Something's dragging on the floor. Mike and Raph look at each other, look at their door. A knock. "Guys?"
"What, Leo?" Mike swings the door open, sees Leo's legs, the futon just behind him.
"Would you mind if I..."
"'C'mon in," Mike says, hopping out of bed and starting to clear the floor. Raph jumps off the top bunk and helps Leo drag the futon in.
"I just can't sleep in there any more," he says.
"It's okay," Raph tells him. "We got room...we just gotta move some stuff."
"It's driving me nuts," Leo says. "If there was just something we could do..."
"We gotta wait," Mike says dully. They've spent weeks with sleeping pills, Valium, anything they could find or scrounge or think of to try to get the screaming in Mike's brain to die down. Mike's finally just gotten used to it, but it's taken its toll.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"Computing Solutions, this is April."
"Ms. O'Neill?"
"Yes?"
"This is Liam at Personnel Plus. It's about Jack Richardson."
"I don't want to talk about Jack Richardson."
"Ms. O'Neill, we'll be better able to serve you if you answer our questions--"
"He called the first person calling for help-- one of our best customers-- a moron, and the
day went downhill from there, believe it or not."
"I'm sorry we keep calling, but we've got to know what went wrong in order..."
"Yeah, I know, but I'm up to here with customers right now. That's why I called you in
the first place. Look, forget people who know computers, I don't care, anybody who can
learn fast..."
"Ms. O'Neill, we've sent you--"
"Why don't you send me someone who knows what the words 'customer service' mean?
Just give me somebody who knows a CPU from an ICU and I'll be happy, okay?"
"Yes, Ms. O'Neill."
"Thank you," she says coldly, kills the call, grabs the other line. "Computing Solutions, this is April..."
Mark says, "You sure you want me to open up the cage?"
"I'd like to know how I'm gonna get the sample without it."
"I dunno," he says, "but I'm just the security guard, so I guess..."
"I can do it myself," Jane says. "Just give me the keys."
"No way, Dr. Ferguson, this is a man's job," Mark says, knowing it'll piss her off.
He hears the keys before he sees them; has to will his eyes to focus on the lock. He watches the man's thick fingers, realizes he's looking at his only hope.
"Jesus Christ," Al says.
Len looks up and sees him staring at the screen like he's in shock. "What is it?"
"Subject's awake," Ed says, noticing the jump in the gauges.
"What the fuck--" Len stands up to get a better look at the monitors.
"That thing must be pretty damn smart to play drugged all this time," Ed says, still
looking at the gauges.
"oh jesus christ..."
"What?"
And Ed and Len finally get close enough to make sense of the image.
"He's got the key," Ed says, "shit, he's got the key..."
"Close the gate, close the motherfucking..." Len says, reaching for the switch.
"Jane's still in there," Ed objects.
"Fuck Jane. You want that thing out in the streets?"
Alphonse, shaking, slumps into his chair.
So weak...his hand finds the phone, almost gets it off the hook when he hears the
noise behind him, spins, too fast, off balance now...the dart hits his arm and she runs, not
worth it, gotta get to the phone...off the hook, he's dialing, wonder if he needs an outside
line...
He can't remember the number. He puts the phone back on the cradle.
He can't even remember who he was calling.
"It's going to be hard on you, sometimes," Splinter had said once.
"What, sensei?" Mike had asked.
"Because you feel things so strongly. I know you've had trouble with the spiritual side of
some of our lessons...but your emotional side, it's so very strong. When your brothers are
suffering, you will always feel it. Sometimes you'll realize it long before they
do."
Jane's got the next dose of tranquilizers ready but she wants out, now, the
door won't open, she punches her code into the ID machine one more time and then the
pipes open and the gas starts and she realizes they've left her there to die.
"You bastards," she screams, "you can't leave me here--" and a picture of Mark,
what was left of Mark, flashes into her mind, and she panics and grabs the chair and
starts throwing it against the door, once, twice, the chair'll break first it's crazy--
And something lifts the chair from her hands.
And she screams, forgetting the tear gas and her burning lungs, drops, and the chair
swings somewhere over her head. She hears the sizzle of electricity.
He's knocked the box off the lock.
"Oh god please don't hurt me don't hurt me oh god..."
He puts his left hand out, slowly, lets it rest on her shoulder while the right hand probes
the wires, trying to find the right combination. He pulls one wire, setting off a shower of
sparks, a second, a third. He touches two ends together.
zzt.
The lights shut off and she can hear the bolt slide back.
He smiles at her, bitter, cold, slides the door open.
Another door; the same drill, the gas burning her eyes and her lungs, worse in the outer
room but there's only one door left...
She runs out but he's not behind her; she turns back and realizes the tranquilizers have
kicked in, he's on his knees, coughing like she is from the gas, gasping for air.
