Enemies & Allies

To Mary Thomson and Cherie Buchheim

 

Longtime friends, fans, research experts, geeks,
and genuine enthusiasts

N
IGHT. A TIME FOR HUNTING. PREDATORS PREFER SHADOWS
and cool silence. But who preys upon the predators—and where?

The Thomas and Martha Wayne Memorial Park. A civic monument to two of Gotham City’s most beloved citizens. A playground with swing sets and teeter-totters, picnic tables and baseball diamonds, fountains, statues, a forested arboretum. In better times, it had been a place where families spent lazy afternoons together.

A place for families like the one he no longer had.

Now the once-bubbling fountains were empty basins to catch windblown leaves. The dense trees in the patch of forest were skeletal and frightening, like props from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Penknife-scratched graffiti marred the statues, defacing honored heroes. Garbage littered the walking paths. Weeds choked the baseball diamonds.

Some of Gotham’s citizens shook their heads at how the son of Thomas and Martha Wayne had allowed the park to fall into such disrepair and ill repute. With his inherited millions, Bruce Wayne could certainly afford to make the park a fine place again.

But he had other ideas.

This place attracted the dregs and bottom-feeders of society. He viewed it as a trap. As bait.

On nights when the pounding guilt and burning anger grew unbearable, when he felt the need to do
something,
when he could no longer sit in extravagant splendor within a memory-haunted mansion, he went out to watch, to hunt. He could have prowled Crime Alley, once called Park Row, or guarded the slums of the East End. Or he could come here, to the park named after his parents. In a way, it was fitting.

He was ready.

His custom-made suit was both second skin and body armor, its dark reinforced fabric molded to his muscled form, sheathing his biceps, shoulders, torso, and legs. It provided as much protection as any medieval knight’s suit of armor. His gauntlets were flexible yet impervious to heat, cold, abrasion, impact. His belt contained dozens of useful devices developed by the greatest minds at Wayne Enterprises (ostensibly for purposes other than to assist him in his nighttime activities). His mask, a fearsome cowl with pointed ears, proved as intimidating as the helm of a ferocious Viking warrior, and his black cape swirled around him like the trailing shadow of a demon.

When he donned this outfit, this identity, he felt powerful, full of determination, yet silent and elusive as a specter. Many people still weren’t sure whether the Gotham City “Bat-man” was real or just an urban legend, a heroic boogeyman created by a desperate populace that wanted the crime rate to drop.

The criminals knew he was real, though. And they were afraid of him.

For the past year and a half since he had first donned the uniform, his crusade had been to clean up Gotham City, a gloomy place that attracted more clouds than sunshine. Although this city had wounded him deeply, he loved it nevertheless. He saw the beauty hidden beneath the warts and scabs. The
promise.
He knew what Gotham could become, and he had to do something to help.

He patrolled the park just after midnight, a time when punks, muggers, murderers, and rapists were abroad, looking for fresh victims, fresh blood. Society’s predators abounded.
He
preyed on the predators.

As he took a mental inventory of the environs, nobody saw him. They never did.

A bearded wino huddled in a stained trench coat, clutching a brown paper bag as though it contained treasure. The wino curled up under a blanket of old newspapers in the dry basin of an unused fountain, snoring softly.

Four young toughs, looking as if they had just stepped out of a government poster warning against juvenile delinquency, lounged in the trees at the edge of the arboretum, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes. Snickering in low voices, imitating moves they had copied from James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause,
all had identical haircuts slicked back with Brylcreem. One had a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his white T-shirt; the others wore leather jackets.

A seedy-looking man on a park bench glanced at his watch, obviously waiting for a rendezvous. After a few moments, a disheveled stranger casually took a seat next to him, as if they were simply two men arriving in the middle of the night to feed pigeons in the park. After conversing in low voices, they exchanged envelopes.

A woman came down the path, walking away from the busy city streets, taking a shortcut through the park’s winding trails.

