Wayne of Gotham (24 page)

Not with only this flimsy mask.

“He fell from afar to give me this scar,” Joker continued singing as he pranced to the bottom of the staircase, waving the revolver over his head, “and Batman, he says, wants to repo this car. Batman, he says, has a fetish bizarre.”

Bruce glanced at Muscle Clown on his left. His stance was casual. The timing would have to be right … and time was the issue. He was desperate to get back to the mansion, and every moment he remained here meant giving Alfred—or whoever was involved—more time to cover his tracks. Bruce slowly shifted his weight to his right foot.

“You see, it's really quite simple,” the Joker said in what passed for a rational tone of voice, belied by his pointing the .44 Magnum randomly around him for emphasis. “There are one hundred and fifteen of the finest Gotham police uniforms money can buy in the room, but there are only one hundred and fourteen ID transponders. Now, if I were balancing my checkbook, I might be tempted to just ignore minor discrepancies”—his voice suddenly rose in anger—“but I'm trying to run a BUSINESS here! And while I know … I KNOW you won't appreciate the gesture, I'm trying to actually preserve our batobsessed friend from doing himself AND me terrible harm. So, I say it's time for a little honesty between friends.
I
say we should ALL be special today. Now that the gang's all here,
I
say we should end the charade, take off our masks, and let our mystery guest sign in, please!”

I wear the mask to terrify others. How strange that a lack of a mask should terrify me.

Bracing his hands against the Batmobile, Bruce gave a quick kick to the back of the knee of the Muscle Clown on his left. The thug's leg folded forward, tipping the Muscle Clown off balance. Instinctively, the Clown next to Bruce tried to recover, but there was not enough room on the crowded railcar. With a short cry, the Muscle Clown tumbled off the edge of the flatbed, falling flat on his back between the tracks and the wall of the tunnel, the air rushing out of his lungs from the impact.

The Joker leaped forward as most of the clown police in the room drew their weapons. “Don't kill him! That's
my
job! Get out of the way!”

The clown police parted in front of the charging Joker. Two of them did not get out of his way fast enough. Joker lowered his weapon, shooting one of them in the back. The recoil threw Joker's arm back behind him, but he kept running forward.

“Fair warning,” Joker shouted as he jumped over the shot clown's body bleeding out onto the painted cement floor.

The other clown police on the railcar turned their drawn weapons toward the fallen Muscle Clown struggling to get up. Several clown police who had stood near him on the railcar, dove onto the Muscle Clown, pinning him to the ground. With the distraction complete, Bruce slipped slightly to his right, brushed his hand over the hatch pad, and quickly keyed the sequence.

“Hold him steady!” Joker shouted as he bounded off Platform Sixty-one. He landed on the tracks in front of the railcar and crossed to the other side, where the Muscle Clown was being smothered under his restraining thugs. “It's about time we had a nice face-to-face chat!”

The Joker knelt down and ripped the mask off the Muscle Clown.

A whooshing noise sounded behind him. The Joker turned to see a gull-winged door open between the binding chains over the Batmobile … and one of his clown police diving through the opening.

“Hahahahaha!” the Joker exclaimed, raising the .44 Magnum. “How I
love
initiative!”

The gull-door slammed shut, sealing seamlessly into the gleaming body.

“New game! New game!” Joker screamed, doing a strange shuffling dance next to the rail way. “Kick the can! I'll provide the kick and Batman is in the can!”

“How do we get him out, boss?” the Muscle Clown gasped between painful breaths, still pinned down by his compatriots.

“Out?” Joker sneered. “I don't want him
out
! I want his spam to stay in that can! I want him to sit in his toy car until the party is completely over!”

The chains across the vehicle started to groan. Joker raised his eyebrows.

B
ruce tore the clown mask off his face, throwing it forcefully over the back of the command seat to the passenger compartment behind. He was sprawled awkwardly in the space, having jumped head first into the cockpit while calling for the hatch to secure. He knew that the reactive armor of the vehicle had passive qualities, but Bruce wondered why he could not hear the sound of projectiles striking the body.

