Episode 7 Part 1: A Machine for Pigs

Batman places the metropolis butcher behind bars at Arkham Asylum, forcing Superman to witness the horrors of the supermax prison for the first time.

HEADPHONE WARNING!! THIS EPISODE INVOLVES SHOUTING!!

            Lazlo Valentine tossed and turned in his asylum bed like an animal. His straightjacket kept his arms from flailing, so his legs tossed enough to compensate. He kicked and flailed with the indignation of a spoiled child, sparing no expense on the ridiculousness of his reaction. The comparisons to a child continued as he screamed out “mommy, mommy” as though his mother were to descend on him like an angel, and rip him from this cruel fate. When rage clouded his head enough to block the flow of words he resorted to screaming. A hideous, pig like squeal that assaulted the ears with some much shrill emotion one couldn’t help but distance themselves. The figure was so grotesque, so pathetic, all you could do was grimace. Arkham was the place for him.

            Batman stood in the gateway to extreme isolation in Intensive Treatment, watching Lazlo through a security camera in his cell. He watched this shell of a man shriek and writhe in his tiny cell, convinced that whatever suffering he felt now was not half as horrid as he deserved. Valentine had fifteen people restrained in his lair, and eight more already corrupted. The naïve hope that the horrors would stop once Lazlo was put away got bleaker with every fact Bruce uncovered. It was scum like Lazlo that questioned Bruce’s commitment to Arkham Asylum. Can someone like him really be cured? Truly? If they could, is it even worth it? The horrors he’s committed should prevent him from ever seeing the outside of a jail cell again. If he’s to rot in here, why waste time and effort on making him sane? He tried to snap himself out of this line of thinking, but every time he did Lazlo screamed and reminded Bruce of his loathsomeness.

“That’s him, huh?” Superman said, entering the room for the first time.

“That’s him.”

“He’s so deformed. What happened to him?”

“A mixture of birth defects and self-surgery, inflicted over many years of mental illness.”

“My god…why is he screaming like that?”

“Because he’s insane.” Bruce growled, hardly able to contain himself any longer. The two men stared at the inmate with a mixture of disgust and curiosity. A figure so terrible they couldn’t look away. They stared in the hope that watching longer would somehow make them understand him. They never would of course, but that didn’t stop them from watching. They just couldn’t tear their vision away from this dejected soul.

“How’d you catch him?” Superman asked, finding the courage to speak again.

“He hired some men to hang another body tonight. They hung it near a bank, which had an ATM within eyesight of the crime. I watched the ATM’s camera footage, found the men, interrogated them. They told me his location.”

“Where was he? What was it like? Do I even want to know?”

“He owned a boutique called ‘The Pretty Dolls Parlor.’ The back room had a secret wall, behind which was his theatre.”

“His theatre?! Jesus…”

“He had fifteen people in there. Fifteen people locked in cages, waiting for their turn to be mutilated.”

“How?! How could this…thing manage to kidnap fifteen people?”

“Those were just the ones I could save. There were eight more…I was too late.”

“He had eight more bodies in there?”

“They weren’t dead.”

“Oh god, no! No more! Don’t tell me any more!” Superman exclaimed. “I don’t want to hear another word! Christ, just looking at him makes me want to vomit.”

“They’re in the medical facility. You should see them.”

“Why? Why in the world would I ever want to see those people?”

“They need hope now more than ever. You could give it to them.”

            Superman’s gaze hit the floor as he instantly agreed with Batman. If those people can at all be helped, he should come say so. The entire point of Superman was to give hope to the downtrodden. Who were they if not the most extreme example of that? Besides if Batman had to suffer through this he should too. He asked for Bruce’s help after all, Bruce didn’t have to see that.

“Alright I’ll go. But they don’t just let me walk around here, like you. They only let me in this far because the guy came from Metropolis.”

“I’ll escort you.” Bruce said, finally able to pull his eyes away from the screaming monstrosity he put away.

            Extreme isolation was in the farthest reaches of Intensive Treatment. It was a place to hold the most dangerous and unpredictable inmates while they are processed, eventually to be moved to the penitentiary. It was a long walk from the exit to the building, involving many twisting hallways, two full security checkpoints, an elevator ride to the surface, another full security checkpoint, and finally a sealed door unlocked by a guard in an undisclosed location once they saw you on camera.

