Chapter 10.
Clint shot bolt upright from a near sleep. Maria had tapped him on the leg twice, a touch so soft it could almost be mistaken for the wind.
A hundred meters away, across the rough canyon floor, a light was flickering.
Whistling ropes, feet touching rocks.
Someone was repelling down the cliff.
Clint drew his night vision binoculars carefully to his eyes, aware of even the brush of the nylon against his shirt. He put his hand on Maria's shoulder, tapping his index finger each time he counted a new body coming down the cliff – he got up to six. Shit. And judging by their movements, their precision, their near-silence, they were some kind of soldiers.
Five of them repelled all the way down, and the sixth waited halfway. When the others had detached from the lines, they dragged his until he could climb onto the boulder with the red minerals.
Clint passed the goggles to Maria, retrieving his bow from beside the rocks, carefully slipping on his backpack. Noise was the enemy.
A drill started up on the boulder.
Hill took advantage of the sound, whispering to her earpiece, "Donavan, access US Military operations database and search for anything that would explain their presence here."
Clint snapped his backpack straps in time with the wailing drill.
A rumbling further down the canyon indicated an approaching vehicle – no, multiple vehicles. A team of five four-wheelers with large tubs strapped to the backs.
"Guess they wanna take it home with them this time," Clint said, shying away from the headlights. He sunk as far as he could into the shadow of their little boulder.
She whispered, "No operations underway in the area. They're not with us."
"Guess that makes them against us," Clint said. "We're pretty well hidden over here. We can wait it out, unless they decide to bring the rest of the wedding party."
Just then, two of the soldiers turned toward them.
"Unless they have thermal detection," Clint added.
"Are they looking at us?" Maria said, just as a flashlight beam zeroed in on them.
"Well, crap," Clint said.
He grabbed the bike, spun it away, and hit the ignition.
Clint took them through the dark, fiddling with buttons, cursing, until he found the headlights. Beams like floodlights illuminated the valley – sharp rocks, breaks, fallen boulders. It was almost better when they were off. Clint narrowly avoided a spray of pebbles like the one he had wiped out on last time, only to veer too close to an overhang. He gave to the blow, letting it turn him as it wrecked his shoulder. For a brief, terrifying second, the right half of his body went numb.
"Are you okay?" Maria asked, reaching through him to keep the bike from heaving.
Clint managed to keep his left hand on the controls, trying to shake the life back into his other arm. It felt like it was on fire, burning, and he was struggling to lock the pain away. He grunted, "I'll live. I'm ambidextrous, anyway."
The four-wheelers were right behind them, filling the canyon with light and noise. Sounds echoed over and over, creating a deafening chorus.
"They're getting closer!" Maria shouted.
Clint hit the gas in vain – he already had it full throttle –, but one of the four-wheelers was already alongside them, brandishing a blade-tipped spear. It surged with electricity, the four-spoked blade crackling and popping.
Maria fired on them, unloading a clip, but the bullets ricocheted harmlessly away.
A shimmering blue force field appeared briefly, and then dissipated.
"That's cheating," Clint grumbled, resorting to taking a sharp turn around a boulder to get them away from their flank.
He took the bike flat out, putting on a lethal amount of speed, focusing on nothing but dodging rocks and turning corners. Blood roared in his ears – now the only sound. Driving in the canyon was as natural to him as using a bow. It was all about perception, observation, reaction.
He zigzagged, aware of bullets dinging the walls in front of them. He turned sharp corners, rode up slopes, deployed the flaps to slow them on a dangerous incline, but their pursuers matched his every move. It went on for what felt like hours, but really only amounted to minutes.
Maria spoke in his ear, breathless, "I'm hit."
"What?" Clint said, just as the ground fell from under them.
The bike heaved forward. Clint deployed the gliders, catching them, jerking them back upright. Maria was still moving, though, her arms loose around his torso, lifting out of the seat. He gripped the bike with his aching right arm and turned, wrapping his left around her. She was unconscious, limp, and it was too dark and everything was happening too quickly. His mind was suddenly jumbled.
And then they hit the ground.
The bike went down on its front wheel, flipped, and flung him off. Both of them went tumbling across pebbles sharp as glass. Clint flopped into a boulder, the impact knocking the wind out of him, and the bike slid up behind him. It tapped his shin, coming to a silent stop.
Clint groaned, forcing himself upright, fumbling for the flashlight in his backpack.
Maria was stirring nearly forty feet away, bracing herself on one arm. It was an incredible, overwhelming relief to see her moving.
"Jesus," she murmured. "That'll wake you up."
Clint laughed, somehow, and made his way to her. He fell to his knees, scanning her with the flashlight. "Where are you hit? Let me see."
Maria shifted, wincing. One of her shins was hit, her black pants now a grim shade darker. She had lost a lot of blood already. In the low light, it looked like she had fallen in a puddle. He pulled out his knife immediately, but Maria said, "We need to find somewhere safe."
"I need to stop the bleeding," he said.
She shook her head, losing energy. "If they find us again, we're dead."
If you keep bleeding, you're dead, Clint thought. But he relented. He made a tight circle around the area, and then retrieved her, supporting most of her weight. A little slot beneath a tilted boulder was their sanctuary.
Clint went to work inside. He cut her pants leg off, used the fabric as a tourniquet. It turned out that she had taken two bullets – one to the calf, just above her ankle, and another to the meat near the center of her shin. Neither had an exit wound. But that was a future problem. For now, they were not life-threatening.
