Batman 5 - Batman Begins (29 page)

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 already 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 . . .

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.