            Yet despite this massive labyrinth taking nearly twenty minutes to walk from one end to the other the two men never said a word. They walked the entire journey in glum silence, refusing to give power to what they had just seen by discussing it. Clark had lots to say, but in such haunted halls he couldn’t stomach saying them. Chief among them being, how can Bruce walk so casually through every security station in the building, setting off every alarm in the book, and nobody cares, yet when he approaches with his suit not even having pockets, he’s stopped for the entire run through? At first it annoyed him, but then it started to horrify. Hallways cleared when Bruce strode through them. Conversation halted, people stared. One man even hung up a phone call because Batman happened to be walking in his direction. Batman walked through these halls as it’s master. He took such an innate mastery over the building that no man understood and even fewer challenged.

            The horror of that alone made Clark uncomfortable. This dirty, underground prison where the worst criminals your mind can conjure go to rot was the place Batman had command over. To bear such a disgusting title would make anyone sick to their stomach, and Bruce had to carry that along with everything else. But what made it worse was the fact that Bruce seemed to hate it so. Everything else Bruce did he did with a sort of quiet dignity. Interrogating thugs was never something he took pride in, but somebody had to do it, and when it was him he never complained. Arkham however, he complained. If he could help it, he never set foot on Arkham Island. Whenever anyone spoke of it, he silenced them like they were speaking of the devil.

“You don’t know what it’s like.” He’d say. He’d never shout but the intensity was there nonetheless.

“It can’t be that bad” someone might say. “It was made to rehabilitate people. If it’s really as bad as you say then it’s failing.”

“It is failing. How could it not? You can’t fix those animals. You have no idea the things I’ve seen.”

            Of course, they would ask what he had seen. They would want to help, or try to impose an intervention, or even just morbid curiosity. Something would drive them to ask what “things” he spoke of. He would never tell. He would always come up with some new way of phrasing “it’s worse than you imagine.” He spoke of it like a parent trying to frighten a child into staying away from strangers. He spoke of it like the deep dark words in a campfire story. There was no evil too dark for this place. There was no sin too far for the specters haunting these halls.

            Clark never thought Bruce was overreacting, necessarily. He thought Bruce was just particularly hurt by the one place he blindly trusted to save the insane he brings here failing. And his villains were a special kind of evil, which wears on a person after a while. He had no idea it was really that awful in here. Knowing that all the trauma Batman described was real hurt. Knowing that Batman had to feel it so often made it worse.

            The lack of reprieve made it worse still. There was no part of Intensive Treatment where things got better. No guard’s desk with a picture of family, no area considered safe, nothing even clean. There was standing water or rats running in every corner of this place. This violated every health and building code Clark knew. How could such a thing have ever existed, let alone get this bad? This wasn’t designed with healing in mind. This was designed to be the most frightening and dehumanizing interment camp ever built. At every turn it made him worse. He opened up once they exited the building. The buzzer sounded and the front door unlocked it’s eight latches. It slid open and Batman and Superman stepped out into the open air of Arkham Island. They both inhaled deeply as they felt the weight of Arkham lifting off their shoulders.

“What the heck?” Clark asked.

“They aren’t supposed to stay there. That’s just the processing building. They get moved to the medical facility or the penitentiary after this.”

“Are those better?”

“…”

“Bruce?”

“You know they aren’t.”

            Clark’s eyes welled with tears. He couldn’t imagine a fate so cruel if he was told to. And at every turn it got worse. He couldn’t tell if he should try and fix it, or if it was too far gone and he should destroy it.

“Dear God, save us…” he muttered.

            Bruce began walking to the left. There was a massive security door, similar to the one entering Intensive Treatment. It led to Arkham Island East, where the penitentiary and medical building were. Clark flew over and stopped him. He placed a gentle hand on his friends chest, then lifted so as to raise his eyeline. They met and Clark saw it. He saw the devastation Bruce was feeling. He saw the terror, the destruction and the guilt in Bruce’s eyes. He saw the wildfire of feeling bubbling within him, suppressed and bottled to get through the day. He saw the invincible force of nature cowering in the shadow of the feeling man. Clark stifled his own feelings and spoke.

“What do you need from me? How can I fix this, how can I make this what it was supposed to be?”

“You think I haven’t tried?” Bruce said, removing his friends hand from his chest. “We can’t move. No state in the union will willingly divert funds to build a new one. Not with the monsters we house. We can’t build up security, they’ll cry ‘it’s supposed to be a hospital.’ We can’t push harder on rehab, they’ll abuse it. We’ll expose more doctors to the elephantine risk that is being in the same room as them. New staff won’t make a difference. We’ll either ruin naïve innocents who think they can change these people, or expose the patients to more dictators who think they can whip the demons into line.”

“There has to be a way to rehabilitate them. There has to.”

“Superman…” Bruce sighed, even here finding it unsafe to use his real name. “Don’t think that way. Please, for my sake, don’t think that way.”

