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Batman 1939: Swimming in the Styx
Chapter 5: Wrath
Wonder Woman planted her foot on the roof barrier and leaned far back. She felt a brutal tug that nearly ripped the golden lasso out of her hands. When the weight steadied, she exhaled and tried to wipe the bloody spit out of her eye with her elbow. The cord stretched taut over the edge and shifted ever so slightly as its load swung yards below. She didn't worry that the lasso might fray against the roof edge. She doubted it could fray. She did worry that it had just crushed his chest when his weight cinched the loop tight. Wonder Woman had an innate control of her weapon and could change its tightness with a thought. No one escaped if she didn't allow them. Her intention to secure the Batman had hardly wavered when she had been used as a diving board and spit in the eye. She had willed it as tight as possible. Now she could feel that the loop was cinched nearly closed - had the cord torn him in half? Wonder Woman steadied her leverage and leaned enough to peer over the roof. A story below, Batman hung from the golden cord by his hand. Through the dark of the moon, she swore he looked up at her. He let go, landed on his feet, and ran.
Wonder Woman wouldn't learn this for a long time, but when Batman kicked off her chest and entered free fall, he had slipped the lasso over his head and grabbed above the knot - expecting to tear the weapon from her hands and suffer the two story fall.
Batman wouldn't learn this for a long time, but the only reason he was able to slip the lasso, even weightless, was because she had been distracted at just that moment and lost sight of him. If she had focused on him in the least, the lasso would have tightened instantly to whatever circumference would secure him.
Wonder Woman watched him retreat along the factory wall. That would be perfect. This district was flat and empty. Even with a limp (an insult soon to be avenged), she was sure she could catch him quickly. He would have nowhere to elude her this time. Batman rounded the corner of the building. She finishing looping her lasso while she walked towards the adjacent edge to see which course he chose to retreat. She didn't rush. Better to watch him from up here than lose him on the ground. She could recover the time in a single leap. Now where was he? Wonder Woman peered keenly into the night. Surely she could spot a fleeing brigand in an empty yard of cement. She had let him out of sight for three seconds; it was inconceivable that he could have reached the far road already.
As she watched in baffled anger, she heard a noise from under her feet. Did he really just ... she slid over the barrier and dropped the ground. There was a window cut into the unpainted cinder blocks he did! This Madman of Gotham had a death wish. He had flown into a cage. Wonder Woman eased inside. By her reckoning, the space was almost a half acre. The scattering of lights were still on, weakly illuminating perhaps one room in four. She moved as quietly as she could, not to protect her own obscurity but to better hear if he tried to leave through another exit. That was the only reason she could imagine for reentering this structure. Was he hoping she hadn't notice his entrance? Could he wish to engage her again? He had to recognize her superiority by
now, surely. He had to realize how patient and gentle she had been.
There was a footstep somewhere in the dark. She spoke out loudly. "You are cornered. By tonight's end you will submit to me from either bondage or the grave; I care not which. But choose now or I will choose for you."
Silence. At the end of a long hall, two lit bulbs went dark.
She frowned and crept further in, staying as best she could to the rare patches of moonlight. She was a seasoned hunter. If he was taking out the lights, that meant a prelude to an ambush. Time was on her side; she wouldn't rush out and make it easy for him. Elsewhere, another bulb broke, the glass scattering on the floor. She thought she heard a footstep to her left, but a wall blocked her view. She continued, moving gently as she tried to peer into the void. She passed under a second floor bulb gleaming high above through the unfinished ceiling. Something sped through the air.
With a soft shatter, the room went dark.
Wonder Woman leaped to the second floor and rammed through a door that was just swinging shut. Blackness. But there were hasty retreating footsteps ahead. She raced forward, crashing blindly through drywall and hanging tarps. A floorboard creaked and she swung a fist behind her, hitting nothing but air. Another squeak a few paces right and she dived at the noise, losing a foot through a hole in the floor. She pulled the leg out, scraping a thin white line across her shin it in the process. Something that sounded metallic shifted further on. She strained to glimpse anything in the inky shadows dancing around her from the light below.
