Batman 4 - Batman & Robin Read online

  As Batman hung on to his nemesis, gloved fingers clawing for purchase, he watched the gem tumble through the air. Even if he had his hands free, it was too far away for him to recover it. And if he didn’t, it would shatter on the pavement below.

  Fortunately, the hero’s dilemma didn’t last very long. A red-and-black figure swooped out of the night. Maneuvering in a grand flip, Robin snatched the falling gem.

  The villain and the swag, both in hand. Batman was just beginning to look for a place to land when he saw Freeze reach down and release his glide-pack buckle.

  Before Batman could respond, he found himself holding an empty glide pack. Freeze himself was dropping unassisted toward the giant, smoking chimney of a towering industrial complex.

  Finger Foods, he thought. One of the bigger businesses in the city not owned by Wayne Enterprises.

  Freeze aimed his cryo-gun at the smoking tower and fired. The maw of the chimney choked up instantly with snow—just a fraction of a second before the villain plummeted into it.

  Once again, Batman felt he was in jeopardy of losing his prey. He flung Freeze’s glide pack away and grabbed the limits of his cape. Then he arched his back and used the Kevlar of the cape like a rudder—to aim himself at the chimney headfirst.

  His cape fluttering around his head like an entire swarm of bats, he sliced into the snowy opening. And caught a glimpse of Robin dropping in right after him, his capsule door discarded.

  They found themselves dropping through one snowy layer after another in a madly snaking tunnel with walls of ice. Batman could see Freeze up ahead of them, firing as he fell, but nothing more.

  Still, the chimney wouldn’t go on forever. They had to break their fall before their fall broke them.

  Pulling out his Batgrapple equipment, Batman made sure Robin saw what he was up to, then fired. Almost simultaneously, two grappling hooks hit the icy inner surface of the chimney and caught.

  Gripping his tether with both hands, the Dark Knight managed to hang on as the line went taut—and nearly tore his arms out of their sockets. But a layer of ice, no matter how thick, just wasn’t the ideal medium for a grappling hook. The sudden tug of his weight on the line jerked the Batgrapple free of the ice.

  Batman fell, albeit not quite as quickly, into icy dark ness. Somehow, he landed on his feet. Robin came to earth a heartbeat later. Then they heard the clatter of their grappling hooks hitting the ground.

  They were in a long, submarinelike corridor. Or at least, that’s what it looked like. Actually, Batman guessed, it was the basement of the Finger Foods complex.

  Robin grinned at him in the murky light of an overhead bulb. “Cool,” he said. “Can we do that again?”

  Batman didn’t bother to answer, and his protégé didn’t bother to wait for one—because at the same moment they spotted Freeze at the far end of the corridor, trying to get away. As they took off after him, Batman saw him pause just long enough to point his gun at the ceiling and fire.

  The pipes there—sprinkler pipes, apparently—exploded under the pressure of water expanding into ice. The result? An intense blizzard in the narrow confines of the corridor.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it, Batman knew. “Sudden temperature drop,” he shouted. “Watch out for the—”

  A blast of frigid air roared down the tunnel, slamming doors into walls ahead of them, beating them back with a powerful jolt of snow and ice.

  “—wind!” Batman finished.

  He and Robin whipped their capes over their wind-burned faces and pushed forward, fighting their way through the howling force of the storm. They went through the doors ahead of them one by one.

  Finally, throwing open the last door in the tunnel, they burst into the boiler room. Of course, by then the place was frozen solid. A rime-covered boiler stood in the center of an icy moat that had, until recently, been the building’s internal reservoir.

  Obviously, Freeze had been here. But where was he now?

  Suddenly, the heavy metal door slammed hard into Batman’s face. He stumbled, dazed—but he had gotten the answer to his unspoken question. Freeze emerged from behind the door and aimed his gun at Batman.

  But before he could fire, Robin interposed himself between Freeze and his target. His intent was no doubt to pounce on the villain, to take him down before he could injure Batman.

  But it didn’t quite work out that way.

