Batman 5 - Batman Begins

by Dennis O'Neil

  Batman moved near and spoke in that raspy growl: “Anything I should know about?”

  “Rachel Dawes is in there somewhere. The Narrows is tearing itself to pieces.”

  “This is just the beginning. They intend to destroy the entire city.”

  “They’ve incapacitated all the riot police here on the island.”

  “If they hit the whole city with the toxin, there’ll be no way to stop Gotham from tearing itself apart in mass panic.”

  Gordon looked at the raised bridge. “How could they do that? There’s no way to get that machine off the island. Except—”

  “The monorail follows the water mains right into the central hub beneath Wayne Tower. If they drive their machine into Wayne Station, it’ll cause a chain reaction that’ll vaporize the entire city’s water supply.”

  “Covering Gotham with a fog of fear toxin.”

  Batman tilted his head up and for almost a minute gazed at the monorail tracks overhead. Finally, he said, “I’m going to stop them loading that train.”

  “And if you can’t?”

  Again, Batman was silent for long seconds. Then: “Can you drive a stick shift?”

  Batman tossed an ignition key to Gordon.

  The blond-haired little boy was trembling, but Rachel managed to hang on to him as she inched her way through the mist. If she could just get him inside somewhere, if they could only survive till daybreak . . .

  Shadows appeared in front of her, black shapes in the undulating white—a lot of them, twenty at least. One of them stepped into a splash of light from a nearby window and she saw that he was wearing inmate’s coveralls. She recognized him immediately: Victor Zsasz.

  Rachel darted to the side of a building and tried to lift the boy onto the bottom rung of a fire-escape ladder. But she was not tall enough.

  She hugged the boy to her and stepped sideways. She stumbled over something, teetered, regained her balance, and looked down at the dead body of a uniformed cop.

  The inmates drew closer. One of them was giggling.

  Rachel left the boy next to the wall and knelt by the body. She pulled the cop’s sidearm from its holster . . .

  How do these damn things work . . . ?

  She remembered, and pulled back and released the slide, and thumbed off the safety.

  Zsasz stepped back into the light.

  “Go away, Victor,” Rachel said. “I’m warning you . . .”

  Victor and the others kept coming.

  Rachel took a deep breath and aimed the gun. Her finger tightened on the trigger. She couldn’t stop all of them, but she could do her best . . .

  A rasping command came from above her: “Grab the boy.”

  Something dark dropped between Rachel and Zsasz. Zsasz grunted and fell.

  Rachel grabbed the boy, and Batman grabbed Rachel. He took something from under his cape, pointed it upward, and then they were shooting past the brick wall, over a parapet, and onto a roof.

  Rachel shrugged off her jacket and put it around the boy. She took his hand and they went to where Batman was standing, looking over the city.

  Mist still roiled in the streets, punctuated here and there with fire. Occasionally, they heard a scream or a moan. Rachel thought that the moans were worse.

  Batman stepped onto the parapet.

  Rachel grabbed his cape. “Wait! You could die.”

  Batman nodded.

  Once more, Rachel was certain that, somehow, she knew this man. “At least tell me your name.”

  Batman turned, hesitated, turned back to Rachel. He spoke in a normal voice, a pleasant baritone: “It’s not who I am underneath . . .” He touched his chest. “But what I do that defines me.”

  Of course. It had to be him. “Bruce.”

  He leaped to the top of the parapet and stepped off it into darkness.

  He wanted to consider what had just happened, how it almost certainly changed everything in his life. But there were tasks to be accomplished and they required him to focus. He slid his hands into the activating pockets of his cape and immediately the cloak became a rigid wing, smashing into the wind, halting his downward plunge. His fall became a glide, controlled by his arms. He flew into the labyrinth that was the Narrows. Buildings and streetlamps flashed past, fires seemed to burst out of the fog. He glanced at the sky. Through a gap in the mist, he glimpsed stars and oriented himself:

  Need to go east . . .

