“Time for ups,” one of the strange voices whispered, pressing cold lips against his cloth-covered ear and making his skin crawl.
“Time for ups,” another voice said, cinching something heavy and way too tight around his neck.
“Ups, ups, ups,” the idiot voices echoed. “Ups, ups, ups.”
Gordon attempted to get his rubbery legs under him and stand, but all his limbs were weak and swarming with pins and needles. He felt dizzy and sick, suddenly sure that he was going to throw up inside the hood as he staggered and fell back to his knees. He hissed between his teeth as a dozen tiny splinters burrowed into his knees and shins.
“Ups, ups, UPS!” the voices chanted, someone punctuating the final word with a sharp yank on whatever was around his neck.
He resisted, pulling back and twisting his torso, wrists straining against his bonds. The exertion of that struggle brought up a film of cold, clammy sweat to his nude skin, bright spangles dancing under his tightly closed eyelids.
Don’t pass out, old man!
He couldn’t afford the luxury of oblivion. He had to get free and find Barbara.
That was the only thing that mattered. But why couldn’t he remember what happened to her? When he heard the crackle of the cattle prod somewhere to his left, it didn’t even need to touch his body to inspire him to leap almost instantly to his feet as he flinched away from the sound. He couldn’t get far, as he was still tethered by the neck.
Breathing much too heavily, he gasped for each tortured breath beneath the suffocating hood, and could feel heat surging through the skin of his face as a wave of sickening humiliation drenched him like a bucket of pig blood. He wanted desperately to cover himself and protect his private parts from the unknown assailants that surrounded him, but his arms were bound so tightly behind his back that his hands were swiftly going cold and numb. All he could do was crouch and curve his body inward, cowering like an animal away from the crackling of the cattle prod and the shrill, shrieking laughter of his tormentors.
“Walkies!” the voices screeched. “Walkies!”
Someone yanked on what was clearly a leash attached to his tethered neck, and he yelped, half-stepping, half-falling forward.
“WALK-IES!” They were chanting in unison again. “WALK-IES!”
He managed one tentative step, then another, when he felt the breeze increase and the wooden floor beneath him start to slant downward. Was he outside now? He knew he must be when he reached the end of the ramp and his bare feet encountered dry, loosely packed dirt. It was colder now, making him shiver and raising gooseflesh across his exposed skin while his face still burned beneath the hood.
“What…?” he said as the relentless pull on the leash led him on a grim and seemingly endless death march to nowhere. “Where am I?”
No reply, just more walking.
“I don’t understand,” he sputtered. “How did I—?”
There was a sudden wrenching yank backward on the leash, forcing him to stop suddenly, nearly losing his tentative balance.
“Down.”
This command issued from one of his lisping captors, and it sounded like it was coming from somewhere very low, disturbingly close to his crotch. Was he right about them being… children? Or worse, was one of them crouching down in front of him, about to do something to him… down there?
“What…?” he started to ask, trying not to cringe away and hating how weak and shaky his voice sounded. The swift reply to his unstated question was the sizzle of the cattle prod kissing the small of his back.
He collapsed into a fetal position in the dust, howling in agony as his muscles seemed to be trying to tear themselves loose from his electrified skeleton and escape in all directions at once. Gordon was shaking and sobbing uncontrollably when he felt another sharp upward yank on his leash.
“Goddammit!” he spat, impotent fury raging through his body as he struggled to his hands and knees. “Will somebody please tell me what the hell I’m doing here?”
“Doing?” This from a new voice. New, yet horribly familiar, coming from up high and farther away. “You’re doing what any sane man in your appalling circumstances would do.”
He had turned his covered face up towards the new voice when one of the creepy little hands ripped the hood off his head. He was temporarily blinded by a surge of light in a hundred swirling and lurid colors but he was soon able to focus on that familiar pale face and leering crimson grin.
“You’re going mad,” the Joker said.
31
“Sarge, you need to see this!”
