warning: not intended for munchkins. Adult situations, violence, and nasty language follow.
Chapter Two: November 1
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
--T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
3:45 a.m.
"Hello?"
"Tom, you gotta give me a hand."
"Len, it's...it's...three o'clock in the morning..."
"Almost four. I know. You gotta come over here. Bring the restraints."
"What?"
"The primate restraints. Trust me. I've got a discovery here...you've got to help me, Tom,
this could be...it'll blow Watson and Crick to hell, Tom. Get over here. Now.
Bring the tranquilizers, too."
"All right, all right..."
"Don't forget the restraints."
4:12 a.m.
Tom knocks on the apartment door. Len opens it, wild-eyed, rushes Tom in.
"You didn't forget the restraints?"
"No, Tom, I didn't. What the hell is going on?" Has the junk finally gotten to
you?
"Come on, come in here..."
Tom follows him into the bedroom. "Len, what?"
There's something in the bed. Len flicks the light on and exposes a green calf to the
light.
"I drugged him as much as I could, but..." That's your bed, Len. What the hell have you been doing? "How did you
get..."
"If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask."
How many times had he been told that? "Len, I..."
"I want you to get the restraints on him first," Len says, loading the tranquilizer gun.
"He's very strong, by the looks of things, and I'm not sure how long..." Tom is running
his hands over the creature, pretending to take stock, looking for a zipper, a seam,
anything--
"Tom, be careful." Len hands him the restraints. "Get these on him."
"Len, I've dealt with a lot bigger creatures than this," he says, letting his instincts take
over, grabbing the hands first, left wrist, then right wrist..."how do you know it's a
he?"
The creature stirs then. "Tom--"
Tom pulls on the restraints, gets the thing's arms behind its back, reptilian eyes half-open-
-
Len can't believe how fast it happens: the arm moves forward and he hears the snap, and
Tom's dead. Something inside him is faster than his brain, pulls up the tranquilizer gun,
shoots, runs.
4:15 a.m.
"Come on, Mike. Just a nightmare. It's all right."
"Raph?"
"It's me, Mike. It's okay."
"Where's Don?"
"I don't know...in their room, I guess. You want me to check?"
"Nothing's happened?"
"It was a nightmare, Mike. Everything's fine."
6:15 a.m.
"What the hell is that?"
"The greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century," Len says. "And I want you
on my team."
"It's humanoid."
"Exactly."
"How the hell did you get it?"
"Ah," Len says. "Professional secret."
"Right." Jane looks the creature over. "This isn't some guy in a Halloween costume, is
it?" It's breathing deeply from the drugs, and a puddle of drool's forming under its mouth.
"Trust me. It's real."
"So you want me to do the prelim?"
"Yeah. Be careful, though. Don't loosen those restraints, whatever you do."
The way he says it grabs her attention. "That's not what--"
"Yeah. That's what happened to Tom. He was getting the restraints on, and the thing just
reached out-- it was awful." Yeah, if somebody was trying do this to me, I might get a little hostile myself.
"What did it do?"
"Broke his neck. Like-- like he did it every day or something."
Jane takes a closer look at its arm and decides that's a distinct possibility.
7:24 a.m.
"What are you doing up?"
"You're up," Leo says, not looking up from Fatherland.
"Yeah, but I never sleep. You made any coffee?"
"In the pot. Was that Mike last night?"
Raph nods and walks over to the coffeemaker, looks for a cup on the shelf. "Nightmares
most of the night. He's been getting 'em for a while now, but it was really bad tonight.
Last night. This morning. Whatever." He takes a mug out of the sink, squints at it.
"Just wash it, will ya?"
Raph frowns and squirts some soap into the mug, starts running the hot water. "When
did Don come in?"
"He didn't." He turns the page in an effort to be casual.
Raph turns to face him. "The nightmares. They've been about Don."
Leo puts the book down; the words have barely been registering anyway. "What kind of
nightmares?"
"He won't say." He turns the hot water off, sloshes coffee into the mug, takes a drink,
frowns. "This tastes like absolute shit."
"Well, if you'd rinsed the soap out--"
Raph turns and spits the coffee out in the sink and, for a second, Leo smiles.
8:54 a.m.
For once, they're all early for a meeting.
There are four people on Len's 'team', and it all sounds like the setup for a bad joke: Len,
the expert on identifying new species, Jane, the reptile expert, Ed the primate guy, and
Alfonse, the obligatory shmuck from the administration. All anyone else is going to be
told is that they've got a big new project that no one else can know about.
"So you've done the preliminary examination, Jane?"
"Yes, and I think he's more in Ed's territory than mine. I'd like to stay on with the project
for obvious reasons, but he's warmblooded and that's definitely a primate skeletal
structure-- despite the shell. I'll need a CAT scan at least to determine the arrangement
of the internal organs."
"What about surgery?"
"I'd save that as a last resort. There's plenty of tests we can run without being invasive.
I'm assuming we want to keep him healthy and alive."
"For as long as possible, yes," Len says breezily. "Ed, do you want to take a look?"
