Batman Inc. #2

“The night's not over yet, Batman. I've tangled with their street toughs, now it's time to shut the Masques down for good.”





The sleeper awoke, and crossed the wooden floor to his dresser.

Before the tall mirror he worked, taking a slender brush and daubing it in white pastes and powders. With quick strokes he painted his face, running a curving line from his chin up past his ears, over his forehead and around back to his chin, and then filling it in.
With neat ticks of black paste, he crossed lines vertically down over his eyes. He puckered his lips and ran a stick of black lipstick across them. With a sigh, he slipped into a costume made of a voluminous white blouse and pantaloons. Raising his eyes upwards, he placed a black skull-cap on his head, and clasped a large black frilled collaret about his neck, all with the most delicate and purposeful care.

He stared at himself in the mirror, with his little black mouth downturned and his eyes creased. He reached his hands up, holding them either side of his face. With a surgeon's eye he manipulated his face, using the softest touches of his fingertips to massage his expression. When he was done he put his hands down, and examined his face once more.

The round white face that stared back was the perfect mask of sadness - not unhappy, as such, but eternally resigned.

He rose and looked up. A single pale spotlight shone down, illuminating the wooden stage he stood on, on which the rough bed and simple dresser were the only props.

Stepping down, he walked among the chemical vats and hissing pressure cookers that filled the warehouse floor, moving between the emaciated youths who manned them in the seemingly complete darkness that surrounded the stage.








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Pierrot Lunaire walked across the shadowy warehouse floor, his hands deliberately held behind his back, his steps long and comically slow and all the while his round pale face gazing up, wrinkled in silent anguish.

Two men followed in his wake, walking with odd stops and starts to keep pace with the mute clown. They pushed and squeezed their way around the workers and their machines while Pierrot traced a path that slipped through the bustle and chaos without need for pause or diversion.

The one man who followed wore the scarlet cloak of the Masques, the hood pulled down to reveal a scarred and angry face; the other wore an elegant dinner jacket, and twitched as he spoke.

"So the shipment will be ready as planned? No delays?"

The cloaked man spat into the darkness. "Some of the materials have yet to arrive. You can take what we have prepared now."

"At... ah... a reduced cost, I assume?"

The clown stopped. The two conversing men waited, watching. A slender gloved white finger was stuck out, poking into the air. The two men shared a glance. The white finger waggled from side to side.

The gesture made, the clown resumed his walk through the warehouse.

"At the original price," the cloaked man said.

"That hardly seems fair..." the twitching man began to say, only to catch himself. "Although I understand there is a great deal of risk concerned at your end of the trade. We...ah, my benefactors, that is...accept your terms. We shall expect the shipment at the usual exchange point."

The clown raised his hand once more with a flourish and clicked his fingers noiselessly.

Two more men in scarlet cloaks pushed their way through the harrowed-looking workers to take either side of the twitching man in the dinner jacket.

The clown and his cloaked lieutenant watched as the man was escorted out of the shadowed warehouse.

"I'll send someone out to find out what happened to our delivery."

Pierrot waved his hand with a sigh. His lieutenant shrugged.

"You're the boss. We should have the last of the product ready by the morning. We'll make the exchange, split the money and part ways. Someone's hired us Masques down in Marseilles, so we're clearing out before the Corsicans find out you're muscling in on the drugs game... and I assume this is the drugs game, though I've never seen drugs quite like these."

The mime stood, a lone figure in white shrouded by the murky gloom of the warehouse.

The cloaked man coughed. "Look, we're all for the odd jobs. We provide muscle and colour to any outfit's operation. All that 'Masque of the Red Death' business. But you've got to face it, the Musketeer isn't coming back. The only thing that's going to happen to you after this high class drugs racket is a mafia hit squad, not a daring fight with Le Mousquetaire."

Pierrot drew a large white handkerchief and proceeded to gently dab away a tear.

"Paris is a different game now," the cloaked man said, apologetically.

Then the warehouse's large, boarded-up main window shattered as two dark figures punched through it, the orange light of the banlieue outside casting bizarre shadows across the angular labyrinth of machines, vats and starved bodies.



"Search the warehouse, they're here somewhere!"

The workers were scattering, yelling and tripping over themselves and their machines to get out. The Masques, drawing firearms, shouted at the workers and at one another.
Somewhere in the maze of machinery and vats, Batman and Nightrunner moved, crouched down low and working from deep shadow to deep shadow.

The ghostly white form of Pierrot seemed rapt in tortured anguish, and then he was gone, vanished into the darkness.

A cloaked gunman tripped, a cable wrapping suddenly around his legs. He scrabbled at the wire, calling out, and then writhed as it lit up with crackling electricity. A dark cape fell over him and a fist punched down, and then Batman was moving on, ducking past a steaming pipe.

