So Many reviews! Thank you!
m klindt: Oh, slipping, slipping! I blame this clinical year. it is truly the hell they have warned us of. Trust me, things do not bode well for our boy:)
WestonFollower: Two reviews! That was totally an after-thought line I added at the very end, just prior to publishing the chapter. somehow it just made me smile, so I had to add it! HAHAHA! I know, the Mike thing was my little red herring I enjoyed dangling:)
Niom Lamboise: poor Steve! he will not soon let this go!
JRBarton: Aw thank you! and thank you also for your constant support and little checks on my well-being. you above many know what a struggle this year is and it warms my heart immensely to know of your support and continued help!
newsyd: muhahahaha, Hydra strikes again! Your english was nearly perfect! I applaud your duel languages, that is a feat I have yet to accomplish (as is proper mastery of the English language itself, LOL)
AvengerOfFiction: Oh, I hope you were not delayed too long! Yes, i did enjoy killing Mike off given the many plans I'm sure my readers panned over him :). Intents had be laughing so hard!
Ms. Hawkeye: Oh, it will only get worse from here, my friend.
Batghost: Yes, yes it is!
amy. .9: Laura is absolutely lovely in my mind! I will likely explore more of the Barton family in-laws soon!
discordchick: those poor agents. I really did like them:). Poor Clint, not thinking straight in the dark! Sometimes he really can get in his own way!
The Aftermath
Chapter 6
I swallowed hard, flexing my hand on the steering wheel. Laura sat on the floor of the truck cab. Her seat was pushed as far back as it could go, giving her just enough room to squeeze down and keep safe. I worried about Steve running after us. I almost wanted him too, at least then I knew we'd get him alone. At a time like this, I wanted, no needed, that assurance of who he kept company with. I wasn't about to pull the truck over and let the agents catch up to us. Who knows what they would end up doing to us.
I had to check what direction we were heading, up or down the mountain. For that I needed our compass. I fished around the seat for it, my eyes focused on the rearview mirror and the eventually headlights I expected to see. Laura knew what I searched for, found it herself, and dropped it in my palm. The overhead light flicked on momentarily while I checked it.
South. I cursed. North would have been better. The chance of larger cities, Billings, Bozeman. An airport. Chance to get away. South meant nothing beyond Cook City except Yellowstone. This sucked.
From her spot stuffed on the floor, Laura whispered my name.
"It's all right. We—" I closed my eyes, just for a moment, and forced myself to open them again. The road went hazy in front of me. I shook my head, trying to clear it but the haziness persisted.
"Clint?" she asked again, her voice raising.
I squeezed my eyes again, hoping somehow to inspire them to work. I wondered how hard I'd been hit by that big guy, Gavin. It was until my vision became dimmer, harder to clear, and when my head began spinning in circles, that I finally realized what had actually happened to me. The truck had to slow down. A bend in the roadway approached us, and suddenly I was filled with the thought of my three kids, Cooper, Lili, Nathaniel, all growing up parentless and being raised how I was raised. I couldn't let it happen to them. My foot switched from gas to stop and we began to swerve. A pit in the roadway swallowed half the right front tire and threw me against the window. Laura bounced up, screamed, and we careened away from the first cliff and into a copse of trees straight downhill. I clung to consciousness long enough to see the pine tree headed our way. Laura shot up, grabbed the wheel and helped me spin the tires. Our duel effort wouldn't be enough to avoid the trunk. We had little choice. It was either hit the tree, or fall down another drop off.
My body all at once stopped feeling. My hands, my feet, then my arms and legs, all went numb, limp, and my mind went utterly blank. A light began floating around in front of me and for a while I thought about chasing after it. I couldn't move. I tried to reach up and grab the floating orb, but it kept pulling away, bouncing farther down a path I couldn't find a way to walk down. It was as if I'd forgotten how to walk at all. A soft voice pressed in close to my ear. I tried adjusting my head, bringing it around to face whoever it was. A cascade of brown hair dropped down beside me. I smiled, vaguely recognizing it. It was an uphill climb to pull myself out of unconsciousness but the minute I did, all Hell seem to break loose around me.
The truck engine smoked. I could smell the distinct scent of burning wires and a deep-rooted fire brewing under its hood. Laura screamed, struggling to free herself from the floorboards. The tree we fought to avoid had smashed through the passenger door and now rested only a foot away from me. If Laura had been sitting in her seat, she'd be dead.
"CLINT!" she screamed again.
Fighting my body, I pulled at my seatbelt, found it had jammed, and reached down into my boot where I always kept my pocket knife. The mere act of bending sent a fire hot poker right through my side. I sat up again, gasping and pressed my hand against the pain. When I pulled it away, I found the blood. Apparently, Steve wasn't as bad a shot as I thought.
