JSA: The Face Of Evil
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.
CHAPTER 6
There were five armed men outside the police station. A radio played loudly from a car near them. Perhaps that is what kept them occupied and unconcerned about what might had been happening inside the police station. The music was unpleasant to Selina. She wasn't fond of this newer music called rock. She preferred the opera.
"Ready, Mr President?" she whispered.
"Yes, as ready as I'll ever be, Miss -- Kyle was it?"
"Selina Kyle, Mr President."
She started ahead, moving like her namesake -- The Catwoman. She tried to narrow the distance so she could get all five men at once. At least one of them, a tall, red-haired man, was armed with a submachine gun. He would be first. The distance to the five men was now less than twenty yards.
The men were on the other side of the car that she approached. She knew what she was going to do.
At the distance of ten yards, she broke into a silent run and leaped. Her hands hit the top of the car roof and her body sprang upwards into the air with the grace of an Olympic gymnast. Her body spun once in the air and landed feet first into the chest of the man with the machine gun. He crumpled to the ground never knowing what hit him.
Selina landed on her feet, just like a cat. She kicked out with one leg and struck another thug in the chest, sending him into the side of the car, back first.
Spinning her body on the ball of her left foot, she kicked out again, sending another adversary sprawling to the ground.
One of the Nazis tried to reach out for her. She grabbed his wrist, twisted his arm all the way around and flipped him the ground. The man hit his head on the asphalt and was knocked unconscious.
Another villian threw a punch at her. Selina easily ducked the clumsy attempt and threw her own fist into the man's stomach. With the wind knocked out of this Nazi, it was quite easy for Selina to throw another punch, this one into the face, that put the man down.
One of the men tried to get up. He was hurt -- his right hand clamped to his chest. He tried to pull out a pistol from the waistband of his pants. But he was much too slow for the likes of Gotham City's Catwoman. A flying drop kick to the face put the man out for the count.
She stood for a moment, surveying the carnage she had wrought. She grabbed all the guns she could find and threw them into the back of the car. She looked behind the wheel of the car the five men had grouped around and found the keys were in the ignition. She leaned inside and shut the radio off.
Selina glanced at the President as he ran up to her with the little girl.
"Get into the backseat, Mr President, and keep the little girl down. We'll use the car to get into the school."
"Well, miss," said the President, "I don't know just how we'll work it, you an infamous jewel thief, you said, but --"
"But what, Mr President?" she asked, sliding behind the wheel.
"Well --" She heard the rear door slam, glanced into the rearview mirror. "I just think a Congressional Medal of Honor would look lovely around your neck."
She smiled and fired the ignition. "Thank you, Mr President." She chuckled to herself wondering what Batman would think about that.
***
The blue-hooded and caped adventurer known as The Atom joined Batman, Wildcat, Dr Mid-Nite and Mr Terrific around the table with General Pauley. Pauley wondered how the crimefighter could see and breathe because his face was totally obscured.
The five members of the Justice Society of America were alone in the tent beneath the yellow glare of a single bulb. Colonel Flagg had left for Washington. Pauley was holding back, waiting.
"Logically," Wildcat finally said, "the chances of False-Face's men in Reddington knowing False-Face's plans in Washington are highly remote. If there's a news blackout, likely they know nothing of it."
"Unless they have another contact source," Dr Mid-Nite interjected.
"But it couldn't be reliable," continued Wildcat. "How would False-Face know, for example, whether the government has some arrangement with the telephone company to suspend all communications or to switch all radio programming to prerecorded programs with no deejay chatter. Maybe there wouldn't be a way for False-Face to get word to these guys at all."
"We cut all telephone lines in and out of Reddington except a direct line to this tent," General Pauley agreed.
Batman had been listening, and now he spoke. "I think Wildcat is right. If we go on the basis of False-Face's track record, his obsession with secrecy, the villians in Reddington probably know something was to happen, but they don't know what or where."
"So you can bluff them, Batty?" Atom said.
Batman winced at the Atom's nickname for him. "Maybe," he nodded.
"But to convince them you're False-Face," General Pauley began.
"It's the only gamble we have. I speak German perfectly, and I can mimic the accent," Batman explained. "I know as much about False-Face as there is to know."
