Chapter Three: Cradled in the Arms of Death
Anger made Bane's voice deeper, his words sharper. "I will kill the next person that enters the room and everyone thereafter. I will fill this room with the dead until you liberate me from this place."
His words brought on a cold sweat as Jane swallowed hard, fear trickling through her body as she knew her mom would likely be the next person to try and get through the door, alerting security when she found it locked and none of her numerical codes working.
Jane stared up at Bane, knowing from the many news outlets coverage that Bane would follow through on his threats, his capacity for violence was obscene.
Even in his diminished state, Bane's muscular body exuded a majestic force.
Jane finally nodded, tearing her eyes away from his long enough to pluck the keys to one of the paneled vans from a nail that had been crookedly pounded into the wall.
Bane felt a trill of satisfaction as he turned his back on her and returned to Talia's dead side.
As he was crossing the tiled room, he paused when he felt Jane's eyes on the back of his neck.
Bane turned his head slightly, catching her in his peripheral vision.
"If you feel the need to attempt betrayal, I promise you that I will end as many lives as I can under this roof before your beloved Gotham Police force attempt to successfully end my life."
His words had interrupted her focused attention on the base of his skull, she'd been wrapped up in the thought of slipping a sharp, pointed object into the back of his neck and finding his off switch.
Jane pressed her lips together as she watched Bane scoop up Talia's corpse.
"Where do you think you're going like that?" Jane asked his back as he carried Talia towards the door.
Bane paused, not speaking, or turning around.
Jane chuckled as she opened a low cabinet and pulled a heavy mylar cadaver bag from a bin of plastic-wrapped body bags.
"The only way out of here is the way you came in," she added as she unrolled the bag onto the transport gurney.
Bane turned with Talia's dead beauty cradled in his arms as he watched Jane flip the cadaver bag in the clinically incorrect direction for securing the dead.
The zipper was supposed to be at the bottom of the stark white bag so one didn't have to uncover the whole body in search of the toe tog. Jane rotated the bag so that the zipper started at the top.
As Bane stared at Jane Bell, Talia a sack of dead cells in his arms, across the city, Bruce Wayne stood on top of a skyscraper that rose taller than Wayne Enterprises. The narrow building with heavily tinted windows housed a branch of the World Bank's Currency Division.
Bruce hadn't made it yet known to anyone that he was still alive, no one in Gotham City, the continent of North America or anyone in the entire fucking world, that Bruce, the billionaire bat boy, Wayne was living and breathing.
Bruce walked to the edge of the building and looked down over the side, the cars looked like colorful insects from his place in the architectural heavens. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a grappling gun with a titanium hook that Lucius Fox had modified.
He fitted the hook around a heavy steel pipe and dropped from the roof, Bruce's perfectly coifed hair fluttered in the air as he fell straight down. His Italian suit cuffs flapped apart when his emerald and diamond cufflinks inexplicably slipped loose.
The right cufflink would later be found by a fat raccoon, attracted to the glittering gemstones under a fallen leaf in the filthy gutters. The nocturnal, masked bandit, greedily scrabbled for the cufflink and stole away under the cloak of darkness.
The left cufflink would later be discovered in a coffee can behind a seafood restaurant. The old coffee can was half-filled with sand and cigarette butts.
The cufflink had landed in the only place where employees who smoked were relegated. They were treated like fucking lepers because they chose to inhale their nicotine though a filter after flicking their lighter. They were ostracized since they didn't vape hashtag, books of the face challenges.
A bartender found the cufflink and was able to pawn it for a good amount of cash, no questions asked.
Cigarettes were expensive.
Anything Bruce might've been thinking was stopped dead in its tracks as the hook lost its grip, allowing Bruce to continue to plummet at breakneck speed until he was brought to an abrupt, wet, halt against the dirty sidewalk, decorated with old gum, cigarette butts and what could've been piss stains.
Bruce's body was turned into a pile of human aspic, his organs turned gelatinous and mixed with the fallen leaves, bird shit and loose change on the filthy fucking sidewalk as he spilled apart on impact.
Far away, Selina had no idea as she huddled around a campfire in a transient encampment, a blanket pulled tight around her shoulders, drunk as a fucking skunk, that she was now mourning the dead.
Hours later, as Bruce's body was being mopped, scooped, and tweezed from the cracks in the sidewalk, they were observed by one of Gotham PD's new captains.
No one could pronounce her name, so they just called her Captain.
Captain shook her head as she watched the GCM techs scoop Bruce's body into specimen containers, trying to slide the bulk of what had stayed intact, albeit, devastatingly broken into a mylar, zippered bag.
No number of Gotham's soldiers, officers or knights would be able to put the dead billionaire back together again.
"So much fucking paperwork," the Captain groaned and looked around for one of the GPD techs on scene, she would need one of them to get her a latte and almond croissant before she dealt with the dead billionaire.
Back in the second to the lowest level of the Gotham City Morgue, Jane cranked the handle of the steel-gurney in a clockwise circle until it lowered. It gave a series of obnoxious squeals that echoed on the cold walls of the room.
The squeals only bothered the living, and the morgue was on a tight budget, the next year was an election year.
Jane took a few steps back after she unzipped the bag and parted the thick plastic.
Bane never broke eye contact as he walked across the room with Talia in his arms, her beautiful body limp, her belly beginning the show the barest of a bloat as her internal organs sloughed, liquified and emitted noxious gases.
Bane sat down on the low gurney and laid back, keeping Talia close to his side, her dead broken body molded against his side.
Jane began to zip the bag closed, anxious to have the weight of Bane's eyes off of her.
