Batman Inc. #4

The carbon black scramjet screamed across the grey waves, the afterburners leaving a gauzy blur in their wake.

“You’re drifting.”

Jiro dipped the joystick, making a minor correction to the jet’s hypersonic flight. He frowned, beneath the smooth cerulean of his customized cowl. The new batsuit fitted him neatly, and he couldn’t help but admire how simple it seemed for all the compact electronics and mechanics concealed within it.

“I thought you said this thing had an auto-pilot.”

“It does,” Bruce said, flatly, “but you won’t always have the luxury. The location we’re closing in is kept under the watch of a specially designated blockade maintained by the Self-Defense Fleet, so follow the stealth procedures as I showed you.”

“I’ve flown through military airspace before,” Jiro said, checking the dimly-glowing readouts that played over his cowl’s lenses.

Bruce sat back, letting the younger man work. It might have been that the ghost of a smile haunted his face, but if it did, it was brief.

“Not seeing this island...but there’s a fog rolling in, so it’ll be hard to see anything soon...”

“The fog is a permanent feature,” Bruce said. “Island Zero was never meant to be discovered.”

Jiro suppressed a shiver. He’d spent the past three days working alongside the Batman, following leads that were given to him or rehearsing manoeuvres and procedures that he was told would be probable eventualities.

He hadn’t heard anything from the Batman about what they would find on the island, however. Or at least, nothing beyond curt, cryptic deflections.

The Batman, he caught himself. He was a Batman himself, now.

The leads he’d been given to follow up only added to the mystery. He had trailed ageing veterans of the Second World War, copied typewritten files and documents from underground bunker research stations, investigated a weird drug ring operating from the Kobe City Museum of Literature and broken up a cult built up around a perversion of Amaterasu.

The jet jumped, suddenly buffeted as it raced into the fog.

For a moment the cockpit was shrouded in thick, rolling blue cloud, and Jiro had to use the buzz of military chatter to orientate himself.

When the fog peeled back, an expansive island chain lay before them, thick green swathes of forest covering small mountains and rises, and pale beaches curving around in slow looping bays. On the far side of the main island a tall satellite dish rotated, and the electric blue lighting of a compound could be made out.

Jiro dipped the jet, and threw it into a slow, steady hover.

Two words flashed up on Jiro’s overlay display, and once again he felt himself suppress a shiver.

ISLAND ZERO







“I’ve hidden your helicopter. It’s fortunate you had all those radar-jamming devices on board, with the naval blockade. I didn’t realise the government was involved in this.”

“Bat-Gyro,” Bat-Man corrected him, quietly. He adjusted the binoculars he held trained on the dense jungle of the valley beyond.

“Someone is directing yakuza finances towards a big hit on this island...they’re after something...that the military are guarding?”

“So it seems,” Bat-Man agreed. He folded away the binoculars. “There’s a secure compound two klicks inland. Let’s move.”

“You know, using guns doesn’t mean I approve of killing. It’s just not practical to say that it isn’t a possibility that I might need to use lethal force in certain situations.”

Bat-Man said nothing, but his scowl deepened.

“It’s not like-”

Bat-Man raised a hand to silence him, then reached for his belt. Unknown moved, unclipping a throwing disc from his belt and twirling it in his hand.

Bat-Man’s hand came back with the binoculars, and he quickly pushed them over his eyes.

“What is it?” Unknown hissed, ducking low.

Bat-Man frowned, and adjusted the zoom. Without a word he handed them to Unknown and pointed.





“Kaiju,” Jiro breathed.

“They’ve been growing,” Batman grunted.

The colossal creature screeched, rearing up. Scaled limbs unfurled, drawing out leathery flaps that opened up between the long, clawed fingers. A beak of razor teeth snapped, and the narrow head turned, beady yellow eyes fixing on the human pair far down below.

Jiro looked right, only to see Batman vanishing into the jungle’s undergrowth. Springing left he reached to his belt, pulling back to launch a fistful of feathered darts at the mammoth clawed talon that smashed down beside him. The talon dwarfed him, shredding a swathe of trees as it grasped downwards. He threw up his cape as a shower of splinters flew out in all directions.

