Batman Arkham Knight (12 page)

Batman never expected to one day walk through his front door and quietly and peacefully die at home, but he hoped that when he died it would be while he was helping others live.

Then it hit him. The pilot had mentioned the Winchester murder. That was five years ago, and he and the police had never reported the details. How would he know Batman had used his grapple? And how could he know he’d used his Batclaws to bring down a helicopter with the Joker in it?

None of that was part of the public record.

Who the hell…?

* * *

The pilot checked his head-up display and tapped the controls on the copter’s keyboard system. Batman’s heat signature was locked in. There was no place he could run that a single missile couldn’t search out and destroy him. And there was more than one rocket set aside for the task.

He pressed the trigger mech, but the HUD blinked red and the words “System Override” flashed on the console. He pressed it again, but nothing changed.

The goddam missiles weren’t firing.

“What the hell?”

His comm system crackled and Scarecrow’s raspy voice came through his earphones.

“I will not permit you to kill him, Knight. In death he will have nothing left to fear, while I still have so much more to give. Your only job is to keep him away from Ace Chemicals.”

“You swore I could kill him.”

“Vengeance will come. When I say so.”

He started to shout as he heard the comm shut off. Scarecrow was no longer online.

“Damn!” The Knight slammed the console with his fist, yanked the controls, and the copter banked away.
Another time then.

It couldn’t come soon enough.

The Arkham Knight watched Batman, standing impotently in the courtyard. He turned to speak to Gordon before heading back to the Batmobile.

“Old man,” the Knight whispered to himself, “I could’ve taken out both you and the cop, and it would’ve been so damn easy. But no. Not yet. Scarecrow wants to play a few more games before then. So go ahead, go inside. See what my men have in store for you. If you survive, fine. If you die, Scarecrow will be pissed, but I’ll stand up and applaud. Whatever happens—between you and me, old friend—there’s going to be a lot of blood involved. Have fun. I know I will.

“This is going to end sooner than you think,” he muttered. “You can trust me on that, Bruce.”

The Batmobile roared up a ramp toward the cluster of buildings that surrounded the courtyard. Batman tapped his gauntlet comm to connect to Oracle but received no answer. Not a problem—her satellite-connected heat sensors might be more powerful than his portable unit, but his would suffice.

He saw multiple thermal blips throughout the quad. The captives could still be anywhere, and he needed to get closer to find them. He gunned the engine and sped across the campus.

According to his sensors, two tanks were waiting for him, both unmanned drones. If Scarecrow wanted him dead he would have had his goons driving them, forcing Batman, who avoided lethal attacks, to be cautious, slowing him down, making him an easier target to destroy. But it was becoming more and more apparent that Scarecrow didn’t want him dead. At least not yet.

That must have been the reason the copter pilot turned away at the last moment, instead of blasting him off the face of the planet. The master had jerked the dog’s leash.

Scarecrow only wanted to slow him down.

The obvious question was… why?

The answer, sadly, also seemed obvious. Jonathan Crane wanted Batman to feel fear before he killed him. Scarecrow needed him to see Gotham City succumb to his toxin, to watch his city descend into a state of primitive dread where its oh-so-valued citizens would see enemies everywhere. Where they would mindlessly attack one another, and destroy those they once loved but no longer recognized.

But most of all, he likely wanted Batman to experience complete helplessness as he failed to save what was most important to him. Scarecrow wanted to destroy Batman’s mind before he destroyed his body—neither of which goals the Joker had ever achieved.

It was all too possible. If the fear toxin turned even a thousand ordinary and decent citizens into paranoid murderers who saw demons wherever they looked, those thousand could easily kill many thousands more. And if Scarecrow managed to blanket the entire city with his toxin, nobody would be spared. Driven by inexorable fear, the population of Gotham City would exist for one reason only—to destroy or be destroyed.

They had to stop him.

As the tanks closed in, he ran his fingers over the touch screen and accessed his weapons controls. Twin cannons swiveled into position, their ammo counter indicating that only two missiles were available—one in each turret. There was no leeway for misses.

