict had thought tonight would be an easy one. He’d pulled the midnight-to-eight shift at his place of employment, the Water Board Control Room, housed downtown in Wayne Tower, and heck, the graveyard shift was usually a snap. Even Gothamites, maybe the world’s biggest night owls after New Yorkers, had to sleep sometime and sleepers didn’t use water, at least not much. And his boss was Lon Calter, one of the real nice guys, easy to get along with, to talk sports with, to do whatever needed doing with. So some guys bitched about the graveyard, but not Jeff. To Jeff, the graveyard was cake.

  He was leaning back in his chair, reading the sports section of the Trib, when Lon said, “Looka that,” and Jeff saw that the monitors were going crazy.

  Jeff and Lon moved to their workstations and began pushing buttons and checking gauges.

  Jeff pointed to a dial. “Wouldja look at that pressure? It’s spiking.”

  “Can you tell where?” Lon asked.

  Jeff swiveled his chair to a computer screen, tapped some keys, and said, “Right there. Southeast sector.”

  “That’s the water main under the Narrows,” Lon said. “Something’s . . . cripes—something’s vaporizing the water.”

  “That ain’t possible,” Jeff said.

  “No? Take a look at the temperature. Going through the roof.”

  “Whadda we do?”

  “Beats me. Whatever this is, it ain’t covered in the manual.”

  Something had exploded near Rachel, knocking her down, and something else scalded her cheek. The hem of her skirt was ripped and her knee was scraped—that was what she was first aware of. She shook her head and blinked her eyes and began trying to make sense of things. The street was filling with . . . what? Fog? But it couldn’t be fog, not when the air was clear a moment ago. So what? The drugs? Was she experiencing a drug flashback? No—steam. That’s what the mist was! She heard a child’s whimper and saw the little blond boy lying in the gutter. He was hurt. She began crawling toward him.

  Gordon had been standing near a sewer when the lid shot into the air, taking parts of the street with it, and a cobblestone struck the side of his head. He went down and heard Flass screaming incoherently. He got to his feet and felt warmth and wetness, first on his hands and face and then soaking through his clothing. Steam was rolling in waves over everything. He saw Flass, a dark silhouette, waving his gun and continuing to scream.

  Flass fired. At what? Something Gordon couldn’t see? Or . . . maybe something that wasn’t there.

  Flass fired again and this time the flash from the muzzle of his gun elongated and grew tentacles that reached toward Gordon—

  He knew he was hallucinating and that he had only a few seconds before the toxin he must have inhaled would fry his mind completely. He fumbled in his pocket and found one of the syringes Rachel Dawes, had given him. He got it out, but then he had a problem; his thumbs and fingers had become as thick as sausages and he couldn’t make them slide the cardboard sleeve from the needle. He grabbed the sleeve in his teeth and pulled it free of the needle and somehow jabbed the needle into the back of his hand. He pressed the plunger with his chin and felt molten fire sizzle into his vein.

  His fingers and thumbs returned to their normal shape and size.

  Something sang past his ear. Flass was still waving his gun and shooting; a bullet had missed Gordon by inches.

  Now Flass was aiming at a kid, a teenager, who stood trembling on the curb.

  “Flass—no!” Gordon shouted. “He’s unarmed.”

  Gordon brought Flass down with a tackle. They locked arms and legs and rolled on the cobblestones. Flass freed his hands and began to choke Gordon. Gordon elbowed Flass in the face again and again, and finally Flass’s grip relaxed and he dropped off Gordon’s body and lay still. Gordon dragged Flass to a drainpipe and handcuffed him to it.

  Gordon stood panting, and he heard it then. It began as a moan and became a howling that increased in volume until it seemed to fill the universe. What kind of beast . . . ? And Gordon realized that he was hearing many voices, thousands of them, wailing in mortal terror.

  In the few seconds it took Rachel to crawl to the blond boy, she realized what must have happened. She wasn’t drugged, but everyone else was. The toxin was in the steam and the guy in the police van must have caused it with the odd machine.

  The boy was sobbing uncontrollably. Heaven only knew what he thought he was seeing.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Rachel cooed. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

  “Of course they are,” someone said behind Rachel and the boy. She turned and looked up. A dark, massive shape was emerging from the mist: a saddled horse, dragging a dead cop from the stirrup, with Jonathan Crane astride the animal, wearing his burlap mask. Other shapes were gathered behind him: inmates from the asylum.

  “Dr. Crane,” Rachel said.

  “Not Crane,” the mounted man screamed. “Scarecrow.”

  Rachel was a lawyer, not a psychiatrist, but she realized that Crane had gone round the bend in an odd way. He apparently believed he was this “scarecrow.”

  She picked up the boy and ran into the mist. Crane galloped after her. Rachel stumbled and hit a telephone pole, but blundered blindly on.

  She slammed into a wall. Dead end.

  Crane reined his horse only a few feet from Rachel and the boy and said, “Let me help you.”

  The inmates crowded around Crane.

  Rachel put the boy down and reached into her shoulder bag.

  The horse reared back, front hooves pawing the air.

  “Try shock therapy,” Rachel said, and pulled her Taser from her bag. She shot it at Crane and the barbs caught in the sacking of his mask. Electrical sparks arced across Crane’s face. He went limp, and slid from the saddle. The horse whinnied and galloped back the way he had come, dragging the dead cop from one stirrup and Crane from the other.

  The inmates scattered.

  Rachel knelt by the boy and put her arms around him.

  Gordon had found an empty patrol car and had driven it to the nearest bridge, now raised and impassable. Police flashers were visible across the river, which meant cops were there, help was there. He keyed the cruiser’s radio and identified himself.

  The radio squawked. “We hear you.” Gordon recognized the voice of Commissioner Loeb. “What the hell’s going on over there?”

  “We need reinforcements,” Gordon said into the microphone. “Tac teams, SWATs, riot cops—get ’em in masks and—”

  “Gordon, all the city’s riot police are on the island with you.

  “Well, they’re completely incapacitated.”

  “There’s nobody left to send
in.”

  Batman had been monitoring the police bands ever since he had rocketed out from behind the waterfall and had heard the exchange between Gordon and Loeb. He was not surprised at the helplessness of the authorities in this emergency. He remembered dinner-table conversations between his father and guests about how the city was woefully unprepared for anything out of the ordinary, from an earthquake to a serious civil uprising, and how sooner or later the odds would catch up with it, with a disastrous aftermath. Joe Chill had killed Thomas Wayne before he could force the lethargic city planning commission to at least study the situation: another casualty of Rā’s al Ghūl’s economic marauding.

  He saw the red lights of police flashers glancing off walls before he actually saw the cluster of vehicles and the men standing around them. Just beyond the police group was the bridge, its halves pointing toward the sky, forming a vee with a forty-foot gap at its apex.

  Okay, here we go.

  Batman shifted and floored the accelerator. The Batmobile leaped forward, crashed through the wooden sawhorses blocking the entry to the bridge, and tilted upward, gaining speed. It left the roadway and was flying in a high arc across the river.

  Gordon reached through the open window of the cruiser and dropped the microphone on the seat. Now what? No help coming, and as far as he could tell, he was the only sane man left on the island. No way to get back to the mainland, either. So what’s the plan? Hide until things cool down, if they ever do?

  Two circles of light appeared on the pavement in front of him. He looked up and over his shoulder and saw headlights coming toward him—from above—and heard the roar of a powerful engine.

  He ducked. A large vehicle landed a dozen feet away, bounced once on its oversize tires, and stopped. Its top slid forward and a seat rose. Batman stepped out.

  “Nice landing,” Gordon said.