From the shadows he made a quick assessment: not a prostitute, just a woman in her early twenties wearing a lightweight coat. Her hair was dishwater blond, long and straight but covered with a black and white polka-dot scarf; her shoes were sensible, and judging from the way she moved, she’d had a long day. As the woman moved toward the arboretum, he could see she wore a waitress’s uniform beneath the open coat. A large German shepherd trotted at her side, eager for a late-night walk.

He was instantly wary. She shouldn’t have been going into the park. Even the big dog wouldn’t be enough to protect her.

His senses were attuned to every sound, scent, and movement. Certain something was about to happen, he crouched in the shadows, his pulse racing, adrenaline filling his bloodstream. He focused his whole world around the possibility of a hunt.

He wouldn’t let it happen again….

In the aftermath of a traumatic experience, some people are left with a ringing in their ears. Some have lingering pain.
He
saw the deaths of his parents. Always. More than memory, different from a nightmare.

After the movie, in the alley, a bad choice, a wrong turn…a man lunging out of the shadows.
His father’s voice was calm as he tried to reason with the mugger, his eyes never wavering from the gun.

How could the reflection of blue steel be so bright in such a dim alley?

“He just wants the pearls, Martha. Just the pearls.”

“And the wallet, too!”

“All right, and the wallet.” Thomas Wayne’s voice was soothing, as if he were reading bedtime stories to young Bruce. At only six years of age, the boy didn’t understand what was happening. His father sounded calm, protective. Everything would be all right.

The pistol shot was loud. So was his mother’s scream.

Those sounds never stopped echoing in his head.

His parents had taken him to see
The Mark of Zorro.
At the time, Bruce had actually believed that masked heroes did sweep down to protect the innocent. But in that moment in the dark alley behind the theater, there was no masked avenger. No one came in response to the gunshot…or to Martha Wayne’s screams.

The boy huddled there on the wet pavement for a long time. His parents didn’t move. Doctors didn’t come to save his mother and father. Police didn’t rush into the alley to apprehend the mugger—the
murderer.

Spilled blood mingled with the rainwater and slime of the street, deep red, pooling together, the last warm traces of his parents. His mother’s hand was very cold by the time young Bruce heard the first siren, but the little boy’s heart had gone colder still….

Suddenly, in the park, the waitress screamed, startling him from his thoughts. He silently cursed himself for letting his obsession distract him at a crucial moment. Weak. Dangerous. He needed to focus!

Over near the trees, the German shepherd was barking and growling. The waitress tried to pull away, but the four toughs surrounded her, switchblades drawn, their teeth bright as they grinned like jackals. “Come on, lady, we’re just asking for protection money. We’ll save you from the Batman. Fifty bucks will do it.”

She screamed for help. The wino roused himself groggily from his hard bed in the dry fountain. The two furtive men on the park bench looked over, clearly not wanting to get involved. They would be no help to her. No one would. No one but him.

For this young waitress, at least, a masked hero
would
come out of the darkness. For her, there was a hero to save the innocent.

He struck without warning. A swirl of the black cape to make himself appear larger, terrifying—all in complete silence. With a sideways sweep of his left gauntlet, he knocked the switchblade from the T-shirted tough’s hand. The young thug yowled, springing backward as if he had touched a hot plate. “It’s the Batman!”

The second hoodlum dipped a hand inside his black leather jacket, reaching for something, but another gauntleted blow sent the young man sprawling to the ground, the wind knocked out of him.

Keep the victim safe.
He jerked the waitress roughly aside, out of the way of the third thug, who also reached inside his jacket. But instead of grabbing a handgun or a switchblade, the attacker retrieved something golden and shiny.

A badge.

From behind him, the waitress shouted, “Gotham City PD—freeze, Batman!”

His mind immediately clicked with the realization.
A trap!
The police had laid an ambush for
him.
The thugs, the waitress…undercover cops.

Time to make an exit.

