Then Batman was on his feet, using the brand-new corpse for a shield. He heaved the lifeless excrement through the air. The body landed on top of one of his friends. The one who was still alive fell back over a garbage can to crack his head against a wall. He fell down, out cold.
Batman was already on the third piece of slime. He rabbit-punched the slime’s throat, then gave his gut a good kick with a steel-toed boot as the thug went down.
Now there was only one more little matter to take care of. Batman pulled his mask back into place as he turned to face his final business.
The last piece of living trash had his gun out, but he was shaking too much to aim. Batman smiled. The trash screamed and ran.
Batman noticed the strobe lights had started again overhead. Vicki Vale was up there, taking pictures.
He’d have to do something about that.
The Batman had disposed of all the goons in a matter of seconds. And then he looked up at her.
She retreated from the edge, so that the Batman could no longer see her. He must know that she had been taking pictures, including some before he had put his mask back on. Pictures that were too valuable to lose. She quickly rewound the film and unloaded the camera. But where was the safest place for the film? Her alternatives were limited. She dropped the roll inside her blouse and started to run across the roof to a door on the far side of the building.
Maybe this was the wrong thing to do after the Batman had saved her life. But there was something about the Batman—something so familiar and so strange at the same time. She realized she didn’t want these pictures so much for the Globe as for herself. She needed to see his face. Once she developed the film, she would know the true identity of the Batman.
Vicki was gone. He could find her in a minute. For now, there were other things to worry about.
He walked out of the alley and saw the Batmobile two blocks away. It was completely surrounded by police and curiosity seekers. A couple of the cops were actually crawling over the top of the car, trying to find a way in. And there was a gigantic tow truck backing down the far end of the street—the kind of truck they used to haul away tractor trailers—maneuvering to haul away the Batmobile.
The Batman made a snorting sound inside his mask. There were always complications. Oh, well. If he had wanted things to be simple, he would have gone into another line of work.
He pressed a button on his utility belt. The miniature radio transmitter popped into his hand. He pressed the Talk button:
“Shields open,” he ordered.
“Shields open,” the car’s computer voice replied.
The steel plates retracted into the doors and wheel wells.
“Ignition,” Batman said.
“Ignition,” the car replied.
One of the cops crawling across the hood tried to get a look inside the darkened cockpit.
“There’s somebody in there!” he yelled.
The turbine engines revved, and the Batmobile started to roll—slowly at first, to allow the cops to roll off the car and the crowd to disperse, then more quickly as the car pulled free of the throng. The left-turn signal flashed as the Batmobile approached the second corner.
Batman would let the computer drive the car for the next few minutes. He needed the cops out of the way for a while, and the Batmobile made an excellent diversion.
In the meantime, though, he had business that would not wait.
Sirens wailed on the street below. Vicki glanced over the ledge and saw the Batman’s customized car tearing down the street, dodging a bus and two taxis, swooping around a gaggle of startled pedestrians. Well, at least Batman had gotten away. Now she had to find a way to get off the Gotham City skyline.
The first door she had tried was locked. That was only to be expected, she guessed, in the big city. But the first roof had connected to a second, with a jump of only a foot or two, and, using an old dining-room chair somebody had left up here, she had managed to climb the five feet up onto a third. And this one had a fire escape that went all the way down. She gratefully started for the ground.
The sirens vanished in the distance. From the intensity of the noise, it sounded as if there were twenty police cars chasing the Batman. She looked down. There was no one on the street below.
She reached the bottom of the fire escape. It didn’t quite reach the ground after all—there was a five-foot drop to the pavement below. She’d have to jump, Why didn’t people warn you about this sort of thing when you went into news photography? At least, Vicki thought, she was wearing her sensible shoes.
Her camera bag slung over her shoulder, she grabbed the bottom iron rung of the fire escape and swung herself down to the sidewalk. Now, she thought, to get out of here. She glanced quickly over her shoulder. It was too quiet around here. She wouldn’t want to run into the Joker’s men again—or the Batman now, for that matter.
She quickened her pace, turning her head back to look where she was going. But there was something in her way, something large and black.
She couldn’t stop herself. She walked—bodily—right into the Batman.
The breath knocked out of her, she looked up into the masked face.
“Not even a thank-you?” he asked.
Thank-you? she thought. For saving her life? Vicki became instantly defensive, probably because she knew Batman was right.
“Well, I think you might thank me,” she retorted. “You were as good as dead.”
Batman stared down at her. His face looked so impassive behind that mask.
“You weigh a little more than a hundred and eight” was his only reply.
Vicki heard the sirens again. They were coming this way, fast.
Batman’s hands were on her shoulders.
“You’d better come with me,” he said gently.
She guessed that she should. The sirens weren’t more than a block or two away. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her day trying to explain things to the police.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Batman’s only answer was to take her hand and pull her to the corner. He led her out into the street.
