Batman Arkham Knight (2 page)

* * *

Owens barely paid attention to the food, forking each bite out of routine and not hunger. Donna was going to have to quit her job to have the baby, so he was trying to figure out if he could support the three of them on his rookie salary. Half of their income would be disappearing in four short months, even as their expenses increased exponentially.

Lost in thought, he didn’t feel fingers tapping at his shoulder until they became insistent, and a frightened voice drew his attention.

“Officer?
Officer?
” The words became louder, more strident with each repeat. The man tapping him was in his thirties, dressed casually, and looking very worried as he pointed to the far end of the diner. “Do you see it? Do you see them?”

The person sitting there had his face turned away, buried in a newspaper, and his attitude was strange enough that Owens decided to check it out. The young officer walked over, stepped in front of the man, and recoiled with instinctive shock.

He wasn’t looking at a man. If it was a male, he wasn’t even human.

Owens stumbled back. What he was looking at was some sort of impossible nightmare. He turned to scan the rest of the diners…

What the hell?

…and suddenly realized there were no longer any human customers, but other things, moving—some even slithering—as if nothing unusual had occurred. He rubbed his eyes, certain it couldn’t be real. Yet when he looked again, the shapes were in front of him.

One by one they turned to stare at one another, as if noticing—and finally, comprehending—what had taken them over.

Pauli’s Diner, established in the mid-1950s by a former city mayor, loved by the locals as much for its amply portioned home-style dinners as its low prices, was filled with… monsters!

And as one the monsters screamed.

“Dispatch, Scott Owens, badge number 47532. I need immediate backup. Pauli’s Diner, Fourteenth and Moldoff.” Pause. “No. I can’t explain why. You have to believe me. And for God’s sake, please hurry.” Officer Owens reached for his weapon but his hand had been replaced with lobster claws which couldn’t hold the gun.

The shapes rushed back and forth in chaos. Their arms—sometimes only tentacles—flailed mindlessly, lashing out at anyone, any
thing
, that came close. And the screams grew louder.

Then the shapes were over him, screaming at him. He tried to tell them he was a policeman, but his own words sounded—even to him—like the growling of a wild dog.

Fists and tentacles slammed at him. He felt his face being cut, warm blood spurting from the wounds. The monsters began piling on top of him, first one, then more, fists hitting him, sharp teeth—no, they were fangs—biting into him even as he bit back, sinking his own teeth into the arms or whatever were holding him down.

Owens could never remember being so afraid. Every time one of the things moved, no matter how slightly, his heart raced, his chest pounded, his skin was covered by a slick sheen of sweat. In his college days he had climbed mountains. He fell once, and his injuries kept him in the hospital for almost four months. But even as he fell, he hadn’t felt this kind of dread. It was pervasive and it controlled him and he prayed for death rather than suffer it for even another moment.

He twisted and like slime he seemed to flow through the gaps between the other beasts. His claws became flippers and he used them to push ahead. The diner door was only feet away, but it might as well be on the other side of the planet. There were monsters blocking every escape route.

Still he struggled through the mob, and realized these creatures were as confused and terrified as he. They weren’t trying to kill him. They were trying to escape, to protect themselves from harm.

Suddenly the front door seemed to explode. Monsters pounded at it, shattering its glass, then pulling their way over the shards and other creatures as they escaped from what had to be hell. Owens was carried along with the others and found himself outside, on the street, his flippers reforming into fingers attached to hands, part of a body that was—thank God—human again.

He fell face down in the gutter. Looking up, he saw a dozen men and women running from the diner as if they still were being chased. A few lay on the sidewalk, or even the street. Some of them looked pretty bad. But there were no other monsters.

Somehow, the threat that came out of nowhere was gone.

Yet the fear was still there.

Owens reached for his phone and tried to call his precinct dispatcher, but he was unable to control his voice. His words still sounded like the howling of a wild animal. And even if he could speak, he couldn’t imagine that they would believe him when he said that he had barely escaped with his life from a diner filled with demons.

