A volatility that was, in Thomas’s medical opinion, quite likely to get him killed.
I can fix this. If I can just reason with Denholm…or at least force him back into the laboratory. Jarvis secured it, but it’s still there. Then I could fix this—fix Denholm and the others and make it right.
The virus had not yet jumped from the hosts—he was sure of that. There were only four members of the Apocalypse, and no additional reports of other vigilantes or aberrant criminals, for that matter. The disease seemed to be restricted to the bloodstream thus far. All he had to do was contain them, hold them, and find a cure. All he had to do—
“Thomas, what’s wrong?” Denholm’s voice echoed into the cavern. It was closer now, near the entrance. “You wanted me to be good. You wanted me to exact justice on the guilty, didn’t you?”
Thomas felt his way further into the cavern. He knew instinctively that there was a small alcove just to the right of the entrance. His father had forced him enough times to find it in the pitched blackness of the cave. He swallowed hard and then plunged down the tunnel, his right fingertips running along the cold, slick, and irregular surface of the wall until it dropped away into an abyss to his right. Thomas stepped into the void and stopped.
He could hear the bats waking.
“That’s what I’ve done, Thomas,” Denholm’s voice rebounded throughout the cavern. “I’ve discovered the guilty of Gotham, and it was a revelation…a pure, brilliant revelation. Thugs, mobsters, thieves, robbers…they’re just the branches, Thomas. They’re leaves that vanish in the fall and are born again in spring.”
Thomas felt awkwardly behind himself, hoping the cavern wall was still where he remembered it…where his father had forced him to find it.
“You know,” Disciple said in a smooth, low voice just above the sound of the river water rushing around him, “I grieve for the innocent, too. Those orphans that died in the fire—it was a terrible tragedy, a crime of unprecedented horror and callous cruelty. I wept for them. I wept for them all.”
Patrick Wayne had a single refuge from his life. It had been coming down to this cave, where he could hide his drunken rages in the darkness and take them out on the bats overhead. He had returned often right up until the day he died, always leaving the tools of his private fury well oiled and ready.
“And I died with them, Thomas; you made sure of that,” Denholm chuckled. “You burned away the impurities in my dark soul, killed everything that I once had been. Now I’ll do the same for others, Thomas, just as you wanted me to do.”
Thomas felt the cold, smooth steel behind him just where his father had left it.
“I’ve arisen like a phoenix from the ashes you made of me, dear Thomas,” Denholm’s voice resounded through the cavern.
Thomas ran his fingers down the barrel. He felt the mounts old Patrick had installed just above the action bar. The corrugated tube fixed parallel to the barrel, flaring wide at the end. The glass lens felt intact. He could only hope the batteries were still good.
“And who will pay for the screams of those children? Celia, who embezzled the money in the first place?”
Thomas gritted his teeth, his hands shaking as they closed around the mounted flashlight, feeling for the switch.
“Or perhaps Martha,” Denholm murmured. “Dear Martha Kane, whose blind desire to assuage her own guilty conscience provided the money that fueled the fires of greed and desperation? Yes…she played a part in those children’s deaths. She must pay, too.”
In a motion, Thomas picked up the shotgun, using its upward momentum to cycle the pump-action. He held the heavy weapon against his hip with his right hand as he used his left to shove the switch forward along the length of the flashlight mounted to the gun barrel. The light brightened at once, its beam cutting a narrow circle of illumination through the void.
Denholm turned toward the light.
He was smiling at his prey from the other side of the cavern, the underground river flowing between them.
“Stand up. Damn it, boy!”
His father’s voice emerged through the ringing in Thomas’s ears.
“That’s no way to hold a gun!”
“It’s going to be all right, Denholm,” Thomas said, his voice lacking the strength of his words even as he said them from behind the barrel of the shotgun. The light from the flashlight continued to dance shifting shadows across Denholm’s still-masked face. “I’m going to take you somewhere…somewhere safe…and we’ll figure this out. I’ll make it right—”
“Make it RIGHT?” Denholm said through a vicious smile. “You made ME to make it RIGHT!”
