Cookie Dough 6: Almost Died Laughing
Second of the Buffy/Batman Crossovers
By David Morris
Summary: It's been almost a year since vampires tried to make Gotham City their own, but thanks to the combined efforts of Faith, Batman, Spike et al, the city has survived. But the arrival of someone that Angel-Slayer thought long gone will start a whole new chain of events that could have repercussions far beyond Gotham….
Rating: Gonna go with PG-13, but it's probably going to hit R very quickly. Like The Dark Knight, this is not a story for the kiddies.
Disclaimer: The characters of Faith, Andrew and Spike, along with the rest of the team at Angel-Slayer are the property of Joss Whedon and all the other brilliant writers at Mutant Enemy. The characters of Batman, Robin and all of the other residents of Gotham are the property of DC Comics and their staff. And though I have made some significant alterations in both their storylines, I continue to have neither any claim to their original form. Just a kid playing with their toys.
Spoilers: It would have helped if you'd read Cookie Dough 5 to best appreciate this story and to understand what the hell's happening. Then again, you're all smart people and you'll probably catch on quick enough. For those of you who are new, all you have to know is that Faith, Spike and Andrew are helping the champions of Gotham help fight a war against the army of the undead which still infests Batman's city to this night. Reading CD1 through 4 would be helpful but is not strictly necessary. Batman spoilers... like I said, this a whole new ball game, so I don't think I'll be referencing any specifics. Still be on the lookout for major shifts.
Here we go…
PROLOGUE
There were fourteen hospitals in Gotham City, all supposedly equal under the Mayor' budget. But, as is almost the case in major municipalities, there were major disparities between the printed page and the real world. In the case of St. Horace's, the disparity was nearly a quarter of the budget of Gotham General or any of the three hospitals subsidized by WayneTech
The reasons for this were technical and mostly irrelevant---- with one unspoken exception. On the map, St. Horace's was on less than five miles east from Crime Alley, and four miles north from the major homeless sections. Therefore, more than a third of the patients of this hospitals were either indigent or had felonies on their records Because of this fact, Horace was more popularly known as "The Chamber of Horrors", where if you weren't good enough for Gotham General or bad enough for Arkham, you ended up staying at until the police either booked you, questioned you, or told you get the hell out of town. This reputation had followed St. Horace even after Batman and his ilk had started their work, and even now it was a high-traffic point--- even if a lot of the patient traffic now had records like 'victim of gangs on PCP' or "fell on skewer.' (Everybody in Gotham City knew what these things really were, but not surprisingly, almost no insurance company was willing to cover medical care where the root cause was vampirism.)
Hospitals like this who deal with the lesser of this world's citizens, whether they be in Chicago, Boston or Gotham City are frequently, do not get the same kind of funding that the better ones do, and because they generally need more professionals or better equipment, they never have much money to make improvements. So when an opportunity to receive a rather large fund for special upkeep of a coma patient, the hospital board agreed to it with only the smallest of hesitations.
Of course, when the chief of staff learned from the trustees who the patient was, he immediately tendered his resignation. So did more than a few attending physicians.. They didn't care how much extra security that was going to be coming or the improvements that were being made in order to ensure their safety. They didn't care that ten separate specialists were certain that the patient was going to spend the remainder of his life in a permanent vegetative state. They hadn't wanted to be in the same zip code as him when he was awake; to have him at their workplace---well, they needed the money but not this badly.
The trustees reaction was typical. They ordered a hospital-wide blackout and told the rest of the nurses and orderlies that the man in Room 565 was the sole survivor of a mob massacre, and the Feds needed to keep him alive before the case came to trial. Only a handful of security guards disguised as residents were allowed to see the patient. The rest of the time, his face was kept bandaged, save for the nose. There were only nine people on a hospital with a staff of five hundred who knew the truth.
The authorities and the trustees thought that this was the solution that worked best for the city. As anyone from Sunnydale could have told them (and they wouldn't have had to go far to look for one), this situation was a disaster waiting to happen. They wouldn't have cared that the finest prisons and asylums had been as easy for this man to escape when he was conscious, or that their hospital wards were utterly unsuited to handle this round the clock care that 'Patient X' needed. They would have shrugged and told them that no matter how tightly controlled they thought the situation was, eventually the bill was going to come, and the repercussions would be disastrous.
