Batman 5 - Batman Begins

by Dennis O'Neil

  Then it started again. The control board lit up and the emergency alarm clanged. Jeff and Lon ran to their monitors.

  “What’s that?” Jeff asked.

  “The pressure’s moving along the mains . . . blowing all the pipes,” Lon said. “Some kind of chain reaction.”

  “Coming toward us.”

  Batman jumped, and that gave him enough altitude to get his palms onto the top of the train car, and he straightened his arms and slid on his chest until his entire body was on the silvery roof.

  The train was still accelerating. He saw a geyser of water shoot up alongside the track bed and knew pipes and hydrants were exploding below.

  The train rounded a bend and canted sharply to the left. Batman recentered his weight and regained his balance.

  Rā’s would be in the first car, so that’s where he had to go. And fast. With each passing second, more toxic spray was releasing into the air, to be breathed in by innocent men, women, and children—to drive them insane.

  Lon swiveled his chair away from the control board and stared at Jeff. His eyes were wide, his mouth slack, his entire expression one of helpless panic.

  “What?” Jeff demanded.

  “Pressure’s building underneath us. We gotta . . . hell, I don’t know. We gotta evacuate the building.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause Wayne Tower sits right on the central hub. If that pressure reaches us, the water supply across the whole city will blow.”

  Jeff glanced at the nearest pressure gauge. The needle was already in the red zone and moving higher.

  “Let’s get outta here,” Lon said, standing and grabbing his jacket from where it hung on the back of a chair. “We’re sitting on the hub—and she’s gonna blow big.”

  Gordon struggled to keep control of Batman’s vehicle. Rounding a corner, he misjudged the speed-distance ratio and sideswiped a parked SUV.

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  He swerved onto the South Bridge, grateful that Loeb had managed to get it lowered, and in a couple of seconds, sped off it and onto the street on the other side. He passed Loeb and a cluster of cops, all of whom were milling around their cars aimlessly, all of whom were wet. So they’d undoubtedly breathed in the toxin and in a minute, maybe they’d be howling lunatics. Well, he couldn’t worry about them. He had to follow the damn train, which was no great feat, because from here, there was only one place it could go. To the center of the city. To Wayne Tower.

  The train sped over a major intersection, and at the periphery of his vision, Batman saw a manhole cover flipping end over end. Wind howled in his ears, the sound mingling with the screech and clatter of steel wheels on steel rails, and the car swayed under his feet. Ahead, he could see the silhouette of the familiar Gotham City skyline, black against the moonlit blue of the sky, with Wayne Tower dwarfing the other skyscrapers. At this speed, the train would pull into the Tower station in a minute or two. Bruce Wayne was no engineer, and so neither was Batman, but he was familiar enough with the city’s infrastructure to realize that Rā’s al Ghūl’s machine would blow every main within a twenty-mile radius if it got close to the complex of tunnels under the Tower.

  There would be an unimaginable epidemic of insanity. The cost in human lives and human suffering would be incalculable.

  He ran, jumped to another car, ran and jumped . . .

  There was a tunnel directly ahead.

  Batman flattened himself on the car as it tore beneath a concrete arch.

  He stood, swayed, continued running and jumping.

  In the Wayne guesthouse, Alfred sat hunched, a cold cup of Earl Grey tea between his palms, wearing his favorite garment, a velvet bathrobe given to him as a Christmas present by Martha Wayne decades ago. It was worn and frayed now, and its rich scarlet color had faded to a bland pink, but it was still his favorite. He was staring at a television tuned to the local all-news channel and on the kitchen table beside him were two radios, a short-wave tuned to the police bands and an ordinary receiver tuned to a news station. He had pieced together some of what was happening. He knew that Master Bruce had eluded the police and that something hellish was occurring at the Narrows. But the reports were maddeningly incomplete. He felt, in his bones, that Bruce Wayne was still alive, but he was by no means certain.

  Batman reached the lead car, swayed for a moment as he considered his options, and decided that he could not afford to waste time strategizing. He had to operate in the moment, letting instinct guide him.

