Batwoman #15

Issue Details

Synopsis

INTERLUDE II Maggie Sawyer's mind is unclear about recent events. It has been days since she's seen or heard from her girlfriend Kate, and she is haunted by the sound of chains. Struggling, she goes back over the events of the last few days.   She had been trying to bring down a pair of Medusa soldiers - apparently recruited from the local branch of the Tong - whose failure to react in the slightest when she pulled her gun and shot them down troubled her. One of the downed thugs kept chanting the word "mitera" over and over, which she later determined was Greek for "mother" - begging the question of why a Japanese gang member would be speaking Greek, and whose mother he was referring to.   Soon, Gotham City was overrun by these soldiers, apparently under the command of Killer Croc. In the melee, Maggie had managed to corner one of the soldiers and demanded that he tell her more of "the mother" - of course, as a fanatic, he would tell her nothing useful.   With the GCPD largely overwhelmed by the Medusa soldiers, the DEO had only been ordered to observe and report. This aggravated Maggie. She recalled how her father had once locked her in the toolshed for hours when she was twelve years old, angered by her tomboyish tendencies. Though she had screamed and screamed for help, she had been forced to break the door down with a shovel. Outside, her mother had been out there the whole time, waiting to explain that her father had only done it because he wanted to protect his daughter from hell - it was out of love. From that point onward, Maggie had decided never to ask anyone for help again, until now. Angrily, she grabbed Cameron Chase, and begged her to get the DEO on the front lines of the battle, in order to save the lives of honest Gotham Police Officers. Reluctantly, Chase agreed, offering a warning that certain people Maggie knew are looking to become martyrs.   Chase directed Maggie to a church in a certain district, where the parents of all of the kidnapped children she had been tasked with finding had gathered with intent to get their kids back without the police's help. Disappointed, Maggie begged Isabella Lopez - a mother with whom she had spent a lot of time on the case - to tell her that she hadn't assembled a mob. Isabella claimed that the monsters out there had their children on chains, that the police would merely keep failing if it were left to them. Maggie warned that the soldiers and creatures outside could not be fought off with baseball bats and kitchen knives, prompting one woman to note that some of them have guns.   Frustrated, Maggie raised her own gun, and demanded that the woman put her gun on the floor and step back, for her own safety. All of her efforts had been to save their children, but if they were to get killed, those children would be made orphans for nothing. Deftly, she rushed across the room, punching the woman and relieving her of her rifle. Convinced of Maggie's intent and their likely failure should her group go out, Isabella began to cry, knowing that her husband Filipe was already out there, having refused to wait for the others. Duty-bound, Maggie went out to find him.   She found him outnumbered by a gang of Medusa soldiers, armed only with a pistol. Though they were staying back, he couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger, so she did for him. He turned on her, then, and it was a standoff between she and Harv, Filipe, and the soldiers. The standoff was broken by a tidal wave from nowhere, caused, by The Weeping Woman, who had decided to save Filipe's life as some kind of penance for her having kidnapped his children. Turning to Filipe, she explained that she could set the whole neighborhood free, by drowning it; washing it clean. He responded that only God could set him free, but that God - and he - would forgive her for her actions. This confused Maggie, as she would never have been able to forgive whoever might try to kidnap her daughter Jamie. Likewise, she could not drop the case until she had found those children.   After returning Filipe to his wife, Maggie and Harvey were disturbed to look across an alley way and see the kidnapped children being dragged along with chains around their necks; the sound of those chains reverberating through Maggie's mind. They were startled then, by a car smashing down, and looked up over the rooftops to see something horrifying going on across town; something monstrous.   Now, with the moments recollected in a more cohesive way, Maggie thinks back on Batwoman's return to Gotham with Wonder Woman at her side; the way she had called out to her. Somehow, Maggie knew that Kate had been spared from all of this madness, to be brought home safe, at last.