Chapter 20: A Tale of Two Hunters
Baron von Strucker stood on the amphitheater at Mount Rushmore National Park, watching the HYDRA soldiers making their preparations. Two million tons of explosives were being packed into the American national monument, in an event that would soon be televised to every American screen in the country. In a show of force, and to further subjugate the people of the nation they now controlled, HYDRA would be destroying Mount Rushmore and unveiling new plans to display monuments of the current and past heads of HYDRA in its place.
Behind Strucker was the Avenue of Flags, a row of pillars flanking each side of the walkway, each one with four flags on it. The pillars were positioned so that the visitors would have to walk between the rows of flags to reach the amphitheater from which they could view Mount Rushmore. There were fifty-six flags in total, representing the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the three territories and two commonwealths the United States still possessed. Currently, his men were tearing down the flags and replacing them with banners bearing the HYDRA symbol of a skull surrounded by six tentacles. The flags, once they had been cut down, were being amassed at the base of the amphitheater, behind the area where Strucker was to make his speech to the people of the newly renamed country Amerika.
It was all part of HYDRA's plan to remodel America in their image. As a member of Amerika's new ruling body, the Council of HYDRA, Strucker had been hard at work helping the other heads to alter the symbolism and norms of the old United States. The pervasiveness of ideas like democracy, freedom, and liberty in United States culture sickened Strucker. Ideas like that were degenerate and antithetical to HYDRA's ideals. American democratic ideas and their so-called "rights" like freedom of speech had been demonized on all fronts. Any films or entertainment programs that celebrated the United States had been relabeled as "depraved filth." Pro-HYDRA propaganda was constantly flooding public television, radio, and newspapers, with no exceptions. Strucker had worked especially hard on his pet project: a remodeling of all children's programming to aggressively support HYDRA.
Before the scheduled destruction of Mount Rushmore, Strucker was participating in a holo-conference call with the other HYDRA heads. They'd all been summoned by Doctor Doom for a status update on progress in taking over Amerika.
"The project is on schedule," Strucker announced. "Destruction of the monument is scheduled to take place in thirty minutes."
"Excellent." It was one of the other heads of Hydra, Doctor Werner Reinhardt. The doctor was one of the most respected HYDRA heads, having served personally alongside the Red Skull during World War II. "This will be the next step in crushing the will of the people. Though they are rebellious, they fail to understand we do all this so that they themselves may prosper. It will take time."
"Where is Zemo?" asked Octavian Bloom, another of the HYDRA heads. He was referring to Helmut Zemo, a former colonel with the Sokovian Armed Forces and a leader of one of their elite paramilitary death squads. Zemo had approached the Council of HYDRA shortly after the Battle of New York and the surrender of the United States, revealing himself as the mastermind behind the split in the Avengers that the world had witnessed almost a year ago. One of their S.H.I.E.L.D. undercover agents, Mitchell Carson, had strongly vouched for Zemo, citing a long history where the two of them had supported HYDRA's goals towards world conflicts. Hence, Zemo had joined their inner circle for his brilliant tactical mind.
"This was a mandatory conference call," said Bloom. "Ward isn't here either."
"Ward is on a mission," Doctor Reinhardt said. "He sends his regards."
Strucker frowned. Grant Ward was another of the HYDRA heads, a former HYDRA infiltrator in S.H.I.E.L.D. who Doctor Reinhardt had claimed as his prodigy. The other HYDRA heads respected Ward for his history in Phil Coulson's special operations unit, but sometimes it seemed that the doctor gave Ward a little too much freedom.
"Instruct your men," Doom ordered the heads, re-centering the conversation around himself. "Round the heroes of this nation up for judgement. The traitor Magneto's space station, Asteroid M, has been recommissioned by my forces. We are jamming any and all communications attempts with the outside world or off-planet. Amerika is isolated. Overwhelm the heroes with your numbers. The ones you kill, hang where the world can see."
A policeman man from Captain Stacy's squad walked through the sewer tunnels, on his patrol route. The cops had taken security patrols to ensure the secrecy of the lair remained intact. More and more cops were joining them every day, and they couldn't risk being discovered.
