Hmm…I guess I'm updating this thing remarkably fast. Oh, the perks of plotting out your story before you write it. And now I have the whole Easter Break to type some more. Aren't my (few) readers lucky. Oh, and for you grammaticasters out there, I'll be proofreading my material and fixing what errors I find every now and then, when I'm not so dead tired.
Monday, August 1 2042, 23:43:18
Dix wanted an entertainment system to liven up his tiny sleaze ball apartment, but he didn't have the creds to buy a toothbrush. So he pulled some strings and cut a few wires and—snap—he was in an electronics store looting to his heart's content. He had to admit, though, the store was creepy in the dark with all the appliances turned off. His reflection in blackened vid and computer screens stared back at him. The man swore he saw something large scuttle past him, but he put it out of his mind when he found his prize.
The system was small in size, big in quality. It was a display item that spent its days playing the same children's vid as the other systems around it. The burglar opened his toolkit and knelt to dismantle his prize. As he did, the row of screens flickered to life, showing the head of a masked person who admonished the viewer with a glance.
"Isn't it a little late to be shopping?" asked a sardonic male voice. The sound came from behind Dix, and he whirled around on his heels to see the masked man from the TVs there in the flesh. He posed standing in front of a store vid camera on a shelf, smiling into it.
Dix scowled and reached into his toolkit for his laser-cutter. He would cut the masked freak down to size. But before he could turn the wicked tool on, the costumed man threw something at his wrist and knocked it out of his hand. Something in his wrist snapped, and he cried out. His eyes settled on a small blade lying on the floor. Red and black, except for the steel razor edge, it was in the shape of a bat. In an instant, Dix understood what was happening. He was breaking the law, and Batman had come to make him pay.
Well, he would like to see the freak try.
With his good hand he scooped up Batman's blade and experienced a nasty shock. Electricity surged from the blade into him, and he was out cold before the girlish scream could escape his throat.
Batman looked down at the unconscious burglar. His right wrist was broken but the electrical shock from the batarang hadn't stopped his heart or his breathing. Needless to say, though, the man wouldn't wake up until long after the police had arrived and the non-caped crusader was once again winging his way through the sky. Batman absently tapped a small white circle glowing on the inside of his forearm. It winked out, leaving only a thin red ring on the ebon techno-Kevlar. At the same time, the batarang folded its wings, placing itself in safe mode. The silvery blades lining the edges of the wings were sheathed. If some kid picked it up, she wouldn't get accidentally cut—or worse: electrocuted or blown up.
Batman looked back into the vid camera and squashed the urge to twist his face into a silly expression. He turned to the row of vid screens projecting what the camera saw and frowned. Seven in profile Batmen fingered a rather too feminine jaw line. So what if Terry McGinnis was too pretty for his own good, he wasn't a girl. Why hadn't he noticed he looked fem from the side before? He scowled and turned off the vid camera.
Instead of blanking out, the screens started to play the news.
"…dropping from #16 for petty theft to #43 for sexual assault," the blue woman said with a heartwarming cheer. The man, more of a second voice box than a separate individual, continued for her, "If trends continue, Gotham can expect to be off the crime black lists completely in years to come."
Batman smirked. "Great to know my ass busting is getting us somewhere," he commented to no one.
"Unfortunately, Gotham isn't there yet, as can been seen with the disturbing disappearance of Terry McGinnis."
Batman winced. Normally some ex-con kid running away didn't make a cramped quarter-column in the back pages of a local paper. But Terry had been the personal assistant of Bruce Wayne, and the big man was reported to have a very large soft spot for the poor kid. There were rumors of kidnapping and blackmail, and Terry's criminal background only made things more interesting. The newshounds had sniffed out the story from miles away and had been doggedly tracking it for a month.
Terry's mother appeared on the screens in that blue dress uniform she wore to her work. She was a pretty woman, but her glossy red hair was mussed and there were dark hollows under her large blue eyes. She wasn't crying yet, but it was obviously a losing battle. "Terry is a good boy, always trying to help—" Her voice cracked, and an old clip of Terry's girlfriend and best friend quickly replaced her. Thanks to more than a few lost lawsuits, reporters were reluctant to film interviewees under extreme duress. Usually. Batman turned away from the screens as one girl put her arm around the other protectively.
"Why? I can't understand why would anyone do this," sobbed the girlfriend. He looked back at her. Once she had been the chic city official's daughter, but now she looked haggard and forlorn in worn out slacks and a baggy sweatshirt Terry had left at her house.