The bill came due on December 1st, 2005, or what many of the crime-fighters of Gotham considered Year Zero.
The night would have been problem enough for St. Horace's from the start. Roughly an hour earlier, there had been a mass casualty reported to all of Gotham major trauma centers. Compared to some of the horrors that the city had undergone over the years--- or that matter, the horror show that had unfolded when Nicholae had made his attempt to take over Gotham's underworld--- this was relatively minor: a fire had broken out at a chemical processing plant a couple of hours ago. Because of all the major events that followed, it would be weeks before the arson investigators discovered that the fire had been set deliberately. Even then the perpetrator would never be indicted, because in comparison to the other felons, he was small fry.
For now, the damage he did was more than sufficient to cause chaos--- there would be nearly a hundred casualties, mostly with chemical burns and toxic exposure. All the St. Horace's ER cared about was the fact that they were up to asses in mass traumas. Even with their best people on staff, a dozen people died that night.
Because the ER was so crowded, no one noticed when a dark-haired woman suddenly appeared at the hospital entrance. She seemed a little disoriented, but among the men and women standing about, fuzzy from the effects of the fumes, she seemed positively normal. None of the orderlies looked at her twice. In fact, the only person who noticed anything strange was an eleven-year old who'd just had her tonsils out, and was still a little dazed from the procedure.
The woman looked dazed but determined, she would later tell the police. She had been heading right for the stairway, but stopped, looked at her room, and wandered over.
"Little lamb's been shorn," she would say. "Wouldn't even baa if mommy had a nip."
She had stood at the gap between her room and the hall for several seconds. Then she turned away.
"The stars don't have to remind Mommy that she's got lots to do today," she said as she headed towards the elevator.
No one would ask the child about what she had seen, but the girl would not soon forget the face.
It haunted her dreams for years.
*
Dennis Borland never understood why the department, after all of the red tape of and the psych evaluations, they would put him through, let him stay on the job. He knew that morale in the department was low, and that turnover rate was high and getting higher every day, but even given that, in any other city, he'd have been shitcanned the minute they figured out he was all right. (Borland had obviously never heard of the machinations the Sunnydale PD had managed through it's existence.)
Perhaps the reason they had been so lenient was because the entire setup for guarding Patient X had been based on the premise that the prisoner would be the one who was going to make the escape. They secured the front door with a steel struts, they had it guarded by electronic guard that could only be opened with a four digit security code, and the entrance was guarded by three men shifts changed every eight hours. The possibility of Houdini getting out of this trap, much less a man who had been a coma for the better part of a year, were astronomical. Even so, they had not reduced surveillance one iota for that same amount of time.
Unfortunately, the board of trustees had not agreed to wall off a separate wing of the hospital--- even with the enormous amount of the money they were being thrown, they couldn't turn part of the hospital into Attica. So, while the room was secure, and the door impregnable to all but a chosen few, the security guards monitored the outside and the inside from a modified security station on the fifth floor, and normal hospital traffic proceeded throughout the floor, though the majority of the staff had been instructed to maintain a distance from the room.
Therefore, Borland was the only man standing outside Room 565 who was carrying a weapon when the strange shit started to go down.
It hadn't been obvious right away that something was wrong. When the woman made her approach of the room, she did so with no noticeable hesitation. This should have been enough to send Borland to deliver a warning to the guards at the security deck, but he had made the assumption--- correctly, not that it would count for much--- that their interior radar had started to ping when they saw this woman.
Dennis Borland, however, had thought that this radar going off was a false positive. The woman might have appeared confident, but also seemed frail, unsettled and a little spacey. She seemed about as much of a threat as one of the Olsen twins.
For that feeling alone, Borland would later ponder, he should've gotten fired.
"Excuse me," he began, "this area is off limits----"
"But my child is in there" Mixed in with an English accent was a definite sound of someone whose mental wires weren't properly crossed. Borland had wondered if this woman was one of the outpatients from the free clinic that met one floor up.
