She landed hard on the other side, nearly toppling over when her feet slammed onto the street. Pressure still throbbed in her ribs, and a delayed dizzyness in her head from the inmate overpowering her were now making themselves known, but until the adrenaline subsided she was more worried about her new allies left behind. She felt wretched. Yells and angered grunts carried over the partition, but Cathy couldn't tell which side screamed what. The helplessness she felt tugged her in all directions, screaming at her to do something. Not even anything useful, just something.
Next to her was a row of four heavily graffitied payphones. Plastic placards on each telephone box listed emergency numbers, including one for the GCPD. She needed to call for help! The police just couldn't allow this carnage to go on, they'd listen! Hurriedly glancing sidelong at the street to make sure it was empty, she turned her back momentarily to fish change out of her bag. She lifted the first phone and listened. No dial tone. She slammed it down and grabbed the next. Nothing! Placing her hand on the smudgy receiver of the third and final one, she was elated with relief to hear a dial tone before it even reached her ear.
Setting it back into it's cradle to hold, she dug into her bag, shaking it to locate the jingling of her quarters and dimes. Now was not the time to scold herself on better organization, but she was definitely wishing she had thought better ahead and placed them in a side pocket.
Clutching the coins in her fist, just as her hand jutted out for the phone again, it...rang.
Cathy's fingers stopped and hovered in the air, mere inches from it. You couldn't call a payphone—could you?
Maybe it was someone on the outside! With that thought sparking Cathy to life, she wrenched the receiver off it's hook and shoved it to her ear.
"Hello?!" she said frantically, not waiting for the other end to answer. "Hello?! Please, send help! We've just been attacked, we're not supposed to be here, please! We're near the cathedral in Arkham City, we—"
A shuddery gasp breathed out of the other end. Not one of shock, but one of...delight. Cathy's grip hardened.
"The cathedral, you say," gushed the person on the other end. It was a voice unlike any Cathy had ever heard before, and it made her blood run cold. It sounded like a man, but with a higher pitch. He almost whispered, just like the prisoner in the courthouse basement, only this one's quietness seemed to be masking a joy welling like a geyser deep in his stomach, as though his excitement was so overwhelming that he needed to suppress it before he lost complete control.
"Oh, darling." The voice shook with fluttery pleasure. "Dear, sweet girl. If help is what you need, I shall be there right away. Salvation is on the way."
Click. The tone signalled that he hung up. Cathy slammed down the phone in horror, causing a shrill reverb in the phone box. She didn't have to guess, she knew that whoever she just spoke to wasn't anybody on the outside. All the payphones in Arkham City had to be in some way connected to eachother. And she had just led some psycho to this very spot.
Cathy spun on her heel, on course for the cathedral. Gripping the bars with all her might, she attempted to wrench its front gates open. She had to remind herself that in Arkham City no shelter was sacred, but she had to try. There had to be good people still left, they couldn't all have met their fate already.
That was, unless she had completely underestimated just how many people like her were stupid enough to have stayed behind.
The gates screeched and clanked with creaky age, but they didn't budge, no matter how much she yanked. She stopped momentarily to peek around the right corner cautiously, expecting that breathy lunatic caller to slink out of the night at any second. The gates were made entirely of vertical steel rods, and only two horizontal. Cathy could easily step onto the lower one, but to reach the second and hoist herself up was an impossible task, it was much too high. Her fingers could barely circle the second bar.
There had to be another way in.
Around the left corner facing the harbour, she tried to jump for the top of the stone wall encasing the cathedral. The pads of her fingers were scratched raw as she swiped for the ledge but missed. Leaping again, she strained the bones in her arms to stretch further, almost painfully rigid just to get the measly extra inch. Her fingertips made it, but they weren't strong enough to support her body weight even for a moment. Dropping, Cathy made a pained noise as her skin scraped against the stones again.
She fanned her fingers in the cool air to ease the sting, hissing as she scanned the area for an object to give her a boost. Nothing but trash as far as the eye could see—moldy newspapers, discarded tin cans, and wind-blown dirt mounds. No cardboard to stack into an extra step, not even a crumbled concrete slab from the collapsed freeway to drag over.
