Chapter Eight: Taking Inventory
Table knives, carving knives, lots of little plastic "knives" where you'd really have to work at it to even draw blood with them.
Forks and spoons. Pots and pans and cookie sheets. Plates—some of hard plastic, and a big stack of stiff paper ones. Some glasses and a few boxes of paper cups. Several kitchen utensils she couldn't even name. (Maybe she ought to learn to cook, one of these days? Right now her abilities stopped at opening a can or a frozen dinner and then putting the food in the microwave for a few minutes.)
A matchbook at the back of a drawer!
Batgirl pondered. Setting the house on fire had a certain appeal. It would probably mess up The Spook's immediate plans. If other people in the neighborhood were awake, and near enough to notice flames dancing in the darkness, then they would call the fire department, and then firemen would arrive with axes and crowbars and other things which might be useful for ripping your way into a house even if it had steel bars blocking the doors and windows.
Flames normally moved up, so if she lit a fire on this floor, or even the next floor up, and if Sergius was still in the basement, he ought to be safe for awhile.
Well, safe from a fire, anyway. Not safe from whatever The Spook had already prepared down in the basement, but you couldn't have everything. And Batgirl would be ashamed of herself if she couldn't dodge a stupid fire for awhile.
Unfortunately . . . Batgirl and Sergius were not the only people in the house, so turning the upper portion of it into a signal fire had serious drawbacks. There were the four unconscious ones right here on the kitchen floor—and they'd be out cold for quite some time yet; she had made sure of that. There were others she had stunned, before and after. She didn't even know how many more minions The Spook had brought in for the evening, still lurking in other rooms. If any died from burns—or just from breathing smoke—before any rescuers could get in, she'd feel awful. (Batman and Oracle wouldn't exactly be thrilled with her performance either.)
And the plan had other weaknesses. She didn't know where the house was, so she didn't know if there were any neighbors who would notice the fire right away. She certainly hadn't seen any telephones in here, although The Spook presumably had a cellphone or some other way of communicating with the outside world when necessary. Batgirl realized she didn't know much about arson—just how fast would this big house burn once she lit up a few curtains or whatever?
And would the first fireman trying to break through a door or window get killed by the electricity in the steel bars before he realized the danger? Trusting The Spook to do the decent thing and turn off the power—as soon as he heard the sirens and realized people were going to force their way in whether he liked it or not—didn't feel like a smart bet.
On the other hand, opening a way to the basement, moving everyone into it (with the possible exception of The Spook, who could probably turn off the electricity and/or move the bars out of his way at any time), and then setting part of the house on fire as a way to "call for help," might be a more workable plan. Maybe. After she had made a clean sweep of the entire house and mopped up any stray bad guys she came across? If she hadn't found any other way to escape the house by that point?
Somehow she didn't think the set-it-on-fire plan was really going to work out—there were probably plenty of other surprises lurking in this house tonight that could ruin any rough plans she made now—but she still tucked the matchbook away in a concealed pocket in her cape, just in case it'd come in handy later. As an afterthought she tore a few paper towels off a roll, folded them up into small squares, and stashed them in her costume too. If she needed matches, she might need tinder. . . .
She hadn't found what she was looking for. Then she realized she hadn't checked the refrigerator yet. Worth a shot.
Various bits of leftover food, baloney, a jug of milk, slices of cheese in little plastic packages, containers of ketchup and mustard, a few more bottles of wine (at least she thought they looked like wine bottles, but she couldn't read the labels and wasn't planning to taste-test anything, so there were other possibilities). Two drawers at the bottom.
She tugged open the right-hand drawer to look in—and flinched away from the spectacle of a human head staring right back at her. For one terrible instant she had been afraid it was Spoiler's head—teenage girl, blond hair, blue eyes open wide, skin much paler than Batgirl's.
After she recovered from that first shock, she bent forward to peer into the drawer again, and realized those weren't really Spoiler's features—similar, but not remarkably so—in fact, the whole thing might not even be . . . real?
Batgirl grabbed the head by the hair and pulled it out of the drawer. No blood was dripping from the neck, although there was some red stuff congealed at the bottom of the drawer, possibly ketchup from the bottle she'd already seen. But inside the base of the severed neck was metal and wires, as if the head came from . . . a robot?