"Of course," Ed says, a big guy, looks like more than part gorilla himself, but Jane
remembers he's got no backbone at all. "I suppose I should do an examination after the
conclusion of this meeting. From the looks of things, I may well conclude that he's more
in Jane's territory than mine." He smiles at her. She doesn't return it. Meetings like this
remind her how little she can stand most of the people she works with. For as long as
possible. God, Len's a bastard.
Or is he just afraid of getting caught?
"So who's going to set up the CAT scan?" Alphonse asks. "I'm assuming we want to keep
this as quiet as possible, at least for the time being."
"Yes, I think we want to have most of our studies complete by the time this goes public,"
Len says. Do you want the specimen conveniently dead by then, too?
"You'd better take your first look, Al," Len says. "Come on. You can set up the
scan."
9:01 a.m.
He wakes up again, probably another nightmare, the sheets are soaked with his sweat and
his heart is pounding, but he can't remember, really.
He looks up at the bottom of Raph's bed. They'd fought over who got the top bunk for a
long time, but Mike has been thrashing so badly in his sleep lately they were both afraid
he'd topple the whole thing over if he didn't take the bed at the bottom.
He shoves the damp sheet to the side of the bed and gets up, sits on the edge of the bed
for a while with his head between his hands, trying to remember her, the feel of her body
and the swell of her stomach, trying to shake off the darkness that keeps creeping in.
9:45 a.m.
"Hello?"
"April? It's Leo. You haven't seen Don, have you?"
"No. No, I haven't. He should be down by now--"
"He didn't come in last night."
"Oh." She's just started opening up the office, turning on the lights to fight off the gloom
from the skies. "He didn't say anything about going out to me."
"And he didn't stop by or anything?"
"No. You think everything's all right?"
He's all ready to tell her yes, but he realizes he'll sound like a liar. "I...I don't
know, April. I hope so. We're gonna check the sewers...look, I'm keeping that cell phone
he rigged up with me, so if you hear anything from him..."
"I'll call, Leo. I promise."
11:45 a.m.
"Al, have you done your prelim yet?"
"Just finished. Why?"
"I've got some...concerns. Not the kind of concerns I want to talk about here."
"Lunch?"
"I can't get out for lunch," she says. "Would dinner be all right?"
"Yeah, sure."
12:24 p.m.
"So we'll search again, meet at three-thirty?"
"Right."
1:30 p.m.
"Computing Solutions, April here."
"April, it's me."
"They found him?"
Casey sighs. "I was just gonna ask if you'd heard anything. I offered to give them a hand,
but they said somebody'd better sit at home and man the phones...plus I've got the
girls..."
"Why don't you three come down and have lunch with me?"
"Sure. They'll like that...Shadow, wanna have lunch with Mommy?"
She can't hear what Shadow says.
"Raven's having her nap right now, but we'll come down as soon as she wakes up. Busy
down there?"
"Oh, yeah. They all waited for the day I'd be alone...damn, that's the other line."
"I'll be down."
3:24 p.m.
"Anything?"
"No."
"Damn."
4:45 p.m.
"Hey, this is Maureen, I'm not at home right now, but if you leave---" --click--
5:45
The cooking's a comfort, and he can tell they're a little jealous of him for it, for having
something to do when there's nothing to do but sit around and wait and worry.
"Raph, Leo, you guys wanna give me a hand?"
"Yeah," Raph says, "sure, what do you want?"
"Why don't you...ah..." Man, he's been doing this by himself for so long, it's hard to think
of anything that needs doing...
"Stir something?" Raphael suggests, with a half-smile, knowing what Mike's doing but
still grateful for something to do.
"Yeah. Yeah, you could stir the sauce. Every couple minutes or so."
"Right," Raph answers, lifting a lid and gazing at the contents. "Looks good, Mike."
"Thanks."
"I'll get the table," Leo says, grabbing the silverware.
It's only when they sit down that they realize he's set four places.
7:49 p.m.
"It's abuse, Ed. Plain and simple."
Ed sips his mineral water and shrugs his shoulders.
"What do we do about it? Set him free? After what he did to Tom, especially?"
"What would you have done, Ed? You wake up and somebody's pulling restraints on
you, what do you do?"
"I wouldn't have..."
"But you couldn't have. What if you could? And you're a reasoning creature. We
don't know what..." She pokes at her steak. "I don't like it, Ed. It stinks worse than your
goddamn monkeys."
"So what do we do about it? Go up to Alphonse and say, 'Hey, Al, love this project, but
we've got a nasty suspicion that Len's been banging the research subject?'"
"We know."
"We don't know anything, Jane. It's all circumstantial. We're biologists, not forensic
scientists. It's all guesswork..."
"So what do you think happened, Ed?"
He puts his fork down, looks at her. "It's not important, Jane. What we think means
nothing compared to the weight of the 'greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth
century.'"
"He told you that, too?"
"Fuck, yes. And he's probably right."
8:15 p.m.
