Harleen F. Quinzel, M.D. leaned into the concrete wall, pressing her hand against the minuscule window. Through the bulletproof glass, the night air tingled beneath her fingertips.
"Med cart in five, Freaks!" the guard barked.
The Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane dominated Gotham's waterfront. Built by Amadeus Arkham, M.D. in the late 19th Century, it was a profane hybrid of hospital and prison. Over 5,000 inmates made their home within its dank corridors. Included in that number were Gotham's most lethal and infamous criminals, the Rogues.
In spite of the millions spent to keep them in, it was ironic how often they escaped. Even more ironic was the increase in tourism whenever they did. Tourists flooded Gotham for a chance to see their savage grudge matches against each other and a certain dark knight. Enterprising tour guides would add stops to their routes before the police tape was cleared. Politicians and dignitaries were frequent visitors to their ward, nicknamed The Rogues' Gallery. They'd stroll through, as if they were looking at zoo exhibits.
"Quinn!" Someone banged on the glass.
"The difference," Harley thought, "is that they remind patrons not to tap the glass at the zoo."
It was the nurse's aide with her evening meds. He'd shoved her medication through the slot and updated her chart while he waited. She jiggled the yellow, oval pills in the cup. "Seroquel. 800mg."
She raised the cup to him and downed the antipsychotics. The former doctor opened her mouth for an inspection, and the aide moved on to the next.
"Stand by for lights out," the loudspeaker rang.
Harley ambled to the concrete slab she called her bed and stretched out. The familiar shadows crept in once the lights flickered off, dancing and playing, rising and falling. The roving guard walked his beat seven times before her mouth went dry. A chemical tingle crept in her veins. The room spun and she heaved. Stringy chicken and gluey potatoes splattered on the floor. She collapsed in her own sickness. Voices and pounding boots swarmed. Fingers to a distant voice wrapped around her wrist.
"What…?"
Her heavy eyelids fluttered.
"…Seroquel…"
Her racing heart crawled with the chemicals.
"…wrong meds…"
Harley slipped into a timeless oblivion. It wasn't until the stench of bleach and urine edged up her nose she realized she had been moved. She was in the general population. Somewhere in the cavernous dark, a disembodied voice hummed Chopin's Nocturnes. Harley rolled against the shackles to face the bulging cells. The gurney's wheels squeaked along when voice hissed in the dark.
"Mistress."
She'd been spotted. The sleeping room stirred to consciousness. Mattresses creaked as their occupants moved to get a closer look. The whispers electrified the air as inmates chanted, "Mistress."
The sound crescendoed until a deafening chorus rang out.
"Whoop. Whoooooooooooooop. Wooooooooo."
A thousand hyena calls swallowed the room. Through her lidded eyes, multitudes of hands grasping for her through the bars. She glanced up at a guard, sweat shimmering on his temples. The group burst through the double doors, the hallway's cool air tickling her nose. The inmates roar faded as they grew closer to the infirmary.
"What's going on?" Harley croaked.
"You're in the infirmary. You had a reaction." A blood pressure cuff squeezed her arm. "We'll keep you overnight for observation."
Harley scrunched her nose. Reaction? No. That was an overdose. Not that his poor choice of words mattered any as her tired body sink into the mattress. The lumpy hospital bed felt like a cloud after sleeping on the slab for seven months. Before long, the rustling of the paper chart woke Harley up. It was a nurse's aide checking on her. "How are you feeling, Miss Quinzel?"
The aide, so engrossed in updating the chart, didn't see Harley's shifting hands.
"I'm Doctor Quinzel to you."
The young woman didn't struggle as Harley choked her unconscious. The hollow where her guilt should've been ached as she dragged the unconscious girl to the bed. She yanked the staff badge from her scrubs and locked the door from the inside.
"What have you done?"
Harley turned to face her former mentor, Dr. Joan Leeland. Joan hadn't changed much in the four years it had been since Harley had seen her. All her former colleagues were forbidden from coming near her.
"Joan, you need to get out."
"But—" Joan lifted her hand towards the door.
"She's alive. She'll be safe, I promise."
An oppressive silence settled between them. Joan tried to speak but no sound came—like she was stumbling over all the questions she wanted to ask, but never could.
"You have ten minutes. Run."
Joan stood motionless before backing from the hallway.
In the historic main building, the long, window-filled hallway glowed with moonlight. Harley stopped to drink in the night in all its glory. The world outside had changed seasons almost twice in the seven months she'd been locked away. She walked among the stern portraits of the Arkham family lining the walnut-paneled walls. Behind their somber gazes laid the asylum's nervous system.
