Thanks for all the reviews! I'm totally overwhelmed by the responses. Suppose you can bump it to 120?
SendMoreParamedics and Mad Scientist Sidekick: yeah, I was pretty much going on the 'dog chasing cars' concept.
Darkknightwing: I figured it was you. Hi new name! And be as excited and sadistic as you please. I am not here to discourage it.
SoSott: Spread the weird reference joy!
Sorry this took so long. My laptop broke and I had to write on a replacement. I miss my baby and I want it back! Wah!
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"I'm as eager as you are to pay the Bat back for all the misery he's caused, but we do have a problem. There's a Centralia situation directly beneath our feet." Crane said.
"I don't care if a hole to hell opened in the basement." The Joker replied.
"Essentially, that is what happened. The fire, which you started you useless son of a bitch, could be eating away at the floor as we speak. This entire house may be close to collapse." The Scarecrow said.
"Then go get the garden hose and play firefighter. I'm not letting this opportunity fly away." The clown said.
"A garden hose against that fire? Spitting on it would be about as effective. We have to leave before the floor falls in."
"Where do you suggest we go, Mop Man? My hideout blew up, the Riddler would never be stupid enough to invite us in, and we can't go to the Ritz with Batman. Can you imagine it? 'Bellhop! Take that Bat up to room 1408 and be snappy about it!' Couldn't find a bellboy buff enough for the job." The Joker said.
Harley snapped her fingers. "That house next door! I don't think nobody lives there. We could just sneak in and make ourselves at home."
That was a fine idea, except for one thing: the crazy cat lady down the street, and her collection of hairballs. Crane had, not long after moving in, taken a peek in the neighboring home. The place was overrun with cats. Oblivious to the advice Bob Barker had given since the turn of the century, the cat hoarder had not spayed or neutered any of her animals. The abandoned house was a den of kitty sin and debauchery.
"No, we can't go there. It's a cat bordello." The Scarecrow said.
"What's a bordello?" Harley asked.
The Joker said, "I'll tell you when you're older."
The blonde huffed, but didn't press the matter. She could always find a dictionary or a public computer at the Gotham library if she really needed to know what a bordello was. There were more important matters at hand than Word of the Day calendars. It might have just been Harley's imagination, but she believed the floor beneath her was starting to warm up a little. It wasn't like stepping on a sizzling skillet, but she was worried.
"Uh, Puddin', I think the Professor's right. We gotta vamoose pretty soon." Harley said.
"And why is that, Harley? Do you enjoy hauling around the men I beat unconscious? Because if you do, I'll go out and find you someone incredibly fat and we'll go from there." The Joker said.
"No, Mister J, I don't enjoy haulin' people around. It's just that the floor's gettin' hotter. I thought it might've been my imagination, but the Babies are feelin' it too." Harley said.
Bud and Lou were indeed looking a little hot-footed. They gingerly placed their paws on the floor, and were avoiding certain areas all together. Because of their thicker shoes, the Scarecrow and the Joker were yet to feel the heat.
Crane put his hand against the linoleum and frowned. "Oh, yes. That's not a good sign. I don't care what you do, but I'm going outside. I've nearly been burned alive once tonight."
"All right! I admit it, I was wrong. The floor is going to burst into flame and we are going to have to leave. Spooky, go get your truck. Bring it to the back door." The Joker said.
The Scarecrow sputtered with a mix of outrage and disbelief. "Are you out of your mind? You shot me in the chest. I am done running errands for you. You want my truck, get it yourself."
The Joker sighed. This was why he liked working with Harley and henchmen with IQs under 50. When he told Harley to fetch him a nice cold soda, she didn't stand around badgering him about it. When he ordered a henchman to plant a bomb, or throw a kitten into a tree, or slip cyanide into a Boy Scout troop's bake sale, that henchman didn't spend thirty years analyzing the morality of the situation. He tossed that kitty and poisoned those muffins!
Spooky wasn't a normal henchman, and apparently still didn't understand where he was on the villain food chain. The top predator was the Joker. Then there was Harley. Then Bud and Lou. Then the toaster. Then there was Johnny the Mop Man. He was the lowest rung on the ladder before the autotrophs showed up.
"I'll tell you one more time. Go. Get. The. Truck. Now!"
"No."
"Yes."
"No!"
"Get it or else!"
"Go take a long fall with a short rope!"
If that was the way the nerd wanted to play, fine. The Joker knew how to deal with people like Spooky. The clown reached into his pocket and retrieved his gun. He was making excellent friends with his weapon today. The NRA would have to forgive him for losing his magazines and allowing the sofa to temporarily ingest his gun.