“Hell or high water, boy, I’m going to make a man out of you!”
“Denholm, please,” Thomas said, the light flickering atop the shotgun. His hands were sweating. “Just come with me. We’ll go up to the house. I can help you.”
“No, Thomas,” Denholm’s smile was malevolent. “It’s me who’s going to help you. It’s in my blood—you put it in my blood.”
“What?”
“The virus,” Denholm said. “The gift. It lives in my veins. I’m going to give you that gift, Thomas. I’m going to give it to the world.”
“There are only two kinds of people in this world: the hunters and the hunted—and you had better make up your mind right now that you’re going to hunt!”
Denholm took a step into the river, the water splashing up around the costume tights. The ridiculous, scalloped cape flared behind him as he moved. The scarf mask had bunched up at the side of his head, forming small, pointed folds. In Thomas’s nervous state, he looked like a Sunday comics version of a bat.
“It’s kill or be killed out there—not like that comic book world you live in!”
“Denholm, you’re not well,” Thomas said, his voice quavering. The gun felt slippery in his hands. The old batteries in the flashlight mounted next to the barrel were failing, causing the pool of light around Denholm to yellow and dim. “Please, just come with me and I can cure this.”
“Come with you? But I’ve come for you, Thomas—my dear, doubting Thomas. Never truly committed to the faith of the convictions you espoused…always questioning yourself. But I’ve come to end your doubt, Thomas,” Denholm the Disciple spoke from the dimming pool of light around him. “I’ve come to purge you of all that, Thomas, just as I’ve purged the souls of so many others. I’ll purify you, too, dear Thomas. You can be free of guilt, free of fear. I’ve ushered many tortured souls into that peace…a peace that you brought to me, dear Thomas…and which I now return to you.”
“And you’re gonna learn how to kill today, son. You’re gonna kill something!”
Thomas remembered to stand across the weapon, bracing against the back foot, pressing his shoulder hard into the stock. “Please, Denholm…I just want to help.”
“You’re sick, Thomas,” Denholm snarled. “I’m going to cure you!”
“Be a man! Show me you’re a man!”
Thomas had released the safety without thinking.
The cartoon bat leaped at him from the water’s edge.
“DO IT!”
Thomas did not hear the gun discharge. He felt the sudden blow to his shoulder, his body bending and absorbing the recoil of the blast. His eyes opened to see the gaping hole in the costume’s chest, the crimson stain blossoming outward like a tide across the cloth. Denholm reeled with the impact, staggering back to the river’s edge.
“Kill or be killed…”
Tears were streaming down Thomas’s face. Part of his mind was examining the wound in Denholm’s chest, spinning through the steps necessary to have any chance of saving the patient. Broken ribs…punctured lungs…internal hemorrhaging…
“Atta boy! Show me!”
Thomas pumped a second shell into the breach, barely in time. Denholm, enraged, charged at him again, blood flowing down his chest, streaming from between his bared teeth.
The shotgun’s roar echoed throughout the cavern. Thomas was not nearly
as ready for it this time as before, the kick of the weapon nearly wrenching it out of his hands. The impact caught Denholm in the shoulder, spinning him around. He caught himself before falling, turned again, and screamed.
Thomas had regained his footing, the shell casings flying out of the ejector from the pump shotgun. Thomas yelled with every shot, his voice drowned out by the stream of explosions from the barrel of the gun. After the sixth shell ejected, Thomas pulled the trigger on an empty barrel.
Denholm was gratefully face down in the river, no longer recognizable from the carnage dealt by Thomas’s hand. His body floated with the river a short way before hanging on the rocks at the cave’s entrance.
Thomas walked out where the river flowed around the body of Denholm Sinclair, the shotgun now held loosely in his right hand. Thomas had promised to take care of him for Martha. It had all gone so wrong. He looked down at the body; the water was dark in the moonlight.
