by Marv Wolfman
“Not again, Bruce. This city needs me. Hell, you need me.”
“Barbara, I agree. Oracle is indispensible—but you can be my eyes and ears from anywhere. All Oracle needs is her computers and a Wi-Fi connection.”
“I’m staying, Bruce,” Barbara said. “Please don’t insult me by asking again.”
“I won’t. But if we can’t stop Scarecrow, and if he unleashes his toxins, this city is done for. If the worst happens…”
“Bruce, we’ll just have to make sure it won’t. And we’ll do that together.”
“Are you prepared for your father’s wrath when he finds out?”
“I think I’d rather face Scarecrow than him. But yeah, if he finds out.”
“You won’t have to do it alone. I’ll have your back.”
“Never doubted that,” she replied. “Ahhh. Okay. Just hacked into the city files, so now it’s a matter of systematically going through them. I’ll get back to you as soon as I root out the intel. Be safe. Oracle out.”
Batman entered the penthouse suite. A long wood-paneled foyer led to the living room, which was spacious and beautifully appointed with antiques that were old when the Victorian age was still young. Intricately carved wooden tables depicting foxes and hounds made Batman think of an eighteenth-century English hunt scene.
The tables flanked a large, plush couch with curved armrests and lion’s-claw feet. Whoever lived here obviously enjoyed hunting. Scarecrow had never shown any inclination as an antiques connoisseur, but anything was possible.
The expansive chamber held four more couches, each set up with facing chairs, creating a series of small sitting areas ideal for simultaneous conversations. Stunning stained-glass lamps—the real thing, rather than knock-offs—sat on each table. Wayne Manor was equally beautifully decorated with irreplaceable antiques, but they had been bought by Bruce Wayne’s mother and hadn’t been changed or added to since their murders. He always had more on his mind than house decoration.
“Batman.” Barbara Gordon’s voice pulled him from his thoughts. “The apartment is owned by Dr. Frank Adams and his wife Tatjana. They left for a month-long vacation less than a week ago.”
“Good. That means Scarecrow is a very recent addition. He probably hasn’t had time to set up many traps.”
“Or he thought he’d only be using the place for a short while, and didn’t take the time.”
“Either way it makes my job a bit easier. Thanks.”
He made it through the living room and found himself facing another long corridor with rooms branching off it on both sides. The heat signature came from a room at the end of the corridor, so he didn’t bother looking into any of the others. He was there for a reason, and it wasn’t a tour.
The door was locked—it was the only one that wasn’t already wide open. He could blow it off its hinges but decided not to cause any unnecessary damage. Instead he removed a pick from a pouch pocket, inserted it in the keyhole, and jiggled it until he heard the lock click into place.
The door opened and he stopped in surprise. He’d expected more antiques, but the room was devoid of furniture—it was empty, except for a half-dozen large steel-bar cages, six feet tall by four feet wide. They were one-person prison cells, and the bars were thick enough to hold in an elephant.
It was overkill.
Only one cell held a prisoner.
Poison Ivy.
7
Ivy was draped with a vine that disappeared out a shattered window on the far side of the room. She was petting the plant, humming to it, and it seemed to vibrate with every stroke. The scene was so intimate that he hesitated, but then moved quickly to the cage lock. She gave no indication that she noticed him until he swung the door open.
“I could have escaped without your help, you know,” she said, still petting the throbbing vine. “Nature won’t be contained when she doesn’t want to be. By the way, what are you doing here?”
“Why did Scarecrow lock you up?”
“What? No hello?” She frowned in mock indignation. “You’re getting rude in your old age.”
“Ivy, I asked you a question,” he replied. “Please answer it.”
“And what if I don’t want to?” she said, smiling seductively.
He stared at the vine sensually twisting around her arm and waist. “Do not make me repeat myself,” he said, anger edging into his voice. Batman didn’t know if plants understood human language, but it looked to him as if the vine suddenly shrank. It pulled away from its host, and disappeared back outside the window.
Ivy’s smile turned to an expression of anger.
“You are rude.” She exited her prison and walked to the room’s balcony, stepping outside into the night, where she breathed deeply of the cool air. “Ask any plant and they’ll tell you that it’s so much better to be outside than cooped up in a human’s apartment.” She leaned over the edge, and he followed her gaze. They watched her vine retract back to ground level, then she turned to Batman, once again smiling.
“You see? You scared her away. You know you’re no better than him. He threatened my children, too.” From atop the balcony railing, Ivy picked up a small potted plant that looked as if it hadn’t been watered in the week the home owners had been away. It was limp and pale. She tenderly gave it a playful kiss and it reacted, growing from a sagging stub, circling her arm and briefly grazing her lips, returning her kiss.
“Ivy…” She nodded, and they headed back into the cell room, then out to the hall.
“All right,” Ivy said. “You’re a tough man, but you’ve never been a mean one.” She stopped and looked up at him. “You want to know about Scarecrow? Well, it started with a meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“Don’t be so impatient. Stories, like plants, need to grow and can’t be rushed. Take it easy and smell the roses. You’d be surprised how much you can learn from them.”
