Chapter 50

In an attempt to save the cop from getting his face smashed in, Bruce, with a black ski mask obscuring his face, had leapt onto Johnathan Crane, pummeling his fists onto Crane's temples in order to subdue him. But Crane released a plume of his special formula gas into Bruce's face before he could dodge the attack - and the fear toxin swiftly entered his lungs, invading his bloodstream and then his mind.

The world darkened around him. He was still aware that he was in the hangar, but it did not look the same. There was something evil... sinister, lurking in every corner of the building. He found himself seized with the same fear that had tormented him in that cave so many years ago. And as before - dozens of demonic bats began to soar towards him, clawing at him belligerently with the intent to gorge out his eyes. Instinctively, he covered his face, hoping in desperation that they would depart.

Without warning, a firm kick into his middle was added to his misery, causing him to crumble to the ground. The bats continued their attacks - but deep within his mind, he began to realise that something was off. When he'd fallen into the cave, he'd been all alone. The solitude of the situation had been a huge factor in the trauma of the event, the sense of being alone made him feel most vulnerable. The bats had swarmed him, and they'd terrified him, but there'd been no one present to send him a kick in the guts.

He took his hands off his face. The screeching bats and their razor sharp claws began to flicker. In those moments absent of the demonic bats, he saw Johnathan Crane enter into the gondola and lock the door. It dawned on him then that he must have been hit by a hallucinogen of some kind. It proved to be a challenge to separate falsehood from reality. Stumbling drunkenly towards the gondola, he managed to grasp a loose cable just as the blimp began to rise off the ground.

Gun shots were fired in the midst of the screeching of the bats. He couldn't tell if he was hallucinating the shots or if there were actual bullets hitting the chassis of the gondola. Between glimpses of the cable he that he was clinging to, and the rising blimp, he saw himself back in the alley, the blood of his parents' on his hands. He heard himself screaming in agony as he felt himself die in that alley with them. But in this twisted reality, the dead do not stay dead.

Both Martha and Thomas Wayne rose up from their slain states - their bodies already in the process of decompose. They glared at him from the worm filled sockets where their eyes used to sit. "Vengeance for our blood," they chanted. "Vengeance for our blood."

"I'm sorry I couldn't save you," he shouted into the wind.

"You've failed us," said his father, towering over him. A rotted finger pointed at him. "You did not kill M Malone. You did not avenge us."

"M Malone wasn't completely to blame. It was the people who hired him. It was the corruption. It was the city. The city turned him into what he was!" All that he'd kept locked inside him spilled out in torrents. He recollected everything he'd gone through to track down his parents' killer, only to put the gun down and walk away from him. "But I vow that I will stop it. I will end the corruption. I will end the crime. I won't let anyone else suffer the hurt that I've suffered."

His father went silent. He looked at him thoughtfully and gradually, his irises reappeared. The rot receded. Flesh returned to his skin. Bruce saw that the same had happened with his mother. They began to look exactly like how he remembered them to be. And they gazed lovingly at him from his place in the sky - he looked down. He saw that he was still clinging to the cable that was flapping freely in the wind - soaring high above Gotham City.

When he turned back to his parents, they'd already gone. All that was left was the vow that he had made. And Jonathan Crane holed up in the gondola.

With a heave, he began swinging himself on the cable. Further and further. He could see Crane operating the blimp, unaware of the stranger that hung to the back of the gondola. Just a little more. Just a little further. And with a huge lurch, he let go of the cable, smashed right through the window, and landed right behind Crane.

Crane was taken by surprise, not expecting to encounter anyone so high in the sky. Bruce swept a leg under his, and the inmate tumbled to the ground. Slamming fists into his temples, Crane was finally rendered unconscious.

A loud rumble cut through the land below. Bruce peered out the windows, only to see a couple of buildings crumbling. Dust clouds pluming into the night sky. Electrical cables shorted, they sparked and faded. Then an eerie darkness swept through the land.

The quake had occurred. He wasn't able to stop it. But he did prevent whatever Crane intended to do. He picked up a canister from the box that Crane had carried with him. Whatever was in that can... Bruce could only figure would be better in the canister than out of it.

The Court of Owls, the League of Shadows, and everyone else who was contributing to the creation of career criminals like M Malone - they all would need to be sought out, and stopped.

He would be Gotham's cure. He would bring the dream of a better Gotham that his parents once had for the city. That decision had already been made for him as he clung to that blimp.

A decision that he would carry with him the rest of his life.