I'm glad you all enjoyed Spider Joker. Man, I love the Spider Pig song.
Purple Ghost Sausage: Want to kick own ass again. It was supposed to just be 'psychopath'.
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"Bloody vampire craze."
The Scarecrow glared at a bare spot on the shelf. To the left were hundreds of colorful cereal boxes, to the right the same thing. Right in front of him, air and dust. The superstore, which had everything any human being from the President to an 18th Century French peasant could ever need, was sold out of Count Chocula cereal. Never mind the six boxes the Joker demanded. He was getting zero. If he cried about it, or threatened to harm Crane bodily, he was prepared to tell the clown to take a little trip to Arizona and kill Stephanie Meyer. It was really her fault all the little girls and boys were snapping up cereal that used to be popular mainly around Halloween.
Crane looked down at the shopping list again. He had the diet soda, Mentos, and the cereal was a no-go. By his estimation, he only had about 8,597 items more to go. He might actually finish by his birthday.
Ten minutes later, the Scarecrow found himself scratching his head and wondering how in the hell he had found himself in the international food aisle. He was standing in front of a whole display dedicated to Indian curry. If he brought home some spicy vegetable mix, the Joker would probably light something on fire, stick it down Crane's pants, and laugh while he ran around in a circle beating wildly at his crotch.
It was unlikely the Joker had gone multi-cultural anywhere on his list, so the Scarecrow departed from that aisle. Eventually, wishing all the while that the store had handed out maps at the entrance, Crane found the snack food aisles. He made enormous progress, because the Joker wanted nearly everything there. Any product that spelled 'cheese' with a 'z' instead of an 's' went into the cart. So did enough chips, nachos, cookies, pretzels, crisps, dip, and salsa con queso to throw a block-wide Super Bowl party of epic magnitude.
"Pork rinds? He can't be planning to eat these, can he?" Crane asked, examining a plastic bag that featured a smiling pig on it.
Grimacing in distaste, the Scarecrow threw the bag of pig snacks into the cart. Even looking at the grinning porker gave him a sudden stab of pain in his arteries. Crane silently cursed pork rinds, and anyone who enjoyed them, to an early and well-deserved grave.
Crane tore the first three pages from the list and crumbled them up. He was actually making progress, real, substantial progress! That dreadful old bat and her cat food might still be wandering around by the time he got to the checkout and unleashed hell.
The next section of the list was dedicated entirely to candy. The Scarecrow knew there was more than Hershey's chocolate out there, in the same vague way people who lived near the Atlantic Ocean knew that England, Portugal and the rest of the European continent was somewhere across the blue. Upon reading the Joker's candy demands, Crane understood just how many different companies made their business rotting teeth and comforting lonely women.
"Mike and Ike? Aren't they presidents? Ike surely was. Is that clown playing with me? I wish I actually had a sweet tooth; maybe then I'd know what half of these are." The Scarecrow muttered.
The Scarecrow, just out of spite, wanted to call it quits now and begin terrorizing people. Deal or no deal, the Joker had taken advantage of him. If it wasn't for the maniac's encyclopedic knowledge of how to maim, kill, and injure, Crane might have just let him go hungry.
"Uh, buddy, that Snickers bar bad-mouth you or something?"
Crane twitched and looked around in confusion. A man, his young daughter hiding behind his leg, was giving him an odd and distrustful look.
"What?" The Scarecrow asked.
"You've been standing there and glaring at that candy for like, five minutes. You were starting to creep me out." The guy explained.
"I'm not angry at the candy, I'm angry at the bastard who sent me to buy it." Crane said. Then he realized the little girl peeking out was much too young to hear such language. "Sorry."
The man waved his hand. "Don't worry about it. She all ready told me they say it on the bus. I'm just glad you weren't having some kind of an episode. It's too bad your friend's a dick, though."
"Yes, he's the scum of humanity. I don't know how I put up with him." The Scarecrow said.
He hastily grabbed some nearby chocolate bars, a tub of sour gummy worms, and boxes of chewy fruit candy. Whether it was on the list or not didn't matter right now. Crane had to get out of the aisle and away from the guy and his kid. The last thing he needed to do was arouse suspicion now.