  He tilted his body and swerved in midair. The tip of his cape hit the top branch of a tree and he spun madly, out of control, for a second, helpless. Then he flattened his body and was again flying smoothly. A man and a woman cowering in a doorway looked up and saw him and screamed in unison.

  Ahead, a huge cloud of steam billowed into the air. Probably from a broken water main . . . Batman glided into it, felt himself lifted by an updraft, and for a moment, experienced a great calm.

  When I emerge from this whiteness, I will be engaged in a conflict, perhaps the last one of my life. Failure is unthinkable and yet I fear what success might do to me. But for now, for this moment, I am peaceful . . .

  And suddenly the cloud was behind him and he was swooping over a rooftop and nosing downward. Just ahead, the roof of a blocky concrete monorail support loomed, its edges softened by the mist. Batman dropped his legs so he was in a vertical position and used the cape wings as air brakes. He lost speed. When his boots touched the roof, he ran a few steps and stopped. He thrust his hands into the cape pockets and the wings seemed to melt until they were only black fabric, hanging from his shoulders.

  He looked around. To his back, there was a street, and to his front, a steep drop down to buildings arrayed along a narrow avenue that wound down to the edge of the river. On a rooftop to his left, two ninjas were putting a bulky machine—the microwave transmitter—into a train.

  That’s the devil’s toy. That’s what I have to destroy . . .

  Rā’s al Ghūl stood a few yards away, mist swirling around him.

  “It ends here,” Batman said.

  Rā’s raised his eyebrows. “You’re not dead? You should be dead.”

  “But I’m not.”

  “I have to admire your persistence. But the costume . . . you took my advice about theatricality a bit literally, don’t you think?”

  Two ninjas came around the corner of the monorail support and positioned themselves in front of Rā’s.

  “They won’t save you,” Batman said. “Give it up. Or meet me man to man.”

  “I doubt that you would be able to do me serious harm because I doubt that you would be able to look upon yet another father figure lying dead before you. But no matter. I decline your invitation to combat. I’ve done you the honor of killing you once today and I can’t save the world by killing one man at a time.”

  “You think I can’t beat your pawns?”

  Four more ninjas rappeled down from the rail above them.

  Batman tackled the man nearest him, and locked together, they both went over the side of the monorail support. In midair, Batman twisted, and a half second later hit the rooftop below with the ninja under him, cushioning his fall. As he was getting to his feet, two more ninjas landed nearby and crouched into combat stances. Batman reached under his cloak and, in a single smooth motion, brought out a Batarang and spun it at one of the ninjas while he kicked another off the roof and onto a fire-escape landing.

  How many more . . . ? Can’t afford to fight them all. I’ve got to smash the microwave transmitter . . .

  Batman lifted his grappling gun from his belt, but before he could aim it, a length of narrow chain wrapped around his wrist and jerked. The gun left his hand and, as it vanished into the fog, fired, sending the monofilament and hook hissing into the darkness. Batman grabbed the chain in his other hand and pulled. The ninja who had thrown it, and was still holding the far end, stumbled forward into Batman’s fist.

  Something landed at Batman’s feet and exploded with a blinding flash and a puff of acrid gas. Refle
xively, Batman turned his head, closed his eyes, and held his breath as he leaped in the direction from which the explosive had come. A ninja was in the act of throwing a second small bomb when Batman smashed into him. They went over a parapet and down onto a sheet of corrugated metal that served as a canopy over a parking area. A beam under the iron snapped and Batman and the ninja slid onto the pavement as an iron sheet clanged beside them. Batman elbowed the ninja’s chin, knocking him unconscious, and levered himself to his feet.

  He mentally scanned his body. There was plenty of pain, but that was irrelevant. Was anything broken? Was he incapacitated in any way? Apparently not. The armor in his costume had done its job.

  How to get back up to Rā’s . . . What happened to the grappling gun?

  He saw it then, in the ambient glow of the monorail lights. Across the street: his gun, in the hands of a bald, mustached man in a business suit, who was turning it over and over in his hands as though it were a fascinating new toy he could not quite understand.

