by Peter David
Chase watched raptly, as did Bruce.
Dick Grayson stood on the highest platform. Grabbing the trapeze bar, he swung out high into the air above the crowd. Sometimes it seemed to him that this was the only time when he was happy: when he was in flight, when he felt the wind rushing past him and heard the gasps of the crowd over his stunts.
And he would always look down at those poor, earth-bound creatures, each of whom was undoubtedly wondering, How? How could he risk death day after day, just to experience the momentary thrill of flight?
To which Dick could only wonder, How could they not?
And then as he soared above the center of the arena, Dick released the trapeze. He fell, somersaulting in midair, over and over again. The crowd was a blur around him and then suddenly his downward plunge was halted by a pair of strong hands that he knew, beyond question, would always be there for him.
“Fly, robin, fly,” his father intoned to him.
They swung toward the platform, then back again toward the center as the acclamation from the crowd below swept over them. Mary was on the opposite platform and, with practiced skill, sent the other, empty trapeze arcing toward them. John Grayson released his son as Dick twirled in midair and snagged the other trapeze. It was a move that was so simple to him, so routine, that the applause it got was as odd as if a little girl had gotten a standing ovation for successfully skipping rope.
Then again, he wasn’t about to knock it.
He landed on the platform next to his mother, and together they waved down to the crowd. On the opposite side Chris waved too as he hauled his father in. Chris hadn’t done anything on this particular maneuver, but heck . . . the hurrahs were for all of them, weren’t they?
“Life doesn’t get better than this, does it, Dad,” Chris said.
To which John could only reply, “Never.”
As the ringmaster watched the proceedings, something suddenly caught his eye. It was a gloved hand, poking from between some curtains offstage. A finger was waggling, trying to get the ringmaster’s attention.
He glanced upward at the Graysons. He knew the act; he wouldn’t have to make another announcement for sixty seconds as they climbed down the guy wires, at which point he would give their final salutation, they’d take their bows, and get offstage.
Besides, who the hell was sneaking around backstage? If someone hurt themselves back there, the insurance claims and civil suits could wipe out everything they’d accomplished this evening.
He headed toward the curtains to see what was what.
“Look, I’m rock-climbing Sunday,” Bruce Wayne said to Chase Meridian. “How about coming along?”
“I’d like to, actually. I love climbing. I really do . . .”
He supplied the next, obvious word for her. “But . . .”
“I guess I’ve met someone.”
“Fast work. You just moved here.”
She gave him a sad look. “You know, much to my surprise, you really are terrific. But . . . you could say he kind of dropped out of the sky and . . . bang. I think he felt it too.”
Oh my God . . .
“Bruce?” She seemed concerned.
Not again. Not again. This one is fixated on Batman too?
“Bruce?” She shook his arm.
What was it, anyway? The mask? The cape? The codpiece? Sure, that had to be it.
“Bruce,” and this time her voice was firm, yanking him out of his reverie. “Has anyone ever told you that you can act rather strangely?”
“Not to my face,” he said. “So, uhm . . . you think he felt it, too. Well, of course he did.”
“What?”
He looked at her with a vast depth of sadness. “Who wouldn’t?”
In the center ring of the circus, a tiny car—horn honking away—roared into the middle. Clowns began tumbling out, one over the other. As that happened, the Graysons descended on the guy wires.
Chase smiled at the crazed activity. “A land of light and shadow where beasts dance and freaks are king.”
He was so startled by the comment, and recently so accustomed to confusion between what he perceived and what was reality, that he asked her to repeat it. She did, puzzled, word for word. “It’s a description of the circus. From a fairy tale my mother used to read called ‘The Tale of the Twin—’ ”
That was all he needed to hear. He took her quickly by the hand and said, “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”
Suddenly the voice of the ringmaster pulled his full attention back to the center ring.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please forget about all good American, wholesome fun,” the ringmaster called out, his face obscured by a hanging barker’s mike. “We are here to bring you absolute chaos and true justice which, my darling ignorant friends, are no more or less than two sides of the same coin. Tonight, a new act for your amusement. We call it Massacre Under the Big Top.”