A locomotive hit her from the side. Something low clutched her ribs with enough force to lift her airborne. Then airborne for a little longer. Then airborne still. In an instant of shock, Wonder Woman realized she had been tackled over another gap and clean off the second floor. They fell together through darkness.
She struck a cement floor with the weight of two bodies shoulder-first. Her head smacked a moment after. Her vision would have swam if there was anything she could see. Her assailant seemed none the worse and shifted above her. A bolt of fear shot down Wonder Woman's spine. She had enough wits to guard her head and neck with her arms, but it was a needless precaution. With a sharp sting, she knew Batman wasn't seeking her throat, he was planting another blade above her knee. She felt him stand, then felt a boot stomp the same knee twice. She cried out. Footsteps faded into the black.
In a burning rage, Wonder Woman punched the floor, leaving a dent, then pushed to her feet. When she steadied her balance, she pulled the spike from her leg and marched stiffly after him.
"Your fists and knives will not wound me!"
A ten foot length of steel rebar slapped her in the back.
One of the greatest marvels Princess Diana found in coming to America was the diversity of metal that girded Man's civilization. These materials boasted strength, lightness, flexibility, ductility, sheen, and keenness in measures and combinations she had never dreamed possible. Even their waste cans were a miracle next to the product of an Amazonian forge. Although iron and its alloys were known in her homeland, most everything was bronze. This was fine for their utopia: bronze was all they needed. Wonder Woman was quickly learning just how much Man's World was not a utopia; it's constant strife catalyzed more inventions in the past century than the Amazons had made in a millennium. Her people did possess sacred gifts from Hephaestus that would outshine Man's artifice, but these treasures would hardly fill a broom cupboard, and even a princess had few opportunities to bring one out of its shrine.
Put briefly, the kinetic potential of an inch-thick rod of high-carbon Gotham steel was something she hadn't adjusted to.
Batman pivoted and swung again. This time he missed. He slid around and sliced from the left. This connected with what he assumed was a shin. He flicked the bar upward and it ricocheted off something, probably her breastplate. He pulled it back in case she tried to grab it, paused a moment to listen, then smacked the shin once more.
Some people assumed Batman had bat traits. They were generally wrong. He didn't fly. He didn't have claws. He didn't live in a colony. He wasn't truly nocturnal (not for lack of trying). He wasn't covered in a fine layer of fur. And he had only eaten insects in emergencies. The one trait he shared with the winged mammals was a fantastic ability to track in the dark by sound. Batman lived and breathed this skill. He was perhaps the best in the world, but unlike the bat his prowess was limited to the living. Inanimate objects didn't make cough or pace. He still moved cautiously in the dark, lest he knock over a flower pot whenever he entered a window.
This was a burden on his methods, so he found exceptions. Batman learned early on how vital it was to establish safe hideaways. GothCorp had quietly paused construction here a year ago as part of an accounting scheme; its crews worked two days a month. Anything worth looting was long gone, so the company didn't bother with security. The area was too remote for squatters. It had a direct route to a sewer hub, and best of all, it was the sort of crowded, irregular environment where his tactics thrived. Batman could elude half a dozen pursuers for an hour in a place like this. Once he committed the layout to memory - another mastered art - he could jog blind without breaking a cobweb. Here in this empty shell he had the home field advantage. He was free to run.
Batman heard the woman charge across his path. She was close, dogging his movements almost step for step. He speared again and scraped her collarbone. It seemed the leg trauma was finally wearing her down. He certainly wasn't at his best. The new armor dispersed force wonderfully, but that just meant her pummeling shook all of him equally. Every joint and ligament had rattled loose, and his neck and shoulder were badly strained. He could hardly turn his head left. The analytical corner of his mind was starting to compensate. When he had escaped the safe room, Batman was lost in primal terror. It was the terror of a child, of a victim. Any reason that had returned in their first confrontation had crumbled again when her rope had invaded his mind. But now in the dark he was home. The fear was quickly freezing to anger. She had wrecked his plan, she had wrecked his reality, she had wrecked his body, and she had wrecked his mind.
