Subject: [OTL]: HellsX 33 Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 17:52:27 -0700 (PDT) From: D Benway HellsX [33:45] Death in Gotham Produced by Benway. See notes for disclaimers. _______________________________________________________________________________ She looked out of the window of the helicopter, floating 20 feet above the roof of the building next to the one where Doug was being held. At the top of that building was a clock tower, with four illuminated faces. According to Summers, the nerve centre of the enemy operation was inside. She dropped through the hatch in the floor and did a quick scan of the surrounding rooftops. Most of them were empty except for one, where there was a woman in leather holding- "Jump!" she screamed through her headset, as the Stinger missile raced towards the helicopter. She saw Summers and Rasputin make the leap. Summers landed on his bad leg. Another woman, this one dressed like a biker chick in fishnets, emerged from a trapdoor. The biker chick opened her mouth, and some sort of blast sent Kitty over the edge. She reached out and snagged a gutter, avoiding a fall to the street. She glanced down and saw the second squad going in at street level, then saw Rasputin, metalized, go flying over the edge. Kitty was pretty sure he would survive the fall. Summers, on the other hand- Kitty made it back onto the roof just in time to see Summers blast the biker chick off of it. Kitty raced to where her attacker had been standing, just in case she could fly. Her attacker had not been able to fly. From twenty stories above, the waste of all that adrenalized blood soaking into the concrete twenty stories below almost made Kitty weep. Summers was lit up by the burning helicopter, grimacing. She ran over to him. "I'm useless," said Summers. "Rasputin's joined the B-team, downstairs, but they've encountered resistance and they haven't found Ramsay. It's all up to you." "Yes," she said. "Don't forget," said Summers. "They've got silver and endsilver." She remembered the film, the shrieking of the ghoul as the soldiers hacked it apart with silver axes. She leapt across the alley, meaning to crash through a clock face. Instead, it stopped her cold, and she started to slide, really fast, down along the surface. Scrabbling wildly, and caught one of the hands of the clock. As she pulled herself up onto it, she saw the dominatrix on the far rooftop pointing a sniper rifle at her. She could see the magazine glowing bright blue in the dark. A red beam shot out across the night, narrowly missing the sniper. The sniper's shot missed, making a small hole about a foot to Kitty's right. Kitty lashed out with full force at the hole, and the glass collapsed. She hurled herself in. Bullets followed, missing. She could see bright blue traces where they had passed. Inside, below the clock mechanism, was a nest of computers. A woman in a wheelchair was staring at up at her, screaming into a headset. The woman was reaching for a pistol. Kitty threw herself downwards, landing behind something large and electronic, 20 feet away from the woman. She knew the woman was on the other side of the equipment, either to the right or to the left. She couldn't clearly use any senses to tell which side was the right one to choose. Kitty made a guess. She darted right. The woman's pistol pointed straight at Kitty's heart. Kitty could see the blue glow from the bullets, straight down the barrel. "Never good enough," said Kitty, voicing her last thoughts. Except that they weren't. The woman was staring at her, wide eyed, mouth open. A dissipating blue line passed right through Kitty's chest, but there was no wound. Kitty stepped backwards. She looked down, and saw that she was about to trip over large metal box. Except that she didn't. She instead stepped through it as if it wasn't there. She started to sink into the floor, as if falling backwards through water. "In the pool?" said Kitty. Kitty swam and ended up two feet above the floor. The woman in the wheelchair howled from somewhere miles away and fired the pistol at her. Blue lines passed through Kitty and ricocheted off the wall back behind her. "Woah," said Kitty. The woman in the wheelchair inserted a key into a red box located next to her terminal. Kitty drifted downwards, trying to get some kind of control, and floated into an electrical cabinet. All the lights went out. Smoke started coming from the terminal, and a huge, glass-fronted piece of equipment caught fire. An inch above the ground, Kitty decided that the ground was a good thing to be able to stand on. She dropped the remaining inch, solid once again. "Where's Doug?" said Kitty. "Doug?" said the woman. "Want him back," said Kitty. "You won't get anything from me," said the woman, who