Chapter Twelve
Jessica's ability to tap into the conscience of Gotham weighed heavy on her soul. Every time she tried to think, a million thoughts raced through her mind, none of them hers. Nothing good came out of knowing the thoughts of other people, and Jessica knew the burden first hand, but at times she didn't have the ability to fight the thoughts. Even in a Utopian society, she'd feel displeasure in knowing the thoughts and feelings of good people. Her father's journal called, "The Mind", talked about controlling the ability to read other people's thoughts, but she hadn't mastered it yet. The vilest of thoughts of the sickest people in Gotham flooded her mind, and caused her soul great agony. Not only did she see the faces of the people who put an II order on Vivian, she saw murders as they happened all across the city. There was more chaos than one girl with super strength could handle, but she had to do her best to focus on the here and now.
She took Vivian and Ronnie to her house, and they immediately wanted to spend their time in the dark basement, away from everybody else. She told them repeatedly that a spare bedroom existed in the house, but they insisted on being in the basement. Jessica realized that they felt at home when in the cellar for some reason, so she let them quietly stay down there without a fuss. She gave Vivian a cool drink of water from the faucet, and she frowned.
"The water in the sewer has a better taste," she mumbled, "Don't remember ever having water from the tap though."
Jessica winced for a moment. "You drank sewer water?"
"It was treated," Ronnie retorted with a sheepish grin on his face. "The big black machine in the center of the shanty town purifies the water. Keeps the diseases to a minimum."
For some reason, Jessica kept feeling that a major disaster was imminent, but couldn't see the problem clearly. She walked back into the living room, and noticed that it started to snow profusely. Looking out of the living room window, she watched the kids across the street horse playing, as the giant flakes covered everything. The weatherman had stated that Gotham would receive a copious amount of snow, and she thought the inclement weather would slow down the search.
She did her best to try to focus on finding a solution for the kids, but something kept nudging at her conscience. According to her father's journals, the premonitions had to do with her DNA, and the glove helped suppress some of the harmful effects of having the ability to see future events and read thoughts. Opening her father's journal, she came across a passage that taught her how to use the glove to enhance her ability to see into the future without the mental anguish. She held her gloved hand in front of her face, and then said, "Sights and sounds from the future to now, help me bring the evil one's down." Her gloved hand began to shake and glow wildly, and then a picture of the huge, black water tank appeared in the living room like a hologram. A child no more than eight-years-old took some water from the sewer, poured it into the tank, and then she drank the cleansed water. At first, the machine appeared innocuous in her premonition. She could see the machine vibrating, and all the residents hopping up to their feet. The young girl fell face down on the ground, and Jessica didn't realize what had happened. A green, noxious gas spewed out of the machine, covered the room, and the people in the room fell to ground, dead. Eagerly, she watched the vision of the people in the sewer laying on the ground, and didn't know what to make of it at first. She saw bodies on top of bodies, and many of the people that died in her vision were kids. Confused, she tried to ascertain information from the glove.
"Is this true?" She asked.
"It will be," the glove answered in a soft female voice.
"How long?" She asked.
"Ten minutes," the glove said, "The death of the sewer people is imminent."
Grabbing her cellphone, she raced to the basement, and the two kids had fallen asleep on the bed. Jessica grabbed Ronnie by the shirt, and forced him to wake up.
"What's going on?" Ronnie asked.
"Give me a number of somebody in the shanty town?" she said, "They're in danger."
"In danger?" Ronnie asked.
"Please, Ronnie. The machine emits a toxic gas," she sniped.
He reluctantly gave her Buddy's number, and she called him. She had awoken him from a deep sleep, and he answered in an angry voice. "How you get my num...?"
"Listen. You're in danger," she said, "Get the people out of there."
"Who's this?" Buddy asked.
"Please! Get everybody out of the sewer, now!"
He didn't answer her back. The phone went dead, and she screamed into until she realized that she had lost connection. Tears ran down her face because the images of dead bodies raced through her head, but she knew that she couldn't stop it. She ran back up the stairs, opened up the front door, and her wings tore through her clothes like confetti. The snow covered everything. Even with her super sharp vision, she had a hard time seeing through the heavy snow. She flew through the air, and the Glove of Darkness said, "You won't make it."
