Batman/Resident Evil: The Gotham Protocol
Chapter 9
By: Christopher W. Blaine
e-mail: darth_yoshi@yahoo.com
DISCLAIMER: Resident Evil™ is a registered product of Capcom Inc./Batman™ is a registered product of DC Comics Inc. Neither of these properties is used here with permission. This original story idea is ©2003 by Christopher W. Blaine.
Rebecca dropped the clip out of her pistol and checked it. Satisfied that she had enough ammunition for the time being, she slammed it home and locked a round in the chamber. Batgirl said nothing; the time for lectures was long past. While the young hero shared many of Batman's views, she understood and accepted that there were times that people not trained as well as the "Bat Family" had to resort to other methods to defend themselves.
Batgirl was impressed with the restraint Rebecca demonstrated with the use of her weapon. So many people would fire off every round they had to deal with the walking dead. Did that mean Rebecca was a true professional or worse, was she so used to the horror of the zombies that it didn't shock her anymore?
They had made one more round through the barracks just to make sure they left no stone unturned and then exited the building. Rebecca locked the door as they left. "Wouldn't want anyone to stumble in there. Lord only knows what sort of biohazards are still in there!"
"Should we contact the Gotham HazMat team?" Batgirl asked, concern in her voice.
Rebecca shook her head. "Not until we secure the area. There's more zombies around, believe me. Most likely locked up, possibly with some still live humans. Plus Batman said something about explosives…"
"You're right," Batgirl said and they crept over to the next building. "I wonder, if they use sufficient demolitions to render this place to dust, would there be a chance of hazardous materials getting into the air?"
The S.T.A.R.s medic thought about it for a moment as she watched Batgirl put her head to the wall. Hearing nothing, they continued on. "The virus, or at least most of the strains I've encountered, does not last long in the air. I would be concerned about the water table though; the virus seems to thrive in aquatic environments." Batgirl cast a glance towards the on-site sewage treatment plant.
"We'll check there next," she said, pointing to it. It didn't seem to be active and there was no strange odor in the air, but there was no sense in not being careful. Batgirl silently made conversation as they moved along. "Does the virus only affect humans?"
"No…beware of dogs," Rebecca said. As if she were clairvoyant, she suddenly stopped and pointed. There were three distinct silhouettes coming out from a small shack next to the treatment plant. They were canine. "Crap," she said as the dogs started to move closer.
Batgirl did not relish combating innocent animals but when the first one slowly came into view, she changed her mind. Its skin was pulled back and rotted in many areas. Most of the lower jaw was skinless, held together by sinewy strands of brown tissue. The tongue hung out a hole in the jaw and it dripped what looked to be blood.
Its companions were in no better shape; one even had a bloated stomach that drug on the ground with an alarming squishy sound. The alpha dog tried to growl, but it came out like something drowning and it hacked up green bile from its lungs. Rebecca commented that they were in the final stages of the disease, the point where complete breakdown was only hours away. "They are at their most infectious," she said. "Watch the teeth."
Batgirl nodded and the two women slowly moved apart, the dogs watching them both, their diseased minds trying to determine fight or flight. When the farthest one hunkered down and started to come towards Batgirl, she pulled out her batarang and let it fly. The heavy weapon whirled through the air and something deep inside the dog's limited mind took over. It jumped into the air and tried to grab the batarang of the air like it was a razor-sharp Frisbee. The weapon cut the animal's skull in half, severing what was life of its brain from the spinal cord.
With a wet thump, the animal fell to the ground. The other dogs immediately set upon the carcass. Rebecca pulled her weapon and flipped the safety off. Carefully, she lined up on one of the dogs as it feasted on the spoiled meat of its comrade. She looked to Batgirl, who simply turned away. A squeeze of the trigger killed the first one, while two more shots took down the last.
The air was now filled with the scent of fresh death. Rebecca holstered the pistol and the two resumed their trek to the sewage plant. When they got there, they found a cesspool of filth and grime. It was obvious that the plant had not been running for a long while. "They must have bribed the EPA inspector," Rebecca announced.
"Or killed him," Batgirl offered. She refused to get too close to the filth, but Rebecca moved to the pool's edge in order to obtain a sample.
"I doubt it," Rebecca said as she squatted down and carefully put a small glass tube in the liquid. "Umbrella really does prefer to bribe government officials. In the end, it helps them more than hinders them."
"They try to kill S.T.A.R.s agents…"
Rebecca nodded slowly. "At the Spencer Estate, they killed my entire team, the Bravos. That was unexpected, though. Their intent was to buy off the top agents and let them control the lower ones."
"Why is it that you do not go to the press?" Batgirl asked, suddenly curious.
"With what? We need hard evidence, not just a few bodies and some wild stories. Umbrella has trillions of dollars and a million lawyers. People are willing to believe a lie more than the truth unless the truth is so awful it cannot be forgotten." Rebecca finished gathering her sample and placed it inside a small fanny pack. "There were many people who believed that the concentration camps in World War 2 were a hoax until the allies invaded Germany."