He tried to right himself, but realized he had left the Batsuit he had shed earlier draped over the seat he was now trying to sit on. The Batsuit shifted under him, bunching up in places, and the Utility Belt was making it impossible for him to sit properly in the space.

What else can go wrong
?

“Kronos: activate!” Bruce said, squirming as he tried to shift the Utility Belt away from his seat.

The security system did not answer. The Batsuit was present in the vehicle—a required security precaution—but the biometrics were not registering him properly out of the Batsuit.

“Kronos: activate!” he said again.

“Activated.” The console answered this time, but Bruce realized the sound was indistinct and muffled, as it was coming from beneath him. “Systems online. Main bus charge level sixty-nine percent.”

The cowl … the sound is routed through the cowl.

“Kronos: audio to panel and exterior view to panel,” Bruce barked. The visual displays would all be two-dimensional without the cowl, and he would have limited tactical awareness. The vehicle was chained down to the railcar, so the drive wheels would be useless. Time was slipping away from Bruce Wayne.

The eye-level displays lit up instantly. Bruce could see the clown police milling about the car with their weapons drawn but none of them firing. The Joker stood next to the rails pointing up at him and doing a little dance.

I've got to get out of here. I've got to know who is behind all this.

“Kronos: increase physical profile twenty-five percent,” he said, pulling at the safety restraints. He managed to find and straighten them out, though each needed adjustment to fit him without the bulk of his Batsuit, which still sat under him.

The vehicle responded to his command. The exterior shell of the car, charged with electric current, pushed outward, inflating its size against the restraining chains, which creaked and groaned under the pressure but held strong.

“External resistance approaching stress limits,” the car responded. “Fuel stable at eighty-six percent. Power reserves dropping to fifty-three percent.”

“Kronos: reset physical profile,” Bruce said.

I have to move! There's no time …

“D
id you ever wonder how long a bat will keep?” the Joker asked the Nervous Clown, his gun arm draped over the quivering thug's shoulder. “I mean without refrigeration. Normally I would never advocate leaving a bat inside a car, say, on a hot day while going into a grocery store or embarking on a protracted cruise. However, we have an opportunity now to—”

Short gouts of flame exploded from ports suddenly appearing in the car's body, rocking the railcar from side to side. The clown police leaped off of the railcar, scattering from the jet's blast.

“Oh, pardon me!” Joker exclaimed. “Was that me?”

Suddenly, four columns of flame and smoke erupted from the back of the chained-down Batmobile, their exhaust merging into one. The roar filled the enormous space with a sound that forced many of the clown police to their knees, hands slammed against their ears.

The railcar groaned … and then started to roll down the track.

“NO!” the Joker screamed, his words swallowed up in the deafening sound of the rocket motor. “You'll ruin everything!”

The railcar and its chained, raging cargo, rumbled faster and faster down the rails together, picking up speed as it vanished into the subway tunnel beneath the city.

“Stop him, you morons! Arrest him!” the Joker yelled. “What's happened to law and order in this city? Bring him back!”

The clown police were galvanized into action. Those left standing on the tracks rushed back into the tunnel and down a maintenance side tunnel. They soon reappeared in pairs astride ATVs, their drivers hunched down over the handle bars while their passengers were readying weapons ranging from assault rifles to rocket-propelled grenades. They plunged into pursuit of the rocketing railcar, the high-pitched keening of their engines changing to an echoed pitch as they followed the smoke trail into the subway tunnel.

The Joker clambered quickly back onto Platform Sixty-one, smoke from the rocket engine still choking the room.

“Well, that might have gone better.” The Joker sniffed, and he climbed back up the stairs to his throne. “But you know, whenever I get discouraged or think life is getting me down, there's one thing that always cheers me up.”

He sat down, picking up a laptop. An Ethernet cable connected it into a port on one of the routers rack-mounted in a stack on one wall. He opened the laptop. The screen sprang to life, displaying “Gotham Transit Authority Rail Service.”

