An hour later I sat in the living room of Tony Stark's home at the top of Stark Tower. I had found my bag, (he really did have a coat check in closet…I thought that was just blatant saracasm) showered and changed. The dress I was wearing was a favorite, made a few years ago by my mother from a polka dot material I had fallen in love with and an oversized Rob Zombie t-shirt. Sounds like an odd combination, but my mother had a major dressmaking talent, and I had been obsessed with Rockabilly pin-ups. She'd made a swing dress for me for my birthday that year. But that was before.
The living room had a wall that was made of glass, and even though it was at a different angle of the tower than the bedroom, it did not matter. The entire sky had been engulfed by the strange storm. Clouds swirled and danced, green bolts of lightening marred the sky in jagged tears before fizzling out so that more could take their place. The booms were deafening and shook the walls…being that high up in the Stark Tower, the Avengers Tower, we felt as though we were in the middle of that hellish storm.
The Avengers. I'd seen their faces on the television, read stories about them in the paper. World's REAL Superheroes, a group put together by Nick Fury to protect the world. And now here they sat, in Tony's living room, assembled again, because it sure the fuck looked like the world needed protecting.
A God was among them, one of them. Just to be near one of the Ancient Ones of the old ways, it was mesmerizing. Thor's tone was quiet as he said, "This is Loki. I can feel that this is all him, and yet I do not know what he is doing. He has escaped Asgard-"
"-and it looks like he is pissed," Fury intereupted. "The last time we faced him, he tried to destroy us all. He did pretty good, but nothing gets past you all." He bared his teeth in a grin that was very feral. "This shit he is cooking up now, though…well, I don't know what too make of it."
"Aren't you the God of Thunder?" Tony spun to look at Thor and flicked his hand at him. "Isn't this kind of weather radar supposed to be your specialty?"
"This is like nothing I have ever summoned or seen," Thor said thoughtfully. "I do not know what power Loki has tapped into, or what he has made a deal with now."
"Well, if he flies by riding a bicycle that turns into a broom, then I can tell you how this is going to end, cause I have seen that one," Bruce Banner said in his soft way.
Tony snorted. "As long as he doesn't have flying monkeys. Cause that would suck. They throw their-"
"Yeah, we get it," Natasha Romanoff said, holding up her hand to shush him. Tony complied, but pouted in her direction.
I drew my knees up to my chest. The black couch against the crisp white walls would have been impressive, except that the green shocks outside kept lighting everything up with a sickly glow. It was giving me a nauseated feeling in the pit of my stomach. JARVIS suddenly piped up to say that there was a very interesting broadcast that he was picking up, and did Sir want him to play it. "Hit me, baby," Tony said.
The broadcast sounded military and at first was a very jumbled mess of fast talking, several people at once. "Can you smooth that out a little, JARVIS? Make it so we can hear one at a time?" Tony asked. The A.I. complied immediately, and one voice pierced through the air. My stomach flip flopped again.
It was a woman. "I-I don't know what is happening. This may be the last time I ever talk to you, and I can't even talk to you….Baby, I wish you had picked up. Listen, stay inside, okay. Janie and I were out at the club when this storm hit…." Static interrupted her ,"…lights went out…we went outside and the lightening was amazing, and then it started raining, so we grabbed a cab. Baby, it was fucking awful…there was this man in the road, like he couldn't see…he just wandered right out into the road, and the cabbie swerved, but we hit him. Oh my god, we fucking HIT him, HARD." more static… " stopped, Janie was screaming and crying…and we got out, and he was fucking trying to get up, he was TRYING TO GET UP, but his legs were all crumpled under him and they wouldn't work, his back looked broken…and he kept making this awful gurgling growling sound. FUCK, it was fucking awful…His head was all bloody, but he kept trying to get up…and then he was clawing at the ground, and dragging himself over to us, and I kept backing up, and so did the cab driver, but Janie, she just stood there screaming. I grabbed her and tried to drag her, but she was hysterical, and saying, "We have to help him, we have to help him", and we were soaked from that GODDAMN RAIN….and he grabbed her fucking leg and BIT HER. OH MY GOD HE BIT HER LEG AND WOULDN'T LET GO, AND…" there was a loud beep, and a voice said "End of messages."