Batman had always known deep down that it might not be healthy to spend one's life dreaming how to ambush and maim, but there were more important things than health, and dreaming had its advantages.
She hunted like a fiend, crashing through walls and knocking over machinery, but Batman knew the rooms too well. He waited with endless patience, keeping away until he could approach her rear, until she misstepped and gave him an angle. Polearms were not a major chapter in Batman's training as a martial artist, but he knew enough. He added more and more muscle behind each blow, and by the fifth attempt he was giving the nearest impression a ten foot steel bar could to a home run swing. Most missed or struck armor - but whenever one landed he could hear her stagger. After an especially punishing blow she dropped limp to the floor. Batman retreated a room, waiting for the reprisal.
None came. The lady must have been struck senseless. An old part of him wanted to check on her, but after a minute he decided that just this once he would leave a victim to chance. She could leap off a building with a hamstrung leg and a broken ankle; he doubted she was in mortal danger. Plus, he was eager to get as far away as possible. Batman crept as quickly as he dared to the disposal room. The crates over his escape route were a yard from letting him slip through. Batman set his shoulder and leaned in. Tendons burned along his flank. He shuddered and stopped. With a moment to breathe, there was nothing to distract him from how profoundly tired he was. The sweat-soaked fabric of his suit pinched under the armor at every joint. The metal plates seemed fifty pounds heavier than when he put them on. He had to rally his efforts just to turn around. He squared his upper back against the wood and forced his feet into the floor. His legs twitched, but at last the crates started to squeak and shift. He took small steps backwards, struggling to keep the momentum.
His fatigue and this noise deafened Batman to her footsteps. It was only by luck that he faced her way when the woman arrived. This disposal room had no ceiling to speak of. Turquoise moonlight bathed them both in a dusty arena of masonry and latticework. He spied a new cut on her right earlobe. She stood in the doorway, watching him with flat hatred. Her stance had devolved from dignified to predatory. He crouched and set the rebar ahead like a spear. It wavered slightly - he didn't have the strength to keep its twenty-seven pounds steady anymore. She noticed, and he knew it.
She took two swift steps and leapt, soaring the thirty feet between them.
Wonder Woman's vision pulsed and blurred - her right eye was mostly blind. Batman narrowly avoided her dropkick. She demolished the boxes behind him then was slapped in the back for her efforts. Her legs screamed as vinegar shot through her joints with every step. Wonder Woman deftly batted away another two short swings before a feint and a jab left a welt on her hand. She huffed in unregal frustration. His steely rod was really starting to vex her.
It figured that she left her own weapons at home. Amazons were masters in all arts of war, but their training paid far more attention to the sword, spear, and bow than to mere boxing or wrestling. Losing a weapon in the field but winning regardless was an unlikely scenario at best. An adversary fierce enough to disarm you would be an almost insurmountable threat after your disarmament. Any other purpose for the sports were mere recreation. Only a mandrake-addled fool knowingly entered the field of battle empty-handed (which raised more questions about this Batman). At least he seemed to have as great a deficit carrying proper arms as she did unaided: his spear-work was mediocre at best. Equipped with a stave of her own, she could doubtless subdue him in seconds. But none were in view, so the long weapon gave him a formidable advantage however lax his technique.
Lacking options but determined to conquer him, Wonder Woman rushed again and again only to be battered aside, kept at bay until she finally gleaned his rhythm. It was complicated: he transitioned through foreign stances and paces with admirable ease, but he was weary and his movements grew repetitive. At last, she divined his next intention, hopped over a low swing, caught it between her calves, turned, and dropped to a knee, trapping the weapon to the floor. Wonder Woman blew some matted hair out of her eyes and grinned. She tried to grab the rod, but he had stepped on it himself and was readying another throwing knife. She crossed her silvery bracers and intercepted the missile. It popped and engulfed her in a cloud of smoke.