"Why don't you threaten me with something new? I've all ready been shot once today. Look, there's blood and everything." Crane said.
"Something new, huh? Not a problem! What if I just pretend you're a zombie, and pistol-whip you until your brain's nothing but Jell-O? That would be interesting and it would keep you from spreading your zombie plague to Europe." The Joker said.
A spike of sympathy pain shot through Crane's head at the mere thought of any further abuse. Being shot, mortally most likely, would be unpleasant but only until he bled out. Getting smacked on the head would be exponentially worse.
"I'll get the truck." Crane said.
"Since when can zombies drive? Harley, you saw Shaun of the Dead. Did Phil drive after he turned into the hungry undead?" The Joker asked.
"No, Puddin', he didn't. But Professor Crane's not a zombie. I mean, he's talkin, and it ain't 'brains, brains!' or anything like that." Harley said.
"I'm going, I'm going." The Scarecrow said.
Before the Joker could decide to play zombie hunter, Crane limped his barely twitching carcass out of the room. The truck was out in the yard, unless some thugs cruising from the grungiest alleys of downtown Gotham had disassembled it for parts. The Scarecrow hoped that hadn't happened. He didn't want to know what the killer clown would do if his ride was nothing but a sad shell and a bullet-riddled windshield. Even the most ingenious chop-shop would have trouble selling a windshield full of holes.
Mercifully, the car-thieves hadn't made it this far into the suburbs. The purple pickup, looking decidedly less like a monster than it had under the effects of fear toxin, was unmolested. Crane approached it, and was then struck with a singularly selfish and delicious thought.
Why should he do anything for the Joker? The clown was in a house that was ready to burn up like a funeral pyre. Crane was outside, only feet from his best chance at escape. He could be long gone before the Joker got annoyed at the holdup and came looking for him. The Scarecrow knew a rat hole or two he could curl up in for a few days. What was stopping him from forgetting all about the Batman, the Joker, and the day's general agony?
"Because he'd find me and he'd do everything but kill me." The Scarecrow said.
That was the sad reality of the situation. As long as the Joker was free, and holding a grudge for any reason, Crane was in danger. The clown, through his network of informants, or tortured victims, or wiretaps on police phone lines, or however the hell he got his information, could track anyone down. He was like a sinister bloodhound, able to follow a trail through the city without a problem.
Muttering about how unfairly life treated him, the Scarecrow stopped at the tailgate of the truck. A few grocery bags the Joker hadn't chucked out in his mad quest for ice cream were still resting in the bed of the truck. The universe Crane had just been decrying granted him a favor. The bag containing first aid supplies had survived the Joker's searching.
"Hallelujah." Crane said.
The Scarecrow shook the various medicinal items from the bag. In the dark, with only a half moon to serve as a lamp, it was difficult to distinguish the various bottles and containers. Finally, Crane located a plastic bottle of Tylenol. He fiddled with the childproof cap before popping it off. The cap slipped through his fingers and was lost in the grass. Crane did not pursue it.
"Take two and call me in the morning. Doctor jokes, ha." The Scarecrow said. Ignoring the warning label about overdose, Crane shook six pills from the bottle. If the Joker hadn't killed him by now, three times the recommended dose of Tylenol wasn't going to either.
Ignoring how much care, scientific research, paper, and glue had gone into making the warning labels, Crane put the pills in his mouth and chewed them. The Tylenol manufacturers would have been pulling their hair out by the roots if they knew how badly their product was being abused.
Even though the painkillers looked a little like candy, enough alike so that a young child would have grubbed them up, they surely didn't taste sweet. Asides from being hard enough to snap off teeth, the Tylenol also tasted like contaminated sand. Crane winced, wishing he had something, especially something with sugar, to wash the horrendously bitter taste out of his mouth. Even after he swallowed the crushed pills, the aftertaste lingered like a certain unwanted guest.
Hoping the Tylenol was both as powerful and as quick-acting as the commercials advertised, the Scarecrow made his way to the front of the truck. Someone, presumably Harley unless there was an auto safety fairy flitting around, had untwisted the ignition wires and shut the truck off. Not too keen to repeat the initial shock he had received hotwiring the truck in the parking lot, Crane got the engine running again.
The proudly purple pickup purred like a cat: a discolored, totally hairless cat that got between ten and fifteen miles on each gallon of fuel it consumed. Careful not to bump his head off the top of the door frame, Crane got into the driver's seat. The truck's digital clock was kind enough to tell him it was a little after midnight. The Scarecrow wished he was sleeping, snug in his bed, with a hyena under his feet, and not out aiding the Joker's nefarious and doubtlessly brain-numbing plans.
