Batman and the associated characters are owned by DC. With grateful thanks for cmar for beta reading this chapter and thanks for all the reviews so far! All reviews welcome!
Chapter Ten – Batman – Time of the Wolf
There are several ways to deal with a man with a gun. My own favourite method is a brick wall, a heavily armed swat team and an ocean in the way. If the gun ejects a cartridge it is possible to jam the exit point of the cartridge, jamming the weapon. It is also possible via something called joint manipulation (not something you smoke at college) to bend fingers and thumbs the way they shouldn't go to make them drop the gun. Or it is even possible to press the centre of the hand forcefully; this hits a nerve cluster and makes the fingers open.
All these methods and dozens more besides, the Batman knew and had tried more times than he cared to remember. None of them would work against a man with the strength of Superman who had an energy weapon melded into his very arm.
The Cyborg fired, a stream of glowing energy heading towards where the Batman was standing. The relevant word being 'was'. He leapt into the air and twisted impossibly to land behind the Cyborg.
The front of the bank exploded in a vivid red explosion. Bricks and mortar went flying in parabolic curves, smashing windows and cars. Bits of paper wafted down over the waiting police line.
Batman lanced out a leg at knee height to the Cyborg to try and cripple him.
A pain lanced through his leg.
It was like kicking concrete.
The Cyborg whirled around and pushed the Batman back through the now open back of the bank and hundreds of feet into the air…
Alfred sat down heavily at the table. His vision was starting to blur. What could be wrong?
Just need some sleep, that's all. Just some sleep.
Batman was flying through the air, uncontrollably. If he was to hit a building at this speed, there would be nothing recognisable left of him.
He adopted the classic skydiver position and twisted in mid air to see where he was going.
A building.
Gotham Metropolis Library, to be precise, but that information would not help him. He pushed his legs back to try and change direction. It worked but only slightly. He got a line from his belt and threw it around a fire escape. It caught and slowed his ascent.
He twisted round a corner in the street and let go of the line as he got tangled in some washing lines like a fly in a spider's web. A whistling sound came to his ears and he saw the red streak of the Cyborg heading towards him at incredible speed.
Luthor was drumming his hands incessantly against the desk. He was waiting for the phone to ring and he hated waiting.
The phone rang and he snatched it off the receiver.
"Luthor."
"Hi, Mr Luthor. I represent Phones Direct. Do you pay the household bills?"
"Get off the phone."
"I reckon we could make you some substantial savings."
"Get off the phone."
"Do you know what your average phone bill is, sir?"
"I will have you hunted down."
"That's our job sir, but seriously, Phones Direct can."
"Do you know what happened to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah?"
"Biblical cities, destroyed by the hand of God? Right."
"What happened to them will be as nothing compared with what will happen to you."
"That only happened because they did not have Phones Direct!"
Luthor slammed the phone down.
"Happersen!"
A tall white haired man in an expensive business suit strode up behind him. "Sir?"
"Buy up Phones Direct and have their call centre staff digging for coal in Death Valley by the end of the day."
"Sir, Death Valley is mainly Pre-Cambrian rocks. There will be no coal there."
"Good."
The phone rang again and Luthor picked it up, slightly more hesitantly this time. "Mr Luthor?"
"Yes."
"This is Amanda Waller, the leader of Task Force X. We thought you might be interested to know that the Cyborg has engaged the Batman. He should be out of your hair soon."
Luthor unconsciously wiped his bald head at this. "Excellent. Let me know when he succeeds."
"Yes sir." The phone clicked down.
"Happersen?"
"Yes sir."
"How long have we got before nightfall?"
"About another six hours sir."
"We need to find Slade before then. Extend the area of search and find him."
"We need more men then, sir."
"Contact the GCPD if you need to, but find him!"
The dark tunnels under the City of Gotham echo to sounds of metallic feet. Team Luthor are searching the area. Sewers are pretty unpleasant places at the best of times. At least when it rains it stays liquid and flowing, but when the rain stops it dries up into a sludge that is foul smelling at best and positively lethal at worst.
The men of Team Luthor have specially adapted armour that filters out the smell and toxins in the air.
The tunnel glows red, then green as various scanners are used to check the area. There is a flicker of movement as a dozen rats run away from the noise of Team Luthor.
