NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I'm Baaaack. ^_~! I can't tell you how much I missed you all, but also, how much a break was truly needed. Seems like the month just flew by, but nearer to the end, just seemed to drag on forever.
Now, before we get all this started again, I just want to make something clear. Recently there have been some issues in my life that have left me a little distracted and unbalanced. I'm trying really hard to maintain something of a writing schedule, but it's difficult with so much going on in my head. I'm going to keep posting a chapter a week, but I may need to take weeks off in between if things worsen.
Nothing to be worried about! I'm so happy to be posting this chapter for you, and know that I have so much in store that I could never stop writing this story.
Enjoy!
How had it all come to this?
The Joker wondered that as the two of them hurried down the rickety fire escape of the Asylum. They had traipsed in bloody footprints all the way to the door, and though the Joker had tried to skip delicately around the massive pool of blood that had collected around the fresh corpse of the dark-skinned nurse, Harley had pulled him down the hallway so quickly that he hadn't had the chance to avoid it.
There was no point, anyway. The girl must have been a bleeder, since the pool nearly stretched from one wall to the other. He'd noticed, though, that Harley didn't flinch, didn't pause or hesitate in the slightest as they ran past her. Although the deed had clearly been her doing, there was no remorse. Not right now, anyway.
The Joker didn't know much about psychology, but he did know a bit about human nature. In life, some people focus, while others freak out. You put just a little bit of pressure on someone, and their true colors really shine. You see people for who they truly are. Harley was very obviously one of those special kinds of people who focus in periods of extreme stress, and nothing could be more stressful than an escape from Arkham Asylum.
"So, what do you call this get-up of yours?" he asked her, as she all but pulled him down the rusted metal stairs by the tight grip she had on his wrist. While he moved quickly enough to follow after her, his mouth seemed to move just as readily. "I mean, I knew you were going to do something, but this reads a little too much like a page out of my book, don'cha think?"
No immediate response came. The soundtrack to their daring escape rattled around them, a symphony joined by the aching wail of police sirens. They grew closer and closer as the two of them reached the bottom stairwell, an archaic, mechanical ladder waiting for them there.
It didn't take a professional eye to see that the place wasn't up to code. You can't expect a place made entirely of concrete to burn to the ground so easily. In fact, they probably could have renamed the fire escapes to "loony escapes" and gotten more use out of them if a particular patient had suddenly gone apeshit.
Maybe then they would have maintained them properly.
This might have placed a thorn in the side of what was so far a genius plan, seeing as the bottom of the ladder was still a good fifteen feet from the street below. But without missing a beat (and still without a single reply), Harley released his wrist, and slid down the edges of the rusty ladder, using her body weight to send the rickety steps tumbling from their lock and coming much closer to the ground. So close, in fact, that Harley's own feet had less than half a foot to cover before they made contact with the ground. It was certainly enough to make his escape more comfortable, and that must have been why she had done it...
Perhaps that was what caused that look of shock to wash over his face when she turned her electric blue eyes up to him.
"Well, are you coming?" she chimed.
His haste in following her suggested an obedient reply. The Joker dusted himself off as she came down to ground level again, and if he had the time he would have dropped to his knees and kissed the ground. Before he could catch his breath, though, Harley was pulling a cardboard-hued protective tarp away from a relatively bland-looking vehicle. It was a little, black hatch-back with small tires and tinted windows.
"You wanna outrun the cops in this piece of shit?" he asked her.
But when he leaned over to take a look at the dual exhaust, he heard her scoff, and she threw back a shock of platinum blond hair, her well-sculpted fringe fanning out in the gentle night air. "You really do think I'm a moron, don't you?" she asked him, shaking her head. "You'd think you would have figured out by now: I do my research. They stopped production on this car in 2007. In fact, there were only 55 sold in the United States. They took it off the market because..." She unlocked the car door on her side, pulling out another handgun and an old, short-barreled shotgun that looked like it had seen substantial wear and tear over its lifetime. "...the manufacturer was trying to compete with high-end German brands. They ended up making the car too powerful."