They find her on her knees rubbing the ridge of his shell, over and over, and they have to
drag her away from him, screaming.
"Who knew Stockholm Syndrome only took three minutes to set in?" Len jokes, but no
one smiles.
He knew enough to pick up the phone, Ed thinks to himself.
And halfway across the city, Mike has to sit down, will himself calm, try to sort out the
jumbled thoughts that he's not even sure are his.
"Computing Solutions, this is April, how can I help you today?"
"Don there?"
"He's out today."
"I'll call back, then--"
"Scott?"
"Yeah."
"I'm not sure when he'll be back in, maybe I can help you."
"Something wrong?"
"Well...yeah. Look, don't tell any of the others, but we haven't seen him since
Halloween." Josefina's caught the words and turns to her, frowning; April had just said
her partner was gonna be out for a while. Have to explain that when I get off the
phone, she thinks. She's actually worth keeping.
Silence, then "You checked the hospitals and all that?"
"Oh, yeah."
"Cops?"
"Don't get me started." It's almost startling to her, how easy it is to lie about it all.
"God, April, if there's anything I can do..."
"Thanks. I don't think there's much any of us can do at this point...pray, maybe, that's
about it."
"I...God. Since the first, then."
"Yeah."
"His family hasn't seen him?"
"No." She sits there looking glumly at the fishtank. He called us,
April, remember? "Uh...what's the problem, anyway?"
"Problem?"
"With your computer. You called...?"
"Oh. Oh, yeah, you were thinking...no, there's nothing wrong...look, how well do you
know Mike? His brother?"
She smiles at that. "Pretty well."
"I just wanted to kind of...feel Don out on a coupla things."
That, April thinks, has got to be the double entendre of the week. "What?"
"Has Mike ever had any...you know, any creative writing courses, anything formal?"
"No, why?"
"Well, he's really raw. There's a lot of potential here, but he's got a lot of work to do, and
sometimes people don't want to do it...it's like they fall in love with their flaws."
"Well, nobody's really looked at his stuff but us, and we're not exactly writers, any of
us..."
"What did he take in college?"
"No college."
"Damn. This is a pretty high level for a high school--"
"No high school, either," she blurts out. Great. How'm I gonna get out of
that?
"What--"
"Well..." she says, searching her brain furiously for the story they cooked up months ago,
"they just went through so many operations at that age, regular school wasn't really an
option, and they all kind of taught themselves. I mean, they were smart enough and they
were going through so much garbage already they didn't push it too hard...at least, that's
the impression I've gotten over the years. I think they've all got GEDs..."
Will he buy it, that's the million-dollar question.
"Wow," he says.
Yes. "You've got electronic mail at the university, right?"
"Yeah. I can even use it most days without having to call Tech Support. Don would be
impressed."
"Why don't I give you his address?"
"That'd be fantastic."
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Three a.m. and he's looking through April's baby books again. They calm him down
for some reason, make him forget the nightmares and the screaming and the empty
room.
Seventh month, now. April had gotten one of the 'watch your baby grow' books with the
big color pictures and he looks at the photo, a recognizable baby now, floating in an
ocean of colors he has trouble believing are real. He traces the tiny fingers with his
fingertip.
He doesn't call very often any more. He's given up hope of ever catching her, doesn't
know what he'd say if she did pick up the phone. Doesn't know why he keeps these
books around, looking at the pictures, sorting through lists of names to see what he likes.
He's half-convinced the baby will be a girl, makes it more real to him somehow, thinking
"she" instead of "the baby." He likes thinking of the two of them together, mother and
daughter. Maureen and-- Donna? Nah. Diana, the huntress? Maybe...
The books are hidden under the bed, in the box where he keeps the manuscripts and
drafts and rejection slips. They know better than to get in that stuff. He's gotten some
editing done lately, but he hasn't been able to write anything new. Unless you count the
thirty or so unfinished letters to Maureen that collect dust next to the rejection slips.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
April figures she's as safe in Chelsea as she is anywhere in the city, but she's terrified,
every night she does this she's just about shaking. Raph gave her one of his sai, taught
her how to stab with it through her purse, and she grabs onto the handle once in a while
to reassure herself, although it never really does.
"Like this," he'd said, his arm moving so fast she'd had trouble tracking it. "You gotta
really mean it."
"I can't do that," she protested.
"I know you've got the killer instinct," he'd grinned at her. "You've just never needed
it."
"Yeah, right," she answered him, looking dubiously down at the blade.
The next bar on the street; she opens the door and sticks her head in.
This one's dark, nobody's in drag, and the most cheerful thing on the walls is a giant
ACT UP "Silence = Death" poster.
Promising, April thinks to herself.