“I relax by playing with my trains,” the Joker said, cracking his knuckles before pressing the keys.

T
he displays were giving Bruce a clear night-vision view of the tunnel as it moved past him at an increasing rate. A digital counter in the corner continued counting down the seconds to the four PAM rockets shut down.

Twenty- five … twenty-four … twenty-three …

It cannot happen too soon.

The PAMs were propelled by solid fuel. It was efficient and relatively stable as propellants went, but once ignited, it could not be stopped—it had to burn its full duration. Each alone would have been sufficient to thrust the Batmobile forward significantly in normal conditions, but the enormous weight of the railcar might have slowed his exit enough to allow the Joker and his henchmen to toss something large in front of him and completely block his escape. So he had ignited all four at once. Even then, he was only guessing at the mass and resistance of the old railcar and, for a moment, was concerned the thrust would not be adequate. Then the flatbed started to slide down the rails propelled by the vehicle, straining against its restraining chains and leaving the platform and the underground control room behind.

Bruce now saw that he had leaped from the Joker's frying pan into a different line of fire; the transformation of the railcar into a rocket sled. The speed may not have been great compared to the normal operating limits of the Batmobile in these tunnels, but for a rolling stock railcar attached to the rails only by its weight and the strength of its open wheels, the velocity was beyond dangerous. They were a top-heavy, rocket-driven sled …

And they were rapidly approaching a bend in the track.

“Kronos: plot track forward and display!” Bruce said quickly.

“Three hundred meters to intersection with Diamond District line.”

Bruce glanced again at the PAM countdown to end of thrust.

Fifteen seconds. At this speed, the corner is four seconds away.

“Kronos!” The stress Bruce was feeling was reflected in his voice. “RCS control to manual. Status?”

“RCS manual and online.”

Bruce gripped the controllers on either side of the pilot seat, drawing in a breath as the railcar entered the left curve.

The railcar pushed hard to the right with inertial force, tipping precariously. Bruce slammed the lateral control hard to the left. The reaction rocket motors fired both front and back, pushing against the tipping mass. He held the thrust constant, watching the heat indicators on the thrusters climb dangerously high but knowing the alternative to melt down was an uncontrolled crash. The thrusters kept the railcar held through the curve, and the left wheels of the carriage slammed down with a terrible squeal as the rail tunnel straightened out before them.

Bruce shook from side to side in the still-too-loose restraints, sweat beading on his brow. The turn had robbed some of their speed, but the continued burning of the PAM motors was quickly increasing the acceleration once more.

“Kronos: track green to Diamond District Line!” Bruce called. “Track green,” the computer answered.

Wayne Enterprises had computerized the subway routing system back in 2004. Bruce had made sure that he knew the back door into the control system precisely for this purpose: so that he could manipulate the subway traffic and allow this version of the Batmobile to traverse beneath the city. It was normally a sophisticated system that subtly delayed or advanced the subway trains in such a way that commuters never knew that the Caped Crusader was moving through the same tunnels they used to commute to work and home again.

Now is not the time for subtlety.

The red light on the line switched to green, the points ahead having been switched. Suddenly the light went red again.

Joker! He's using my own system against me!

“Kronos: track green to Diamond District Line!” Bruce shouted, though he knew the only difference it would make to the audio interpreter was possibly to confuse it.

“Track green,” the computer answered as the light turned green once more.

It was barely in time. The railcar hit the rail points hard in another left turn into the main subway line. Bruce again slammed the translational controller all the way to the left, firing the side-thrusters at full throttle. He could feel the carriage under him shudder under the contradicting forces. The flatbed railcar again fell hard against the track, but it was now on the main commuter line running around the city. Bruce knew that they were traveling west now on the southern circuit—a straight run for at least a mile before it turned northward. He glanced to his right as the rockets continued to press him into his seat. The Geilla Park Station flew past in a bright blur, its platform filled with the gaping faces of commuters before the rocketing sled and its chained Batmobile cargo again plunged into the darkness.