What now? Sergeant Stan Merkle oversaw the crime stats reported in by the dirigible patrols. He was standing at the precinct’s coffee machine, breathing in the stale, bitter aroma of the hours-old brew and debating between his freshly blooming ulcer and his existential and seemingly unshakeable weariness.
Judging from the pinched and urgent tone, whatever Officer Tim Carstairs wanted him to see was going to piss him off, so against his better judgment, he went ahead and refilled his chipped GCPD mug.
Reluctantly he followed Carstairs over to their brand-new computer, around which a curious crowd had gathered. Peering between the blue uniformed shoulders, Merkle saw an image on the screen, filling itself in line by line, like a kind of slow digital striptease. It was a nude woman. As her features appeared, she looked vaguely familiar.
“Is this some kind of a joke?” Merkle growled, gulping and instantly regretting a mouthful of lukewarm coffee that both tasted and felt like battery acid going down. “Who’s responsible for this?” Other windows appeared on the screen, one by one, and began filling up with similar lurid images.
“We don’t know, sir,” Carstairs said. “We can’t do anything to override the transmission. We’ve tried everything.”
“It’s not just us, Sarge.” Officer Nancy Payton of the blimp squad was standing at a nearby desk, hand over the receiver of a phone. Her brows were drawn into a worried frown. “I’ve heard from six different precincts, and they’re all receiving these same images.”
On the screen, the nude woman’s lips appeared in the central photo, line by line. They seemed twisted, teeth flashing in a painful, angry grimace. Around them, disheveled licks of hair became visible, and there was dark blood clotting in her hair and webbing her teeth. Merkle felt a cold twist of nausea in his belly, aided and abetted by the bad coffee. This wasn’t some centerfold model.
This was something much worse.
“It looks like Commissioner Gordon’s daughter,” one of the younger recruits whispered to his buddy.
“You’re lookin’ at the face?” someone said, and that caused some sniggering.
“Shut up, asshole,” Payton said. “That’s not funny.”
“No, wait,” Merkle said, shoving the recruits out of the way and setting his cup down too hard, causing the coffee to slosh onto some nearby paperwork. “Jesus Christ, it is her.” He tapped the screen, trying not to look at her exposed breasts and focus on the patterned background. “That’s Jim Gordon’s rug!”
He spun. “I want all available units sent to the Commissioner’s place, pronto,” he roared. “And I want our best computer man here before this image finishes. Am I making myself clear? And the rest of you knuckleheads, have some respect, willya? This a police station, not a goddamn porno theater.”
He took off his jacket and was about to use it to cover the screen when another file suddenly popped up.
“What the hell is this now?” he raged.
“I think it’s a… a video file, sir,” Officer Payton replied.
“Lord A’mighty,” he muttered, covering the screen after all. “Video? Is that even possible? Look I don’t want anyone clicking anything, is that understood. Where the hell’s my computer guy?”
He put his hand over his eyes. Without wanting to, he found himself remembering Barbara when she was a scrappy little girl, back when he’d first started on the job. A whip-smart kid, always with her nose in a book. H
ow she’d essentially grown up around cops. She and Jim had their differences, especially during her rebellious teen years, but he loved the hell out of that girl and there’d be no way something as godawful as this could be happening at his place without him doing something about it.
Which meant he had to be in trouble. Deep trouble. Maybe even the kind of trouble he wouldn’t walk away from.
“Do I have officers on the scene yet or what?” Merkle snapped.
“Under fifteen minutes, Sarge,” Officer Payton replied.
* * *
Kevin Lannister was working late in the comp science lab of Gotham University, catching up on some extra credit for his Unix class, when several images started appearing simultaneously on every screen in the room. Just a small handful of his fellow hardcore code monkeys were hanging around the lab, and they all gathered around the monitors, sniggering as the first image started to reveal itself as a nude woman.