Jiro unhooked a bladed discus from behind his back, whirling it around. It bit into the scaled skin and lodged there. As the talon withdrew, the discus and the darts disappeared with it, insignificantly small, lost on the vast crocodilian canvas.

Jiro ran, zigzagging through the trees. He looked up, catching glimpses of heaving scaly hide through the leafy canopy above. He stopped, suddenly lost. The jungle had gone dark. The creature was standing over him. It had eclipsed the sun.

Jiro kept moving as the monstrous talons came down after him, each lift and fall as deafening and as momentous to the fleeing figure as earthquakes. Dappled sunlight stabbed the ground in front of him as the monster swayed and dipped, a looming shadow dragging itself over the jungle.

Jiro ran through the belt’s inventory. Batman - the real one - had been explicit when it came to the belt’s contents. Explosives, he thought, pulling loose a chain of thermite. Priming it, he started counting. Despite himself, he thought of Juro. Always me doing the heavy lifting.

Then he threw the thermite.

There was a roaring squawk, a raucous, shrill wailing that rattled Jiro’s teeth. A smouldering talon swung, toppling trees and tearing up great furloughs in the earth. The wailing sounded again, bending the jungle around Jiro. The beaked jaws came down, the yellow eyes suddenly closing in until they seemed more like jellied saucers.



There was a jagged shadow that launched from the canopy, swinging on a thin cable-line latched into the creature’s ridged forehead. A flash of brilliant yellow blinded Jiro, then he heard the explosions. The creature reared, throwing its head back and lumbering forward. A tail the size of a whale crashed by Jiro’s head, and he threw himself down.

Up above, Batman drove a batarang down, fixing himself to the bucking head. Drawing a handful of vials, he pitched them down into one of the smoking craters of exposed flesh that now ran along the creature’s heaving jowls.

The wailing became throttled, the beaked head began to dip, the angry thrashing slowing to a dulled swaying. Slowly, with the thunderous certainty of an avalanche, the mass of reptilian bulk sank, crashing into the jungle floor and staying down.

Jiro stood, breathing hard. Batman stepped out beside him.

“Didn’t anticipate continued growth. You aren’t carrying a strong enough tranquillizer dosage for conventional application.”

“Hey, don’t beat yourself up about it,” Jiro shrugged, holding his side.

A howl sounded from further into the valley, shaking the ground, and echoing calls from the mountain bellowed out in answer.

Batman growled. “We won’t have enough for more engagements.”

Jiro frowned. “Wait, what?”

“There’s a research bunker on the other side of this jungle. We need to move out, now.”

“What about the kaiju?”

“Improvise.”





Mr Unknown jerked the lasso taut, gritting his teeth and hauling against the thrashing creature’s weight.

The lasso tightened, dragging the kaiju’s arm downwards, and Unknown emptied his handgun with a short, sharp barrage. There were metallic tings as the bullets ricocheted off the scaled hide, and Unknown ducked down instinctively as a talon swept out, his hat flying off as he did so.

There was a low droning, and then the Bat-Gyro swung into view, flying low above the jungle canopy. A rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire sounded as the small plane zipped by the snapping beak, and then a series of glass vials shattered against the creature’s snout as it came in for another pass.

“Bullets?” Unknown clicked the bat-radio.

”Non-lethal. Should hurt, though.”

The clouds of near-translucent purple gas formed where the glass vials had broken, and the creature began to stagger, its aggressive swipes becoming more sluggish, drowsy.

Unknown hauled hard, and it fell to its side, toppling with an earth-shaking crunch, bringing down a tall tree as it did so.

”The bunker is just ahead. I’ll bring the gyro down and we’ll make it on foot.”

Unknown ran, leaping onto the scaled mass and moving quickly to avoid the slow pawing of its talons. Reaching the head, he pulled out a thin pneumatic reed pipe and aimed it, balancing carefully as the beak snapped the air beside him.

Firing in quick succession, a series of feathered darts planted into the creature’s mouth, and the kaiju’s head fell back, its eyes rolling.

Listening to the slow, laboured breathing for a moment, Unknown moved on, chasing after the dark shape of the Bat-Gyro above.





The ageing scientist didn’t look up from his work as the two Batmen burst through the door.