Maybe it wasn't a knife. Wonder Woman coughed and ran until she found clean air. When her vision cleared as much as it could, Batman was nowhere in sight. She spun to find him, but it was too late. A brutal palm reached over her shoulder to wrench her chin up. She elbowed backwards twitch-quick, hitting a helmet, but he punched her in the ear twice and hooked her eye with his middle finger. She grabbed that wrist and wrenched his middle finger backwards, but this finally allowed a heavy arm to snake around her throat and flex shut. She was pulled against a man's body, his ragged breath warmed her neck. He smelled of sweat. He was primal. Feral. She fought desperately to pry herself loose, letting just enough blood pass to keep her faint awareness. Her thoughts swam. He pressed his forehead against her and leaned back, lifting her just off her feet, using her own weight to help hang her. Sound began to fade. But inch by trembling inch, Wonder Woman pulled the arm away. His hold was so secure and his leverage so dominant that it took the deepest reserves of her prodigious strength, but in the end it was no contest. He strained with equally absolute determination, but he was just a man.
Once the arm was clear of her neck she touched the ground and pivoted, still holding his arm, and seized Batman's throat through the small opening in his armored collar. He flinched but she held fast, adjusting her grip to surround the contours of his esophagus. Then her fingers gently closed. Batman's mouth burst open with a pained cough until he could grit his teeth shut. The veins on his oaken neck, already swelled from a marathon of effort, twitched with a new rush of blood. She added a feather of force. He hissed a long trail of air through his nose like a deflating balloon. His bloodied lips bent in a silent snarl. She stared coldly back and waited a long moment - she wasn't sure why, perhaps indulgence - then squeezed further.
In that instant she felt an urgent and agonizing pain dig through her hip. Batman's other hand had disappeared in the struggle. Wonder Woman glanced down and realized it had dropped low and was pressing something just under the lower edge of her breastplate - straight through her soft culottes and into her flesh - something that glowed. Her mouth opened in quiet surprise. Acrid smoke fumed around them and sparks danced down her leg. The pain was so perfectly intense that she didn't even recognize it as heat. She had the hazy notion to push Batman away, but her limbs were lost across a chasm of shock. Her body had clenched in a seizure Before she could act, his hidden hand rose to her arm that choked him. But it wasn't a hand any longer. It was a halo of magnificent light. The brilliant flame touched her arm. Stars erupted in her mind. It brushed along her bicep and up to her shoulder. Its arc left a line of blackened skin in its wake. The golden halo rose off her shoulder and jabbed sharply into her cheek.
Wonder Woman's face burned like she had dipped it in the fiery hell-river Phelgethon. Her voice broke out unbidden in a scream and a plea and a threat. Time collapsed. She lived a epoch of pain between each heartbeat.
When her senses returned, Wonder Woman lay in the dust, facing up at the sky. Her tiara had finally fallen off. Heedless of a hundred wounds, she struggled to a knee and saw the edge of a cape fall through a hole in the floor.
Batman slid fifteen feet down a chute steep and wide enough to dispose of five thousand rotted pickles a minute. Gotham City's fondness for oversized civic structures didn't stop at their sewers; the city was consistent like that. The food industries - canneries, meatpacking plants, and the like - built especially spacious plumbing since they had more organic waste than anyone. Batman didn't even lower his head to fit in the dank tunnel at the bottom. It sloped down into the earth with many grates and unfinished branches along the way. If GothCorp ever bothered to finish the place, it would be half-filled with a thick vegetable slurry that would make Walt Whitman puke. Until then the only moisture was some slime on the curved brick walls.
