Chapter Six


It was the most difficult conversation that Donatello had ever experienced. He did not enjoy a great amount of talking anyway, but this was a particularly unpleasant encounter. He had to try and explain Michelangelo's condition to the rest of his concerned family, trying to pretend that there was hope when, in fact, there was little. He was trying to make them understand something that even he did not fully understand. He had a brilliant mind and a good comprehension of genetically modified chemicals, but it was hard to grasp this particular substance without knowing what he was dealing with. And that was without the mention of a possible cure.

Donatello would try anything to help his brother, but at that time he was worn out from his constant tests and research. So he decided to pool his ideas, and take some of the pressure off of his shoulders. He told them as much as he knew, trying to subtly sugarcoat the raw news as best he could.

What he knew so far was this: Somehow, an unknown drug had been introduced into Mikey's system. He had been given time to attempt to diagnose his brother, and that was when he noticed the mark on his arm. Really noticed it, that is. At first, one and all had assumed that it was a scrape that he had got when he was on his "drunken rampage" as Raph had fondly come to call it. But Donny had studied it more closely. In the centre of the bruise was a pinprick, one that was most probably caused by someone injecting something into Mikey.

Taking into account his brother's delirious ramblings, both Donny and Raph had made the connection that the gang that they had fought in the alley en route back from April's house had been the same group of people that Mikey had seemingly encountered on his own night out. This meant that whatever Mikey had been injected with was probably the same thing that the gang had tried to inject into Raphael, and thus the same thing that was in the syringe. But, due to the mix of modified chemicals, Donatello was having a difficult time distinguishing exactly what it was that was in the syringe.

Many questions remained unanswered, but three particular questions remained in the minds of all three turtles and one rat present at the mini-assembly. Were the men in the alley who had tried to inject Raphael definitely the same people that had injected Mikey with the unknown substance? If so, why did they do this? And was there some sort of antidote to cure him with?

"I don't think these guys were playing with their first chemistry sets; judging by the complexity of the chemicals I think they know what they are doing," Donny said. "And if they know what they are doing, then there is a high chance that they have created an antigen of some kind."

"All right, so if these scientist guys are so legit as you think they are, why do they have to pick random subjects and knock them out to test their formula?" Raphael asked rhetorically.

"I didn't say they were legit, not by any means," Donny argued. "All I'm saying is that they know what they're doing, and if they really know what they're doing then they'll have an antidote to whatever this stuff is."

"I think," Splinter began, speaking for the first time since Donny had called the meeting, "that these scientists, as you call them, met the three of you in the same alley as they had found Michelangelo the previous evening. I believe they were waiting to see if he would return, and they realised when you all returned that Michelangelo was not present among you."

"But Master, do you think they would be able to tell us apart?" Leonardo asked. With the exception of their uniquely coloured bands and their exclusive weapons, there was little to distinguish between the four turtles until one became acquainted with their different characteristics, voice tones and so on. Was it possible that they knew exactly what to look for?

"Maybe," Splinter said quietly.

"Look, none of this is getting us any closer to finding the creeps that did this to Mikey," Raphael said, having built up to such an outburst throughout Donatello's lengthy explanation of events. He felt that there was too much talking and not enough action taking place at that moment.

"Is there any way we can find these guys?" Leonardo asked.

"There may be, which is why I've brought in an expert to help us," Donny told them with the ghost of a grin playing across his face.

As if on cue, a female voice rung through the lair. "Hello? Anyone home?" Those present in the room smiled simultaneously as they recognised April's voice.

"Miss O'Neill, a most pleasant surprise," Splinter said, looking pointedly at Donny as April walked through into the living area.

"Thank you, Master Splinter," April said, walking through into the vast room. "Donny called me, saying that he needed my help." She paused, and asked, "How's Mikey doing?"

"He's not doing too great, I'm afraid," Leo said as he began to make a cup of coffee for April.

"Poor guy," April said quietly. "How can I help? I mean, I'm no doctor, you guys know that, right?"

