Down And Dirty

His breakfast moved in the pit of his stomach, and for a moment Tom thought he would gag. Beaten, he unbuckled his seat belt. His hand was shaking. He turned off the fans, the tracking motors, the cameras. The darkness closed in around him.

The shell was supposed to make him invulnerable, but they'd turned it into a death trap. He couldn't take it up again. Not even for one last trip. He couldn't.

The blackness trembled around him. He felt as though he were going to fall again. He had to get out of here, now, he was suffocating. He could have died.

Only he hadn't.

The thought came out of nowhere, defiant. He could have died, but he hadn't died. He couldn't take the shell up again, but he had, that very night.

This very shell. When he'd finally made his way back to the junkyard, he'd been half-drowned and exhausted and drunk with shock, but also strangely alive, exhilarated, high on the mere fact of his survival. He'd taken the shell out and crossed the bay and done loops over Jokertown, climbed right back on the horse that had thrown him, he'd showed them all, the Turtle was still alive, the Turtle had taken everything they could throw at him, they'd knocked him out and napalmed him and dropped him like a rock to the bottom of the fucking Hudson River, and he was still alive.

They'd cheered him in the streets.

Tom's hands reached out, flicked a switch, a second. The screens lit up again. The fans began to whir.

Don't do it, his fear whispered within him. You can't. You'd be dead now if the shell hadn't blown-

"It did blow," Tom said. The napalm, the water pressure, something…

The walls of his bedroom. Broken glass everywhere, his pillows ripped and torn, feathers floating in the air.

The water made a sullen gurgling sound somewhere in the close, hot blackness. The world twisted and turned, sinking. He was too weak and dizzy to move. He felt icy fingers on his legs, creeping up higher and higher, and then sudden shock as the water reached his crotch, jolting him awake. He tore away his seat harness with numb fingers, but too late, the cold caressed his chest, he lurched up and the floor tumbled and he lost his footing, and then the water was over his head and he couldn't breathe and everything was black, utterly black, as black as the grave, and he had to get out, he had to get out…

Cracks on the wall of his bedroom, more every time the nightmare came. And pictures in a magazine, fragments of armor plate torn and twisted, welds shattered, bolts torn loose, the whole shell shattered like an egg. The armor bent outward. Fuck it all, he thought. It was me. I did it.

He looked into the nearest screen, gripped the armrests, and pushed down with his mind.

The shell rose smoothly. up, through the bunker, through the garage door overhead, into the morning sky. Sunlight kissed the flaking green paint of its armor.

He came out of the eastern sky, out of Brooklyn, with the sun behind him. The trip was longer that way, when he circled over Staten Island and the Narrows, but it disguised the angle of his approach, and twenty years of turtling had taught him all the tricks. He came in over the great stone ramparts of the Brooklyn Bridge, low and fast, and on his screens he saw the morning strollers below look up in astonishment as his shadows washed across them. It was a sight the city had never seen before and would never see again: three Turtles sweeping across the East River, three iron specters from yesterday's headlines and the land of the dead, moving in tight formation, banking and turning as one, and sliding into a flamboyant double loop over the rooftops of Jokertown.

For Tom, in the center shell, the reactions down in the streets made it all worthwhile. At least he was going out in style; he'd like to see the magazines blame this one on Venus.

It'd been hell getting the other shells out of the bunker; gutted or not, their armor still lent them plenty of weight, and for a moment, hovering above the junkyard in Bayo

Dutton had one camera crew on the Brooklyn Bridge, a second on the roof of the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. With all the film they shot, there would be precious little question of authenticating the shells.

"All right," Tom a

Dutton, tall and dark with his cowl drawn up over his features, made a peremptory gesture with a gloved hand, and the camera crew-all jokers-loaded up their equipment and left the roof. When the last of them vanished down the stairs, Tom took a deep breath, slipped on his rubber frogface, killed the power, and crawled out into the morning sun.

After he'd emerged, he turned for one last look at what he was leaving behind. Out here, in daylight, they looked different than they had in the dimness of his bunker. Smaller, somehow. Shabbier. "Hard to walk away, isn't it?" Dutton asked him.

Tom turned. "Yes," he said. Beneath the cowl Dutton was wearing a leather lion mask with long golden hair. "You bought that mask at Holbrook's," Tom said.

"I own Holbrook's," Dutton replied. He studied the shells. " I wonder how we're going to get these inside." Tom shrugged. "They got a fucking whale into the Museum of Natural History; a few turtles ought to be easy." He was not feeling nearly as nonchalant as he tried to sound. The Turtle had pissed off quite a few people over the years, everyone from street punks to Richard Millions Nixon. If Dutton hadn't been discreet, any or all of them could be out there waiting for him, and even if they weren't, there was still the small matter of getting home with eighty thousand dollars in cash. "Let's do it," he said. "You got the money?"

"In my office," Dutton replied.

They went downstairs, Dutton leading, Tom following, looking around cautiously at every landing. It was cool and dim inside the building. "Closed again?" Tom asked.

"Business is off badly," Dutton admitted. "The city is afraid. This new wild card outbreak has driven the tourists away, and even the jokers are begi

When they reached the basement and entered the gloomy, stone-walled workshop, Tom saw that the museum was not entirely deserted. "We're preparing a number of new exhibits," Dutton explained as Tom paused to admire a slender, boyish young woman who was dressing a wax replica of Senator Hartma

"It looks very real," Tom said.

"Thank you," the young woman replied. She turned, smiling and extending her hand. Something was wrong with her eyes. They were all iris, a deep shiny red-black, half again the size of normal eyes. Yet she did not move like a blind person. "I'm Cathy, and I'd love to do you in wax," she said as Tom shook her hand. "Seated in one of your shells, maybe?" She tilted her head and pushed a strand of hair out of her strange dark eyes.

"Uh," said Tom, "I'd rather not."

"That's wise of you," Dutton said. "If Leo Barnett becomes president, some of your fellow aces may wish they'd kept a lower profile too. It doesn't pay to be too flamboyant these days."