Batman: No Man's Land Page 17

  Bad heads…

  Heh. You know what bad heads is, Harvey.

  Go ahead.

  Flip it.

  TWENTY

  EARLIER THAT NIGHT, WHILE JAMES GORDON was returning his wife to their home in TriCorner and the Penguin was removing the broken end of a crossbow bolt from his thigh, the Batman recovered consciousness.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d ever been bludgeoned into darkness, but the moment he opened his eyes, he knew he’d been drugged, too. The fog in his head was deep, and beyond the lenses inside his cowl, the world seemed to quiver and tremble. He tried to move his arms and discovered they had been tied behind his back. His legs, however, were free.

  He twisted, checking the strength of the bonds while trying to clear his head. It was still dark. With a squeeze of his glove he activated the heads-up display on the left lens, checked the clock, saw that it was 0403 hours. The HUD winked off, leaving the dim LED glow dancing on his retina for another few seconds. His head ached, and for a moment he felt a rising surge of nausea that forced him to stop moving altogether. He checked his breathing, began pulling in air steadily through his nose, feeling it fill his lungs, then letting it rush from his mouth. The sensation passed.

  He shut his eyes, took another, deeper breath, and, twisting his wrists, slipped out of the ropes that held him.

  Too easy, he thought.

  He got to his feet and moved to the edge of the roof of the courthouse. Below him, the square was empty. There was no noise.

  Drugged, he thought. The ropes were a token restraint.

  This was a trap and I walked right into it.

  But not a trap to capture me. My cowl’s still in place, my equipment is still with me. Two-Face didn’t want me prisoner.

  Two-Face wanted me out of the way.

  The surge of nausea this time had nothing to do with the blow to the head, or the remnants of the drug in his veins.

  The Batman spared himself another ten seconds to clear his head, and then he began moving uptown, going from building to building using what Nightwing called the “rooftop express.” It was slower going in the No Man’s Land, but it served, and he knew it took him exactly seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds to make it from Civic Plaza back to the Upper East Side, to the territory he had claimed as his own.

  He didn’t like claiming territory, but he understood its merits in the NML, especially psychologically. The statement was everything, and ostensibly, those people who resided under a bat-tag had a reasonable assumption that they would be safe. It had worked well during the past month, and in a way the No Man’s Land seemed uniquely suited to his crime-fighting persona. Before Gotham had turned to rubble, he had existed more as an urban legend in the popular culture than anything more. And while every night the number of people who could testify to his existence had steadily grown, compared to the millions of men, women, and children who lived in Gotham, it was simply a drop in the bucket. For so many people, he knew, he was nothing more real than the Bogeyman.

  Before the NML

  Now, where the numbers were fewer and eyewitnesses were everything, more and more people knew the truth.

  That translated to cachet in dealing with them, a trust. Those people who put themselves in his care, they did so believing in the myth. They knew nothing of the man.

  He was at Muffo and Eighth when he knew there was a problem, and he began moving faster, toward the source of the light, where the fire was burning out of control in the distance. He flew past the EMS Barracks where he’d been meeting Batgirl, noting that it, too, was empty, and then, on the next block, he stopped short, registering what his eyes had seen on the brick wall twenty feet back. He turned and looked again, feeling his pulse beginning to beat at his temples.

  The wall where he had sprayed the sign of the Bat, the wall that declared the block was his, protected by him, had been defaced. The yellow bat-tag had been painted over, replaced with another tag entirely.

  Two-Face.

  He resumed his path, trying to keep the focus, trying to push the fear away. But he felt it creeping at him, snaking around his spine—the lurking despair, that same haunting helplessness born in Crime Alley all those years ago. The sense that death was moving through the world, and it didn’t care who it touched. The sense that pain rode with it, clearing the path.

  He reached Peterson and Sixth, the ruins of the Eagle Cinema, and again knew that it was true.

  He stood there for almost five minutes, staring at the fires burning in the streets. At the six bodies that had been strung up along the walls, the men who had been beaten to death or shot with arrows or otherwise murdered, all for the defense of their home, for his territory. He had known each of them, and knew that they had never known him.

  He stared at the Two-Face tags that peppered the walls all around him, and at the words, painted in red, on the wall above the bodies.

  TAILS, YOU LOSE.

  As if it were some kind of joke, some sort of prank that Two-Face had played simply to get a laugh out of him, or at least a rise.

  He had been holding his breath, and with a start realized that he’d been doing so for over two minutes now. He forced himself to breathe, returning to the basics.

  He stood vigil for another hour and then, as dawn was threatening, set to work freeing the bodies from their confines. There was clear ground in Puckett Park, and he could inter the bodies there. It was the least he could do for them.

  As far as he was concerned, it didn’t matter if Two-Face had murdered them personally or had henchmen do it. They were dead.

  Six more dead.

  His fault.

  And hers.