"I have to try," she said with a grimace. "I can't let all those people die."
Even though she hadn't learned the best way to fly through the air at the greatest speeds imaginable, her frustration helped her learn quickly. It took her seven minutes to arrive at Fifth Street, and the poisonous gas had seeped up through the ground, and people died on the main thoroughfare. The gas crept into every business in the vicinity, and over six hundred people had fallen victim to the noxious gas. She flew above the toxic cloud, and looked at her glove for a second. When she put out her gloved hand, the gas formed into one straight line, and jettisoned into the sky, and excited the planet. To her amazement, she didn't know the limits of her powers, but realized quickly that saving lives wasn't the easiest thing to do. She landed in the middle of a sea of dead bodies, and many of the deceased were children.
When she crawled into the sewer, she didn't hear one rodent flapping in the water or any movement in the tunnel whatsoever. She quickly walked into the commodious room where the people lived, and saw a gaggle of dead bodies on top of each other with a look of panic on their faces. Some of the women had children in their arms, and fell to the ground with them, dead. It pained her to see so much death that she began to cry.
The machine stood in the middle of the room, and it looked ominous. She held up her gloved hand, grabbed the machine by the leg closest to her, and ripped the machine off its foundation. As she tore the machine from its base, it made a grating sound that reverberated throughout the room. She flung the machine into the wall repeatedly, and turned it into small, broken pieces of metal. Her rage was like a feral cat as she tore at the medal, and ripped it into shreds. Angered, she looked over at the young, Asian kid with his eyes wide open, flat on his back, and green slime dripping out of his nose. It didn't take much thought process to realize that he didn't have a chance to warn everybody about the imminent threat. She felt nothing but antipathy for the people responsible for the dead bodies all around her, and didn't know how to tell the kids that their people were murdered.
She felt someone else alive in the room; and when she looked over her shoulder, she saw a young man with a hideous scar on his neck.
"Who are you?" She asked in a throaty voice.
He walked over to Buddy's body, took a good look at the boy, and softly said, "Dennis is my name. Use to live here." The phlegm covered the boy's face, and he apparently ripped half of his nose off trying to breathe. He fought for air until his last breath, and died within steps of where the gas first hit him. Some of the people had made their way into the sewer water, and they floated face down next to dead rats. A little girl dove over to the water, and stuck her head under it to never come up again. He turned to see a woman with a small television set making an attempt to cover her mouth with a towel, but it was too late. The toxic gas killed her. It killed them all. With a look of disbelief on his face, he pulled a small child out of the water, and hugged her. "No more pain, child."
"Who did this?" Jessica asked. Her voice sounded like a person in charge, and Dennis immediately responded to it. He placed the girl on the ground, put her arms across her chest, and said a little prayer for her. He then looked over at Jessica with tears rolling down his face.
"The Libertines," he said with slobber rolling off his mouth. He had to clear his throat in order to pronounce the name correctly.
"Libertines?" She had a slight inflection on the end of the word, and it sounded more like a question.
"They pay for all this," he said with a grimace on his face. He used his hands to suggest the Libertines paid for the tents, the water machine, and the people. "They're sexual deviants, but get away with it because they run this town."
"You're not telling me something," she snapped. Slowly, she walked beside the stream of water, and asked, "What aren't you telling me?'
"The Jokers pimp these people to the Libertines," he said, "They funded their criminal organization off these people."
"Jokers? They're back in Gotham?" She asked.
"Never left," he replied. "They went from the clown makeup to nice business suits. They're behind all this."
She quickly realized that more sewer people throughout Gotham existed, and their lives might be in danger too. "What of the other sewers around the city?"
"Nothing that I know of," he said, "The Libertines killed these people because of Mister Garrett's nude photos of Vivian."
"All this to protect their filthy habits?" she said.
"Yeah. It's big business to them. They're having something called the Pedophilic Finally tomorrow night at the Bilks Hotel," he said, "They're renting the whole building."
"Better get out of her before the cops come," she said, "Thanks for the info."