Phase 2. Meeting Casey's Family
Jones looked up at April with raised eyebrows, as if his forehead wasn't still red from banging it on his desk. “I'm fine.” A slow blink. “What did you want again?”
“...The file I gave you this afternoon. I need it back, if you haven't gotten it to editing yet. You put it in your bottom drawer.”
“Right.” Jones tried his luck a second time, leaning comically outward as he bent to open his desk drawer.
He was definitely not fine. First off, unlike April the man had excellent spatial awareness. Spilling coffee everywhere was one thing, but trying to put his face through a solid wooden surface was definitely out of character. Secondly, April's Uncle had come home bruised and sprained from his adventures often enough for her to know hurt when she saw it.
Jones found the file and sat back up with it. His arm didn't quite straighten all the way and he leaned forward to compensate as he passed it to her. April took the folder and set it firmly on the desk.
“What's wrong, Jones? You haven't waved your arms in my face all day. Is it your shoulder or your back. Should you be at work?”
“What are you, a cop?” Jones rolled his eyes and leaned back (stiffly). “I'm fine! I pulled my shoulder on the rink. It's one of the hazards of an active lifestyle.”
“Are you taking anything for it?”
“Now you're pretending to be my mom!” Finding the lack of an arm to be restricting his self expression, Jones used his feet to send his chair into a frustrated spin. Like the child he was. “I'm a grown up. I can open childproof bottles and take ibuprofen. Why’re you asking?”
“I'm asking if you're safe to drive home!” April exclaimed, not sure why she was doing this or why it was firing her up. Jones leaned his head back over his chair and looked at her upside down. (Why on earth this man had a desk job was beyond her)
“It's ibuprofen. I could take five at once and still be less drugged than most of the other drivers.”
April only barely stopped herself from grabbing his collar and telling him NOT to do that.
“‘Sides. I didn't take the bike this morning. Walked.”
April gave her most annoying coworker the side eye but collected her file anyway. “Alright. Tell me if you need anything.”
“If I have a fairy problem or an infestation of gnomes you'll be the first to hear about it,” Jones called after her as she walked off.
April's fingers crinkled the folder. Once again, she didn't know why she bothered.
April paused in gathering her coat to glance out the window. Three stories below, Jones exited the Channel 6 News building and set off in the OPPOSITE direction of his house. She sighed deeply as she stepped into the elevator. He could be doing any number of things, she reminded herself. Going to the drug store, visiting a friend, checking a PO box. It wasn't her job to decide if his evening activities were legitimate or not. Or to make sure he got home alive.
The elevator dinged and April stepped out of the building into a waft of New York scented air. When she glanced to the left Jones was still in sight, about to turn a corner when snakes alive he skidded away from a light pole as if it had been the one striding into him and not the other way around.
Without really deciding to, April started off in the same direction.
She tailed Jones for several blocks before it truly started to be difficult. The man would duck into alleys suddenly, sprint a little to the next turn, cross the street for no apparent reason. April almost thought he knew she was there except… In all honesty, she believed Jones could lose her easily if he wanted to. This felt more like a habit, acted out without even thinking like filling a dishwasher. (Jones probably didn't even know what a dishwasher was. He had looked at her automatic transmission like it was foul witchcraft, and couldn't use a phone for the life of him. That neandertha-)
Suddenly confronted with a clear view of the back of Jones’ jacket, April realized she'd been going too fast and ducked as casually as she could behind a dumpster. There came a clink and the unmistakable sound of feet scuffing down concrete stairs.
April held her breath for a second, a realization sinking into her as the chill of the filthy dumpster sank into her back. This was ridiculous! She was stalking a coworker after work hours for absolutely no reason. A little bloom of shame uncurled in her chest and she stepped away from the dumpster. She should just go home and leave Jones to whatever grungy hangout he was-
April's feet, only one step toward the mouth of the alleyway and a normal night not spent chasing down the bane of her existence, turned her back to where Jones had disappeared.
It was a maintenance access gate to one of the abandoned subway tunnels.