"Maybe you want the maternity ward?" he said gently.
"You don't understand. He hasn't been born yet, but he was promised to me."
Borland had not yet given the signal for the guards watching via the closed circuit camera to intercede. This woman seemed to be a fruitcake, but she still didn't seem dangerous.
"And who made this promise?"
The woman smiled fondly, and for some unexplained reason, he had felt a little safer.
"I had a child once," the woman said, in a soothing voice. "Daddy never loved him, but he and I we were together forever--- till she took him from me. Have you ever lost someone?"
A little more humoring her, and I'll call psych. "No, I don't have any kids. I've never been married."
"Of course not. You're a steadfast tin soldier. They always burn up before they find love.."
From this point on, things had gotten truly weird. Even he saw the security footage, Borland still had a lot of trouble believing it--- mainly because the audio didn't correspond with what he remembered. Her voice had been so relaxing, so natural.
"You're a brave little soldier man," the woman--- she was beautiful, he had to say that --- told him in a flattering tone. "A solder has to protect the people he guards."
"That's right," he had said in a detached voice.
"All the evil and screaming and snakes in the woodshed," she told him. She began to wave her finger in a pattern. "All the darkness oozing out of the night. And there you are standing alone against the cold and the dark."
By now, the woman was so close to him, she was practically breathing in his ear. (Borland never did find out that that part should have been impossible.) Yet despite this, he felt no urge to go for his weapon.
"You have to keep him safe," she whispered. "Save him from all the bad men out there."
"Yes." An outsider would have noticed by now that his voice was that of a sleepwalker.
"All the bad men out there," she murmured. "All the bad men--- like--- them."
And suddenly he turned to his immediate left. And there were Nails Gibone and Carl Novello, two of the deadliest men in the Maroni organization, both with their guns out. Problem was, Borland was pretty sure that they were supposed to be dead. But he had been in Gotham long enough to know death didn't carry the same weight that it used to.
"Stay where you are!" he shouted, pulling his weapon and pointing at the dead felons (At that moment, the fact that killing them probably wasn't a big danger never occurred to him.).
Amazingly, both of the men froze.
"Drop your weapons!" Even then, he noticed how hysterical he sounded.
These armed, dead killers surrendered without hesitating. Again this didn't seem to register. All that mattered was that he follow his training and secure the prisoners. He had to keep the bad men out .
"Don't do this," Novello said as he put his weapon down in front of him.
"Shut up!" Borland shouted, not noticing how nervous these hardened killers sounded. He took out his handcuffs and cuffed Novello's hands behind his back Unfortunately, he didn't have a second set.
"For God sakes, Borland looo----"
"Stop them," he heard the voice.
Again moving without thinking, he brought the butt of his gun down upon Gibone's head. Until he was sure he man was unconscious.
"What the fuck are you doing, you crazy----" Gibone started.
"Stay exactly where you are, and do not talk to me." He took his gun out, and pointed it at Novello's head.
Borland stood in that position for the next ten minutes. When the backup he never called for actually came, they were upset, but not for the reasons Borland had been. In the space of that time, the door had been breached, Prisoner X was freed, and both he and his accomplice had escaped. Which was bad enough, but according to the security camera, while this was happening, he had somehow knocked out and secured the two men who had been his backup, who had run in the second they though there was a threat, and who had basically been helpless to watch as the prisoner escaped.
As it turned out, there were extreme circumstances, and what he had done was actually understandable under them. But even when Borland was officially cleared for duty, he immediately applied for a desk job in a different part of the city, and never went on the active roster again. And given the events that immediately followed this, no one was that surprised when, nearly two years after the actual breakout, Borland ate his gun.
The note he left had five words
I keep hearing her voice.
*
The people in charge never did find out just how the woman managed to break the code, and essentially that was closing the barn door after the horse had run out of the stable. The woman managed to open the door, get past the traps, and looked at the man she'd come to get.
"Mommy's come to take you home," Drusilla said.
There was a briefest of flicker on the monitor of the Joker. Unfortunately, that was more than enough.
