Batman and the associated characters are owned by DC. James Bond and the associated characters were created by Ian Fleming. With thanks to Cmar for beta reading this for me and thanks to all the reviewers and readers so far! All reviews welcome.

Golden Bat – Chapter Twenty-Three

Damian Alvey walked into the police station. He had no need to look around. Not now.

The nano-droids that were repairing the shotgun wounds to his chest were feeding him information all about the police station. There was not a person there he was not aware of.

Not a person there who was not dying from the nano-droid plague he was carrying.

The boy Tim was dying slowly as were all of them. However if he concentrated on any one person, then the nano-droids would kill quickly.

A police officer raised a gun to him and Alvey concentrated on him. He could feed every single nano-droid into every cell of his body. The man collapsed in front of him.

He saw Alfred and Tim make their escape deeper into the station.

He chuckled to himself. They could not escape him. They were both dying slowly now. He controlled their lives in the palm of his hand. If he willed it now he could kill both of them as easily as squashing a fly.

A police officer raised a shotgun to him and he grabbed it and crushed it. Alvey froze as an image appeared in his vision. Speen. The killer of his family. If it weren't for him he would have a normal life. A happy life. He was tempted to send in a stream of nano-droids to kill him now.

No. That was the easy way. He would kill him hand to hand. Make him beg for his life and then tear his soul away from him piece by piece.

The door to the holding cells in the police station was reinforced steel. It might as well have been paper as he tore through it.

Speen would pay for this…

Batman looked at his arm. He slowly moved a hand towards his arm that was crawling with poisonous spiders.

He controlled his breathing and movement. The spiders were still crawling unhurriedly up his arm. With his free hand he gently flicked off one of the spiders.

One was just approaching his sleeve. He pressed his sleeve down to stop it crawling further up his arm and flicked it off as well.

The remaining spider sensed something was wrong and prepared to bite him. Milliseconds before the venom would have got into his veins Batman picked it up accidentally squashing it as he did.

He examined the threat curiously and looked down at Bond who was facing off with Kirby. .

He gave himself a rare smile and flicked the spider into space…

Kirby pointed the gun at Bond's feet and then screamed as a small brown spider landed on his arm. Bond kicked at Kirby, disarming him and then punched him solidly in the jaw.

Batman landed next to Bond, light as a feather.

"Any problems?" Asked Batman.

"No not really."

"Where's Davies?"

"He's eerrm, sleeping," said Bond.

"Sleeping? Really?"

Bond grinned. "Well, he is now."

Batman immediately looked up, on his face a look of concentration.

"What is it?"

"Helicopters," said Batman. "We'd better get out of here."

"I'll get Davies." Bond ran through the trees and picked up the still sleeping pilot.

Batman was standing there. "Sleeping eh?"

Bond looked slightly shifty. "He was tired."

"The knock on the head happened afterwards, did it?"

"Possibly." He looked at his watch. "We've got under six hours to go."

One of the helicopters passed overhead and a small canister left it. It span in midair and a strange sticky liquid was sprayed over the jungle behind them.

BOOM!

The jungle erupted in flames behind them.

More helicopters passed overhead and flames began to leap and dance up all around them.

Speen opened one bleary eye as a crashing and screaming sound invaded his hearing.

Somebody was coming.

Somebody strong.

Judging by the screaming sounds he was not in the best of tempers either. Speen slowly got to his feet. The aspirins were doing their work and the top of his head no longer felt like a small but industrious midget was trying to remove it with a tin opener.

BANG!

The steel door in front of them buckled under the force.

Dane was sweating with fear. "Who the hell is that, Mr Speen?"

BANG!

"Did you order a pizza?"

"No," Dane shuddered. "I'm scared, Mr Speen."

"Relax, boy. There is nothing we can do now. You should only be scared if you have a choice." Speen thought for a moment, his expression calm and motionless, compared with the fear-struck features of Dane. "It might be room service?"

BANG!

"I don't think it's room service, Mr Speen!"

BANG!

Speen looked over the cell with interest. "Shame, although to be honest it does need it. I mean the staff here do not care about their work."

BANG! Crack.

"They haven't even turned over the ends of the toilet paper."

BANG! CRACK!

He sniffed a couple of times. "They haven't even used air fresheners in this place." He ran a finger down the side of the steel bed.

BANG! CRACK! CRACK!

"Look at this dust!"

The door cracked down the middle and a furious Alvey was framed in the ruins. "SPEEN! YOU DIE!"

Speen gave a smile. "Good morning! You must be the maid. I don't like to complain but this place hasn't been dusted in a dog's age."

Alvey reached through the battered remains of the door and tried to grab Speen by the throat.

Dane grabbed Alvey round the neck as he was concentrating on Speen and then collapsed, going a strange mottled red colour as Alvey sent a concentrated stream of nano-droids into him to kill him.

