Batman 4 - Batman & Robin Read online

  With his free hand, Woodrue lifted the jar of Venom so his guests could see it better. “The super-soldier serum,” he announced proudly. “Code-named Venom. Patent pending, of course.”

  Then, slowly for the sake of drama, he put down the phone and poured the Venom into a high-tech injector strapped to the back of the gurney. Next, he held up an open-front black-and-white mask attached by snaking tubes to the injector pack.

  “Notice the hassle-free zipper,” he pointed out.

  Pulling the oversize mask over Diego’s head, he fit its tubes into the ducts in the murderer’s skull. Finally, he zipped the fabric of the mask closed over the prisoner’s face.

  Taking a remote control device out of his pocket, Woodrue glanced at his audience. “Time to scream,” he advised them cheerfully.

  At the same time, he hit a control stud on the remote. The injector pack began pumping the milky Venom into Diego’s skull. As Woodrue had promised, the man screamed.

  And screamed.

  And screamed.

  But that wasn’t the worst part. Something strange was happening to the prisoner right in front of Pamela’s eyes. Something hideous.

  His chest was beginning to enlarge noticeably. His neck was thickening, his forearms growing to massive proportions. There was a murmur of appreciation from the figures on the bridge.

  Woodrue picked up the phone again. “Behold,” he said. “That is, those of you who can. Muscle tissue volume and mass are actually increasing tenfold. But that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. Venom stokes the fires of rage, fans the flames already inside a subject. In his current condition, Diego would kill to silence a grating voice . . . or darken the light in a pair of eyes that looked at him wrong.”

  The figures on the bridge took note. Clearly, they were impressed.

  “The ideal killing machine,” Woodrue went on. “I call this little number . . . Bane. As in ‘bane of humanity.’ Catchy, eh?”

  His audience didn’t respond to the scientist’s remark. They were too intrigued by Bane himself.

  Woodrue continued in the same high-pitched tone of excitement. “Imagine it, your own personal army made up of thousands of these super-soldiers. What force on earth could stand against you? Who would dare?”

  He let that thought sink in for a moment. Then he held the phone up to his mouth, so whoever was on the other end couldn’t miss his next remark. “The bidding begins at a mere ten million. Dollars, of course.”

  For good measure, Woodrue punched another stud on his remote and increased the Venom flow. Impossibly, the prisoner grew even larger.

  His arm and leg shackles snapped. Sitting up and swinging his legs around, the monstrous Bane lurched for the Venom pump, smashing equipment and computer consoles as he went.

  One piece of equipment actually exploded, raining sparks down around Pamela. Closing her eyes, she shielded herself with her arms and waited a few moments. Then she looked up again.

  To her utter dismay, Woodrue was hovering over her, his eyes more maniacal than ever. In the background, she could see the scientist’s guards rushing to subdue Bane.

  “Welcome to my parlor,” said the scientist.

  “I . . .” She tried to come up with an explanation, but it stuck in her throat. “You don’t understand, I . . .”

  “It’s all right,” Woodrue told her. “Really. All for the best.”

  Helping Pamela up, he escorted her back toward her lab. Still reeling from what she’d seen, she went willingly.

  “You see,” he told her en route, “our original sponsor had no stomach for military applications. He cut the funding for our work. In fact—”

  “Our work?” she murmured. “I had nothing to do with that . . . that creature I saw in there.”

  Woodrue smiled. “But without your research, your Venom, I could never have come this far, my dear.” His smile widened. “Join me, won’t you, Pamela? The two of us entwined, side by side . . .”

  He let his voice trail off suggestively.

  By then, they had arrived at Pamela’s tent—the one where she created the Venom. Woodrue opened the tent flap for her.

  “Join you?” Pamela repeated, still numb from what she’d seen. She sat down on the nearest stool. “But I’ve spent my life trying to protect plants from extinction . . . and now you corrupt my research into some maniacal scheme for world domination.”

  She felt herself getting angry. She drew strength from it.

  “When I get through with you,” she told him, “you won’t be able to get a job teaching high-school chemistry. You hear me, you grade-A psycho?”