The skin was incredible—not just one smooth layer of rubber or plastic, but with pores, and minor differences in coloring, and other irregularities to make it convincing. The eyes looked like the eyes of someone who's only been dead for an hour or two, and Batgirl had seen enough corpses to qualify as an expert on such details. The hair was perfect—heck, might be real human hair from a natural blond; Oracle had once told her that some poor women used to grow their hair long and then sell it to wigmakers so rich people could look good—but it was a robot's head all the same.
Batgirl wondered if she would have been fooled at first if the real robot were here, moving around like a normal human being. Be interesting to test that someday. As was, her ability to read muscular twitches didn't work on the dead, so she hadn't known at first glance that this motionless object wasn't the real thing.
Then an evil laugh filled the kitchen. (The Spook must have known when she opened the drawer, and had given her a minute to react before he gloated at his little joke.) After several seconds, he broke it off to speak normally. "I was dreadfully disappointed when you didn't find that on your first pass through the kitchen, my little barbastelle, but it warms the cockles of my heart to know that my trouble was not for nothing! After a contretemps with some other costumed 'heroes,' a colleague of mine was willing to sell off bits and pieces of damaged androids at scrap prices, and I just knew I'd find a use for that fabulous face, sooner or later! What's a Halloween without a few stray body parts floating around, that's what I always say! Gave you quite a shock, eh?"
Batgirl wasn't about to describe the awful chill she had felt in that first moment. Not to him. But the reaction bothered her. She'd stumbled across corpses before, and coped—so didn't she know enough to look at them closely instead of wasting time on a sudden rush of pure fear? Batman would have examined it carefully before reaching any conclusions.
The Spook was perfectly willing to carry on a one-sided conversation, though. "Keep your eyes open, child! The next scraps of flesh and bone may very well be the real thing! If you don't find that Sergius hack all at once, at least you can hope to find him on the installment plan!"
She forced down a surprisingly strong surge of hatred at the sneering sadism of that remark. (It helped that there was no valid target standing right in front of her, or she might have gotten a little carried away in venting her temper.) What was wrong with her tonight? She'd heard equally nasty threats plenty of times, but she didn't know that anything really bad had happened to Sergius yet—The Spook could be bluffing, just trying to make her squirm.
Belatedly she realized Oracle's summary of The Spook's style hadn't mentioned how likely he was to kill people. Some costumed villains did it routinely; others rarely or never. At the time, standing outside the bank, Batgirl had believed their fight would be over in a few minutes, so she hadn't been too worried about the fates of possible future hostages.
She was worried now, though. A couple of carving knives and the piano bench would have to do in cutting or smashing a way through a wall into the descending stairwell. She was headed for the basement with no further delays.
The Spook checked a screen in his control room. Sergius was still alive, but the client had wanted to warm up with him first, before moving on to the main event. That was all right; Batgirl would take at least a few more minutes to find a way into the basement, and by then the client ought to be ready. There were things The Spook could have done to buy more time, if need be—setting off an explosive charge on the ground floor, for instance—but that would have had to be done very carefully, because he'd forfeit a big chunk of his promised payoff if Batgirl was severely injured before the client was ready to finish her off himself.
(That was what the client expected to do, anyway—The Spook had doubts on the subject, but the last installment of his fee was not conditional upon the outcome of the final confrontation; only upon his delivering her for it, still in reasonably good physical condition, albeit with certain psychological preliminaries already attended to. In just a few minutes it would be time for the client to authorize the wire transfer, and then it would be interesting to see what happened next.)
Author's Note: Remember, this story is set several years ago in the comic book continuity, maybe around late 2001, which means long before Spoiler supposedly died during the "War Games" event. So Batgirl would have been completely surprised to see something which, at first glance, resembled her friend's severed head (although the superficial similarity was probably coincidental).
Incidentally, in the next chapter we'll find out what Sergius has been doing since he was separated from our heroine, and we'll probably get our first look at the mysterious client who's been paying The Spook to arrange this evening's entertainment for him. But i doubt I'll mention the client's colorful alias right away, so you may or may not be able to figure out who we're dealing with. (I'm reasonably certain that Sergius won't have a clue.)