The policeman's name was Jefferson Davis. At least, it had been before the alien invasion. Now they were in a whole new world. When he'd been a skinny kid in Brooklyn, he'd constantly been getting into fistfights a crime. Eventually he'd landed behind bars and been cut a deal to serve as an undercover agent in exchange for shaving some years off his sentence. Now here he was, a member of New York's finest with a loving wife and a son who was obsessed with Spider-Man. He was happy. At least, he had been, before the world changed.
He was underground now. He'd searched and searched for his family without luck. No longer happy; it was a different feeling now. A heavy, simpler feeling in the back of his skull. He felt differently about animals now, too. The cats and the mice . . . he respected them. He'd used to look down on them as vermin, but now he had to admit that he admired their tenacity and their ability to survive in the sewers. We aren't so different, he thought as he watched a rat scamper off a nearby tunnel.
But the change had turned many things on their head. Just as today, things were turned on their head again. Jefferson Davis had been a hunter, while serving on the NYPD. He'd hunted down criminals and brought them to justice time and time again. But today, he did not hunt.
Today, he was hunted.
The hunter had tracked Jefferson Davis through almost three miles of pipe. He had made several scouts into the sewers over the past couple of days, each one more successful than the last. He had determined exactly where the turtles' lair was. He knew that there was no one in the lair now save for a group of policemen. Policemen were not his prey, and not his concern. Let them go on thinking they could somehow save the city. That was none of his business.
But the hunter had done his research. He knew that the turtles had once been allied with the Shredder's adopted daughter Karai, who had become a mutant and gone into hiding ever since, appearing every now and again.
He'd seen her in the sewers last, and he was certain that she was tracking the police the same way he was. She was protecting the lair, too, in her own secret way. He'd tracked her to a large sewage disposal room, where she had made her home.
Peering through the scope of his rifle, he saw her in her human form as she walked alongside some kind of robot. It looked suspiciously like one of Stark's machines, but the head was different, flatter and with blue eyes that stood out. The robot was probably heavily armed; the hunter could see a shoulder-mounted rotary blaster cannon.
"Alright, Metalhead, let me do the talking," Karai told the robot. She stepped forward, and from the shadows emerged an eight-foot-tall creature. It looked to be a giant alligator, standing on its hind legs like a human, with a stocky build, broad shoulders, and enormous head and hands. A tail dragged along behind it, and its faded coloration indicated it was an older beast. "Karai, is that you?" it asked in a raspy voice. "Where have you been? You went hunting and disappeared. The community is—" The beast stopped talking, sniffing the air as Metalhead approached. "Wait. Is this ... Metalhead?"
This is unexpected, the hunter thought. Well, a fight was coming. He would prefer to not have to fight both mutants at once. He aimed the rifle at the alligator mutant. Alligators were ectothermic—to this one's disadvantage, the hunter thought. Down in the sewers, the creature must be underfed and sluggish. Still, it was a massive beast and its hide looked thick, and he could not afford to underestimate its strength.
The hunter loaded his rifle with a .585 Gehringer cartridge, designed to hunt elephants, still listening to the mutants' conversation intently. "Metalhead is with me, Leatherhead," Karai said. "There is an enemy in our tunnels—a threat to us."
"Surely you could have come home to the community first," said Leatherhead. "We need to involve the turtles!"
"Metalhead is looking for the turtles," Karai explained. "He found me. I don't know how, but he found me. He is looking for the Mighty Mutanimals. He needs your help."
Kraven squeezed the trigger, and the sound echoed throughout the tunnels. Leatherhead made a gurgling noise and fell to the ground, dead. The bullet from the hunter's rifle had gone through his left eye cleanly, killing him instantly.
"Noooo!" Karai screamed, transforming into her mutant form in the blink of an eye. Whirling, she spotted the hunter in the shadows, and slithered towards him faster than he'd ever seen a snake move. "Run, Metalhead! Flee!"
There was no time to reload; the hunter drew his knife as Karai tackled him. "You killed him!" she hissed. "Why?"
In response, the hunter drove his knife into Karai, the knife's nine-inch blade sinking to the hilt just behind her shoulder. "Raaaaa!" she shrieked, recoiling in pain.