As she handed the shotgun to him, the Joker found himself caught in a whirlwind of casual explanation. "Zero to sixty in three-point-nine seconds. That's faster than the Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor... and it can maintain its maximum speed for a longer period of time," she told him, heavily placing a box of shotgun shells into his hand.
A moment ago, he couldn't get her to say a damn thing. Now she was schooling him on the acceleration rates of illegal street cars.
"Now," she went on, walking over to the driver's side of the car and gesturing to the other side. "Seeing as how you're probably a better shot than me, you're riding shotgun...no pun intended."
The sirens were closing in on the pair fast, so he hurried over to the passenger seat, sliding in beside her as she pushed the key in the ignition. He turned in the seat to face the back of the vehicle, his back pressed up against the dashboard and his legs straddling the passenger's seat. "So...?"
"So what?"
"So what do you call this get-up of yours?" he asked once again, his red smile widening as his eyes pored over the more subdued features of her face that so adequately mirrored his own.
She shifted the gear to first, then drove them silent and blind out of the alleyway, her headlights off so as to avoid detection. Turning to him, she smiled her broad, toothy white smile, thick red lips framing the perfection that she knew encapsulated him. "Aw... c'mon Puddin'. You telling you can't guess?"
"Oh, I can guess..." he purred back in a low rumble.
That massive smile turned into a mischievous grin as she pulled out onto the main road, threw on her high-beams, and double-clutched into third gear. "Well then, keep guessing, baby... and hold on to your hat," she cooed, before sending him lurching toward the seat as the engine roared and took off in the direction of a nearby bridge.
As the car's tires sped over the road, the Joker pulled three of the twenty-gauge shotgun rounds from the box she'd handed him. He pushed two into the magazine, a soft spring-loaded click echoing from the gun, then chambered a round and pulled the long, sliding forearm handle toward himself. He ran a glance over the gun, caught a little off guard by how smoothly it handled. "Say, where did you get this thing anyway?"
She got that unyielding grin of hers again, turning the small car into the Narrows. "That old thing? Heh..." Her grin slimmed into a knowing smile. "On my week off, I paid my mother a little visit, but she was out playing bridge with her friends, like she is every Tuesday..."
"Why would you visit her if you knew she'd be playing brid... ahh..." He was impressed, and it echoed in the dark chuckle from the back of his throat. The Joker didn't know much about her family life, but he knew enough to know that these weapons had most likely belonged to her incarcerated father. Her naively devoted mother had probably kept them around the house for purely sentimental reasons.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
But regardless, he had to give her credit where it was due. The daring and bloody rescue, the smooth and dashing escape, the exact research and acquired firearms – she'd done more, far more, than he would have ever expected from any regular henchman. But this girl was not a criminal, and yet here she was, exhibiting one of the finest criminal minds he'd ever seen. If heroes were made, and not born, then maybe the same went for villains as well.
From a few hundred meters behind the speeding black hatch-back, Joker could see familiar, swirling blue and red lights turn the corner after them. They marched single-file between the jagged, garbage-lined alleyways of the Narrows. "So, I'm your lookout, is that right?" he asked her casually, watching the lights inch closer.
Lifting her light brown eyebrows, she looked back to her rear-view mirror and watched as the squad cars approached the them. "I suppose you could call yourself that. Though I wouldn't say you're playing second fiddle or anything." When he turned to look over at her, she was still smiling, her darkly rimmed eyes darting from the road in front of her to his face. "Go get 'em, tiger," she said with a wink, thumbing toward the backseat.
The thrill of a car chase must have been lost on the population of the Narrows. None of those who dwelled in the shabby houses to their sides came out to see the commotion as the sirens wailed out into the misty, late night streets. Counting the buildings between their car, and the screaming police cars in the distance, the Joker turned to glance over his shoulder to his ambitious new chauffeur. "Slow down a little, would ya?" he growled to her, with only enough exasperation to get her to bat her thick black eyelashes in bewilderment. "They're not in range."