Wildcat interrupted, "When I fought him in the apartment in London --"
"When was this?" Pauley asked.
"Before the thing in Florida," Wildcat replied. He shifted his eyes to Dr Mid-Nite and the crimefighter flushed. "But there's no time for details. He got away during a fire that started. But he was tall, about Batman's height. I think you can pull it off."
"But I still don't understand how you can convince them you're False-Face," said Pauley.
"You just get those choppers on the ground, out of sight of the town, and draw your forces back to beyond ten miles of the city. All I need is one helicopter to fly me in, leave me there, then fly out," Batman said.
"I don't know," Pauley began.
"If it doesn't work," Mr Terrific said, "the other option is an assault. And that means they'll detonate the bomb laced with nerve gas, kill every man, woman and child in Reddington, and the President, too. And maybe the atomic 'football' figures in their plan. They may have the President pumped up on drugs right now and be getting the launch codes from him. Then we have World War III. And how long before some enterprising KGB agent finds out False-Face is holding the entire United States government hostage at a joint session of Congress? No, we don't have time for anything else. If Batman doesn't come back out in two hours, you do what you want and good luck with it. We'll help you."
Pauley's eyes had a yellow cast to them under the light of the bulb. His cheeks were sunken and a hint of gray-blond stubble highlighted his chin. He extended his right hand across the table to Batman. "I think you guys are crazy frolicking around in public in your underwear, but I respect you gentlemen. Good luck."
Batman took the general's hand. "Thank you."
***
Selina Kyle's borrowed nun's veil blew in the wind that rushed in through the open window of the Cadillac Fleetwood she had taken from the five gunmen. The double glass doors of the grammar school loomed ahead of her beyond the horseshoe-shaped driveway. The President of the United States, a pistol in each hand, was visible in the rearview mirror, and the little girl huddled on the rear floor.
Selina shouted over the roar of the Cadillac's motor, over the pulse of the wind, "Keep the little girl down, Mr President -- we're going right through the doors. And shoot anybody you see inside the school who has a gun! Don't take any chances!"
She stomped her foot down to the floorboard and cranked up her window. The car banged its way up the three low steps leading to the doors, scraping bottom and sending out a shower of sparks.
The big Cadillac's steering wheel jumped under her clenched fists as she fought to keep control, and she turned her face away and hunched down in the seat as the front end hit the doors. The glass-and-aluminum doors exploded as the car plowed its way through. A metal center post broke off between the doors, and for an instant she though it would impale her through the Cadillac's windshield. But it shot up and out of sight, over the mating point of the roofline and windshield.
The car careered down a small corridor and punched through another set of doors.
Selina saw classrooms on her right side, and the large opening of a lunchroom filled her left field of view. She cut the wheel hard left, half- surprised the steering still responded. The Cadillac swerved wildly after bouncing off a doorframe, upending and tossing aside lunchroom tables and folding chairs.
There were armed men running ahead of her. Young Sister Catherine, Sister Mary Albert and three other nuns were grabbing wildly for the children.
Directly ahead of her, on a table, sat the bomb. One of the Nazis held something in his hand. "Mr President, kill that man beside the bomb -- I can't drive and take him out at the same time, damn it!"
In the rearview mirror she saw him, like a marshal defending a stagecoach from marauding Indians, a revolver in each fist, wing shooting through the open rear passenger window behind her. The roar of guns discharging in the confined space of the car deafened her for an instant. The man beside the bomb lurched once, then reeled away from the impact of the slugs.
Desperately she fought the wheel of the skidding Cadillac as she tried to bring the big car to a halt before it skidded toward the bomb.
***
Selina Kyle looked down at the three men she had just rendered unconscious. Two of them would probably seek medical attention after they woke up. The President had wounded two more, including the one who had held the detonator for the bomb that had a canister of VX nerve gas attached to it that dominated the far end of the lunchroom. Sister Mary Albert had decked one man with a folding chair across his back and neck. And Sister Catherine -- Selina hadn't thought the young girl had had it in her -- had tripped one of the Nazis, taken his machine gun from him and hit him over the head with it.