Donny led April to his workbench, where he was about to resume looking through a heavy textbook, hoping for answers. "I know that, but I also know that you are a wizard with computers." He explained further, "we've come to the conclusion that Mikey has been injected with some sort of substance that is toxic to his body. If possible, we need you to find out who that company might possibly be. I know, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack, but..."

"Have you looked at the syringe yet?" April cut in, having picked up the syringe and studied it for a moment.

"Not yet, I took the fluid out of it and left it over there somewhere," Donny said, absently looking through the notes he had made from the various textbooks.

After a moment of looking at it, "It's got some initials on it. A-M-I," April spelled out.

For a moment no one said anything, as Splinter, Leo and Raph turned to face Donny from their seats in the living area, and gave him sour looks. Donny shrugged his shoulders and tried to defend himself. "Well, who knew they'd be dumb enough to leave their initials on the syringe?"

"They were dumb enough to drop it in the first place, weren't they?" Raph said back, walking over to Donny's workstation to join the conversation.

"April, would you be able to find out any information about whatever AMI is on my computer?" Donny asked, quickly changing the subject.

"I can do better than that, I'll go back to my place and look on my own computer," April said, knowing that her computer was newer and faster, and would be able to search more efficiently than the one in the lair. "I'll call you guys if I find any information. Is there anything else you'd like me to do?"

"That alone will be enough help," Leo said gratefully. They showed April out of the lair, and turned their attention back to the unanswered questions.

"Whatever April turns up should tell help us to figure out who did it, and then we can figure out why they did it and get the antigen," Donny said, hoping that April would discover something on her search.

"Hey, Einstein, I know you scientists like your answers and such, but let me sort your priorities out for you – the antigen comes first," Raphael growled, thinking that questions could wait, and Mikey might not be able to. Mikey comes first, he added to himself.

"Of course," Donny said defensively, hurt at the implication that he cared more about answers than he did his brother. "It wasn't a particular order or anything!"

"All right," Leonardo said, stepping in before any proverbial volcanoes could erupt. "We know what we need to find out. We wait for April to research – Donny, keep studying whatever that stuff is – and whilst we wait, we keep Mikey as comfortable as possible. Got it?"

"Got it," replied the other two, one curtly and the other more softly.


April picked up her pad of notes and read through them one last time before making the call to the turtles. Satisfied, she picked up the piece of equipment that Donny had given her, and studied it for a moment, wondering how to switch it on. She pressed one of the numerous buttons on the side, and suddenly the device came to life. She let it drop to the table, light flashing and noises emitting from it as the shell opened.

"Maybe I should have asked Donny for some instructions or something," April murmured, watching the Shell-Cell curiously.

At that moment, a voice sounded from the machine. "April? Are you there?"

April picked up the gadget gingerly, and spoke into it as though it were a telephone receiver. "Donny? I'm here."

"Whoa, no need to shout," Donny exclaimed.

April decided that the appliance resembled a two-way radio rather than a telephone, so held it in front of her mouth and spoke. "Sorry," she chuckled, "I'll get the idea of this thing in a minute."

"No problem. What did you find out?" Donny asked, knowing that, for Mikey, time was of the greatest essence and he needed to get straight to the point. He had checked on his brother a few moments before receiving April's call, and he appeared to be faring worse than before.

"A lot," April said, preparing to begin reading from the sheet of notes she had taken. "All right, are you ready for this?" She paused a moment, taking a moment to figure out where to begin. "AMI stands for Astor Medical Industries, a business that creates and tests drugs that psychologically manipulate the brain. I know that all drugs do this one way or another – they play with the mind – but this company wants to go deeper than that. Some of the drugs have even been known to enhance the mind, but don't ask me how. I couldn't find out a lot about it, apparently they haven't released a lot of details to the press since one particular incident."

"Incident?" Donny asked, intrigued.

"The company had a recent revamp after almost being shut down a number of years ago. I had to dig deep to find out why, but I discovered that allegations were made about the legitimacy of their testing. It was discovered that they picked homeless people off the streets, including a lot of kids, to test their products on. That way, if one of the tests was a failure, the death couldn't be traced back to anyone and they could bury the evidence of any fatalities during testing – literally."