The faltering deductive engine of his mind spent a few cycles chewing on the memory of her scream. He heard it again and again - every throaty syllable and note. It was a puzzle. She spoke English earlier, albeit with an accent. But that scream sounded kind of like Greek. Normally the World's Greatest Detective wouldn't tolerate feeble observations that used the term "kind of like", but he was ashamed to admit he didn't know any Greek. A few words, sure, but next to nothing. Ironically, it was one of the very few academic subjects he hadn't studied. That was ironic because his dimmest peers at prep school had. Classics was compulsory at every institution he attended, and he habitually skipped every one. He thought it would never come in handy, and it hadn't ... until now. That was going to bother him for awhile.
He eased his blistering finger joint back into alignment. After a blind minute of walking, he reached a cupola in the tunnel with a ladder above. Batman had performed tens of thousands of pull-ups in his life, but he nearly fainted in his exertion to reach the ladder. He didn't need to see the ring of bruises around his neck to know they were blue and indigo and deep. He would be eating through a straw for a long time. And he didn't need to see the blisters across his hand to know what misery it was to touch anything.
Contrary to myth, Batman couldn't prepare for every surprise. But he had survived several lifetimes' worth of rough scrapes already, so there was very little that still surprised him. And the more dire the threat, the better he learned. For example, there was one instance in the recent past - though he detested to think about it - when someone he was responsible for was trapped behind a steel door and freezing to death. He improvised a solution but vowed afterward that he would never face that particular crisis again.
He found a simple powder in a welding journal, a variation on thermite that could melt through any material the authors had tested. Batman was at home in his lab and no stranger to pyrotechnics, but even he was reluctant to experiment with the stuff. It took three months to build a cigar-sized applicator which carried enough powder for a brief burn. He added a hilt above the grip just thick enough to stop the backwash of heat before it became uncomfortable. Naturally, this safety measure was tested while he was wearing gloves. He never expected to hold it with his bare hands, but he never expected to hold it against a person either. After doing both, he was surprised how little he minded. His burnt hand stung and throbbed as he stiffly climbed, and he remembered seeing the anguish and surprise in her face, and a perverse corner of his mind was proud that his tool could still put a hole in anything.
Batman heard motion far behind him. Someone had entered the tunnel. Batman climbed over the ladder like an old man and leaned against the wall. His mind was tired. It floated thin strings of useless ideas, ashes of the honed brilliance he took for granted. He paused to muster his thoughts. His options were all bad, and he barely cared. She was breathing when he left. She might well be invincible. Maybe she could follow him through the tunnels. They were practically made to echo, and he wouldn't run again tonight. He had spent his speed and mindfulness and strength. His arsenal was useless. He had no more fear to give. All he had left was spite, an anger deep in his marrow that drank in every bruise and blister and congealed those rich sensations into those nightmares that horrified him most, the nightmares when he was the beast. He realized he was sad. Whatever came next, he had already lost.
Men were beasts. The Amazons held this lesson dear to their hearts in every theater drama and bedtime story. It was the cause of their civilization. They were refugees in a sense, though all the better for it in hindsight. The globe was surely ravaged and laid fallow long ago by the dominion of Man. They had seen the bleak signs even on the eve of their exodus. The bravest spearmaidens would shudder to imagine the wasteland Man's world must be today. Surely across the sea was some great desert, a stagnant, miserable dystopia where the wails of the anguished echoed from dim Hibernia on one end of the world to lavish Persia on the other. The Amazons were its last survivors.
And so it would be till the heavens fell. In a hundred generations, not one son of Man could be trusted. The Amazons would always live apart. It was common knowledge that men were generally dense and added little to culture individually, chasing their crudest hungers when they weren't held back by sloth, but this made them no less a threat. In large groups Man's natural habits toward tyranny and cowardice occasionally organized him above the state of an animal, if not by much, and groups of men were a different beast altogether. If they couldn't enslave their women through force, they would ensnare them with guile and lies. Men were to be loathed, not pitied. They were strong of arm and clever in all dangerous crafts. The Amazons would never forget just how far a man would go to seize power when it suited him, and it always did.