Four more Nazi thugs had taken refuge in a fourth-grade classroom. The room had no windows, and Selina utilized an old Nazi ploy to get them to surrender. She connected a piece of tubing found in the kitchen by one of the nuns to the Cadillac's exhaust pipe, then shot out a hole in the classroom door and inserted the tubing. Avoiding fire from the inside room, she packed over the glass at the upper part of the classroom door and effectively sealed it with seat cushions taken from the teachers' chairs, then used rags to pack around the doorframe.
She ran the Cadillac's motor for ten minutes until the Nazis, choking, surrendered. The President had kept the men away from the door and from blocking the exhaust fumes by spraying out covering fire through an air vent opening from the next classroom.
Selina was tempted to let them die, the way the Nazis had Jews less than twenty years earlier, using automobile exhaust to gas them before the innovation of more efficient methods of mass extermination.
But she let them live, and now, with the other wounded men, they were bound and placed by each door and window opening, to give their comrades, who had encircled the school, second thoughts about shooting into the building.
The nuns had agreed to display weapons by the window and door openings, but they refused to fire them.
Selina Kyle and the President stood beside the wrecked front doors waiting. The President had personally freed the Air Force sergeant who served to protect the 'football' with the launch-code sequences. Neither the sergeant nor the briefcase had been harmed, and with a machine gun, he now supervised the rear defense of the school.
Selina began working at the pins to take the veil from her hair.
Sister Mary Albert spoke. "You would have made a good nun, Selina -- got a lot of guts. And a nun needs guts, child."
Selina felt herself smiling. "Thank you, Sister." She laughed and then said, "And you've got a lot of guts, too, Sister."
The chubby nun smiled.
The President spoke. "Ladies, we have the detonator, and until we learn otherwise, we should assume this is the only detonator that can make the bomb go off. So long as we can hold this position, there's a chance that either our forces assembled outside of Reddington will attack or the Secret Service agents will effect some sort of escape."
Better still," Selina Kyle noted, "I think we have all the children now -- would you agree, Sister?" and she looked at Sister Mary Albert.
"Every last one of them, including the babies. The third-grade classrooms were converted into nurseries, and some of the mothers are in charge of them. Sister Catherine went in and informed them when you and the President retook the school."
All right, then, there should be enough guns in this town that maybe the people will rise up and attack the Nazis," Selina concluded.
The President noted, "Fox overheard some of the Nazis say they had cleaned out the local gun shop -- left the weapons, but emptied all the boxes of ammunition and took the magazines from automatic pistols and semiautomatic rifles. The only guns that could be in the town would be things the citizens had hidden away. The Nazis collected all the privately held firearms they could find when they took over the town."
"All right," Selina Kyle began. "Then what we must do is try to convert the school's PA system to broadcast outside, to let the people know we have all the children safe and sound."
"Let's get started," the President said.
"The Principal's office is this way," Sister Catherine said.
***
The Public Address system had been connected to speakers feeding into each classroom. While the President and the Air Force sergeant manned the barricades, Selina, the nuns and some of the mothers from the third-grade classrooms converted to nurseries stripped the speakers from each room while Selina worked to rearrange the wiring system.
Their work was punctuated by sporadic gunfire and demands from some of the Nazis outside, but no serious attack took place in the half hour required to rearrange the speakers by the windows and doorways opening to the outside.
Selina had moved the speaker's master console to the front corridor near the smashed glass doors.
Behind cover to protect the system from gunfire, the President spoke: "Citizens of Reddington, this is the President of the United States. Because of the valiant efforts of Miss Selina Kyle and with the courageous assistance of the nuns, we have retaken the school, gained control of the detonator for the bomb that is laced with the VX nerve gas and overpowered the Nazis who threatened this community's children. It is now up to you. Your children are safe. Rise up and harass the Nazi invaders, attack when you can, hit and run, strike at their weakest points, force them to flee. Show these people that someone will stand up to them and they will be countered by the force of justice in the hearts of free men and women everywhere."
He set down the microphone, and turned to Selina Kyle. "Well, Miss Kyle, it looks like we wait and see, doesn't it?"
"Yes, Mr President, we wait and see."
The Nazis ringing the school seemed to be massing for an attack.