She flinched when Bane's hand shot out with reptilian speed and closed around her fine-boned wrist.
"If you're giving thought to drawing attention outside that door, I will kill everyone I can, you'll be the last."
Jane narrowed her eyes as she shook her hand free. "Just play dead," she hissed as she yanked the zipper the rest of the way closed and arranged a GCM sheet over his broad form.
Under the body bag's reinforced seam, Bane grew still. Jane hurriedly stuffed a few clear evidence bags with some medical supplies, linen and a few bottles of water that were standing in a row at the end of the desk.
She settled the bags on either side of Bane's head and readjusted the linen. The bags almost looked as though she was a paramedic trying to keep his head and neck supported during medical transport.
After Jane typed in the override pin on the door's keypad to reopen it, she cast a glance over her shoulder at the kidney-shaped desk everyone shared.
The advent calendar proclaimed just twelve days until Christmas. Jane felt a wave of nausea as her mouth flooded with bitter saliva at the thought of eating the piece of waxy chocolate behind door number twelve. The day before, behind the paper door was a chocolate shaped into the form of a small mouse. Jane hadn't opened the brightly colored door yet, but it looked like from the drawing that there'd be a piece of chocolate formed into the bricks of a chimney.
Jane wondered if she'd finish eating her way to Christmas through the rest of the paper doors.
She wouldn't, the remaining doors would stay closed.
Jane was able to navigate the gurney with Bane and the dead Talia nestled at his side, through the morgue to where the rows of Gotham City Coroner vans were parked, all were remarkedly similar, down to the tire pressure from regular maintenance.
When people were later questioned, they'd all reiterate that it wasn't odd to see a medical examiner pushing around a covered corpse.
Jane wheeled the gurney to one of the vans that was parked on a slight incline, relying heavily on gravity to slide the heavy gurney into the back of the van. She yanked the sheet to the side and tugged down the zipper of the body bag.
She slammed the back barn doors of the van and climbed behind the wheel, driving off at a speed not to draw any attention.
As Jane navigated out of the tri-level parking structure, in the back of the van, Bane slipped out of the heavy plastic bag and carefully arranged Talia in the space he'd just occupied.
Jane looked in the rectangular rearview mirror as Bane grasped Talia's dead hands in his and closed his eyes. Her eyes flicked between the road to the mirror, squinting at Bane's moving lips as he whispered at too low a tone to decipher.
The Morning Star crematorium was a fifteen-minute drive with perfect traffic conditions and owned by three generations of the Geranie family.
Jedediah Geranie had immigrated to the country and opened the crematorium in the early-19th century.
His only child, a son, Judah, began working with corpses as soon as he could walk.
Judah's only son, Joseph, continued working in the family business that Jane Bell was headed to with Bane and Talia's exquisite corpse.
The Morning Star crematorium still boasted some of the original stained-glass windows, an effort to make cremation beautiful.
Bane remained kneeling at Talia's dead side for the entire drive to the Morning Star Crematorium.
Jane parked at the loading entrance; the docking door still closed with the earliness of the hour.
Joseph Geranie happened to be looking at the security monitors and saw Jane pull up in the Gotham City Coroner van
He came out on the docks, giving her a wave and tired smile before covering a yawn.
Inside the van, Bane had climbed onto the gurney on the left side of the van and covered himself with the off-white sheet after he'd folded Talia's hands over her dead chest and zipped up the bag, memorizing her face, the last time he'd see it before Talia was reduced to four pounds of ash in the 1800-degree chamber.
"Jane, what are you doing here, are you guys that short staffed?" Joseph asked, not accustomed to seeing Jane drive one of the Coroner vans.
Jane poured on a heathy serving of silly, girlishness to her words and movements, affecting vulnerability as she stammered out a story about messing up her first autopsy on a Jane Doe.
Her actual fear made it easy for to cry real tears that Joseph lapped up like mother's fucking milk.
Joseph was giddy to take the role of being a hero as Jane stammered between sobs how disappointed her mom would be this close to her retirement. She just needed the body reduced to ash and she'd adjust the paperwork, it would never be traced to anyone.
Joseph's chest inflated, every part the hero, already thinking how he could be paid back, various methods involving zero cash as currency.
"Are you gonna be at your mom's retirement party?" Joseph asked as he leaned against her driver's side door.
Jane managed a genuine chuckle. "Of course, I'm in charge of the food."
"What are you doing after the party?" Joseph asked, his eyes moving over the exposed skin of her neck and top of her chest.
On the gurney behind the driver's seat, Bane slowed his breathing to a nearly undetectable rate in order to hear Jane's answer, finding himself feeling his hackles rise under the sheet.
"I've got some plans I can't change, my mom's pissed but she's okay with me leaving a little early."
Joseph nodded, thinking he'd come back to the topic.
"It's the body on the right," Jane said as Joseph tapped the side of the van as he walked to the rear, pulling open the doors.
Bane remained as still as an actual corpse as Joseph tugged the gurney with Talia's lifeless body out of the van and wheeled her into the crematorium.
Jane watched the crematorium doors slam shut, knowing that Talia would be loaded onto a slow-moving conveyor belt after being arranged in an oblong cardboard box, destined to become ash in the 1800-degree chamber.
Outside in the dark blue van, Bane sat up, the sheet sliding to puddle on the metal floor.
Jane watched him in the rearview mirror as Bane raised a hand and pressed it against his side. The euphoric effects of the epinephrine were beginning to wane.
Jane looked down at her watch.
It'd be about 90 minutes for his beautiful bitch to burn.