“Do you think it might be Tazic?” Lannister asked, taking a rope of red licorice from the packet clutched in the sweaty paw of an anxious freshman named Dave, sticking it into one corner of his mouth like a cigar. “He was all jumpy and cagey, last time I saw him, dropping hints about being onto something big.”
“I’ll say it’s big,” Dave replied. “Is that Danielle Embry from Calc-3?”
“In your dreams, doofus,” Lannister said. “Nobody with tits like that could get past Calc-1.”
“That’s a sexist thing to say!” This from a fat kid named Frank, or Fred. Lannister barely knew him. “It’s also preposterous to imply any correlation whatsoever between physical endowments and intelligence.”
“Fair point,” Lannister replied, munching on the licorice. “Anyway, I hear Emmy Noether had an epic rack.” He reached up and slapped Frank or Fred’s doughy chest. “Nothing compared to yours, of course.”
“Um, guys…” someone else said. “Guys!”
“What?” Lannister asked.
The guy pointed at the screen.
“I think that’s blood.”
Lannister looked closer. “Holy shit!” he said.
Kevin Lannister wanted to look away from the computer screen, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. Whoever was doing this was a certified genius, and most of the logical candidates had been killed.
Holy shit, that’s real-time video, he thought, and the realization took away his breath—as well as any doubt he might have had. His original thought had clearly been correct.
It has to be Tazic.
* * *
Things were quiet in Gotham Central Library, and whenever things got quiet, Cassie Lane got bored. When she got bored, she frequently got into trouble. Barbara always made fun of her, calling her a nymphomaniac, but she liked to say that she was just a healthy red-blooded woman. She had needs that didn’t all fit between dusty leather covers. Unlike certain other librarians that she wouldn’t name.
So what if she had a lot of boyfriends? She was young and had plenty of time to settle down someday in the ill-defined future. Meanwhile, that cute boy in the philosophy section had been casting lingering gazes in her direction for nearly an hour. Before long the two of them were discussing Kant, passionately arguing the role of reason in morality. Soon they were in a state of partial undress.
Then Mr. Neiderman started calling her name.
What the hell?
There were a couple of reasons this was out of the ordinary. First, the fact that Mr. Neiderman was there at all, when he practically lived in the microfiche catacombs down in the basement. Second, that he was speaking above a whisper. That simply wasn’t done. Not by him, nor by anyone.
Something was very, very wrong.
Offering a brisk apology that left the young philosopher looking very chagrined, and a little uncomfortable, she ran back to the main desk. There she found the entire staff crowded around the computer screen.
Holy crap!
* * *
Greg Grossman, a second-year student, might have missed the transmission if it had come ten seconds later.
He’d been lurking in a chatroom dedicated to a paperback sci-fi series, all about a modern man turned barbarian on a distant planet. He’d also been trawling for new ASCII porn files, but was bored and tired and thinking that he’d just log off and go grab a bite at the Chinese joint down the street. The place had a cute waitress.
Just as he was about to get up a new file popped up, unbidden, on his screen. Then another, and another. In a rush of giddy excitement, he logged onto a private BBS called GROSSNET666. It was a repository for all the most foul, shocking, and outrageous content he and his fellow gross-out enthusiasts from all over the world could find and upload. Car accidents. Autopsies. Tentacle porn.
He typed rapidly.
54Filth is this you?
Gutshot redhead, looks real. Video incoming.
Y/N?
A reply appeared on-screen.
Not me dude.
Upload?
Several others chimed in, and Greg’s fingers flew over the keyboard, capturing the images and packaging them for upload to GROSSNET. This was better image quality than he had ever seen, and once he made sure to get them uploaded before anyone else could take the credit, he needed to trace this transmission and figure out where it was coming from.
Because whoever did this had some serious skills—and, in Greg’s opinion, excellent taste in content. The last window to open was the clincher.
Holy shit, that’s a live video feed!