To be continued ...
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.
CHAPTER 6
There were five armed men outside the police station. A radio played loudly from a car near them. Perhaps that is what kept them occupied and unconcerned about what might had been happening inside the police station. The music was unpleasant to Selina. She wasn't fond of this newer music called rock. She preferred the opera.
"Ready, Mr President?" she whispered.
"Yes, as ready as I'll ever be, Miss -- Kyle was it?"
"Selina Kyle, Mr President."
She started ahead, moving like her namesake -- The Catwoman. She tried to narrow the distance so she could get all five men at once. At least one of them, a tall, red-haired man, was armed with a submachine gun. He would be first. The distance to the five men was now less than twenty yards.
The men were on the other side of the car that she approached. She knew what she was going to do.
At the distance of ten yards, she broke into a silent run and leaped. Her hands hit the top of the car roof and her body sprang upwards into the air with the grace of an Olympic gymnast. Her body spun once in the air and landed feet first into the chest of the man with the machine gun. He crumpled to the ground never knowing what hit him.
Selina landed on her feet, just like a cat. She kicked out with one leg and struck another thug in the chest, sending him into the side of the car, back first.
Spinning her body on the ball of her left foot, she kicked out again, sending another adversary sprawling to the ground.
One of the Nazis tried to reach out for her. She grabbed his wrist, twisted his arm all the way around and flipped him the ground. The man hit his head on the asphalt and was knocked unconscious.
Another villian threw a punch at her. Selina easily ducked the clumsy attempt and threw her own fist into the man's stomach. With the wind knocked out of this Nazi, it was quite easy for Selina to throw another punch, this one into the face, that put the man down.
One of the men tried to get up. He was hurt -- his right hand clamped to his chest. He tried to pull out a pistol from the waistband of his pants. But he was much too slow for the likes of Gotham City's Catwoman. A flying drop kick to the face put the man out for the count.
She stood for a moment, surveying the carnage she had wrought. She grabbed all the guns she could find and threw them into the back of the car. She looked behind the wheel of the car the five men had grouped around and found the keys were in the ignition. She leaned inside and shut the radio off.
Selina glanced at the President as he ran up to her with the little girl.
"Get into the backseat, Mr President, and keep the little girl down. We'll use the car to get into the school."
"Well, miss," said the President, "I don't know just how we'll work it, you an infamous jewel thief, you said, but --"
"But what, Mr President?" she asked, sliding behind the wheel.
"Well --" She heard the rear door slam, glanced into the rearview mirror. "I just think a Congressional Medal of Honor would look lovely around your neck."
She smiled and fired the ignition. "Thank you, Mr President." She chuckled to herself wondering what Batman would think about that.
***
The blue-hooded and caped adventurer known as The Atom joined Batman, Wildcat, Dr Mid-Nite and Mr Terrific around the table with General Pauley. Pauley wondered how the crimefighter could see and breathe because his face was totally obscured.
The five members of the Justice Society of America were alone in the tent beneath the yellow glare of a single bulb. Colonel Flagg had left for Washington. Pauley was holding back, waiting.
"Logically," Wildcat finally said, "the chances of False-Face's men in Reddington knowing False-Face's plans in Washington are highly remote. If there's a news blackout, likely they know nothing of it."
"Unless they have another contact source," Dr Mid-Nite interjected.
"But it couldn't be reliable," continued Wildcat. "How would False-Face know, for example, whether the government has some arrangement with the telephone company to suspend all communications or to switch all radio programming to prerecorded programs with no deejay chatter. Maybe there wouldn't be a way for False-Face to get word to these guys at all."
"We cut all telephone lines in and out of Reddington except a direct line to this tent," General Pauley agreed.
Batman had been listening, and now he spoke. "I think Wildcat is right. If we go on the basis of False-Face's track record, his obsession with secrecy, the villians in Reddington probably know something was to happen, but they don't know what or where."
"So you can bluff them, Batty?" Atom said.
Batman winced at the Atom's nickname for him. "Maybe," he nodded.
"But to convince them you're False-Face," General Pauley began.
"It's the only gamble we have. I speak German perfectly, and I can mimic the accent," Batman explained. "I know as much about False-Face as there is to know."
