Batman 5 - Batman Begins (23 page)

Batman’s fingers danced on a row of buttons beneath the screen and the images blinked and changed.

Rachel’s breathing continued to be erratic.

“Breathe slowly,” Batman said. “Close your eyes.”

“That’s worse,” Rachel gasped.

Batman looked down at the screen, twisted the steering wheel, and left the freeway. He moved into an industrial area, deserted at this late hour.

Three cruisers were blocking the intersection ahead of him.

Batman slewed into a turn and into the entrance of a multilevel parking garage. His vehicle smashed through the ticket machine and wooden barrier and roared up a ramp.

“What are you doing?” Rachel whispered.

“Shortcut.”

Batman’s vehicle erupted onto the top level, the roof of the garage. A helicopter, hovering directly overhead, surrounded it with a circle of light.

Batman braked, and smoke rising from its tires, the vehicle skidded to a stop.

Gordon had been following the progress of the chase on the police radio, He knew where Batman had gone and went there too, hoping the man in the mask was not trapped, that he could somehow escape. But when he parked his car across from the garage, he could see that: it was hopeless. The place was ringed with cops, cruisers blocking every entrance and exit, a chopper hovering overhead, a spotlight on its underbelly glaring down at Batman’s vehicle, and armed officers moving into place. There was nothing Batman could do and nothing Gordon could do for him.

“We’ve got the bastard now,” Flass said to the uniformed captain as they trotted toward the garage. He holstered his service automatic and commandeered a shotgun from a uniformed officer. He was remembering being hauled up the side of a building and being so scared he could hardly answer questions. Being dumped into garbage and all that made him feel like a puke and the only way he could
stop
feeling like a puke was to watch the bastard die at his feet. And that was going to happen. Real soon. Because he couldn’t go on feeling like a puke.

Rachel was leaning against the passenger-side window, staring at the blurred images around her. “Brace yourself,” said Batman. “This might be a little rough.”

Batman had a momentary doubt. What he was about to try
might
work. Maybe
should
work. But would it? Would even this wild fantasy of a muscle car, this
Batmobile,
be able to do what he required of it?
Doubts are pointless and unproductive—I learned that at the monastery.
And he floored the accelerator. And the . . .
Batmobile—
for that’s what it was—sped toward the edge of the roof.

“So the bastard’s taking the coward’s way out,” Flass said to the captain. “Gonna off himself.”

Gordon was hoping he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t drive off the roof and fall six floors and into a crash that he surely would not survive. But that’s what he seemed to be doing.

Rachel did not know much because she could not discern the real from the phantasmagoric and she knew that she could not. But she was about to die. Of that she was certain.

Batman pulled a lever next to the gearshift. The Batmobile shifted into its formal driving position. The car lifted off the roof and started a rampless jump.

So far, so good.

The vehicle soared thirty feet to the neighboring roof. It landed with a jolt. But the tires held and Batman sped toward the next roof.

Flass stared, the shotgun forgotten in his hands.

Gordon thought:
Maybe?

Rachel wondered if she were already dead.

The Batmobile did its leap-and-soar maneuver twice more and finally landed on a steeply pitched, chateau-style roof. Its tires bit into red tiles, crumbling some and sending others flying down into the street, where a few of them pelted the tops of police cruisers that were tracking the Batmobile.

Batman glanced at the global positioning screen—
okay
!—and up through the window at the chopper, which was still in pursuit.

“This last bit might be the roughest,” he told Rachel. “But we’ll be fine if the roof holds.”

It almost did not. The tiles were raining inward and falling, baring cracking timbers, when the Batmobile shot off a gable and dropped onto an elevated freeway twenty-five feet below. Batman’s navigational gear told him that the nearest on ramp was almost two miles to the south. By the time a police cruiser could get to it and then get to where Batman was now, the Batmobile would be only a memory. But there was still the chopper. The chopper was a problem. As long as he stayed on the freeway, the chopper could follow him.

“Hold on,” Batman said. “Just hold on.”

Warning signs seemed to race past them: the freeway was still under construction and the pavement ended in less than a mile. There were no lights; the electrical lines had not been extended this far yet. Batman accelerated. The Batmobile smashed through wooden barriers and down into a clearing below, then veered under the elevated road. Batman killed the exterior lights and the windshield immediately tinted night-vision green. He tapped a control near the screen, which converted it into a television receiver tuned to an infrared camera at the rear of the vehicle, and reverted the engines to stealth mode. They made no sound as the Batmobile sped silently away from Gotham City. The chopper hovered and descended, its searchlight probing the area under the road. It moved forward, in the opposite direction from the Batmobile.

The Batmobile lurched forward and flew off the edge of a lookout, over a river gorge, straight at a waterfall.

