It was an overcast day in the North Precinct and Officer Eastman had come on duty with a bad feeling in his stomach.
So far, though, his stomach had been wrong. The day hadn't been dull - it never was in Midtown - but it hadn't been unusual either. There had been a couple of traffic stops, some stolen property reports that seemed to be developing into a pattern, and another street brawl on Purple Dragon turf.
Somebody really needed to be doing something about these gang wars, Eastman thought to himself. Well, he reflected, somebody is. And I just arrested him.
"Name?" asked the officer on desk duty.
The handcuffed vigilante stood up straight as he answered. He was tall, muscular, and kind of a lunatic; it hadn't been fun to take him down. "Casey Jones."
"Real name?"
"Arnold," he muttered, his steely blue eyes darting away.
"Seized these weapons from him, Jenn," Eastman said, hoisting a golf bag over the desk. It contained a baseball bat, a tennis racket, and various other sports paraphernalia. As he passed the bag across, one of the items slipped out and clattered to the floor.
"That ain't a weapon, it's a hockey stick," Jones said. "Don't you know what hockey is, you hosebags?"
"Keep talking like that and you won't get it back any time soon," Eastman's partner said as he led the other arrested man forward.
"Name?" Jenn asked again.
"Dragon Face," replied the suspect, and Eastman couldn't help rolling his eyes.
"Real name?"
But the self-proclaimed Dragon Face wasn't listening. He was looking in the other direction, a strange expression on his face. "What the heck is that thing?"
Whatever it was, Eastman had never seen it in the station house before. Nor anywhere else, for that matter. It had a big head that he might have described as football-shaped, except that it featured a pair of nasty-looking jaws and a massive dent. The head was attached to a cylindrical body by a short neck, and the whole contraption was standing on two clawed feet.
Before anyone could venture an answer to Dragon Face's question, the thing opened its jaws and started honking.
"Bomb Squad!" Jenn shouted into her communicator. "Bomb Squad, we have a potential attack in the booking room. Repeat, potential explosive device in the booking room!"
Dragon Face was trying to take cover behind the desk, Jones looked ready to tackle the walking bomb, and Eastman was trying to remember if he'd said "I love you" to his wife that morning, when the honking stopped. At the same moment, the small protrusion on top of the device's head lit up, and suddenly a three-dimensional image of a woman's head was projected into the middle of the room.
"Help," said the flickering image in a tinny voice. "My name is April O'Neil. I'm being held prisoner. This is not a joke. Follow the robot; it will lead you to me."
After a brief pause, the message repeated. When it was finished, the light blinked out, and the robot stood inert.
"What a babe," Jones commented.
Eastman glanced at his partner, as the Bomb Squad officers belatedly rushed into the room. "What do you think, Pete?"
"I guess we'd better investigate, Kev." He held up a hand to the arriving technicians. "It's all right, guys, we'll take this."
"Can't let you do that, officers," said the squad's leader. "Once a threat is called, protocol says we have to check it out."
"All right," Laird replied. "Make it quick while we finish booking these guys; it's related to a potential hostage situation."
The squad leader gave him an odd look, but didn't question the order as he directed his team to get to work.
"No signs of explosives," he reported less than thirty minutes later, when Jones and Dragon Face had been taken away to the holding cells. "Look at this, though." He turned the still-immobile robot over to show the two officers a logo printed on the bottom of its foot. "That's Stocktronics. What do you make of it?"
"It's a tech company," Laird said, scratching his head. "No business with us, so far as I know."
"I'll have someone look into it," the squad leader replied, as he set the robot down. "Good luck with your hostage situation."
"Uh, yeah." Eastman sidled closer to the robot. "Okay, buddy. You want to take us somewhere?"
The robot remained inanimate for a moment, then beeped and tilted its mangled head. It seemed to regard the two officers, and then it turned and marched out of the room.