There was a gunshot, then another, as the overseers in their red cloaks fought to keep their starved workforce from battering open the doors that led out into the streets. There was a tzing! as a stray shot ricocheted and sent the spotlight overhead swinging, its broad circle of white light rolling across the frantic scene.

The lieutenant of the Masques, a handgun drawn in one hand and a heavy wrench in the other, snapped around as the light suddenly illuminated a masked face crouched before him.

"There you are, you batard-"

Nightrunner moved overhead, his bruised ribs screaming as he ran around the thin rim of a huge, bubbling vat. He jumped sideways, drawing the grapnel gun and firing down as he did so.

The hooked grapnel sparked as it closed on the gun, throwing it down and smashing it into the warehouse floor. The lieutenant bellowed, thrown off-balance and blindsided. Scarlet cloak billowing, he lunged, swinging the wrench.

Batman moved upwards, catching the wrench and driving it up against the lieutenant's head. The metal tool struck with a crunch.

"Stay above. What are our targets?" Batman growled, stepping back and pulling the wrench free of the man's grip as he did so.

Nightrunner darted over an industrial grinder and scanned the warehouse. "The whole place is a giant drugs lab, right here in Clichy."

"Focus, Nightrunner." Batman jumped back as a gunshot sent a shower of concrete shrapnel across his feet. More men in red cloaks were joining them, caught up in the swell of confused crowding.

"Right, there's... thirty Masques... workers are almost clear... some kind of raised platform in the middle, has a bed on..."

The lieutenant, blood trickling down from behind his ear, charged, grappling with Batman and sending him back into the side of the industrial grinder. Something clicked, and the grinder began to churn into life.

Nightrunner leapt as flakes of white marble were thrown up as the grinder swallowed a stone bust that had been jammed into the metal chute.

Batman marked the gunmen who had begun to fan out behind the lieutenant as they wrestled.

"Keep moving. Work through the Masques in here. We need to wrap this up before-"

Somewhere out in the darkness of the warehouse, beyond the factory floor, something animalistic roared. Primal anger, confused and pained brute force.

"Two cages have just been revealed. They're...four monster men, Batman, they're letting them out!"

"Keep moving," Bruce grunted, squeezing. The lieutenant's hands broke with a series of grating crunches in the Batman's grip. He screamed, and Batman pushed him back, reaching for his belt.

There was a hissing and the Masques surrounding the grinder vanished into a thick pale smoke.

When the smoke cleared, the Batman was gone. In his place the Masque lieutenant was propped up, unconscious and pinned to the machine with two curved batarangs.

A grenade went off, the monster men lumbered in among the maze of machines and the Masques fired sporadic bursts of gunfire. The swinging spotlight continued to roll the stark white circle of light over the warehouse as it smoked and crashed in protest.

Running over an outcrop of pipes, Nightrunner stalled, perching in the shadows.

He breathed out, raggedly. Everything hurt, but it was a dull hurt now.

"We're shutting the warehouse down," Batman's voice grated through his earpiece. "If you still have doubts as to your capability, now is the time to leave."

Nightrunner swallowed, levelled his grapnel, and swung down.



The workers. I knew those people, Nightrunner thought, his feet pounding as he sprang over the heads of two red-robed gunmen. I've seen them... I used to see them at my mosque.

He dropped the pair, landing in shadow and dispatching them with high, jabbing kicks. He snapped specially-designed cables about their hands and moved on.

It's been too long since I prayed, he chided himself. Batman told me he chose me because I cared. Because I was involved in what was happening here. Because I wake up every morning among the exploited, the abused.

Nightrunner poised, crouched on a rusty chemical bath. Two monster men, red-cloaked henchmen scattering in their wake, were tearing through the walkways between the machines.

Their eyes were strained, veins bulging, every swollen muscle of their body over-stimulated and oversized with the hideous effects of the black-market serum.

Incorporated means bigger bad guys. But it means bigger wins for the little guys too.

"I have these two," Bilal said, closing his hands into fists.

When everything around you is wrong, run. It's what you do. Run.

He ran, sprinting between shadows and over creaking wooden planking. He ran, springing over workbenches and broken-down chairs. He ran, and as he did so he began to spool cable from a pulley built into his blocky yellow utility belt.

Running means things changing. It means putting the old things behind, and putting each foot forward towards something new.

He ran, ducking the swinging reach of the first monster man, clipping the cable in a loop about its arm as he went.

Skidding across the floor, Bilal shot through the legs of the second monster man, unhooking his cable and clicking it off in a loop around its thick, meaty ankle.

Even if that means running straight for the bad guy sometimes. Even if it means hurtling through something ugly, something mean, something dark. Because whatever you're running to, it's going to get better. It has to.

