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“Holy slumber party, Batman.”
Bruce grunted in quiet agreement, taking in the sight before them.
There were only a few people inside the warehouse. It was a small-scale production, but they had managed to do a lot of damage over the last month.
Fourteen deaths and counting. Patients arrived at the hospital riddled with ulcers, breathing shallow, pupils unresponsive. Batman and Robin had managed to trace it back to a corner store selling unbranded “relaxation supplements,” which eventually led them here.
Five men and women laid across the small warehouse’s bare floor. Lit in the weak moonlight, and from the vigilantes’ vantage point in the rafters, they appeared still as the dead.
“You have the naloxone?” Batman asked in a low voice, not looking over.
Robin nodded, eyes skimming the warehouse perimeter and floor ceaselessly like he’d been trained. “Affirmative.”
The boy shifted his weight, and Bruce shot a hand out to keep him from taking flight. “Stay by me,” he reminded him. “Don’t touch anything.”
Dick’s mouth tightened and relaxed. “Got it.”
As one, they tilted forward and swung from their grapples to the warehouse floor.
Robin jogged to the nearest unconscious person as soon as his feet landed. Batman followed, staying upright to keep an eye on the surroundings.
“He’s breathing,” Robin announced, starting his medical evaluation like they’d practiced. “Respirations are normal.” He reached to the man’s wrist to check his pulse, pausing at the track marks inside the man’s elbow. “Is the drug we’re tracking supposed to be injected?”
Batman knelt next to the next unconscious person on the floor. He was wearing a ratty sweatshirt big enough to drown him. Gently, Batman rolled back a sleeve. More track marks. And—
“His pulse is. . . . what. . . .” Dick trailed off, gloved hands hovering. “What is this?”
The man in front of the boy had an ulcer the diameter of a baseball on his shoulder, visible under the loose collar of his T-shirt. Dick stepped back, reassessing.
The man in the sweatshirt also had small ulcers spanning from his shoulder to his fingers. Each small hole was ringed with black. Necrosis?
“They all have them,” Dick breathed, more from shock than for Bruce’s benefit.
Indeed, every unconscious body shared the wounds. They were large, deep; ulcers that had eaten away at skin until bone and tendon were exposed. One sleeping man’s forearm bore several inches of fully exposed ulna, which was black and crumpled like charcoal. A woman’s lower legs were mottled with them, holes writhing with maggots, like a corpse that had been left to rot.
As if on cue, a man across the room let out a long groan. Dick was moving toward him before Bruce could stop him.
“Robin,” Bruce whispered harshly, giving the hand signal for Dick to return to his side.
Dick turned a confused gaze toward him, “But they—”
They froze in sync, heads whipping to a door in the back corner of the room.
Batman gave the signal to hide, but Robin was already sliding behind a pallet of large oil barrels.
Bruce wouldn’t make it to him in time, so he ducked behind a teetering tower of cardboard boxes.
Not a second later, the door creaked open.
Careful not to touch anything, Batman leaned slightly around the corner to watch.
A woman shuffled through the door. She slapped the light switch like it offended her, and the heavy dome lights above hummed with power.
The light revealed that her hair was matted into a braid. Her face was pinched with stress and pain.
The vigilante watched silently as she scuffled in her dirty slippers toward the table in the center of the room. She scanned the contents before plucking a glass bottle full of a green-tinged liquid. The liquid sloshed unnaturally as she held it up to the light.
She paused.
Batman froze, wary he’d been caught. His hand crept toward his utility belt.
Without warning, her body shook with a loud sneeze, a thick glob of bloodied mucous landing on the floor at her feet.
Bruce didn’t relax as she swiped at her nose, sniffling loudly. A yawning dark streak of necrosis twisted up her arm like a burn.
He hadn’t expected anybody here to be awake.
She hummed questioningly as she set the bottle down. Something had caught her gaze across the room.
Batman pulled out a Batarang as she crept closer to him. It wasn’t necessary; she stopped a few feet away.
She looked down at the man in the sweatshirt. “I thought I told you to keep watch,” she seethed.
The man didn’t respond.
She kicked him in the gut, hard enough his entire body jerked. It earned no more than a wheeze of breath.
“Useless,” the woman tutted. She spat another glob of thick saliva toward him and turned, shambling toward the sink against the far wall.
The way she’d kicked the man left his face smothered in the excess fabric of his jacket. Even as Bruce watched, the man’s chest began heaving more heavily, gasping for air he couldn’t reach.
Bruce waited until the sink was running to risk making a move. He edged closer to the unconscious man, staying low to the ground. It was quick work to roll him onto his side, airways clear of impairment. The man’s next breath was easier.