The waitress released the German shepherd, and the snarling dog launched itself at him, all claws, fur, and fangs, bowling him to the ground. Using the muscles of his thighs and back, he threw off the heavy dog, but it bounded toward him again. Now the woman—the supposed victim—had a police-issue revolver in her hand and a badge of her own. The other “toughs” had regrouped and pressed closer, working together, surrounding him.

“I said
freeze
!” the waitress said. “You’re under arrest.”

With a flourish, he swirled the weighted, scalloped hem of his cape, knocking the revolver out of her hand, then bolted toward the shelter of the arboretum and the concealing shadows of the trees.

The police dog gave chase but was unable to bite through his armored fabric, though the weight and pressure threw him off balance. Only one way to react: He let himself trip, then purposely rolled, using momentum to take the dog with him, and shoved it away as he ran in the opposite direction.

As a boy, even with all the riches in the world and a large manor house with expansive grounds, Bruce Wayne had never owned a dog—or any kind of pet. He had not wanted to get attached to anything. Too dangerous.

Now his suit gave him plenty of options. With a crunch and a twist, applying just the right pressure from his left boot heel, he released a cloud of stinking purple gas. The stench and the smoke drove the dog away yelping.

Now, however, the wino sprang out of the fountain and drew the service weapon he had been concealing within the rumpled paper bag. The two furtive men from the park bench also came at him, carrying a net between them.

Everyone
was part of the trap.

Though he raised an arm to protect himself, the thrown net caught the sharp points of his mask and his forearm gauntlets.

From the trees, a voice on a bullhorn bellowed, “Batman, this is Captain James Gordon of the Gotham City Police Department. Surrender yourself.”

He saw flashing red lights, heard sirens coming from the streets outside the park—more policemen homing in on the same quarry:
him.

He slashed the strands of the net with his gauntlet’s sharp razors, pulled himself free, and began to run through the shadow-latticed moonlight.

The “wino” opened fire, and bullets splintered bark and wood from a thick-boled oak. Swirling his dark cape like a toreador to distract the aggressor, he disguised the position of his body. Bullets stitched along the flailing fabric; none touched his skin. His armored outfit would stop or slow most bullets, but a solid impact from a slug might knock him to the ground.

And then the police would be able to catch him.

He made for the trees. Though the police captain’s voice had come from that direction, he had to hope a large contingent of the GCPD wasn’t hiding among the closely packed trunks.

All this manpower was being wasted on
him.
The corrupt police force clearly didn’t like the fact that he worked against criminals—successfully, though outside of their laws—and worse, several of his recent captures were little hoodlums who had squealed about cops being on the take, which had led to official investigations. He knew the Gotham City PD protected its own, and they didn’t like to be embarrassed.

And he had embarrassed them.

They wanted to bring him down.

The two men from the park bench rushed toward him, guns drawn. He struck one of them with a hammer blow to the stomach, the other with an uppercut to the jaw. Both men fell hard.

He refused to kill—not cops, not even criminals—but sometimes he couldn’t avoid inflicting an injury or two, a broken jaw, a shattered tooth. He had to do what was necessary to get away. The pain of bruises and broken bones would heal.

The pain of his parents’ deaths would not.

He melted into the trees, trying to be silent, but his boots were heavy, and the underbrush made crackling sounds. Even against a background of wailing sirens and shouting police, the noises seemed incredibly loud.

But this was the Thomas and Martha Wayne Memorial Park, and it held plenty of secrets.
His
secrets. If only he could find the cleverly concealed hollow tree stump, his emergency exit.

Two uniformed policemen from the squad cars tried to cut him off, and now it was time to use his Bat-shuriken, small projectiles he had modeled after ninja throwing stars. They came into the palm of his gauntlet, each one no bigger than his curled forefinger. He threw them accurately, their gleaming black curves shaped like an emblematic bat. The pointed tips nipped his pursuers’ skin, leaving behind small wounds, surprise, and a sting of pain—and a fast-acting tranquilizer he’d obtained from the cloud forests in Ecuador. The two men yelped and went down.