Batman 5 - Batman Begins (20 page)

A puff of smoke rose from Crane’s briefcase and wafted into Falcone’s face. Falcone coughed.

“They scream and cry,” Crane said. “Much as you’re doing now.”

And Falcone began screaming. He stared wide-eyed at Crane, screaming and crying.

A guard ran in brandishing a club as Crane was putting the mask back into his briefcase. “Dr. Crane, are you all right?”

“Yes, but I’m afraid he isn’t.” Crane gestured to Falcone, who was curled into a fetal position beneath the table. “It looks like a total psychotic breakdown.”

“You think he’s faking?”

Crane moved past the guard and said, “No, no faking. Not that one. You’d better put him someplace where he can’t hurt himself. I’ll talk to a judge, see if I can’t get him moved to the secure wing of Arkham. I can’t treat him here.”

Heat lightning lit the horizon and a cool breeze swept down the alley behind James Gordon’s apartment. Gordon, a sack of garbage in his hand, paused to look through the kitchen window at his wife Barbara, who was coaxing their young daughter to eat. Thunder rolled from the sky and lightning flashed again.

“Storm’s coming.”

Gordon immediately recognized the voice and turned to see Batman crouched on the fire escape.

“The scum’s getting jumpy because you stood up to Falcone,” Gordon said, lifting the garbage-can lid.

“It’s a start,” Batman said. “Your partner was at the docks with Falcone.”

“He moonlights as a low-level enforcer.”

“They were splitting the shipment in two. Only half was going to the dealers.”

“Why? What about the other half?”

“Flass knows.”

“Maybe. But he won’t talk.”

“He’ll talk to me,” Batman said.

“Commissioner Loeb set up a massive task force to catch you. He thinks you’re dangerous.”

“What do you think?”

Gordon dropped his sack into the can and replaced the lid. “I think you’re trying to help . . .”

He was talking to himself. Batman was gone.

“. . . But I’ve been wrong before.”

A few minutes later, the rain began to sweep across the docks, where District Attorney Carl Finch was walking beside a man in beige overalls, checking the tags of shipping containers with flashlights.

They stopped before a particularly large container and Finch said,
“This
is the one I’m talking about.”

“What’s your problem with it?” the dock worker asked.

“It shouldn’t exist. This ship left Singapore with 246 containers and arrived with 247. I’m guessing there’s something I’m not supposed to find in there.”

The man in overalls winked at Finch. “Lissen, Counselor, we know the way things work in this town. You and me—we don’t
wanna
know what’s in Mr. Falcone’s crates.”

Finch glared at the man. “Things are working differently now. Open it.”

The man in overalls shrugged and pulled the container door open. Finch swept the inside with his flashlight beam and saw what looked like some kind of industrial machine the size of a small refrigerator.

“What the hell is this thing?” he asked and then was struck in the back by a bullet. He fell to the ground, dead.

The man in overalls put a .25-caliber automatic back in his pocket. He grabbed Finch’s ankles and dragged the body into the container.

By nine, rain was falling throughout Gotham and the suburbs. Most of the city’s street workers had given up for the night and gone home, or were huddled somewhere hoping the storm would end. But in the theater district, one food stand had remained open and there, under its canopy, Flass stuffed a falafel into his mouth, half chewed it, and swallowed. Bowing his head, he left the shelter of the canopy and ran into the pelting rain. He turned a corner and continued running down a narrow alleyway.

Suddenly something looped around him and he was no longer standing on the pavement; he was being lifted. He stopped when his face was inches from a black mask. He then realized that the masked man was holding him by the ankle, about forty feet above the concrete.

“Where were the other drugs going?”

“I don’t know,” Flass gasped.

Batman released Flass and the cop dropped twenty feet. His scream was lost in a crack of thunder. The wire that looped around him halted his fall. Batman pulled him back up.

“I never knew,” Flass whispered. “Shipments went to some guy for a couple days before they went to dealers . . .”

“Why?”

“There was something else in the drugs, something hidden.”

“What?”

“I don’t know . . . I never went to the drop-off. It’s in the Narrows . . . cops only go there in force . . .”

Batman released his hold on Flass. Flass dropped quickly and jerked to a sudden stop just inches from the ground. Then Batman gently lowered him to the ground and disappeared, leaving Flass speechless.

Like everyone else in Gotham City Bruce Wayne knew about the area locals called “the Narrows.” But, like most who lived uptown, or in the suburbs, he had never visited the neighborhood, an island in the middle of the Gotham River with an insane asylum at one end and a labyrinth of dilapidated public housing at the other, accessible only by three bridges and a tunnel. Bruce Wayne would have no business in the Narrows. But Batman—that was something else.

It was early evening by the time he got there and the rain had increased to a heavy and constant downpour. He entered the housing project grounds by climbing over a chain-link fence and glided to one of the seven bleak, boxlike structures that were crammed with men, women, and children—families of up to ten surviving in tiny, three-room apartments with leaky pipes, peeling paint, and long, dark, treacherous corridors. Batman caught the bottom rung of a fire-escape ladder and began climbing. He halted at a fourth-floor window and took from a belt compartment a small viewer equipped with a night-vision lens. He lay on his back below the window and angled the periscope to see into the apartment beyond. In the greenish night lens he saw that the place was empty except for a few boxes and a large pile of stuffed rabbits.