Eastman's stomach had been right after all. Just when he thought he'd seen everything New York had to offer, he was reminded how wrong he was.
A lot of other people were similarly reminded that afternoon, as the little parade of one robot and two police officers proceeded through the streets. Eastman was fairly certain the spectacle caused a couple of traffic accidents, or at least a little extra gridlock. He ignored the stares, reminding himself that he was an officer in the line of duty.
They walked several blocks, into the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and then the robot led them down a culvert so narrow and well-hidden that Eastman could have sworn he'd never seen it in nineteen years of patrolling this precinct.
He had certainly never been where it led.
He squeezed through a broken gate - his partner squeezed more - and found himself in a place so filthy and miserable that even the homeless had forsaken it.
It must have been a part of the city's sewer system. It was dark, running with putrid water, and choked with garbage. The robot marched on as Eastman fumbled for his flashlight. He took one look at the scene, pulled a handkerchief over his mouth, and thought of his pension.
The first time he slipped and nearly fell, he decided the pension wasn't worth it. The second time, he turned back.
"Forget what the robot said," he griped. "This has to be a joke."
The robot honked at them, as if disagreeing, as Eastman tried to squeeze back past his partner. "Hold up, Kev," Pete said, in his endlessly patient way. It had probably saved their butts more than once, but it sure did get annoying. "I think we'd better keep going."
"Going where?" Eastman asked. He glanced back at the robot, which had apparently realized it was no longer being followed, and had stopped to wait for its errant charges. "There can't possibly be anything at the end of this tunnel. Except maybe death."
"Except maybe a woman being held hostage," Pete corrected.
Eastman grumbled under his breath, but turned around to resume the trek. If we just left Hell's Kitchen, he mused, this must be Hell's Garbage Disposal. Once he'd had the thought, he couldn't help seeing the robot's toothy jaws as the disposal's whirling blades, and that image didn't make anything any better.
After a few more minutes of slippery terrain, the end of the tunnel was exactly what they found. A rounded chamber, with water dripping into it from narrow gratings along the ceiling, it contained neither imprisoned civilians nor anything imminently deadly.
"Well, now what?" Eastman asked. He wasn't sure if he was talking to his partner or to the robot.
It was the robot who answered. It opened its jaws, but instead of speaking, it pivoted towards one of the cement block walls and began to chew. In what seemed like seconds, it had carved a hole large enough for itself.
Eastman didn't know on what basis he had formed an expectation about what would be on the other side of this hole, but somehow, there it already was. He expected darkness and silence. As he raised his flashlight, he found neither.
Cold light spilled out of the low opening, and there were voices. No - not voices. It sounded like the chattering of birds.
A New Yorker all his life, Eastman could hardly recognize any bird other than a pigeon. He certainly didn't know anything about their calls. But these noises, somehow, didn't sound like what he would expect from a happy bunch of avians. Then again, his spontaneous expectations definitely didn't include birds at all.
More cement fell away, bringing the top of the hole above his eye level, and Eastman realized with dreamlike clarity that he was already in one of those adrenaline-induced time warps where everything was happening much faster than it seemed. The robot, finished with its work, began to advance into the fluorescent-lit chamber. From across the garbage-strewn floor, figures were approaching, lightning-fast and molasses-slow at the same time.
They were chirping and they were howling and they weren't human.
When Eastman reacted, it was partly from training and partly from primal instinct. He dropped his flashlight and reached for his gun, knowing that his partner, just behind him, was doing the same. He identified the targets - four of them - and the civilians, a red-headed woman crouched on the floor.
He emptied the chamber. The shots echoed off the concrete walls, deafeningly loud. When the echoes died away, the four monsters lay motionless on top of the trash.
Three of them stayed that way. The fourth looked straight at him with golden eyes, turned its gaze to the woman, then lay its head down and moved no more.
It was the first time Eastman had shot anyone, and with mounting horror, he realized he had no idea who or what he had just shot.