That said, ice cream was pretty fantastic.
So was the jitterbug. And aircraft. And basketball. And street cars. And cameras. And Antarctica. And dinosaur bones. And saxophones. And Billie Holiday. And the Nineteenth Amendment. And microscopes. And coffee. And potatoes. And strawberries. And cheese! Great Hera, the Amazons had cheese, but Man's terrible regime had so many more cheeses, and most of them were delicious. And they would melt it on so many things. And mustard! Myths spoke of the mustard plant, but it didn't grow in her homeland. Wonder Woman was the first of her people to taste mustard in millennia, and she had every kind of cheese to do it with.
Wonder Woman's complicated feelings towards Man - in essence, towards men - could fill a bookshelf. She was the emissary of her people, their champion in every sense of the word. But her people had prepared her to expect demons, and she found, well, people. She arrived with hate and suspicion in her heart, but the men of the world were practically human. They didn't spend all their time sparring and exercising for battle; they weren't the host of Hercules. In fact most were weak by Amazon standards, and many smelled better. Quite a few men were chivalrous - a concept so backwards that she had a hard time wrapping her head around it. Women weren't peers here, it was true, but they were undeniably citizens. Occasionally they were even in charge. The spectrum of Man had its sinners and criminals (or bad eggs and crooks, as she was learning to say), but most ne'er-do-wells were a lesser breed of evil. They didn't have ambitions of glory and supremacy. The lion's share of social harm came from those who were selfish and ignorant, not exactly disciples of Ares. Brutish nations did exist in far-off lands, but good men were striving to cast them down.
In the quiet corners of her soul, Wonder Woman had begun to wonder if her culture's core conviction might simply be wrong.
Then she came to Gotham.
As she wiped the dust and blood from her brow, there was no doubt in her mind that Man still had his beasts. They were as fierce and cruel as the legends said. They had brawn and martial skill. They had armor of granite, and they hefted insidious weapons the likes of which the Amazons knew not. If those monstrous hordes of old no longer roamed the Earth, it seemed they willed all their malevolence into one ultimate descendent as a final curse. It was Batman! Batman. Batman. Batman. An atavistic fiend. A plague to the bonds of compassion and love that knitted humankind. She had faced a few terrible men here in Man's World, adventures found through her new friends and compatriots, but so far these foes all turned out to be an angrier, more vicious breed of the same weak men that she passed on the street. This horror, this Bat was something darker entirely. He was inhuman, stepping through the night like it was lit with a torch. He bludgeoned the valiant sentinels of Lady America's armies with impunity. And his words had twisted and confounded her conduit of Truth; only a most heinous mystic could spin a fable so innocent under divine coercion.
And now he had struck her a nigh-vorpal blow. Wonder Woman had never suffered such grievous harm. She shifted her garb aside and looked down: the burn on her hip was revolting to behold. It's only redemption was that the strange fire cauterized as it left, leaving no blood. A milder burn line marred her arm. She feared what travesty the wound on her face might resemble. She felt no sensation from ear to chin around its vile epicenter.
But Wonder Woman would not be bested. Disdaining every cut, she picked up her tiara and rose to her feet. Down the chute she found another realm of darkness. Typical. This city was so stale and artificial, but at least on the surface she was at liberty to move and could breath fresh air, and a few living things grew. But this passage was hardly different from a crypt. No wonder he seemed so familiar with the place. It was where a ghoul belonged.
She heard faint movement ahead. No duty in her life had ever seemed so necessary and clear as removing this blight did now. The virtuous people of the world needed her. Wonder Woman slowly cracked her knuckles. If he wouldn't face justice under civic law, if he insisted on the ways of the dark, then she wouldn't hesitate to send him into the Plutonian night.