“Ivy, time is running out. If Scarecrow wins, Gotham City will die, your plants will die, and I won’t be able to save them.”
He could see her face contort, as if she was trying to understand his words. Finally, she gave him another smile.
“Yes, of course. Now, he is a mean man, and I believe he’d slaughter all life if given the chance—plant, animal, and human. Anyway, the meeting. Everyone was there. Penguin, Two-Face, Riddler. Even poor Harley. That dear dimwit actually believed she had a chance at a life with her… Puddin’, but then of course, whoosh. He gets himself toasted, roasted, and finally mulched. She was bereft of her usual élan.”
“Ivy. The meeting.”
“Right. Of course. The meeting. Scarecrow said he had a plan. That together we could take you out, and Gotham City would be ours.”
“Over my dead body.”
“I believe that was the idea.” Her smile turned sly. “The old notions are still the best, you know.”
The small potted plant was still growing. Thorns emerged from its stems. The once-tiny flower was no longer cute. It looked as if one wrong word would send it on the attack.
“Anyway, I told him I wasn’t interested in his pathetic human games. I mean, how could destroying a city—even one as life-stifling as Gotham City—help my plants?”
“And his response?”
“Well, if he had one, I never heard it. All I remember after that moment is blackness, then waking up in that room, in that cell. He came and babbled some insanity at me, then heard something—probably you—and fled. I sat there trying to formulate a plan when you interrupted.” Her look was coy. “You know the timing between the two of us has never been good.”
“That’s everything?” he demanded brusquely.
Ivy looked like she was trying to give him an answer as she walked from the room, still carrying the potted plant. She made her way to the elevator, humming again along the way, pausing before each dying plant in the apartment, taking a moment to revive it.
“Ivy,” he said, “I asked if that was everything.”
The el
evator door beeped, and a moment later its door slid open.
“Pretty much. I told him it was a shame for him that his vile toxin had no effect on me. I seem to remember that he didn’t laugh very much at all. Hmmm. Do you think that’s why he did what he did to me?”
She paused, pinched a small piece from the plant, then set the pot on the floor. She stepped inside the elevator and pressed a button. He moved to follow as the elevator door began to slide shut again. Ivy smiled and blew him a kiss.
The potted plant’s stem grew longer, erupting upward and circling Batman, squeezing his chest, pressing in harder and harder until he could no longer breathe.
“Nature always wins.”
He was gasping for air as the plant yanked him back, out of the elevator.
And then the doors closed.
* * *
“Will he ever learn?” Ivy looked at the cutting in her hand. She stroked it, and it quivered with life. Muzak played as the small car descended to the lobby. Plants loved this music, and so did she. Its quiet rhythms seemed to put her at ease, and with the myriad stresses in her life, she welcomed whatever calm could be found.
The car jerked to a stop as it reached the first floor. She waited for the doors to slide open again. Next stop for her was the botanical gardens. Those gardens truly scared Scarecrow; so where better to go to produce even more of her toxin repellant?
The door opened, and Ivy gasped. Batman stood directly outside, dead plant growth strewn across the ground, lifeless brown vines dripping off him.
“My children!” she shrieked. “You killed my children!”
“No,” he said, and the word was like a slap. “You did, by pitting them against me.” He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out of the elevator, then slapped handcuffs around her wrists. “You’re coming with me.”
She smiled and gave him a fake pout.
“You only had to ask.”
* * *
Scarecrow wasn’t happy.
As the prominent psychologist Dr. Jonathan Crane, his job had been to help people rid themselves of their deepest fears. He reasoned that fear kept people from becoming their best, and by minimizing those dark terrors, an individual could achieve peace.
Crane spent years researching fears—why people had them, how they manifested and grew stronger, and finally, when he learned everything he believed he needed to, he began to experiment on how to eliminate them.
Over time he came to believe that to fight fear one needed to create and instill a substitute fear. Firemen fought fires by building a firewall to prevent the bigger blaze from moving forward. Doctors fought many diseases by injecting their patients with small doses in order to build the antibodies necessary to resist the main infection. He believed if one substituted a lesser, more governable fear, it could replace the overpowering dreads that paralyzed his patients.
And it worked.
He replaced nyctophobia—the fear of the night and darkness, a phobia that crippled so many of his patients every day when the sun went down—with hydrophobophobia, the very rational fear of contracting rabies. He replaced arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, with syphilophobia, the avoidable fear of contracting syphilis.
There were thousands of such fears that could be substituted with thousands of others far easier to treat, and less likely to arise for a person living a reasonably normal life. One could, he realized, avoid almost all situations that generated taurophobia, the fear of bulls, much easier than selenophobia, the fear of the moon.
But with each success, Crane began to relish the godlike ability to enter a patient’s mind and to take it over, rebuilding their response mechanisms from the ground up, changing the very way they reacted to the world around them. He enjoyed watching his patients respond to a new series of phobias, and he began to believe that people deserved the fears they sought to eliminate. If they were good people, after all, there’d be no reason to fear anything.
Only those with something to hide should ever be afraid.
Send the fear out there, he thought. Infect the masses. See what happens to them. Those who were good would resist his infection. Those who deserved punishment would become victims of their own darkness. What he was doing was right and just.