One of the tunnels that she'd had on her list.
She remembered it like it was last week: back in the summer when she'd still bothered trying to tell her self-appointed research partner things. She'd spent hours over a map, scribbling down entrances and locations she wanted to examine for the bio-anomalies she'd come to study. Jones had taken one look at that paper and whisked it away, smiling that insufferable smile and saying that if she wanted to find bogles and oversized bugs she should look in the sewers, not those. April had been so mad that day, and it didn't help that Jones, through some infuriating version of keeping his word, had dragged her through tunnels of sludge and exclaimed excitedly over every common bio-hazard they came across till April could stand it no longer and asked to work on other storeis for a while.
She'd never seen that paper again, but now here she was, standing in front of a subway maintenance entrance that was certainly familiar. And Jones had just gone down it.
April’s brows lowered. She counted to twenty, opened the door, and went in.
At the bottom of the steps was a tiny space. Not quite long enough to lie down in, which explained why there didn’t seem to be anyone squatting here at the moment. Directly in front of her was a dilapidated electrical box with water stains running beneath it. To her left was a barred gate, heftily chained. And to the right was a half boarded up drain pipe. Soft sounds of sloshing echoed up it. Jones must have gone that way.
Bending nearly double, April stepped over the boards and threaded herself into the space. Spending all that time running through culverts with Jones these past few months had taught her a thing or two about echoes, so she tried to measure her breathing and step on the outer edges of the tube to avoid crunching anything on the floor. The noises ahead of her soon faded away, and in the pitch blackness she was pretty much left with her sense of touch and her sense of smell.
Oddly, it didn’t smell terrible down here. A little musty, sure, but…more ventilated than she would have expected, and less moldy. And just a touch warmer than average.
April was yanked out of her thoughts when her foot sloshed into water. She gasped,
then cringed as the gasp and the slosh bounced around the corrugated walls. She paused there, shoe dripping slightly, and for the first time it occurred to her to be afraid. Not of getting her shoes wet (she had a whole shoe cleaning and drying station at her apartment by this point) but of what she might find at the end of the drain. Normal guys don’t crawl into pipes for fun after work, her brain helpfully told her, and she had to agree. There were two main options here. 1: Jones was homeless. Possible but not likely. He’d mentioned his apartment before, and while he might have been lying, a New Yorker who actually owned a truck with a cap was NOT going to go through all this trouble just for a place to sleep. The other option was that April was about to walk in on some sort of drug deal.
Common sense screamed in her ear to turn around and never speak of this again, but her feet stayed put. Jones…didn’t feel like a drug dealer. Jones, with his maddening chipped grin. Jones, who scoffed at her every theory and laughed at every idea. Jones who’d brought her a sandwich when he’d found her slumped face down on her desk in despair. Jones, who’d purposely got them lost when they were driving the van back to the Channel 6 building because he knew the manager was in a foul mood and had singled her out that day. He was annoying, and bothersome, and probably a flat-earther, but… Dangerous? Blast it, was she just making up excuses to let her burning inferno of curiosity propel her down this tunnel? Probably.
Her dad would be so disappointed. April put her foot down in the water and moved forward.
Fifteen more steps and a light started to show ahead. As she drew closer she saw that there was a hole in the metal wall of the pipe, passing through what must once have been a brick wall on the other side. April drew toward it cautiously. She could hear Jones’ feet again; slow steps scrunching on grit. Very, very slowly, she peeked around the edge.
Jones stood silhouetted in front of a glowing subway train. It was a surreal sight. The first half of the engine loomed there, its windshield flooding the tunnel with light. The other half of the engine was buried in the rubble of the caved-in ceiling. It looked…too alive to be dead.
Jones rapped his knuckles against the exterior as he made his way to the door, calling, “Guys? You awake? Can I come in?”
