Chapter 33

Chapter 33

Bodies. Three dead S.H.I.E.L.D. agents lay at the foot of the stairwell, barely a mark on them. What had happened here? And how had the Chitauri managed to breach the ship so quickly? The Triskelion was designed to thwart this kind of frontal attack!

Natasha?

No. Steve pushed the errant thought out of his mind. Natasha had been with Fury when the incident occurred. He'd watched the gliders come in and open fire from across the harbor. It was bad enough he felt uneasy about Natasha ever since she'd been injured, but now it appeared they had mole in their midst. The hatch he'd dove through should have been locked down the moment S.H.I.E.L.D. realized the ship was under attack.

Sirens indicated someone had given the alarm. The only light in the dim hallway came from flashing red lights, the stench of smoke giving the facility an insidious feel. He leaned against the wall for support, getting his bearings as he took the weight off his leg and enjoyed the absence of pain shooting all the way up to his crotch. Broken? Or just a sprain? The latter, he hoped. At least he could walk so long as he didn't keep any weight on the injured limb. He fished his cell phone out of his soggy pocket, thankful Fury had made him get one that was waterproof. It lit up, but no bars. Broken? Or were the Chitauri blocking the signal?

Where was everybody? It was Sunday, a time when staffing was normally pretty low. It was also a few days before Thanksgiving. Many S.H.I.E.L.D. members had taken the week off to fly home to spend time with their families. The aliens must have been aware of this weakness and chosen to attack while their ranks were thin. But why? What was important about this facility, other than the fact it provided a base of command close to a major metropolitan area?

Steve had navigated the fortress many times, but this was his first time coming in through something other than the front door. He examined the signs on the doors, some hinting at what lay within, others having an obscure alpha-numeric code. C-421. Fourth-level deck, third spiral arm of the triangle, room 21. He needed to get to A-217, the room where they stored his armor. Down two levels and across the heart of the fortress. Leaning against the wall to take pressure off his injured leg, Steve moved through the ship, his breathing ragged as daggers shot up his leg.

He paused when he got to the junction of the three wings. Footsteps marched in unison, more than Steve could hope to take on in his compromised condition. He faded into the shadows, holding his breath so his ragged breathing wouldn't alert them to his presence. Three soldiers passed, wearing S.H.I.E.L.D. uniforms, but something about the way they marched gave Steve pause. Most S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were former military, but even the lowest-ranking agent tended to be a bit of a misfit like Hawkeye or Natasha. They were the elite, and they frequently had the egos to go with that. That meant agents didn't usually march in orderly lines unless they were doing a training drill.

His suspicions were confirmed with the group stepped over a body without pausing to check the man's pulse. Yes. S.H.I.E.L.D. had been infiltrated. He waited until they moved into one of the wings before moving across the large central chamber. The click of a safety being slipped off an automatic weapon inches from the back of his head made him freeze.

"Who's the president of the United States?" a voice hissed. A voice that was familiar.

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt," Steve said, breathing a sigh of relief. "Clint. Don't scare me like that."

"Sorry," Clint said, holstering his weapon. "Had to make sure it was really you."

Clint gestured for him to follow, hurrying down the hall until he got to one of the anonymous doorways. Tapping twice, pausing, and then tapping once, he counted to three and then slipped inside, tugging Steve in behind him and shutting the door with a soft 'click.' He fiddled on the table, clicking on a small battery lantern.

"What happened here?" Steve asked.

"Don't know, exactly," Clint said, keeping his voice low. "I was down in logistics, poring over some South Pacific navigation charts trying to figure out where our friends might have disappeared off the map. Next thing I know, our own people are shooting at us."

A low moan came from the back of the room. "Clint?"

"Come," Clint said, tugging him towards a door at the back of the room. "She's hurt pretty bad." He grabbed the lantern off the table then gave the same knock, twice pause once, before opening the door. "I'm here, Maria. I found Steve."

Maria Hill sat slumped against the wall, her eyes filled with pain as she panted for breath. A wet, dark stain was visible on her dark uniform, even in the dim emergency lighting. Gut shot. A wound that could kill you if it wasn't treated right away.