He double-checked the targeting mech, breathed in deeply, hit the firing icon, and launched the rockets. Nine seconds later both tanks exploded. Perfect hits, but now he was out of major firepower.

The Batmobile ground to a stop, its hatch swung open, and Batman took off at a sprint toward the closest building, only to confirm that its steel door was shut and locked from the inside. He removed a small canister of explosive gel from his belt pouch and sprayed it on the door hinges. Contact with air hardened it into position.

Batman reached for his detonator when a sudden taser blast sent him falling back, involuntarily yelping in pain. Struggling to his feet, he saw three armed mercs rappelling from the building roof. The foremost one fired, and a new taser hit him in the chest, dropping him to his knees where he fought the compulsion to flail like a marionette.

He writhed on the ground, helpless to stop the barrage of fists that slammed into his face and gut. His stomach was burning and he found it nearly impossible to control his body, still shaking wildly from the taser blast. Focusing as best he could, he forced his legs under one of the mercs and pushed. Surprised, the man stumbled back toward the steel door.

Batman’s hand shuddered as he finally pressed the detonator, setting off the explosive gel that was already in place. Even as the explosion took the merc out of the action, it ripped the door’s hinges from the wall.

The explosion startled the other two thugs, giving Batman the few precious seconds he needed to gather all the strength he could. He activated the Batmobile by remote, and heard its weapons system power up as its AI scanned for targets.

All he had to do now was survive.

Sadly, that was becoming an increasingly unlikely concept.

The weapons honed in on Batman’s signal, then targeted the figures surrounding him, as per Fox’s programming. Rubber bullets slammed into the mercs, leaving the killers unconscious.

Batman stumbled to his feet and through the opened door, and switched his cowl lenses to “detective mode” which could sense heat patterns, movement and sound even through walls nearly a half-foot thick. Though already beginning to recover, he was still trembling from the taser blasts, and knew he wasn’t yet capable of taking on trained fighters. Unfortunately, that was exactly what he would need to do in order to find and rescue the captive workers.

He launched his grapple and pulled himself up to the ceiling, then kicked through a top window and climbed outside, pulling himself onto the roof. This building was the tallest on the Ace campus, and overlooked the entire facility. From this perspective everything looked peaceful.

Removing a small device from his belt pouch, he tossed it high over his head. It was a remote scanner that tied directly into his gauntlet communicator. It hovered for several minutes, sending out sonar signals, and then suddenly beeped.

Accessing the campus schematics uploaded by Oracle, he cross-referenced them with the data provided by the remote. There was a pulsing green light over one of the buildings—the one that housed the pump room. That was where the hostages were being kept.

Now he had to get to them. Several dozen armed mercenaries were going to do their damnedest to make certain he wouldn’t.

* * *

Bruce Wayne had visited Ace Chemicals many times when he had considered buying the factory and especially the land. He gave up the notion when his geologists reported that the grounds were irreparably contaminated, and there’d be no way to ever cleanse it. Over the course of his research he’d checked out every building and knew their layouts by heart. Despite that fact, he still referred to the floor-by-floor schematic Oracle had provided. It never hurt to have overlapping intel—“belt and suspenders,” she’d say.

All Ace Chemicals buildings were crisscrossed with underground tunnels that ran under the campus, accessed through steel gratings. Back in the day, thousands of dollars’ worth of liquor and unstamped cigarettes had secretly moved through these passageways or others exactly like them. This factory, like so many of the others built in Gotham City in the mid-1930s, was designed with that era’s bootleggers in mind, and they served their masters well.

Constructed for Prohibition, the underground network also stretched into the city, reaching nearly every corner, mostly hidden from view. The maze of tunnels, always dark and somber, provided a physical reminder that the booze-soaked Gotham City skin everyone thought they knew so well only served to hide its diseased bones.

Batman planned to put the tunnels to good use. He pried loose one of the gratings and slipped into the darkness, then pulled the steel back in place. Even if the unconscious mercs recovered, they would have no idea where he’d gone.

