Batman 5 - Batman Begins (27 page)

“Time to spread the word,” he said, “and the word is . . .
panic.
”

He pressed a button on the machine and—

Within moments, the reaction spread throughout the Narrows. It was as though cannons were fired simultaneously along every street and alley. Fire hydrants shot their caps into the streets and began gushing. Manhole covers flipped high into the air. Sewer pipes split. Steam pipes burst. Soon there was broken glass and water seeping from foundations and spouting from sprinklers. Avenues were flooded and cars were stalled. Alarms rang and sirens shrieked. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children awakened, blinked, looked first at clocks and then out of windows, and muttered, “What the hell,” and ran to their phones to call neighbors and relatives and ask if
any
one had any idea what was going on.

One man in his eighties found his air raid warden helmet, last worn during World War Two, and put it on and told his wife that he
knew
it would come in handy someday, dammit.

Some went to the nearest house of worship and many, many more simply prayed wherever they happened to be.

And others made preparations to begin looting.

Jeff Benedict had thought tonight would be an easy one. He’d pulled the midnight-to-eight shift at his place of employment, the Water Board Control Room, housed downtown in Wayne Tower, and heck, the graveyard shift was usually a snap. Even Gothamites, maybe the world’s biggest night owls after New Yorkers, had to sleep sometime and sleepers didn’t use water, at least not much. And his boss was Lon Calter, one of the real nice guys, easy to get along with, to talk sports with, to do whatever needed doing with. So some guys bitched about the graveyard, but not Jeff. To Jeff, the graveyard was cake.

He was leaning back in his chair, reading the sports section of the
Trib,
when Lon said, “Looka that,” and Jeff saw that the monitors were going crazy.

Jeff and Lon moved to their workstations and began pushing buttons and checking gauges.

Jeff pointed to a dial. “Wouldja look at that pressure? It’s
spiking
.”

“Can you tell where?” Lon asked.

Jeff swiveled his chair to a computer screen, tapped some keys, and said, “Right there. Southeast sector.”

“That’s the water main under the Narrows,” Lon said. “Something’s . . . cripes—something’s vaporizing the water.”

“That ain’t possible,” Jeff said.

“No? Take a look at the temperature. Going through the roof.”

“Whadda we do?”

“Beats me. Whatever this is, it ain’t covered in the manual.”

Something had exploded near Rachel, knocking her down, and something else scalded her cheek. The hem of her skirt was ripped and her knee was scraped—that was what she was first aware of. She shook her head and blinked her eyes and began trying to make sense of things. The street was filling with . . . what? Fog? But it couldn’t be fog, not when the air was clear a moment ago. So what?
The drugs?
Was she experiencing a drug flashback? No—
steam.
That’s what the mist was! She heard a child’s whimper and saw the little blond boy lying in the gutter. He was hurt. She began crawling toward him.

Gordon had been standing near a sewer when the lid shot into the air, taking parts of the street with it, and a cobblestone struck the side of his head. He went down and heard Flass screaming incoherently. He got to his feet and felt warmth and wetness, first on his hands and face and then soaking through his clothing. Steam was rolling in waves over everything. He saw Flass, a dark silhouette, waving his gun and continuing to scream.

Flass fired. At what? Something Gordon couldn’t see? Or . . . maybe something that wasn’t there.

Flass fired again and this time the flash from the muzzle of his gun elongated and grew tentacles that reached toward Gordon—

He knew he was hallucinating and that he had only a few seconds before the toxin he must have inhaled would fry his mind completely. He fumbled in his pocket and found one of the syringes Rachel Dawes, had given him. He got it out, but then he had a problem; his thumbs and fingers had become as thick as sausages and he couldn’t make them slide the cardboard sleeve from the needle. He grabbed the sleeve in his teeth and pulled it free of the needle and somehow jabbed the needle into the back of his hand. He pressed the plunger with his chin and felt molten fire sizzle into his vein.

His fingers and thumbs returned to their normal shape and size.

Something sang past his ear. Flass was still waving his gun and shooting; a bullet had missed Gordon by inches.

Now Flass was aiming at a kid, a teenager, who stood trembling on the curb.

“Flass—no!” Gordon shouted. “He’s unarmed.”