The vehicle splashed through the waterfall to the stone floor of a cave. Steel hooks sprang from its rear chassis and engaged a cable. The Batmobile stopped.

“Quite a ride,” Batman said, but Rachel did not hear him; she was once again unconscious. The top of the Batmobile hissed open and slid forward, and the seats rose up to allow Batman to exit the vehicle.

Batman lifted Rachel from her seat and carried her into the damp blackness of the caverns. He entered a section that was brightly lit and laid Rachel down on a medical examining table. He ran up steps to his computer station. A small cardboard container lay on the desk next to his monitor. Batman removed from it a vial and a hypodermic needle. He filled the needle with milky fluid from the vial, cleared it of air bubbles, and returned to where Rachel lay, now whimpering quietly. He removed her jacket and rolled up her left sleeve.

“I hope this won’t hurt,” he said. He jabbed the needle into her biceps, and fed the fluid into her body.

He stepped back and watched. Within a few minutes, she stopped her whimpering and her breathing slowed and became deep and regular.

“I think we’re home free,” he said.

Rachel’s eyes fluttered open and widened. Batman knew she was seeing the bats hanging high above. She closed her eyes again.

“How do you feel?” Batman asked.

“Where are we?” Rachel’s voice was hoarse.

Batman was silent.

“All right, then, why did you bring me here?”

“If I hadn’t, your mind would now be lost. You were poisoned.”

“Am I still?”

“No. Your left arm probably hurts a bit where I injected the antidote. How much do you remember?”

Rachel frowned. “Nightmares. This face, this mask . . . It was
Crane.”
She swung her legs around and stood. “I have to tell the police. We’ve got—”

Her knees buckled. Batman caught her and put her back on the table.

“Relax,” he said. “Gordon has Crane.”

He stepped back into the shadows.

“Is Sergeant Gordon your friend?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t have the luxury of friends.”

For a moment, Batman completely vanished. When he again stepped into the light, he was carrying a syringe. “I’m going to give you a sedative. You’ll wake up at home.” He held up two syringes. “And when you do, get these to Gordon and Gordon alone. Trust no one.”

“What are they?”

“The antidote. One for Gordon to inoculate himself, the other to start mass production.”

Batman gave Rachel the syringes.

She tucked them into a pocket. “Mass production?”

“Crane was just a pawn. We need to be ready.”

Batman gestured with the syringe and Rachel offered her arm. “I guess if you wanted to hurt me, you would have by now.”

Batman performed the injection and waited. Rachel put her head down on the table and, a few seconds later, began breathing deeply. Batman put the syringe in a cabinet near the table and returned to where Rachel was sleeping.

He pulled off his mask. He was no longer the Batman; he was Bruce Wayne, gazing at a person he had known all his life. He was motionless except for his eyes, which shifted from Rachel to the mask and back again.

Do I love her?

The answer was almost certainly yes. But to tell her how he felt would be to assume certain obligations—of trust, of fidelity—and to abandon what he had begun to create. That, or subject her to continual danger.

He put the mask on and strode into the darkness.

F
lass had vanished after the chase at the parking garage, so Gordon had to supervise the investigation at Arkham Asylum alone. He began by summoning crime-scene technicians and a hazardous materials team from headquarters and putting them to work in the hydrotherapy room. For the next two hours, he questioned the staff and those of the inmates who were able to answer him, scribbled a few lines in his notebook, and after sending the staff home, returned to the basement and the hydrotherapy room. Two crime-scene investigators were taking flash photos and a man wearing a hazardous material protection suit was at the edge of the large hole, shining a five-cell flashlight down into it.

“They get any of the toxin into the mains?” Gordon asked.

The hazmat technician nodded inside his plastic helmet. “Oh, yeah.”

“Okay. Notify the water board. There’s gotta be a way of isolating the area’s—”

“You don’t understand. They put it
all
in the water supply. They’ve been doing this for weeks. Gotham’s entire water supply is laced with it.”

“Why haven’t we felt any effects?”

“Near as we can figure, it must be a compound that has to be absorbed through the lungs.”

“I don’t know if that’s good news or bad,” Gordon said. “Keep me posted.”

Bruce Wayne’s birthday bash was in full swing when Bruce emerged from the hidden door behind the mirror now dressed in a dinner jacket and pants; the top two buttons of his white shirt were open. Hundreds of people were in the big hall, drinking champagne and chattering, and the members of a fourteen-piece orchestra were running through their repertoire of antique dance tunes.

Alfred was waiting. “Have a pleasant drive, Master Bruce? I believe you
did
say that your activities are not about thrill seeking.”

“They’re not.”

Alfred pointed to where a television, sound muted, was tuned to an all-news channel. The Batmobile, barely visible in the dim light, was soaring between two buildings. “Well,” Alfred asked, “what do you call
that
?”

“Damn good television?”

“It’s a miracle no one was injured.”