"I've done everything I can for her," Clint said, fishing through the first aid kit already laying open at her side. He pulled out a package of clean gauze. "We've got to get her out of here or she isn't going to make it."

"Like hell," Maria panted, coughing as Clint gently moved the hand she had clutched to her abdomen, the previous gauze already saturated with blood. He pressed a fresh bandage against the wound. Maria looked up at Steve. "What the hell happened to you? You look like crap."

"The usual," Steve said, waving off the burn to his arm and pointing to his leg. "Just a sprain." His entire body was soot-ridden and his shirt so charred it barely clung to his body anymore, but the fabric had taken the brunt of the damage.

Maria waved Cliff away, grabbing the gauze and applying pressure herself. "Take care of him, will you? Before Fury chews my ass off for letting his prize super-soldier get all banged up."

Both Steve and Clint understood this was tough talk. Maria's way of taking control of a situation when there was little control left to be taken. If they didn't get her out of here quick and find a real doctor to treat her wounds, she'd bleed out. Even in the faint light, Steve could see her skin was too pale and clammy, a blue tint around her lips. Then again, maybe Maria was right?

"Can you help me splint this?" Steve asked Clint, pointing to his leg. "If you can stabilize it, I think I can fight. But I'll only do it under one condition."

"What?" Maria asked, her words coming out a pain-filled gasp.

"You're going to have to lay down so your heart doesn't have to work so hard, okay?" Steve said, forcing his voice to remain calm. "Then I'm gonna let Clint patch me up so we can both go for help. We'll take these alien buggers."

"Get them the hell off my ship," Maria ordered.

Maria gasped in pain as they helped her lay flat and propped her legs up higher than heart on a stack of photocopy paper. The room was spartanly furnished, leaving no blanket to cover her to fend off shock, and none of them was wearing a coat. Steve's shirt was too charred to provide any warmth, but Clint pulled the shirt off his back, ignoring her protests as he used it to cover her. Steve shoved fresh gauze into the wound to stem the bleeding while Clint searched for something to splint his leg. He finally ended up snapping off the legs of a chair, twisting the square metal tubing until it had the right shape. Steve yelped as Clint sliced his pant-leg and tugged on his foot to see if the bone was dislocated.

"Just like a guy," Maria said, her grim expression not matching the jest in her words. "Nothing but a big baby." There was fear in her eyes. Her life's blood was seeping out of her body and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

"Yeah, that's me," Steve said, grabbing Maria's hand and squeezing it. "Just a big baby. Need a strong woman to hold my hand and show me how it's done."

Maria nodded, gratitude in her eyes at the lie. Her hand clutched his as though her life depended on it which, in a way, it did. He was no good to anybody like this. The sooner Clint could stabilize the leg, the sooner he could help them fight their way out of here.

"It's broken," Clint said. "Just above the ankle, it looks like from the bruising. But it doesn't look like the bone has gone out of alignment. So long as we stabilize it, I think you can fight."

"Do it," Steve said, thankful he wouldn't have to endure another bone-setting with nothing but a dirty stick to bite down on. Been there. Done that. Getting a broken bone reset on the battlefield with five guys in a muddy trench holding you down while a sixth battle buddy yanked on your broken bone until got set right, or you passed out from the pain, was no fun.

Clint was efficient about setting the makeshift splint, ripping padding out of the chair he'd just destroyed to wrap the leg before he placed the splints around it. He used strips of vinyl and cloth, cut from the chair and a bench, to tie it tight. Steve gave Maria's hand one last squeeze and lurched to his feet, clamping down at the pain as he tested it out. It hurt like a bastard, almost as much from the splint digging into his leg as from the break, but that excruciating grinding feeling was gone. It was stable.

"We'll send someone for you as soon as we fight our way out of here," Clint promised Maria.

"Steve," Maria said, her voice vulnerable. "The Psi-Ops team. They've been compromised. That's where the breach occurred. I think they're after your pet alien."

"I'll check in on him after I get you out of here," Steve said.

"No," Maria coughed. "If they want him badly enough to storm the ship, there must be something they don't want him to tell us. You've got to make sure they don't get whatever they came for. Got it?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Steve said. Wounded or not, next to Nick Fury, Maria Hill was S.H.I.E.L.D.'s second-in-command.