Denholm’s virus-infected blood was washing down the stream, toward the Gotham River and the lit towers of the city beyond.
* * *
Batcave / Wayne Manor / Bristol / 8:59 p.m. / Present Day
“…e“…ended any hope of containing the Richter virus to those who had been infected. As I watched his blood flow down the stream I realized the effects of the virus could be spread by contact with the infected blood or through other similar agents. I also knew that there were three more carriers still loose in the city…”
The mansion phone was ringing.
Bruce sat at his terminal in the Batcave listening to the continuation of the tape. It had taken him a while to locate an old reel-to-reel deck, but now it was playing the tape back into the cave. He had shed the heavily damaged Batsuit; its power was completely drained and the exomuscular system completely compromised. He was hearing the voice of a father he now realized he had never really known.
The mansion phone continued to ring.
“…Jarvis once again insisted on taking care of the problem, and I have wondered since if there was some ulterior motive behind his efforts. He certainly is the one man who had more leverage on me than I care to acknowledge. I suppose part of my reasons for making this record is so that my sons may not be threatened after my passing—so that the blame and the responsibility for all that has happened should rest on my shoulders rather than theirs…”
Bruce was slowly aware of the sound, wondering vaguely why Alfred did not pick up the phone. Then he remembered. He toggled the tape machine to stop and picked up the receiver.
“Wayne Estate,” he said flatly.
“Yes, I…uh…I apologize for calling, but I was wondering if you might help me. I’m trying to get in touch with someone.”
“Nurse Doppel?” Bruce said the words more as a statement than a question.
“Yes! I’m—is this Mr. Grayson?”
“Yes, everyone else is…out,” Bruce answered. Alfred was gone and he was feeling his loss keenly. Turning in his chair, he gazed down at the video image of the unconscious Amanda lying on the divan in the reproduction of the study nearby. “Apparently I’m also the chief cook and bottle washer here now…not to mention babysitter.”
“Oh, Mr. Grayson, I’m so relieved to find you,” Doppel said over the phone. “I did exactly as you asked, but I haven’t heard anything back from Amanda since I dropped off that book. She hasn’t called back since and—”
“You can relax, Nurse Doppel,” Bruce said, rubbing his hand across his eyes. “She’s here with me. She’s unconscious at the moment.”
“You shouldn’t worry about that too much,” she replied. “That may just be an effect of her not receiving her medication on time.”
“You would know better than I would.” Bruce’s voice sounded tired in his own ears. “Other than that, I don’t think she’s been harmed.”
“Oh, thank God!” Doppel responded. “Can you bring her home? I’ve no car and without her medication…”
Bruce froze in his chair, staring with angry bewilderment down the metal catwalk that led to the elevator entrance to the cave. His eyes were fixed on something he knew for a fact had not been there when he had left for the Kane Mansion earlier that same evening.
There, propped against the railing, gleaming clean and well oiled, was his grandfather’s shotgun.
“I’ll bring her,” Bruce said. “I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”
His eyes fixed on the weapon.
It was the last thing he remembered seeing before he awoke.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ATONEMENT
* * *
Academy Theater / Park Row / Gotham / 10:35 p.m. / Present Day
Bruce Wayne came slowly back to consciousness. He saw a bright blur in front of him surrounded by darkness. Thin, tinny music echoed around him, muffled as though by distance.
I was going to take Amanda Richter home. There was a phone call…Nurse Doppel…then my grandfather’s shotgun…
A spray of sparkling laughter sounded in his left ear.
“Oh, Thomas, it’s too funny!”
Bruce turned his head slowly, tentatively. He tried to focus his eyes. He seemed to be having trouble controlling his movements.
The hazy silhouette of a head atop a long, tapered neck filled his vision. Platinum blond hair shifted in and out of focus. The vague head tilted back, laughing again.