“Professor Hitori Eto,” Batman said, folding his arms. “Still here?”

“There’s no-one better qualified,” Eto shrugged. He sighed and closed his laptop. “You were not satisfied with my answers the last time?”

“No. Because you lied.”

Eto sat back, a patient expression settling over his face. Batman turned to Jiro to explain:
“When Mr Unknown and I first visited Island Zero we assumed it was another Dinosaur Island case. Prehistoric creatures somehow isolated from evolution’s progression, left to rule their own warped micro-system.”

Eto smiled, faintly. “There would not be the food to sustain such large creatures, not even on an island of this size. Of course, they were smaller then, but still. You have since come to another conclusion as to the origins of our... specimens.”

“I hadn’t met Uncle Sam then.”

“Ah!” Eto offered a wan smile in mock congratulations. “We class him now as an Ethneographic Entity. The embodiment of an idea that exists in a symbiotic relationship with the people and geography united by that idea. But back then, he was an American super-weapon.”

“Uncle Sam?” Jiro frowned. “What does he have to do with this?”

“The young, they forget so much,” Eto shook his head. “but then, our government did take pains to avoid word of our project getting out.”

“Uncle Sam was supposedly created by an occult ritual held by the Founding Fathers. A super-powered being capable of drawing on the patriotic belief of the American people, the embodiment of the American ideal. His intervention in the Second World War was catastrophic to the Axis powers.”

Eto nodded. “There were naturally attempts to replicate the process of creating such a powerful national asset. The Reich’s Ubermensch was one such example, the result of Herr Himmler’s research, perhaps, or the Völkisch or Vril societies...an idea made so real that it continues to this day, as I believe I read about your Global Guardians encountering the thing not so recently.”

“But there was no Japanese super-weapon,” Jiro said.

“No,” Eto agreed. “Our wartime efforts in that area were...more than unsuccessful. Rather than creating the embodiments of our national spirit we gave form to our fears, the monstrous thoughts given shape as the hideous kaiju you have encountered. They still feed, you know, on every negative aspect around them. Every moment of hate, or contempt or horror, they twist into their own sustenance.”

As if on cue, the low roaring began again outside, until every glass beaker and vial in the laboratory rang in protest.





Eto ran a hand through his hair and shivered.

“And so we guard them. These...evolutionary mishaps, here in their lost world. To allow proper research and to prevent their endangering the outside world.”

The Bat-Man narrowed his gaze, the thin white lenses thinning into a scowl. By the door, Mr Unknown kept watch, his broad-brimmed hat askew.

“Someone in that outside world is looking for this island, professor,” Mr Unknown called. “Someone willing to mess with the yakuza to find it. Why?”

Eto frowned. “I... I’ve no idea. What could they want with such creatures? They are a scientific marvel, nothing more.”

“One of your staff is on the yakuza payroll. They’ve been leaking information out,” Batman growled.

“I don’t know why they want this island, but you better step up your security,” Unknown ordered.

“My thoughts exactly-” Eto whirled around, the concealed pistol now in his hand. He looked around, confused.

Mr Unknown and the Bat-Man were gone.





“When I was here last it was because someone wanted your research. They wanted to do what you did.”

Eto shook his head. “We didn’t even do it correctly, why would someone want to do what we did?”

“There’s no historical record left of the details of the Founding Father’s ritual. The Nazi’s work on the Ubermensch was lost when the Soviets took Berlin. This island represents the forefront of current knowledge on the creation of your Ethneographic Entities.”

“Oh dear,” Eto said. “Then the reason you’re here again now must be-”

“Someone was successful in taking the research from this island. Someone who has been perfecting the process, and is now coming towards the culmination of that work.”

“Batman, I’m not following,” Jiro said, moving towards the door as an alarm klaxon began to whir.

“I’m only just starting to see it,” Batman admitted. “but Paris and the grotesque fit the same puzzle. Someone is summoning a super-weapon. I’m going to need a copy of your research data.”

“Ah, yes, I think I have some files right here…” Eto nodded, reaching under his desk.

Batman tapped the wireless system built into his belt. “Not a problem.”

Eto moved, drawing the pistol from his desk. He cocked it, then stopped, and smiled, faintly.

The two Batmen were gone.