A metallic voice broke the silence. "Tunnel 35c clear, sir. Apart from the rats. This is a waste of time, there is nothing down here. Slade has long since got out of here."
There was the sound of rats running down the tunnel towards the men of Team Luthor.
"Stupid rats." He picked up his scanner. "What the hell are they running from?"
At his feet was a mass of squeaking terror-ridden rodents. His scanner quickly flicked through the various stages. Ultraviolet. Nothing. X-ray. Nothing. Sonar, beta radiation, electro-magnetic radiation. Still nothing.
He looked quizzically up the tunnel. A rat, squeaking in terror, was picked up by some invisible force from the tunnel floor and crushed against the wall.
Oh boy.
He raised his chain gun and rattled a few thousand bullets down the tunnel. The bullets bounced and scraped down the tunnel. The place was echoing and re-echoing with the sound of the bullets.
There was a clanking sound as another case of bullets attached itself mechanically to his gun.
"I think I found him, sir," he said to his communicator. The sound of static greeted him. The armour of Team Luthor is a marvel of modern technology. It makes the wearer extraordinarily strong, invulnerable to most forms of attack and with a vision system modelled on the dragon fly, that means the wearer can literally see what's happening all around him in a variety of modes from infrared to x-ray.
However.
One problem with it is that the wearer cannot move particularly fast.
In front of him a shadowy form appeared for just a brief second. The form of a huge wolf.
The man was grabbed by an invisible force and slammed with armour breaking speed against the walls of the sewer.
The Batman tried to halt his fall by grabbing hold of some washing lines. One of them snapped and whipped upwards, sending the masked man down.
A wave of heat swept over his head.
The Cyborg was firing at him.
He let go of the washing line and fell the rest of the way to the ground. Another shot swept through his cloak, tearing a long line through the bullet proof Kevlar like it was made of paper. His nose was assailed with the acrid smell of burning.
He landed awkwardly on the sidewalk and rolled to his feet. Various undergarments and clothes wafted down with him. A surprised looking woman stared at this man, dressed like a demon but covered with various damp shirts and jeans.
He looked up and could see the Cyborg floating about twenty feet above him like an ancient Greek God.
He threw himself at the woman and pushed her out of the way as the street behind him erupted in flames and bits of stone and brick.
Batman had been trained for years on how to react to enemy fire. It is called 'Reaction to Effective Enemy Fire.' What this basically entails is running to make yourself a hard target and acquiring a safe area to either escape or find an area to launch a successful attack on your assailant. This was a technique the Batman had used for years against such foes as the Joker, KGBeast and even the army and police Swat teams.
It was a technique he was very good at.
He was pretty much stuck on the ground here. He ran, ducking and weaving down the street, his dark cloak hiding his form pretty well. A car was hit to his left and sent sailing into the air in a plume of superheated air. The air was full of burning and hissing sounds as the energy beams whistled overhead.
The Cyborg was getting furious and loosed shot after shot after him. The street was a mass of broken and melted paving slabs and burning cars. It was sheer good fortune that no civilians were injured.
Where had the Batman gone?
The sound of a door slamming shut came from the other side of the street. The
Cyborg's arm-cannon folded back in on itself with a series of clicking noises and formed his arm again.
The door the Batman had escaped through was made of half-foot thick steel. This part of Gotham was a known haunt of both the Joker and Two-face, and anyone who wanted to live here had to take home security seriously or they would not live at all.
The door might as well have been made of tissue paper as he burst through it, sending bits of warped metal bouncing down the corridor. The floor beneath his feet was a mass of free papers and old yellowing letters. The carpet was old and worn and a strange musty smell filled the air.
The Cyborg stopped and listened and concentrated. If he wanted to he could hear a pin drop a hundred miles away. The air was full of sounds of a busy bustling city. He could hear the sound of police sirens and calls coming in on the surrounding police radios.
Concentrate!
He could hear everything going on in the building now. Taps dripping. Televisions spewing their ads into empty rooms. Curtains rustling against the walls. The sound of cockroaches marching across kitchen floors. The sound of feet running up the stairs above him.
He did not bother taking the stairs, he just flew up at the ceiling, erupting through floor after floor. Beneath him he could hear the shocked screams of Gotham residents as he burst through the floors like a living missile.