  The man would be no problem. But he was surrounded by other men and women and even a few children, staring and shuffling out of the mist toward him.

  “Monster,” someone screamed, and the mob ran toward him.

  Batman dodged the first few to reach him, but his back was to a wall and he had no possible escape route.

  I can’t harm them. They’re drugged . . . they don’t know what they’re doing . . .

  Fingers clutched his ankles and his arms and tugged at him until Batman fell. As bodies swarmed over him, he heard the grinding and hissing of brakes from the monorail and the sound of steel wheels turning.

  It had taken several minutes to get the microwave transmitter loaded onto the train, and another minute for Rā’s to be certain he understood the train’s controls. When he was satisfied, he pushed a red lever forward. The train jerked, rattled, and began moving.

  A minute after Batman had vanished, Rachel found a trapdoor in the roof and managed to get it open. Inside, there was a steep flight of steps. She urged the blond-haired boy onto them and together they entered the building, an ancient tenement that smelled of cooking odors and other, less pleasant smells. Several doors along the dimly lit hallway were open and one had been torn from its hinges. The apartments behind them were deserted—in two, television sets were still on. But the occupants might return, and would be crazy when they did. So Rachel and the boy descended farther, all the way to the basement. The floor was wet, but Rachel found a platform that once supported a futon leaning on its end against a back wall. Straining under the weight, she lowered it and then she and the boy climbed on top of it.

  The boy had stopped trembling, but his eyes were wide and occasionally he gasped. Rachel put her arms around him.

  If only we can get through the night . . . If only those lunatics don’t find us . . .

  Once, Rachel had dreamed of doing grand deeds, of making the world a better place and gaining renown in the process. Now, all she wanted was to save one small child.

  The bald man tugged the ends of his mustache, as though that would make his brain work better, and continued to stare down at the grappling gun. He squeezed the trigger. Suddenly the wire that trailed from its muzzle retracted, hauling a three-pronged hook from the fog. It snapped against the gun barrel with such force that the man stumbled backward. He yelped, spread his fingers, pulled his hands wide. The gun clattered to the cobblestones and the man kicked it away.

  Batman saw it land through a forest of legs. The members of the mob were moaning, clawing at one another more than at him. Batman hunched his shoulders, thrust out his arms between the nearest pair of calves, and separated them. The kid who owned the calves toppled into several other people and for an instant there was a clear area between Batman and the gun. He scuttled forward, flattened, closed his fist. He had the gun. He rolled onto his back, lifted and aimed, and shot.

  The grappling hook soared over the top of the monorail, reached its apogee, dropped, and caught on the air vent of the train’s last car.

  The monofilament went taut as the train moved and yanked Batman to his feet.

  Two of the ninjas grabbed him.

  The train’s speed increased.

  Batman was pulled from the grasp of the ninjas and left the ground.

  How the hell does this thing open? Gordon stood beside Batman’s car, or whatever it was, trying to get inside. He had a key, sure, but there was no keyhole. His thumb tightened on the key and the roof of the vehicle slid forward.

  Oh. That’s how it works. Some kind of microwave transmission.

  Gordon climbed in and the roof slid closed above him. He put his hands on the wheel, tried the pedals with his feet, scanned the dashboard. He had no idea what most of these buttons, levers, and dials were for, but the basic operation of the . . . car?—that seemed conventional enough.

  There was a keyhole on the steering column, just like on the car his wife drove. Okay, good. Put the key in the keyhole, give it a twist—

  The engine rumbled to life.

  Gordon depressed the clutch and ran the stick through its various positions. Six forward gears and reverse. Pretty fancy, but not too exotic. Okay, time to go. He shifted into first, released the clutch—

  The enormous rear tires began to spin and smoke, but the vehicle did not move, which seemed to indicate that the front wheels were locked, somehow. There had to be a brake release handle. Gordon groped under the dashboard and found something. He tugged and pushed and—

  He was at the other end of the block, heading straight for a wall. How long had it taken? Two seconds? Three? He stomped what he hoped was the brake pedal and jerked the wheel. The vehicle skidded around a corner and immediately accelerated again.