Harley seemed to understand, and compressed the brake, slowing the car down enough to bring the police cruisers behind them within range of his shotgun. Smiling, he relished the familiar feeling of the butt of the gun pressing into his shoulder, the way the recoil pushed him back ever so slightly as he blew out of the back window of the car for a clearer view.
"Hey watch out!" Harley called out to him from behind the steering wheel, and although her tone was chiding, he could practically hear the smile still plastered to her lips. "This is a rental!"
The two of them shared a cackling laugh before he nudged her to slow down another touch, bringing them just a couple hundred meters from the police. He kept himself low and out of sight from the police as they wrapped around a smooth corner and up a small embankment. "Let me know when you have a decent straightaway, would ya?"
Nodding, Harley's gloved hand wrapped around the head of the shifter and pulled the car into second gear, the rear bumper easily drifting around a hairpin turn as they made their was up a steeper hill. The car purred as it downshifted once more. Watching as the cops wrapped themselves around that hairpin turn, the Joker leaned over the back seat, the stock of the gun pressed firmly into his right shoulder, firing a couple rounds around the tires of the vehicles as they struggled to catch up. One of them had foolishly swerved to escape the blast, but the maneuver stopped short of success when the cruiser slammed through a dry-brick wall of some crummy residence, sending a cloud of dust and chalky shrapnel flying out into the street.
The sound of the Joker's high-pitched, adrenalized laughter echoed through the car as he pushed a couple more rounds into the magazine. "One down, one to go."
"I wouldn't expect it to be quite that easy," Harleyquinn said from the driver's seat, in a kind of weary sing-song that made the Joker twist around and look out the windshield to the scene before them.
Anyone with a clear understanding of the Narrows would understand exactly why such an escape was so daring in the first place. Arkham Asylum was located on an island in the mouth of the Sprang River, and to the east, on the same island, was a place which greatly resembled the slums of Sao Paulo, the Narrows. Here, Gotham's most impoverished people mingled with its seedy underbelly to create one of the most (if not the most) dangerous neighborhood in America. There were always reporters from esteemed publications providing reports on the place as if it were some war-torn, decimated third-world country.
But the Narrows was only a symptom. Crime was Gotham's illness, and if it could be cured, then the Narrows would surely shrink, or disappear all together. For the most part, though, the city didn't care. If the hooligans wanted to share land with the crazies, it was all for the better. Particularly on this span of land, because unlike criminals in most other parts of the world, here they could be corralled. Ten years ago, the city of Gotham had installed a series of ten drawbridges to surround the island to cut off transportation to and from the darkest places in the city.
Those bridges were the police's strategy of apprehending the nouveau Bonnie and Clyde, and the expression on the Joker's face turned sour when he saw the bridge slowly begin to lift off its hinges. And they were still several hundred meters away.
"Shit..." Joker muttered under his breath.
But the girl in the other seat said nothing. Quite the contrary – she smiled, the same twisted smile he used to wear when he was just about to get the better of someone.
"Remember what I said about zero-to-sixty in under four seconds?"
Without warning, she flung the car right into its fifth gear, her left foot double-clutching as the engine roared past the developing barricade. Uniformed police officers tried to rush after the car on foot as it made its way up the ramped bridge, easily sailing over what was sure to be a ten foot gap. There was a surreal moment of anti-gravity as the two of them flew through the air, in which the Joker almost believed the lightning-fast little rollerskate of a car would sprout wings and sail through the skyscrapers that lined the adjacent side of the Sprang River. Instead, it landed with a hard thud on the other side of the bridge, the back bumper scraping into sparks as it landed.
Just as the two had huffed a sigh of relief, there came another car screaming after them. Without gearing down, Harleyquinn gnashed her teeth in frustration, twisting the rear view mirror to place her hardened gaze upon the driver and its passenger. Her face dropped.
