When the team leader noticed both Reggie and the blond man at the back of the line were missing, his expression clamped shut.
"Something's wrong. Everyone up."
Then Reggie stepped out of the alley, buckling his belt.
"Hmm? What's going on? Who are we watching for?"
"You could've said something before disappearing."
"I needed a minute. Relax, brother."
The team leader scanned the street. "Where's the dog?"
Reggie shrugged. "Probably spooked itself and ran off. Or it got smart and decided not to follow us somewhere Solomon might be."
A couple of the men laughed despite themselves. Reggie rejoined the group, and the patrol moved on.
On the other side of the Upper West Side, a cluster of Joker soldiers had set up a card game on a folding table outside a grand old theater. The streets around them were thick with foot traffic — hundreds of civilians moving in slow, silent circuits, every one of them wearing a hat.
"Keep it down on the drinking," one of the cardplayers said, glancing up at the street. "The Mad Hatter said there might be an attack tonight."
"Look at these people." The man across from him had a cigarette hanging from his lip. He threw down two cards and nodded at the hat-wearers drifting past. "Robots. Every single one. They don't eat, they don't complain, they don't get cold. They just walk. We've got hundreds of them. What exactly are you worried about?"
"It's not the patrol that bothers me." A third man took a long pull from his beer. "It's him. The guy makes people perform Alice in Wonderland for him in that theater, every night, those creepy nursery rhymes going until midnight. Every one of his actors ends up dead on the stage. We're not cleaning blood out of theater seats every week because the Joker keeps sending him out on jobs. The moment that stops, we're back to mopping."
"Jackson caught a bullet on stage yesterday," someone else muttered. "Shot by the Hatter himself, mid-scene. I'd love to put one between that freak's eyes."
"Keep your voice down." The cigarette man didn't look up from his cards. "You're working for one madman and allied with another. You say that too loud, and it's Gotham Harbor for you. Concrete accessories included."
"At least I'll outlive you."
"Besides, the intelligence might be nothing. Those lunatics get their information from God-knows-where. We do our jobs, we go to sleep, and if a fight does break out, these hundreds of hat-people are going to handle it a lot better than we will. Our job is finding a safe corner and not catching stray bullets."
"Tych said there's actually a mole planted in the Riddler's operation," one of them offered. "Apparently the hat's unusual — not one of ours. If that's real, the tip might actually be solid."
The man with the cigarette set down his cards and his beer. "Alright. Fine. If it goes loud, nobody plays hero. We find cover, we stay low, and we let the controlled ones do the work. That sound reasonable to everyone?"
General murmurs of agreement.
Then the night exploded.
A massive detonation ripped through a street several blocks away — not a gunshot, not a car crash, but something that sent a column of fire climbing against the dark sky, trailing a plume of grey-black smoke that blotted out the stars above it.
The card game scattered.
"What the hell —"
"Whose territory is that?"
"Solomon Grundy's."
A beat of silence, then: "Well. That should be interesting."
"Shouldn't we go help?"
"That monster fights like the Hulk. You want to go?"
Nobody moved.
Solomon Grundy — born on a Monday.
The roar that came from inside the factory wasn't quite human. It wasn't quite animal either. It was the sound of something massive and barely contained — and it was coming from the pale blue figure tearing at Clayface's chest with both hands.
The blast had caught him direct. His ragged clothes were scorched, embers still smoldering along his forearms, burns charred into the grey-blue skin of his torso. None of it slowed him. He drove his fingers into the clay of Clayface's chest and pulled, trying to rip his attacker apart one handful at a time.
Clayface held on. The sticky mass of his body wrapped Grundy's arms, fouled his grip, tried to contain the terrible force working through those enormous limbs — but it was a losing proposition and they both knew it.
He took a direct hit from an explosion and he's still this strong.
Two massive clay legs pushed off the factory floor. Clayface launched them both upward — dead weight, the full mass of a zombie that had been walking since the 1800s, dragged into the air by raw momentum. Grundy grabbed for a steel beam overhead and missed, his hands still fouled by clay, and then they were through the roof, punching into the open night sky above the Upper West Side.
Clayface's super strength didn't match Grundy's. Nothing did. But it was well beyond human, and for a moment they hung in the dark air together before gravity caught them.
Solomon Grundy — born on a Monday.
The clay mass reshaped itself around the zombie in freefall, twisting his body, adjusting the angle. Grundy hit the concrete headfirst. The impact was catastrophic — the ground cracked in a ring around the point of contact, the shockwave rattling the factory walls hard enough to shake dust from the ceiling. The mud ball burst apart on contact, splattering thin across the floor, and Grundy was buried in the crater it left.
Outside the factory, the situation had already spiraled past the point of rational intervention. Hundreds of hat-wearing civilians were converging on the building in silence, guns drawn, following commands that weren't their own. The Joker's soldiers stood at the perimeter, watching, none of them willing to step into the radius of whatever was happening inside.
The math was simple. Stray debris from a fight at that scale could rupture organs. A shockwave could kill a person standing thirty feet away. And if one of those two things decided to throw something, anything in its path was already dead. Even Kite Man and Batman arriving together couldn't have cleared that crowd — there were simply too many of them.
Grundy clawed his way out of the pit. The impact had split his skull, peeling the skin back from the crown of his head to reveal a strip of white bone, dark red muscle, something that might have been brain matter exposed to the open air. He didn't seem to notice. Zombies didn't bleed, apparently — or if they did, Grundy had run out of blood some time in the last century.
Across the factory floor, the scattered clay was already pulling back together, reforming, stretching upward into something vaguely humanoid and extremely large.
Clayface looked at what had just climbed out of the concrete and shook his reconstructed head.
"This guy is a monster."
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