By far the most unshakable regulatory office in Gotham City was the Meatpacking Supervisory Board. It was said that there were only three groups in the city who could never be bent by money or politics: the Franciscans, the Salvation Army, and the pork inspectors. Contrary to observers, Gothamites did have a sense of self-preservation, and it had been obvious since the city's founding that any illness from tainted food would be disastrous on top of their always questionable hygiene and sanitation. The slaughterhouses took extraordinary steps to protect the food and separate what remained. The nature of the city's density and building codes offered this challenge with a unique twist. The meat plants worked all hours to satisfy their huge demand, but this production routinely outpaced the logistical means to remove it: cargo space on trucks and trains was a hot commodity in the area. If a slaughterhouse could only transport one of its outputs, it would obviously send the day's meat to the stores and keep the waste for later. But no one could keep thousands of pounds of offal and other, even nastier butchery byproducts inside the factory.
The solution for one infamous ring of meatpacking plants near the uncompleted GothCorp site was to dump all this waste into what they called the Meat Pool. The backs of the eight buildings surrounded a round cement pit, sixty feet across and forty feet deep. Truck paths and conveyor belts led to the edge, and at least one was emptying animal remains into the pit at almost any given hour of the day year-round. Eventually, one of the slaughterhouse shipping schedules would have an opening and a portion of the Meat Pool's contents - now long decayed and fermented - would be hauled back up. To facilitate this, a network of screw pumps, pulleys, tubes, and, most disturbing of all, ladders also lined the pit's walls. Just as it was impossible to know how long a certain raindrop stayed in the ocean, no one could say how long an average bucketful of innards waited in the Meat Pool. Some employees guessed a week, some said a month. It was ultimately a philosophical question. Everyone knew the Meat Pool was the worst-smelling place a person could be.
It was one of Batman favorite places.
The muck wasn't technically harmful to spend time in. Smells were simple sensory signals. If you could overcome those, you were fine. And he did. It took a few sessions. He deemed it time well spent. At the core of Batman's philosophy was the belief that an individual could prevail against a crowd by having the will to take extraordinary measures that no one else would follow. In this case, he meant it literally. He could slap the mayor in front of city hall and be trailed by every officer in the GCPD, and not one of them would follow him into the pit.
He opened a grate under a storm drain next to one of the smaller slaughterhouses. It took several seconds to lift himself onto solid ground. His burned hand cried. he felt that if he turned his head in the least, it would fall off. Taking an old man's steps, he paced along the building until he reached the edge of the Meat Pool. Only three of the plants were operating tonight, but one on the far side was dumping indistinct clumps off a conveyor belt. He could see a general silhouette of things despite the hour. All the buildings in use had lamps around their rear loading doors and there were a few permanent lights installed halfway down the pit itself – someone in management seemed to think that any poor soul forced to do maintenance here at night shouldn't need to fumble with a flashlight. Likewise, the short chain-link fence around much of the edge was one of the sturdiest safety precautions in the city.
Batman leaned against the fence and paused to catch his breath. A shape sped towards him in the dark. As he turned, Wonder Woman rammed him against the fence and reached again for his throat. This time he tucked his shoulder and blocked the opening in his collar. She held him against the fence with a palm and struck viciously at his face. He took a few blows to his helmet, so much weaker than her first, then managed to put his arms up. She growled and seized him around the chest in a bear hug.
Batman was dazed but had enough to sense to be confused. A static move like this didn't seem her style. Then he was reminded that she could rip a steel door out of the floor. He instantly felt the back of his armor start to buckle. A new wedge of metal was touching his spine and feeling larger every second. She pushed her matted hair into his face to get as close as possible. There was a muted squeaking as their chestplates scratched against each other. A tightness increased in his ribs as the armor deformed. His shaking hands finally found purchase against her face and he pressed on her severe burn. She bucked her head but didn't let go. This was fine. Most of his body was immobile, but his neck, for all its trauma, wasn't constricted. Sucking down the pain, he bent slightly forward, turned his head sideways, and bit her throat.