  * * * * *

  It was dawn before he had the last corpse in the earth, buried deep enough to be honored. His whole body ached from the labor, from the digging, and beneath the Nomex and Kevlar weave of his suit, he felt the sweat sliding around his body. All of him was exhausted, and it ran deeper than muscle and bone, and it surprised him somewhat. He was used to fatigue, had lived with it for most of his life, first as a result of horrible insomnia and then as an active decision, the commitment to two lives, one to be lived in daylight, the other in darkness.

  He marked the graves with stones and promised himself that, when it was all over, when Gotham was restored, Bruce Wayne would pay to have the bodies exhumed and moved and buried properly, with all honor and consideration. But for now the stones would have to do.

  He finished, straightened, and fixed his gaze to the horizon, ignoring where Batgirl had been hiding for the last hour, watching him. He had heard her approach though she’d tried to keep it silent, and twice while working he had marked her as she came close, almost found the courage to speak to him. Each time, though, she had retreated, and now he knew she was watching him from behind the broad oaks at the top of the slope.

  He looked at the graves a final time, then turned and began heading north. Alfred would be with Dr. Thompkins, or at one of the northernmost caves. He would take some rest there and determine his next course of action.

  No, that was a lie. He already knew his next course of action.

  She was coming down the slope behind him, still at least fifty meters off. To pay her respects or her penance. It didn’t matter. Both were worthless to the dead.

  He stopped and without turning back, said to the Batgirl, “I trusted you.”

  And then he left her to stand over the graves.

  PART TWO

  ORACLE

  PERSONAL

  Entry #404—NML Day 176

  1751 Zulu

  Dear Dad—

  Hindsight.

  It’s a bitch, ain’t it?

  If only we’d known. If only we could have known then, maybe… but maybe we’d just do the same damn things. Maybe it’s fate.

  That day, 145, it changed everything, didn’t it? All of my maps had to be redrawn. Two-Face’s territory doubled in one fell swoop, while Penguin lost almost all of his holdings. You made it all
the way to the Park.

  The Batman lost it all.

  What a way to mark the middle of spring, huh?

  I’ve been trying to reach him for the last seven days, broadcasting on his frequency twice an hour, but no response, nothing. Not even the Batgirl has answered my calls, though whether that’s because she’s out of a job or because she’s not picking up. I don’t know.

  One of my agents, Charlie, he was on the ground there, told me that the Batgirl had saved his life.

  But he told me the rest of it, too, how she had retreated, surrendering the territory to Two-Face. Charlie said she seemed to take it pretty hard.

  “I think she was crying under that mask,” he told me.

  “Good,” I said.

  Is that cruel? Maybe.

  I know who she is, and she has no right to that costume, never has. Six men died that night, six men who did nothing more than fight to protect their own homes, their own lives. Those six men … she had damn well better cry for them.

  When I said what I said. Chas was still on the radio. He said, “You didn’t see it. You don’t know what it was like. She tried her best.”

  “Trying isn’t enough,” I said, and I cut the connection and caught my own reflection in one of my monitors.

  Don’t look a thing like the Batman, but I sure can sound like him. I suppose.

  Maybe I am being too hard on her.

  Maybe we’re all just being too hard on ourselves.

  Maybe that’s why he’s vanished again.

  Cassandra was in here last night, had a note for me. I asked her where she’d gotten it, and after a couple minutes of charades with the map. I determined she’d been up in the MASH Sector with Dr. Thompkins.

  The note was from Alfred Pennyworth. Bruce Wayne’s butler—or gentleman’s gentleman, as he prefers to be called. The note was short, basically bringing me up to speed on what had been going on at his end. He’s been staying with Dr. Thompkins for the last couple weeks, assisting her in running the MASH unit. He says it’s been busy up there, but the initial onslaught of injuries as a result of the “great claim jumping”—his phrase, not mine—has finally ended, and things are beginning to settle down.

  Of the Batman’s current situation and whereabouts he had little to offer, though I suspect he was being circumspect for fear that the letter fall into the wrong hands. He wrote only that he has taken the loss of those territories claimed by him very much to heart, and is currently reevaluating his strategy with regard to the Declaration of the No Man’s Land as a whole, and his modus operandi in particular.

  He signed off wishing me the best, and saying that he expected that events would begin moving very rapidly now. He did not say why.

  Maybe it’s the change in the weather, the heaviness in the air, the rising humidity and the increasing heat. Whatever it may be, though, I feel it too.

  It feels like everything up until now has been a sort of preamble.

  It feels like the real show is just about to start.

  TWENTY-ONE

  IT HAD TAKEN YRECISELY AS MUCH EFFORT to break into the No Man’s Land as David Cain expected. The National Guard outposts, the tank barricades, the antipersonnel mines, all had been deployed to prevent people from escaping rather than penetrating. Certainly, they hadn’t considered that anyone would spend the time, money, or effort to arrange a HALO drop. Or perhaps they had determined that anyone prepared to go to such lengths to get inside deserved whatever he had coming to him.

  Cain fell for five miles before the city resolved below him, and through the night-vision goggles he was wearing, he made out Robinson Park, steering himself toward the reservoir at its northern end. He kept one eye on the altimeter, and at six hundred feet cut the cord to his equipment, kicking away the canister even as the water rushed up at him. At two hundred feet he deployed his chute, and at twenty he cut it away, too.