Once he was safely halfway across the store, Crane removed another page from the list. He doubted if he had even come close to getting all the sweets the Joker wanted, but he was not going back. It would be a totally useless gesture, anyway. He would have to hire a Sherpa and Indiana Jones if he wanted to locate every piece of candy the clown had written down.
With candy and snack food out of the way, that left baked goods. Most of Harley's list, asides from the massive amount of hamburger Bud and Lou needed, could be found at the bakery. She probably wouldn't torture him for getting blueberry instead of strawberry cheesecake, so the Scarecrow was a bit less strict with her list. By the time he found banana nut muffins, the cart was nearly full.
A single cart was not going to be enough for all the food on both lists. Crane should have foreseen this and grabbed a second cart. Now he would have to abandon his laden cart, run back to the front of the store to get another, and hope nobody stole anything while he was gone.
The Scarecrow left his cart next to the bagels. He paid no attention to the fossilized greeter, who waved pretty gamely for a man nearly immobilized by arthritis. Ignoring the indignant bark of a woman he shoved in front of, Crane grabbed another cart. He jogged, not wanting to get any weird looks or double-takes from security for running in the store.
In the three minutes it had taken Crane to retrieve a second cart, the parasites had crawled upon his filled cart like flies on a flattened mess that had once been a possum. Two brats were stealing Harley's brownies, and throwing them into their mother's cart. They had apparently never been taught any manners at all, the selfish little monsters, because they returned to raid the candy Crane had managed to collect.
In a world that was paranoid about molesters and kidnappers, Crane violated a major taboo. He caught the arm of one young thief, just as the kid was about to snatch a box of sour gummies. Physically touching a child that wasn't yours was a sure way to earn a blast of pepper spray to the face, or a high-heeled shoe to the groin.
"Let it go, or the arm comes off." The Scarecrow hissed.
The boy, hardly half as tall as Crane, let out a shriek reminiscent of a velociraptor. His younger brother began to scream as well. With all the rage and force of a mother bear defending her cubs, the boys' mom stormed onto the scene.
"Franklin! Let him go, you sicko!" The woman demanded.
"Your untrained offspring was stealing from me! Woman, shut up and take him." The Scarecrow replied. He plucked the box of sweets from the boy's hand, tossed it back to the cart, and shoved him in his mother's direction.
"I should report you." The mother hissed.
"For what? Keeping your misbegotten spawn from robbing me blind? He's a criminal in the making. In ten years, you'll be visiting him in prison." Crane said.
"Franklin is a good boy."
"Franklin is going to be sharing a cell with a biker ironically named Tiny, and he is going to learn a great deal about Greek culture and home-made tattoos." The Scarecrow replied.
With her lower lip trembling, the mother gathered her two sons under her arms and shepherded them away. Crane glared at them, and fully hoped his prediction about Franklin's future came to fruition. The last thing he heard before the family disappeared into a new aisle was, "Mom, what's misbegotten spawn?"
The Scarecrow found it very difficult to manage two carts at once, especially when one was chocked full of eclectic groceries. His great need to make a quick escape on the off chance that woman really did bother to locate a security guard or store employee was hampered. Cursing the newer cart's gimpy front wheel, Crane ended up shoving the full cart with one hand and dragging its disabled counterpart behind him.
It was time to deviate from the list, and Jonathan Crane was prepared to damn the consequences. He just wasn't good around normal people. First he had stared down a Snickers bar, and then he had threatened to dismember a ten-year-old over some chewy fruit. If he didn't do some triage work now, he would almost certainly end up being cornered by an overweight rent-a-cop.
"Ice cream and a first aid kit, then." The Scarecrow decided. He yanked the two uncooperative carts to the frozen food section. Since he was not going to stand in line at the meat counter and order twenty different kinds of sandwich meat, Crane decided some frozen corndogs and popcorn shrimp would have to be suitable substitutes. With no regard to New York Super Fudge Chunk or any of the other flavors the Joker had requested, the Scarecrow randomly grabbed pints of Ben and Jerry's and threw them into the second cart.
By the time Crane had wrestled his way over to the pharmacy, he was ready to pull an Annie Wilkes and just axe the useless, squeaking wheel straight off the lame cart. He had also offended half of the shoppers with his cursing, which had started as quiet muttering under his breath and finished just short of shouting.