"Those creeps," Donatello said coldly. Leo and Raphael, who could only catch Donatello's end of the conversation, looked at each other in disbelief, thinking to themselves that if the information that April had given their brother was enough to get him rattled, the something pretty big had to be going down.

"There were also rumours that although they were public about some of their testing, they also did some unofficial testing, on the side, as it were. These would probably be experiments that the public would have been against taking place."

"Makes sense," Donatello agreed.

The phone call ended with April giving Donny the address of the AMI company, and agreeing to meet the turtles there in half an hour. Upon ending the call, Donny turned to his brothers and his Master and explained what he had been told.

"The company makes drugs that basically mess with people's minds," Donny explained. "From what we've discovered today, it looks more and more like Mikey was drugged by these guys, as a test subject for whatever was in that syringe."

"Jeez, when I get my hands on those wanna-be scientists..." Raph growled, clenching his fists in anger.

"Easy, Raphael," Leo said in a warning tone, laying a calming hand on his brother's tense shoulder. "You said it yourself - the first thing we're going to do is get a cure for whatever Mikey's got, then everything else can be taken care of afterwards. Got it?"

"Fine, fine," Raphael relented, remembering the lecture he had given to Donatello earlier. For this, he shot the purple-banded brother an apologetic look, and said, "We cure Mikey, then we pulverize those creep scientists."


Soon Donatello, Leonardo and Raphael were speeding along the streets of the city towards their destination. They met up with April just around the block from the building and walked through the dark alley together towards the company base. From the outside, it looked like a typical concrete cube with the odd broken windowpane in downtown New York.

The three turtles deftly climbed up onto the roof of the relatively small building, helping April as they went. "I was never trained to do this," she reminded them through gritted teeth as she slowly scaled the rope that Donny had thrown from the ground to the roof. Once all four were safely on the roof, they began to look for a way in. Donny quickly located a vent on the roof.

"Seems too easy," Raphael said quietly as he slipped through the gap.

"I guess they didn't count on having company," Leonardo responded as he surveyed the interior of the building.

The corridor was dirty white in colour, with greying tiles covering the lower half of the walls. It was poorly lit; some of the few working bulbs in the strip lighting flickered whilst others remain lifeless. The floor, a green-grey lino tile, was slippery and sticky underfoot in some places, as though liquids had been spilt and just left to dry.

"They definitely weren't expecting company if they didn't clean up first," April murmured, looking distastefully at the damp patch that she had just stepped in.

"I sure hope they aren't carrying out serious experiments in these conditions," Donatello said. "It's far too unsanitary."

"Yeah, I know what you mean, even Mikey's room is cleaner than this place," Raph said, forcing the joke.

The four walked along the corridor in stiff silence, their thoughts on Mikey and his current poor state of health. Motivated by thoughts to do anything within their power to help him, they powered on, and soon came to a crossroads in the corridor.

"Here's what we'll do," Leonardo began, taking charge. "It may look like a small place, but we'll split into two groups. Donny, you go with April, and Raph can come with me. Find out whatever you can, and we'll meet back on the roof in an hour, if we don't meet up before that. Got it?"

"Got it," the three replied.


Donatello and April walked quietly down the passage, careful not to draw any attention to their presence to anyone who might be in the building. They looked through the windows of every door they passed, but saw what looked like to be disused labs. They came to a flight of steps, and crept up them, Donatello moving ahead of April so as to check for signs of trouble.

"What exactly are we looking for?" April whispered, her back flat against the wall as she moved behind the turtle.

"I'm not sure, April, but we'll know when we find it," Donny replied in a hushed voice. "So far, this place seems totally deserted, apart from ourselves. But, the fact that there are lights on in some of the corridors has to indicate that at least someone is in here somewhere."

They passed two empty rooms on the next floor, but found that the third laboratory was occupied. Donatello, who was leading the way, peered through the window first. The moment he saw movement from inside, he stopped and quickly turned around to April, placing a green finger to his lips. April nodded, understanding, and quietly ducked under the window and looked in through the other side.