He was in awe, his mind, already in fast-forward mode, imagining the far-reaching implications of that kind of technology. He could picture a future in which it was possible not only to watch prerecorded porn movies, but to connect with girls performing live, interactive sex shows in the privacy of your own home. All he had to do was figure out how to reverse-engineer this stunning new advance and he’d be in on the ground floor of a priapic empire!
Once he finished uploading the files, they’d be winging their way to at least nine different countries that he knew of. From there, who knew?
His mission accomplished, he opened up the video file and eased back in his chair to enjoy it.
32
When Barbara came to again, she was alone in her father’s apartment. Her memory was spotty, but much to her amazement she wasn’t dead.
She still couldn’t feel anything below her sternum, and her newfound hold on consciousness was tentative at best. She’d been sick all over herself at some point, and miraculously managed not to choke on it.
But where was her father? What had they done to him? Something about topping the bill, the Joker had said. What could that possibly mean? Without activating the tracking device, how would they ever find him?
A wave of desperation and panic crested inside her, and she forced it down. Her eyes fell on the glossy, unblinking eye of the camera lens—for some reason they’d left it behind. But why, unless…
It’s still on, she realized, rage building inside her. That sick bastard. With anger came renewed determination. She might ultimately lose this battle to survive, but she’d be damned if she was going to let that thing record one more second of her torment.
It seemed as if it took hours to pull herself three feet to reach the damned camera. She lost track of how many times she grayed out along the way, but white-hot anger kept her moving, closer to that hateful, unblinking eye.
By the time she wrapped her fingers around it, her fury had reached critical mass. Lifting it as high as she could, she let gravity take over and smashed it against the hardwood floor. There was a satisfying crunch, and the telephone receiver was jolted loose from the strange rubber cradle. A glittering, brightly colored chip popped out and she grabbed it, clutching it so tightly that its tiny metal prongs bit into the meat of her palm. It seemed important—a clue of some kind—but she just couldn’t think straight.
She felt like a dying animal, rational thought obliterated by pure survival instinct.
The blackness
claimed her again.
* * *
Gordon was surrounded by freaks.
Now that the hood had been removed, he could see his three tiny captors. They were definitely not children, but they didn’t seem to have any obvious secondary sexual characteristics either. The thin, patchy green hair on their oversized heads was scraped up into identical topknots adorned with jaunty, feminine pink bows, but their misshapen and humped torsos were bare beneath matching black leather harnesses, revealing concave and undeveloped chests that definitely did not read as adult female.
One was wearing a garter belt and fishnet stockings with high heels on feet that looked far too big for those stubby, knock-kneed legs. Another was sporting a riff on a ragged, dirty tutu. The third wore what may or may not have been women’s underwear and nothing else. All three had tiny, crooked bat wings attached to their harnesses. The wings were made of rusted umbrella struts and thin, stained leather that was disturbingly close in color and texture to their own skin.
Their faces were not identical, yet it was likely that they were related as they all suffered from the same unusual genetic affliction. Their narrow and crooked jaws were far too small to hold the number of jagged teeth crowding their near lipless mouths. Their eyes were huge and filmy, oversized pale gray irises barely distinguishable from the whites. Gordon might have believed they were blind if they weren’t staring so intensely at him and giggling at his predicament.
They weren’t the only ones laughing. In fact, a small crowd had gathered around him, each abnormal and misshapen form stranger than the last, and all of them wearing stark expressions of harsh, mocking cruelty. There was a bikini-clad girl with alligator skin, thick flaky lips drawn back in a nasty sneer. A stooped and emaciated giant in a loincloth was sniggering behind a hand the size of a baseball glove. A smirking strongwoman in a leopard print singlet was holding a giggling, toddler-sized person with webbed hands and feet, and a flat head that sloped back sharply from slitted eyes. Another tormentor seemed to have no lower body beneath the ribs, scooting himself—herself?—around on a rusty old skateboard.
DC Comics novels--Batman Page 19