"Aspirin, fine, dandy, great. Red Cross approved first aid kit. Gorgeous. Water-proof bandages. I'm surely going to need those, the way my day is going. Head-On. For Christ's sake, what nonsense." Crane said. The offending, and probably useless, headache medicine went flying.
Satisfied that he had enough medical supplies to take care of anything short of the amputation of a leg or an arm, Crane began the long and painful process of getting from to the checkouts. He was offered assistance once from a man in an ascot who was gayer than Elton John, but frightened the poor fellow off with a look of red hatred.
Crane scanned the checkout counters, looking for the cashier he'd most like to gas. His first inclination was to head straight for the most crowded counter, since it offered the most victims. Upon catching sight of the girl who manned it, a frumpy thing who filled out her uniform in all the wrong places, he felt a twinge of pity. That poor child probably had a life similar to his own. It wouldn't be fair to add hallucinations and trauma to her miserable existence.
While the girl reminded the Scarecrow of the long series of beatings, humiliation, and pain that had been his adolescent years, a male cashier a few aisles away gave Crane actual flashbacks of the sadistic children who had been his tormentors. The teen was tall, but actually had something in the way of muscles. He had the same face, down to the eyebrows that weren't quite symmetrical, as one of the bullies who got his jollies by smashing Crane's hand in locker doors. Judging by how he was chatting up his customers, as long as those customers happened to be teenage girls with oversized breasts and short skirts, he had the same personality, too.
"Perfect." The Scarecrow said. He knew that the cashier wasn't the same person who had haunted Crane's footsteps during high school; for starters, that original bully was dead, courtesy of a particularly nasty batch of toxin. It was nothing more than an unlucky shuffling of genes that gave them similar appearances. Right now, that didn't much matter. Crane's rotten day was about to become very contagious.
The two carts, even the crippled one, no longer seemed like such hindrances. Wearing a smile he hoped was natural but probably suggested he was concealing a meat cleaver, Crane approached the checkout lane.
Crane was the third person in line. It was unlikely that anyone would come behind him, because of the sheer amount of crap he had to check out. That was a little disappointing. He wasn't going for research data, just a body count. The more people he poisoned, the more chaos he spread, the longer he'd have to find a suitable vehicle and hotwire it.
"Thanks for shopping at… Wow, you have a lot of crap." The clerk said.
"Bluntly put. But yes, I'm throwing a party." The Scarecrow said.
"Man, are you inviting the whole state or something?"
"I'm going to have clowns and everything." Crane said.
"All right. Whatever you're into, man."
The cashier rang up the first aid supplies, the ice cream, and half of Harley's baked goods without any problems. By the time he was scanning the brownies and cheesecake, Crane noticed the kid was taking peeks at him between the items. The more items he bagged, the more the clerk dared to stare.
"Have I sprouted a second head?" The Scarecrow inquired.
"Huh?"
"My head. Do I have two of them now? Is that why you've been scanning the same box of cookies for the past three minutes?" Crane asked. This time, he made no pretense of being nice about it.
"I know you from somewhere." The clerk replied. He finally dropped the cookies, which had been rung up sixteen times.
"I have never seen you before in my life. My memory is quite good, doubtlessly better than yours. If it was more than a mere passing on the street, I would have a recollection." The Scarecrow said.
"Your voice, too. I recognize it. Except, you weren't talking like some elitist. You were on the news, and you were yelling." The cashier replied.
Crane snorted. "And what was I yelling, if your undeveloped mind is so astute?"
"I am the Master of Fear and the Lord of Despair! Worship me fools, worship me!"
"Damn it. Damn it! Damn it!" That little clip had been from his last incarceration at Arkham. He hadn't exactly gone back to his cell quietly.
"Yeah, that was you on the news last month, and you're the Scarecrow. Man, I can't believe it. The Scarecrow comes to my checkout counter, and gets in a fight with me. This is going to make one ass-kicking story. I'm going to be on TV." The clerk said.
The Scarecrow couldn't wrap his lobes around the young cashier's gall. People shouldn't get excited over meeting Gotham's worst villains, like they were some sort of celebrity or visiting world dignitary. No, the citizens were supposed to grow pale, scream, call the police, faint, or lose control of their bladders! What was the world coming to when the youth wouldn't even respect the Master of Fear?
"You're going to have a hard time getting on television if you're a stone dead corpse. Or too insane to form a noun and verb together." Crane said.