Through the wired glass they could see three scientists, in dirty white laboratory coats and jeans, poring over some liquids frothing in a beaker atop a Bunsen burner. Donatello struggled to hear what the three scientists were muttering.

"Y-56 testing... successful... all subjects reacted to... C-56... system."

Donatello grasped that they were conversing about one of their experiments, and tried to gather whether it had anything to do with his brother. He narrowed his eyes in concentration, listening harder.

"What of... not given C-56?"

"As we thought... unconscious... comatose... two fatalities so far..."

Donatello gulped on hearing the last part of the sentence.

"And the... the alley?"

"Some went out... found creatures... not the same... bug..."

"Bug?" April asked in a whisper.

"Probably thinks that's what we are, giant bugs or something," Donny replied in a faintly miffed tone. He looked back to see that one of the scientists was heading towards the door, so he grabbed a surprised April and headed back the way they came. He pulled her into one of the empty laboratories and waited until the man had walked past before sighing with relief.

"Well," Donny began, "now we know that these guys are definitely the same ones that fought us the alley before. I have a pretty good idea about the rest of what they said, but we'll find Leo and Raph and see what they found out before I explain it. Come on, let's go."


Raphael and Leonardo silently walked through the corridor of the building, before taking a flight of stairs down to the basement of the building. Down here, there were even less working lights in this shorter corridor than before, which the two turtles used to their advantage and found it better for moving through the shadows and not being seen.

They passed a couple of doors, and looked through the windows of each one. They were mainly storage rooms, some containing piles of dusty cardboard boxes, others with old and broken pieces of machinery. "Donny would have a field day down here," Raph muttered.

"Shh," Leonardo hissed, ignoring the look his brother shot at him. The last thing they needed was a fight, especially in a narrow corridor. Throughout the time that they had been prowling the building, Leonardo had been calculating their situation against that of the scientists, their most current foe. From what they had witnessed in the alley, none of the scientists were trained in any form of martial arts, which is where an advantage lay for the turtles. The only advantage. Who knew how many scientists were in the building, or if they had guards somewhere? And though the turtles knew the art of ninjitsu, the scientists could possess any kinds of shotguns, rifles, pistols... or perhaps modified chemical or scientific ray guns that they had been developing. This confirmed it – the very last thing the turtles needed was to be spotted by and battle with the occupants of the building.

At the end of the corridor was a metal door with no window for Leonardo or Raphael to peek through. As Leonardo assumed a ready stance in preparation for a possible fight, Raphael slowly opened the door, a sai in one hand.

Raphael stole a look around the door, and let out a low whistle at what he found inside. The large room contained rows of beds along walls on either side. Leonardo looked around the door, and counted ten beds in total. Along the back wall were cramped enclosures containing two of various different types of animals.

"What did we hit, Noah's Ark?" Raphael asked, still staring at the find.

One of the humans in the bed turned towards the door, and his eyes widened when he saw the two silhouettes in the doorway. It appeared that he had just woken up, and was too dazed to do anything else but gasp. The other humans in the beds also began to gaze in wonder at the two giant turtles that had entered the room.

"It's okay, we're not here to hurt you," Leonardo began as he and his brothers quickly replaced their weapons.

"There's two of you," one young boy murmured in confusion.

"The kid can count," Raphael muttered sarcastically, still taking in the scene before him. Each of the humans in the steel beds was hooked up to machines that bleeped and took readings of what he presumed to be their heart rates. "They teach you that down here?"

"You misunderstand," a male in his forties said, sitting up in bed. He had no shirt on, and the thin, itchy-looking blanket did not look as though it kept him very warm. "We heard them talking, they said they knew of only one of your... kind."

"Who are they?" Leonardo asked, sitting on the edge of an empty bed.

"The scientists, the ones who put us here," the man spoke. "We heard them talking, saying that they found a giant reptile that they injected with the Y-56, but we didn't really believe them, that is, not until you just showed up." He paused for a moment, as if studying them. "What are you, exactly?"