She looked up to see the Batmobile screaming toward them. They had to get out of its way!
Instead, Batman stepped directly into the headlight beams.
“Stop!” he demanded.
Brakes squealed. Batman’s grip was firm on her hand, keeping her from running. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the car had stopped, three feet away from her toes.
Batman pointed for her to get into the passenger seat as he leapt behind the wheel. She climbed into the car as the sirens rounded a nearby corner. She could see the flashing lights behind them now. There were at least four cop cars, the closest less than half a block away.
The doors closed overhead, and Batman pushed the accelerator to the floor. The engines roared. Vicki could have sworn she could see flame shooting from the car’s exhaust. The car started to move, faster and faster down the broad avenue.
Batman told her to put on her seat belt.
She did just that, glancing over at the speedometer. It looked as if they were doing 140. She looked in the rearview mirror.
She saw only one flashing light, far behind them. A minute later, even that was gone. They had outrun them all.
They were driving out of the city. Batman slowed the car on a deserted stretch of road bordered on both sides by tall and ancient pines. He flicked another one of the switches on his control console. Vicki suddenly found the window before her had become completely opaque. She couldn’t see where they were or where they were going, which, she realized, must be precisely what Batman had in mind.
“This is kidnapping!” she pointed out.
“Looks like it,” Batman agreed.
He flicked on a light between them, a light so bright that Vicki could no longer look at him. She blinked, trying to adjust to the brightness, then noticed that she could see out of the front glass on her side again. Not that she wanted to
. It looked as if they were driving straight for a sheer cliff wall.
She looked back to the Batman, her eyes finally adjusting to the new illumination. She saw him smile as he hit the gas.
They rushed toward the cliff face.
Vicki screamed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The cliff wall vanished. Vicki realized it was some sort of trick, a projection maybe, something done with mirrors. Instead of smashing on the rocks, the car rushed into the mouth of a giant cave.
Vicki looked overhead as Batman stopped the car. They were in an enormous cavern. Floodlights overhead illuminated the chamber. In places, she could see cave walls of rough-hewn stone; in others, passages twisted their way into darkness. The cavern was so vast that the floodlights could really penetrate only small portions of the overall chamber, making pools of light in a sea of total dark.
She could identify some things in the better-lit corners of the gloom. Over against the far wall was a whole bank of computers, next to a lathe and a jigsaw and rows of tools—a fully equipped machine shop. Beyond that was a table piled with flasks and beakers and Bunsen burners. She guessed it was some sort of chemical-analysis setup. Vicki decided she wouldn’t be surprised if Batman had a whole crime lab down here.
She climbed out of the car as Batman got out the other side. She carefully walked farther into the cave, trying to get a closer look at everything. Batman followed her, keeping his distance. Vicki stepped toward him, into a circle of light.
“Watch your step in here,” he suggested. Vicki looked behind her and to her right, the direction she would have walked. Another step, and she would have stepped into a pit so deep that the light didn’t show the bottom. She kicked a pebble over the edge. No sound echoed back to her. The pit seemed to go down forever. She looked up. Suspended over the bottomless pit were a pair of gymnast’s rings.
“Welcome to the Batcave,” Batman said.
There was another sound, far above her, the high shrieking cries of animals. She looked farther overhead, above the gymnast’s rings, and saw the shadows of wings in the lights at the roof of the cave.
She shivered when she realized what it was.
“Bats,” she said softly. “They’re terrifying.”
“That’s the idea,” Batman agreed. He walked over toward the computer wall and a small bird cage, half in shadow, that she hadn’t seen before. Vicki followed him over. She realized, as she approached, that the cage didn’t contain a bird, it held a small bat with a broken wing, wrapped in bandage and splint.
Batman patted the cage.
“Bats are great survivors.”
He moved on to a table, piled high with papers. Vicki kept her distance from the bat cage as she followed. Behind Batman was a clothes rack, full of hanging bat costumes. She strolled over to take a look. The fabric felt odd between her fingers. It was like no clothing she’d ever seen, an odd combination of natural fibers and something that stretched like rubber, but more than that, too. As thin as the fabric was, it had density and weight, as if the center of the cloth was woven steel.
“What are they made of?” she asked when Batman looked up from his papers.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t have a name.”
Batman didn’t seem the talkative sort. She realized she didn’t even know why he had brought her here.
“What are you going to do with me?” she asked point blank, approaching him quickly. She wanted to get a good look at his face. She’d find out something more about him, whether he wanted her to or not.
He glanced at her approach and took a single step away. He was instantly lost in shadow.
“You’re going to do something for me,” Batman replied.
What did he mean by that? She watched as he walked behind the lab table. Now that she was closer, she could see more than beakers and Bunsen burners. There were cosmetics, deodorants, shampoos—all sorts of products. On Batman’s left, a computer printer began to chatter. Vicki looked at a monitor next to the printer, automatically scrolling through an endless list.
