Epilogue — Demon of Gotham
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The chopper moved through low cloud cover, running dark, its navigation lights off. Below, the city gave way to suburbs, then to the flat, featureless geometry of outskirts, then to nothing at all.
Inside, the cabin was loud with rotor noise and quiet with everything else.
Flag sat against the far wall with one hand gripping the strap on his vest, his eyes moving across the cabin in the unhurried way of someone who has spent enough time in helicopters that the noise and the vibration have become neutral. He wasn't looking at anything in particular. He was simply present, which was its own kind of readiness.
Helena had her arms folded and her eyes closed, her head resting back against the cabin wall. Whether she was sleeping or had simply decided the outside world didn't require her attention was impossible to tell, and she wouldn't have answered the question either way.
Across from her, Steel had his sidearm broken down across a cloth on his knee, working through the components with the focused economy of a man who cleans weapons the way other people meditate. He pressed rounds back into the magazine one at a time, each one seating with a small, precise click.
Joey sat with her head tipped back against the wall, staring at the ceiling with her legs stretched out in front of her. The cabin light caught the silver of her bracelet when the chopper banked slightly. She was thinking about what Waller had lined up, running through the possibilities with the particular appetite of someone who finds danger the most interesting category of thing. She hoped it was something fun. It usually was, when Waller went to the trouble of assembling people rather than just sending one.
---
An hour out from the city, the desert opened beneath them.
The Mojave spread in every direction under a pale sky, the ground cracked and pale and featureless except for the occasional low ridge or dried formation. The chopper descended, slowing as it approached a stretch of ground indistinguishable from everything around it, and set down with a rush of displaced dust that spread outward in a wide ring before the rotors wound down.
The Null Division dropped out of the cabin and into the dry heat.
A man stood waiting at a distance, alone, no vehicle visible anywhere nearby. He was wearing a black long-sleeve shirt and military trousers with boots, and he watched them approach with the stillness of someone who had been standing in the desert waiting for things long enough to be comfortable with it. They met him in the middle.
He extended his hand toward Flag. "Colonel."
"Where is she," Flag said, and shook it.
The man didn't answer immediately. He turned and walked a few paces, then stopped and looked down at the ground.
Joey glanced around at a flat, empty expanse of cracked earth. "Is something supposed to—"
The ground shuddered.
It was subtle at first, more vibration than sound, felt through the soles of boots before it registered as anything audible. Then the desert floor split along a seam that had been invisible a moment before, and a platform elevator rose from beneath it, shedding a cascade of sand from its roof as it climbed. The doors were heavy steel, the kind with no handles on the outside. When the platform locked into position, they slid open.
The man stepped in. The team followed. The doors closed, and the elevator descended.
It took three minutes to reach the bottom, long enough that the depth became its own statement.
The doors opened onto a hallway that had no business being under a desert. The floor was sealed concrete, clean and pale, the overhead lights recessed and bright without flickering. The air was processed, cool, carrying the faint antiseptic undertone of a facility that had never seen sunlight. A few personnel moved through the corridor in both directions, carrying tablets or equipment cases, none of them looking up.
Jessica Torres was standing directly in front of the elevator.
She looked like she hadn't slept. Her hair was still in its bun but the edges of it had started to come loose, and the skin under her eyes carried the specific gray quality of someone who had been running on coffee and obligation for longer than was advisable. She was in her mid-twenties and currently looked older.
She looked at the man who had guided them and said, "I've got them from here."
He left without comment.
Jessica turned to the team. "Follow me. She's waiting."
She moved quickly, leading them through two corridor junctions and a security door that required a six-digit code and a palm scan before it opened. Beyond it, the hallway widened slightly, the walls giving way to reinforced glass panels that looked down into a lower level. Through the glass, lab stations were visible — long benches covered in equipment, illuminated containment units, personnel in protective gear moving between workstations.
She stopped at a door at the end of the corridor, typed a code into the panel beside it, and pushed it open.
---
Waller's office occupied the upper level of the facility and looked directly down into the lab through a floor-to-ceiling window that ran the entire length of the far wall. The room itself was spare in the way of someone who considered decoration a distraction — a desk with two monitors and a single lamp, a wall-mounted display to the left currently showing a map overlaid with location markers, a long table with six chairs that had clearly been used for briefings and cleared afterward. No photographs. No personal items. The overhead lights were bright and even, and the room smelled faintly of printer ink and recycled air.
Waller stood with her back to the door, hands clasped behind her, looking down into the lab below.
She didn't turn when they entered.
"Close the door."
Jessica pulled it shut.
Flag moved to the center of the room. "What this about, waller?"
Waller turned then, unhurried, and looked across the assembled team with the flat assessment of someone taking inventory.
"Two years ago, Gotham started producing sightings," she said. "Monstrous creatures, moving through the city at night. Witnesses described things that didn't fit any known metahuman profile. Initially, GCPD wrote it off as mass misidentification — people seeing the Batman and their imagination handling the rest." She paused. "It became clear fairly quickly that wasn't the explanation."
Steel, standing with his hands folded behind his back, spoke without shifting his posture. "Why hasn't Batman caught it?"
