Whistling, and winding through the empty streets like a melody. Gracefully touching the air like a feather touches the ground. Almost silent as it blows old dust from the road like waves of sand on the beach, waxing and waning with each pulse of undetectable wind—shaping the landscape of the dirt, even if unnoticed under a streetlamp.
There was no other steady noise most nights. Only one other night has the sky graced the horizon with a pitter of rain, the pattter made voices muffled. No thunder yet, but early August usually brought more downpour from the south. For the usual night, wind was the background.
The whistling, like a flute to the eardrum, was always better heard higher up. While heat rises, typically the ground remained warm during the late summer months, leaving the higher parts of the city more prone to the cool warnings of autumn.
The wind, when made applicable to any sort of strategy was the perfect cover to footsteps. A lesson taught in the thousands on ninjitsu videos Donatello grew up watching specifically stated that; "background noise is the only noise that should follow a ninja."
A lesson the world has forced him to reconcile with.
He sat, planted on the roof of the channel 9 news building, the wind playing melodies in his ear softly as he overlooked the city below him. Ink smeared across his palm, and the paper, yet he paid no mind to it as he jot down another thought in blue. What he held in his lap was a map, ingrained with an ample amount of color dating back weeks. The colors soaked through to the other side, the small tears were windows showing where the page couldn't soak in any more ink. Yet, Donnie couldn't care less. He wrote onward.
He used specifically a opisometer to track the distance between black smudges—each one roughly a quarter mile from his current location. He scribbled in the distance with a neon green, something stark and bright to keep him from forgetting how close the danger was.
He used blue to track something different, the blue was soaked through the map more often than any other color he used because the blue wasn't tracking certainty, it was tracking false hypothesis'—his false hope.
Donnie sighed, as he crossed out another blue marker on the map, writing "no" in tiny letters small enough to hide his disappointment. He leaned back, gazing at the skyline of a broken new york city while the words pounded through his head, "where are you guys?"
He let himself sit for a moment, just to ponder and calm his mind. A strategy he found kept him alive was that of relaxing before moving forward. The sun was just beginning to rise, welcoming the 4th day of August and the 47th day of the apocalypse.
The apocalypse was really just a sick game of hide and seek, the nuance of losing wasn't a reset or restart like the game was as a child. No, if Donnie lost this game he would be dead. If he left his cocoon of silence he would he sliced in half without any negotiation of mercy. He lived in a world submitted to quiet hiding.