Chapter eight: To fear or not to fear
Blue-Jay swung in for a landing on the roof of one of her mothers more 'exclusive' drug houses. She had several of them in Gotham city, each one being used for only one specific drug or big-time dealer at a time, there was even one with Rupert Thorne's hand in it. But it wasn't his warehouse that she was investigating this time.
This one was an anomaly. It had been in the use of one specific person for almost a year and a half now. The code name that the customer was using was Jaser, meaning 'fearless'. She wasn't sure what type of drugs he was having brought in, but she was sure of one thing, whatever he was up to was something big. And with this crowd, 'bigger' was never better.
The drug house was in the basement of a normal warehouse that was used for a legitimate shipping company, Seabirds Shipping, one of her mothers few valid businesses.
The warehouse had been the old asylum originally, so it had rooms upon rooms crammed full of goods. And there was more basement then there were upper floors, but Seabird's wasn't a huge business so no one thought much of it. She wasn't even sure that anyone knew about the old asylum that was below the small, two-story structure that sat innocently on the surface of a monster drug hot spot.
Blue-Jay slipped in through a skylight and crept through the shadows of boxes and crates until she reached a dumbwaiter shaft that was used to send food down to the inmates in the lowest levels.
It took a bit of tugging but she finally managed to cut the lock and get the rusty door open. She had to open it slowly to minimize the screeching of the rusty hinges but slipped inside the shaft as soon as the door was open enough to admit her small body.
The cables were also rusty and the metal carrier crate as so badly corroded that it was almost nonexistent. But the chains were not so far gone that they could not hold her weight and that was her concern.
Marking her entrance/exit with a small glowing luminous strip placed just above the opening, Blue-Jay turned on her night vision lenses before beginning her decent, quickly and quietly, into the darkness below.
It seemed like hours, but in reality it was only twenty minuets before Blue-Jay, at last, hit the bottom floor.
Pressing her ear against the small door to make sure that the coast was clear, Blue-Jay then used a small torch to cut the lock the swung the door slowly open in order to avoid screeching, for this door was just as rusty as everything else, if not more so from all the damp and mildew down here.
As she walked quietly down the main hall, keeping to the side in case anyone should come walking through the blackness, Blue-Jay felt her heart ache at the thought of the inmates who had been forced to endue the torture of this place before Arkham was built.
All the cells were underground, so there were no windows to let in sunlight, the only source of illumination being the small oil-lamps in the narrow corridors that branched off the main hall that she was in. The cells were tiny, too small for any human to be placed in comfortably. The beds on some of the cells appeared to have been made of canvas sacks that the inmates had clumsily stitched together, but in most there was only evidence of ancient, rotted straw-stains on the damp, cold stone floor, or nothing at all.
The place that seemed to be for the 'patients' to use the bathroom was actually nothing but a small, shallow pit dug into the floor in the corner of some of the cells, and not all of them even had that.
The cell doors were wood, they were rotting now and many hung from their hinges or lay on the floor, made of oak slabs as thick as her two fists, with only a tiny door for people to look in at the inmates through and a slot at the bottom for food to be pushed in. It was horrifying, and Blue-Jay had to force herself not to cry.
She also had to force herself to hurry onwards when she looked into an open cell and spotted an old skeleton lying in the center of the filthy floor, or most of a skeleton anyway, its head had somehow managed to end up perched on an oil lamp just outside the cell door. She decided not to think about how it might have gotten there, and hurried on her way.
She didn't look into any of the other old cells, not wanting so see any more of the poor people that hadn't even been given a burial.
At last she reached the room where all the activity was going on.
It was enormous, the ceiling two stories up from the floor and the floor space equaling about the size of a large high school cafeteria. But not everything in there was old, the catwalks that went around and across the room were shiny and new, as were the bright lights that hung from the ceiling and lit up what was going on below.
Bathtubs were lined up in rows as were tables where people wearing surgical masks sat, measuring out the mystery powder that her mother had been importing into different containers which were then taken by other workers and mixed with other substances in the bathtubs.
Blue-Jay had installed a micro camera into one of her gloves and proceeded to take pictures of the procedures with one hand and video and audio with the other, into which she had installed a micro video cam.
She was in the midst of doing this when she noticed a man surrounded by a group of armed thugs walking through the workers. He was wearing a green cape and his grey hair was in a weird, horn-like style. He had a short goatee and at his side was a young, dark-haired woman. He looked like he was the one in charge so she followed them as they left the room, going down another dark corridor that looked new as well.
They came out onto an observation deck and Blue-Jay had to climb a service ladder that was stuck in the wall until she was above the lights and the people. Judging her moment perfectly, she aimed and jumped, landing on top of one of the lights, where she could see everything that was going on without interference, but at the same time, no one could see her.
She could clearly hear what the strange man in the cape was saying "This drug triggers the fear and temperamental centers of the brain, causing the victim to become terrified and to react to the fear and panic with violence and aggression or complete and total submission. Now, let's see how it works." He nodded too one of the men standing beside the door and the man bowed slightly before throwing a large switch in the wall.
Doors on the ground floor opened and about three dozen man and women were forced into the enclosure. The men who had pushed them in quickly left and closed the doors behind them. There was a loud whirring sound and a Plexiglas shield slid between the observers and the observed. Once it was closed, the man in the cape said "Release the gas." And one of his men pulled a leaver that came out of the floor beside him.
Never, for her entire life, would Robyn ever go a day without remembering what happened in that chamber that night, and there was never a night where she did not still hear the screams of the people imprisoned in that hell as they became beasts, as they tore each other apart using teeth and nails like carnivores that had never become civilized.
"Excellent." The man in the cape said when it was over, "it is ready at last, start loading the canisters, I want it ready so that we may proceed with the plan to destroy Gotham for good, and then we will begin to return the world to the paradise that it once was."
Blue-Jay waited until they had gone before heading back the way she had come. She managed to score some of the toxin on the way back through the manufacturing room, and then made fast-tracks back to the dumbwaiter shaft. As she climbed, she felt tears begin to well up in her eyes but she forced them back, she had to get out of there and make an anti-toxin for the gas, then find out how they were going to get the stuff into the air, as it was obvious that the hallucinogen was a compound that had to be breathed to be affective.
But there was one thing for sure, she couldn't do it alone.