We all sat silent for a moment. "That was a voicemail," Hawkeye said. "And a crazy one. Are there more?"
JARVIS played another. This one was actual pieces of a conversation between two men. "What the fuck is this shit about?" The first man said. "The news was saying something about a freak storm, they have no idea what caused it…the power went out and came back on and I've lost TV signal now."
"Fuck, dude, I have no idea. Michelle and I are at the hospital, her aunt is in here, ya know, and the lights started flickering. The nurse said it was okay, cause the back up generators kick in when the main power fails. But then somebody down the hall started screaming, and we could hear more shouts from all over the place in there, the phones started ringing in the nurses station, someone was yelling about ICU being full of crazies…" the second man said. He sounded out of breath. "We just barricaded ourselves in her Aunt's room, and I called you. Something bad is going on man."
"Why the fuck are you barricaded in a hospital room? And what is that sound?"
In the background of the phone converstation we could hear a strange muffled screaming noise and scraping, scratching. "That's them, that's why I called," the second man said. "There are people outside of the door, and they are trying to get into the fucking room. I swear, dude, I swear…"
"WHAT?" the first man screamed.
"You remember all those nights when we were kids, and we would sneak back down to the living room late at night and watch those zombie movies? Scare ourselves senseless, and have nightmares for like a week, and then do it all over again?" The man was laughing now, but it also sounded like he was crying too. "Well, bro, it's like that here. It's like that now. I don't know if it's some kind of a virus, or the fucking apocalypse, but it's just like all those fucking movies we watched."
The scratching in the background grew louder, and then there was a sickening splintering sound, followed by screaming. The man on the other end of the phone was screaming his brother's name over and over when Tony told JARVIS to stop. There were more transmissions, some were so awful that I feel guilty for being able to tell you about them now…the kind of things that make you wish you hadn't lived to hear them. Calls between mothers and their children, lovers dying in car crashes but calling home to give their goodbyes, and always, always screaming. And while we were listening, the rain stopped.
"I-I can't take this anymore", I said. "This can't be real, it just can't…I've got to get some air."
Tony pressed a button and the glass wall slid partially open. I walked out onto the huge balcony and took a deep breath of air. It seemed off, heavy, full. I walked toward the edge. "I don't know if that is such a good idea," he yelled. "The wind could pick back up and toss you over."
"Can you hear that?" I asked him. There was a noise, like a low moaning, but intensified, multiplied, times a thousand. Or maybe a million. It was loud, haunting. Like the sound the wind makes when it blows through the eaves, only sadder…or madder, I couldn't tell which at first. I walked to the edge of the building and looked down. "WHAT THE FUCK? Have you got binoculars?"
"Of course he does, he's a pervert," Natasha quipped, gaining her a laugh from the rest of the team, and a glare from Tony. He mumbled to himself as he dug out a couple of pairs of binoculars, and they all joined me at the edge of the balcony.
When I looked through them my heart jerked in my chest. I heard a gasp from my right, as Tony put a pair up to his eyes. "What is it?" Bruce asked. "What are all those people doing?"
Through the binoculars I could see the throngs of people in the street below were not just standing at the base of Stark Tower waiting on a show from Iron Man or for the Avengers to come and save them. They weren't waiting in line for the city bus or a coney at Fred's Hot Dog Wagon. The faces were vacant, lifeless, many covered in blood. Dead eyes shone in the light from the still flashing lightening and the street lamps that were flickering below. Some of them were kneeling on the ground around something else…then the something else would twitch, they would move a little and I could see the body underneath them. The blood, so much fucking blood. A child, around 10, expressionless, slowly walked into my line of vision, an arm in his hands. The arm was still wearing a watch. I watched in horror and fascination as he took a deep bite out of it and then meandered back into the crowd. Occasionally a scream could be heard and the crowd would moan even louder in unison, like one collective mind. Not sad. Not mad. Hungry.
My stomach jolted and tried to revolt. I handed the binoculars off to Bruce, like they were a poisonous snake that I needed to be rid of right then. "They're eating."
"Eating what?" Steve asked cautiously. He hadn't a word until now, just listened.
"Eating us," Tony murmured.