His hands trembled and he dropped the phone. He tried to pick it up, but it suddenly vibrated. Startled, he dropped it yet again.

One of the fleeing customers stepped on the phone, crushing it. Owens felt utterly alone, and the fear spiked. Like the others, he wanted to run away, and began to pick himself up, but his legs collapsed under him and he was unable to move.

He lay there waiting for death.

But he didn’t die.

What he had seen could not have been real, no matter how true it felt. Was it an hallucination? Mass hysteria? If so, did everyone see the same monsters? How was that even possible?

Across the street from him stood the Gotham Triangle Building, home of the
Gotham Tribune
, a newspaper that in its heyday had boasted a daily readership of three million, but in the internet age barely sold a third of that. Raised high on the front of the building was a giant projection screen which scrolled the news in a small banner that ran along its base, while commercials filled the rest of the screen.

On the giant screen were the images of beautiful women in just about legal-sized bikinis, running along a beach, while some feminine product unknown to Owens was being hawked. Suddenly the women pixelated into static and disappeared, replaced by an interior shot of the diner.

For several minutes Owens stared at the images. The restaurant patrons were running wild, striking out, mindlessly biting each other. Then he saw himself slithering across the tiled floor, grabbing the others and viciously pushing them aside as he pulled himself to the door in a desperate attempt to escape. He stared at his own image, huge on the screen—not the monster he thought he’d become but violent and mindless—and he was sick at what he had done.

But then he thought of something else, something so frightening it made his stomach churn and his skin turn cold. During all the madness, someone was filming the scene and he never saw it.
What the hell kind of cop was he?

As he stared at the screen, it began to flicker again. His image was replaced by a face covered in a brown hessian sack that appeared to be stitched to the wearer’s face. Dark, hollow eyes burned with fire and he gestured with hands that had syringes where fingers should have been.

Was this another hallucination?

Words scrolled across the screen where the news had been moments earlier.

IT IS TIME TO OBEY

The bony figure spoke in a deep, raspy, guttural voice that barely sounded human.

“Gotham City, I am taking over all your television channels, so look at what I have done,”
he said.
“This demonstration used only five ounces of my latest toxin. Tomorrow this will seem like child’s play.”
Owens read the crawl again, and stared at the image, recognizing him from one of the daily briefings. That was the criminal known as Scarecrow.
“Gotham City, this is your only warning.”

That hideous face seemed to stare directly at him, causing the blood to pulse in his veins. The huge screen crackled again with static, and then died as if the plug had been pulled.

Our only warning?

What the hell was coming next?

Scarecrow’s threat worked.

The lines of cars heading to the Mercy Bridge was backed up for more than five miles, some all the way to Memorial Park in City Center. From the bridge one could see City Island and Lady Gotham rising from it, torch held high, standing tall and proud. The great statue had been constructed decades earlier as a beacon, shining a light on Gotham City’s hopes and dreams. Sadly, over the years, that light had dimmed, until it illuminated little more than its endless failures.

Police on motorcycles and horseback corralled the lines in a near-fruitless attempt to keep calm those desperate to escape. Repurposed school and city busses were packed to the bursting point and helped alleviate some of the traffic but ultimately they, too, were caught in the endless wave of frightened, fleeing humanity.

Gordon orchestrated the city’s exodus as best he could from the back seat of his squad car. He was a blur of motion, switching between a half-dozen cell phones that connected him to his captains covering Gotham City’s key districts. The car drove most of its winding path on the sidewalks, its whooping blare of sirens sending already frightened citizens running to avoid being hit.

“Sir.”
A frightened voice came over one phone.
“My men have cleared about a third of Miagani’s population, but there’s no way we’ll reach everyone in time.”
Jerome Finger, a twenty-two-year veteran of the Gotham City Police Department, was captain of the Fifth Precinct, and he was obviously afraid. But he was also struggling to maintain control.
“I don’t know what to do, sir. We really need some help here.”