  Freeze fired—and Robin was enveloped in a point-blank blast of cryonic energy. One moment, he was a living, breathing human being—and the next, a frozen version of himself, openmouthed with shock.

  The villain plucked the diamond from Robin’s frigid hand.

  But Batman was no longer quite so concerned about the gem. He wasn’t concerned about anything except the frosted statue of his protégé.

  He fought off horror. No, he told himself. It can’t be. It couldn’t end like this for Robin.

  He wouldn’t let it.

  As he made that silent promise, Batman heard a rumbling in the ground and looked around. What . . . ?

  And then he remembered. Freeze’s drilling truck—they’d left it in the museum. And if it was anything like the Batmobile, Freeze could summon it via remote control. Batman imagined the thing burrowing its way underneath the city, freezing the rocks and dirt in its path and clearing away the debris as it zoned in on the boiler room.

  Abruptly, with a shriek of bending metal and a crunch of concrete, a wall of the room exploded inward—and Batman didn’t have to imagine the vehicle any longer. As the smoke cleared, the drilling truck loomed point first like some bizarre beast out of legend.

  “How cold-blooded can you be?” Freeze asked his enemy. “You have eleven minutes to thaw the Bird before it’s too late for him. What will you do—chase the villain or save the boy?”

  A hatch opened in the giant vehicle, and Freeze leaped inside. But he didn’t close the hatch just yet.

  “Your emotions make you weak,” he said. “Weak and vulnerable. That’s why this day is mine.”

  And with that, Freeze shut the hatch. As he cleared the frosted pane of a window to say good-bye, the drilling truck withdrew into the ground. Before long, it had sealed the last part of its entry tunnel with a mighty blast of cryonic ice.

  Batman had a bad taste in his mouth. He wasn’t accustomed to letting criminals get away. But in this case, he’d had no choice.

  Moving to Robin’s side, he touched the boy’s frozen skin. Eleven minutes—that’s what Freeze had told him. But what if he was lying?

  Batman knew he couldn’t think that way. He had to do something before he lost his friend forever.

  Whipping out his Bat-laser, he pointed it at the frozen reservoir and fired. The ice melted. It began to steam, to simmer.

  Picking up Robin with the utmost care, the Dark Knight lowered the boy into the steaming liquid until he was completely immersed. But under the water, Robin’s face was terribly still.

  Deathly still.

  For a long, heart-wrenching moment, Batman thought the boy was a goner. Then Robin’s eyelids fluttered. A couple of bubbles broke the surface. There was movement, the sudden flapping of arms and legs.

  Batman dragged the boy up until his head broke the surface. Robin coughed out water, took a wheezing, wet breath, and did it again. He looked weak, drained of energy.

  But he was alive.

  Then he clutched at Batman’s arm and asked him something. But he was still gasping too hard to be understood.

  “Say again?” Batman asked.

  Robin looked up at him. “Did we . . . get him?”

  The older man scowled beneath his mask. He didn’t think his protégé was going to like the answer.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hoping for a breeze to relieve the dense, humid heat, Pamela Isley opened the door to one of her tents—more a soiled, smelly flap of canvas, really—just in time to see a jagged spike of lightning spasm in the darkness. Thunder followed, a deep, tremulous rumble that could be fe
lt in her bones as well as heard.

  But the storm notwithstanding, Pamela didn’t find the breeze she’d hoped for. All she found was the same close, sweet-scented stillness, the same sticky, narcotizing stew she’d lived in for months now. The same monotonous drone of insect song.

  In fact, the only change this night, besides the storm itself, was the number of vehicles braving the marshy road that wound its way through the rain forest—a road that ended in front of the half-ruined building against which her tent city was built.

  What was the name of the place again? She could never remember, though she’d seen it every day. Oh yeah. Prison Morte. Prison of Death. Very colorful. Very funny. She was sure the inmates had laughed themselves silly.

  The other thing it said on the building was “For Sale or Lease”—although she was pretty sure Dr. Woodrue wasn’t paying any rent for his pile of rocks. Maybe it was another joke, she realized. A regular riot, this place.

  It wasn’t what she’d expected when she left Seattle, that was for darn sure. It wasn’t even close.

