Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King by Alan Grant (best english novels to read .txt) 📗

The mother smiled. "It must be an advertising stunt, dear."

A ragged cheer went up as more people noticed the impressive face. A group of students masquerading as zombies performed an impromptu dance in the middle of Main Street. Children out to trick-or-treat clapped their hands in delight.

Several concession holders, camped out in their booths along the procession route, made a mental note to complain to City Hall about their lack of advance information. What a great mask that face would have made!

In his office high in Police Headquarters, Jim Gordon stood at his window, looking down on the city below. His men were out in force tonight, but so far, so good. There had been virtually no arrests.

The disasters throughout the world had dampened everyone's spirits. Gordon found himself comparing the partygoers to ostriches burying their heads in the sand rather than facing up to danger. But maybe that was unfair. When people were afraid, they needed something out of the ordinary to help them forget their worries.

Gordon's mind, however, kept straying to Cassandra's vision. She said the city would be destroyed at midnight on Halloween, and Batman seemed to have taken her very seriously indeed. Gordon hadn't heard from Batman since, but that wasn't unusual. They had no regular contact. When one of them needed the other, he was always found.

The commissioner took a last look at the moon, wondering how on earth the sponsors had managed to project a hologram onto the lunar surface, then turned away from the window.

He glanced at his pipe, which lay on his paper-strewn desk beside a pouch of tobacco and a box of matches. The evening had been largely stress-free, and Jim had been able to comply with his decision not to smoke again.

I'll give it till midnight, he thought. Gordon pulled out the old pocket watch that had belonged to his father, and his father's father, from his waistcoat pocket. Twenty minutes to go. All quiet so far. Has to be a good omen.

Then the face in the moon spoke.

Every man, woman, and child in the city heard it, yet no microphone would have picked it up, no tape recorder could have translated it to audio. The voice spoke directly inside their heads, coming from a location that seemed to be at the heart of their being, their very center of existence.

And the voice prophesied doom.

"Your foulness will be cleansed, as the foulness of the world is cleansed. The cycle is ending. Make peace with your gods. Tonight, every last one of you will die."

Jim Gordon's stomach lurched. With sinking heart and shaking hand, he reached for his pipe.

Meanwhile, at the pyramid, lightning flashed from the eyes of the five duplicate Stone Kings as they launched themselves at their foes.

The Flash was first to react. In the blink of an eye he accelerated to superspeed from a standing start, spinning around like a top, his arms outstretched and fists balled. The centrifugal force was tremendous as his fists slammed into the Stone Kings with devastating effect, knocking the creatures off their feet. One was sent careening into the chamber wall, sparks flying from its point of impact.

But even as the Flash slowed to a halt, the Stone Kings were recovering, springing to their feet to renew their assault.

Superman dived headlong, his arms taking two of the figures around the waist. The momentum sent all three crashing through the outer wall in an explosion of stone and chalk.

J'onn J'onzz pinned a third Stone King to the hard earth floor, increasing the density of his molecules in an effort to crush the creature into submission.

Wonder Woman's golden lasso snaked out to loop over the fourth Stone King's body and slip down over his arms. Wonder Woman pulled the lasso taut, jerking the beast off its feet again.

Batman took a couple of steps to the side, moving behind the altar stone with its covering of dried blood and rotting animal entrails. The original Stone King still stood in the center of the chamber, the intense pulsations that affected his body coming more frequently now. Batman glanced toward Manhunter and saw the duplicate he was fighting suddenly heave the Martian away as if he were made of feathers.

Green Lantern! Batman thought urgently. J'onn's in trouble!

For the briefest moment Green Lantern looked flustered, as if unsure what to do. Then a solid green beam sprang from the power ring, its end shaped like a medieval battering ram. The beam took J'onn's foe in the chest, blasting the creature off its feet and hurling it into the wall with brutal impact.

Time's running out, Batman informed his teammates. Only seventeen minutes left!

Most of the Western Hemisphere was in darkness. Almost midnight in Gotham meant almost nine P.M. on the West Coast. In Europe, it was five in the morning, with dawn still more than an hour away. Across the globe, more than a billion people were sleeping.

And every one of them had heard the Stone King's warning. It came to them in their dreams, or they wakened with a start . . . to his physical manifestation.

A Navajo medicine wheel laid out in the New Mexico desert started spinning like a top, spitting out cobalt-blue sparks. The Ohio Serpent Mound began to undulate as if it were a living thing. In California's Death Valley, a thick, sulfurous smoke began to spew forth from the old bauxite mines, suffocating everything it came in contact with.

A British army patrol on night maneuvers reported thirteen giant figures dancing around the sacred stones of Avebury in a slow shuffle. Each one wore a bull's-head mask.

An ominous plume of smoke spewed out of volcanic Mount Etna in the Mediterranean. Grimacing in its swirls and roils were the faces of a thousand demons.

After a silence that had lasted two thousand years, the cave-dwelling Oracle at Delphi in Greece began to speak again. But where once the air was perfumed with burning laurel leaves,