The Batman was sent hurtling down the stairs as the Cyborg burst through the stairs beneath him. The air was filled with dust and wooden splinters as he leapt at the masked man.
His hands closed round nothing.
He span around in confusion, creating a small vortex that knocked a door down and sent several pictures hurtling off the floor.
Where the hell had he gone?
He felt something on his foot and was blown through the building by the plastic explosive the Batman had attached to him.
The Batman was fighting back.
Alfred collapsed on the chair. He had a lot of duties to do, he knew. A lot. He tried to get up but felt weak.
This was ridiculous; what would Master Bruce say if he saw him like this. He had been overworking recently; it must be that.
He had to prepare dinner for his guests tonight. He had to clean the place up. The builders had left the house in a fearful mess. He was sure the lawn would need several weeks of patient ministrations to get it to what it was. There was dust over all the fine china. There were coffee mugs abandoned all over the house.
He needed to get up and tidy the place.
But he couldn't.
He could see strange figures in the periphery of his vision. He tried to get to his feet but they skirted out of sight as he turned around. He sat down heavily and closed his eyes. He could still see the shadow figures and they seemed to gather around him, hiding him from the world of men.
The Oracle, or Barbara Gordon, was examining the data that Nightwing and Batgirl had downloaded from Luthor Towers.
The data had been encrypted and she did not have the encryption keys. It appeared to use some sort of symmetric key encryption by an algorithm. Bruce Wayne had supplied her with four liquid nitrogen cooled Cray computers. Each one with 200 processors and capable of over 2 billion calculations a second.
She would need every one of them and they hummed louder as they got to work. Luthor's file security was second to none. She had several recovery agents on her computer and she assigned each Cray computer to work on each file. Four of the screens next to her were suddenly a mass of numbers and data as the files were decrypted.
She arched her hands and sat back patiently. Now was just the waiting game.
Slade was not human. Not any more. He was drawing on the power of nearly forty werewolves in the city. He just needed a few dozen more to have God-like powers and he would rule this city like the spirits in his day.
The Cyborg was sent flying out so fast by the explosion that he landed with a crash in the building opposite. It was an old power station. It had been closed down when the new hydro-electric station had opened up outside the City. It was now a mass of ageing rusting generators.
A single halogen bulb that had been alight for years illuminated the place in a yellowish glow. Several moths were fluttering uselessly around it. He got to his feet shakily and looked around the building.
Where was he?
Every step he took crunched broken glass beneath his feet. The sun cast several beams through the dusty atmosphere.
Concentrate, he cannot be far away. He slowly rose in the air and spun around gently, his eyes and ears taking in everything. High above the building he could hear a police helicopter approaching and also what sounded like a flight of F16 planes. He could even hear the pilots in the planes hunting him down.
No threat to him. Not down here.
Unlike the nanites coursing through his system. He had only two hours in which to kill the Batman or they would kill him. A shadow swept over him and landed in the corner opposite him.
He flew over to where he had seen the shadow land.
Nothing.
He could not afford this time. Energy poured from his eyes like a torrent, setting the ageing building alight in a second. The huge metal furnace designed to withstand temperatures of 2000 degrees Celsius melted like a candle in the depths of hell. The Cyborg grinned as he heard a scream from the depths of the flames.
The furnace protected him from the worse of it but it was still too hot to withstand. He cursed as the flames licked up around him. His suit was fireproof to a large degree but nothing like this. The heat was overwhelming, stealing his strength, melting his belt to his suit. The brickwork behind crumbled at the inferno and he threw himself out of the building, his clothes and cape smouldering. The acrid smell of smoke assailed his nostrils. In the distance he could hear the sound of explosions as the fire set off the gas mains.
Despite himself he screamed to try and control the pain coursing through his body. The Cyborg heard him and grabbed him by his smouldering cloak and leapt into the sky with him.
The speed of the slipstream put out the flames, he gasped in shock at the cold air. His ears started popping as they went higher and higher to approaching 30,000 feet. Beneath him Gotham looked quite idyllic, little lights flickering, belying the horror of the situation he was in.
"I'm going to crush the life from your body." The Cyborg started to squeeze the Batman's neck with one metallic hand. "Yeaaargh!"