Gordon brought Flass down with a tackle. They locked arms and legs and rolled on the cobblestones. Flass freed his hands and began to choke Gordon. Gordon elbowed Flass in the face again and again, and finally Flass’s grip relaxed and he dropped off Gordon’s body and lay still. Gordon dragged Flass to a drainpipe and handcuffed him to it.

Gordon stood panting, and he heard it then. It began as a moan and became a howling that increased in volume until it seemed to fill the universe. What kind of beast . . . ? And Gordon realized that he was hearing many voices, thousands of them, wailing in mortal terror.

In the few seconds it took Rachel to crawl to the blond boy, she realized what must have happened. She wasn’t drugged, but everyone else was. The toxin was in the steam and the guy in the police van must have caused it with the odd machine.

The boy was sobbing uncontrollably. Heaven only knew what he thought he was seeing.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Rachel cooed. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

“Of course they are,” someone said behind Rachel and the boy. She turned and looked up. A dark, massive shape was emerging from the mist: a saddled horse, dragging a dead cop from the stirrup, with Jonathan Crane astride the animal, wearing his burlap mask. Other shapes were gathered behind him: inmates from the asylum.

“Dr. Crane,” Rachel said.

“Not
Crane,”
the mounted man screamed.
“Scarecrow.”

Rachel was a lawyer, not a psychiatrist, but she realized that Crane had gone round the bend in an odd way. He apparently believed he was this “scarecrow.”

She picked up the boy and ran into the mist. Crane galloped after her. Rachel stumbled and hit a telephone pole, but blundered blindly on.

She slammed into a wall. Dead end.

Crane reined his horse only a few feet from Rachel and the boy and said, “Let me help you.”

The inmates crowded around Crane.

Rachel put the boy down and reached into her shoulder bag.

The horse reared back, front hooves pawing the air.

“Try shock therapy,” Rachel said, and pulled her Taser from her bag. She shot it at Crane and the barbs caught in the sacking of his mask. Electrical sparks arced across Crane’s face. He went limp, and slid from the saddle. The horse whinnied and galloped back the way he had come, dragging the dead cop from one stirrup and Crane from the other.

The inmates scattered.

Rachel knelt by the boy and put her arms around him.

Gordon had found an empty patrol car and had driven it to the nearest bridge, now raised and impassable. Police flashers were visible across the river, which meant cops were there, help was there. He keyed the cruiser’s radio and identified himself.

The radio squawked.
“We hear you.”
Gordon recognized the voice of Commissioner Loeb.
“What the hell’s going on over there?”

“We need reinforcements,” Gordon said into the microphone. “Tac teams, SWATs, riot cops—get ’em in masks and—”

“Gordon, all the city’s riot police are on the island with you.

“Well, they’re completely incapacitated.”

“There’s nobody left to send in.”

Batman had been monitoring the police bands ever since he had rocketed out from behind the waterfall and had heard the exchange between Gordon and Loeb. He was not surprised at the helplessness of the authorities in this emergency. He remembered dinner-table conversations between his father and guests about how the city was woefully unprepared for anything out of the ordinary, from an earthquake to a serious civil uprising, and how sooner or later the odds would catch up with it, with a disastrous aftermath. Joe Chill had killed Thomas Wayne before he could force the lethargic city planning commission to at least study the situation: another casualty of Rā’s al Ghūl’s economic marauding.

He saw the red lights of police flashers glancing off walls before he actually saw the cluster of vehicles and the men standing around them. Just beyond the police group was the bridge, its halves pointing toward the sky, forming a vee with a forty-foot gap at its apex.

Okay, here we go.

Batman shifted and floored the accelerator. The Batmobile leaped forward, crashed through the wooden sawhorses blocking the entry to the bridge, and tilted upward, gaining speed. It left the roadway and was flying in a high arc across the river.

Gordon reached through the open window of the cruiser and dropped the microphone on the seat. Now what? No help coming, and as far as he could tell, he was the only sane man left on the island. No way to get back to the mainland, either. So what’s the plan? Hide until things cool down, if they ever do?

Two circles of light appeared on the pavement in front of him. He looked up and over his shoulder and saw headlights coming toward him—from above—and heard the roar of a powerful engine.

He ducked. A large vehicle landed a dozen feet away, bounced once on its oversize tires, and stopped. Its top slid forward and a seat rose. Batman stepped out.

“Nice landing,” Gordon said.

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.