  He might have only seconds left.

  He sat on the edge of the car and swung his legs backward. His boots struck a shatterproof window and knocked it from its frame. As it dropped to one of the seats, Batman was already sliding and twisting through the empty frame and landing inside the car. He landed in a crouch on the floor facing the front of the train.

  The microwave transmitter blocked the aisle, humming and vibrating slightly. Behind it stood Rā’s al Ghūl.

  “You’re still not dead,” Rā’s said.

  “Obviously not. We can end this now, Rā’s. There’s no need for further bloodshed.”

  “Oh, you are wrong, Bruce. There’s an enormous need.”

  “I’ll stop you.”

  “No. You won’t. Because to stop me you would have to kill me and you will not do that.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. You could not stand to see another father die.” Rā’s edged around the machine and slid his sword from the cane. “But I have seen many of my children die. Another one won’t make much difference to me.”

  Rā’s advanced, the sword in one hand, the cane in the other. He feinted with the sword and swung the cane at Batman’s head. Batman trapped it in one of his scallops, twisted, and the cane went spinning over his shoulder.

  Rā’s thrust the sword point at Batman’s chest. Batman pivoted and the steel slipped past his chest, grazing his costume. Rā’s kicked. Batman sidestepped and Rā’s kicked again, striking Batman’s hip. As Batman stumbled, trying to regain his footing, Rā’s arced the blade downward toward Batman’s head, but Batman crossed his wrists and trapped the steel in the scallops of both gauntlets.

  “Familiar,” Rā’s said. “Don’t you have anything new?”

  “How about this?” Batman yanked his arms in opposite directions and the blade snapped in two. Then Batman drove the palm of his right hand into Rā’s’s chest, and as Rā’s stumbled backward, Batman jumped onto a seat and past Rā’s to the train’s controls.

  He looked out the front window and saw Wayne Tower looming ahead. He grabbed the brake lever but before he could pull it back, Rā’s’s cane was thrust into the mechanism, jamming it. Before Batman could free it, Rā’s swung his clenched fist at the back of Batman’s head, bouncing it off the windshield. Rā’s struck again and Batman fell and rolled onto his back and Rā’s was straddling him, his hands clenched around Batman’s neck, his thumbs pressing into Batman’s throat.

  “Don’t be afraid, Bruce . . . you hate this city as much as I do, but you’re just an ordinary man in a cape. That’s why you can’t fight injustice and that’s why you can’t stop this train.”

  “Who said anything about stopping it?”

  At four in the morning, it hadn’t made any difference that Gordon had run every red light between the Narrows and downtown Gotham. Eight minutes later, he was racing along beneath the monorail. He passed the speeding train and pulled ahead of it. The Wayne Tower station was just two blocks ahead, so whatever he was going to do he had to do now. If he’d understood Batman’s instructions correctly and if everything worked as Batman had predicted, Gordon was about to break the law, big time.

  He was scared, but so what? Being scared was nothing new.

  Gordon tried to remember what the Batman had told him about the weapons on board the vehicle. He looked for the buttons that indicated where the guns were and eventually found them. He pushed a button and squeezed a trigger. Two missiles shot past the monorail support and
exploded inside a parking garage. Gordon cursed himself for not aiming first and steered the Batmobile closer to the monorail support.

  Aiming as best he could, he depressed the trigger again and fired. This time the missiles hit their target. Gordon exhaled and leaned back in his seat.

  As he watched, the support crumbled and the monorail tracks smashed into the street.

  The train car shook and Rā’s’s grasp relaxed for an instant. He looked through the windshield at the track, twisted and smoking.

  “You’ll never learn to mind your surroundings,” Batman said, “as much as your opponent.” He slammed his right gauntlet into Rā’s’s face. Rā’s toppled sideways and Batman scrambled to his feet. He grabbed Rā’s’s hair with his left hand and pulled a Batarang from under his cloak with his right. He raised the weapon over his head; a single downward swing would bury it in Rā’s’s skull.