An F16 plane had loosed a sidewinder missile at the Cyborg hitting him square in the back. The impervious form of the Cyborg had protected the Batman from harm but he was sent hurtling from the Cyborg's clutches and into freefall.
His ears were still ringing from the explosion when he realised how high he was. Above him he could see several F16's engage the Cyborg with machine guns and missiles. He tried to breathe but there was too little oxygen at that height and he blacked out.
File decryption complete
The Oracle looked up from her work to see that the files had been decrypted.
"Finally, let's see what you are planning, Luthor."
Streams of data shot across the screen. Data involving plans and reams of instructions passed in front of her eyes.
The voice crackled into the communicator.
"Mr Luthor, this is Eileen Engler, of Team Luthor 12, we've got a confirmation of Slade's whereabouts."
"Tell me more."
"His power is growing, he has adopted a corporeal presence but he has not achieved the stage you mentioned in your initial briefing."
"Good, that will probably happen tonight unless we stop him now, and I don't want it to happen."
"What are your orders, sir?"
"Contain him as per orders, 7G."
"Yes sir."
Batman regained consciousness about 15,000 feet from the earth. Up above him he could see several explosions as the F16's engaged the Cyborg. One F16 was sent spinning, smoking and sparking from the fight and as it exploded a parachute bloomed into existence above him as the pilot ejected. That was not his fight though. Now his fight was mere survival. The wind was whistling past his ears, threatening to pull off his cowl.
He was falling at about 120 mph. At this speed he would not just fall and land, he would fall and bounce and what landed would not be identifiable by dentistry or looks. DNA would be easy enough though; there would be more than enough of him around.
This kind of morbid thought would get him nowhere.
His belt was warped and melted by the extreme heat he had been through. On the plus side, his new werewolf genes were healing up his burns but they would not be able to deal with landing in Gotham at 120 mph.
Have to slow down. He grabbed the edges of his cape and stretched out in freefall, trying to hang-glide. Anything to stop or slow down his speed.
He cursed as he span uncontrollably in midair. A glance behind him showed the problem.
His cape was a mockery of what it had been.
Torn, ripped and burnt. It would not have slowed down a dead spider let alone a dying bat.
He needed something to break the fall and fast. His keen eyes looked at Gotham with a survivor's instinct. Any large expanse of water was worse than useless, it would be lethal. The water would not be able to move away in time to slow down his fall. It would be like hitting concrete.
He remembered reading about Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant who in 1972 had survived a fall from 33,000 feet in the tail of an exploded DC-9 jetliner. She landed in snow and survived. There were also several World War two airmen who survived falls from similar heights. It was possible.
However, they were not falling over Gotham. Gotham at this time of year had a real lack of snow. This was a time that Mr Freeze could make a timely appearance, but considering he had last left him hanging upside down on a lamppost in the East side of Gotham it was unlikely.
One square metre of cloth could provide enough drag to slow a human's fall by about 70. Shame most of it had been burnt off his back.
Not even the five-point landing could save him from this. This was where you meet the ground with your feet together, and fall sideways in such a way that five parts of your body successively absorb the shock, equally and in this order: feet, calf, thigh, buttock, and shoulder. 120 divided by 5 24. Not bad! 24 mph is only a bit faster than the speed at which experienced parachutists land, however it would require millimetric skill and timing and 24 mph was still enough to kill even a man of the Batman's prodigious skills and training.
He needed trees. Lots of them, and now.
Bending his legs back and putting his arms to his side he started to head towards Gotham State Park.
He did not just need a normal tree. If he fell on an oak or an ash the strong branches would undoubtedly rip his limbs off. What eventually reached the ground would not be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
No he was after a conifer, and thankfully he knew where there were some. The Wayne Corp Corporation had paid for several acres of parkland to be planted with them as part of an urban development programme.
The branches of a conifer are small, thin and light at the top and slowly thicken as they approach the ground. As long as a man keeps his feet together, hands by his side and hit the tree at a parallel angle to the tree close to the stem he could survive.
Well that's what the theory says. Now to put it into practice.
He could start to hear the sounds of life beneath him. Dogs barking. The irate beep of Gotham taxi drivers. People selling the Gotham Herald, dogs barking in the park.
The first 30,000 feet was easy it would be the final 30 feet that could make or break him.