  Wiping the sweat from her brow, Pamela sighed, let the flap fall back into place, and made her way back to her stool. In the amber light of a flickering Bunsen burner, she inspected a beaker full of chemicals—one of many scattered around the tent.

  The beaker was bubbling merrily. At least something was merry around here. Certainly, it wasn’t her.

  Pamela caught sight of herself in the metal of the burner, her precise features hidden by glasses and a frizz of bad hair, her shape obscured by her loosely fitting lab coat. Lovely, she thought sarcastically.

  She had never been the cheerleader type. She’d accepted that long ago. But out here in the rain forest, her personal appearance was going from bad to absolutely terrible. Everywhere she looked, she had some kind of blemish, some interesting variety of rash.

  Then again, what difference did it make? Who could she possibly impress? Dr. Woodrue? She chuckled despite herself. Yeah, right. She would sooner have swallowed a frog.

  Assuming a more businesslike demeanor, she reached for her microrecorder, one of the few pieces of modern equipment Woodrue had allowed her. Clicking it on, she spoke into the metal cylinder.

  “I still have high hopes for the animal-plant crossbreedings,” she noted. “Despite the setbacks.”

  She surveyed two lab tables. One held a variety of plants she’d collected on her forays through the rain forest. The other was covered with tanks of poisonous spiders, snakes, and scorpions. Tubes ran from the lethal beasts into a jar of milky fluid labeled “Venom.” More tubes ran from the Venom jar to the plants on the other table.

  One plant twitched as it received the toxins. It was a good sign.

  “If I can only find the correct dose of Venom,” she said into the recorder, “these plants will be able to fight back like animals. I will have given flora a chance against the thoughtless . . .”

  Her lip curled as she remembered.

  Her mother’s flower shop back in Seattle. The way those vandals had trashed it for a lark. The way they’d used their switchblades to cut and slash every living thing in it—every blessed shrub and perennial and houseplant.

  And the way her mother had never gotten over it.

  She could still smell the spilled-chlorophyll scent of death. The stomach-churning stench of rotting cellulose. The bitter taste of fear and helplessness . . .

  “. . . the thoughtless ravages of man,” she finished.

  Suddenly, she heard something. Not thunder. Something higher-pitched, but muffled. Some bird, maybe, screeching in the night? She listened, but the sound didn’t repeat itself. She spoke again into her recorder.

  “Where was I? Oh yes. On a more personal note, my work would proceed a lot faster if Dr. Woodrue weren’t always whisking my Venom samples back to his mysterious Gilgamesh Wing.”

  She negotiated a path through the tents until she reached the old, massive-looking prison door to which the last tent was affixed. A sign referred to Woodrue’s experiments, the ones conducted within the prison building, as Project Gilgamesh.

  He had never explained what that meant. Nor had he showed her any of his work since she’d arrived.

  “Why won’t he let me into his lab?” she wondered out loud.

  There was another scream—but this time, she was sure it hadn’t come from any bird. It was too bloodcurdling. Too human.

  And it had come from the other side of the prison door. Cold sweat trickling down her back, Pamela turned off the recorder. “What is he doing in there?” she whispered.

  Her mouth dry, her heart beating wildly, she came closer to the door. Put her ear to it. Listened for the scream.

  Just then, the door opened. Pamela dropped her recorder as lightning flashed, illuminating Dr. Jason Woodrue, a man with Albert Einstein’s hair and Charles Manson’s eyes.

  She’d always thought of him that way. But now, the comparisons took on a whole new significance.

  “Dr. Isley,” he said in his nasal voice, “loveliest flower in our garden. How fare our little wards?”

  Before Pamela could reply, before she could force her heart back down her throat, Woodrue moved in too close for comfort. He backed her all the way to her worktable, his face mere inches from hers. Then his eyes fell on the jar of Venom in the farthest tent.

  “What do we have here?” he inquired as he made his way through her equipment and supplies. “A lovely new supply of Venom?”

  He reached the table, lifted the jar, and held it up for inspection. “I’ll just take this to my laboratory for further study.”