Bruce closed his eyes hard and then blinked them open.
The shape next to him came into focus. She was sitting just to his left in a row of theater seats while she laughed at something playing on the screen.
He shook his head, trying to clear it, and then looked again.
She was another version of Amanda Richter. Her long hair was now piled up onto her head into a bouffant style vaguely reminiscent of the late 1960s. Amanda’s makeup was carefully done to match the emerald green dress.
Bruce’s eyes widened with the shock of recognition, his vision suddenly clearing.
The dark stains were still visible in the satin, radiating in an irregular pattern from the entry hole punched through the high scooped collar just above the left breast. The stain radiated undisturbed down past the cinched waist, where it broke up just above the knee into smaller patches and splatters.
It was her dress…IS her dress. Mother?
She turned to face him, her pupils dilated and unfocused. “Oh, Thomas, this really takes me back!”
Bruce turned to the screen. It had originally been a silent film, though he could hear a tinny piano orchestration playing from the theater speakers. Douglas Fairbanks leaped up onto the balcony after having defeated Noah Beery and started making eyes at Marguerite de la Motte.
It’s that same damn movie. We came to the art theater retrospective that night. It was a charity event for the Gotham Arts Council.
Bruce looked quickly down. The tuxedo coat was unbuttoned, exposing the pleated, formal shirt beneath. There was a terrible dark stain on this garment, too, with two finger-sized holes within two inches of each other in the chest.
My father’s tuxedo.
Bruce’s hands began to shake. A short figure was seated on his right. He turned slowly toward it, dreading what might be there.
The Scarface ventriloquist dummy stared back up at him. It was no longer in its customary gangster pinstripe suit, but now wore a small tuxedo which was slightly too large for him. Bruce recognized it at once as his own, when he was a boy. He knew it from the pattern of the stains that were burned into his childhood.
Bruce tried to stand up at once, but his legs were unsteady beneath him.
“Sit down, Thomas!” Amanda urged. “You’re ruining the show.”
Bruce collapsed back down into the seat. He was finding it difficult to breathe.
Douglas Fairbanks stood next to Marguerite de la Motte and rakishly spoke to the cheering crowd below. A title card then appeared on the screen.
Have you seen this one?
Suddenly the film jumped on the screen. The
re was a loud pop and a grating sound. Then the scene changed to another crowd—also silent, and this time without the thin background music. It was the Kane Mansion ballroom…and Bruce realized he was seeing the footage of the ballroom shot that night by the newsman. There were scratch marks running through the film, but the image was still clear. There was the hodgepodge costume that looked more like a bat than any hero of popular imagination struggling against the Moxon mob at the end of the ballroom. There was Lewis Moxon being knocked unconscious.
“Oh, Thomas,” Amanda cooed, wrapping herself around Bruce’s left arm. “I never really saw you before that night.”
“Amanda,” Bruce said, “we’ve got to get out of here.”
“Thomas! The movie’s almost over—besides, that’s you,” Amanda purred back at him. “I think I started falling for you right then, when you punched poor Lewis. I don’t think he ever forgave you.”
The end of the footage grew bright and spotty, and then the sound rumbled once again, dramatic marching music playing through the hall. A new title, this one animated although still in black-and-white. It proclaimed, “News on the March,” and the title was shouted by an announcer’s voice. The music continued as a second title card popped onto the screen.
NEWS ON THE MARCH
END OF AN APOCALYPSE
Vigilante Murderess Meets Gruesome End
FEBRUARY 1962
Bruce drew in a measured breath, his eyes fixed to the screen.
It’s a message…for me…
“Blackgate Penitentiary!” the announcer continued in dramatic and deeply resonant tones as old stock footage of the prison walls splayed onto the screen. “Judgment isle for the first of the mass murderers known as the Apocalypse. Here, within these walls, came the grim end of Adele ‘The Chanteuse’ Lafontaine.”
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