“There has to! Nobody is really that ruined! Everyone can be saved.”

“STOP!” Bruce exclaimed. His voice thundered in the air and frightened even the man of steel. It wasn’t intimidating, the command didn’t come laden with the implication of what might happen to you if you disobeyed it. It was begging. It was pleading with Superman to please stop hurting him this way. Clark had never heard such a cry from his friend before, and nothing he’d said had ever felt so real.

“Stop, you have to stop.” Bruce said, his voice holding back tears. “You can’t think that way, please. I’ve been where you are. I’ve thought the way you do. It only leads to pain. These monsters want you to pity them. They want you to give them just one more chance, ‘they’ll really change, they promise.’ They won’t. They never do. They take your generosity, your love, and they use it against you. They use it to hurt innocents, destroy things, kill people, all in your name. These cretins will never be saved, so the only thing we can do is lock them up and hopefully they’ll get so demoralized that…”

“No, no!” Clark pleaded. “No! That can’t be. They have to want to get better, one of them has to! We can’t deprive them of healing just because some won’t cooperate.”

“You think so? You really think so?! Huh?! What about Croc?! What about him?! He’s a monster! He eats people for fun! He doesn’t get paid to, he gets paid to kill them! He doesn’t have to eat them, he just chooses to, because he likes it! You think he wants to get better?! I know for a fact he doesn’t! I developed a cure for his condition years ago! A simple genetic therapy regiment that if followed would revert him to a humanoid state in a year! Maybe less! He denies it! He refuses to take it! He claims he likes his life better as a monster! We try to force him, people die or get hands bitten off forcing him to take his medicine, and he breaks out! Or Joker does and takes Croc with him! Then his condition is aggravated and he gets worse! He’s turning into a crocodile faster than if he was left alone, he knows it, and he keeps doing it anyway!”

“That can’t be all of them! There has to be one that wants to be helped!”

“Which one?! Which one Superman?! Mad Hatter?! The mind controlling rapist who only hasn’t taken a child because I haven’t let him?! Zsasz?! We’ve wasted so much anti-psychotic medicine on him pharmacies won’t even send it to us anymore!”

“Freeze?! Penguin?! Two-Face?!”

“No, no, no!”

“Bane?! Come on! He’s an addict! Deprive him long enough he’ll get better!”

“How long?! A year?! We tried, that wasn’t enough! Two years?! Three?! How long do we need to keep armed guards in the basement of this hell at the risk of being torn apart to justify saving this one drug addict?!”

            Clark threw his arms in the air and screamed. The gravity of it all caused him to drop, and he landed on the floor with a weighted thud. He couldn’t even bring himself to cry it was all so wretched. He sat paralyzed with rage, fear and compassion. Every inch of him rebelled against this place, and it didn’t matter. This place was a machine that turned the people in it into cogs, fully aware at how failed the whole system was, but being too powerless to stop it. Arkham Asylum was sliding deeper into the abyss and the only thing people could do was make it slide slower by sacrificing their own lives. He had never felt so impotent to evil before. He couldn’t believe it.

            Bruce knelt down and placed a hand on his friends shoulder. He knew the pain all too well. He tried to warn Clark, but maybe it couldn’t be avoided. Clark needed to learn that some things truly can’t be saved. Deep down Bruce wondered if he still thought like Clark on a microscopic level. He felt proud that somebody did, heartbroken that it had to be his friend. Clark was too good for this place.

“I’m glad you care. Somebody has to. But please, face reality. Do you think Joker can be saved? Do you think Scarecrow can ever do the things he does and somehow come out feeling bad about it?”

            He pulled his friend closer, and lowered his voice.

“Do you think Lazlo can? Do you really think someone as deranged as that can return to normal? Do you think he even knows what that means?”

            Bruce stared expectantly. He waited anxiously for his broken friends response. Bruce didn’t know it, but he was placing his own thoughts on that response. If Superman, thought it was hopeless, than truly it must be. If the best version of all of us, the man so good it defied reality, could say that there was evil too foul to tame, then there must be no saving it. The infinitesimal voice within Bruce still fighting over this idea waited for Clark now. That voice lived or died on Superman’s response. Superman looked into the eyes of his friend, and responded.

“He has to. He can’t be unsalvageable.”

            Superman gave the right answer. It was foolish, naïve, stupid, ignorant, and sad. But deep down, it was right. So while it was exactly what he wanted to hear, and it lit a fire of hope inside Bruce Wayne like he hadn’t felt in a long time, he still had to challenge it.

“Come see his victims and tell me again.”