Careful to avoid the maple tree, which was wilted and pathetic, Crane drove the truck to the rear of the house. The back door was open and Harley, her despicable parasitic lover, the hyenas, and an enormous shape that was either Batman or an adult Grizzly were all silhouetted by the kitchen light. The Joker was bent over Batman's unconscious form, and appeared to be fiddling around with the gadgets on his utility belt. Or, at least, that was what the Scarecrow forced himself to believe. Surely, Harley would step in to stop any impropriety. Right?
Crane put the truck in park, and stuck his head out the window. "Why are you all outside? Did the floor catch fire?"
"Not yet, but it's gettin' there in a hurry!" Harley said.
"My sole has melted. You owe me a new one." The Joker said, straightening up from whatever task he had been engaged in.
"You don't have a soul, clown." Crane said.
"Yes I do, and it's melted. Do you have any idea how much a pair of my shoes cost? If you don't, you will when my cobbler sends you the bill." The Joker said. He stood on one leg, and showed the Scarecrow the underside of one of his shoes. The footwear had indeed sustained some heat damage.
Just when he thought he had reached the pinnacle of human mental and physical agony, the disturbed clown started making shoe puns. Crane wanted to curl into a ball and turn off the light. This was, absolutely, the most awful thing to ever take place in all of mankind's bloody and sordid history.
"Next time you want to make a joke like that, make sure I'm dead beyond any hope of resuscitation before you do it." The Scarecrow said.
"Everybody's a critic! Harley, you thought it was funny, didn't you?" The jaded clown asked.
"Actually, Puddin', I think the non-Disney version of Old Yeller was funnier than that. No offense or nothing." Harley said.
"Bats, you're my only hope." The Joker said.
For one terrible moment, Crane thought the Dark Knight had woken up, and was going to physically demonstrate, with much punching and beating, just how funny he thought the Joker was. That fear was alleviated when the Joker grabbed the hero's jaw, and in an act of perfect ventriloquism, turned Batman into his dummy.
"You're the king of comedy, Joker! You're also the snappiest dresser, the greatest artist, and the sexiest sex machine to ever grace this unworthy town."
"Puddin', you've been spendin' too much time with Puppet Head." Harley said.
"There is nothing, no torture or threat, that would ever force Batman to say that." Crane pointed out.
"He's a little OOC, so what? Even a guy like Bats has to fall victim to my charms sometimes. I'm irresistible." The Joker said.
The Scarecrow wasn't going to ask what OOC meant, or who, asides from Harley, found the Joker even slightly attractive. He certainly wasn't going to ask if the Joker had a gay streak a mile wide, even though that thought was doing naked cartwheels through his brain. In fact, he was just going to forget the entire conversation and write it off as a product of whatever brain disease the clown obviously suffered from.
"It does seem like the elephant in the room, but what are we going to do with Batman? I take it you aren't going to turn him in to the police for his nightly vigilante activity." Crane said.
"Duh." The Joker said. "Spooky, I'm not paying you to ask stupid questions. So why don't you stop?"
"Fine, I'll just shut up and drive. Why don't you ride in the back, with your beloved Batman?" The Scarecrow suggested.
The Joker acted as though Crane had suggested they all renounce their evil ways, join the Peace Corps, and convert to Buddhism. "No one puts Joker in the back, nobody!"
Crane rolled his eyes. "Then throw the Bat in the back, stick Harley and the hyenas somewhere, and let's go. Night's wasting, and I don't want to be caught driving around in broad daylight with you sitting next to me."
"Harley, you heard the straw man! Throw the Bat in the back pronto."
The blonde's mouth fell open so far it nearly reached her belly button. "Mister J, I can't do it!" She whined.
The Clown Prince came over to see what the problem was. It was quite obvious. Harley was just a petite little lady. The Bat was roughly the size of a bull alligator, and even more dangerous because an alligator couldn't fly through the air using a grappling hook. Without a winch and pulley system, there was no physically possible way for her to get Batman into the truck.
"How much can you lift, Spooky?" The Joker asked.
"Right now? Oh, about an ounce or so. Anything more than a postage stamp would probably break me." Crane replied sarcastically.
"Stupid useless scrawny nerd." The clown muttered.
Watching in the rearview mirror, the Scarecrow was granted the best seat to the most hopelessly funny act he had seen in a very long time. The Joker had clambered into the bed of the truck, while Harley stayed on the ground. Bud decided to join the Joker, and was wandering around, sniffing the few bags that remained. Crane hoped the hyena didn't get into the Tylenol.