The first monster man pivoted, flailing its arm and sending the second's leg lurching up into the air. The creature slammed heavily into the ground, laid out flat on its back.

The first lunged for Bilal as he scrambled to his feet, a great barrel of a fist closing and coming hammering down towards him. Bilal fell back, rolling, just as the fist was pulled short by the restraint of the cable.

Grabbing hold of the fist, Nightrunner levered his weight up and over, delivering a flying kick to the temple of the monster man. His boot connected with a crash that sent shivers reverberating back through his body, and sent the monstrous henchman staggering.

"Mine are down," Batman said, a swirl of black canvas suddenly flaring up amidst the baying monster men. There was a hiss of a pneumatic jet firing and a thunk! thunk![/size] as two needle-darts plugged into the puckered flesh of the monster men.

They lumbered and crashed down, their eyes rolling closed in a deep stupor.



"I had them this time," Bilal blurted, as Batman rose up.

"I know. But you have a new threat to-"

Batman leant back, his cape rushing up before him, and the whistling throwing knife tore a line of jagged wiring over his stomach before embedding itself in a hissing vat of murky chemical product.

"Pierrot Lunaire," Batman growled.

Nightrunner moved, then yelled. The white-gloved hands had wrapped themselves around his arm with a deceptively gentle ease, and when they twisted into a sharp lock they bent the arm back unnaturally until it screamed with burning pain, the joint threatening to pop or break in the mime's contortionist grip.

Nightrunner kicked backwards, and drew his free elbow back, sharply. His arm was freed, cool relief flooding his system, and then the Batman lunged past him, and he was engulfed in the darkness of his cape.

Pierrot danced with exaggerated fear from the Batman's grasp, moving with the sudden surety of an acrobat following a rehearsed routine. He pirouetted past a punch, then did an easy flip back from a reaching hand.

A blast of gunfire from somewhere in the darkness lit up the faces of the two combatants, the one set grim, the other wearily apologetic, his black mouth turned down.

Nightrunner drew a handful of large ball bearings from his belt and scattered them across the floor, sending the gunmen tripping and falling out of the action.

Batman feinted, then connected his fist with the lithe mime, cracking his jaw and sending him twirling against a heavy vat.

Pierrot gagged silently, then looked up at the container behind him. Mutely his gaze went from the vat, then to the dark crusader who approached him.

"You don't shift drugs in this city, Pierrot," Batman growled. "Not any more."

Nightrunner watched, taking up position behind Batman. Pierrot gibbered, uncertain worry played out with elaborate gestures. Then Pierrot raised a finger, stabbing it into the air as if caught up with sudden inspiration.

Batman lunged as the sad clown drew a knife and stabbed it into the metal drum of the vat.

There was a rushing of escaping fumes, and a cloud of high-pressure liquid and grit, soot-black, brick-red and cut like grains of glass, streamed into the Batman and Pierrot, losing them in the gloomy wave of fabricated-drug concoction.

Nightrunner caught himself, pulling a thin gas mask from his belt and pressing it to his face before diving in to grab the staggering figure in black.

He dragged Batman clear, and slumped him onto the ground. The heavy mass of muscle and armour was limp, lifeless. The mouth lay open, gaping, and the white lens eyes of the cowl stared emptily into the shadows.

"Operative Nightrunner, this is A. B's signals have just flatlined, what's happening?"

The voice in his earpiece was old, and spoke a stiff and accentless French.

A?, Nightrunner thought, his mind racing. The only one before B, that's what Batman said. If A is worried...

"He's been hit by some sort of drug," Bilal said, trying to work his fingers under the neck of Batman's cowl. "I can't feel for a pulse."

"You don't need to, his suit will do that. It seems he's shutting down his body to a reduced state of functionality, using a number of yogic techniques he has trained himself to perform automatically if his mind is put under psychological attack."

Nightrunner tapped at his belt, cycling the vision filters his lenses ran. As he passed heat vision he noted the cool blue shape of the Batman on the floor, disguised by both the technology of his suit and the physical mastery he was exerting over his body.

He marked Pierrot's frame, slumped by the vat as it spewed the drug into the air around it. Pierrot was twitching, shaking and spasming as the drug worked its way into his mind.

Nightrunner, his gas mask attached, dove in and pulled the struggling body of the clown free, before binding his hands and injecting him with a sedative from his belt.

Nightrunner looked back to the Batman, as he lay still as the grave across the warehouse floor. Somewhere another burst of gunfire rattled off, and the sound of police sirens began to whine.

"How can I help him?"



In a specially-kept penthouse nestled high among the glass and steel marvels of Paris's La Défense, Alfred worked at a customized super-computer, his crisply-ironed sleeves rolled up and the smell of percolating coffee filling the room.