The driver wasn't familiar to her, but the man in the passenger seat – in his taupe trenchcoat, and darkly-rimmed glasses, speaking angrily into a police radio – was Jim Gordon, obviously expecting that the two would have made the bridge.
The Joker seemed pleased when he saw who it was, though, and he braced the shotgun to his shoulder and aimed a shot. She turned to glance at him over her shoulder, and he grinned mischievously at her, his eyes turning back to stare down the barrel of the gun, preparing his shot into the face of the Commissioner.
Without thinking, she veered hard to the left, disappearing into an alleyway and throwing the Joker from his perch in the back seat, hard up against the right side of the vehicle. When he had regained his bearings, he twisted toward her and shot her a nasty glare.
"Are you out of your mind?" he spat at her, as she weaved through the narrow alleyway and into an adjacent, nearly empty street.
"Listen, I've got one condition though all this," she told him, far more forcefully and directly than he was expecting to hear from her. "Clearly, at this point, I'm not one to preach a neat and clear moral existence, but if you didn't plan on shooting me in the head immediately after I finish helping you escape then I'd appreciate it if you didn't kill Jim Gordon."
The little rant caught him off guard, and he gazed at her, his spine pressing up against the back of the passenger seat as he considered the idiocy that she had just asked of him. After a moment or so, that surprise bled into a knowing smile as he wagged a gloved finger at her. "Oh-ho-ho...someone have some Daddy issues?" he asked with his deep, rumbling chuckle.
Her dark eyes shot him the same harsh stare he had offered her a second ago, before she had to turn her attention back to the road in front of her. "What are you going on about?"
"You know..." he started, "it's not as easy as putting on a costume and make-up. If you did this thinking that you were going to be able to go back to your cookie-cutter life one day..." The Joker paused, his hand dancing through the air to the tone of his sing-song melody. "...then you're in waaaay over your head."
With her eyebrows furrowed, a firm, almost daunting look carved onto those normally tiny and delicate features, she turned the car sharply to the right again, pulling up on the emergency break to brought the car to drift with its back end out into a perfect arch, before tearing off down another alleyway.
The Joker pulled himself off the wall of the vehicle again, groaning at her in exasperation as he did. "You think I don't know that?" she asked, swerving around a dumpster with just inches to spare on her right side. "I know what I've gotten myself into, and I know there's no going back, and in time my condition might change, but for now, I'm asking you... pretty please with sugar on top...don't shoot Jim Gordon."
Her tone was layered thick with cynicism, but where one might expect that he would turn the shotgun on her for addressing him in such a way, the Joker looked at her with a silent understanding. He sat there, reflecting for a moment as the cool night air rushed in though the gaping, jagged-edged window in the truck of the hatchback. At the beginning, letting go of everything had been difficult, and although there hadn't been much, he remembered those early days. He could clearly recall how strange it had been to know, without a shadow of doubt, that you were completely alone.
But she wasn't, and now neither was he.
When he didn't respond, she turned to look at him again. The Joker made his way into the front passenger seat again and buckled himself in. There was a moment of silence when he removed the live shells from the magazine and placed them back into the box, but as soon as the topic had come up, it had passed. Twisting the rear view mirror, the Joker's black eyes scanned the scenery behind them. Jim's car seemed to have disappeared behind them, as the small, beaten car flew through the nearly empty streets, far ahead of their pursuers.
The Joker gazed around the area, looking out through the passenger window at the buildings as they changed from skyscrapers to low-rise buildings of dark red brick. "Okay, we're getting close enough," he said, turning around to look through the windshield. He appeared contemplative for a moment before looking himself over, peering through all sides of the vehicle and looking high above the windshield to see if they had pursuers oat any angle.
"We need to ditch the car," he told her.
"Ditch the car?" she asked, frustrated. "Where you want to leave it, at the side of the road somewhere?"
"You got a better plan, then?"