  Woodrue chewed the inside of his mouth. “Well,” he said with eerie calm, “I can respect your opinion.”

  Then he shoved Pamela viciously backward into the interconnected tables. Plants and poisonous vermin came raining down on top of her as they spilled from their cages.

  “Sadly,” shrieked Woodrue, his eyes popping wildly, “I’m not very good at rejection!”

  He began pulling down shelves full of cages and bubbling beakers. Their contents came crashing down on Pamela, burying her, burying all her specimens as well.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to die!” he screamed at her.

  He pulled down more equipment. More. Pamela felt herself crushed by the weight of it. She tried to struggle against that weight, but it was no use. She was overcome.

  As blackness gathered before her eyes, she could see Woodrue grinning, taking pleasure in her death. She imagined him turning, heading back into the prison, where the bidding was about to start.

  And she hated the idea. Hated it.

  But not for long.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Bruce Wayne stood by the main computer console in the Batcave and tapped in a command. Then he retreated a few steps to join his legal ward, Dick Grayson—who was wrapped in a heavy blanket, a steaming mug of hot cocoa in his hand.

  “Gotham University Labs,” said Bruce, eyeing the monitor. “Security video. Two years ago.”

  A moment later, an image sprang to life—that of a dazzling, high-tech laboratory. A beautiful young woman was lying on a gurney in the foreground as a lab-coated scientist worked on an elevated platform in the background, manipulating a bank of controls.

  Below him, a vat of chemicals steamed and roiled. Bruce recognized the stuff as cryonic solution—a variation on which had made Dick a frozen statue in his guise as Robin.

  Abruptly, the scientist looked up. It was Freeze—not as they had just seen him, but as a handsome, confident man at the top of his career. His eyes were warm and friendly, portals to a soul that seemed much the same.

  “Dr. Victor Fries,” said Bruce. “Two-time Olympian.” He realized how that sounded and modified it. “Two-time Olympic decathlete. Nobel Prize winner in molecular biology. After his wife, Nora, contracted a rare disease called McGregor’s Syndrome, he hoped to freeze her in cryogenic sleep until he could discover a cure.” Bruce frowned. “Watch closely. This is where everything goes north.”

  On the monitor screen, alarms began to sound. A panel exploded. And Fries, caught in the blast, was thrown into the vat of cryogenic solution.

  “That liquid is fifty below,” Bruce pointed out.

  Bobbing to the surface, Fries screamed through the mists of the cryonic solution. His skin was frozen now, a bluish color. His hair was brittle where it still existed at all.

  Dick winced in sympathy. “He’s freezing alive. That’s gotta hurt.”

  Fries was still bobbing. Still screaming in pain and terror.

  “Somehow,” Bruce said, “he survived. But the cryo-solution mutated his body. Made him something other than human.”

  The image on the monitor changed. It became a revolving schematic of Fries’s unique physiology.

  “What happened to his wife?” asked Dick.

  Bruce remembered the woman he had seen that night on the athletic field. He remembered how beautiful she was.

  He shrugged. “Presumed dead. No
one knows.”

  The schematic turned into an image of Mr. Freeze. Then it outfitted him with his high-tech silver suit, layer by layer. When the computer was done, compartments in both of Freeze’s sleeves were highlighted with flashing diamond shapes.

  “He needs extreme cold to survive,” Bruce went on. “His cryo-suit uses diamond-enhanced lasers to keep him at zero degrees.”

  Dick held up his hand. “Let me get this straight. A brilliant citizen, disfigured by a horrible accident, reemerges as a psychotic super-villain bent on theft, revenge, and destruction. You see a pattern here?”

  Bruce returned Dick’s somber expression. The boy was talking about Two-Face, of course—the district attorney turned master criminal who had shot Dick’s parents to death.

  The same paradigm seemed to fit the Riddler as well. And a number of other maniacs whom Batman had fought over the years.

  “Maybe it’s something in the water,” Bruce replied.

  He glanced thoughtfully at the screen again. “Well, if it’s ice the Iceman wants . . .” He glanced over his shoulder at the costume vault, which stood at the far end of the cave. “Alfred?”