"Dane? Dane my boy?" Speen went pale as he looked down. "You've killed him! You bastard!" Using his artificial arm he punched Alvey squarely on the chin and sent him flying out of his cell. He landed with such force on the door opposite him that the door caved in around him.

Speen leapt out of the ruined doorway and punched Alvey again as he struggled to get to his feet.

"Bastard!"

His titanium alloy arm gave him a great strength and his every strike was conducted by a series of processors all running on a thin filigree of gold circuits giving him unparalleled strength and lightning speed.

"Bastard!" he spat again at Alvey, punching him again and again. Alvey was being pushed back farther and farther down the cell corridor, each punch throwing him back ten feet and warping his features beyond measure.

Speen was beyond fury. Beyond anger and in a hell of his own making. He was rarely angry. In his job being angry meant you got involved, and when you got involved you got careless, and when you got careless you died.

Speen was angry. Speen was getting involved. Speen was getting careless.

"Bastard!" He spat out the invective. True, he told himself he did not care about Dane, and he always put him down and made fun of him, but he was a friend, and in his business friends were a rare commodity.

Each punch was breaking and crunching Alvey's bones.

Were Alvey still human they would have killed him. They would have killed him many times over.

Alvey was not human.

Far from it.

He grabbed Speen's arm and crashed him into a wall.

Speen was stunned; a lesser man would have collapsed at the blow, and only his anger and adrenaline made him carry on fighting. Blood was pouring down his face from his broken nose and he carried on punching Alvey.

Alvey was weakening from the blows. Each time Speen punched him the blows took that little bit longer to repair. He concentrated on Speen.

"Bastard!" said Speen. But he was weakening himself. The nano-droids were infecting him. It was a war of attrition, which of them could survive the most damage.

He punched again at Alvey, trying to knock him out. The punches that would have made a hole through a brick wall and felled a prizefighter were starting to lose their power.

Alvey's face was a rictus of blood. As Speen looked at him his nose straightened out and his skull reformed to the proper shape.

Speen was weakening. He lunged once more at Alvey, but he was slow and the other man caught his metal arm with one hand and ripped his artificial arm from him.

Speen screamed with pain as the wires that ran up to his brain were pulled from him. The last thing he saw before he died was Alvey's fist beating down at him…

Bond and Bruce Wayne ran through the jungle as if the very gates of hell had been opened behind them, and in a sense they had been.

Napalm as a weapon was first created in the Second World War. It was found that gasoline burnt itself out too quickly to be an effective incendiary device. What the military wanted was a substance that burnt just as easily but was slower burning.

They found it.

In spades.

It was a mixture of naphthenic and aliphatic carboxylic acids and gasoline. This made it more directional and slower burning. Regiments that stood firm in the face of bullets and shells ran in fear when faced with this weapon that could boil water or scorch people to death from dozens of feet away.

It burns at a temperature of 1000 degrees centigrade, and although the United Nations banned this horrific substance in 1980, sadly Mr Blofeld and his cohorts were not invited to sign this agreement.

Blofeld had stockpiles of this weapon.

Although to be fair to him he was trying to get rid of it as soon as possible. It was unfortunate for James Bond and Bruce Wayne that he had chosen the particular patch of jungle they were running through to offload it in.

The leaves crackled, hissed and burned around them as they ran from the conflagration behind them. The flames were a hundred feet away but the temperature travelled.

Oh yes, it travelled. Above their heads parrots fell dead from the sky and monkeys slipped from their perch as they roasted.

Bond and Wayne ran on, their very clothes smouldering.

"We're going too damn slow!" said Bond, patting at clothes as they started to smoulder.

Batman grabbed Bond and pulled out a grappling gun. "Hang on!"

The grappling claw buried itself into a tree a hundred feet away and the motor whined as it carried all three of them into the air and they swung through the trees.

The area they just left exploded in flames. As they reached the top of the arc Bond reached down to his belt for his own grappling hook and pointed it at the nearest helicopter that was chasing them down.

The grappling hook buried itself into the armoured metal base of the helicopter and carried Bond high up through the canopy, tearing him through the leaves and branches, towards the metal dealer of death.

Bond looked behind him and could see the jungle was a mass of flame. He grabbed hold of the support strut and looked up to see a huge machine gun pointing out the side.

He looked at the second helicopter and could see that Batman had dropped Davies and was just pulling himself up to that one as well.

He drew his gun from his holster and grinned to himself as the armoured military helicopter flew in circles dropping canister of napalm behind him. Beneath him was the jungle that had been turned into a furnace and above him was armoured helicopter filled with half a dozen heavily armed soldiers.

He was about to prove why he was the best in the business…

Thirty-five miles from Gotham is an old hotel in a run down suburb of a small village called Lawrenceville, named after a French officer who helped the Americans against the English in the Civil War.

It's the kind of town that if you want some milk after 7 pm you might as well drive the thirty-five miles back to Gotham. You could call it a one-horse town but the horse would have died of boredom years ago.