"You don't kill people." The kid countered.
"I don't usually kill people. Occasionally, it happens. I haven't killed anyone recently, so perhaps it's time I remedy that. After all, I do have a reputation that obviously needs repairing, if monkeys like you think it's safe to sass me." The Scarecrow said.
The nightly news, as was usually the way they operated, left out a few key facts. In this case, the blonde model they improperly labeled an anchor had failed to report the numerous test subjects who had expired under Crane's care. Albeit, it had been an unfortunate combination of severe allergic reactions to the toxin, and a heart attack or two along the way, but dead was dead.
"I really don't want to die. Look, man, I haven't even graduated high school. I didn't tell my mom I loved her this morning. I want to go to college, or join the Coast Guard, or help sick people in Africa! I'm still a virgin! Please, Scarecrow, man, don't kill me!" The kid begged.
This was getting embarrassing. It was also earning unwanted attention; the cashier two aisles over, and her customers, were all watching with growing curiosity. The useless, puling clerk was now grabbing at handfuls of Crane's shirt, and looked on the verge of tears. It was a nice change from the undeserved arrogance, but it was also causing wrinkles.
"Finish bagging. I'm not going to kill you, in all likelihood. The worst you're going to get is a two day break from school. And get your hands off me." Crane said.
"Okay."
"Don't you dare start crying! Show a little dignity, for God's sake." The Scarecrow said.
"Sorry, Scarecrow." The kid said.
"And stop calling me Scarecrow. Dr. Crane, if you feel the need to call me anything at all." Crane said.
"Sure thing, Dr. Scarecrow. Shit fire. I mean Dr. Crane."
"Forget it. Just help me get all this into a cart. Stomp on it if you need to. It's only for the Joker." The Scarecrow said.
Upon hearing the Clown Prince's name, the kid seized up. "This is all for the Joker? Jesus, if I did a bad job bagging, he'll come back here and kill me! My name's on the receipt, he'll know what aisle, oh man, I'm gonna die!"
Crane forgot all about feeling bad for the teen's lack of dignity. The Scarecrow was nothing, but the mere mention of the Joker was enough to cause hysterics? Son of a bitch!
By now, thanks to the wailing fit the boy was having over his impending death, everyone was staring. Somebody had alerted the store's manager, and the overweight, bald underachiever was threading through the curious customers. A security guard whose normal day consisted of stopping kids from stealing candy bars or DVDs was also running toward the checkouts.
The Scarecrow shook his left sleeve, and the mask fell into his waiting hand. A few of the wiser sheep recognized the burlap sack, shrieked, and made a break for the doors. Most of the customers stayed put, watching with dull eyes. They had just come to do their weekly errands, and had not been looking for any trouble.
Crane donned the mask, and surveyed the crowd. By now, anyone with a brain knew who he was. Fear was the only thing that kept them from stampeding, or from attempting to play the hero. The cashier, Crane noted, had crouched down below his register and had thrown his arms over his head, as though he was performing an old duck-and-cover drill.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I found the service lacking, the overall organization poor, and all of you dreadfully boring. From me to you, a little excitement. Please, be scared."
The cashier was the first one affected. In abject terror, he leapt up, whacked his head off his cash register, and fell down unconscious. He would end up getting a week off from school and about 700 get-well-soon sympathy cards. A few customers who had been drawn forward by their nosiness regretted their interest. Screams soon filled the air. Carts were overturned, groceries rolled across the floor, glass broke, soda bottles exploded, and through it all, Jonathan Crane laughed.
"Not such a bad day, really. Not so bad at all."
There was just the little matter of stealing a car, and delivering the groceries. There was no way that could go poorly. Of course not.
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Author's Notes: My little sister writes nothing but Twilight fanfiction. When she read the line about the Joker killing Stephanie Meyer she yelled "He'd better not!"
Salsa con queso is salsa with cheese.
Mike and Ike are fruit-flavored candies. Ike is Dwight Eisenhower.
Annie Wilkes is the psychotic nurse from Misery. In the movie, she's got a hammer, in the book it's an axe.
Head-On: Apply directly to the forehead. Head-On: Apply directly to the forehead.
"I am the Master of Fear and the Lord of Despair! Worship me fools, worship me!" is a line directly from Batman: The Animated Series.