She paused outside the steel door and punched in a code. "Tsk, Tsk, Doctor," she chided the painting of Amadeus Arkham. "Four years, and they still haven't changed my passcode."
Behind the door, a guard slouched in his chair asleep. Harley crept through the shadows behind the man. With a flip of her wrists, she snapped his neck and let his body drop to the floor. She smiled at his uneaten lunch. Harley sat in the still-warm chair and scooted to the panel. She kicked her feet up and took a bite of sandwich and hit the main lockdown button. She laughed with her mouth full watching guards throughout the asylum freeze the locks engage.
"Is it just me," Harley crunched on a potato chip, "or was dinner fucking terrible? Who wants a midnight snack?"
Thousands of hands reached from their cells, and the walls shivered with their screams.
"But, where are my manners? We gotta say Grace first. Bless us, O Father, for these…"
A trapped guard made the Sign of the Cross.
"Yada Yada, One who eats the fastest gets the most. Grace!" Harley slammed the evacuation button. Every cell in the asylum swung open, and the wave of inmates flooded the room.
The Mistress of Mischief's reign of terror had begun.
Barbara listened to the last drops of coffee hit the pot.
"Guardian Zero-Niner, this is Archangel One, message, over."
She stared at the radio from the corner of her eyes. Archangel One was one of Arkham's callsigns. While there was frequent radio traffic during the day, the transmissions all but stopped after the last ferry.
"Guardian Zero-Niner, send."
"…she's loose. Over."
Barbara roared. There was only one inmate they could be referring to. While others were content to escape Arkham, that would never do for Harley Quinn. She escaped with such frequency Gotham Casino allowed gamblers to bet on it. While Harley held many dubious records, her most cherished was being the only person to break out of and into Arkham Asylum. Two days after a warden declared the facility impenetrable, Harley snapped a selfie in his office and spent the rest of the evening club hopping. After he resigned, she sent a framed, autographed picture to him.
Barbara pulled her hair, convinced several grey hairs had Harley's initials on them. Then again, Harley was the reason she could get grey hair. Barbara growled and rolled back to her desk.
"Harley'd piss herself with joy if she knew she was wrecking your plans."
Before she could say anything, Selina raised a gloved hand. "It's all over the radio."
No sooner did Selina sit down when Dick strut in, tossing his mask on the table.
"Hey, Har—"
"I know." Barbara channeled her fury into the keyboard. Selina and Dick's small talk faded as her eyes fixed on the screen. She did not think about the commands or her fingers in relation to the keys. Output screamed past her eyes on the screen.
"Holy shit," Dick choked on his coffee.
"You hacked Arkham?" Selina chimed in.
On the monitors surrounding her desk, the chaos Harley unleashed streamed into the quiet of Hammond Tower.
Harley watched her mayhem from a safe height. After hitting the evacuation button, she fled the control room and prowled the staff hallways before climbing to an old fire escape. The tat-tat-tat of a sub-machine gun echoed over the screams and went silent. Bored with watching the carnage, Harley abandoned her perch to search for a weapon.
She stepped through pooled blood, peeking among the corpses. The gore on the wall told the story. The original owner's face had been degloved after a struggle. The next owner, an inmate, turned on his associates and mowed a few down until his reign of carnage ended with a misfeed. His lifeless eyes stared beyond her, his finger still pulling the trigger. She grabbed her new prize and headed for solitary confinement.
Arkham had several "holes", or solitary blocks, to house misbehaving inmates. This was not where she or most Rogues went to pay for their sins. Instead, they were banished to Hell—a pit in the bowels of Arkham. The hand-dug cell walls wept murky water, and the steel doors were covered with a century of rust. In Hell, time stood still and
Harley clinked the gun's barrel along the steel doors as she strolled in Solitary Unit Five, reciting:
"By the twitching of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes
Open locks!
Whoever knocks!
Knock-knock…"
"Who's there?" a voice hissed.
With a flip of a lever, the last lock released. Five of Harley's gang members staggered from their cells. Her elaborate badge of office, a tattoo of a three-of-diamonds and a Joker, peeked from under her prison shirt on her right bicep. They pranced and whooped down inky corridors to the exit, destroying anything and everything in their path. Harley's eyes fixed on the door. Her heart pounded in anticipation and cold kissed her hands as she burst through outside. The screams swirled and blew past them. Harley lifted her eyes to the riotous stars and inhaled. Crisp, cool air tickled her nose. Forty feet above them, more inmates rushed the walls to be buzzed down by the machine guns. Their bodies fell like rain drops to the ground.
