The crowbar that comes down on your back is agonizing, biting into your flesh. Something under your skin, your bones for sure, splinter, and a sharp and electrifying heat of pain races through you, making your head swim. The yell that spills out of you is more like a sob. What's one more broken bone to add to what you already have? You spent hours in the chair a few feet away, being bruised and beaten. You hurt. Everything hurts. The coppery taste of blood keeps running up your throat, filling your sinuses, your mouth. You've been hit plenty of times before, but you had almost forgotten how quickly an eye swells shut when it's hit.
Distantly in the white static of your brain, you can hear a man cackling gleefully. His black oxfords step around in your line of sight as you're lying on the floor, and his lanky, tall body briefly gets rid of the harsh fluorescent light of the warehouse. You slowly open your remaining eye.
"Still with me, little birdy?" he asks, voice wavering with maniacal delight. The crowbar's clink against the floor by your head makes you flinch. "It'd be such a shame if you die now! Why--Batman hasn't even come to save you yet! And I went through all this trouble to decorate, too! My, my, my, my... You know, I don't think he's going to show! Sort of familiar, don'tcha think, Jay? Like dear, old dad!"
Nearby, a woman shouts, "Stop it!"
The crowbar scrapes the cement as it swings up, and your whole body tenses even though pain shoots through you from feet to head. The rope around your wrists and your arms and torso might be the only thing holding you together. He spit blood onto the floor.
"He'll... come," you whisper hoarsely.
The man lets out a burst of laughter that echoes through the warehouse and your head. "'He'll come,' he says! He'll come! Batman will surely come to save the day! To rescue his precious sidekick, Robin!" The crowbar comes down suddenly on you again, and you scream. "No, no, no, no, no. He's forgotten about you, don't you see? He'll just replace you with another one when you're gone!" The crowbar comes down again, throwing stars behind your burning eyes, breaking something else inside of you.
A long hand grabs your jaws and twists your head sharply around, forcing it to look up, and you choke on the blood in your mouth. The man's grotesquely painted face leans down over you. "Not to worry," he says darkly with laughter and venom in his voice, "I promise to let you go out with a bang."
He drops your head and steps away, dragging the crowbar along the floor behind him before he lifts it and stabs it into a wooden crate, using it to pry the pieces apart. Behind the sounds of the sobbing woman, you can hear the faint, rhythmic tick--tick--tick of something. You struggle to lift your head. The red, counting down numbers are enough to tell you it's a bomb. The woman's scream and the man's maniacal laughter hurts your head. His feet can be heard receding into the distance. Leaving.
"Surely Batman hasn't forgotten you!" he calls over his shoulder. "He'll be here just in the nick of time! He's got--would you look at that! Thirty seconds! Hahahahahaha!"
"Jason," the woman calls desperately. "I'm sorry, Jason!"
You want to roll onto your knees and sit up, but you can't move. Your legs don't feel like they can work. Instead, you roll partially onto your back, hurting your broken arms as you lie on them. "He'll come, Mom," you murmur. He'll come. You believe in Batman. He's the hope everyone clings to, and the retribution every bad guy fears. He'll come.
The ticking is nearly comforting in a way. Steady. Strong. You listen to it count down, not sure what number it's on, not sure if you want to know what number it's on. Tick. Tick. 20 maybe. Tick. 15 maybe.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
"Batman," you whisper, looking up at the bright red numbers finally--00:02, :00:01--"where are--"
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