  There was no answer. Bruce darted a glance at his ward. Dick shrugged. Bruce was about to see what was keeping his butler when Alfred emerged from the costume vault.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said. “The costumes needed more dusting than I thought. I lost track of the time. Did you require something?”

  Bruce nodded. “The Wayne Diamonds, Alfred.”

  Dick jerked his head at the image of Freeze on the monitor. “We gonna trap ourselves a snowman?”

  “Absolutely,” said Bruce. He glanced at his ward. “Just as soon as you take ten hours training in the simulator.”

  Dick’s mouth opened. Clearly, he’d been caught by surprise.

  “Whoa,” he said. “I made a mistake, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  Bruce shook his head. “You were reckless,” he insisted gently but firmly. “You could have been killed.”

  Dick held out his hands in an appeal for reason. “But I’m fine. See? I’m here, alive. How are we gonna work together, be a team, if you’re never gonna trust me?”

  “How indeed?” echoed Alfred.

  Bruce was surprised by his butler’s comment. He looked from Alfred to Dick and back again.

  Then he smiled a wry smile. “When did I become the bad guy?”

  Dick smiled back, but not as enthusiastically as he might have hoped. Alfred smiled, too, though more faintly.

  Bruce cleared his throat. “Well, we’ve got to sleep sometime.”

  “Not me,” Dick declined. “Not yet. I’m still too pumped.”

  Bruce nodded, understanding. “Suit yourself. Good night.”

  Dick nodded. “Good night.” But his gaze had already strayed back to the monitor and its representation of Freeze.

  Bruce headed for the winding stair that led from the Batcave into Wayne Manor. Alfred was right behind him. For a while, they walked in companionable silence. Then, when they were out of earshot of Dick, Bruce turned to his butler and close friend.

  “You don’t usually disagree with me,” he noted.

  “You were rather stern with him,” Alfred observed.

  “He’s overeager,” said Bruce. “He’s impulsive. I can’t trust him not to get himself hurt.”

  Alfred pondered the comment. “Perhaps the truth,” he replied, “is that you don’t really trust anyone.”

  Bruce frowned. “Don’t tell me you’re on his side.”

  His butler smiled benignly at him. “For all your talents, Master Bruce, you are still a novice in the ways of family. Master Dick follows the same star you do, but he arrives there by his own course. You must learn to trust. For that, I daresay, is the essence of family. Trust.”

  They stepped through a doorway into the mansion’s first-floor study, where a portrait of Bruce’s parents hung over the fireplace. Alfred’s quarters were just across the hall.

  “I trust you,” Bruce pointed out.

  Alfred looked at him. He seemed oddly discomfited by his employer’s words. “Thank you, sir. But I shan’t be here forever.”

  Bruce returned the look. It wasn’t like Alfred to express such sentiments. Then the butler smiled, dispelling Bruce’s concern.

  “Sleep well, sir,” he said.

  Bruce nodded. “You too, Alfred.”

  The butler repaired to his room for the night. Bruce stood there at the entrance to the study until he saw Alfred’s door close. Then he turned away and looked down the hall . . .

  . . . and saw himself come racing around the corner.

  Not as an adult, but as a boy of no more than ten. As he watched, the youngster tripped and tumbled to the wooden floor. Immediately, another figure stepped past the corner to pick him up.

  It was Alfred. A significantly younger Alfred. Kneeling beside the boy, he brushed off his knees and gave him comfort. He made it seem as if it didn’t hurt at all.

  Bruce blinked away the memory. Funny, he thought, that he should remember that just now. Then, undeniably fatigued from his escapades, he made his way down the empty hallway, its echoes loud in his ears as he sought the comfort of his bed.

  Alfred closed the door of his bedroom and crossed the carpeted floor to his workstation. But as soon as he sat down, he felt the pain come back.

  In waves. In pangs as sharp as kitchen knives. It was even worse than it had been in the costume vault, and that had been so bad he’d barely kept from crying out.