Batgirl knew she was correct and became even more determined to try and help the S.T.A.R.s get what they needed. She moved over to the small shack and gave it a quick scan. It was darker here than ion some of the other spots on the grounds and she noted that they were near the road that led to the back of the office building. She switched to her night-vision lenses and immediately picked up on a strange object near the pumping station.
Moving quickly, she scrambled over a small fence and landed near the object. It was a bomb. Rebecca was soon behind her. "Can you diffuse it?" she asked.
Batgirl shrugged. "I'll contact Oracle," she said as she re-established her link with the mysterious cyber-hero. After explaining the situation, Oracle ordered her to switch her cowl lenses to transmit. In her apartment in Gotham City, Barbara Gordon, the woman who was really Oracle and the original Batgirl, watched on the monitor. Through the magic of science and technology, she was able to view what her younger friend was looking at.
"This is beyond anything I've ever seen," Oracle told her. "Hold on while I connect to the Cave." There was a pause and Rebecca took the opportunity to look around the shack. She found a dissolving corpse of another dog. Satisfied that there were no others ready to leap out at them, she returned to Batgirl who was conferring with Arsenal.
"Hell, yeah," the archer said from several miles away. "I can tell you how to disarm it, but I have some really bad news. That's only one on a link." He went on to explain that years before, when he had been a government agent with Checkmate, he had been given extensive instruction on bombs. "That's a top of the line job, mercenary-type stuff. Probably set up by this Vandross guy that Nightwing is playing footsy with."
Nightwing caught the boot in the jaw and he went down again, fearing that he would soon be spitting teeth. "I told you to stay away, boy," Vandross said calmly as he looked down at the hero. Nightwing started to struggle to his feet and the mercenary grinned. "Damn you've got brass ones," he said as a compliment.
If the hero was grateful, he didn't show it. As he stood and wiped the blood away from his lip, he brought his fists up again. He was a little shaky on his feet and fighting in the close confines of a university building passageway wasn't ideal for a man accustomed to combat in the open, but he was determined to stop the mysterious Umbrella soldier. "I will not let you kill another person," Nightwing told him.
Vandross sighed and put his arms to his sides. "All right, little man, take your best shot."
Nightwing didn't even pause. He landed a right hook and followed it up with a quick left. They were blows that would knock out most professional boxers. Vandross simply smiled. "I don't feel pain," he said as Nightwing kicked him in the groin. The mercenary yawned. "Nope."
Stepping back, Nightwing reevaluated his situation. "You're Kryptonian, aren't you?" he guessed. It was the only thing that made sense. He had seen the vision powers and now there was invulnerability.
"Partially; my DNA has been altered with samples of Superman's very own genetic structure," Vandross said, seemingly proud of it. Nightwing took another swing, but he dodged it and gave the hero a knock in the back of the head with his elbow. "As I said, you don't want to cross me, boy."
Nightwing spun around, dropped and tried a foot sweep, but his adversary simply jumped up and away. As he landed, Vandross reached into his black trench coat and grabbed a bolo. Before he could tell what was happening, Nightwing found his legs trapped in the line.
He fell hard onto the cold tile and the air rushed from his lungs. "I've been doing this sort of thing for years, boy; I'm not about to be stopped by an apprentice."
"I'm so going to enjoy putting you in prison," was the terse reply. Nightwing struggled against the bonds, more angry with himself than with Vandross. The mercenary made no move to exploit his advantage, treating Nightwing like he was a bad child as opposed to someone who was a real threat.
"You are trying my patience; like I said, I don't want the Batman coming after me…"
"And like I said, I'm your immediate problem," Nightwing responded.
Vandross shook his head and stepped over the hero. Nightwing went for his knees, but Vandross kicked him back, loosening some more teeth. Nightwing then felt the darkness moving in to swallow him and then he felt nothing.
"Damn, he is fine up close," a disembodied voice called out as Nightwing started to return to the world of the awakened. He opened his eyes slowly to see two figures standing over him. One of them was a little too close and smiling. "I think he's awake!"
The other figure bounced and Nightwing immediately recognized it as female; most likely they were both students. They had untied him from the bolo and he started to rise. The second figure, which turned out to be male, helped him to his feet. "Gosh, what big muscles he has," the man said.
Nightwing shook his head, but said nothing immediately. His jaw was sore; in fact, he was sore all over. He started to step forward, but tripped. The male student grabbed him, while the girl gasped. "Easy, big guy," the male said. "You've taken quite a beating."
"Do you need a doctor?" the girl asked.
"Massage?" the man asked.
Nightwing thanked them, saying he was fine and managed to break free of the man's grasp. He started to stumble down the hallway, telling them to contact campus security. He glanced up at a clock and realized he was most likely too late. He had been out cold for over a half hour.
