JSA: Atrocity
By Bruce Wayne
DISCLAIMER: Most of the characters portrayed in this story are copyright by DC Comics, an AOL/Time/Warner company. They are used without permission for entertainment without profit by the author.
An Elseworld's story: Stories, situation or events involving familiar characters in unfamiliar settings.
Chapter 2
The European villian known to the world as The Boomer had always liked tinkering -- especially with clocks. That had first led him, he reflected now as he hid, to bombs.
He heard footsteps crunching on the roof, slipping then crunching closer. He drew the lockblade folding knife from the right hip pocket of his Levi's and waited.
He recognized the sound of metal scraping leather -- the policeman had drawn his gun.
Boomer pressed himself flatter against the red brick of the chimney.
He heard a tiny mechanical click; the footsteps were getting closer now.
A voice, very near but below the roofline, asked in German, "Was ist los?" Then the same voice queried again, "Where are you?"
From beside the chimney, inches from Boomer, came a reply, "It's dark up here, Fritz!"
"Be careful!"
"I am, Fritz!" The near voice again.
Boomer held his breath, his knife not yet open.
The crunching started again. Suddenly the plainclothes policeman came around the chimney, a startled look in his green eyes as he spotted The Boomer.
One-handed, Boomer flicked open the lockblade, ramming it forward into the red-haired policeman. The pistol discharged, but Boomer felt no pain. The villian again rammed the knife into the officer's chest. The young man screamed in German, "It's him! Fritz!"
The pistol discharged once more. The Boomer slipped, skidding on the peaked roof as he tried to reach for the gun. It clattered down the roof shingles, following the young officer as he rolled off the roof.
The Boomer lost his balance. He slipped and tumbled forward.
He saw a rain gutter and frantically grabbed for its edge to stop his downward plunge. His fingers hurt as he held it. Then the gutter tore away, swinging out from the roofline. A gunshot. Another shot. His ears rang as one of the bullets punched into the rain gutter.
"Polizei!" shouted a voice from the ground.
The Boomer hung from the gutter as it started to sink under his weight.
"Hilfe!" he shouted. "Hilfe!" He looked below him, dizzy. "Schnell!"
The policeman on the ground knelt beside his young red-haired colleague. The man was obviously dead.
The Boomer heard a voice from the ground. The one who was apparently Fritz looked up, his pistol clenched in both fists. The criminal's eyes were riveted on the muzzle. The words weren't for him. He looked further along the street below. Uniformed police were running and shouting in German. "Call an ambulance ... ambulance!"
Policemen had discovered bombs and explosives in Boomer's apartment; he was wanted by the authorities in four European countries; he had just led the police in a six-block foot chase through the streets of Hamburg. Now, as he hung by his hands from a collapsing rain gutter, he laughed.
But he stopped laughing. There was hate in the eyes of the young policeman, the one named Fritz, who held the gun pointed at him.
He had hung there for five minutes, he guessed. A fire ladder was raised beside him now as policemen cordoned off the area below him. A lean-faced man with tousled brown hair, wearing an open khaki trench coat with a woolen muffler around his neck, ascended the ladder.
The Boomer knew the face. It belonged to the Englishman assigned to work with the West German police. His name was Durkey.
"You speak English, don't you?" the man said. Without waiting for an answer he said, "Of course you do, Boomer."
"Get me down, Durkey," Boomer snarled.
"Yes, I must get you down. Sad. I'd rather let you just hang there until you drop. Then you could die, like that young policeman."
"Go to hell, Durkey!"
"You know us, don't you," the Englishman said, his voice low. "We won't let you just flop down there and die."
"It's your weakness," Boomer gasped, his back aching, his fingers numb. He doubted he could hang on any longer.
"Here let me help," Durkey said. He reached out and grabbed Boomer's right ankle, placing his foot on a rung. The Boomer released his hold on the gutter. Durkey grasped at his free right hand. The criminal was losing his grip with his left hand, falling, but something was holding him.
It was Durkey. The Englishman's left arm was threaded through the ladder rungs; both hands were clamped tight on Boomer's right wrist. The Boomer swung there for a moment. "Why -- why don't you let me fall, kill me?" The criminal bomber swung, watching the strain in the hard cheeks of the Englishman.
"You said it, Boomer -- it is our weakness, isn't it?" and Boomer swung his left arm around to grasp at the ladder, Durkey never letting go.
***
All these strange events took place in 1961 on Earth-Two. Earth-Two is a duplicate Earth that occupies the same space as our own earth, but separated from it because it vibrates at a different speed. It is noted that two objects -- like our planet Earth and its duplicate -- can inhabit the same space if they vibrate -- as all matter does to an extent -- at different speeds.
***
The Boomer stood in the witness dock, not having bothered with a lawyer. He knew what the verdict would be even as the judge droned on. For the bombing of the synagogue in Cologne that killed eighteen people; for the derailment by incendiary device of the train near Stuttgart when forty-seven died; for the airplane bombing out of Berlin that sent 80 to their deaths; for the dissemination of destructive devices; for the murder of the policeman -- Boomer hadn't wasted his time to bother remembering the man's name -- and for a long list Boomer had stopped listening to midway.
He heard the verdict.
He smiled. It could have been nothing else.
He watch Durkey's face. Someday, when he escaped, he would leave Durkey a nice "present" on the engine block of his car. Then the true escape would come.
Guilty, indeed.
***
Durkey seemed to whisper; Boomer only half listened to him. "It's an honor to be allowed to accompany you to prison, Mr Boomer. To see you shut away."
The Boomer said nothing.
"You might be able to have your sentence adjusted. Perhaps a more posh prison rather than the hole we're putting you in. Just tell us about False-Face."
Still Boomer said nothing.