Wildcat interrupted, "When I fought him in the apartment in London --"
"When was this?" Pauley asked.
"Before the thing in Florida," Wildcat replied. He shifted his eyes to Dr Mid-Nite and the crimefighter flushed. "But there's no time for details. He got away during a fire that started. But he was tall, about Batman's height. I think you can pull it off."
"But I still don't understand how you can convince them you're False-Face," said Pauley.
"You just get those choppers on the ground, out of sight of the town, and draw your forces back to beyond ten miles of the city. All I need is one helicopter to fly me in, leave me there, then fly out," Batman said.
"I don't know," Pauley began.
"If it doesn't work," Mr Terrific said, "the other option is an assault. And that means they'll detonate the bomb laced with nerve gas, kill every man, woman and child in Reddington, and the President, too. And maybe the atomic 'football' figures in their plan. They may have the President pumped up on drugs right now and be getting the launch codes from him. Then we have World War III. And how long before some enterprising KGB agent finds out False-Face is holding the entire United States government hostage at a joint session of Congress? No, we don't have time for anything else. If Batman doesn't come back out in two hours, you do what you want and good luck with it. We'll help you."
Pauley's eyes had a yellow cast to them under the light of the bulb. His cheeks were sunken and a hint of gray-blond stubble highlighted his chin. He extended his right hand across the table to Batman. "I think you guys are crazy frolicking around in public in your underwear, but I respect you gentlemen. Good luck."
Batman took the general's hand. "Thank you."
***
Selina Kyle's borrowed nun's veil blew in the wind that rushed in through the open window of the Cadillac Fleetwood she had taken from the five gunmen. The double glass doors of the grammar school loomed ahead of her beyond the horseshoe-shaped driveway. The President of the United States, a pistol in each hand, was visible in the rearview mirror, and the little girl huddled on the rear floor.
Selina shouted over the roar of the Cadillac's motor, over the pulse of the wind, "Keep the little girl down, Mr President -- we're going right through the doors. And shoot anybody you see inside the school who has a gun! Don't take any chances!"
She stomped her foot down to the floorboard and cranked up her window. The car banged its way up the three low steps leading to the doors, scraping bottom and sending out a shower of sparks.
The big Cadillac's steering wheel jumped under her clenched fists as she fought to keep control, and she turned her face away and hunched down in the seat as the front end hit the doors. The glass-and-aluminum doors exploded as the car plowed its way through. A metal center post broke off between the doors, and for an instant she though it would impale her through the Cadillac's windshield. But it shot up and out of sight, over the mating point of the roofline and windshield.
The car careered down a small corridor and punched through another set of doors.
Selina saw classrooms on her right side, and the large opening of a lunchroom filled her left field of view. She cut the wheel hard left, half- surprised the steering still responded. The Cadillac swerved wildly after bouncing off a doorframe, upending and tossing aside lunchroom tables and folding chairs.
There were armed men running ahead of her. Young Sister Catherine, Sister Mary Albert and three other nuns were grabbing wildly for the children.
Directly ahead of her, on a table, sat the bomb. One of the Nazis held something in his hand. "Mr President, kill that man beside the bomb -- I can't drive and take him out at the same time, damn it!"
In the rearview mirror she saw him, like a marshal defending a stagecoach from marauding Indians, a revolver in each fist, wing shooting through the open rear passenger window behind her. The roar of guns discharging in the confined space of the car deafened her for an instant. The man beside the bomb lurched once, then reeled away from the impact of the slugs.
Desperately she fought the wheel of the skidding Cadillac as she tried to bring the big car to a halt before it skidded toward the bomb.
***
Selina Kyle looked down at the three men she had just rendered unconscious. Two of them would probably seek medical attention after they woke up. The President had wounded two more, including the one who had held the detonator for the bomb that had a canister of VX nerve gas attached to it that dominated the far end of the lunchroom. Sister Mary Albert had decked one man with a folding chair across his back and neck. And Sister Catherine -- Selina hadn't thought the young girl had had it in her -- had tripped one of the Nazis, taken his machine gun from him and hit him over the head with it.