"Because whatever it is, it's smart. It never stays visible long enough to be tracked, it doesn't repeat locations in any predictable pattern, and by the time anyone gets a response team in position it's already gone." Waller nodded at Jessica, who produced a tablet and handed it to Flag. "What we do have is witness accounts and fragments of security footage we pulled from cameras the GCPD didn't know to look at."
Flag looked down at the screen.
The first clip was grainy, shot from a high angle, the timestamp in the corner reading sometime after two in the morning. A red-skinned figure, broad and heavily built, with four arms, was lifting the front end of a car. Two people scrambled out of the vehicle and ran. The figure held the car aloft for a moment before the footage cut.
The next clip. A creature rose from a cracked sidewalk, its body assembling itself from below in a series of thick, vine-like formations, a fire-like pattern moving across its head. It rose to full height, and then, in the space of a few seconds, it sank back down through the concrete and was gone.
The third clip. Something large moved on all fours down an alley at a speed that the camera barely tracked, its body compact and powerful, its face entirely without eyes.
The clips ended.
Helena uncrossed her arms. "What are they?"
"Alien," Waller said. "Not metahuman, not augmented, not a suit. The biological readings we've managed to pull from trace samples at two of the sites are not terrestrial." She let that sit for a moment, then nodded at Jessica again. The tablet in Flag's hands changed to a new image. "But here's what matters."
On each of the three frozen frames from the footage, a shape had been circled. The same shape, appearing on each creature's body. A stylized hourglass, contained within a circular faceplate.
"All three share this," Waller said. "Same symbol, same energy reading, same design. They're connected. Whether this is coordinated reconnaissance, the early phase of something larger, or something we don't have a category for yet — that's what you're going to find out." She looked at Flag. "Gotham is your operational area, your mission is to find the source, and bring it in."
---
In the Batcave, Bruce Wayne stood at the main display with the same three footage fragments arranged across the screen in front of him.
He had been looking at them for the better part of an hour.
He reached forward and isolated the hourglass symbol from the third clip, enlarging it until the pixels broke apart and then reconstructing it through the cave's image processing software. He studied the result.
Then he reached for the cowl on his back, pulled it on, and turned toward the batmobile.
---
Evening in Gotham arrived as a gradual dimming rather than a shift, the gray of the afternoon deepening by degrees until the streetlights took over the work the sky had given up on. The temperature dropped enough to feel it, and the streets filled with the particular foot traffic of people moving between places rather than lingering.
Ben carried a small bouquet of white chrysanthemums, which he had bought from a corner florist two blocks back. He hadn't deliberated over them. They were what the florist had that looked the least like an occasion.
Gotham General stood four blocks from the edge of the medical district, a wide building with a curved facade of pale stone that had gone slightly gray over the decades, the emergency bay visible down the side street with its permanent overhang and its permanent slow movement of ambulances and staff. The main entrance was marked by two automatic doors and a row of low concrete planters that never seemed to have anything growing in them, though someone made a regular effort. The hospital flag hung limp above the entrance in the still evening air.
Inside, the lobby carried the particular atmosphere of a place that operated regardless of the hour — reception desks staffed in shifts, a waiting area with chairs bolted to the floor in rows, overhead lighting that was calibrated for function rather than comfort. The floor was a pale vinyl that showed scuffs from decades of foot traffic, and the air held the layered smell of antiseptic and recycled warmth. A television mounted in the corner of the waiting area played a news channel at low volume. Nobody was watching it.
Ben made his way to the front desk.
The nurse looked up at him with the particular warmth of someone who recognizes a face and knows the context that goes with it. Her expression was gentle in the way that people become when they've had the same conversation with someone enough times to know exactly how to carry it.
"I'm sorry, honey," she said. "Still no change."
"Thanks," Ben said.
He turned and walked further into the hospital, past the elevator bank and down a corridor he knew well enough to navigate without looking at the signs. The flowers were slightly warm in his hand from carrying them. He passed a nurses' station, a storage room, a window that looked out onto the side parking structure.
Room 114.
He stopped in front of it. Through the small reinforced glass panel in the door the room was dim, lit only by the low light left on through the night. He could see the edge of the bed, the monitoring equipment on the stand beside it, the slow steady line on the screen.
He exhaled slowly, preparing himself the way he always did, the small act of composure before the door opened, and pushed it open.
She lay in the bed with her blonde hair spread across the pillow, her face calm in the way of someone in a sleep too deep for dreaming. The monitoring equipment beside her marked time in steady intervals. The room was quiet. A chair had been pulled close to the bedside at some point and left there.
Ben walked to it and sat down. He set the chrysanthemums on the table beside her, next to the ones from the previous visit, which the nurses had put in a vase and kept fresh.
He looked at her face for a long moment.
"Hey, Mom," he said.
End of demon of Gotham.
NEXT : PART 3 : ESCAPE.
( An old enemy of Batman escapes from captivity, and his actions will bring us closer to the inevitable clash between Batman and Ben 10.. stay tuned)
( Author note:
Sorry to those who are more attune to action, I know there was no action in this part, believe me, I felt like just skipping it, but it was an important part of the story, but man.. it was boring to write.. the next part will have action , I promise. Thanks for reading, till next time)