Chapter 420: Escape
When the Green Goblin came back down to the second underground level with his eyes red, Batman already knew fear gas had reached him. There was no other explanation for that particular color.
The Abomination and Red Hulk were still twitching on the ground -- bodies responding to the Leader's continued mental commands even in unconsciousness, muscles contracting and releasing in cycles, straining against the void where their waking volition used to be.
Batman had prepared for Harry to come at him with everything. Lethal strikes included.
Harry didn't come at him. He just stood there with those red eyes and looked, fixing the image of Batman's face and posture and the dimensions of this space into his memory with the slow, deliberate attention of someone who intends to use the information later.
He let his gaze move around the room. The Batcave was unfamiliar to him, but not entirely -- there was something in the layout, the proportions of the space, the curvature of the ceiling that caught at something.
Then he placed it.
This was the City Hall subway station. He'd been here before. His father had brought him once, years ago, when the station was already long out of service and the city occasionally allowed private tours. He remembered the way it looked. He remembered the ceilings.
He remembered where the skylights were.
Harry's gaze went up and fixed on a single point. Batman tracked the look and understood what was about to happen roughly a half-second before Harry moved.
That section had been reinforced. But the amethyst glass panels of the original station skylights had been preserved for exactly one reason -- they needed to look like abandoned infrastructure from the outside, not like armor plating. The reinforcement was functional. It wasn't unlimited.
Harry's fist connected with the skylight.
The glass went out in a single sharp percussion of sound, and the November air came down through the gap in a cold rush, filling the space and pushing toward the lower level.
What followed was immediate. The gamma suppressant mist that had been the single largest factor keeping the Abomination and the Red Hulk manageable was now compromised -- diluted and dispersed by the fresh outside air flowing through the breach. The two bodies on the ground began to respond more forcefully. The Leader's control intensified in response, pushing harder as the variable changed beneath him.
A threshold was crossed.
The Leader's eyes went wet with blood. His nostrils. His ears. The effort of pushing through the degraded conditions had cost him, and it showed, but the result came with it -- the Abomination and the Red Hulk lurched back into full wakefulness simultaneously, the suppression no longer enough to hold them under.
The instructions the Leader sent were not to attack Batman together. The calculation was simple: the Abomination would restrain Batman at maximum effort, burning whatever he had, while the Red Hulk carried the Leader out of the building. Separate objectives. Don't converge. Flee.
Harry, having broken the skylight and broken the atmospheric conditions that had been keeping the Batcave stable, turned around and came at Batman anyway.
What followed was loud and fast and largely formless. The Abomination got hold of Batman and drove him backward from the second level down to the first, tearing through the space with the singular purpose of holding him in place, and in the process he destroyed everything he passed -- work surfaces, instrument racks, the mechanical arm housings along the wall. He didn't appear to notice or care.
The Red Hulk collected the Leader in one hand, formed a fist with the other, and moved. If Batman was in front of him, he swung. If the Abomination was in the way, he swung. If Harry was in the trajectory, he swung. He punched a straight line through whatever was between him and the broken skylight, reached it, and went through it without slowing.
Harry had found a thick electrical cable. He pulled it free from its housing as he ran, trailing sparks of blue-white current, and brought it down against Batman's suit.
The Gargoyle suit's conductivity rating was complete. The current distributed across the exterior and dispersed. Batman felt nothing. The Abomination, who was currently in contact with Batman through the suit's outer surface, received the full discharge and went into spasm.
Harry looked at what had just happened. He stepped back. He gave Batman a long look, the look of someone who has just added a piece of information to an existing structure. Then he turned, drove forward, and went through the skylight the same way the Red Hulk had gone, dropping into the November darkness outside without looking back.
Batman had thought through the arithmetic of this situation before. Against four opponents who were prepared and operating in an enclosed space, with preparation and the right conditions, he could have taken all of them. But that was a fight. This wasn't a fight. This was three of them fleeing at maximum output while one of them held him in place, and fleeing on brute speed and strength was something the Red Hulk and Harry Osborn could do without any technique at all. Since his spider abilities had returned at their initialization values, his baseline strength was approximately thirty tons -- rebuilt somewhat through the weeks of training since, but nowhere close to the eighty-plus tons the Abomination and Red Hulk were operating at even through the suppressant. Brute force was where he was at a disadvantage, and escape was a brute-force problem.
Less than three minutes after Batman had entered the building, everyone except the Abomination had cleared it.
His spider-sense was screaming. No countdown timer on the self-destruct -- he'd built it that way deliberately -- but the sense gave him everything he needed. Three seconds.
He released the Abomination, drove himself sideways, and went through the skylight breach in one motion.
The ground above the City Hall subway station lifted. A column of fire went up fifteen meters or more, sharp and sudden, then fell back into black smoke. The force traveled laterally through the street -- the Parker Tower building nearby lit up along its entire sound-activated lighting grid, a cascade of illumination that had nothing to do with any switch, and the glass in its lower windows groaned audibly.
Cars parked near the station were launched. They came down several blocks away and finished as fireballs. A fire hydrant near the blast point was knocked loose from the ground and landed on its side, ringing on the pavement -- and when the connections broke, nothing came out. The main had nothing left in it.
A car alarm started somewhere in a side street two blocks over. Then another. The pattern spread unevenly through the surrounding blocks, the kind of alarm chorus that only city residents who have lived through construction blasts and vehicle accidents recognize.
Where the City Hall Batcave had been, there was now an irregular blackened crater. The explosion had done exactly what it was designed to do -- it had blown through the ceiling layer between the underground space and street level and through the floor between the first and second underground levels. No deeper. No wider. Enough to make the space unrecoverable and uninhabitable.
In the crater, embedded in the far wall, was the Abomination. His outer surface was blackened and cracked across his spine and shoulders. He had absorbed the direct blast. He was not moving.
He was also not dead.
Batman dropped back into the crater through the breach. He found the Abomination lodged in the concrete, gripped him, pulled until the material gave, and slung the unconscious body over one shoulder. He moved without pausing, scanning the blocks around him for heat signatures. Red Hulk, Leader, Harry -- nothing. They had used the seconds of the explosion's distraction to put distance between themselves and the area, and that distance had already become enough that they were outside his immediate tracking range.
He stopped looking for them. He sent a message to Venom Robin -- currently under cover at Fisk Industries -- to return to North Brother Island and left through the nearest service tunnel he could find, carrying the Abomination through the sewer system while the fire department began arriving at street level above him.
He reached North Brother Island roughly fifteen minutes later. The lab looked like it had been used as the testing ground for an argument between its occupants and a structural engineer -- the damage from Hulk's exit and return through the roof was comprehensive. Batman set the Abomination down on what remained of a clear section of floor and said nothing.
Venom Robin came in a few minutes after him.
Six of them formed a loose circle around the charred, unconscious Abomination. Batman's voice was low.
"Guys..."