As she recovered, the hunter approached, knife ready. "You'll make such better sport than that dumb, lumbering croc," he laughed. Karai blocked another knife attack, the blade bouncing off her scaly skin.
The hunter leaped onto the wall in a parkour move, bouncing off of the wall onto a pipe above. "I didn't realize there was another apex predator down here," he remarked casually, running along the pipe and down a tunnel.
An enraged Karai slithered after him. Was this some kind of sick game to this man? "I do not prey upon the innocent," Karai hissed. "I protect them!"
"Ha," the hunter remarked over his shoulder. "A pity. If you are not a predator, you are prey."
They continued running down the tunnel, past a collection of pipes. "You are fast and strong," Kraven observed, vaulting over a pile of wooden pallets and garbage bags. "But impulsive."
Karai slithered over the pallets and immediately felt something snap around her torso. "Nyarrrgh!" she cried in pain. The hunter had set a trap; a steel bear trap lying just out of sight on the other side of the pallets.
"And not nearly as smart as I thought," the hunter laughed. Again he drew his knife, walking towards Karai. "I'd set that trap for a different trophy," he said. "But your head will do fine."
"Your brains will do better!" Karai shrieked, flinging her snake arms forward. The snake heads on the end of her arms bit deep into the hunter's arm and bare chest, throwing him into a pipe hanging from the ceiling. He bounced off and fell over the edge, towards the water below. Karai grabbed hold of the bear trap's sharp edge, straining as she pulled the jaws open with all the strength she could muster. "Rrrrrrrr!" she groaned as the sharp teeth of the trap, now stained in her blood, slid out of her sides. Wounded but still determined, she slithered for the edge and leaped down towards the hunter, hissing, jaws open.
But the hunter was ready. Whipping out his rifle, he fired an explosive shot that tore through Karai's shoulder. She hissed in pain and flailed involuntarily, her tail striking the gun with a forceful blow that snapped it in two. Blood flowed freely from her shoulder as she staggered back, losing her mutant form. Weakened from blood loss, the now-human Karai collapsed against the sewer tunnel wall.
Victorious now, the hunter drew his knife again and strode forward. "You have allied yourselves with a family of mutants," he told her. "Four turtles and their rat father. Where are they now?"
"You—you are a monster," Karai spat.
"Where are they now?"
"I will not—I will never talk to you."
"They are not in their lair. Where are they now?"
"You—you—" Karai's head was pounding, and she had begun to lose feeling. If left untreated, she wasn't going to make it. She could feel the life slipping away from her. But still she glared defiantly at him, even as her eye began to swell shut and the blood from her wounds poured onto the concrete she lay on. "You do not frighten me," she whispered.
The hunter stepped forward, placing the knife against her cheek. Now she could see his face clearly for the first time that night. "Now Kraven knows what you look like when you lie," the hunter said, grinning wickedly. "Show Kraven what it looks like when you tell the truth. Make me believe you."
On the surface above, in the streets of Manhattan, another hunter was sticking to the shadows, trailing his prey. But this hunter was no ordinary hunter. He wasn't out to score a big kill, or make money.
This hunter was on a scavenger hunt. A search mission for the only thing that could restore the world to the way it had been.
The hunter walked through the abandoned streets of Manhattan, which felt like something out of a post-apocalyptic novel. Demolished buildings had created random piles of rubble in the street. Fires still burned, releasing clouds of black billowy smoke over the city. Car alarms blared on the wrecks of cars that their owners had abandoned.
The hunter wore a dark hooded cloak to conceal her face and her S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform from the world. The hum of an aircraft caught her attention, and she looked up to see a HYDRA vessel flying overhead, scanning for any signs of life. Quickly the hunter moved to an abandoned bus full of corpses. The bus had been demolished by a group of rock trolls and everyone inside had been killed.
The hunter buried herself beneath the bodies of the New York citizens. The blood from the dead poured over her as the HYDRA copter flew slowly past. It paused to scan the bus, then, not detecting any signs of life, it continued on.