"We're mutated turtles," Leonardo explained. "We're here because we believe that our brother was injected with a fluid that is now poisoning him." He stopped, taking a real look at the occupants in the beds. Those in the beds on one side of the room, apart from looking very tired and somewhat dishevelled, did not look ill. There was the male that had done most of the talking, the boy that had boldly spoken up, a young woman in her twenties, a man who looked to be about seventy years old, and a teenage girl. Leonardo then looked at those on the other side of the room, the left side where he say on one of the beds. The people in the beds were all lying asleep, looking very pale, with beads of sweat dripping off of their bodies. Their covers had been kicked about, and some had fallen to the floor. The three in the beds, all between late teens and early thirties in age, looked far worse for wear than those opposite them. A nauseating feeling began to bubble deep within Leonardo's stomach.

Raphael, who had remained at the door, heard footsteps and suddenly spoke up. "Leo, someone's coming!"

In a split second, the two turtles dove under two of the beds on the right side of the room. Those in the beds tried to shield them by drooping their thin, grey blankets over the side of the bed facing the door, so as to help cover them.

The door slowly opened, and two masked eyes widened as they peeped around the door. "April!" Said the soft, hushed voice. "You won't believe what I just found!"

Donatello and April walked into the room, and the man in the bed smiled wryly. "Ahem, I think your friends found us first." Sheepishly, Leonardo and Raphael crawled out from under the beds.


Splinter knelt beside his son, who had been moved from his bedroom to the couch in the living room before the others had left. They felt that the air in the larger room would be cooler and that Mikey would be more comfortable. The rat placed the cloth back into the bowl of cool water, wrung it out, and gently pressed it to Mikey's burning forehead. The young turtle groaned in his sleep, fidgeting under his thin cover.

"Shh, my son," Splinter said quietly, wishing he could do more to ease Mikey's pain. It was every parent's instinct to do so, whether or not they are a blood-related parent.

Mikey heard the words of his Sensei, though they were muffled in his sleep. He tried desperately to cling to them, as they soothed him, and took his mind off of how hot he felt.

"Michelangelo," Splinter began after a moment, "I must apologise to you for how I reacted when you were brought home two nights ago. At the time I was most disappointed in you, but events have shown me that..."

At that moment, Mikey's eyes snapped open, and he was drenched into that familiar feeling of swimming in the dense, black molasses that he could never seem to easily find his was out of. Splinter was cut off in his apology, and stood up in alarm.

Mikey was back in the alley again, the same alley where he had been attacked by the group of men. He was pinned down, and the man with the moustache had injected him with the contents of the syringe. He slowly regained consciousness, and began to lift his head and open his eyes.

"He's waking up!" One man cried, seeing the turtle pry his eyelids open.

"You didn't hit him hard enough!" The moustached-man snapped in fury.

"We should have waited until we got him back to the lab before we injected him," another man snarled.

"Come on, it's done now," the leader of the pack said, putting an end to it. "Let's get him back."

The group had not taken three steps between them before they heard a noise, and saw the silhouette of a man walking down the alley towards them. In sheer panic, they threw Mikey into a Dumpster, planning on coming back to collect him later, before scattering to hiding places. The turtle was plunged into darkness for a moment, before he saw the light breaking through again. He looked up, and in front of the light he saw a familiar face.

"What the Hell?" Casey uttered, staring at Mikey in the Dumpster. Mikey looked up, but the light turned everything white and he could see nothing.

Mikey blinked a few times, and turned to see his Master staring at him in alarm. Sleepily, he murmured, "It's okay, Master Splinter," before settling back down and falling into another deep, restless sleep.

Splinter sighed, and replaced the cloth on his son's forehead. "Hang in there, Michelangelo," he said softly, hoping and praying that his other sons would soon return soon, bearing a remedy for Michelangelo's ailment.

As if on cue, Splinter heard the door open. He stood up and turned to the entrance to the lair, but his expression of warm greeting saved for his sons turned into a look of fear as he saw who had entered their home.