“What is all this?” she asked.
Batman turned toward her. His hands, above the table, were in light, but his face was still in darkness.
“The police have got it all wrong,” he said brusquely. “They’re looking for one product. It’s much bigger than that. The Joker’s tainted hundreds of basic chemicals at the source.”
At the source? Vicki looked at the vast array of cosmetics and beauty-care items spread out before her as she struggled to comprehend exactly what he was saying. “But . . . then whole shipments of every product would be poisoned? We’d all be dead.”
He shook his head in the darkness. “No. Each product only contains one component. The poison only works when they’re mixed.” He picked a can up off the table. “Hair spray won’t do it alone. But . . . hair spray and perfume and lipstick will be toxic and”—his hand swept above the drugstore’s worth of products—“untraceable.”
Really? This was quite a story. Batman seemed to be more than just another guy in a cape punching out bad guys. But, Vicki realized, it wasn’t as simple as that. If she wanted to have a real story—one that she could print—she needed to determine his methods, to make sure this was more than speculation.
“How did you figure that out?” she asked.
He didn’t reply. He walked away from her again, back into the darkness. Maybe, she thought, there wouldn’t be a story after all.
When he turned back to her, he had a thick manila envelope in his hands. He stepped forward and passed it to her.
“Take this to the press.”
She looked inside. There must have been fifty sheets of paper, full of chemical equations and lists of tainted products.
Still, once the doubt had entered her mind, it was hard to get rid of it. She remembered all the rumors and speculation in the news office about who the Batman really was and what he really wanted. These papers all looked very impressive at first glance, but what happened if the science editor at the Globe took a look at it and decided it was nonsense? She didn’t want to promise anything she couldn’t deliver.
“I may have some trouble with that,” she said at last. “A lot of people think you and the Joker work together.”
Batman’s reply was quick and harsh: “Do me a favor. Don’t flatter my enemy. The man’s psychotic.”
Vicki looked up from the papers. “Some people say the same about you.”
Batman paused, as if that thought was new to him.
“What people?” he said at last, his voice much softer than before.
“Well, let’s face it,” Vicki replied frankly. “You’re not exactly normal, are you?”
This time, Batman’s answer was more confident: “It’s not a normal world.”
He stepped back as he spoke. He was swallowed again by the darkness.
Vicki suppressed the urge to shiver all over again. The strangeness of her situation seemed to grow with every passing minute. What, really, did she know about this Batman?
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked, hoping he didn’t hear the catch in her voice.
He had moved in the darkness. His voice was behind her.
“People need that information.”
“But you could have just sent it,” she shot back.
Again, there was no immediate reply. Vicki looked around, trying to catch some movement in the total absence of light. But there was no movement and no sound. She could be all alone, lost in an endless cavern.
“You’re right,” he said in her ear.
She gasped. He stood right in front of her.
“I could have,” he added. “There is something else.”
Vicki had trouble breathing regularly enough to answer him.
“Wh-what?” she managed.
“You have something I want,” he replied.
He took a step toward her. She took an automatic step away. She looked behind her and saw that she was almost at the edge of the pit. How ha
d she gotten back here? Had the Batman maneuvered her to the edge so she couldn’t escape?
She looked back. Batman was very close to her. Her hand clutched at her blouse.
“What could I have that you want?” Her voice suddenly sounded very small.
Batman swirled his cape over her.
She felt trapped. She couldn’t breathe. She wanted to scream.
His arms encircled her. That calmed her somehow. It was odd. Somewhere, beneath the panic, there was something familiar, even reassuring, about the embrace.
He freed one of his hands and raised his glove toward her face. There was something in that glove, something acrid. She felt her eyes close. The lids were too heavy to keep them open. It was knockout gas! The panic wanted to rise in her again, but she was tired, too tired. Everything—Batman, the cave, pools of darkness and light—everything was fading away.
The last sound she heard was the flapping of wings.
Bat wings.
She opened her eyes. Sunlight streamed through the windows. She was in her own apartment, in her own bed.
What was she doing here? Batman, the Joker, the Batcave—had it all been some sort of a dream?
She pulled off the sheet and saw she was still wearing the clothes from the day before.
So it was all real. Batman must have brought her here.
But there was something else. Something she had hidden. Something she didn’t want him to find.
She sat up and searched inside her blouse. It was gone.
“The film!” she said with a vehemence that almost made the words a curse. “He took the film!”
What could she do? She stared blankly for a moment at the patterns the sunlight made on her floor.
The phone rang.
She reached over to the side of the bed, realizing with the movement that she was still a little woozy.
She picked up the receiver.
“Hell-hello?” she managed.
“Vicki?” It was Allie Knox’s voice. He sounded concerned. No wonder, the way she answered the phone. “Are you all right? You want me to come over there?”
“No,” she replied with more certainty than she felt. That’s when she saw something on the bedside table. “Wait. Allie?”
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