“Wish I had some to give, Jerry,” Gordon replied. Finger was one of the first cops he met when he came to Gotham City. There was no better or more honest officer anywhere, which is why he had been promoted to captain only three years later. “We’re down to a token force. I need you to get out everyone you can.”

“What about those we can’t, sir?”

Gordon hated the answer, but there simply was no other.

“We can only do what we can do.” He clicked off the phone before Finger could respond, dropped it to his side, and exhaled. This job was impossible at its best. Today it was even worse.

He watched as several school busses slowly edged past his car, filled with kids junior-high-school age and younger. They were heading north toward Mercy Bridge and Bleake Island. From there they’d go west and, if luck was on their side, they’d be out of Gotham City an hour or two later. The kids looked frightened, and they had every reason to be. This was, without doubt, the most chaotic event they’d experienced in their short lives. Sadly, Gotham City had a way of leaving its mark on even its youngest.

“It always comes down to the children, doesn’t it?” he said to Bill McKean, his driver. “I can’t even imagine how frightened they are. I see those kids and remember what it was like when James Jr. and Barbara were that age.”

McKean nodded. “Yeah, but you know something, Commissioner? Twenty years ago madmen like Scarecrow never existed. Today, they’re almost a dime a dozen. I can’t even count how many there are.” He shook his head. “I think these kids are growing up knowing way too much about how low humanity can get. Without realizing that life doesn’t have to be a cesspool, that this isn’t what’s supposed to be normal.

“That’s the real crime, you ask me.”

Gordon felt his stomach tighten. “So how do we make it better?”

“Okay, you asked. This is me, remember, but I think we need at least a hundred more Bats. And we tell them to pull out all the stops.” His voice became louder with each word. Then he took a deep breath, and added, “Like I says, just my opinion.”

“Batman’s good,” Gordon agreed. “Maybe even vital. I know that, Bill. But no matter how valuable his contributions have been, you know as well as I do that we can’t survive forever under vigilante justice. Ultimately we need law—rules and order. The people look to us to protect them, and they have to believe that we can do the job, and that we don’t need outside help.”

“Agreed, sir,” McKean said. “But until that day, he gets the job done.”

“Trouble is, he raises the stakes. And the bad guys keep matching him.”

“I know, sir. But if you’re so much against him, why do you let him do what he does?”

“It’s what you said, Bill. He gets the job done. And it’s not Batman I worry about. He’s a good man, maybe the best I’ve ever known. But it’s those who follow him. The copycats. They might not have his unwavering sense of justice. They’re the ones who frighten me. Yes, it’s working for now, but I still keep praying that one day my officers will be all Gotham City needs.”

“Your lips to God’s ears, sir.” McKean pulled the car to a stop. “Oh, we’re here. Ground zero.”

Where it began.

Across from Gordon’s car stood the shattered remains of Pauli’s Diner, its windows broken, its door pulled from its hinges, its tables and chairs overturned, its stovetops and ovens smashed beyond repair. Seventy years of history, gone in less than four hours.

“Bill, you know, just yesterday there were six point three million people living and working here in Gotham City.” Gordon got out of the car and stepped over the debris, avoiding the carpet of glass shards, and entered the empty diner. He looked around staring at what were now only bloodstained memories.

“Today, not so many.”

He picked up a child’s stuffed bear lying under an overturned booth, straightened its overalls and cap, and carefully placed it on a countertop, hoping it would eventually find its way home. He would probably never know what happened to the child who owned it, whether it was a boy or girl, or if he or she had managed to get safely out of Gotham City. Some questions would never be answered, and for a man who lived for answers, that deeply bothered him.

He stared out of the diner, past the cracked pavement badly in need of repair, to the vast emptiness—and thought for a moment he saw a black blur swing past.

“Yeah,” he said aloud but to himself, “he gets the job done. And God do we need him now.”

He was perched on a cracked masonry gargoyle two hundred twenty-seven feet above the sidewalk, scanning the horde of running figures. Thousands of men and women, dragging their crying children with them, panic distorting their faces, all hoping without any real hope that they’d be able to get out of the city before the deadline came.