Ignoring her throbbing fingers, she glanced upwards at the enormous freeway overhead that obscured her view of Gotham City's skyline. She needed a higher vantage point, somewhere to give her an idea of what to do. Forgetting about trying to infiltrate the cathedral's walls, she noticed behind her yet another burnt-out vehicle casing that lined up with some sort of tin shack that blocked a straight path onto the freeway. The car could give a generous boost.
Cathy placed her foot on the car's trunk and climbed on, her thigh muscles unused to the great lunge, and she hopped across the roof and onto the hood. The top of the tin shack, it's side meeting the car's headlights, was eye-level with her. Backing up, careful not to fall through the missing windshield, Cathy took a small running jump and threw herself onto the shack. The metal edge slammed into her stomach, but she managed to leap high enough to balance her upper torso by her elbows. Her feet dangling below, she threw one heel over onto the roof, and was suddenly very grateful that, as a child, dance classes had granted her the ability to do the splits. With her right rubber sole firmly in place for leverage, Cathy grunted as she lifted the rest of herself up.
A rush reeled through her body once she finally made it over, but there was no time to sit and catch her breath. Delicately lowering herself onto the partly grounded freeway, she ascended the incline, rising almost as high as the cathedral's bell tower itself. A double lamp post at the top of the freeway median, surprisingly, still worked and shined down on her like an impromptu spotlight.
It was odd to know that the hour was very late in the night, but the power of all the electrical lights gave the impression that Arkham City was just a regular, working borough again, settling into early evening. The night sky was brilliantly wide open up here, but the wind was violent. Sepia-toned clouds were moving in gradually, heavy with snow but not quite ready yet. The blue spotlights atop the Arkham City border wall were agonizingly bright enough to make Cathy squint in their direction.
The two roads dropped off up ahead in jagged edges of concrete and broken rebars. Cathy approached, carefully leaned over, and looked down through the exposed metal grid to see only the choppy grey harbour underneath where another road had once been years ago. She backed away before the feeling of vertigo overtook her. To fall in meant her doom. With water that cold, her body would seize in no time, rendering her immobile and left for the depths to swallow her. In her mind she didn't see an expanse of water anymore, just a vast, icy, wet casket.
The Amusement's Mile's waterlogged semi-ruins stretched far ahead, all the way to the furthest focal point of the electric-blue lightning bolt belonging to The Gotham City Olympus nightclub.
A plastic thump pattered behind her. Startled more by the suddeness of the noise rather than what caused it, Cathy whipped around defensively, only to find nothing behind her. Now in a cautious state, she looked down the ramp-like freeway to the political prisoner's camp, and then to the row of payphones she had just used, but she couldn't see a thing. Nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. Looking down at her feet, she spotted her water bottle on the road, it's contents sparkling and swishing from an apparent fall.
That inmate who attacked her must have shaken it loose from the top. She bent her knees to pick it up when a thin clattering sound tinkled behind her. Still in her crouch, she looked over her shoulder and under her arm to find that her whistle just dropped, too. With a bad feeling brewing, Cathy urgently unwrapped Phil's wool blanket from around her neck and shrugged the strings off her shoulders.
Inspecting the backpack's material, she immediately found the source of the problem. A hole. A hole in the bottom corner, frayed at the edges and as large as a tangerine. It was already prepared to let loose her second bottle.
Cathy cursed silently to herself, and after looking at the hole again and stretching it to measure the extent of the damage, she threw in another colorful swear chain right after. How long had that been there? What did she lose? She couldn't afford to have left any single thing behind, not even an extra water bottle. Water wouldn't have been a problem due to plentiful snow hills everywhere, except that they were filthy with sprinkled dirt and yellowed flyers thrown by the breeze. A snowflake merely had to hover in the vicinity of Arkham City before it wasn't even white anymore, and she wasn't about to dunk her head in the surrounding harbour water that was probably full of toxic sludge and inmate piss.
Gathering the whistle and fallen bottle, she set the bag on the ground and started rifling madly through her stuff, taking inventory once again and racking her brain to remember every item to the tee.
Bottle, seven snack bars, good. Wad of cash, there it was. A smattering of loose hairpins, but she never really counted the exact amount of those. She included the whistle and water bottle to her count. She pressed around the smooth inner-lining of the pack, waiting for the flat feel of a plastic card, and of a rubbery laminate.