Four more Nazi thugs had taken refuge in a fourth-grade classroom. The room had no windows, and Selina utilized an old Nazi ploy to get them to surrender. She connected a piece of tubing found in the kitchen by one of the nuns to the Cadillac's exhaust pipe, then shot out a hole in the classroom door and inserted the tubing. Avoiding fire from the inside room, she packed over the glass at the upper part of the classroom door and effectively sealed it with seat cushions taken from the teachers' chairs, then used rags to pack around the doorframe.
She ran the Cadillac's motor for ten minutes until the Nazis, choking, surrendered. The President had kept the men away from the door and from blocking the exhaust fumes by spraying out covering fire through an air vent opening from the next classroom.
Selina was tempted to let them die, the way the Nazis had Jews less than twenty years earlier, using automobile exhaust to gas them before the innovation of more efficient methods of mass extermination.
But she let them live, and now, with the other wounded men, they were bound and placed by each door and window opening, to give their comrades, who had encircled the school, second thoughts about shooting into the building.
The nuns had agreed to display weapons by the window and door openings, but they refused to fire them.
Selina Kyle and the President stood beside the wrecked front doors waiting. The President had personally freed the Air Force sergeant who served to protect the 'football' with the launch-code sequences. Neither the sergeant nor the briefcase had been harmed, and with a machine gun, he now supervised the rear defense of the school.
Selina began working at the pins to take the veil from her hair.
Sister Mary Albert spoke. "You would have made a good nun, Selina -- got a lot of guts. And a nun needs guts, child."
Selina felt herself smiling. "Thank you, Sister." She laughed and then said, "And you've got a lot of guts, too, Sister."
The chubby nun smiled.
The President spoke. "Ladies, we have the detonator, and until we learn otherwise, we should assume this is the only detonator that can make the bomb go off. So long as we can hold this position, there's a chance that either our forces assembled outside of Reddington will attack or the Secret Service agents will effect some sort of escape."
Better still," Selina Kyle noted, "I think we have all the children now -- would you agree, Sister?" and she looked at Sister Mary Albert.
"Every last one of them, including the babies. The third-grade classrooms were converted into nurseries, and some of the mothers are in charge of them. Sister Catherine went in and informed them when you and the President retook the school."
All right, then, there should be enough guns in this town that maybe the people will rise up and attack the Nazis," Selina concluded.
The President noted, "Fox overheard some of the Nazis say they had cleaned out the local gun shop -- left the weapons, but emptied all the boxes of ammunition and took the magazines from automatic pistols and semiautomatic rifles. The only guns that could be in the town would be things the citizens had hidden away. The Nazis collected all the privately held firearms they could find when they took over the town."
"All right," Selina Kyle began. "Then what we must do is try to convert the school's PA system to broadcast outside, to let the people know we have all the children safe and sound."
"Let's get started," the President said.
"The Principal's office is this way," Sister Catherine said.
***
The Public Address system had been connected to speakers feeding into each classroom. While the President and the Air Force sergeant manned the barricades, Selina, the nuns and some of the mothers from the third-grade classrooms converted to nurseries stripped the speakers from each room while Selina worked to rearrange the wiring system.
Their work was punctuated by sporadic gunfire and demands from some of the Nazis outside, but no serious attack took place in the half hour required to rearrange the speakers by the windows and doorways opening to the outside.
Selina had moved the speaker's master console to the front corridor near the smashed glass doors.
Behind cover to protect the system from gunfire, the President spoke: "Citizens of Reddington, this is the President of the United States. Because of the valiant efforts of Miss Selina Kyle and with the courageous assistance of the nuns, we have retaken the school, gained control of the detonator for the bomb that is laced with the VX nerve gas and overpowered the Nazis who threatened this community's children. It is now up to you. Your children are safe. Rise up and harass the Nazi invaders, attack when you can, hit and run, strike at their weakest points, force them to flee. Show these people that someone will stand up to them and they will be countered by the force of justice in the hearts of free men and women everywhere."
He set down the microphone, and turned to Selina Kyle. "Well, Miss Kyle, it looks like we wait and see, doesn't it?"
"Yes, Mr President, we wait and see."
The Nazis ringing the school seemed to be massing for an attack.
To be continued ...