  Pamela screwed up her courage. “What exactly are you working on in there?” she asked. “What are those screams I keep hearing?”

  There was a bright flash of lightning. His face caught in its glare, Woodrue advanced on Pamela again.

  “How I’d love to share my secrets with you,” he told her. “But I ask you, sweet sapling, can you be trusted? You refuse my invitations to dine. You hide your honeyed buds behind these sallow robes.”

  He took the lapel of her lab coat between his spindly fingers. She pulled it away.

  There was more lightning, followed by a deafening roll of thunder.

  “Ah,” whispered Woodrue, fashioning a toothy grin, “but there’s romance in the air tonight. Perhaps a moonlit stroll in the jungle, eh? And then later, in the dark, we can share everything.”

  Abruptly, Woodrue backed her up against a table, his twitching lips only a finger’s breadth from her own. Pamela winced, managed to sidestep him. Then she heard another scream.

  “You have to tell me what you’re doing with my Venom,” she insisted.

  Woodrue’s features turned nasty. “You must show me your secrets, blossom, before I show you mine.”

  For a moment, Pamela thought he would attack her then and there. But he must have thought better of the notion, because he backed off. And, a moment later, turned and left.

  As the door to the prison building swung closed, Pamela had an idea. She kicked her fallen recorder across the tent. The metal cylinder rolled between the prison door and the jamb, keeping the entrance from sealing.

  And Woodrue didn’t notice. Through the narrow opening, she could hear his footsteps retreating on the building’s stone floor.

  Pamela waited until she thought she had put enough time between her and Woodrue. Then, her pulse pounding in her temples, she took a deep breath and opened the door and followed the doctor inside.

  She found herself in a crumbling hallway. There were no cells here, but the place had the smell of death about it. Death and pain.

  As Pamela thought that, another scream split the air. But it was much louder now, with no door to shield her from it. Much louder and more heartrending. And it didn’t stop there. There was another scream. And another, echoing through the corridor.

  She followed them deeper into the prison. And deeper still. Finally, she felt as if she was almost on top of them.

  Turning a corner, s
he peered into a large, dilapidated chamber that seemed like something out of a Frankenstein monster movie. That is, she told herself, with a few key updates.

  Banks of overhead lights hung on long wires, suspended from the crumbling ceiling. A series of computers flashed tiny, red lights in repeating patterns. And in the center of the room, an empty gurney was surrounded by an array of circuits and tubes and equipment so arcane and so intricate, Pamela couldn’t even begin to divine their function.

  Woodrue walked past the doorway, showing himself to her without realizing it. He was speaking into a portable phone, nodding his strangely shaped head every few seconds. Finally, he looked up and addressed someone Pamela couldn’t see. Curious, she crept closer to get a better view.

  What she saw was a small bridge strung from one side of the room to the other. An American general, a high-ranking Russian officer, a sheikh, and the dictator of a Central American nation were all standing on the bridge, watching Woodrue from above.

  Pamela couldn’t believe it. She had thought the vehicles she’d seen arriving all evening were carrying supplies—not foreign dignitaries.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the un-United Nations,” Woodrue began. Then he spoke deferentially into the phone. “And, of course, our mystery bidder. I give you the future of military conquest.”

  A scrawny prisoner in a too-large tank top was dragged into the room by several gun-toting guards. Pamela’s eyes opened wide. Guards? Where had they come from? Had Woodrue had them in his employ all along?

  As she watched, horrified, the prisoner was shackled to the gurney. His shaved head was adorned with three surgically implanted ducts.

  “May I present Antonio Diego,” said Woodrue. “Diego is a serial murderer who was serving a life sentence in an Argentine prison. He is also my sole surviving volunteer.”

  Diego glowered at the scientist. Without warning, the man spat.

  “And what a charmer,” Woodrue added.

  That’s when Pamela noticed a jar of milky Venom among the equipment hooked up to the gurney. Indignant, she slipped into the room, still unnoticed, and hid behind a stack of circuit boxes. If she was going to get the goods on him, she would need a ringside seat.