"I know you probably don't know his face. No one does, we understand. He fancies himself a master of disguise, he does. But tell us what you know. If you do, we'll turn this car around and find you a better prison, give you a new identity. Plastic surgery, perhaps, so False-Face will never be able to find you."
The Boomer remained silent, staring down at his manacled hands. The belly chain around his waist irritated him over the blue prison shirt he wore. His ankles were manacled, too. He sat on Durkey's right in the back seat. He stared at the back of the driver, then at the guard beside the driver in the front seat. The Boomer's gaze traveled slowly sideways toward Durkey, who continued to speak.
"Why don't you consider it, Boomer? Because if you think False-Face can help you, you're insane. He cannot. A decoy car was sent out with a man dressed and built like you. If False-Face puts together some sort of crew, he'll attack the wrong car. You'll still go to prison."
Again Boomer did not reply. He was waiting.
"False-Face is dangerous. What if we put it out on the street that you told us everything you knew, put you under maximum security but under your own name. It would be only a matter of time before he got you. False-Face is very good. I'm offering you a choice -- a false name in a better prison, or I can make you a sitting duck, as the Americans say. Would you like that?"
The Boomer merely watched the scenery along the country road, slightly distorted through the bullet-resistant glass of the police car.
"What do you hope to achieve by silence? Is it loyalty to that madman?"
The Boomer looked at Durkey, finally saying something. "Your conversation, Herr Durkey -- it grows tiresome."
Durkey's eyes hardened. "Look, you bastard, it can grow a good deal more tiresome for you in that prison. We'll be there in less than an hour. Think about that. And think about our letting it out that you spilled your guts, Boomer! Think about how tiresome that could get!"
The Boomer said nothing more, shrugging his shoulders and returning his gaze to the distorted scenery.
Durkey spoke again. "False-Face is slime, Boomer, slime. A murderer of women and children. Hiding behind disguises, he's too afraid to show himself."
"Herr Durkey, you are very tedious, indeed." The Boomer sighed.
"Tedious? You fucking bloody bastard, I'll show you tedious." Durkey, his face livid, turned forward and reached across the front seat to the driver, tapping him on the shoulder. "Stop the car. Stop the bloody car!"
"But, Herr Inspector," the driver pleaded, half turning over his shoulder.
"Stop the bloody car, man!"
"But, Herr Inspector!"
"Take this bastard to his damned prison and pick me up on the way back. I can't stand the smell! Stop, I tell you!"
"Ja, Herr Inspector." The driver nodded, pulling off to the side of the two-lane highway. The Boomer was watching, interested.
"And you," Durkey shrieked. "You -- you filth." He slapped Boomer. The Boomer's head snapped back, and a thin trickle of blood started as his lip impacted against teeth.
Both the driver and the guard beside him turned around at the sound of the slap. Durkey's wrists jabbed forward. His hands were cocked back at bizarre angles, and a clear liquid squirted out from beneath each wrist into the faces of the driver and the guard. Durkey -- his voice somehow different -- rasped, "Cyanide, Boomer!"
The Boomer bent his head forward between his knees, covering his face with his manacled hands. In a blur of motion he saw Durkey's raincoated right arm reach past his face.
The Boomer heard the click of the door lock beside him. He felt himself being shoved out onto the road. Then he landed on his right shoulder and hip.
He pushed himself up to his knees. Hearing a car door slam, he glanced up.
Still on his knees, he stared ahead at the raincoat of Inspector Durkey.
The Boomer looked up as Durkey started to speak, but the inspector's voice was different somehow. "Really, Boomer, you are so loyal to me." Then the British accent again. "That False-Face, the slime, the killer," and then the slight German inflection. A voice he knew -- False Face's. The man in the raincoat laughed. "That killer has struck again, hasn't he, hmmm? Cyanide gas and two dead pigs, ja?"
The laugh -- Boomer had heard it before, though he'd never seen the face. Feeling confused, stupid, still on his knees, he stammered, "But False-Face ... Durkey, the Englander ... the police -- how --?"
"Durkey never quite completed the trip from London to Stuttgart. There was a tragic accident at Heathrow Airport; the body was hidden. An easy matter to match the passport photo of a man no one in West Germany had ever seen."
"You -- you on the ladder before the trial?"
"Why do you think I saved your bloody life, Boomer? For Durkey to do it he have had to have been a bigger bloody ass than the police usually are. Been rather nice, actually, living as Durkey for the past nine weeks, reviewing all the police files, mislaying a few interesting sets of fingerprints -- such as my own. Which the ignorant swines never even knew they had in their possession! Ha." He laughed again, then fell silent.
The Boomer, still kneeling, looked up as False-Face's hands reached out to his shoulders.
"You are loyal, Boomer. This is something money cannot buy."
The Boomer felt stupid for thinking it, felt somehow he was being knighted by False-Face.
"Get up, my friend -- I shall help you." False-Face -- his hands somehow irresisibly powerful -- drew Boomer up until he was standing.
The Boomer looked at his manacled hands.
"But F.F. --"
"These shackles -- we will dispose of them soon. There is a job ... the rarest and best opportunity. And I need your expertise with the use of bombs, with timing devices. I need you. You will help? I will bring the United States, all the Western democracies and the Communist bastards, all of them crawling on their knees. But no hands will reach out to uplift them as I have uplifted you. You and I, we shall go on to restore the glory lost in the dark hours of 1944. I feel his blood. It surges through me. His precious blood. You will help bring about this new glory, Boomer?"
"Ja," Boomer gasped, breathlessly. "Ja, mein --"
"No, not yet," the former 'Durkey' said smiling. The Boomer wondered if False-Face's real face ever did that.
***
Wildcat begins an interesting adventure in chapter 3.
***
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