Batman Read Online Free PDF Page B

and the tower of the old hospital.
    Burned-out cars and barricades choked the streets, here and there columns of smoke indicated fires that still smoldered, and every window was either broken or had a bullet hole in it. It would be years before the area could be rebuilt, if anyone cared to do so. A smoky pall hung over the landscape, making it impossible to tell what time of the day it was.
    Sometimes it seems like there’s
always
a haze hanging over Gotham City
, Robin thought bleakly.
I’ll bet they see the sun in Metropolis.
He held his position long enough to make certain there was no motion down in the streets. If anyone remained, they were unwilling to venture outside.
    Who can blame them?
    The pump house next to the Flood Control Facility served both Arkham City and, hidden below, Wonder City. Its tunnels linked up with the cooling system that twisted and turned beneath the steel mill.
    Robin sized up the approach. He scanned the parking lot in front of the pump house, empty but for a few charred hulks. A lot of dark windows gaped in the building itself—positions that could hide observers… or snipers. Arkham City was supposed to be empty, but it wasn’t as if the GCPD was enforcing a curfew.
    There’s never a cop around when you need one.
    The package, the computer files, the blueprints, all of them might have been planted to get him and Batman out into the open. A windswept expanse like the one he had to cross would make the perfect killing field.
    He would have to move fast.
    With a three-step running start, he launched himself off the station roof and gripped the ends of his cape, holding it out, gliding over the street in a shallow descent. If anyone was watching him, there was no sign of it. For all the evidence of his senses, he was the only person in Arkham City.
    His intuition, however, told him otherwise.
    Someone was here. Maybe some of Gotham City’s homeless had taken up residence, hoping to disappear. Maybe the street gangs had decided to take advantage of the total lack of police. A lot of criminal bosses had set up shop here during the madness. Maybe their henchmen had decided to stay, now that Gotham City’s attention had turned elsewhere after the Joker’s death.
    There were a lot of maybes.
    He landed at the front entrance and readied his bō as he approached. The twin glass doors were both shattered, and not recently. Robin stepped through the empty frame of the one on the right and entered a small lobby. Crossing the shadowy space, he slipped through a door next to a service window, and found the hall that led back to the pump room. Its machinery was silent. Gotham City’s water authority was building a new treatment and flood control plant, and putting it in a safer neighborhood.
    Dropping down to the main floor of the pump room, Robin located the outflow tunnels that channeled storm water overflow from Gotham City’s sewers, sending it into the river. He opened a hatch and dropped into the nearest pipe. There was a stream of water pushing at his feet, and he moved against it until he came to the connecting pipe that had carried discharge from the steel mill’s cooling tunnels. The only water in these tunnels now came from leakage. He stepped around stagnant pools and heard the skittering of rats in the darkness. Every so often he paused to make sure he wasn’t hearing larger animals, particularly the dangerous two-legged kind.
    Still nothing… yet he had a sense that he was being watched.
    The mill’s discharge pipe led to an empty holding tank. When the facility was up and running, the hot water from the operations would be cooled until its discharge could be released without killing all of the fish in the river. The discharge ports themselves were further downriver, or at least some of them were. Other wastewater was probably vented back toward the Flood Control Facility for filtration and disposal.
    A ladder was built into the tank wall for inspections and maintenance. It led up