"No one knows why, hon," the other girl told her sadly.
Batman's electronic ears picked up a distinctive noise then, and he whirled into action. When the police jumped forward and leveled their weapons, the vid screens were dark and there was no batarang, no Batman, no sign of him at all except for the unconscious burglar.
XXX
It wasn't so easy for Batman to erase from his mind the image of Terry's mother on the verge of tears. And he was trying.
XXX
First, he went to the park.
It was a public recreational zone in the heart of the city, elevated about forty stories off the ground. Walking along the tree-lined paths, looking up at the moon, he could believe he was in some rural, peaceful place where the only crime was to be unhappy. Then he pulled his head from the clouds and glanced down at reality. And then he went to work.
Later that night, a troupe of clowns decided to take a stroll through the park and do some community work. They were going to give all the boring trees an artistic makeover, something for the little kiddies to look at. After much deliberation, they had decided to keep it natural and use The Birds & The Bees theme. And of course it wouldn't be art if it wasn't anatomically correct.
However, they arrived to find their plans thwarted. Someone had already come and livened up the rows of trees, and they had to admit, his idea was funnier. "I love it!" cried one, gesturing wildly at a stately oak. "Human fruit!"
Indeed, there was a man hanging from the tree, trussed up with dark cable and unconscious. The exuberant clown quirked an eyebrow and started to tap his red-painted nose thoughtfully. "Hmm, wonder how this fella got up there." Grasping the man's hair, he turned the head from side to side and asked, "What kind of fruit is he anyway? Hey, wake up, Fruity! Anybody home?" He rapped his fist on the man's skull several times, then let out a painful whimper and shook out his hand. "Yow! He's got a hard head. Wait…" He turned and bowed to his fellow clowns, grinning, and in a formal manner said, "Ladies and ladies with facial hair, may I introduce to you my good friend Mr. Coke O'Nut?"
The three girls in the group laughed and applauded as one of the Man-clowns came forward brandishing boxer's gloves. He threw an arm over the much smaller, frailer jokester and said, "Oh no, Buddy. You don't need to introduce me to Mr. Nut, Buddy. You see Buddy, Mr. Nut and me are old pals. Buddies. And Buddy?"
The small clown smiled shakily, "Yes, BigTop?"
The big clown grinned back. "You know someone's my buddy when I use his head as a fucking punching bag." And he stepped in front of Mr. Coke O'Nut and moved his arms in a forward windmill, whacking his fists into the unconscious man's skull. There was a merry thunk-a-thunk sound as the head hit the tree trunk repetitively, then an awful groan as Mr. Nut came to.
A Girl-clown with a noose around her neck leaned forward and asked him, "Hey, BigTop's buddy? How'd you get up there?"
His answer sent her running in the opposite direction, and then stopping abruptly when the small clown grabbed her noose's rope, choking her. "What's the big deal, Jay!" she demanded, rubbing her neck. "He said Batman. We gotta go!"
Jay pulled on the rope, and reeled her in towards him. "No, we don't, Dolly. Mr. Coke O'Nut's been out for a while. The Bat's long gone. I say we admire his handiwork. Maybe make some improvements?"
One of those, slow dangerous smiles spread across BigTop's painted face. He grabbed the hanging Mr. Nut and swung him about from arm to arm. "Who's up for a little tetherball?" he asked. All the clowns nodded, grinning.
The game was fun for a time, but then the motion sickness made Mr. Nut vomit all over the pretty green grass. So the clowns moved on and, to their delight, found that the park's trees were laden down with all sorts of criminal fruit
Jay, the small clown who seemed to be the unofficial leader of the group, turned it into a game. He skipped from tree to tree, naming the villains he found dangling from them. "And Mugger Apples, and Druggie Pears, and …ooh!" He bounded up to a particularly impressive tree with several men hanging from its sturdy boughs. "A bunch of rapist bananas –with very small bananas," he commented snidely to Dolly. "Do you like bananas, Dolly Dear? I've got a nice big one in my pocket, just for you."
Another Girl-clown draped her arms around hi neck and cooed, "Oh, I love bananas, Jay. And do you know how I eat them?" Jay gave her an eager look, and with a crazed grin she told him, "I slice them in half. Lengthwise. And I make a banana split, with whipped cream and"—she tweaked his red nose—"a cherry on top."
Dolly laughed and added, "I like to eat banana too, only I peel the skin off. And then I chop it up into little pieces. It tastes really good in cereal."