People were always surprised that anyone would build a hotel in such a town. They never got any tourists or even anyone on business trips; it was so far off the beaten track. The old hotel still got a steady stream of visitors though, much to the bemusement of the locals.

They would have been more surprised if they knew that the hotel was not a hotel but a front for a technologically advanced but highly secretive government department called Cadmus. This curious name (named from the founder of Thebes) hides an organisation with huge amounts of information and alien technology.

Information on heroes past and present.

In some cases where they have successfully obtained it, the DNA of heroes.

The nano-droids had poured into this building. The people who manned it had evacuated the place due to the nano plague. The nanos got into computer systems. Rifled through data files and found the equivalent of gold. Twenty-four carat gold.

Superman's DNA.

When he was presumed killed by the Doomsday monster, Cadmus brought his body to be examined and to have his DNA extracted. They weren't completely successful but with what they had they could make a man capable of flying.

Super strength.

Bullet proof.

Impervious to physical harm.

They fed this information back to the nanos in Alvey and they immediately begin to work on his DNA…

Alvey got to his feet after killing Speen and Dane, and smiled to himself. He felt a great strength fill his body. A policeman started shooting at him. He could see the bullets approach him seemingly at a snail's pace. It was a matter of ease to bat one of them out of the way with his hand. The others he just let hit him. It did not seem to matter anymore.

Instead of the bullets pushing him back and him having to wait several agonising seconds for the healing to start, the bullets bounced off him.

He seemed to blur and the policeman was thrown thirty feet out of the station entrance and through a fifth floor window across the street.

He concentrated and could see all the people in the police station. They were all dying, all of them. He could see Alfred and Tim on the second floor of the police station. Tim was unconscious and Alfred had started the sweats that indicated the start of the nano-plague. With just a thought he could send in the stream of nano-droids to kill them, or send a heat beam to pulverise them.

Suddenly a new image appeared in front of him. There were millions of nano-droids being held in a magnetic containment field in Colombia. They were showing him images.

Blofeld.

Speen had just been a puppet of Blofeld. He would turn Gotham into a wasteland first and then release his creatures in Colombia.

More images appeared in front of him. The nano-droids were destroying the cruise missile capabilities of American submarines. More and moreinformation appeared in his brain, including about his new skills.

He could fly now.

Curiously that information did not surprise him.

Blofeld had the power to kill the nano-droids in Gotham. A picture appeared in his mind of Bond and Batman fighting soldiers in a helicopter. They were going to stop Blofeld and prevent his revenge on Gotham.

The world would pay for what it had done to him and now he had the power to demand payback. In full.

He could leave Gotham to his multiplying nano-droids. Now he would hunt down Bond, Batman and Blofeld. Blofeld would have an exquisite death.

Alvey walked into the streets of Gotham, his every step crushing the paving slabs beneath him to dust. He bent his legs and leapt into the air with the speed of a missile towards Colombia and vengeance…

The wind was whistling past Batman as he clung onto the underside of the helicopter. The heat from the furnace below was carrying huge great sparks and even some twigs that were on fire. The blades of the helicopter were setting up a huge vortex below him, making it difficult to hang on, and the heated air made it difficult to breathe.

Don't complain. Just do it.

He grabbed the support strut and swung himself into the helicopter.

A bullet whistled over his head as he landed in the aircraft. The four men inside, all scarred and carrying AK47's skittered back in fear as he came in. Good, they were afraid of him. With the flames surrounding them and his black mask it looked like the devil had come to claim his progeny.

The men were all veterans of FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia) before Blofeld took them under his wing. One of them aimed his gun at Batman but a black booted foot caught him in the stomach and sent him back coughing.

The pilot looked back at what had just landed in the back of his helicopter and swore in fear. A pulse of heat from the furnace below knocked the helicopter sideways and made him jerk on the controls, sending it spinning.

The changing centre of gravity made standing on the deck impossible for all but Batman. The helicopter swayed and swung. One moment the floor was like a wall and below was just the hell that was the jungle.

There was a small patch of unburnt jungle below that Batman could see where he had left Davies, on a rock in the middle of a large stream. An oasis in the middle of the fire storm.

A terrified thug dropped out below him. Batman let go of his hold in the helicopter and grabbed the man and threw him back into the now quieter helicopter and swung himself easily back in.

One of the men, who had somehow kept hold of his gun, fired his AK47 at Batman. He twisted impossibly in the small space and rolled around the heavy machine gun strapped into the side of the helicopter, kicking the gun out of his hand.

The helicopter lurched to one side.

Batman knocked out the thug and quickly tied him to the other unconscious men.

The engine of the helicopter started groaning in mortal agony.

Batman looked at the pilot. The back of his seat had a small hole in it but the windscreen was covered in blood showing him the story.

The helicopter started its inexorable death dive towards the furnace below…