  Then he was in the water, kicking to follow the rising of the bubbles, yanking the remainder of his drop equipment from his jumpsuit, letting it sink to the bottom of the reservoir in his stead. He broke the surface with air to spare, and swam quickly to the near shore, where he pulled himself onto the dry land, into the heat of the Gotham summer night. Without pausing Cain rose, making his way carefully through the thick undergrowth to where he estimated his gear to have landed. He walked carefully but quickly, cautious not to harm the abundance of greenery, the bushes, flowers, and trees that were unnaturally thick and lush. Where he found his path blocked he maneuvered to go around, and where he could not go around he went to his belly and crawled.

  His intelligence had told him Poison Ivy was in the park; he had no quarrel with her, so he took care not to offend her by harming the green. From what he knew, Ivy eschewed all human contact, and was content enough to live and let live as long as her plants remained safe and strong.

  Nonetheless, he found that his gear, still sealed in its black, ballistic canister, had broken two branches off an enormous pine when it had fallen to the earth. Working quickly, he hoisted the container onto its side, snapping open its main compartment, from which he armed himself with a single, silenced pistol, and a container that appeared to be nothing more than an aerosol can. Then, having done this, he moved the canister to his back, slinging the straps across his body, and made east as fast as he could.

  He was in sight of the southern gate when the green around him came alive, suddenly, the branches of the two enormous oaks on either side of the exit gate dipping across his path with a furious cracking of wood and bark. He had been expecting this, though, and was ready. As the branches sprouted more branches, ends sharp as needles racing at him, he went into motion.

  Cain pivoted, turning between the two extending spears with barely any room to spare, then dropped to his side, rolling toward the gate, bringing the aerosol up in his hand. He pushed the nozzle, spraying mist into the air around him, then pressed the second tab, causing the spark to fly.

  The flames erupted instantly, the misted gasoline igniting everything it touched. The branches burst into fire, twisting crazily out of his way. He didn’t stop, only pushed forward until he was out of the park, smelling the burning wood behind him, feeling the extra push of heat turn the remaining water on his clothes to steam.

  He stayed stationary just long enough to find his bearings, then, certain he was oriented properly, began moving south, counting the blocks until he reached what he believed had once been Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. He followed it south, the street empty and the night silent, and in under a minute saw the landmark that was his goal—the twenty-story tower with the clock face at its apex.

  Cain moved to the side of the street, to the shadows, though he was certain no one had seen him thus far. He was paid to be cautious, however, and so he took the time to give the street a thorough visual scan. Two people were on guard outside the entrance to the Clock Tower, flanking the front door at either side. Not much of a deterrent, and certainly nothing that would slow him down should he decide to enter the building.

  He considered his options, looking at the ruined architecture around him. His data suggested that the target would be at the top floor of the tower. Farther down on the opposite side of the street, there was another building still standing, but in sorrowful condition. Only sixteen stories tall, its front had crumbled in the earthquake, yet still the structure managed to defy gravity. He wouldn’t be certain until he was inside, but he suspected the angle might well be workable.

  Cain moved out of the shadow, turning at the corner and heading around the block, entering the building through a shattered window at the rear on the ground floor. Inside, he pulled the canister in after him, settled it once more on his back. He took the pistol from the holster on his thigh, screwing the silencer into place at the end of the barrel, and then slowly chambered the first round. There was a slight noise coming from above him, perhaps between floors, perhaps rats.

  The employer had specified stealth first, and Cain meant to oblige the req
uest. He hated to do things twice. He had his reputation to maintain.

  The stairs looked capable of taking his weight, and he ascended slowly, the gun out in front of him, held in both hands. On the second floor he noted which apartment doors were opened and which were shut, keeping a tally in his mind. He continued his count as he worked his way higher. Though the building looked abandoned, he knew better than to believe it so. This was Blue Boy territory, or so he had been informed, and there were plenty of people who would be eager to live under the illusion and memory of the Gotham City Police Department.

  The sixteenth floor, he was disappointed to learn, had four apartments, and all the doors were closed. He removed the canister from his back once more, setting it carefully in the hall, then went to the first door, assuming that it would not be locked. He turned the knob slowly and it offered no resistance, and so he pushed back the door and made his way silently inside.

  A man and woman were sleeping, half-nude, in the bedroom.

  He shot them both twice in the head.

  In the next room he found a man, alone, asleep on the couch.

  He shot him twice, too.

  The third apartment was empty.

  The fourth apartment, the one with a view of the Clock Tower, the one he wanted, had another couple asleep in the master bedroom. He shot them, as well.

  Then he returned to the hallway, hoisted the canister under his arm, and went back into the apartment, closing the door silently behind him, then locking it. Setting the canister on the floor in the center of the room, he then moved to the sofa, swinging it around so that its back was to the cracked window he wanted. He removed the cushions from its seat and experimented with their positioning. After a while, he moved the coffee table and other chairs around too, creating a pocket in the corner. He climbed into the space, kneeling on one of the cushions, looking out the window.