The newly arrived clowns immediately shed their garments, yanking massive guns out of the oversized clown clothes. Some people in the crowd were still laughing uncertainly until a couple of the thugs fired random shots into the air. The unmistakable chatter of the machine guns was the confirmation—for any who still needed it—that the evening had taken a deadly turn.
There was panic and screaming, and the ringmaster stepped out from behind the microphone. His hideous split face was now apparent for all to see. “People, people. Show some grace under pressure. A little decorum, please,” cautioned Two-Face. And then added, “Shut up or die!”
The deadly admonition, backed up by the armed thugs, had the desired effect. There was still the occasional whimpering, but largely the crowd was silent.
Two-Face nodded approvingly. “If we may direct your attention . . .”
A couple of thugs rolled a round object into the ring. They attached the sphere to ropes hanging from the rafters.
“Inside that harmless-looking orb,” continued Two-Face, “two hundred sticks of TNT. In our hand: a radio detonator.” Calmly he pushed a button on the box.
The bomb promptly beeped in response, and continued to do so, one beep per second.
“You have two minutes,” he informed them with no more concern in his voice than if he’d been hawking red hots.
An angry voice spoke up from the crowd. “What the hell do you want?”
Bruce turned to see the origin of the speaker and, of course, recognized him immediately. It was the mayor. Chase, meantime, was clutching Bruce’s arm. Under other circumstances, the pressure might have been pleasurable.
“Want, Mr. Mayor?” Two-Face called. “Just one little thing: Batman. Bruised. Broken. Bleeding. In a word: dead.” He gestured to the collective crowd. “Who do we have assembled before us? Gotham’s finest. Rich, influential. One of you must know who Batman is. Hell, odds are one of you is Batman. So, unless the Bat is surrendered to us posthaste . . . we’re off on a proverbial killing spree. City wide mayhem and murder. Cries of agony and bloody streets, with all you folks as our very first corpses-to-be. You have two . . .” and then he nodded toward the bomb, “well, just under two minutes.”
Bruce watched helplessly as the bomb, attached to wires, was hoisted high into the air, toward the upper structural supports of the tent. It made sense, of course. It would make for the most spectacular blast from the furthest distance. If there was one thing that Two-Face lived for, it was high-profile mayhem.
Wayne rose to his feet, for no secret . . . not even his . . . was worth innocent lives. Chase, not understanding what he was about to do, tried to pull him back down.
He started to shake her off, to shout out Harvey’s name. Get his attention and repeat to him things said at their first meeting on that rooftop so long ago.
That was when people started to shout and point. He looked up toward the rafters, and gaped.
The Flying Graysons were scaling the scaffolding, heading for the bomb.
“Boys! Move, move, move!” bellowed Two-Face, furious.
Several t
hugs started climbing the guy wires. It quickly became obvious to the Graysons that Two-Face had not come unprepared; the thugs doing the climbing were obviously trained gymnasts.
Chris prodded Dick upward. “Go! We’ll hold them off!”
John, Mary, and Chris swung from trapeze to guy wire to platform, setting up a barrier of human bodies to try to delay the thugs. They kicked, they shoved, they blocked egress. And the thugs, needing both hands to climb, weren’t in a position to pull guns and start shooting.
In a daring display that made his earlier theatrics tame in comparison, Dick launched himself from trapeze to trapeze, bounced off the high wire, and just managed to snag an overhead catwalk. He hoisted himself up onto the catwalk.
One of the thugs grabbed John’s leg. John Grayson kicked him away and jumped to another trapeze.
Momentarily distracted by her husband’s danger, Mary Grayson was unaware of her own. From underneath the platform she was crouched on, one of Two-Face’s thugs swung up and slammed into her. Mary Grayson’s arms flailed as she tried desperately to regain her balance. But then gravity seized her and pulled her downward.
