DC Comics novels--Batman

by Christa Faust

  In a strange way, it made her feel more alone.

  * * *

  “Ms. Gordon,” the sycophantic social worker was saying. “I understand you’ve refused physical therapy again.”

  He was a runty red-headed guy with a relentlessly chipper attitude, and reminded Barbara of a chipmunk in a cheap suit. She turned her face away, staring out the single window at the same dull, rainy slice of Gotham City she’d been looking at for weeks. It seemed as if she’d never see any further. Where once the entire city had been hers, now…

  “Please, Ms. Gordon,” the Chipmunk said. “Your ability to live independently depends on your willingness to work with our physical therapists. They’re only trying to help you.”

  “Help me what?” Barbara snapped. “Help me roll this stupid wheelchair out into the city so I can watch a thousand strangers pretend not to stare? They already got their big show at my expense. No thanks.”

  “At the very least, won’t you consider talking with our counselor to help work through your emotional trauma.” His voice was pleading. “Her name is Mrs. Colbert. She’s very nice.”

  “If she’s so nice,” Barbara said, keeping her face turned away, “you go talk to her. I’m sure it’d be more fun than talking to me.”

  “Suppressing your feelings isn’t a healthy coping strategy, Ms. Gordon.”

  “Don’t you get it?” She turned back to him, a bitter kind of fury coiling cold in her belly. “I can’t feel anything.” She pounded a fist against the numb, useless meat of her thigh. “I can’t…”

  She trailed off, unable to find words to express the hollow, aching loss that had punched a hole in the center of the person she’d always believed she was. Strong. Powerful. Brave. Fighting side by side with Batman as a respected equal. That was all over now.

  All that was left of her was this broken body and fractured soul. Just another sad, pathetic punchline to one of the Joker’s malicious gags. And what was the point of a punchline after the joke was over? Why bother to go on living?

  The Chipmunk went on and on with his platitudes and empty self-help jargon, but Barbara wasn’t listening. She was wondering if that window would open, and if it did, how hard it would be to pull herself up onto the sill. If she could get the top half of her body out, gravity would do the rest.

  Her heart raced at the thought.

  “I said you have a visitor,” the Chipmunk said. It might have been the second time he’d said it, but she hadn’t been paying attention. “I’ll come back later.”

  “Don’t bother,” she said.

  “Um…” A new, yet familiar voice. “I don’t know if you remember me.”

  She turned toward the door of the room. It was the kid. The kid with the glasses from that night. Her breath caught in her chest, nausea pulsing in the back of her throat. She wheeled her chair over to the bedside table and reached for the phone, gripping the receiver.

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the cops.”

  “I don’t have one,” the kid said, looking down at his hands. “You probably should.” He shrugged. “I would.”

  That gave her pause. She relaxed her fingers around the receiver, but didn’t take her hand away. She waited to see what would happen next.

  For a moment, nothing. They just looked at each other. When he spoke again, his words seemed to come too fast, voice cracking in a shaky rush.

  “Look, I’m really sorry about what happened,” he said. “About what I did, I mean. It wouldn’t have happened without my chip. I never meant for any of this to happen, honest. I thought…” He paused. Swallowed. “I’d understand if you called the police. If I was you, I’d want… justice.” Looked up at her and then looked away again. “It was supposed to be a joke.”

  A hard, dry bark of a laugh escaped before she could stifle it.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Well, it was a real laugh riot.” She frowned. “Wait, did you say ‘chip’? You mean the one inside that machine, that broke into all the computers in Gotham City?”

  A pained grimace flickered across his pale face. He nodded, and her mind started racing.

  “He said he was going to broadcast an embarrassing prank. I had no idea he was going to…”

  “Look, forget that,” Barbara said, feeling more alive than she had in weeks. She motioned for him to come closer to her. “Can you rebuild that machine?”

  “It would take time,” he said. “And money. It took me three years to design that prototype. I’d have to start over from scratch.”

  Barbara’s heart was racing again, but this time with a rush of excitement. She reached into the drawer in her bedside table and pulled out the thick plastic bag that contained the one and only thing she’d had with her when she had been admitted. The thing she’d held clenched in a manic death grip so tight they’d had to pry it loose from her fingers before they could operate to save her life.

  The chip.

  “Look, kid,” she said. “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t say,” he replied, looking confused. “But it’s Zach.”

  “Okay, Zach,” she said. She might have even been smiling, though it had been so long she almost forgot what that felt like. “I’ll make you a deal.” She pulled out the chip and held it up for him to see.

  His eyes went wider than she thought was possible.

  “If you’re really sorry, and want to make up for what you did, you can use this to build me a machine that’ll give me access to the computers of all the criminals in Gotham City. A machine that will allow me to do it without ever getting out of this chair. Almost like… like a kind of high-tech oracle.”