Just beyond a retaining wall covered in glorious moss was their destination: The Power House. It generated every volt of electricity on the island. Given its importance, it was the most fortified building on the island, and had its own contingent of guards. The group bypassed the main door and headed for the rear fire escape. She peered through a dirty window to see the guards barricaded inside with enough ammunition to make a Tarantino movie.
"Here's the plan," she whispered. "I'll distract them. You go in shooting. Capisce?"
The men nodded before hoisting her to the roof. Harley slid on her belly to a hatch and dropped onto a walkway from above.
"It's Quinn!" a guard yelled.
Bullets chased her down the walkway. Harley leapt for a hanging pipe and swung behind a half wall. Bullets showered her with concrete fragments as they shot over her head. Her plan worked, though. It bought the other men enough time to move forward, but she needed something to even the odds, and fast. The thwack of lead through flesh surrounded her. Her eyes locked on a decrepit box. Two convicts screamed as they bled out on the floor. Harley scrambled low, bullets whizzing over her head.
"Please. Please. Please."
Another convict dropped to the floor. The box disintegrated under her touch exposing brittle steel canisters, stenciled, M18 SMOKE RED.
"Jackpot!"
The pin popped out and red smoked hissed and spit. She flung the smoke grenade over the wall. Moving into the red plume, blood spray mingled with the smoke as the remaining prisoners exacted their revenge.
"Fuckin' pig," an inmate spat on a guard's corpse.
Harley rummaged in a guard's cargo pocket for his keys and gave them a triumphant jingle.
"Let's go," she commanded.
Hair on their arms stood on end as they walked through the bare, humming wires. Ancient machinery sputtered and belched hot air. On a dusty platform near the rear of the building was spinning electrical generator. The men hopped up on the platform to inspect the antiquated motor.
"What now, Harley?"
"You die."
Their lives, and the power to the asylum, were cut in a haze of bullets.
The blood drained from Barbara's face as Arkham flickered into darkness. Connections dropped like dominos on her screen. All except one. A guard had set up a network that was hooked into the security camera's backup batteries. Barbara cycled through the cameras hoping to to catch any movement before the batteries went dead. "Christ, Harley, where did you go?!"
"She knows that place like the back of her hand, even in the dark," Selina added.
Before Barbara's fingers could strike another key, Harley appeared on screen, strolling down the center hallway of the Rogue's Gallery. Her frame cast lithe shadows on the floor as she stopped in front of a cell. Closing her eyes, she reached out and touched the glass.
"Why would she go back?" Dick asked. "Joker isn't kept on the Gallery."
Barbara switched to another security camera to get a better angle. Deep within the cell, the darkness moved and from the shadows a woman's hand reached back.
"Ivy," Barbara gasped. While everyone knew Harley and Ivy worked together on occasion. Together, they were more successful, more destructive, but no one could've suspected this level of coordination. Barbara flipped through the evidence pile in her mind. Both women had established patterns in their crimes, yet there were times…instances that whispered of deeper influence of one on the other.
Harley slide the cell open and tugged Ivy into the light. Ivy, with her arms resting on Harley's shoulder, twirled a blonde curl around her finger. Harley ran her hands over Ivy's hips and waist and pressed their lips together.
"Holy shit."
The computers' fans whirred in Hammond Tower as Barbara, Dick, and Selina watched Ivy and Harley burn off months of sexual frustration.
"How…?" Dick stuttered. "How is she not dead?" As dangerous as a long-term relationship with Joker was, Poison Ivy's lips were certain death.
"Did you know anything about this?" Barbara glared at a gobsmacked Selina Kyle.
"You think I watched them make out?"
Barbara raked her fingers through her hair, trying to squeeze answers from her brain. "Do you think anyone else knows?"
"No—no way," Selina grasped for words. "There'd be war." Gotham's underworld would tear itself a part if word the poison that had no exception did, and that exception was the Mistress of Mischief.
Harley and Ivy had ended their kiss on screen. Barbara zoomed the camera in on Harley's face. Her lips were still attached, unlike the last man who had kissed Ivy. Ivy stepped back, their hands still linked. Barbara furrowed her brows, frustrated she couldn't read their moving lips. They watched Ivy take another step back, raising their hands before letting go. She blew a kiss to Harley and vanished into the dark. The connection dropped, leaving the frozen image of Harley Quinn in the spotlight.
Hi everyone! Thanks for being so patient. As you can tell, I made huge changes to the story. I may make some additional tweaks to this, but I wanted to get it out to all of you. The first 10 pages of the script are DONE, and I've gotten a lot of great feedback. Overall, I want the script and the story to follow each other more closely, but you can expect a lot of fun, one off scenes and extra bits that won't be in the script.