As one, the audience screamed.
At the last instant, Mary snagged a wildly swinging trapeze with her leg. It jolted her to a halt, but it was too sudden a stop and she started to slide off. But her other leg, dangling wide, wrapped itself around a trailing rope. She hung precariously high above the ground.
Dick was clambering toward the bomb and was able to see what several of the other thugs were now pointing at: the time clock. As he watched, it ticked down to 43, and he had the sick feeling that it didn’t signify minutes.
The thugs, not having signed on for a suicide mission, started sliding down the ropes and guy wires to put distance between themselves and the bomb.
John Grayson, meantime, was moving to help his wife. He didn’t panic, didn’t even come close, They’d been in tighter spots than this, and the threat of falling didn’t paralyze the Graysons the way that it might others. But he couldn’t do it alone. “Chris!” he shouted, and, as if by magic, Chris was there by his side. He’d already been on his way, having seen his mother’s predicament. Quickly they clambered out onto a trapeze, John anchoring Chris.
“Just like a thousand times before, Chris,” said John calmly. “Same old same old. Not a problem.” The mark of his bravery was that it was impossible to tell whether he believed this to be as routine as he was putting across. John set the trapeze swinging, building up momentum.
Mary saw them coming. She reached out, stretching her fingers desperately. The trapeze twisted and tilted under her leg and she felt herself slipping off. The ankle of her other leg throbbed; the rope twined around it provided her major source of support.
It was all laid out beneath Dick Grayson. And yet, remarkably, he wasn’t concerned about them. His father was on the case, his brother was helping, and his mother was the most resourceful of the bunch. Dick, meantime, had his own problems, as he worked quickly to unlash the bomb from the rafters. He made a point of not looking at the timer counting down, because he couldn’t possibly work any faster than he was . . . and knowing precisely how much time he had, or didn’t have, wasn’t going to do him any good.
He heard the chatter of machine-gun fire and prayed that it wasn’t aimed up at him.
Then the bomb came free in his hands, and, God help him, he almost dropped the damned thing. It bobbled momentarily, but then he recovered it and inadvertently caught a glimpse of the amount of time he had left.
Thirteen seconds . . .
Two-Face’s thugs were firing over the heads of the crowd, trying to cause panic, to drive the people back, keep them in their places. Meantime the thugs were inching back toward the trapdoor through which they’d made their entrance. The moment the bomb went, so would they.
But as the crowd panicked, falling one over the other, it was Bruce Wayne’s chance. A sea of people came between him and Chase, and he used the opportunity to slide between the rails. Within seconds he had closed in on one of the guards who blocked the way to Two-Face. The guard spotted him at the last moment and swung his gun up, but he was too slow. Bruce slugged him and he went down without another sound.
He afforded himself a glance upward, and saw that the daring young man from the flying trapeze had gotten his hands on the bomb and was clambering through a roof hatch. Presuming the kid could dispose of the explosive fast enough, the people were going to be okay. Bruce prayed that the boy—Richard, Chase had said his name was—would be up to it.
Then his gaze shifted to the rest of the Graysons, high above the ground. The father was swinging the son toward the mother, still twisting between the trapeze and rope. They were swinging back now, toward the far end of their arc, and now they angled back and up toward the trapped woman.
The boy’s hands closed on his mother’s. They had her. With the additional support, it would be a matter of moments for her to disentangle her leg, free herself, and swing safely with her son and husband to the opposite platform.
And then he saw Two-Face. Two-Face, and one thug between Bruce and the maniac who had turned a charity evening into a hellish disaster.
Bruce charged.
This thug was faster, however. Faster, bigger, and far more formidable. He was holding a machine pistol and squeezed off a few shots. Bruce dropped to the ground, bullets cutting the air above his head. He rolled and came up, slamming his feet into the thug’s face. The thug staggered but didn’t go down. Bruce grabbed the machine pistol, but the thug wasn’t inclined to let go. The two of them struggled against each other, angling for position.