Inside the warehouse, he made his way up until he found himself peering at the steam pipes that vented the heat created during chemical processing. He stared out through a grating and saw a single thug, pacing back and forth. The sound coming from the vents would be loud enough to cover the Dark Knight’s movements.

He followed the man’s path and took position about ten yards ahead of him, then stood quietly as the merc walked past. In a sudden move imperceptible over the pump’s rhythmic thumping, he pushed the grating aside, grabbed the man’s ankles, and pulled his legs out from under him. The merc fell and Batman quickly covered his mouth with one hand, preventing him from calling out, while he wrapped his other arm around the man’s throat and squeezed until his opponent gasped for air and collapsed.

Incapacitate, don’t kill.
He was controlling the Joker’s blood.

Securing the merc’s wrists with plastic ties, he gagged him then dragged him into the tunnels, leaving him there while he moved on to look up through the gratings into the next area, which was also filled with pipes.

Three mercs patrolled this new chamber, talking but still paying attention. They weren’t close to one another, so there was no way to take out one without being shot by the others. This action would have to be perfectly timed.

He quickly moved through the conduits until he was directly under one of the guards. The three were still talking about a girl one of them was dating, and it became clear that the conversation was nearly over. Batman waited while they finished, and the other two turned to continue their rounds.

As soon as they turned away, Batman lunged through the grating and pulled the closest merc into the tunnel with him. He drove his elbow into the man’s throat and quickly took him out of the action.

Harsh, but still controlled. He breathed in deeply and moved on.

The merc nearest to the action heard the scuffle, turned back, and saw Batman running at him. It took a moment for him to realize what was happening, but he’d been well trained. Instantly, his weapon was in position to fire, but as he squeezed the trigger Batman jumped over his head, twisted, and slammed the man from behind—both feet hard to the back of his head, smashing him into a power box.

Sparks exploded, the merc gasped, and crumbled to the ground, unconscious.

No sign of the third man.

Batman triggered his comm and spoke to Alfred.

“Oracle’s off-line. I need some help. Whoever the guy in the copter is, he’s assembled an army. These men are trained pros.”

He gave Alfred the best description he could of the man who had piloted the aircraft. When he stopped speaking he could hear the butler typing.

“Master Bruce, there’s only one hit. I’m accessing intel on a Black Ops team working out of Venezuela. There’s nothing but speculation on their commander, though. The only thing sources agree on is he calls himself the Arkham Knight.”

“Fancy,” Batman replied.
If not unique
, he thought to himself. Then the third guard reappeared. “Hold on. I’ve got a merc coming at me who’s begging for a lesson in hand-to-hand.”

“I’d say be careful,”
Alfred admonished
. “But when have you ever listened to my advice when it came to war?”

“More than you’d suspect, Alfred,” Batman said, and he laughed.

The third merc took aim, and he had a clear shot. There was no way he was going to miss. Batman dived to the ground and sent a Batarang hurtling toward the killer. It spun past him, and the man grinned.

“Can’t aim for shit, can you?” The Batarang began its circle, arcing back, and slammed into him from behind. He fell without a sound.

Batman retrieved the Batarang and folded it back into his pouch. “You people always forget what a boomerang is supposed to do,” he said as he dragged the unconscious form over to the other two, and dumped them all into the tunnel safely secured.

He tapped his gauntlet comm and heard Alfred respond.

“Sir, I’m picking up a computer in the room. Do you see it?”

“Give me a moment… yes, I see it,” he said. Stepping over to it, he found a twentieth-century keyboard, a massive hunk of metal that other businesses had long ago replaced with aluminum copies or even less-expensive plastic. Data began to appear, and he switched from one screen to the next as fast as the tech would allow. “Alfred, there’s a crew of Ace Chemicals workers on site,” he confirmed. “I’m one room away from the first of them.”

“Good. You can expect to find opponents, as well. There’s no way they’re going to let you get close to their leader.”