"I'm looking at his suit's analysis of his blood content. It seems he was hit by a rather large dose of what is known by urban lore as Grotesque. Not your usual drug bust, I take it?"

"It's had its surreal moments," the young man at the other end of the communication link said. Alfred closed his eyes, just for a moment.

"Batman will no doubt fill you in on the unorthodoxy of the drug when he is in better condition, but for now you need to keep his body safe and out of harm while his mind works to close down any effects the drug is having on him."

Alfred moved a file across the screen with a wave and called up a glowing schematic of the Batman's suit. A web of subsystems blinked with activity, some flashing red as they worked against the narcotic invasion.

"Here we are. I'm compiling an antidote using the materials available in your respective utility belts, and if you can follow my instructions for application you might be able to bring Batman back all the sooner."



"That would be great," Nightrunner groaned, strapping Batman to his back. The Dark Knight bent his frame, weighing him down. There was a shower of sparks as a handful of the remaining Masques opened fire on them, and Nightrunner forgot the weight and ran, hefting Batman up with him as he darted around and about the maze of machinery once more.

He launched a grapple up, swinging out and letting the winch carry the two upwards, towards the warehouse roof. As Alfred talked, Nightrunner worked, drawing vials and capsules from his belt and from Batman's, plugging them into a pneumatic injector and applying them to the Caped Crusader.

Somewhere, sirens began to whir, and red and blue lights began to flash dimly across the warehouse interior.

"That should be enough to purge the drug from his system, if his mind can withstand it. I'm activating the suit's adrenaline boosters now."

Batman's body went rigid, then twitched.

As the police swarmed toward the few remaining Masques below, and shone torches over the unconscious monster men and the bound-and-drugged Pierrot, Batman and Nightrunner disappeared into the high rafters.

Nightrunner felt the weight of the Batman shift, and then the two of them were swinging themselves out through a rooftop hatch, running into the night.

"Good work, Bilal."



Alfred sipped his coffee demurely as Bruce walked past him, peeling off the torn body of his bat-suit.

"Not a bad start for the boy, taking down a name criminal and a professional outfit of henchmen," he remarked, as his employer and friend tugged his cowl free and stepped out, bare-chested, onto the penthouse balcony.

"Pierrot is one of the Musketeer's rogues. He's a mastermind with a penchant for his own doomed failings, an architect of his own misery. Putting an end to his attempt to run a Grotesque lab in Clichy will stand as a perfect demonstration of the good Bilal can do for the people here with the help of Batman Incorporated."

"Not to mention ably handling a Batman who was deliberately putting himself into a self-induced coma in the middle of a gunfight... far be it for me to question your methods, sir."

Bruce craned his neck, stretching his back. "Grotesque in its purest form requires perfect mastery of the psyche to endure without any lasting mental deterioration, and, with the excessive dosage I was exposed to, the alternative to shutting down my vital functions was a potential cardiac arrest or epilectic seizure. Incorporated means I can put my faith into the abilities of others. It means I can afford to take risks like that because I can count on people I have chosen, outfitted and trained, like Nightrunner."

"I read your files on the drug, Master Bruce. The aleatoric writings of a down-and-out, secure medical files taken from various government and corporate entities, historical letters and correspondences from your own ancestors..."

Bruce sat, bending his legs into the resting of the lotus position. He breathed in the sweet air of the morning as it crept over Paris's glittering business district.

"Grotesque is a drug that carries significant layers of artistic and symbolic meaning for those that value it. Pierrot is one of a few that can synthesize it with the correct degree of proper iconoclastic decorum, and has been commissioned to produce a large batch for some event that is to take place, soon, by someone..."

"Then this isn't a concluded case, is it?" Alfred sighed.

"No. Nightrunner has spared a great deal of disillusioned and unemployed young people from a life working in the para-criminal drugs trade. He has ensured the arrest of the Masques and of Pierrot Lunaire, both very dangerous elements to French society at large. For Bilal it is the first of many victories as a crime-fighter." Bruce inhaled, slowly, his blue eyes glazed, inward looking. "But no, for Incorporated the case continues. A great, dark shape is being felt, by the edges and outlines."

"Are you talking about this imagined arch-enemy, or about the Batman?" Alfred asked.

Bruce said nothing.

"If I may ask, Master Bruce..." Alfred began. "In some of the more colourful descriptions your files offer of this Grotesque, it talks of induced visions, sightings of raw ideas with forms of their own...indeed many users seem to ingest the stuff in order to see certain concepts...I wonder, sir, what you saw under the effects?"

Bruce stared out, over the city of Paris.

"I heard the bleating of goats, Alfred. A blasting of sound and fury. And I saw the face of the enemy. Older, more brutal than any other."

The moon, caught out by the coming daylight, began to fade away.

Somewhere, out in the city of Paris, the Nightrunner ran.