  She paused for a moment, looking out over the rainy city and seeing possibilities. Seeing a future beyond Batgirl. The city could be hers once again.

  “Look,” she said, turning back to Zach. “Forget about revenge and silly sophomoric pranks. This is your chance to do something that really matters with your skills.” Her pulse raced, and for the first time in weeks, she felt alive. “We can do it, together. What do you say? You in?”

  Zach still looked confused, glancing from her face to the chip and back again. He was wary and nervous, like a street cat that wanted the food she had, but wasn’t sure if she could be trusted. Given what the Joker had done to him, she could understand.

  Better than anyone.

  “Listen, I know what it means to be hurt, and to want to get back at the people who hurt you,” she said. “And maybe you can, and maybe that gives you an ego boost, but it also makes you no better than they are. We do this my way, you’ll have a chance to really be somebody. To make a real difference in this lousy world.”

  Barbara picked up the phone.

  “You promised you weren’t gonna call the cops!” Zach said, backing toward the door. She held up her hand and motioned for him to sit.

  “I’m ready for my physical therapy now,” she said into the receiver.

  41

  Light from the setting sun filtered through the wild steel mesh in the windows of Arkham Asylum. The cracked plaster walls, the inmates, and the staff were bathed in comforting hues of orange as if in a Vermeer painting.

  Linus Stephens sat in the visitors’ room.

  “So good to see you again, Noah,” the professor said to Noah Kuttler. The young man, along with Zach Tazic, had been one of his prized pupils, but he’d dropped out of school months ago. Noah hadn’t resurfaced until this very afternoon.

  “I heard about what happened, Prof. Stephens,” Kuttler said, “and felt compelled to see how you were doing.” The former student was a rangy individual, lean-faced with a hawkish nose.

  “Oh, don’t be concerned, my boy,” Stephens said. “Once I present my evidence at the retrial, they all will understand how the Russians set me up. It’s a vast conspiracy, far more so than anyone could imagine. You’ll see.”

  “Yes,” Kuttler said. “Of course.”

  “But please, enough about me, though it is my favorite subje
ct.” He chuckled for a moment. “What have you been up to? A man with your talents and abilities.”

  “I’ve been consulting.”

  “Consulting?”

  Kuttler made a dismissive wave of his hand. “Figuring out strategies, working out scenarios, determining how best to pull off… certain transactions, shall we say.”

  “Using your profound computer analytics?”

  “Oh, yes,” the young man said. “Some have even dubbed me ‘the Calculator.’” He smiled.

  “How colorful,” Stephens enthused. “That’s wonderful, Noah. Simply wonderful.”

  They chatted for a while longer, talking computer technology, then discussing the reasons the Russians might want to gain the advantage in what the professor was certain would become the next arms race. Cyberspace, he said—that was where the real war was certain to take place.

  Finally Kuttler offered his apologies, and explained that he had a commitment for the evening.

  “Of course, my boy,” Stephens said. “Not all of us know exactly where we’ll be, day in and day out.” He gave a wry smile.

  Outside the asylum, Kuttler got into a car and smiled at the woman behind the driver’s wheel. The freckled Lisa MacIntosh leaned over and kissed him with a smack of their lips. She then put the car into gear, and they drove away.

  * * *

  The sky began to darken as Dr. Joan Leland drove her car through the streets. She was returning from a late-lunch fundraiser, and road work forced her to take a detour back to Arkham. She got turned around and found herself cruising through Crime Alley, passing the clinic of Leslie Thompkins—a friend she hadn’t seen in some time.

  Checking her watch, she decided what the heck and parked her car not too far away. She’d drop in to say hello and maybe set up a time for the two of them to get together. Walking along, she passed a boarded-up building. It must have been that way for some time, she figured, as there was a wooden fence erected in front. It was weather-beaten and covered with graffiti, fliers, and posters.

  One handbill in particular got her attention.

  It was aged and partly eaten away by the elements—a faded image done in German Expressionist style of a man running toward the viewer, his face obscured by shadow. The man’s grin was a white crescent in his face, and he had an unruly mane of hair flailing about his head. The man was being pursued by a figure swinging on a rope behind him. This figure wasn’t a man in costume, but he had horns on his head and bat-like membranes on either side of the body, running the length of his arms to the middle of his legs.

  There was an art deco structure behind the airborne figure, and at the bottom of the poster was a title.

  The Mystery of the Monarch Playing Card Company

  The poster was for the revival showing of a late 1920s silent film. At least it had been a revival, however long ago it had been. There was no year. It took her several moments to take this in. Unbidden, the Joker’s words came back to her.