  Rā’s smiled. “Ah. You have finally learned to do what is necessary.”

  Batman flung the weapon at the windshield. The glass cracked and then broke. “I won’t kill you . . .”

  Batman pulled a small mine from his belt and threw it at the back door of the car. There was an explosion and the door was gone.

  “But I don’t have to save you.”

  Batman moved to the other side of the microwave transmitter and thrust his hands into the pockets of his cape. It stiffened and became a wing.

  There were no cameras, no news crews. But there were three eyewitnesses: Jeff Benedict, Lon Calter, and James Gordon. Jeff and Lon had just left the Tower and were racing toward where Lon’s minivan was parked when the monorail support disintegrated, scattering debris in all directions. Not knowing what else to do, utterly bewildered, they simply stopped in their tracks and waited for whatever would happen next.

  Gordon couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The explosion that took out the monorail also took out one of the two streetlamps in the area, leaving most of the block in heavy shadow, with most of the illumination coming from the moon.

  This is what Gordon thought he saw:

  The back door of the train shooting out and hitting the front of the car behind it just as the windows on either side of it disintegrated into a hundred fragments and sprayed outward. The uncoupling of the front cars from the rest of the tram—caused by the explosion?—and then a man flying out of the twisted door frame, a giant wing on his back lifting him high into the air as the two front cars derailed and careened off the rail bed and dipped down into the plaza, shattering concrete and marble, raising clouds of white dust.

  Then the car exploded.

  Gordon, trembling with shock and excitement, was too stunned to react. He simply watched.

  The three of them—Jeff, Lon, and Gordon—were momentarily blinded by the flames that followed the final explosion. But Jeff and Lon were pretty sure, and Gordon was certain, that they witnessed one final, bizarre thing: a giant bat, soaring above the roof-tops, plainly visible against the moon, but only for a moment.

  Batman had caught a thermal that lifted him a couple of hundred feet into the air. He looked down. There was a fire gouting up the wall of the Tower and in it he could see the silhouette of the monorail car. To the south, he saw the flashing red lights of fire engines and he heard the distant wail of sirens, mingled with the sighing of the wind.

  He shifted his center of gravity and began his long, slow descent. If he calculated correctly, and could maintain the shallow angle of his glide, he would land on the access road north of the freeway, a short distance from Wayne Manor.

  The sky was beginning to lighten in the east. False dawn, but the real item would appear very soon.

  He touched a button on his belt, activating a transmitter in his cowl, and told Alfred where he expected to be in ten minutes.

  Then he relaxed and allowed himself to enjoy the early morning air, the gentle motion of his flight.

  He remembered instruction given at the monastery: Know your emotional state at all times in order that it not deceive your intellect.

  So what was he feeling? Exhaustion, sure. But emotionally? He couldn’t find any distinct emotion within him. Maybe later?

  The earth was rising up to embrace him, and that was enough, for now.

  Gordon stood next to the Batmobile. The gutter nearest to him was full of rushing water, as though the city were in the middle of a major storm, But the sky was clear. So the water was coming from burst pipes, hundreds of burst pipes.

  What was left of the fallen monorail cars was burning with a hard, blinding, blue-white flame. Gordon had no reason to continue looking at it, so he went to look for help.

  During the short ride to the Wayne property, Batman used the car phone to call Lucius Fox and, in his ordinary voice, issue some instructions. Although it was almost five in the morning, Fox sounded fully alert, and when Bruce had finished the call, Fox had sounded truly delighted.

  Alfred parked the limo next to the guesthouse and Batman allowed his old friend to help him inside.

  First, Alfred made tea, a cup of Earl Grey for both of them. Next came the ordeal of removing the costume. Together, they managed to get it off and Alfred surveyed the bruises on Bruce’s flesh.

  “Stimulating night?” he asked.

  “It had its moments.”

  Bruce moved his arms, legs, touched his toes, and rolled his head around on his neck; nothing seemed to be broken. But, under Alfred’s prompting, Bruce admitted to being in pain. Alfred was pretty sure that he could persuade Dr. Harkins to prescribe a sedative. Perhaps that young Wayne wastrel had tumbled from a polo pony?