Something moved inside the car and the door swung open. “Casey, enter enter.” April could not see the speaker but the voice was quite accented. What was that? Something Asian. Jones hopped up a set of steps seemingly constructed of bricks from the crumbled walls. The door clicked shut behind him and the two figures moved to sit so their heads were just visible in the window. April peeked out a little farther. She couldn’t quite see the other man but she had a vague impression of shortness and lots and lots of brown-grey hair. Hoboes didn’t have money for barbers, she supposed. Voices filtered out of the subway car, but they were too indistinct to make out what was being said. More movement, and then two more hoboes bobbed into the space and clustered around where Jones was sitting. Louder voices, someone laughed. Then one of the hoboes came to lean against the window giving April a clear view of his face and shoulder.
The face was not human. The head was round in a way that was not natural and stood on a skinny neck. One enormous, white, oval of an eye was visible, and while she couldn’t be completely sure, April thought the skin looked distinctly green.
Her breath, which had taken leave with no notice, now came back to do overtime. April inched back a step as she tried to quiet her loud breathing. Another step. Three.
Suddenly every head in the window snapped toward the hole she was standing in. Seconds later the door crashed open. April screamed.
Casey sighed in relief as he flung himself onto the battered couch that stood with its sagging back to the windshield glass. It felt good to sit. Well, he’d been sitting all day, but that was dumb sitting. That was office sitting with your legs straight and your feet on the floor. This *he slouched to the side and pulled one leg up to join him* was good sitting.
Splinter shut the door and turned to look at him sternly. “Take off your shoes, you savage.”
Casey groaned and let his body jackknife forward till his face was nearly on his knee. That was a mistake. Ow. With one hand, he plucked at his shoelaces.
“I guess it’s just obvious to the world. There go my dreams of becoming an actor,” Casey said to his knee. Then he sighed. “I tried to redo it last night like you showed me to but I couldn’t reach the spot very well and I can’t get the bandages to stay right so…”
Splinter’s eyes squinted and the tufts of fur that were his cheeks lifted a little, the rat version of a smile. “You could have come back last night.” There was a friendly “idiot” at the end of that sentence that Splinter never said out loud.
Casey finally got both shoes off and tossed them expertly onto the shoe mat by the door that was almost exclusively for him. “Yeah, well I’d already taken all the stuffing out and I think a shirtless man running down the street at night while bleeding from the back would snag eyes even here.”
Splinter did not argue this, instead moving to their medicine cabinet in the corner of the room and beginning to root around in it. Casey was halfway through unbuttoning his work shirt (too tight, thanks to the clumsy bandages around his chest and shoulder) when the door to the kitchen section of the home darkened with little brothers. Donnie hurled himself at the couch, as was his want, smacking into Casey’s body on the way (definitely not by accident). Casey yelped in genuine pain but grinned as he shoved Donnie’s head into the stained cushions and held him there.
Raph smirked from the doorway. “Can’t handle a little stabbing, old man?”
“Can it, Raph. I am a thousand percent more stabbed than you were when you had that glass in your foot. Those pieces were tiny and you were still greener than Mikey.”
“It’s different when you’re getting tweezed,” Raph said, perilously close to defensive. “You didn’t have to get tweezed.”
Splinter lifted a pair of tweezers and clicked them ominously with his head still stuck in the cabinet. Casey laughed. Donnie finally freed himself and slithered off the couch to stand by the window. Hands no longer otherwise engaged, Casey finished unbuttoning his shirt and struggled out of the sleeves, leaving himself with only the final battle of a teeshirt to deal with.
“You guys eaten yet?” Casey asked as Splinter began to arrange his armload of bottles and bandages. “You should check my backpack, I brought some-”
Mikey exploded through the kitchen door, clearly having been asleep just moments prior. Casey grinned. “Bro, don’t get your hopes up. It’s not that exciting. Just-”
“Someone’s really scared!” Mikey yelled.
Everyone fell silent. Mikey tended to be right about these things. But Mikey’s eyes weren’t locking on to anyone in the room, so unless Leon was having a bad dream…
“Who’s scared?” Leon asked, craning from the next car to see around his brother’s large shell.