And well deserved.
Nearly everyone succumbed to the basest fears, which meant he was achieving what providence had meant for him. He was culling the weak. Within a generation only the strong, the pure, his believers, would live.
And that, he decided, was good.
But there were those who disagreed with his mandate and fought him. Most of them he dealt with easily, but not Batman. The Dark Knight always managed to resist.
Scarecrow was on the offensive now. He was going to cleanse Gotham City, and to do that he needed to see his greatest enemy die.
“Batman must be mine,” he ordered the criminals. “Defeat him and bring him to me. My champion will be rewarded.”
Now he needed to recapture Poison Ivy. She possessed the antidote that rendered his toxin ineffective. He would not allow her to synthesize it—and let the weak resist his warriors. “As for the woman, bring her to me alive, and you will be wealthy beyond your greatest dreams.”
8
Batman and Ivy had made it to West Broadway when one of Scarecrow’s tanks appeared behind a row of parked cars. With a squeal of metal on metal it reared up, crushing the vehicles beneath its massive treads.
Ivy tried to pull back, away from Batman, as the tank smashed car after car into twisted steel, but he firmly held onto her.
“Did you come here to rescue me or get me killed?”
“Neither,” Batman said as another tank rolled into sight. More appeared from other directions, six in all. All of their escape routes were blocked. Then he heard the whoosh of helicopter blades, and saw a police copter hovering above them—he recognized it as a WayneTech-467, designed by Lucius Fox for reconnaissance, not combat.
There were no weapons on board.
* * *
Lt. Adrienne Broome, with seven years on the G.C.P.D., was the chopper pilot. She’d flown in the last Middle East war, then retired from the military when the troops were brought home. But Adrienne lived for the adrenaline and after floundering a few years with jobs that didn’t come close to being fulfilling, she applied to the Gotham City Police Air Division and was quickly accepted.
The job required constant concentration, and where most found it daunting, she thrived in it.
Below, she saw Batman, headed for the Batmobile, which was parked about a block away. He was pulling a redheaded woman dressed in a tight uniform of some sort. It might have been a trick of the light, but her skin appeared to be… green. The tanks following them were moving closer. Maintaining her calm, she reached for the comm.
“Lt. Adrienne Broome,” she said. “Commissioner, I’ve got six heavily armored tanks on the ground in Chinatown. They’re targeting the Bat and a woman I don’t recognize.”
Gordon responded, and it sounded as if he wasn’t fully comprehending what she was saying.
“Did you say tanks?”
“Yeah. Batman and the woman are surrounded. They need backup, with offensive weapons. Armor-piercing weapons. Please advise.”
* * *
“Sir.” Alfred Pennyworth’s voice suddenly came in over Batman’s comm. “I thought you should know I’m detecting no heat signatures. I believe those tanks are unmanned, and being controlled remotely.”
Batman let himself smile. “Then I’m clear to engage?”
“Indeed you are, sir.”
Batman tapped his glove’s control panel, then turned to Ivy.
“Hold on tight, and do what I do.”
* * *
Broome waited for Gordon to answer, but the comm remained silent. After a long pause, she hit the button again. Its light blinked green—she was still connected to G.C.P.D. HQ.
“Sir, I asked for advice. What do I do, sir?”
After what seemed to be forever but wa
s probably only a few seconds, Gordon responded, his voice soft and his words slow and measured.
“We have to help him. We can’t let him die.”
“Umm, things seem to have changed, sir. I’m not sure he needs help.”
“What do you mean, Lieutenant?”
She stared at the Batmobile, moving toward the tanks even as its parts seemed to shift and change.
“It’s his car, sir. It doesn’t seem to have a driver inside, but it’s heading toward him, and, sir, it’s, ummm, transforming.”
“Transforming? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m not sure I can explain it, sir, but it looks as if it’s becoming a tank. And I think the Batman is controlling it.” She watched in silence as the vehicle’s fenders tucked in under it. Metal sheathing unfolded and slipped over its chassis, covering it, as steel plates lowered to protect its tires.
Damn, we sure could have used that in the war.
While she watched, Batman positioned himself in front of the woman, shielding her as he did something to his gauntlet—it had to be a digital control of some sort. The car responded instantly, spinning in place until it faced the closest tank even as its wheels pulled out and revolved.
Sixty-millimeter kinetic-energy penetrator cannons rose from behind the front cabin. To its rear an armor-piercing incendiary Vulcan gun unfolded. Surface-to-air anti-tank missiles were primed to fire a barrage that could simultaneously target and take down up to six hostiles at once. Finally, riot supressor guns flipped into position, ready to fire non-lethal slam rounds at any human attacker.
The Batmobile was now in battle mode and ready to take on all attackers.
* * *
Twin missiles exploded from the Vulcan guns and slammed into the militia tank. Batman pushed Ivy to the ground and shielded her with his body. Seconds later the tank exploded and shrapnel flew in all directions. His uniform kept them from being burned as heated scraps pelted down on them.
Keying further instructions into his gauntlet, he spun the Batmobile again and aimed its next two missiles at another tank. As this second tank exploded, he pulled her to him.