then put the barrel of her pistol into her mouth and fired. There was a rather wet blast, and the woman's brains painted the ceiling. "No," said Kitty. The body spasmed in the wheelchair, blood pouring from it. Kitty turned away. The woman almost certainly wasn't Jewish. Then again, neither was the guy in the park, and all that blood was going to go to waste. Kitty didn't let it all go to waste. Doug was nowhere among the burning equipment in the clock tower. Her headset had stopped working, so she tore it off and threw it into the flames. In one corner, there was a steel door covering a staircase. She tore it open, but it took time that Doug didn't have. Below were 20 floors of what had once been a warehouse, and possibly a steel door at every staircase. It would take forever to get down. Unless- There was no-one pointing a gun filled with endsilver bullets at her, but she could remember how it had felt, like floating underwater. She tried to feel like that again, and started to float down through the floor. It wasn't until she reached the 16th floor until she heard the voices. She stopped there, but stayed floating. She could make out what they were saying, just. Whatever she was doing was seriously messing with her senses. "You have to go," said Grayson. "Selina's waiting on the roof across the street." "But Barbara-," said Wayne. "Will take care of her," said Cassandra. "Come." "I'm not going unless-" said Wayne, and then there was a thud. "Line's ready," said Grayson. "You go," said Cassandra. "Rock paper scissors," said Grayson. "Damn," said Cassandra. She could hear something being dragged, and someone heading down the stairs. There was the whir of a mechanism, dwindling into silence. "Shit," she muttered, continuing the float downwards. At the fifth floor, she encountered the first body. It was a blonde girl in black combats, pinned to the wall by a pair of crossbow bolts through her eyes. The bolts glowed with a faint blue light. In a dark corner, Rasputin crouched, panting. Kitty made herself solid again before he caught sight of her. "Where did you come from?" said Rasputin. "Where's Doug?" she said. "Don't know," said Rasputin. "That one tried to ambush Logan while Wayne's creature was distracting him. Think Logan took care of it." There was silence from below, mostly. She thought she could hear someone crying. She made her way down to the fourth floor, where she saw scraps of black leather composite gear strewn about the floor. The darkness that was Logan coiled in one corner, holding Grayson's jacket and apparently sucking on it. Something like glowing quicksilver ran out of one sleeve onto the floor, and pooled there, evaporating. "Your friends are downstairs," said Logan. She ran down the remaining three flights. At the bottom, Doug and Summers were standing over Bobby, who was weeping. "Kitty!" said Doug, running up and embracing her. "Not your fault," said Summers. "Don't care," said Bobby. "They had endsilver," said Doug. "I didn't know!" "Enough," said Summers. "Ramsay. Over here." "Glad you're safe," said Kitty. "I-" said Doug. "Ramsay," said Summers. "Coming," said Doug, giving her one last smile. "We lose someone?" said Kitty. "No," said Bobby. "Not us." "Then what?" said Kitty. Bobby pointed at the basement stairs. "He said they were waiting down there," said Bobby. "Waiting for us. In armour. That only I could take them out, by freezing them in place. I believed him." The stairs were impassable. She could see the light from the fluorescents, still glowing through the ice. She glanced over to see Bobby, who was holding his head in his hands, oblivious. She did the floating thing, drifting down to the basement floor. She had visited a wax museum once, and had seen the bloated form of Michelle Kwan fixed in mid-pirouette, held in place with wires. There was the same sense of a frozen moment, all around her. A boy with big hair was caught in mid-stride, his mouth open, screaming. The others weren't screaming. A girl with long dark hair and Greek features was standing at the bottom of the stairs, pointing at a girl with blonde hair. They were both wearing the same black t-shirt with a Worldwide Wayne logo on it. A man with a staff and tattoos was guiding an old man with a gas mask around his neck towards an open manhole. A kid with jet black hair was half-out of the manhole, reaching out to give the old man a hand. A black girl with a bo-staff was crouching down and talking to a child of perhaps five, who was crying. The child's parents, sat on the edge of a bunk bed, clutching each other in terror, and looking up at the ceiling. Behind them were dozens and dozens of bunk beds, and even more people who Cassandra had promised to save. "No," Kitty whispered. [Next: Barbara Gordon]