"Oh, that's no way to eat a banana," admonished the third fem, a clown wearing a bared corset of bone. She pulled a strand of hair away from Jay's face. "Give me that banana of yours, Jay, and I'll show you how to eat it."
Nervously, the clown gestured to the hanging men and suggested, "How about you use one of those? Bananas galore."
She pouted. "But theirs are too small. I need a nice, big banana, Jay. You see, I'll stick it,"—she giggled—"in the blender! And I'll make a yummy smoothie, just for you Jay. So how about it?"
The girls all released him, laughing. Dolly turned to look at the men in the tree. "Know what they remind me of?" she asked her friends. "A maypole." She grabbed a man by his bound ankles, and the othersfollowed suit. Around in crazy patterns, they circled the tree, pulling along their men until the dark cables were a wild tangle around the tree and the failed rapists were pressed up tightly to the trunk.
And so it went. They came to a tall, majestic tree with dark leaves on gracefully outstretched arms. Jay folded his arms crossly and fumed, "No fair! This is the best tree of the lot, and there's nobody hanging from it. The parks are crawling with scum. Surely there's somebody the Bat could put up there."
"Oh, I could think of a few possibilities," a voice behind them mused.
Jay whirled around. Standing there, arms folded just below the red bat on his chest, stood none other than the Man himself: the Waking Nightmare, the Fun Spoiler, Mr. Guano Ass. Batman. Laughing uneasily, the clown apologized, "Sorry, must be going. Late for a very important date."
BigTop lunged at the Bat, swinging his fist. Jay gulped as the big clown went down fast, unconscious before he belly-flopped on the ground. "Actually," he smiled, "I can hang around for a while."
A minute later, he found himself hanging upside-down from the same tree he had just been admiring. To his left was BigTop, sleeping like a baby with a possible concussion. On his other side were the other two Man-clowns in his group. They were mimes. For some reason, they didn't talk much. The ladies were hung somewhere out of sight, which was a shame because they were complaining loudly about being tied together with the rope from Dolly's noose. Upside down. All those pretty legs sticking straight up, and he couldn't see.
Mr. Guano Ass was a very mean man, Jay decided. He hung there for a while, swaying upside-down in the breeze, trying to figure out what sort of criminal fruit he was.
"Oh, I know!" he cried after a while. "We're Jokerz pineapple upside-down cakes!"
One of the Mime brothers rolled his eyes and broke his vow of silence to mutter, "You're a fruitcake."
Jay nodded, proud of himself. "Exactly!"
XXX
Batman flew away from the park in a dark mood. Trust a Joker to find hanging upside-down from a tree amusing. Another night, a night a month ago, he would have been amused almost to tears along with them, but now he only felt anger and guilt. Turning, he dropped altitude and winged towards an area that better suited his gloom.
He landed on the Ground Level, not in one of the carefully cordoned off safe zones near the public elevators, but in the alleys that wormed their way in between sky scrapers and enormous support beams. Gotham thought the Ground Level was uninhabitable, but only half thought it was uninhabited. The other half lived there. They didn't vote, attend school, or ever go up higher than twenty levels. If the U.S. Census knew they existed, they didn't bother.
The same went for the police. GCPD never went in there. It just wasn't worth the dead cops. They kept their consciences clean by saying that they had no right to be there, unless someone called them. On the Ground Level it was a rule, written in blood, that no one called the cops. But just because no one dialed 911, it didn't mean that there weren't any cries for help. There were plenty, and if the police wouldn't help—well, that just left Batman.
Going down there was always disturbing. To many of the people down there, he wasn't a man hiding behind a mask. He was an avenging angel. Or a demon, depending on the point of view. Women and children with exotic features and no English skills to speak of would wear bat plastic necklaces and permanent marker tattoos for protection. Those who were pretty kept shrines.
When he first started working the Ground Level, he had tried to keep track of the crimes, but the faces of victims and villains had blurred together after a while. Now he only kept track of the numbers, a figure he could record at the end of the night to feel like he'd accomplished something.
For example:
A fifteen-year-old girl, probably a mother of several. A young man, probably a gang member since he was six. Batman barely stopped her from slitting her victim's throat with a jagged piece of shrapnel before a second scream rose from just down the street. Throwing away the blade and girl, he rushed towards the new problem. At the edge of his vision, he saw her grab her baby from a dark corner before fleeing in the opposite direction ofher victim. All that shock, all that wrongness he would only remember as a number: 1.
Then 2.