"Okay, Harley-pie. See if you can get his leg up here." The Joker said.
Harley grabbed Batman's foot, and attempted to raise it high enough for the Joker to grab. The only issue was that the rest of the hero's body was attached to the foot. Grunting, cursing, and getting her pigtails in a knot, Harley was finally able to lift the leg onto the tailgate.
"Great, we've got a leg here. I'm going to pull on this, and you push." The Joker said.
To her infinite credit, Harley did manage to almost get Batman onto the truck by herself. The Joker was next to useless, and seemed to forget his end of the plan. He dropped Batman's leg, and instead took up the task of shooing Bud away from anything that looked remotely like it might be food.
"Bad dog, bad! Let go of that, whatever it is. I want some food, damn it."
Harley's muscles gave out on her. She had time to emit one horrified, hamster-like squeak before Batman fell on top of her. She was nearly flattened by the Caped Crusader's weight.
"Harley? Harley, where did you go? Oh, what're you doing under there?" The Joker asked.
"I'm bein' squished!" Harley said.
"Oh. Hold on a second. I've got to get back those brownies."
The Joker never did get those brownies. Bud leapt from the truck, laughing, and scurried into the night. His laughter, and the sounds of him tearing apart the plastic container that held the brownies, marked his location. The clown cursed darkly, and hopped down to help his favorite hench-wench before she suffocated underneath his favorite flying vermin.
"Mister J, remind me why I love you again!" Harley panted when the Joker finally dragged Batman's dead weight from her.
"Cause I'm cuddly." The Joker said.
"So are Bud and Lou." Harley said.
"Cause I'm a genius."
"So's Professor Crane."
"Cause I'm a super sex machine who can go all night."
"Okay."
Since Harley had forgiven him for leaving her squashed and helpless, the clownish duo buckled down to get the job done. Mister J really put his back into it this time. With Harley pushing on Batman and the Joker yanking on his leg, they were finally able to force the Dark Knight into the back of the truck.
Crane popped his head out the window again. "What about the Babies?"
"Professor! I knew you'd learn to love Bud and Lou! They can ride in the back. If B-man gets up, they can eat his feet off so he can't go nowhere." Harley said.
On Harley's command the two hyenas eagerly bounded into the truck. Harley pointed at Batman, and said, "If he so much as twitches one bat-finger, sic him!"
Harley locked the tailgate and walked to the front of the truck. The cab had enough room to seat three people, especially when one of those people was bony and one was a woman. The Joker had already taken the middle seat, so he could annoy Harley and Crane with equal ease.
The Scarecrow checked the rearview mirror, and found Lou staring straight at him. That was pretty creepy. Hopefully, the hyena would decide to sniff Batman or ruffle through the bags or something. Crane didn't want the mutt watching him the whole time.
"Do you have any idea where we should go, clown?" Crane asked.
"Not a single one." The Joker replied.
"Are we just going to rely on psychic magnetism to find a hideout?" The Scarecrow asked.
"Works for me, Johnny-boy. I'd suggest you get moving before Batman wakes up. He'll be grumpy and looking for someone weak and sissy-looking to bring to justice." The Joker said.
"One day, fate's going to bite you on the ass for all the pain you've caused me." Crane muttered.
The clown snorted. "Karma doesn't bite me, I bite karma."
Knowing it was probably true, Crane put the truck in drive and headed toward the road. He was about to merge onto the nearly empty street when the Joker called out excitedly. The Scarecrow slammed on the brakes, wondering if it was a certain black-clad ninja wannabe who had just drawn the clown's attention.
"Look what I just found! It's Spooky Junior!"
This was going to be a long, long night.
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Author's Notes:
Centralia is a city in Pennsylvania that is essentially abandoned. Decades ago, a fire started in the coal mines underneath the city and the entire place is now uninhabitable because the streets are prone to collapse and noxious gases from the fires routinely burst through the ground.
1408 is the haunted hotel room in a Stephen King story by the same name.
The zombie plague spreading to Europe is a reference to 28 Weeks Later. Not as good as the original, but pretty sinister in its own rights.
In Shaun of the Dead, Phil was Shaun's stepfather. He was bitten by a zombie and turned into one while inside his own car. He didn't drive, but he did turn off the CD player.
In an episode of B:TAS, Harley refers to the Ventriloquist as "Puppet Head".
OOC, as most fanfiction writers know, stands for Out of Character. I don't know where the Joker would pick it up but, meh.
Psychic magnetism is from the Dean Koontz book Odd Thomas. It was a power of Odd's, where he could, by driving randomly, end up where he needed to be more often than not.