T H E B A T M A N
T H E B A T M A N
Screams echoed around Garfield Lynns, bouncing off the walls of the corridor as he made his way to the doors at the end of the hall. He was underground, beneath the renovated old Sionis place. At one time a grand high-rise town-house, it had burned down a few years ago when Lynns was a fire-bug teen in the Gotham Narrows; in the last year, Roman Sionis, the surviving heir miraculously unscathed by the fire, had resurfaced after time spent recovering from his tragedy, and had had his old family home rebuilt and renovated. On the surface, it was near-identical to its pre-blaze glory, but there were a select few - a handful, no more than 7 or 8 men - who knew of a hidden bunker beneath the residence, secreted away from the public eye. Roman Sionis lived in the house above. It was Black Mask who inhabited the bunker.
"Watch yerself, kid. Boss got his tools out. Real edgy tonight."
Garfield nodded nervously at the advice of the hired muscle on the door, and then pushed through the doors to Black Mask's personal play room.
The smell hit him first; copper and rust, but behind that the distinct ammonia of piss, and behind
that the salt and stink of sweat. The source of this olfactory miasma was plainly apparent; some poor wretch, strapped to an upright gurney in the middle of the room, skin slick with blood from cuts and gouges across his figure. Bloodied and gored tools lay strewn across the floor in the immediate vicinity, and a selection of smaller implements on a mobile cabinet. Black Mask hovered over him, his own arms stained crimson, and with a chill that ran through his bones Lynns could see he was gripping onto a pair of pliers that were stuffed in his victim's mouth.
Without warning, Black Mask yanked, and there was a wet 'pop' as a molar came forcibly loose. The victim gave a guttural grunt of agony and breathed heavy, exhausted from pain. Black Mask dropped the tooth into his open palm, holding it up for inspection. Satisfied with some invisible criteria, he set the pliers down and moved his other hand up to his palm, and then, carefully and deliberately, flicked the tooth. It struck the bound man square on the forehead, leaving behind a little imprint of saliva and blood. The man's body shuddered as he broke down sobbing, tears streaking through the bloodstained skin of his face. Above the weeping, Lynns could hear Black Mask chuckling to himself, darkly amused.
This was the worst part of Black Mask's torture sessions; not the carefully planned tour of agony from top to tail, nor the creative methods of sadism employed. It was the
pettiness of it.
Lynns waited patiently, quietly, wincing slightly at the sight of the victim's condition, wincing more that he knew this was still early in the night for what Black Mask usually had planned. Sionis turned his head slightly, just enough to catch Lynns in his peripheral, and slapped a torn piece of duct tape over his victim's mouth as he gave him a fond pat on the shoulder and turned away to address his new guest, gesturing back to the door. Lynns nodded politely and stepped outside, holding the door for Black Mask to follow behind.
"I got a job for ya, kid. Needs doing tonight." Black Mask said. His eyes, dark and steely, bore holes in Lynns from behind the skull-plate mask. Lynns had heard a rumour Sionis had hewn it from the ebony stone of his father's sarcophagus. Others said it had been whittled from blackened, charred chunks of wood from the ashes of the fire that had left Sionis an orphan. Whatever stories were attached to that mask only distracted from the evil that lurked
behind it. Maybe that's what Sionis wanted.
"Shitstain back there I'm workin' on thought protection money was optional. Fuck got his lofty ideals in the empty skulls of his neighbours, and now they think since Falcone and Maroni got themselves strung up by the Bat like the pair of washed-up old men they are, they don't gotta listen to
authority no more."
Lynns nodded along, trying his best to appear deferential. Despite the harsh fluorescent lighting of the bunker corridor, Sionis' pupils were a yawning abyss, dilated beyond reason. They flicked about wildly beneath the mask, and there was a shake to his voice that betrayed his otherwise even tone. Lynns knew it was what he was doing in that room to that man that had Sionis...Lynns had no other word for it. Black Mask was high.
"Burn his place to the ground. Then they'll see what they're paying for." Sionis said, producing a small piece of folded paper from his shirt pocket. Lynns opened it up and read the address, committing it to memory; having done so, he pulled a lighter from his pocket and dangled the paper over the flame until the ashes drifted to the floor. Sionis had already turned, but stopped to turn back to Lynns as he held the door open. Lynns could see the 'shitstain' barely clinging to consciousness in the room.