None came.
Oh no.
Cathy pressed her fingers harder, nervous that she missed her two indentification pieces the first time. She trained her sight to the sky, as though loss of sight would strengthen her sense of touch, and did a once-over, waiting for her finger to run over a thin, hard edge somewhere in the lining.
Nothing.
Every inch turned up nothing.
No!
Her driver's license and her Health Insurance card, her only means of identification, had fallen out of the bag! Cathy angrily slammed the water bottle in her hand down onto the street, causing frothy bubbles to explode in the container. With eagle eyes, she searched the street all around her, even braving a look down the road's steep slope for any sign of a card-sized object, but even with the bright lights of Arkham City uncharacteristically helping her this time, it was still night.
Her bag must have ripped when the inmate threw her onto the ground. The cards had to have fallen out anywhere between the payphones to the cathedral, the hole wasn't there earlier in the night when she left the brownstone house. But even if she knew where the cards were, she couldn't go back. That psycho on the phone could show at any minute, the marauding thugs who attacked the camp could vault over the wall at any time.
Cathy cursed again. Again and again and again. Some Arkham goon could happen upon the picture of her license. If word got around and her driver's license was passed from grubby hand to grubby hand, she'd be instantly recognizable in no time. There was no guarantee that they'd think she was currently within the Arkham enclosure as of now, but it didn't hide the fact that everything from her face, to her eye color, to her height, to her weight was readily available in pristine, readable font to anybody who glanced upon it.
There was an easy chance that her I.D's would simply be stepped on, brushed or kicked aside and lost forever, but the first scenario was infinitely scarier, thus making it a very real possibility. And it was. If Cathy wasn't safe in Arkham City before, the potential danger she was now in was even worse.
To prevent the loss of anymore crucial items, Cathy removed them from the bag, then folded the brown blanket only once or twice and placed it inside. Shaping it as a third layer of lining, it covered the hole entirely and the wool was thick enough to not pull through easily. Not ideal, but it had to do for now. She tested it out, bouncing it on her back a few times and then checking the rip again. The blanket held tight. But that was only one problem solved.
Cathy frustratingly viewed the skyline for some sort of inspiration. Gotham's skyscrapers glittered from across the bridge that connected Old and New. The sprawling city center was close enough to be seen and admired, but far enough to be entirely unattainable. By lone human means, at least.
And then she had an idea. A crazy idea that once it came to her, her eyes glazed over and it encased her mind entirely until it was all she could think of, all she knew, and all she would know.
Cross the harbour and get to Gotham.
Cross the harbour and get to Gotham.
Cross the harbour and get to Gotham!
The idea would have been insane if she weren't so desperate. If the water wasn't so cold, if one failed to mention an added risk of a strong current sweeping her out to sea, she would have already felt crazy enough to swim for Gotham's merciful city shore. But no, she wasn't Arkham Asylum potential yet. All she needed was a boat. A raft. A tub, even. Some sort of object that floated, and an oar to steer. Her mind buzzed with the idea like a million drones swarming in her skull, bringing on a ringing in her ears that soon overpowered the swish of the strong wind.
That's so stupid, you'll never make it! screamed the reasonable side of her mind.
But the incredulity already of her situation at hand was drowning the voice out. For a moment, she feared that Arkham City was getting to her, that the confirmed insanity of many of it's members was contagious through the air, and that the disease was slowly creeping in through her nose and clouding her brain.
No, I'll make it, I'll make it, she told herself. I'm going to.
She wasn't crazy. She was of sound mind. She had to do this. The political prisoners, innocent people just like her, they needed help. They were her. She was them. They all didn't belong here.
It was either fight for survival without losing yourself, or lose yourself anyway.
A/N: Sorry for the short chapter, I meant to do much more, but I was just so antsy to post, I couldn't wait. I've got an itchy trigger finger. Here's a little game for you all while waiting for the next chapter, though. Can you figure out how I got the title to this story? I mean obviously it's referencing Maxie Zeus, but it was a line said in the game. If anyone knows where in the game the line "A bolt out of the blue" came from, you get the fabulous grand prize of...the honour of knowing that you knew where it came from :D...I throw terrible contests.
Still in awe about the amount of views and favorites here. Give me a moment...*bites knuckles to keep emotions in*