  “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another.”

  * * *

  As dusk settled in, Harvey Bullock was, not surprisingly, smoking one of his cheap cigars, sitting in his unmarked Marquis up the street from the Gotham Home for Wayward Children. He watched as a beaming Thea Montclair emerged, holding the hand of her nine-year-old daughter, Desi.

  Jeez, what a name.

  But what the hell. She’d used the cash he’d ripped off from Palmares to get a new apartment in a better part of town, and had proved to Children’s Services that her sobriety was here to stay. With the help of Dr. Thompkins, she’d gotten a more upstanding job in a curios shop, one specializing in artifacts gathered from costumed villains Batman had apprehended. This was Gotham after all.

  Batgirl had believed his story when she’d cornered him. She’d let him go with the scratch, though she’d warned him that she’d be checking out his story. Bats wouldn’t have been that kind of flexible. Sometimes, Bullock reflected grudgingly, you had to use vigilante methods to get past the bureaucratic bullshit to give a person a chance.

  Turning the key, he gunned the motor. A familiar shadow flitted across his windshield and he peered up at darkening sky.

  “Friggin’ bat-eared freak,” he muttered. As a doo-wop number played on the car’s cassette deck, Bullock threw the smoldering stub of his cigar onto the asphalt and headed back through downtown Gotham.

  * * *

  The Nolan-Sprang building, one of the older office structures in downtown Gotham City, boasted Beaux-Arts architecture and an excellent vantage point from which to watch over the entire downtown area.

  As night descended, Batman stood on one of its gargoyles—a pitted stone carving of a winged underworld creature said to have been inspired by Dante’s Inferno. The masked man surveyed his city.

  Gordon was safe. The Joker was back in Arkham and had been virtually mute since the incident on the carnival grounds. Yet it wasn’t the clown’s condition that occupied his thoughts. Nothing he could do would ever explain what went on inside of that head. No, it was his own behavior that mystified him.

  Why had he laughed like that?

  Had it been gallows humor, of the sort cops used to ease the tension when they secured a crime scene? Had he been releasing the pressure brought on by the shooting, the kidnapping? That didn’t make sense though—he’d seen it all before, and much worse.

  That led to a more troubling possibility. Perhaps he had discovered his limits. Perhaps the Joker had nearly succeeded in driving him around the bend. How close had he been to letting his worst enemy watch him crumble? How close had the Joker been to the last laugh?

  Would he ever know?

  His mouth set grimly, Batman raised his arm and shot a line from his grapnel launcher. He had a lead on the two henchmen who’d beaten Gordon, had watched as the Joker shot Barbara. The hook caught hold and he swung down and across the concrete canyons past Crime Alley, where his parents had died. He remembered vividly—as if it had happened just yesterday—kneeling as the moonlight streamed in. He’d said a prayer intended for the wrathful God of the Old Testament.

  “I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths, by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.”

  He would live by that credo, that night and for many nights to come.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The authors would like to thank Steve Saffel, Nick Landau, Vivian Cheung, Laura Price, Samantha Matthews, Steve Gove, Natasha MacKenzie, Paul Gill, Chris McLane, Lydia Gittins, and Polly Grice at Titan, Josh Anderson, Mickey Stern, and Amy Weingartner at Warner Bros, Mike Pallotta, Doug Prinzivalli, and Michele Wells at DC Entertainment, and of course Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, Denny O’Neil, and Mark Chiarello, as well as CDV, Lady V, Django and all the badass Batgirls who are out there fighting back against the Jokers of this world. We see you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  CHRISTA FAUST is the author of several hardboiled crime novels, including Choke Hold, Money Shot and Hoodtown, as well as a dozen tie-ins and novelizations such as the award-winning Snakes on a Plane. She’s written for Marvel and created an original comic series called Peepland with coauthor Gary Phillips. She worked in the Times Square peep booths, as a professional dominatrix, and in the adult film industry both behind and in front of the cameras for over twenty years. Faust is a film noir fanatic and an avid reader of classic hardboiled pulp novels, and an MMA fight fan. She lives and writes in Los Angeles. Her website is http://www.christafaust.com.

  Son of a mechanic and a librarian, weaned on the images of Kirby and Kane in comics, on too many reruns of the Twilight Zone, and on Himes and Hammett in prose, GARY PHILLIPS has published various novels such as Violent Spring, the first such mystery set in post ’92 civil unrest LA; edited several anthologies including The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir; and published more than sixty short stories. With Christa Faust, he co-wrote the late ’80s-set graphic novel Peepland for Titan, about
which thefandompost.com remarked, “A damn near perfect comic, hardboiled in all the right ways,” and did the Vigilante: Southland miniseries for DC Comics.