Mikey and Donnie’s heads whipped toward the windows. Raph flung open the door and leapt out, drawing his sai. A woman screamed. And Casey’s heart took a hard fall and got a mouthful of acrid chemical ice.
He had a bad feeling he knew who that was.
April’s feet, no longer trying to be quiet, pounded through the water. Panic spiked in her chest and buzzed through her limbs. Something had come out of the train. SomeTHING was chasing her! And she was bent double in this stupid drain and couldn’t run properly and it was probably SO GOOD at running in drains and it was coming to kill her andshewasgoingtodiegoingtodiegoingtodie-
When something did tackle her she screamed loud enough to be heard in Albany, then, briefly, her face was underwater. I’m going to die here! Then the thing on her back was lifting her face up and she sucked in air and stripped her throat screeching again and it dropped her but there was less weight on her shoulders now and she fought her face up on her own. One of her wrists was trapped in cold metal going to die going to die the other was behind her back trapped in an iron, alien grip diediediediediedie!!!
There was a lot of shouting above her, some from the creature gripping her, some from further away. A lot of shouting.
The weight on her back moved as if shoved to the side and April took her opportunity. She somehow got on top of her knees (more hands, grabbing grabbing grabbing, die die die!) and leapt forward like a coiled spring. She escaped the hands, but forgot in her panic that she was inside of a culvert. The following collision rang her head like the bells of Notre Dame. White, and then colors crackled in her vision and then the pain hit: hot and awful like a pot of boiling water dumped over her head and shoulders. With a tiny broken noise she sagged to the ground, momentarily unable to comprehend any action other than clutching her head.
A few painful seconds slid past before she was touched again. It was the lightest tap on her shoulder. April sobbed and jerked away but came up against the wall. The hands tried again, (both of her shoulders! The thing was in front of her, it had her pinned!!) but they withdrew again when she knocked her head against the metal trying to get away.
At this point April's body decided that pain was more important than survival and she curled over her wet knees, struggling over her ragged breaths. Slowly, over the raging tattoo of her own heartbeat, a voice filtered into her ears.
“-okay! You're fine, April. You're alright. Nobody's going to hurt you. It's safe.”
It sounded…why couldn't she- was that..?
“He didn't mean to scare you. Can you hear me? We're okay now. It's me, Casey. Everything's going to be okay.”
April cracked open her eyes and uncurled as far as her clenched limbs would allow. It was dark, but there was just enough of a glow filtering down the tunnel to make out the distinctly human shape in front of her. He saw her look up and cracked a chipped smile. It was Jones. A more collected version of herself might have been surprised at how reassuring that was, but today… April shuddered forward and clung to him like he was life itself.
Casey hesitated a moment before slowly bringing his arms down around the woman. She didn't jolt away this time and he took it as a sign she was calming down. Good. In this steaming cesspit of everything in his life going wrong at least he was no longer worried she'd die of a heart attack right in front of him.
Casey winced slightly as she tightened her balled fists into his shirt (and subsequently his injured shoulder) and buried her head farther into his neck. A little sob broke free. Casey felt a fresh pang of guilt. He'd made her cry. He knew it would be nothing compared to the guilt of looking in Splinter’s eyes. That thought…maybe made him feel a little like crying himself.
Casey sighed and hugged April awkwardly, muttering the same string of assurances he'd gone through three times now. “Everything’s fine. No one's getting hurt.” Oh how he hoped it was true.
They sat there in four inches of water and thirty-two more inches of darkness until April's breathing slowed down and her trembling lessened. At last, Casey turned his head to glance behind him. No one was visible, but that was very different from not being there. He cleared his throat and spoke louder than he had been. “April, I think we should get out of the pipe. There's some things I should explain. And…people I think you should meet.”
April wasn't quite listening, but Casey hadn't really been speaking to her. Dead silence was his answer from both fronts. We'll…there wasn't any more putting it off. Casey took one last moment to swallow his dread, then rose to his knees and prodded his shaken coworker toward the place he'd promised never to lead another human soul.
romaincrisis
snowghoul
2087