"Clint," Maria ordered. "Get to Fury and tell him what we know."

"We don't know much," Clint said.

"We know about a dozen of our Psi-Ops team was compromised," Maria said. "These weren't people that just came on board. These were people I've known for years. Good men. I don't know why they turned, but all of a sudden it was like I was talking to robots. And then they shot me."

"Effects of the Tesseract cube?" Clint asked grimly.

"I don't think so," Maria said. "Their eyes didn't glow blue. I kicked one in the head, thinking that was the problem. It didn't snap him out of it."

"Some other form of mind control?" Steve asked.

"The guy I fought was a hell of a lot stronger than any human," Maria said. She winced in pain. The gunshot wound wasn't the only injury she was sporting, just the most serious. "I think these bastards somehow took out our guys and … I don't know … used prosthetics or something to make themselves look like them?"

…The French villagers had told tales of shape shifters. Monsters that sucked the brains out of your head and then turned into you…

"Steve?" Clint said. "You ready to rock and roll?"

"Rock … and roll?" Steve asked, feigning cluelessness.

"Bastard!" Maria coughed, holding her wounded abdomen. "Don't make me laugh. That joke only worked the first few weeks we thawed you out, Capsicle!"

Steve gave her hand a squeeze, then rose, still favoring the leg, but able to walk. He noted the fear in her eyes as she took shallow breaths to lessen the pain and closed her eyes. They were leaving her here alone. Helpless. At some point either the aliens would get what they came for and leave, or the military proper would storm the fortress and take it back. The question was, would anybody get to Maria in time to save her life? With no bars on his phone to inform somebody where to find her, if they didn't regain the fortress quickly, Maria was a dead woman. He made his way through the room to the door to the corridor.

"Where's your bow and arrows?" Steve asked.

"Where's your shield?" Clint retorted.

They gave each other a 'we're so screwed' look.

"Guess that takes the 'super' out of the super-soldier, then," Clint shrugged. He pulled his sidearm and chambered a bullet, his pale arms glistening past his khaki wife beater where he'd removed his shirt. Steve rubbed his hand along his own charred clothing and smeared soot on his colleague's arms, grunting approval when Clint's skin took on a mottled appearance of a muddy zebra.

"I always thought the 'super' part was highly over-rated," Steve said. "The only thing I ever wanted to be was a regular soldier."

With a grunt and a nod, they parted ways, Clint heading for the surface while Steve made his way deeper into the bowels of the ship.

X

Note: A little Clint-love for those of you who are Hawkeye fans. He wasn't in the original UA thread for this scenario, but what the heck! Why write fanfic if you can't change the facts? I do enough factual writing for my day job. If I wanted facts, I'd entertain myself at night watching television!

Exsanguination (bleeding out) occurs when the amount of blood in your body drops so low there's no longer enough pressure in your arteries for your heart to pump it to your tissues. Think of it as siphoning gasoline … you have to suck the air out of the tubes and keep enough liquid in them at all times or the gas stops flowing. Elevating the wounded area above the level of your heart, applying pressure, and laying flat with your feet elevated can prolong your life until medical help can arrive. Unfortunately, with a wound to the torso, there –is- no way to keep it higher than the rest of your body.

A bullet to the abdomen can prove fatal not simply from exsanguination, but from the sepsis that results from fecal coliform bacteria leeching into the abdominal cavity from pierced intestines. It's the reason old Western movies always depict the cowboy who is gut shot asking the others to leave him a gun with one bullet in the chamber. Sepsis (blood poisoning) is a horrible way to die, with pain, high fever, and seizures, that can take days to kill you even if a doctor removes the bullet and stitches you up. Thankfully, these days most gut shot patients survive if treated promptly with a fierce regiment of antibiotics. If the intestinal rupture is bad, surgeons may need to cut into your abdominal cavity and, quite literally, vacuum it out with saline after they stitch the pierced intestine back together.

Poor Maria Hill! They need to kick those aliens off the ship fast or she isn't going to make it…

Don't forget to drop a review in the little comments box below. Reviews make me smile … and also weigh in whether to save Maria's life or let her bleed to death in a dark supply closet.

[*Bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah!*]