"Hey, Robyn," Casey says, falling into the couch. "No, she's not here. Yeah, I don't
seem to see her much either...yeah, a friend of hers. She seems to think if she can figure
out where he was on Halloween, it'll all just fall into place...Sheesh, I don't know what
the hell happened to him. They're all gettin' hysterical about it...yeah, the guy she works
with, answers the phone sometimes. Mr. Personality, huh?"
Clink. Raphael drops the sai, has to start the kata over again.
"She's gonna spend Christmas Eve giving out fruit baskets to the drag queens down in
Chelsea," he says, lowering his voice. "She must've hit every fag bar in New York by
now, you should see the places..."
Raph gives up, kneels down, touches his head to the floor.
"I went with her one night and that was enough for me. I've seen some freaks in my time
but--"
Raph gets up, opens the training room window, climbs out on the fire escape, closes the
window behind him.
"I keep thinking if Splinter were here, this wouldn't have happened."
"Leo," Mike says gently, "will ya stop being so hard on yourself?"
"Why shouldn't I be?" He stands up, looks out the window at the city. "I mean, I don't
even know where Raph is at this point. What the hell kind of a leader am I?"
"Raph's only been a couple hours," Mike says. "I know it's been hard since we lost him,
Leo, but that doesn't mean--"
A key in the lock; the door snaps open and Raph shoves into the room, edgy, pissed.
"I don't know about you guys," he says, "but I've just about friggin' had it."
"You're out practically every night, April. You're working every day. I know you're
worried about him, but the kids need you, and you're just not there. When we first got
married, you wanted to be Shadow's mother, not some woman who ran in and out
of her life whenever she felt like it."
"Casey, will you please leave her out of this?"
"How can I, April?"
"Look, Casey, I'm sorry Gabrielle's gone, but she's gone, and you're stuck with me."
"What the hell--"
"Look, it's always, 'poor Shadow, her mother's dead'...who potty-trained her, Casey? Who
taught her how to count to ten? Who caught her when she tried to climb up to the top of
her high chair and slipped? What the hell am I, dammit?"
"What are you, April? Where have you been lately? Down in Chelsea, hanging
out with--"
"Watch it, Casey--"
"--God knows what, you're not finding anything, and here we are sitting around the
house--"
"--And what do you think we do when you and Raph go out to bang heads?"
"I don't do that--"
"Not like you used to, but you still go out. And I never say anything about that, maybe I
should have for the past--"
"April, this is night after night after night. I'm gonna have to put a picture up in the kids'
rooms so they'll remember what you look like."
That's the last straw. Leo nods at Raphael, and he runs down the stairs, knocks on the
door before things get anything worse.
"Hey," he says, smiling at Casey like nothing's wrong. "Wanna spar?"
"Sure," Casey says, glares one last time at April before he sprints up the stairs.
"You okay?" Raph asks April. She looks like hell, and he can see she's been crying for a
while.
"I'll be all right," she says softly, and turns away from him.
"So," Raph says when he gets to the top of the stairs, "who gets him?"
"We're gonna have to flip for it," Leo says.
"Guys?" Casey asks.
"Gotta quarter?" Raph asks him, and Casey fishes one out of his pocket. Raph takes it,
hands it to Leo.
Leo tosses it into the air. "Mike, call it."
"Heads," Mike says, and Leo grins. "Yep."
"Let me see that." Leo shows the coin to Raphael, who nods and takes it. "Leo, call."
"Tails."
"All yours, Mike," Raphael says, flips the coin back to Casey, who's starting to look suspicious.
"All right," Mike says, starts spinning his 'chucks. "'Cmon, Casey. This'll be fun.
You wanna grab a weapon, or are you just gonna let me kick your ass?"
Raphael flips on the radio, laughs hysterically when he finds Marky Mark. "Oh yeah," he
says. "Oh yes."
It's such a good vibration...it's such a sweet sensation..."
Mike asks, "You ready?"
"Yeah," Casey says warily, clutching one of the baseball bats he keeps in the training
room.
"Good."
If Mike's actually paying attention, his thoughts and his motions are all but simultaneous;
the trick to fighting him is knowing where he's going to go before he does. Raphael
usually does it through pure aggression, pushing him into obvious choices, and Casey's
always used the same approach. It's not working this time. Mike gets the first good hit, a
solid blow to his left thigh that stings even worse than they usually do. It's then that it
really hits Casey that sparring has nothing to do with this, that they've called him up here
for another reason altogether.
A left to his head, then a kick that puts him on his knees. He's back up in a second, tries
a roundhouse kick; Mike ducks it and knocks his legs out from under him again.
Feel the vibration! Marky Mark's voice cries. Feel it, feel it!
Casey is dimly aware that Leo and Raph aren't sparring; they're leaning up against
the training room wall watching the show. Mike takes advantage of his distraction,
comes in with a solid left-hand strike that feels like a knife blow. They can all hear the
cracking sound.