"Oh, I should mention - when we picked this guy up, wifey and the kids were still home, above the shop." He said loudly, loud enough that the victim roused and thrashed when his family were mentioned.
Lynns nodded. "You want me to arrange them to clear out before I torch?"
Lynns wasn't sure how he could tell, but beneath the mask Sionis smiled a sickening, wide-toothed grin.
"I want you to
seal the doors." He answered. His victim screamed, wild-eyed and muffled through the tape; as Garfield Lynns walked away, he could hear the screams through the closed door, and hear them twist in suffering as Black Mask went back to work.
-
The shop stood on the edge of the Narrows, a garage used for quick swap auto-parts and the occasional chop job, where no-names could bring joy-rides to have plates sheered off and parts stripped, a quick buck paid out to the hooligan for a profit to be made on the flip. Above the workshop was a dead-end flat, the kind that had a feature-piece microwave instead of an oven, and needed a camping stove to replace the hob that had never been installed. But it came with the property, and meant you didn't have to double up on your city zone tax.
You
did still have to pay your street dues, though, thought Garfield Lynns as he approached. Gloved, masked, his heavy jacket zipped up and goggles in place, he cut an intimidating figure as he crossed the dark street, barely-lit by dingy, burnt-out street lights that splashed a grimy yellow across the brickwork; but in truth, he was a bundle of nerves, jittery and anxious. The job from Black Mask was a big step-up for him, and it paid, it
paid, money Garfield thought he'd never see in his life. But though he'd torched before - extensively, prolifically, his fires well known, and this was why Sionis had sought him out - he'd never
killed. His fires had been on abandoned property, out-of-hours units, defunct warehouses; all carefully selected to produce the grandest blazes will the smallest collateral damage. That was how he stayed 'low-priority' on the lists you didn't want to be at the top of. Tonight would change everything for Garfield Lynns. There was no backing out now, no backing out since the moment Black Mask had asked his men to ask around about where to find Lynns. Just get the job done and get out and try not to think about the woman and children asleep upstairs. Just hope they died of smoke inhalation before the flames reached their beds.
The jerry-can of gasoline in one hand sloshed as he set it down, looking for the doors. There were three ways out of the property from the ground floor - a front and back door, and the garage shutters themselves. The doors were simple; the key had been 'acquired' from its owner and passed to Lynns before he'd set out, and it slid smoothly into the locks and clicked them shut without trouble; after the fire had been set, it would be too thick with smoke to see where the spare key was, and the flames would prevent passage to the doors anyway. The garage door was trickier, but far from an impasse. It was already locked, bolted to the ground; Garfield however poked around the building, finding and cracking open the fusebox before severing all the wiring. With power to the building cut, the few standby lights in the garage flickered off, and the electric motor that lifted the shutters up was useless.
The only way off the property now was from the roof, which Garfield tossed around in his head while he set to work with the jerry-can and hobbyist's assortment of accelerants. Knowing what he knew about fires and burns, and thinking of the patches of mottled skin that speckled his arms and legs, he eventually decided on roof.
He stepped back, mentally reviewing everything he'd prepared, and then nodded. The fire had him now, thoughts of the family above were ejected in favour of anticipation of the blaze; he always got this way as he prepared, every new splash of gasoline or carefully stuffed roll of newspaper letting him map out the path of the flames before he set them, an inferno amuse-bouche. It worked up inside him and made his hands shake. He was
excited, on a level he'd not been by previous fires. He didn't think about it, but he knew
why. And then it was time.
Lynns used a match to flick on his blowtorch, an old-school kerosene tool, something he'd picked up for cheap in a military surplus store; the match sizzled against his tongue as he put the light out, and then, listening to the low roaring hiss of the torch, hefted the molotov he'd prepared in his other hand. He knelt to set light to the various trails he'd made around the garage, each one a dragon's tail leading back into the building, pilot lights feeding the beast within - and then, with practiced aim and a strong arm, lobbed the molotov square through the second-story window. Flames belched out the window as the grenade exploded within and began the fire on the top floor.
The screams started not long after.
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