The fire brewing in the engine finally poked into the air. The orange/red tongues flicked beneath the seams of the hood and found fresh oxygen waiting for them. All at once, they erupted into a furnace. The heat burst across the dashboard, baking us alive. Laura managed to twist herself in place, reached into my boot and grabbed the bowie knife. Fighting the pain I reached out and took it from her. Within seconds I cut myself free, shoved the cab door open, and fell out of the truck onto the hard ground. I lay there in the dirt, panting and groaning like a stuck pig. Laura crawled across the driver's side floorboards and spilled out beside me.
"Clint? What is it? What happened?" she demanded, her hands tracing mine. They pulled away, stained in my blood, and her heart leaped into her throat.
"Get—the truck—away—explode-," I gasped, pushing myself up on my hands and knees. Laura threw a glance back at the now engulfed old pickup. She grabbed me around my chest, hauled me up. I stumbled over her and nearly lost consciousness a second time. I tried to keep upright, but my right leg kept dragging behind me. Laura guided us further down the hill, away from the wreckage.
A thick underbrush stopped us momentarily. The sound of snapping bark split the night skies. The pine tree caught fire. Damaged by the cars impact, uprooted half way already, the tree shook, tumbled over, and fell down the ravine, bringing the pickup with it.
I leaned away from my wife, trying to take the pressure of my weight off of her. My right leg attempted to support me, though it was deficient at its job. She came closer, bent down, and looked me over. Laura had been a late night trauma nurse for SHIELD before she was my wife. Fury, in a way, introduced us when he dragged me through her clinic one day years back. I knew right then I liked her. It took about a year to convince her she liked me too.
"I can't see anything in this light," she complained. "Clint you need to lie down. I have to look at this. Pull your hands away."
My back found another tree and I started sliding down it. The night around me went hazy and white as the bullet wound made me scream. Her hand caressed along the side of my face, and I settled. Her fingers worked my flannel shirt off, then yanked at the formerly white undershirt beneath. She pushed the fabric up my chest and I leaned my head down a little to see what she found. It was hard to tell anything in the poor lighting. A black looking puddle smeared around my waist, concentrating around my right side. Laura tugged the button of my trousers and yanked the zipper down. With them open, she pulled, letting my jeans fall off my hips. The second she did, I bucked backward, contorted my face and drew a hiss in through clenched teeth.
She ignored me. She was good at that. Her hands danced expertly over me, moving from front to back. They pressed against my pelvic bone, cruising higher as my body started to shake. She hadn't even reached the hole when I hollered again, pushed her away, and begged her to stop.
"Broken," she muttered to herself, thinking. She pulled my white shirt down again, took my left hand and pressed it against my side. To me, she said, "The bullet went through, unless it shattered to pieces. It got you in the top of your pelvis, might have gone through your colon. Clint, you have to hold pressure here while I go and get us some help. Understand?"
I shook my head furiously. "No, absolutely not. Laura you—"
She pulled away from my grip and started toward the roadway above us. I grabbed at the ground, using it to shove myself up.
"Stop! Clint, you're going to kill yourself if you keep this up!" Laura spun back to me. She dropped down, her hands forcing me to stay put.
"You can't go," I forced out.
A mind like hers, a doctor as good as she was, would not take that kind of order lying down. I had to explain, painful as it might be.
"Steve was there. He didn't know. He shot me and he didn't know it was me. He was with a bunch of them. He won't know who to trust." My eyes tightened shut. I kept my hand pressed tightly against my side. While I couldn't feel the broken bone beneath my fingers, I trusted it was there.
"Clint, if Steve is with them, he can get us out of this mess!" Laura exclaimed.
I shook my head vehemently. "Not if he's outnumbered. He used a gun, not his shield. He might not even have it. Laura, there are three good agents, dead back there. My gun is there. Our fingerprints."
"You think we're being framed for something?" Her voice was thick in shock and anger.
"I don't know. Maybe they followed us. Maybe they're planning to kill us. Laura, I don't know." I tried to force my eyes open again. Eventually I could see her. "Until we know, we're sure, we've got to stay away."
Truck tires grinding along a road echoed in the canyon. A reflection of headlights passed over the tree line just north of where we sat. The engines were loud, gravelly sounding machines chuck full of horsepower. Angry men sat behind their wheels and at least two of those men were friends, Avengers, who still had no idea Laura and I were in the mountains. Our cell phones went over the cliff. My spare gun, our supplies, everything gone. Exposed and alone in the cold darkness we sat and stared into the distance.