"I told you not to break anything," Leo says.
"Just a rib," Mike says sullenly. "It'll heal."
"More than one," Casey groans, dropping the bat, and Mike strikes again, kicking his
chin, knocking his head back so he's disoriented.
"Gosh, I'm sorry," Mike tells him. "Really, I am."
"Why are you doing this?" Casey manages to ask, ducking the next blow, getting up,
trying to get his aching body to follow his mental commands.
"You know what this room's above?" Mike asks.
"Yeah."
"Well," another kick Casey can't duck, this time it catches him in the back so hard it feels
like every little bone in his spine is independently screaming, "we've talked about it
some--" a punch in the stomach strong enough to send him down-- "and we're getting sick
of your stupid--" just smacking him with the back of his hand now, Casey too tired and
weak to stop him-- "obnoxious--" smack-- "ignorant--" smack-- "mouth."
Casey spits the blood out and says, "So I guess you guys are on April's side."
"If this was about April," Raphael answers him, "Mike woulda done a lot worse. And if
we hear one more of your cracks about the kind of guys who hang out down in Chelsea, we
will do a lot worse."
Casey looks up at him, remembers the coin toss. "You would have done this, too?"
Raph nods.
"But you're my friend."
"I thought you were mine, too," Raph tells Casey, and punches him out.
They stare at him for a few seconds, and Mike pushes him over to the stairwell with his
foot, hesitates for a second, pulls his foot back--
"Mike," Leo says.Mike frowns, grabs Casey by his T-shirt, drags him down the
stairs.
"And the drag queens are in the Village, for cripe's sake," they hear Mike saying.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
They took her off the project-- some bullshit about it being too hard on her nerves,
yeah, watching Mark's face get pulled off his skull might make you a little edgy, but that
wasn't the reason and everyone knew it. Jane had figured out Len's codes long ago,
though, and the first layer of security is easier. The second, the identity test, had taken a
bit longer. But it's astonishingly simple once you get the idea. It doesn't test for anything
but the proper impression, so all you need for a model is a good clear fingerprint...
The door slides open, and she passes through.
She's never been here when the research center opens in the morning, so she doesn't
know about the electric eye just past the doorway.
The one you flick off just like a light switch, if you know it's there.
Finally the bartender had found someone else who remembered the buff green
guy.
"Ed, this is the woman I was talking about; April, Ed, Ed, April."
"Hi," she says, and smiles. Somewhere around thirty, he figures, pretty and Irish looking,
with dark rings under her eyes she's done a poor job of covering with concealer. He
gestures her toward a table away from the jukebox.
"So what's a nice kid like you doin' in a place like this?"
"Looking for a friend." She's wearing a thick black sweater and jeans, little gold hoops in
her ears. She stirs her drink.
"So he just disappeared?"
"The last time anyone saw him was Halloween night. He didn't show up for work the
next day, no one in his family has any idea--"
"Work?"
"Yeah."
"What kind of work?"
"Doesn't matter, does it?" She frowns. "He works at a computer place. Sales and
support."
"Muscular guy, right? Short?"
"Yeah."
"I mean, really short, under five feet..."
"Yes."
"And a turtle costume."
She nods.
"He can talk? He's capable of speech?"
Her jaw drops down a little and she sucks in a breath. "You son of a bitch," she
says quietly. "You goddamned son of a bitch."
"Look, by the time I got in on this, he was so drugged--"
Her fingernails dig into the surface of the table. "Where is he?"
His jaw opens but he can't get any sound out. The nail on her index finger's folding,
splintering on the surface of the table. "...I shouldn't tell you..."
"He's my best friend," she says quietly, "for the last three months I've run a
business with him, answered phones, argued with him, and now you're trying to tell me
you shouldn't tell me where he is when he's so drugged that you can't even figure
out..."
"What will you do if I tell you?"
"I won't do anything."
"But other people might?"
Her fingers loosen up on the table for a second, and she meets Ed's eyes. "I have no
control over that. But you should know that I can find out where you work. I can find
out where you live. And if you don't tell me where the hell he his, I'll make sure
that...that those 'other people' know that."
Ed looks at her exhausted eyes, wonders if she's bluffing.
Jane clicks the IV off and looks into the creature's glassy eyes. She's rigged up a
restraint of her own-- it gives her a little more flexibility than the traditional design, but
should still keep her safe if he panics-- and she figures by the time she gets it secure, he
should be aware enough to move.
He looks up at her, makes a noise somewhere between a moan and a growl.
"It's all right," she says calmly, trying to kill her instinct to panic. "I'm getting you out of
here.
Pounding at the front door; nobody ever comes to the front.
"What?" Raph calls out.
"It's-me-let-me-in--"
I'm first to the door, and April practically falls in, breathless, she must have run up the
stairs.
"I found him," she gasps. "I found him."
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