When he finally reached the lab that held the former partner of Kirk Langstrom, he found her dead from a broken neck. Nothing fancy about it, just a simple execution. He knelt next to the body and sighed, finally pulling out his radio transmitter. "Babs?" Nightwing said silently.
"Here, loverboy," was the response. Over the many years they had known each other, Oracle and Nightwing had danced many times in the ballroom of romance. Currently, they were not a couple, but their friendship and feelings for each other went very deep still. "You'll be happy to know that I've got Dinah coming out to get the Huntress."
Dinah was the real name of the Black Canary, a hero that worked with Oracle often in the Birds of Prey, a semi-private super-hero group. She was also the former girlfriend of Green Arrow. Most of all, she was a trusted ally. The fact that she was coming in to get the Huntress made Nightwing feel a little better. "I wasn't able to save my target," he announced.
There was a brief pause. "Don't feel too bad, according to the information I've gotten, this Vandross is as dangerous as Deathstroke."
Even though she couldn't see him, he shook his head anyway. "That doesn't matter; he's the bad guy and I'm the good guy." He looked again at the corpse, realizing that the dead woman had most likely been a morally challenged individual if you considered whom she had been working for, but it didn't matter. Like the Batman, Nightwing did not make any life worth more than another. A life was a life.
The fact that she had not been killed in the same way as Dr. Perot told the hero something. "He's in a hurry now," he commented.
"No doubt on his way to Umbrella labs that Batman is looking into," Oracle replied. She then filled Nightwing in on what was going on there, including the bomb that Batgirl had found.
Nightwing cursed silently. "Then I'm going to wait here and try to talk to Commissioner Gordon privately." It was ironic that he had to do that when Oracle was actually the daughter of the veteran police officer. Because of the nature of being a super-hero with a secret identity, they could not use her as a link to Gotham City law enforcement without jeopardizing their entire operation. "Is Batgirl confident she can disarm the bomb?"
"Arsenal is but he's afraid they won't be able to get to all of them." There was a brief pause and Nightwing found himself speaking to Arsenal.
"Hey, Wingster," Arsenal said cheerfully. "No problem with that bomb and Batgirl is having Rebecca scout for some more. There is a possibly benefit to the type of explosives they're using, though. Without being there exactly, I can't tell, but if they hooked up the explosives to run off of one trigger, then disabling the first one may have disabled them all."
Nightwing saw red and blue flashing lights outside the window and sighed. "You have to be there to check?"
"No, but we'll need to find at least one more bomb for me to be sure," Arsenal replied.
Nightwing asked to be kept updated on the situation and then signed off, replacing the radio into his utility belt. He rubbed his sore jaw, realizing that he had underestimated Vandross. He had expected the man to try to kill him, but instead the mercenary seemed more intent on just embarrassing him.
He also thought about what Vandross had said about having some Kryptonian DNA. What exactly did that mean? He knew that Umbrella had been looking at creating metahumans; that was no secret. Many successful technology companies were involved in such activities and it wasn't considered illegal. Abuse of a corpse or experimenting on non-volunteers was.
As the sirens grew louder, Nightwing slowly made a circuit of the lab. It was a typical university lab, nothing strange. The instructor's desk had been rifled and there was a laptop sitting on top of it. He checked it to find that the hard drive had been taken out. There was no computer case either. Vandross had grabbed all of her important personal items.
He checked the file cabinet and found only school-related items. There was no way he could get to her private office before the police and campus security arrived. He didn't expect to find anything useful and so he made his way back to the body. He searched it and was surprised to find a hand-held computer.
He turned it on only to find it was passworded and he would have to give it to Oracle. By taking it, he was violating the law, but if it saved lives in the end, it would be worth it.
A few minutes later, he heard voices and footsteps coming down the hallway outside the lab and he stood up, trying to appear somewhat in control of the situation. He was sure his body was as black and blue as his costume. Three figures entered the room, all dressed in paramilitary gear. They weren't campus security, nor were they GCPD S.W.A.T. Nightwing had grown up around the cops of this city and he practically knew all of them by face, but these three were strangers.
There were two men, large military types with buzzcuts and permanent scowls. They were holding M-16 rifles. The obvious leader was a small, yet stunningly beautiful woman of Asian descent carrying a very large pistol. She gave Nightwing a once over and then glanced down at the body.
Her eyes went back to Nightwing and he straightened. He recognized the patch on her arm. "I'm Sheri Yokama, Metropolis S.T.A.R.s; what the hell are you doing here?"
"A little out of your jurisdiction, aren't you?" Nightwing said. The two men stepped forward and pointed their rifles at Nightwing's chest. He put his hands up.
"We're federal agents, the whole damn country is our jurisdiction," she replied. Her face suddenly took on a menacing visage and she went from desirable to frightening. "I'll ask one more time and then I'm taking you into custody, hero."
"I'll give my story to the locals when they get here," was the response.
One of the men locked a round in the chamber of their rifle. "Wrong answer, smart-ass."