"Hey, this is Maureen, I'm not at home right now, but if you leave---" --click--
9:25 p.m.
"Look," Casey says, "he hasn't even been gone twenty-four hours yet. You should at least
wait a night or two before you start panicking. Remember when Raphael took off--"
"Yeah, we all knew about that pretty quick, didn't we?"
"So Don's got more respect for the building." He shrugs his shoulders.
"Do you have any idea how frustrating you are?"
"Do you want me to pretend I'm gonna lose sleep over this? 'Cause I'm not."
"You've been a jerk for the last month about him, why should you stop now, right?"
April keeps her voice low; she doesn't want to wake up the kids.
"Do you want me to start pretending he's my best friend in the whole wide world? He's
never thought I was good enough for you--"
"Can't you just respect the fact that he's my friend, and he's Raph's brother, and we're just
a little bit worried?"
"You're not 'a little bit worried,' April. You're all flipping out."
There's a knock at the pantry. When they moved in, Casey took the rear stairwell and
made it into a pantry, and let the connecting staircase go between the training room and
their apartment. That way they all have access to the training room, and the guys can
come down to visit everyone without having to play Spider-Man with the fire
escape.
It's Leo.
"We're gonna hit the city and see if we can find anything. Can Casey give us a
hand?"
"Fine with me, if you don't mind listening to him."
"Ah, we'll stick him with Raph. That's what we always do..."
Casey's come up behind her, puts his hand on her waist. "I just think you're overreacting,
that's all."
Leo-- well, he'd be raising his eyebrows, if he had any. "But you'll help us."
"Might as well."
10:15 p.m.
Jane's right and Ed knows it, but what can he do?
If he makes a fuss, he'll be taken off the project and he can just imagine what
would happen if he tried taking it to the press.
There he'd be talking to some reporter from the Enquirer, no, worse, The
Weekly World News..."So, Mr. Cohen, you say the university's keeping a gigantic,
heavily drugged, humanoid turtle on the premises?"
"Well, I wouldn't say gigantic. More human-sized. A little short for a human, I
think."
"Uh-huh."
Maybe if he holds on, he can push them in the right direction. At least get them to ease
off the drugs, let him move around a little...
Maybe.
11:00 p.m.
Jane loves turtles.
When she was a little girl, she used to sneak off to the pond behind her house for hours
and play with the frogs and the turtles and salamanders.
At least she thought she was playing. They probably figured it was some kind of strange
torture beyond their comprehension.
She has never been all that comfortable with the more brutal side of her profession; with
destroying animals after the experiment is over, with addicting chimps to heroin, to
manipulating chromosomes so animals can grow cells humans need.
One of the reasons she loved working with reptiles was that they weren't similar enough
to humans to be used in many experiments. She's observed their behavior, dissected dead
specimens to find out quirks of turtle anatomy, done chemical tests to try to see why baby
sea turtles head for the sea and not the shore. Never anything like this.
She usually goes to bed around ten-thirty. Not tonight.
Tonight she knows she's in for the long haul.
11:47 p.m.
April's sitting drinking tea and watching Letterman when he comes in.
"Hey, babe," he says, and kisses her. "Did I miss anything?"
"The Top Ten Ways to make the Pillsbury Bake-Off More Exciting," she says. "Shadow
needed another glass of water and she wanted to know where you were."
"What'd you tell her?" he says, nuzzling the back of her neck.
She pushes him off. "I told her you were helping the guys out."
"She went back to sleep?" He puts his arm around her waist.
"Yeah. Good thing she didn't wake Rave up...not tonight, Casey, all right?"
"Yeah, yeah," he lies. "I just wanna hold you, anyway. You want to get to bed?"
"Not yet. I'm gonna sit up and overreact for a while longer, okay?"
"Okay," he says, knowing it's not worth arguing with her.
11:52 p.m.
Raph sits up after they've gone to bed, just watching TV, hoping to get his mind off it for
a minute or two. They're in the middle of some stupid skit when Mike starts
screaming.
He's in their room first, Leo right behind him, Mike's got his hands clapped over his ears
now, moaning "no no no..."
"Mike!" Raphael takes him by the arms, getting good at it at this point, if he grabs him
too quick he'll strike and he's way too fast for Raph at that distance, "Mike, wake up, it's
just a nightmare, c'mon, Mike..."
Mike's eyes pop open and he puts his arms down, stares at his brothers. "I heard
him."
Leonardo asks, "What was he saying?"
Mike shakes his head. "Nothing. Nothing."
"What was it?"
"He was screaming," Mike says, sitting up slowly. "Just...just screaming. That's
all."
"Shit," Raph says under his breath.
After a minute they all get up and go into the living room, because there's nothing else to
do.
Contents are the property of phishtar, with the exception of the T.S. Eliot quote, who has fortunately been dead long enough to be public domain, and of course the characters, who are the intellectual property of these guys. If you try to profit from any of this, good luck...you're gonna need it. If you'd like to link to this story, please link to the main page. If you'd like to reproduce this for any reason, email me and we'll talk. Your comments are welcome as well.