"We've got to move." I tried to stand on my own and failed. Laura wanted to keep me seated, tried to get me to stop moving, but when I was this bull-headed it rarely worked.
The tires screeched to a halt on the roadway above us. It was likely the agents uncovered our smoldering truck. I could hear the shouts of half a dozen voices as they piled out of slamming car doors. My finger nails dug into Laura's arm.
Run.
I fought to my feet. Forced my right leg up, in front of me, and down again. Pain shot up my leg from the bullet in my side. I buried my head in her neck to stave the cry I desperately wanted to let out. Shaking, Laura guided me down the hill, deeper into the mountain woodland, as the SHIELD and HYDRA agents hunted behind us.
I hated this. There were a few promises I made to my wife, whether I actually told her about them or not. One was about my life. I promised that nothing in my life, nothing in this stupid job I took would put her in danger. Work was work. It stayed there, never came home. For the most part my promise worked. I blamed Fury for my family's kidnapping. When Ultron hit, I brought the Avengers to my place, knowing it would be safe. Thinking it would. It wasn't until now I understood how wrong I had been all along.
Running for our lives from the very people I worked with, pledged my life to, hurt almost as much as the bullet in my side. I didn't know what we were going to do. I could only hope that somehow Steve might break away from the pack and find us first. Or perhaps Tony was there. He could scan the woods, find our heat signatures. Get to us before the agents could. I'd be able to explain everything.
My vision went fuzzy again. We were forced to stop. Laura set me down against a boulder and stooped down at my side again. Her probing fingers were like fire against my skin. I was still bleeding, hard. All this running around wasn't doing me any good.
She mumbled to herself. "I need a better way to wrap this. The wing is fractured. I can feel it. Might have hit the colon. Clint, how are you feeling?"
I missed her question. My teeth were digging into the back of my hand, helping me to endure her prodding. She stood and pulled me against her chest. I rested there, not moving, not able to speak. I knew all the things we had to do and couldn't. Find a car, drive to Red Lodge, sneak into an ER and get myself some help before I bled to death or worse.
"I want to go home," I whispered to her.
:(:):(:):
I eyed the bed greedily, limping across the berber carpet to drop right over into the queen-sized mattress. I was lucky the hotel owner remembered me, and even more so that he had my old room, just the way I liked it, and carrying all my necessities. Falling into a pile of goose down held no comparison to the comfort now spread out beneath me. God, it felt good. Laura came in behind me and gently closed the door. She set a bag down on the chair and began to rifle through it for some necessities. A spare pillowcase, ducktape, things she'd collected from the housing staff that no one would miss. The mistress of field medicine.
At first light we mounted the hill again in search of the main road. The last few hours of darkness had been pure torture. My side hurt. It tried its hardest to hold me back, but I knew that we had to keep going. SHIELD might send a jet at any time to comb the hills. The fact that Iron Man hadn't made an appearance made me less inclined to think Tony had come out with the group. That was good. Steve might be able to defend himself against a coup of ten armed men, but Tony was just a regular guy. Smarter than anyone I knew, but still that didn't make him any more immortal than me.
Reaching the roadside, Laura left me along the embankment and stepped onto the small two-lane street. Eventually she flagged down a couple heading south. Our story was simple and true. Car crash. We'd hoped after hours of coming up empty the SHIELD agents had returned to the crime scene to comb through it daylight. That meant my gun, and my rifle, were soon to be in SHIELD hands. My fingerprints might come up on them unless someone who knew me, trusted me, got hold of them first and buried the fact. So far we hadn't exactly been that lucky.
We arrived at my bolt hole around three in the afternoon.
The weight on the bed shifted. My right eye opened, watching as Laura settled down next to me. I know she planned to check me over. I hadn't exactly warmed up to that idea just yet. She had to check the bullet's track. Despite being a through-and-through we both knew something inside me busted free. Bones I never really felt before grinded over themselves and pinched a cluster of nerves. Occasionally they'd clamp down hard enough and I'd get an electric jolt of pain that shot right across me.
I eyed my wife, the gloves on her hand, and the bottle of alcohol she held. I tended to get into trouble on missions and kept a few necessities in a go bag just for such occasions. Miguel, the Super 8 owner, kept my bag in a downstairs locker for me should I ever wind up in town again. He was one of the few people out here with the impression that I was a spy. He liked the idea of being "in-the-know".
"Can we not do this and say we did?" I asked.