  Cripes! This baby would take some getting used to . . .

  Steering awkwardly with one hand, he got out his walkie-talkie with the other and keyed it.

  “This is Gordon,” he said. “Lower the south bridge. I’ll be there in a minute or two.”

  Rā’s insured that the train was running properly and would continue to do so without any further attention from him. He moved away from the controls to the microwave transmitter and activated it. The machine hummed.

  Commissioner Loeb relayed Gordon’s request and watched the two halves of the bridge’s roadway descend and meet. For whatever good that would do.

  He pulled back the sleeve of his uniform coat and squinted at the luminous dial of his watch. Almost two-thirty in the A.M. He’d been standing on this god-forsaken bridge since . . . what? Since midnight. Standing here with a bunch of uniforms and a couple of plainclothes guys and waiting for something to happen. But nothing was going on, either here or, as far as he could see, at the other end of the raised roadway, in the Narrows. Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe he was wasting his time when he could be at home getting his eight hours. ’Cause he needed his eight hours. He didn’t get his eight hours, the next day he wasn’t worth a thing. And where was Gordon? It’d been . . . what?—fifteen minutes, at least, since he’d heard from the sergeant.

  He felt something through the soles of his shoes. Some kind of shaking. And he heard a rumbling.

  “Commissioner, look!” one of the uniforms said, and Loeb looked in the direction the cop’s finger was pointing: the monorail, which ran above the bridge and way above the river. The mist was getting brighter and that was because . . . The headlamp of a train was shining through it. Which meant the train was moving. Coming this way.

  Loeb got a pair of binoculars from the nearest patrol car and put them to his eyes and twisted the focus wheel until the monorail and the train were sharp in the lenses. Yeah, the train was coming, all right, picking up speed, too. But what was that behind it?

  A man?

  The first few seconds had been bad. The first few seconds had nearly killed him. He clutched the gun and was pulled upward toward the rim of the track bed that overhung the street, his face scraping along a rivet-studded beam. He estimated that he was alrea
dy moving at twenty miles an hour. If he hit the rim at this speed, it would either take off his head or knock him to the cobblestones below. Either way, he would be dead.

  He managed to put both his feet against the steel beam and push. His body flew outward and he missed the track bed by maybe two inches.

  One hurdle passed.

  He was being dragged behind the rear of the train, bumping along the tracks. His costume was some protection—ordinary clothing would have been shredded by now—but it would not last indefinitely. And sooner or later, one of these bumps would snap a bone.

  The train was over the bridge. Batman could see lights gleaming on the river underneath it.

  He squeezed the trigger of the grappling gun and the line began to retract, pulling him toward the train.

  The train’s speed increased and Batman’s body left the tracks and, for a couple of seconds, trailed the train like some kind of bizarre streamer. Then the line finished retracting and Batman was clutching the rounded end of the car, looking through a window at rows of empty seats and empty cardboard cups rolling on the filthy floor.

  Batman reached up and curled his gloved fingers around the tiny metal lip running around the top of the car. Not much to hang on to. But maybe enough.

  As the train passed overhead, Loeb drew his gun. Then he realized that he had absolutely no use for it and reholstered it. And then the fire hydrant next to him exploded and a hard gush of water knocked him flat on his back. He rolled over onto his hands and knees and saw a manhole cover flipping end over end and sprinklets of water arcing up from cracks in the pavement. Across the street, another hydrant exploded.

  Jeff Benedict and Lon Calter were busy again. For a while, after the ruckus at the Narrows, things had quieted down. Lon had called the bosses, all of them, and they’d all promised to be right down, but that was forty minutes ago and none had shown yet. No surprise. Most of them lived in the northern suburbs—long drive.

  Jeff asked Lon if he had any idea what had caused the ruckus and Lon said that he’d seen nothing like it in his thirty years with the Water Department. But in the morning, the engineers would get it figured out, and anyway, the worst seemed to be over. Course, there’d be a lot of people in the Narrows without water, but that was life in Gotham City . . .