  But as before, Alfred gritted his teeth and clenched his fists and endured what he had to endure. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the misery passed. He was drenched with perspiration.

  However, Masters Bruce and Dick weren’t the only ones with a modicum of determination in this household. Activating his computer, Alfred watched its screen light up. Then he lifted a compact disc from its holder, slipped it into his disc drive, and began to type.

  An advisory came up on the screen in bright green letters. “Override engaged. Copying protected files.”

  Alfred lifted a microrecording unit and spoke into it. “Still unable to reach you,” he said. “Have vital information you must see . . .”

  One by one, the screen displayed the files he was copying. Batmobile schematics. Batsuit designs. Blueprints of the devices stored in Batman’s Utility Belt.

  All of Batman’s secrets, kept since the night he took to the rooftops above Gotham. All of them essential to the continued effectiveness of Gotham’s Dark Knight.

  And all of them downloading to the compact disc.

  Through a canopy of ivy, past the open flap of her tent, Pamela Isley could see a slice of sky. And the full moon that had risen over the roof of the Prison Morte complex.

  But it didn’t look the same as she remembered it—neither the sky nor the moon, nor Prison Morte itself. Everything was different. Everything had a certain glamour about it. A certain glow.

  And she was different as well. She could feel it in her every cell. She was something she had never been before, something that in all likelihood had never existed before.

  Hearing a voice, Pamela turned toward it. Focused on it.

  It was Woodrue. He was hovering over her battery-powered laptop in the next tent, talking on his portable phone as he rifled through her research files.

  “Yes, sir,” he was saying, “I’m so pleased you won the bidding, your supreme . . . er, ruthlessness.”

  In the distance, someone screamed. Pamela remembered that he had a name now: Bane. As in the bane of humanity.

  “We’re making the final modifications on him right now,” Woodrue was telling his high bidder. “We’ll have a thousand super-soldiers out to you tomorrow by overnight mail . . .”

  Ridiculous, she thought. The man is insane.

  But even in the grip of his insanity, the scientist had accomplished his goal. Just as she would accomplish hers.

  As Woodrue hung up, she began
to move. To shrug off the ivy that enveloped her, concealed her. Noticing the disturbance, he turned to look at her.

  She stood, casting off the jungle vines. As before, her reflection was cast back at her in one of her chemical beakers. But this time, it showed an altogether different personage.

  Her hair was magenta. Her eyes were a chlorophyll green. And her ravaged clothes revealed the form and stature of a goddess.

  Smiling, feeling a rather interesting change in her body chemistry, she approached Woodrue. He tilted his head with curiosity as he took in the sight of her.

  “Dr. Isley?” he ventured. “Pamela? My God, you look great. I mean . . . for a dead woman.”

  Her smile deepened. “Hello, Jason. I can call you Jason, can’t I? You know, I think I’ve had a change of heart.”

  Coming closer, she took him in her arms. He didn’t resist, either. Slowly, languidly, she kissed him on the lips. Then she drew her face back to gaze into his eyes.

  “Quite literally a change of heart,” she added. “I don’t think I’m human anymore, Jason. The animal-plant toxins had a rather unique effect on me.” She thought it through as she spoke. “They replaced my blood with aloe, my skin with chlorophyll . . . and filled my lips with Venom.”

  Woodrue’s brow furrowed beneath his wild shock of hair. “With Venom, you say? But that would mean . . .”

  Suddenly, the man began to choke. He fell, clutching at his throat. Trying to speak or breathe and accomplishing neither.

  “Silly me,” she said, kneeling beside him. “I probably should have mentioned that I’m poison.”

  As she watched, Woodrue shivered and spasmed. But after a few moments, it stopped. He lay still, eyes fixed on eternity.

  Pamela shrugged. “Oh well,” she said. “It’s a jungle in here.”

  Standing up, she turned to the beakers she had labored so long and hard over and—one by one—spilled their contents onto the floor. Then she picked up a Bunsen burner and threw it to the ground.

  Its flame spilled out, latching on to the flammables in its vicinity. Before long, her lab was a conflagration, sending up tongues of fire and trails of black smoke.