She smiled a little, but I could tell she was not enjoying this like she used to. I remember the first day walking into the old clinic she worked in. Laura was putting herself through the world's most intense residency training and spent her nights doing ER shifts for a SHIELD pop tent, or field medic station. I tried to come on to her day one and she laughed in my face. The next time we got together, she practically poured salt in my wounds. She enjoyed that sort of thing. Knocking me down a few pegs.
"Can you do me a favor and go six months without bleeding?"
Touche`. She won. I leaned up, tugging my shirt away from the flesh it stuck to. I winced.
"Just lay down and let me do that." Laura told me. She unclipped my pants again and tugged them down far enough to see my hips. Apparently, I didn't look any better from that angle. My body started shaking again about an hour before and had yet to stop. I felt a fever coming on, accompanied by cold sweats and all those things I hated about being on the verge of a septic infection. Being shot in the field was not as easy to manage as the movies make it out to be. It sucks, and I hate it. Case closed.
The alcohol hit my flesh like a splash of ice water. I shot up in surprise, then the burn followed and I grasped out blindly for a pillow. Laura noticed at once and grabbed one for me. I turned my head to the side and buried my screams.
Laura soaked a towel in alcohol. My red, swollen side burned as she cleared the blood away and disinfected what she could. Her hand wrapped around my back and the sting got worse. I bucked against her, trying to squirm away from the pain. Laura held tight to me until my side became so painful it just turned numb.
Then, she went in for the kill. Her hands pressed up the wing of my pelvis, tracing a line until she reached the bullet wound. My entire body spasmed. I couldn't catch my breath. She intended to probe the wound, front and back, should she find something even worse than just a random gun tract. She liked throwing the word peritonitis around. I'll admit, I had to look that one up the next time I found a dictionary or Google. In basic terms, she figured I had a hole in my intestines and they were leaking out. That alone tended to line up with my typical luck.
Laura only went so far. I guess she got tired of me writhing and soaking a pillow in tears. I'm not ashamed to admit it. You go get yourself shot (please don't) and tell me you don't feel the pain after spending a whole night in the woods.
"Clint, you need medication. Something better than asprin." Laura gently lifted the pillow from my face and looked down at me. Flushed red and sweating, I must have been some sight to see.
I didn't reply. I couldn't.
"I'm going to go see what I can find. I need you to stay here and don't try to do something stupid."
"No!"
Laura pulled away from me and slid from the bed. I reached for the back of her shirt to try and stop her, but she'd already moved across the room.
"Laura, no . . . you can't risk . . . stop—"
She wasn't listening. I had no idea what she planned to do, or how. Through my fuzzy vision I watched her strip off her shirt and grab one of my spares. There were no sleeves and she folded the bottom up her waist and fastened it beneath the wire of her bra. In essence, she made a crop top.
"What are you doing?" I whispered.
"Going to the pool. Maybe I'll meet a teenager I can buy some marijuana from." That was her, my wife, in all her glory.
"Avenger's don't smoke joints," I complained. Apparently, she did not agree.
While I laid sprawled out on the bed, mentally fighting off infection, pain, and the fever slowly taking hold she slid out of the room with her key card in a back pocket. I didn't see her again until she stole back inside. Her arms fed beneath mine, dragging me upright against the head board. Laura sat down on the bed beside me and extracted two blue pills from a vial she found and placed it in my mouth. I swallowed reflexively. I worried that somehow she'd found a pharmacy, put her name on paper, and written me an actual prescription. She was a doctor and had full license to do it. I also knew, Laura was smarter than that. She eventually told me the story. I shouldn't have been at all surprised.
Laura headed right to the pool, up the corridor and across from the vending machines around the same time half a dozen traveling RVers did. A gaggle of kids dove through the steam rooms and into the clear water. Summer vacation was coming to a quick close, a fact that weighed heavily on me. Our own kids needed to start school soon. Time at the grandparents would be short lived, if we could ever find another place to bring them.
At nearing four in the afternoon, lazy mothers and fathers trying to take a rest from the multi-hour drive clung to the outskirts of the room. Their feet were propped up on cushioned benches, some even wore wide-brimmed sunhats as if the tropics had made an appearance in the sleepy Montana town. Laura spied around the room at them all, picked her victim, and went in for the kill. She dropped down onto a bench by a woman wearing a white and yellow flowered bikini and reading a romance novel. The woman grinned at once.
"Looks like you're overdressed!" She exclaimed in a friendly way, the twinge of a Southern accent twanging her voice.
"Don't I know it!" Laura replied, falling onto the bench. She pressed a hand to her forehead and became an actress worthy of any walk-on roll. "Driving for weeks, not a single thing goes wrong. Then all of a sudden my husband gets this great idea to go off and play a joke on me. We were out camping and I leave for a minute to pee. I come back and he moved the truck. I guess he thought he was being funny. Anyway, the entire thing rolls right down a hill!" She sighed, shaking her head. "Men."