Wonder Woman felt his mouth fasten across her jugular. She redoubled her efforts to finally wreck that accursed armor, but even now his hold was better than hers. The jaw was a formidable muscle, and his teeth cut and crushed as it struggled to shut. Continuing her assault meant offering her neck defenseless, and as she felt his fangs close towards her lifeblood, she was finally shocked by an icy drop of fear. Wonder Woman let go and struggled backwards. He didn't let her go easily and took some skin on the way. Being held by the throat left her overcompensating her balance, and before she had backpedaled two steps, Batman moved forward and stuck his hands into the large burns at her hip and cheek. She cringed as if shocked. He gently grasped her shoulder and performed a simple Judo throw. She landed on her head.
The effort seemed to wind him, but as she rose in anger, he was already straddling the fence. A dangling chain hung from a pulley several feet in front of him. Batman leaned forward into empty air, hopped, and caught it. Then he descended out of sight. It was then that she gave any attention to her surroundings. She gagged. Wonder Woman was engulfed in a furious stench wafting up from this abyss that made her eyes water. She realized her fury must have been heroic indeed if she missed that during her struggle. Wonder Woman was tutored to the loftiest heights of poetry and rhetoric, but words failed her now. It was almost physical, a dank sheet against her skin, moist and hideous. Her nerves needing time to restart again inside the veil of this sensory abomination. She paused, breathing only through her mouth. Then her righteous anger steeled her, and she leaped to catch the same chain into the pit.
She landed in the arena. He stood there, ghoulish, with his cape pulled around his body, casting half a dozen faint shadows from the multiple lights above. But she didn't see him at first. The air as she descended had turned from noxious to foul to belligerent. Each new layer was a new and terrifying odor dimension. She let go of the chain halfway down and crashed facefirst. And here at the bottom she finally knew what it all came from. The cesspit of an abattoir. A mass grave. The moment she spent submerged was the worst in her life. Even when she rose, the filth was all over her, sticking to her skin and clothes, infecting her through stench alone. A million flies appeared from nowhere and began to orbit her. That repellant city above seemed like paradise now. This was beyond even the horror she imagined could be found in Man's World. It rose to her waist, wet and warm, like all the dirtiest animals in the world ate garbage until they burst and died and their kin ate their remains until they also died and they all baked in the sun in a bog for a century. Her guts turned inside-out. It took an Olympian effort to hold down bile. Whatever spots of vision she once possessed were burned away by the power of the place. The smell had blinded her.
When a frayed shred of Wonder Woman finally found the fortitude to function in the Meat Pool, she saw Batman watching her, not bothered and not moving. Somehow this annoyed her further still. She approached him wearing a look of undiluted hatred and dripping undiluted gore. At four paces, Wonder Woman brought out her golden lasso and spun it beside her in rapid circle, then let go and launched it towards him. He lifted an arm as if to shield himself. She snared it and pulled taut. Batman crouched and stepped forward, keeping his balance. When she finished pulling and there was no slack between them, he grasped the cord in both hands and fell backwards.
Wonder Woman wouldn't ever be sure if she had made the right decision then, keeping hold of her priceless gift and being pulled into the muck for it. She wouldn't remember what it felt like to be submerged. All she was knew was that at some point she surfaced and looked around. The end of her lasso was loose, and Batman was nowhere to be found. She looked around for least half a minute, mindless, undone by the smell, then Batman burst out of the pool of waste like a shark, grabbed her, and pulled her under.
Eventually he must have let go and she managed to stand. All she remembered was that after a few seconds he did it again.
This time when she rose, he was nowhere to be found.
Wonder Woman had no way of knowing that there was another way out of the Meat Pool. Its rancid contents were wet and soft but largely solid. Any disposed liquid drained through filters in the bottom of the pit into a basin below. This basin was filled deep enough to cushion a fall and conveniently near a hatch to a major sewer tunnel. She would also never learn that these filters tended to clog, so they were built with a hinge for easy opening.