From the next apartment, he heard shouts of anger. A little boy opened the window and crept out onto the fire-escape platform. In the ambient light from inside the apartment, Batman could see that the boy, who was about eight, had a smear of grime across his forehead and what looked like a bruise on his cheek. His clothing was torn, his blond hair unruly and falling in a cowlick over his forehead.

A long way from what scrubbed, pampered, adored Bruce Wayne looked like at that age
. . .

“You’re here to get that guy?” the boy asked.

“I guess I am.”

“They already took him. To the hospital.”

From inside the boy’s apartment came a woman’s shrill voice. “Get your ass back in here.”

“The other kids won’t believe I saw you,” the boy said.

Batman handed the viewer to the boy. “It’s yours.”

Before the boy could thank him, Batman lifted the window to the empty apartment and climbed inside. He took one of the stuffed rabbits from the pile. It had been ripped open. As Batman was examining it, there was a noise at the door. He melted back into the shadows.

The door opened, and in the glow from the hallway, Batman saw Jonathan Crane and two other men enter.

Crane pointed to the pile of stuffed rabbits. “Get rid of all traces.”

“Better torch the whole place,” one of the men said. He took a bottle of amber liquid from a coat pocket and poured it on the toys. The air was suddenly filled with the pungent odor of gasoline.

Crane had moved to the open window and looked out onto the fire escape.

“Wait a minute,” the man with the gasoline said. “I gotta take a leak.”

He went into the bathroom, switched on the light, and glanced into the cracked mirror over the washbasin. What he saw made him open his mouth to yell—

Batman smashed him into the mirror and as he was bumping against the basin and falling to the floor, Batman was already moving to the bathroom door. There he met the second man and took him out.

Batman shoved past the falling man to confront Crane, who had donned a burlap mask. Crane raised his hand and a tiny cloud of smoke puffed from his sleeve. Instinctively, Batman turned his head to avoid inhaling it and leaped at Crane. There was a second puff of smoke and this time Batman breathed part of it in and choked . . .

. . .
and the Batman who was Bruce who was a child at the bottom of a well was not looking at a funny man in a funny mask, oh no, not now, not anymore
—
he was seeing a monster coughed up from hell with flaming eyes and long tentacles spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning . . .

“Stop the spinning!” Was that his voice, yelling like that?

Batman staggered, shook his head. He had to make the vision go away. Somehow.

Crane smashed a bottle over Batman’s head. Amber liquid trickled over his mask and the reek of gasoline stung his nostrils. Batman gasped and coughed.

. . . the gasoline stink congealed into another hell-spawned monster with gaping jaws . . .

The window. Maybe salvation lay outside, in the air, in the rain. If only he could get to the window. The window should be easy to reach. The window was only a few steps away.

. . .
but the room was suddenly miles long and the window was receding into the horizon . . .

. . .
and bats were exploding from a dark crevice . . .

Crane was holding up a cheap plastic lighter.

“Need a light?” he inquired pleasantly, and flicked the wheel. When a tapered flame sprouted from the top of the lighter, he tossed it at Batman.

Gasoline ignited and Batman was swathed in fire.

The window!

. . .
no matter how far away it is, got to reach the window . . .

Batman closed his eyes and flung himself at where he knew the window had to be. He felt something crack and heard glass breaking and knew he was on the fire escape. His momentum carried him forward and he flipped over the railing and, cape trailing flame, he fell. He pressed a stud in his cowl and the cape popped open and became rigid—a wing. No, only
half
a wing; fire had damaged the other side. Still blazing, he spiraled out and down, the damaged part of the wing flapping—

His fall was broken by a car. As his flaming body struck the vehicle, he fell through the roof into the rear of the car. The heavy rain had extinguished the flames. He lay, gasping for breath, mentally scanning his body, seeking broken bones. None: not that he could detect. He worked his way out of the wreckage of the car and struggled to regain his balance.

Two men, hands in pockets, approached.

“Hey, wait up a minute, got something to show you,” one called in a singsong voice.

Batman stepped into the light of a streetlamp—a gaunt, black figure with smoke rising from it.

“Never mind,” the man said, and he and his companion ran.

Batman limped into an alley and from his utility belt pulled out a tiny phone. He pressed a button, and in a hoarse whisper said, “Alfred?”

Forty minutes later, Batman lay sprawled on the rear seat of Alfred’s Bentley as Alfred turned toward the manor. The smell of scorched fabric filled the car.

“We’ll be home soon,” Alfred said, putting the car into gear.

Batman pulled off his mask. “Blood poisoned,” he whispered.

. . .
and the car was filled with bats, screeching, tearing
. . .

He knew they could not be real but also knew, absolutely, that they were.

B
ruce opened his eyes. He was in Wayne Manor’s master bedroom and Alfred was sitting next to the bed.

“How long was I out?” Bruce asked, almost not recognizing the hoarse rasp that was his voice.

“Two days. It’s your birthday. We’re having a party, remember?”

Bruce sat up, lifted a glass of water from the night-stand, and quickly drained it. “It was some kind of weaponized hallucinogen administered in aerosol form. I’ve felt something similar before. If I’d breathed in a whole lungful . . .”

“You are definitely hanging out at the wrong clubs,” said a familiar voice. Bruce turned; Lucius Fox was sitting near the window, his legs crossed, an amused little smile on his face.