The woman laughed. "Oh no! All your things?"
"Gone. Thank goodness I saved my wallet, but I get the absolute worst migraines and off my pills rolled down the hill." Laura cast the woman a sympathetic eye, rubbing her temple dramatically, "He just gave me one big one too. I hoped the air in here might make me feel better."
"Oh you need something better than that, Jenny? Hey, Jenny, hand me my purse."
The woman known as Jenny grabbed the large, hulking thing and teetered over with her four Southern Belle friends. Hearing the retelling of Laura's predicament, suddenly my wife was inundated with a pharmacy for fifteen bottles of prescription medications. Apparently, they too had husbands who liked to cause headaches in their wives.
Laura smiled down at me and shrugged. "Apparently one of them has back pain. She gets a new script every couple weeks. She had two and a half bottles and gave me the half."
"What are they?" I asked, knowing it didn't actually matter. I was desperate.
"Morphine."
A look of white-washed shock passed over my face. "What?!"
She shrugged. "Look, Clint, we can discuss the legitimacy of a woman with back pain being on morphine later. Right now we have bigger issues."
"Bigger than me being shot?"
Her chin raised and lowered. "I was coming back here from the pool. I glanced at the front office and there was a team of fifteen men checking in, at least. I could see SHIELD logos on their uniforms."
I cursed under my breath and jostled myself upright. Laura moved back a little to give me room but continued to speak.
"You were right about Steve, he's with them. I don't think they saw me."
I edged my feet over the side of the bed, grunting the entire way. I wasn't sure how long the morphine would take to kick in or if it would even help this far along.
"What are you doing?" She asked.
"Phone," I replied, pointing at it. Laura moved across the room and grabbed it from the small desk. She set it down beside me. "Pressing 2 dials out, block the number. *67. Let me see it."
The old phone base spun toward me. I focused on the numbers to make my vision clear. The first two times, I typed wrong. Frustrated, angry, and hurting worse, I shoved the base at her and fell into the pillows again. My hand held my side as I panted.
"Steve's cell phone," I tried to explain.
She set the phone down, punched in the number 2, then *67 and looked up at me. I told her the number and she listened on the other line for the ringing to start. I reached out for the receiver one it did. The line rang, repeated, the trill continuing on until I was positive either Steve hadn't carried his phone with him or just wasn't answering a blocked call.
Too tired to hold up the receiver I let it sit on the pillow beside me instead. "Try again. Dial again," I muttered.
Laura repeated the process. The phone began a second course of shrill tones. I mentally willed my teammate to answer. He had to answer. If he didn't, the minute I saw him again, Steve was going to get shot in the—
"Rogers, who's this?"
I was so relieved to hear his voice I almost forgot to speak. Laura's hands flew up to her mouth. Salvation was in sight at last.
"Steve," I whispered, keeping my voice low enough not to be overheard by any others in the room, "Don't say my name. Don't look excited. If you know who this is, just say "yes"."
The line was silent for a time, then finally I heard, "Yes."
Relief washed over me. "Thank God, Steve, I need you to move away from the agents you are with. First look at them, tell them I am an old friend, and move away. Get to the window. If you understand me, laugh."
The Captain's hearty chuckle burst through the connection before he said something too low to hear. His ear pressed against the phone a second time and he muttered quietly to me, "Care to tell me what this is about?"
"Shh," I told him. "When you're away, tell me the weather."
I could hear Steve sigh, the scrape of a window, and a sudden gust of air distorted the feedback. "It's not bad out. Little cold in the morning but the heat kills you during the day. How's New York?"
"I'm not in New York, I'm in this hotel. Look, I need you to get away from the men you're with. I don't care what you tell them I just need—" I inhaled sharply. My mistake to try and sit up, then talk, all at the same time.
"Hey—"
"Don't say my name!" I nearly shouted at him. Laura placed her hand on my arm and I shook my head at her. I was all right. To Steve I said, "Room 108, first floor. Don't be seen. If you understand, tell me about the mountains."
Steve paused again. I could almost hear the gears turning around in his mind. "The view's all right. Lot of trees and bears out this way. Can't see much of the mountains this side of the hill."
"Good, get down here."
"All right. I'll see you around."
I handed the receiver back to Laura.
"He's coming?" Laura asked.
I nodded my head. Utterly exhausted.
So sorry this is taking so long! I have an original that is stealing my time, an Emergency rotation for the next 16 days, and only the single most important exam in my veterinary career (my certification) coming up. Please forgive! and please review!