The hunter climbed out of the pile of bodies, checking their pulses for any survivors. She found none. Her brow furrowed in frustration and grief. So much death and destruction. Everywhere. Even at the hospital she'd been to. The doctors and nurses staffing the place had fled, leaving patients to fend for themselves. Without power, many on life support had been killed. The rest were left to die slow, agonizing deaths. When would it all end?
The hunter continued on, through the city's abandoned streets. The citizens were taking refuge in whatever building or shelter they could find, hoping and praying that this nightmare of a life would end. Some were becoming desperate for survival. As the hunter passed by what had once been the New York Stock Exchange, the click of a pistol's hammer caught her attention.
The pistol's owner appeared to be a businessman, dressed in what had once been a nice suit but was now covered with the dust of battle. His tie was crooked, his hair unkempt, and his eyes wild as he appeared behind the hunter from the doorway of the stock exchange building. "What do you have?" the man asked the hunter. "You've got something. What? A car? Food? Give me what you've got."
The hunter turned her head slightly, observing the man from under her hood. He was not the enemy here, she reminded herself. Just a desperate man trying to survive. He was obviously succeeding fairly well; he didn't look undernourished. And of course, there was that glint of steel aimed at her face as well. "Where did you get a gun?" she asked him.
The man was becoming increasingly nervous. "D-drop the blanket and put your hands on the . . . on the wall," he stammered, the pistol in his hands shaking.
The hunter shrugged. "Okay, which wall?"
"Hands on your head!"
"Which is it?" she asked him. "Hands on the wall? On my head? What?"
"I'm going to shoot you," the man said, his voice trembling as much as his hands. "Take off the—the—the—"
The hunter scoffed. "No, you won't. If you were going to shoot me you would have. If you were a real man, you would have. That I would respect. You coward." She pulled back her hood, releasing a tangle of red hair and two piercing blue eyes. "Did you get to watch your family die?" she asked, in a mockingly sympathetic voice. "Do you think they watch you now?"
The man didn't recognize her face, but if he had been a member of the intelligence community he would have. She was Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow, a highly trained S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. But to him, she was nothing more than an obstacle to his survival. "N-no more talk!" the man shouted. "Give me what you have! Wh-what do you have?" Suddenly the side of his head exploded as a bullet entered him from above, and he toppled to the ground.
Black Widow grabbed the gun as the man dropped it, catching it before it hit the ground. She turned, her eyes following the trajectory of the shot to a man standing on the roof of a building above. The man wore a lightweight tactical suit with a half-face mask and bulletproof tinted goggles to conceal his true identity from the world. A special metallic bionic arm hung from his left shoulder where his arm should have been, and in his other hand he carried a Barret M82 heavy sniper rifle with an added silencer.
Black Widow raised an arm to the sky and spoke in sign language to the figure: I had him, Bucky.
Sure you did, Bucky Barnes signed back down.
Black Widow dropped to the man's body, searching his pockets for anything they could use. In one of the pockets on his jacket she found a chocolate bar and an unopened bottle of water. She unwrapped the chocolate bar and took a bite. Delicious. She hadn't known how hungry she was.
She glanced back up at the Winter Soldier, signing the words Safe house. Bucky nodded and disappeared.
Natasha dove into a pile of rubble, scraping shards of wood and concrete over her as the sound of the HYDRA patrol copter's rotors filled the air. The vessel flew by, failing to detect her. Or maybe it had detected her and believed her to be just another hapless citizen trapped in rubble, barely living, hardly worth their trouble. At any rate, the chopper moved on.
Black Widow climbed from the rubble and headed down an alley, on her way to the safehouse. A commotion caught her attention, as she hid around the corner. The safe house entrance was just ahead, but two Dark Elf troopers were blocking her way. Worse still, the troopers had cornered a group of citizens and were raising their blaster rifles. "Submit or perish," one of the Dark Elves hissed.
Panicking, the citizens began fleeing down the alley towards where Black Widow was hiding. "I don't know these guys!" one of the men cried. "Please!"
"Just run!" shouted another, pushing the rest aside. "Run! Get out of my way!"