"It just doesn't seem like you to ditch a car," she said, the car slowly weaving into the oncoming lanes, and though they were empty, the Joker still held a worried expression. Their pace had come down quite a bit since Jim had lost their trail, but she was still moving quickly enough to kill the two of them in a head-on collision.
"What did you have in mind?" he asked unenthusiastically.
"Well, I'm sure you know just as well as I do that the simple minds of the GCPD just can't help but have their attention captured by a big, sparkling object," she said, hitting the brakes to and gearing down into second.
He slowly got the gist of her vague explanation, and tightened his seatbelt to brace himself. He held fast onto the sides of his seat. The car geared down once more, and taking one last glance at the speedometer, the Joker noticed that she were still doing about thirty miles an hour as Harley slammed the car into the corner of a bakery that had been closed for the evening.
It was the middle of the night, and while the crash had caused a commotion, the only difference in the landscape that the Joker noticed as he opened his eyes was that a few lights in the apartments above the bakery had been turned on in response to the clamor. His vision was foggy for a few seconds after the crash, and Harley's head reeled back into the headrest of her seat as she stretched out a kink in her neck.
"Hmph..." she groaned, reaching a hand up to message her shoulder. "That wasn't so bad."
She hoisted herself out of the broken driver's side window, once she discovered her door was jammed shut, while he threw open the door and moved out into the chilly, windy night. He watched Harleyquinn, straight-faced and focused as she quickly threw open the trunk. A few bits of shattered windowglass decorated the inside like a disco ball, reflecting the few lights that came in from the street. Taking up a jerry can of gasoline from inside the trunk she began hosing the rest of the vehicle down with the yellow-tinted liquid, tossing a healthy dosage into the back seat through a broken window. She tossed the can in after it was empty.
Shotgun in hand, the Joker turned back to her, mildly amused as she immediately reached up to his neck to remove his tie. "You've really had all this planned right from the start, haven't you?" he asked, lifting his chin to allow her to undo the tightened Windsor knot. "Not that I'm not interested, but I don't really know if now's the right time for you to be doing that..."
"Don't flatter yourself," she told him immediately, offering up a small grin as his tie loosened and slid out from under his collar. "You know damn well what I'm doing."
He did, and it was just another reason he was impressed with her strategy for this evening's little outing. The sound of sirens faded into the distance as Harleyquinn stuffed one end of his tie into the gas tank of the car, leaving the thinner end hanging outside the tank. He may not have been much of a drinker, but it didn't matter much, since Molotov cocktails were his favorite cocktails, and she had effectively turned the vehicle into one giant bomb with a silk tie fuse.
Like a smoker caught without a light, she patted her sides down, then found what she was looking for. She reached into a small opening at the small of her back and produced a metal zippo lighter, which she used to light the end of the tie. Hurriedly, she came back to her full height and took ahold of his wrist. The two of them rushed into an alleyway across the street, the fire crawling up the tie, licking up the broken windows of the car.
Flashing lights from far away cast an eerie nightclub atmosphere over the dark streets of eastern Gotham. The Joker tugged back on her to slow down so they could watch, and as the two of them dipped into the alleyway, they turned to look back as the car exploded into a fireball, large enough for the two to feel the heat on their faces and the shockwave pulse through their bodies from several meters away.
Looking back to him, she motioned him further down the alleyway. "I sure hope you know where you're going from here... because from this point on you're leading."
The thought of having to lead her around wasn't exactly appetizing, but he tried to collect his geographical bearings anyway. "Hmph...this is St. James, isn't it?" he asked her, though he'd already realized that it was by the time she nodded her affirmative. It was late, and they had to get themselves situated and organized before the early morning newscasts alerted the public of their harrowing escape. A past hideout of his wasn't far from here, and being as close to North Gotham and Crime Alley as they were, the Joker knew that within a quarter-hour they could be in one of his many safe houses, but they were surrounded by police, and navigating the back alleys of the city was going to take him a bit of thought.
"Alright..." he growled, motioning for her to follow him. "But I walk fast, so keep up."
"Have I given you any reason to believe that I can't?"