And that’s when Bruce saw the coin glittering in the air.
Two-Face had to admire them. A gutsy trapeze family, acrobats, performers. They had decided to try to be heroes.
And they were worthy of the same chance that Two-Face afforded other heroes.
“Day in, day out, time passes, fate has her fancies,” he intoned, speaking to an audience only he could hear. “God stands absent, daydreaming, and the universe asks the same old question. Life . . .”
The coin spun in the air and landed at his feet. “Or death.”
He looked down at the scarred head and smiled a twisted smile. “Our kinda day,” he said.
He pulled out his guns and aimed high.
Bruce slammed his head into the thug’s face. It was the kind of maneuver he far preferred to do when wearing his reinforced mask. Nevertheless it did the job. The thug staggered, and Bruce dealt the thug another vicious shot in the head. It sent him down to the ground and Bruce grabbed up the machine pistol.
He swung it up and aimed it squarely at Two-Face. He had him dead in his sights.
Dead . . .
You’re a killer, too . . .
He leapt toward Two-Face, and just as he did a thug came in out of nowhere, taking him to the ground. Noooo! screeched through his mind. And then, even as he went down, refusing to acknowledge that time had run out, he hurled the machine pistol.
It scissored through the air, spinning like a boomerang, and it crashed squarely into Two-Face’s head . . .
. . . but only after Two-Face had squeezed off two shots.
The first bullet sliced through one of the trapeze supports that were suspending John and Chris Grayson. The support snapped, and John Grayson skidded off, still clutching onto his son’s legs. Chris was still holding onto Mary, and he screamed. His mind hadn’t fully registered what happened. He only knew that suddenly he felt as if he were being torn in half.
Mary shrieked as well, because two seconds ago she’d been on the verge of being rescued. And now, instead, with the crack of a bullet, she was the only thing keeping her son and husband from plunging to the ground. Her frantic hands wrapped around Chris’s wrists as he howled “Don’t drop me don’t drop me Maaaaaaa . . .”
And John knew that he was dead. That he was about to let go of his son’s leg and plummet to the ground because then maybe, just maybe, Mary
could hold on and they would survive.
His life flashed before him and, to his utter surprise, there was nothing he would have done differently.
For the three flying Graysons, the agony seemed to last an eternity. But it was, in fact, no longer than it took for Two-Face to squeeze the trigger a second time.
The second bullet sliced through the rope supporting Mary Grayson.
Dick Grayson scrambled across the roof of the Hippodrome, the bomb ticking under his arm. With a prayer, and all the strength in his young arms, he hurled the bomb down, down into the water. He uttered a prayer, begging that it wouldn’t explode in midair. For one thing, he was completely without protection atop the roof, and the flying shrapnel would cut him to pieces.
And for another, he really hated loud noises.
Apparently God decided to be merciful, for the bomb made it all the way to the water and even sank beneath it. Seconds later there was a muffled explosion and the water erupted upward about fifty feet, sending a geyser and mist through the air before settling back down.
“I did it,” he whispered in amazement. “I saved ’em. This is great . . . this is great!!”
He scampered back up the roof, his mind racing. He was going to be a hero. No . . . not just him. His whole family were going to be heroes. The Flying Graysons, the daredevils who saved the Hippodrome. They’d be everywhere. Newspapers, magazines, talk shows. They’d be able to write their own tickets. They were set for life.
His joy lasted until he regained the catwalk and looked down . . . and saw the broken bodies of his family lying on the ground.
Then he heard a loud, piercing, gut-wrenching scream of agony that seemed to go on and on, and somewhere along the way he realized it was his own voice . . .
“The greatest show on earth!” crowed Two-Face a split instant before the machine pistol hit him. It struck him on the scarred side of his face, so it wasn’t as if the damage was going to be noticeable. Nevertheless it hurt like hell as he went down. He fired wildly in all directions, unaware of precisely where the weapon had come from, and unknowingly forcing Bruce Wayne to dive for cover.