3, 4, 5…
He found number 97 just as the tear began to crest over her lower eyelid.
He wasn't on the Ground Level anymore, but things weren't much better on Floor 6. She was a mother, this time middle-aged. Very pretty still, and that was her problem. Her purse, her high heels, and the rest of her lay scattered on the street. The punk loomed above, hands on his belt. The situation was about to get very bad, when a dark shadow descended on them.
He went too hard on the punk. After, the kid lay on the ground, limp like a rag doll, but he barely noticed. Instead he stared at the woman, whose tears streaked down her cheeks.
She fit that picture perfect Hollywood definition of a middle-aged woman. There was a mixture of gratitude and fear in her blue eyes. Her red hair blew in front of her face in the light breeze. She wore a blue dress uniform under her coat.
"I'm sorry," he found himself saying, though she couldn't possibly know what he was apologizing for. She looked away, and when she looked back, he was gone.
With a trembling hand, she picked her purse off the pavement and looked through it for her cell phone. She dialed the GCPD's hotline and told the young woman, "Hello, Police?My name isMary McGinnis. I was almost...mugged. Yes, that's where I am. He's knocked out. Batman... You'll pick him up? Yes, I'll testify. Thank you." She closed the phone and hurried away.
A dark figure on the rooftops followed after.
XXX
Mary swore as the auto-rail shut its doors and sped away without her. So late at night, it could be twenty minutes before the next tram stopped. She slumped down onto the waiting bench. She stared down at her hands, not as youthful looking as they had been just a short time ago.
"Is this seat taken?" a gentle voice asked.
At first she only heard the voice, not the words, and she thought she recognized the speaker. Turning quickly, her eyes widened as she realized he wasn't the young man she had hoped he'd be. He was Batman. She blinked, finally understanding his question, and stuttered, "No. You…you can…" She faltered and fell silent.
The masked man took his seat gingerly, moving slowly, as if trying not to frighten off a nervous doe. Saying nothing, he stared straight ahead, his head tilted back slightly ashe took in the city lights.
Clutching her purse, Mary finally managed, "Thank you."
"Forget it," was his answer, with the shortest of glances her way. They passed once more into uncomfortable silence.
In it, she found herself studying him. She could see now, why the crazies on TV sometimes called him a demon. And she could see why others called him an angel. More than anything, though, she could see how human he was. Inside the second skin of dark leather, he slumped, trying to disappear into himself. Behind the mask, his features twisted sorrowfully.
"Why do you wear it, the mask?" she asked, "So they don't know who you are?"
He turned and stared at her for a time. "So they don't know who the people I love are," he corrected with a sigh. "They like to do that, instead of going at you directly."
Her eyes followed the auto-rail track into the distance, searching for the next tram. She had never thought that Batman might have a family. He seemed like such a solitary creature. But then here he was, sitting with a forty-year-old woman. "What would you do if…they found out who you were?" she heard herself ask.
Batman made a sound almost like a laugh, or a moan. "In the city zoo, they have these wild hens in the prairie environ," he began. "Do you know about them?"
In a flash of memory, she recalled dragging her sons and that bubbly little girl from next door to that exhibit. Matt, just learning to walk, had loved the petting zoo. Terry and his friend had wanted to pet the tigers. Her throat catching, she nodded.
He explained, "When a predator gets too close to the hen's nest, she starts a big fuss and she…runs away. The predator follows the hen and,"—he glanced at Mary with a sad twitch of a smile—"the nest is safe."
There was a whirring sound, and she turned to watch the auto-rail tram coming towards her. When she glanced back at Batman, he was gone. Shivering, and not just from the chill air, she stood and rushed into the safety of the tram as it came to a stop and opened its doors to her.
XXX
She let go of a breath she had been holding when she reached the door of her apartment. Considering the night she'd just had, she was grateful to be able to walk through the door, lock it behind her three times, and fall into her safe warm bed. She turned the key and typed in the 10-digit code, then frowned when the door only opened a few inches. Something was blocking the door.
She pushed, and the door suddenly swung open unhindered. Inside, scrambling to his feet was Matt. She sighed at him, "You should be in bed."
"You didn't come home," he countered, tears in his eyes. "I…I thought…" Then he was burrowing into her coat, like he hadn't done since he was four. She held him tightly, understanding.
Until Batman came, she had thought so too.
In the window a dark, mask face watched, hesitantly placing a hand on the glass. Then his ears picked up a faint sound in the alley below, and he took flight, fleeing from the McGinnises, safe in their nest.