  “No drugs,” Bruce said, and that closed the discussion.

  William Earle arrived at Wayne Tower at his usual time, seven-thirty. He stepped from his limo and paused to survey the damage caused by the monorail accident. Or whatever the hell it was. The politicos he’d talked to didn’t seem to know their asses from Christmas . . . yeah, that was different—and the reporters and cops weren’t being helpful, either. But it was bad. The remains of the cars had been hauled away, but there sure as hell was damage. This whole side of the building might have to be redone, at least up to the fifteenth story; what wasn’t cracked and falling apart was blackened by fire. The sidewalks would have to be replaced, but maybe the city would handle that, and the monorail was a total loss too, but maybe it could stay broken . . . who rode the damn thing anymore, anyway?

  He entered the building, which stank of smoke, ignoring the “Good mornings” he got from various employees, rode his private elevator to the forty-ninth floor, strode to the boardroom, ignoring more greetings, and tossed his coat to Jessica, who stood by the reception desk.

  “Mr. Earle, the meeting’s already started,” Jessica said.

  “What?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Earle flung open the boardroom door. Lucius Fox was standing in Earle’s place at the head of the table, a sheaf of papers in his hand. His bow tie, today, was bright green.

  “Fox, what are you doing here?” Earle snapped. “I seem to remember firing you.”

  “You did,” Fox drawled. “But I found a new job.” Fox inspected his papers for a few seconds before adding, “Yours. Didn’t you get the memo?”

  Earle’s mouth became a straight line and his eyes narrowed. “By whose authority?”

  Fox leaned over an intercom and said, “Jessica, put Mr. Wayne on the line, please.”

  There was the scratch of static and then a tinny version of Bruce’s voice: “Yes?”

  “What on earth makes you think you have the authority to decide who runs this company, Bruce?”

  “The fact that I’m the owner?”

  “What are you talking about? Wayne Enterprises went public weeks ago.”

  “And I bought most of the shares. Through various charitable foundations, trusts, and so forth. Look, it’s all a bit technical, but the important thing is, my company’s future is secure. Right, Mr. Fox?”

  “Right you are, Mr. Wayne,” Lucius dr
awled. He looked at Earle, and grinned.

  In the back of a brand-new limo, Bruce switched off the phone. Alfred, driving, asked, “Have you seen the morning papers? Batman may have made the front page, but Bruce Wayne got pushed to page eight . . .”

  Bruce opened a copy of the morning edition of the Gotham Times. As Alfred had said, a story about Bruce was on page eight, headlined: DRUNKEN BILLIONAIRE BURNS DOWN HOUSE.

  “ ‘Drunken’ seems a bit strong. ‘Woozy,’ maybe. ‘Tipsy,’ even. But ‘drunken’? Remind me to send an outraged letter to the editor.”

  “Should I really?”

  “No.”

  “You are becoming a bit of a figure of fun, Master Bruce. ‘Billionaire klutz’ is one of the sobriquets being applied to you.”

  “Good.”

  Alfred turned into the Wayne driveway and stopped at the guesthouse.

  “Let’s go on up to the manor,” Bruce said. “Or what’s left of it.”

  The remains of the once-imposing home were even uglier in the morning sunlight than they had been in the semidarkness of early dawn, when the last of the firemen had splashed water on the final smoldering embers and gone away. Nothing was left of the superstructure except a few blackened timbers and stone walls on two sides. Most of the foundation was still intact, buried under tons of ash.

  Rachel’s little car was parked around the back, at the kitchen garden. Bruce left the limo and went to where Rachel was staring at the remnants of the greenhouse, mostly bent metal framework. Broken glass crunched under Bruce’s shoes and Rachel turned to greet him.

  “Good to see you—again,” she said.

  “And you.”

  They walked past the greenhouse to the well.

  “Remember the day I fell?” Bruce asked.

  “Of course. I was so scared for you. I’ve spent a lot of time being scared for you.”