The Dark Elves opened fire, cutting down the hapless civilians mercilessly. As they turned around, continuing on their search for any surviving superheroes, one of them thought he detected movement behind him and turned, staring at the door on an abandoned shawarma restaurant. Deciding it was nothing, the Dark Elves moved on.
Inside the shawarma shop, Black Widow crouched behind the door, her pistol at the ready. When she was absolutely sure the Dark Elves had gone, she headed deeper into the shop, sitting down in an empty reclining chair behind the counter. Picking the armrest cover off to reveal a small panel, she pressed the buttons in a sequence, and the tiled floor beneath her slid open silently. Black Widow rode the chair down, into a hidden bunker deep under the brick and steel of the shawarma shop.
Getting out of the chair, Black Widow walked down a short set of stairs to the main room, a collection of box stacks and desks covered with papers, files, and computer monitors that filled the room with blue light. This was her hideout, an old hideout of Nick Fury's that he had used back when Hydra had tried to take over S.H.I.E.L.D. and he'd faked his death.
"Well, that was a bust," came a voice. Reflexively, Natasha spun and crouched, drawing her loaded pistol in her left and her tactical knife in her right, aiming both at the sound of the voice. Bucky Barnes stepped from the shadows, without his goggles or face mask. Instead, a small grin was on his face. "Careful, Natasha," he said. "You're gonna put an eye out with that thing."
"Aren't you funny," she said, holstering her weapons.
"No luck on the street?" Bucky asked. "Other than Mr. Right with the gun?"
"The hospital is the worst of it all, Buck," she sighed.
"I told you."
"I thought it would take just a little longer for humanity to completely collapse in on itself," Widow said.
"Well, you were really kidding yourself then," the Winter Soldier told her. "No word from the outside world?"
"The invaders have blocked all communications in the region," Black Widow said. "The entire area is bubbled. Before anybody knows what's going on here, it'll be too late. And they're tracing anybody trying to send outgoing communications and hunting them down. Private channels, everything. That's how they've managed to take down so many superheroes." She looked up at Bucky and smiled. "Good thing you know sign language."
Bucky groaned. "Nothing at all?"
"It's getting worse," Widow said, sitting on the edge of a desk next to a black box with a high-tech lock on it. They'd been trying to get the box open for several days now. Rumor around S.H.I.E.L.D. had it that Nick Fury had kept a special box with fail safe plans for different end of the world scenarios. He'd tasked Black Widow and Winter Soldier with locating the box shortly before he'd disappeared to go check on S.H.I.E.L.D. a few minutes after the invasion. Bucky and Widow had searched and searched for several days before finding it. The box had a triple-coded electronic lock which was very difficult to crack without using a computer (and they didn't dare use a computer for fear the Dark Elves would trace the signal).
Bucky walked over to the far wall, which had been turned into a giant billboard covered with polaroid camera pictures of almost every superhero or supervillain in the world. He took a look at some of the names. Stark. Osborn. Richards. Thor. Quicksilver. Iron Fist. Lockjaw. Rogers. Deadpool. Juggernaut. Vulture. Sabretooth. Octavius. Xavier. Spider-Man. Banner. Squirrel Girl. There's a squirrel girl now? Some of the images had the names written in blue, others in red marker.
He pulled one of the images off the wall, a picture of himself, with the word "Barnes" scribbled in red sharpie underneath it. I look really young in this picture. "What do you think the Director was doing down here?" he asked Black Widow.
"This was Nick Fury's secret hideout," Widow answered. "Well, one of them. It looks like this is where he was holed up during the Hydra incident."
"The people he can trust in blue and the people he couldn't in red?" asked Bucky.
"I wonder if he made it out the other side of this?" Natasha asked herself, ignoring Bucky's question.
Bucky looked around. "I wonder if he's going to kill us for using his stuff."
Natasha smirked. "He most certainly will."
"Where do we go from here?" Bucky asked, moving away from the wall back to Natasha.
Black Widow snorted. "Go?" she asked. "This is the safest place in the universe."
Bucky walked between the desks, searching through files casually. "And we don't think that HYDRA will somehow tap into S.H.I.E.L.D. Intelligence and discover these little Fury vacation spots."
