It took about twenty minutes for the dead bodies around him to figure out that Danny-with-white-hair was the same as Danny-with-black-hair.
It required a lot of switching back and forth between forms. When footsteps went by outside, the hidden corpses had to adjust to Danny disappearing into thin air— and when the danger had passed, not all of them were completely convinced that the Danny-who-had-seemingly-left was the same Danny who'd come back.
Whatever. Within an hour, every cold hand was holding a cold hand, and a daisy-chain of dead people snuck out invisibly through the walls.
So...there was fully an evil city of cultists who lived beneath Gotham. That was news to Danny.
One, what a waste of urban planning. All of this space could have been housing. The rent probably would have been astronomical, but come on. It’s New Jersey. It still would have been cheaper than the alternative, and less annoying than commuting besides.
Secondly, Danny had to watch their…necromancers? Scientists?? …Whackjobs???— work over corpses in their ugly basement, injecting something crystalline clear but neon yellow straight into unflushed veins, waiting for the solution to clean the body out for them.
Danny could do a better embalming job in his sleep, and the bodies wouldn’t be waking up as the imprisoned undead besides.
The dead body at the head of the chain led them through a few doors, a few walls—probably smug about not needing to lockpick—until Danny could spot the things his regulars wanted him to see.
Whips, in immaculate condition, in arm’s reach. Leather soft from use.
Chains anchored to walls. Broken links scattered about where they fell. Rotting fluids caked onto the dirt floor.
They just…stopped and stared at a pit of bodies for a hot minute; the dead men and women, and the long-dead kid. Just. In a hole. And in the ditch were abandoned carcasses that once had once been people; the more intact ones on top had their throats torn out, now writhing with maggots and black with rot, or equally as fetid holes in their chests, their hearts. Broken limbs. Broken necks.
…There were a few prayers the funeral directors would recycle in a pinch. Danny muttered something simple in dead, underground air: something about ashes, something about dust.
There were prison cells empty of everything that wasn’t still-yellow bones. Eugh. The tour continued.
There were…busy restaurants. Gilded ballrooms. Lounges—of eager patrons in golden masks, sipping on beverages and tittering over cue balls and and pool tables and all being served by corpses, corpses everywhere in masks and armor and so still, so silent.
“Where are we?” Danny whispered. The bodies on either side of him push him back into the shadows even despite their invisibility.
Oh, Danny realized. They were afraid.
Here were dangerous people, who did deadly things. Here they sat, untouched. Here, the dead were put to use. Here, their corpses were commodity.
Danny hadn’t signed on for this when he’d applied to mortuary school. That didn’t mean this wasn’t under his purview, though. The cold hands in his were as precious to him as a patient would be to a doctor. Danny should have been the last hands they went through, if they were on his table; having met these dead people over and over and over again, they were probably more familiar with him than they might even be with the living people of their long-gone lives.
His lips pursed. “Show me where the important things are.”
The corpses arm and arm with him tittered silently. The one at the front led the way—trusting Danny that they’d make it through the catacomb wall as intended.
Documentation was not Danny’s strong suit. In an office of dark wood and gold leaf and heavy leaded doors, however, Danny could make an exception. His demand was simple: “Show me everything.”
The bodies dropped their hands from his to reappear in the real space of the eerie office. They split into naturally formed searched teams to open cabinets and ransack desks.
They handed him reams of papers. Manila file folders. Stapled document packets. Danny flipped through print after print of glossy photographs. Some of the dead he couldn’t recognize. Some of them he…could. Some of the dead looked over his shoulder, surprised to see their living selves in photographic form.
…He felt kind of bad about that one. One file had the body’s name in Times New Roman at the top; everything that had ever been done to their empty corpse, until it wasn’t so empty anymore, was spelled out across eight inches of printer paper in twelve point font.
More files were placed into his hands. More dead found themselves on standardized printed reports. More faces, stony and still at his side as he read through their public obituaries, through the tortures that had been heaped on them after they had already been made dead, and brought back for more.
Danny struggled to breathe. So he stopped.
“Get everything important out of this room. We’re leaving it behind us. Now.”
The corpses laughed. It didn’t sound like human laughter. It sounded like birdsong in the morning, the world struggling to awaken long after the birds had already risen. So be it.
More cold hands put more files into Danny’s arms. When the dead were satisfied, golden eyes gleaming green-gold in the light, every rigor-stiff hand curled itself around Danny’s elbows.
Danny hadn't needed to use his stronger powers since high school ended. That didn’t mean he had forgotten them.
A deep breath and his hand raised, and the room was frozen into place. No documentation would leave. Nothing could be hidden. Great. As long as someone smart could get to this place, everything would be waiting there for someone clever.
