Free Batman 4 - Batman & Robin by Michael Jan Friedman Page A

magenta. Her eyes were a chlorophyll green. And her ravaged clothes revealed the form and stature of a goddess.
    Smiling, feeling a rather interesting change in her body chemistry, she approached Woodrue. He tilted his head with curiosity as he took in the sight of her.
    “Dr. Isley?” he ventured. “Pamela? My God, you look great. I mean . . . for a dead woman.”
    Her smile deepened. “Hello, Jason. I can call you Jason, can’t I? You know, I think I’ve had a change of heart.”
    Coming closer, she took him in her arms. He didn’t resist, either. Slowly, languidly, she kissed him on the lips. Then she drew her face back to gaze into his eyes.
    “Quite literally a change of heart,” she added. “I don’t think I’m human anymore, Jason. The animal-plant toxins had a rather unique effect on me.” She thought it through as she spoke. “They replaced my blood with aloe, my skin with chlorophyll . . . and filled my lips with Venom.”
    Woodrue’s brow furrowed beneath his wild shock of hair. “With Venom, you say? But that would mean . . .”
    Suddenly, the man began to choke. He fell, clutching at his throat. Trying to speak or breathe and accomplishing neither.
    “Silly me,” she said, kneeling beside him. “I probably should have mentioned that I’m poison.”
    As she watched, Woodrue shivered and spasmed. But after a few moments, it stopped. He lay still, eyes fixed on eternity.
    Pamela shrugged. “Oh well,” she said. “It’s a jungle in here.”
    Standing up, she turned to the beakers she had labored so long and hard over and—one by one—spilled their contents onto the floor. Then she picked up a Bunsen burner and threw it to the ground.
    Its flame spilled out, latching on to the flammables in its vicinity. Before long, her lab was a conflagration, sending up tongues of fire and trails of black smoke.
    “Let the flames touch the sky,” she whispered. “The time has come for plants to take back the world so rightfully ours . . . for Nature to again assert her place in the scheme of things.”
    And she was Nature’s agent, her spirit, her will. “I am Mother Nature,” she declared. “And it’s not nice to fool with me.” She grinned, reveling in the blaze. “It’s not nice at all.”
    As she left the tent, something caught Pamela’s eye. She lifted a broken beaker. On it, there was a logo—that of Wayne Enterprises.
    In the distance, she could hear Bane screaming his birth pain to the world. Bellowing like the biggest, baddest newborn anyone had ever imagined.
    She turned in the direction of his cry. “Coming, Bane darling. After all, we’ve got a plane to catch, you and I.”

CHAPTER SIX

    F reeze walked through the frozen bowels of his hideout, admiring the ice sculptures he had made. Subzero art, he thought appraisingly. He didn’t care if it never caught on anywhere else. Here, in his lair, the sculptures made him feel at home.
    Outside, this place was an abandoned ice-cream factory built in the shape of a snowman’s face, a dripping cone stuck onto his frigid head. Inside, Freeze reflected with some satisfaction, it was an unbroken icescape. An arctic terrain that echoed the wasteland in his soul.
    Up ahead of him, on what had once been the factory floor, Icemen and curvaceous Snow Bunnies in parkas ate frozen dinners, laughing at the wide-screen television they’d installed. One of the Bunnies separated herself from the others and approached him.
    “Freezy,” she said, batting her eyelashes at him, “I’m feeling kind of . . . hot.”
    Freeze grunted, not at all enamored of the name the woman had hung on him. “I find that unlikely,” he told her.
    “Okay,” she conceded. “Truth is, I’m freezing. My hair is brittle, my skin is dry . . . but I don’t care. I’d weather blizzards to have you. You’re the most perfect man I’ve ever known.”
    Freeze scowled. “To be frozen. To never change. A life of perfect ice-olation.” He shook his head. “There is no