"One of the great things about Nicholas Fury is that he hardly ever wrote anything down," Widow said. "If you don't write it down, there's no paper to trail. Nobody can find us because nobody knows it exists."
Bucky let out a soft whistle. "Well, ain't the two of us lucky that we were running a black-ops mission when the world went to hell," he said.
"I was just thinking the same thing, actually."
"You know we have to assume that New York is—"
"It is." Black Widow sighed. "Get some sleep, Buck. I'll keep trying."
Bucky was dreaming. In his dream, he was hanging off a rail on the side of a HYDRA train speeding through the snowy mountains of Germany. His teammate, Captain America, was inching closer to him, begging him to hold on as he tried to grab his hand. But before they could reach each other, there was the familiar sound of a rail snapping and a sudden weightless feeling in his body. Bucky screamed as he fell down to the icy Danube River far below, the look of horror on Captain America's face as he watched helplessly seared into Bucky's mind forever.
"Nnaagh!" he screamed as he bolted upright in bed, clutching at her chest. Then he remembered. It wasn't the 1940s. He wasn't in Nazi Germany with the Howling Commandos. He was in New York City, approximately one-hundred and twelve feet below the surface in a secret bunker.
"Bad dream, Buck?" Black Widow asked. She sat leaned back in a desk chair, going over a handful of papers.
Bucky rubbed the back of his neck. "I dreamt the world had come to an end."
"Uh-huh," Black Widow said, not even looking up.
"And that I was stuck in one of Nick Fury's secret bunkers under New York City with a surly Black Widow who ... oh, wait."
Black Widow looked sideways at Bucky, smirking. "You only slept for three hours," she said. "You want to try again?"
"What are you reading?" Bucky asked, glancing at the papers in Natasha's hand.
"That black box we couldn't open?" Black Widow smacked it with her hand, knocking it onto the floor where it landed with a clang. "I opened it."
"What was in it?" Bucky asked.
"Fury's end-of-the-world scenarios," Black Widow answered.
Bucky got up, moving to Natasha's side in an instant. "Printed up all nice and neat like that?"
"It's Fury," Natasha said, flipping between two papers. "The guy was prepared. Chitauri Invasion. Ultron Takeover. Here's something called the Thanos Protocol. Fury was ready for anything."
"Even this?"
"Even this." Black Widow held up a piece of paper with the words End of the World Scenario 211.3: Loki Return CODE BLACK. It was a piece of paper with printed instructions and a small sticky note paperclipped to it. A handwritten set of numbers were on the note: 69 degrees 30 minutes south, 68 degrees 30 minutes west.
"What does it say?" Bucky asked, taking the form from Widow and scanning it over.
"Fury has emergency underground bunkers in a few other places," she explained. "One specifically for the end of the world.
"Anywhere within walking distance?" Bucky asked.
"Savage Land."
Bucky looked up. "Savage Land? So ... so there might be others there?"
"Long way to Antarctica for a 'maybe'," Black Widow said.
"I'm open to suggestions."
"Well, this is Fury's." Black Widow laid the paper down on the desk.
"Are you kidding me with this?" Bucky asked her.
Natasha looked him in the eye. "You asked for a suggestion. That's a suggestion."
"Have you ever done anything like this before?" asked Bucky.
"No one has," Black Widow said. I'm not sure if the world's ever ended before, Barnes.
"So all we have to do is sneak out of the city and find a way to the South Pole."
"That's all."
"We have to find the others first." Bucky slung his rifle over his shoulder. "Somebody had to make it through this, too."
"Just promise me that you will help me shove a nuclear warhead up that Asgardian's ass," Widow told Barnes.
"Oh, okay."
"I mean it," she said.
"I know," said Bucky.
"Don't be coy," Black Widow snapped. "Don't be cute. Not now." She sighed heavily. "I don't mind going out. We're all going to, eventually."
Bucky clapped a hand on Black Widow's shoulder, and she reached up and took his hand in hers, squeezing it. "But not without taking that son of a bitch with us," the Winter Soldier said.
Black Widow looked up into Bucky's face, their eyes meeting. "Exactly."