Bruce started to sneak back into his hiding spot when he glimpsed a bright flash of yellow across the warehouse. Heart in his throat, he adjusted himself to see better.
Dick had gone pale, bare fingers pressed into the jugular of the woman with maggots in her legs. Bruce recognized the expression. The woman had just died.
Bruce clicked his tongue softly, and Dick’s focus shifted to him immediately. With a wave of his hand, Bruce signaled for Robin to hide again.
Robin opened his mouth, reaching toward him in warning.
There was a metallic click behind Bruce’s head. A gun.
“We knew you’d come,” the woman said, eyes frantically bouncing between the two vigilantes. “We prepared. It wouldn’t even take much, to take down someone as big as you.”
Batman took a deep breath, let it out. Deescalation. “You don’t have to do this,” he growled, calm. He palmed a Batarang, prepared himself to throw it. “There are resources to help you.”
“I don’t need help!”
Bruce saw the moment that Dick panicked. He wasn’t fast enough to stop it.
“No!” Robin shouted, reaching toward the woman.
The woman spun and pulled the trigger.
For a heartbeat, Bruce was frozen. He was eight, feeling his mother’s pearls bounce off his suit jacket.
He was twenty-four, watching blood leak down Robin’s thigh.
But there was no bullet hole. Instead, a long white tube and the telling fluffy red head of a dart.
“Robin!” Batman yelled.
Dick gritted his teeth and yanked the dart out. A small chunk of flesh came out with it: a barbed dart. “I’m fine! Get her!”
Batman flung the Batarang at the retreating figure. It pinned her sleeve to the table, where she’d been reaching for her bottle of mystery liquid. He stalked toward her, fury rolling off of him in waves. She weighed almost nothing in his hands as he picked her up by her shoulders. “What was in that dart?” he growled.
She screamed out of fear. “Don’t kill me! I didn’t do anything!”
He shook her. Just once, not hard enough to cause whiplash. “Tell me!”
“It’s the Static! It’s just the drug!”
Bruce stilled, horror following the reveal.
“Batman?” Dick called. It was followed by a loud thump.
Bruce dropped the woman and leapt to Dick’s side where he’d fallen to his hands and knees. “Robin, report.”
Dick’s mouth opened and closed a few times before he responded. “I don’t. . . .” He lifted a wavering hand to his head. “Something’s. . . .”
He swayed to the side, and Bruce caught him before he fully collapsed. “Stay with me,” he demanded. “Robin, report.”
“Dizzy,” Robin slurred. His face scrunched, like he was shutting his eyes hard behind the domino mask. He wrapped his hands in Batman’s cape like he was trying to anchor himself. “Like. Like falling.”
Bruce tightened his hold on his ward, heart in his throat. He scrambled to peel a gauntlet back and press fingers against Dick’s neck. His pulse was fast, but slowing even as Bruce felt for it.
“Stay awake,” Bruce said. “Don’t fall asleep.”
Dick nodded. His face had gone even more pale.
Bruce fished one of the doses of naloxone out of Robin’s utility belt and administered it.
He knew, from reports, it wouldn’t do anything.
Batman called to the woman without looking back. “How much did you give him?”
The woman gasped, stuttered. The sounds of her trying to tear her sleeve and get away suddenly increased. “We — it was Bill’s idea —”
“How much?”
The woman sobbed instead of answering. But Bruce knew the answer.
It wouldn’t even take much, to take down someone as big as you.
Dick drew in a shallow gasp. “Catch me,” he whispered.
His head fell, his hands released their grips. Limp.
Bruce gently set his small partner down into recovery pose.
The woman stuck at the table cried softly. “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me, don’t kill me.”
“Give me the antidote,” Batman barked. “And I will consider it.”
The woman wailed.
Batman rose to his full height and marched toward her again. “I need the antidote!” he punctuated the last word with a swipe across the table, sending glassware and papers and equipment crashing to the floor.
“I can’t! Don’t kill me! I can’t!” the woman screamed.
“Give it to me!” Batman shouted.
“There isn’t one!”
The words pierced through his rage like a knife. He staggered back a step, two.
The woman’s eyes were rimmed in red. “It was supposed to be you!” she spat.
Bruce raised a hand to his comm and pressed the emergency beacon.
Alfred answered within a second. “Batman?”
“Call the medic. Robin’s down.”
When Bruce returned to Dick’s side, the boy’s breaths were shallow. His lips were beginning to tinge blue.
He carried him out the front door to the Batmobile. He secured the child-size emergency mask over his face. He wrapped him in a heating blanket.
He sped him to the med bay in record time.
He watched his breathing slow, then stop.