Danny handed the paperwork to the closest body, and darted back out into the underground complex.
Ballroom and its well-dressed occupants? Frozen. Lounges, with their cocktail napkins and glittering marble countertops? Frozen. Danny mostly froze indiscriminately—travelling through walls and getting every occupant he could find, leaving no one to ring the alarm or attack. He only noticed the contingent of corpses following him around when he started needing to freeze the armored guards along with their…owners…keeping the armored dead back long enough for Danny to catch them in ice. At least one beckoned with stone face and curled finger towards rooms Danny hadn’t seen, focusing on freezing rooms they hadn’t yet visited.
The ballrooms of snow and ice were…creepy. The occupants looked like statues. Danny exhaled a puff of air, his ghost sense stuck in his throat. A flicker of transformation, and he was back in his sister’s Deadpool tee and kind-of-too-short pajama pants.
“Hey,” Danny rasped. He was…more than a little tired. “You know that time those guys came in and asked about…you?” He pointed to the correct body.
The dead man made a small, quiet noise, wide yellow eyes peering into Danny.
“Think we can find that guy again? Give him this?” Danny gestured to the paperwork its fellow was holding.
The corpse turned and loped off.
Danny skipped the whole “walking” thing and floated off after it. It was necessary—once all ten or so started gaining momentum, their gait was almost double that of Danny’s running speed. In the end, Danny held on to a kind-of-stiff bicep as the corpses swooped and crawled and climbed and whirled up and out of the sewers and into the wilds of Gotham city.
Eventually they made it through the city and out of Gotham proper. Smog and smoke turned into the suburbs and a moonless sky, and then trees, and a slow, thinning out of houses. Danny barely had time to stare as their contingent barreled past the scenery at full haste. Was this where the investigator lived?
The dead man stopped just outside the range of large, iron gates. High tech, Danny would guess. None of the bodies seemed to like being caught on camera or recorded. “How do we get up and over that?” he mused.
The corpses all looked at each other. Finally, one just…climbed up the side and jumped over. Two others followed. The littlest one was small enough to wriggle through the bars and keep walking.
The one Danny was holding onto huffed. It rapped its knuckles against the gate, and then looked at Danny, as if Danny knew what to—
—Right. Oh yeah. Danny turned them intangible, and they walked through. The rest wriggled up trees and jumped down on the other side with no rush.
There was no light on outside of the stately home they approached. Still, they must not have been entirely subtle in their approach, since the door opened.
A different old man was at the door. Danny…frowned. He’d been hoping for the police inspector.
“…Ah,” said the elderly man. Despite the weird hour, the man was still in a very serious suit. They really were in a rich neighborhood. “Would you like to state your name and business?”
Danny had no idea what they looked like: a variety of dead people in Danny’s laundry-day clothes half-in and half-out of shadow, unnaturally still with golden eyes gleaming was probably an unsettling sight. He looked at the dead man whose arm he clung to.
The corpse gently nudged him back.
“…I come bearing paperwork?” Danny tried, looking back and forth between the living and the dead.
“I see. One moment, please.” The door shut between them.
The undead slowly circled around Danny, meandering into a loose defensive position. Danny sat down—or, well, sat midair, still holding on to the dead man who’d directed them here—as an anchor, taking the paperwork into his lap while he waited.
Hinges squeaked. A different man came to the door this time; taller, darker, broader. Oh. He wasn’t wearing the same armor this time, but Danny could understand the mix-up; there hadn’t been only one investigator at the time, after all. He guessed that tall, dark, and brooding had to have more appeal to a dead guy's sensibilities…
“Yes?” the man asked and—looked at Danny, still in his pajamas, floating and pale and translucent. “Are you alright?”
“Sure,” Danny said. The man continued to stare. “I’m just—dead. That’s all.”
The man exhaled. “Oh.” And then: “My condolences. Is there any way I can…help?”
“Sure,” Danny said again, and handed the paperwork to the closest body near him. The little corpse took the stack with both hands and darted over—and darted back out of reach once the papers were in the man’s hands, out of the way and safe in shadow.
The man flipped through the papers. Frowned. Flipped faster—eyebrows rising as he read through more and more, surprised by whatever he saw. He shut the topmost manila folder closed. “I… This is very thorough. Yes, I can have this looked at.”
Whatever. Danny shrugged. “Your life.”
Promptly disappearing into the ether was probably overkill, but Danny wasn’t about to linger. Rich people houses gave him the heebie jeebies. The bodies surrounding him promptly followed his lead and skulked off into the darkness, on a route to a destination Danny already knew.
It would be nice to go home and set all of this aside for now.
(He wouldn’t be sleeping in his own bed tonight, though. Getting kind-of-murdered in it ruined a lot of the vibe.)