"Donovan, can you hear me?" Maria said, a surprising amount of authority in her voice for someone who had just taken two bullets and survived a motorcycle crash in a canyon.
"No way you get signal down here," Clint said.
But she held up her finger, nodding along to something. "Can you get a read on my location?"
Clint looked up, expecting to see a satellite zeroing in on them.
"Shit," Maria said. "Okay. Thanks. Will do."
"Is that a no on the rescue?" Clint said.
"We'll have to get to higher ground in the morning." She pulled her backpack to her front, shuffling through it. "My JES must have gotten damaged on the way down…" She produced a small device, an emergency GPS beacon. It had a bullet lodged in it.
Clint snorted, "C'est la vie."
Maria tried to lean her head back on the rock, but recoiled at its texture. Maybe its temperature. Both were unpleasant.
It was getting cold in the canyon. Down here, the temperature was almost ten degrees warmer than the surface, but that didn't mean much when it was in the twenties up there. Clint sat with an arm around her, her head resting on his shoulder. He still ached from ramming into that overhang, but the cold was helping keep it at bay.
"I guess it's a toss-up between trying to climb higher in the middle of the night, risking showing those assholes where we are, or freezing to death," Maria said.
"You have two holes in your leg, so I think climbing is out of the question," Clint said. "And I'm not strapping you to my back."
Maria laughed. "Well, this sucks."
Clint said, "So if we weren't freezing to death in a national park right now, what would you rather be doing?"
She smiled, "I don't know, probably anything." She paused, and then added, "But I've been working on a new infrastructure for SHIELD. Piecewise. I would probably be doing something related to that."
"Writing rules, yelling at interns."
She smiled.
"As long as none of the rules apply to me," he added.
"Have they ever?
He shrugged, wincing when pain shot through his shoulder. He needed to go to the hospital, too, probably get some X-rays, maybe a splint. For a moment, he regretted agreeing to come out here. He could be at the prison right now, taunting that bastard Paul Marsters. But there was no way in hell he would have said no. Maria was a friend, and that meant a lot to Clint. He trusted very few people.
He loved very few people.
Clint was not the type to tether himself to one place. He took on missions for SHIELD, traveled the world. His bond with Natasha was the first thing that held him down, and when he met Maria Hill, he gained a second.
"If I were anywhere else," Clint said, suspecting that Maria had already fallen asleep, "I would be helping you write those stupid rules."
Maria responded, voice croaky, "And yelling at interns."
XxXxX
Clint scaled a gentle slope about halfway up the canyon, his heel wedged in the only sturdy rock up there. Dawn slowly brightened the horizon, revealing his vulnerable position to the world. He wasted a few precious moments admiring the scenery. Massive, sheer red-rock canyon, gentler cliffs dotted with shrubs, hawks circling as dots against an otherwise empty sky. He would kill to have their vantage point right now.
Forty feet below, Maria was limping around with a hastily repaired GPS relay in hand, giving him instructions for where to point her phone. Clint had converted it to a shitty signal booster, and now their modified tech was the only way to get out of this place. Cell towers were easy, allowing them to communicate with her main man Donovan back at their base – wherever that was these days – but it could only tell SHIELD where they were in a broader sense. Grand Canyon. Not helpful. If they could get a precise GPS location relayed to their rescue party, they might make it out of here before the soldiers found them again.
He was holding the phone out over a drop-off when she gave him the halt signal.
"Confirm," she said to her earpiece. "Can you confirm?"
And then she gave Clint a thumb's up.
Clint sighed, slouching against the slope for a moment before he started sliding down. It was far harder to get up here. On the way down he just had to keep himself from tipping forward while scooting down a cascade of pebbles.
Maria was looking very pale. She was in a state of decline, slowly succumbing to the pain in her injured leg. Clint was impressed she was holding it together so well.
"We're almost home free," he said, helping her ease herself onto a low rock. She spread her leg out in front of her, kneading her thigh.
And then vehicles rounded a bend further down the canyon, using the dry riverbeds to navigate.
Clint had wanted to find a narrower part of the canyon to force them off of those stupid four-wheelers, but their movement was limited. Their last crash had destroyed one of the flaps on the motorcycle, and the back tire had a puncture.
Bullets pelted the slope.
Clint crouched in front of Maria and fired an explosive arrow at the lead vehicle the moment it was in range, intending to force the front into the air and fling its occupants off.
But suddenly everything went to hell.
A stunning, lightning-infused fireball filled the space where the four-wheeler had been. It roiled, screamed, shooting sparks through the rocks, up into the air. A heatwave knocked him backwards, and bolts of electricity danced in its wake. His hair stood up, his wildest, deepest instincts telling him that getting any closer would kill him.
While the first vehicle was obliterated by the explosion, the second rode through it, catching fire immediately. Its riders bailed, tucking and rolling on the canyon floor, but their gear was smoking, melting, and they both went very still. Electricity surged over the vehicle, enveloped it, consumed it, and struck the motionless riders in a horrible rhythm, sealing their fates.
And the third vehicle had just enough time to react, just enough time to swerve violently to the left and avoid the lethal explosion. It hit a solid rock wall head-one, flinging the soldiers forward. But they were still too close. Without the flames even touching them, their gear was smoking, the electricity arcing toward them, almost clawing its way forward to tap their legs, their boots.
Clint was floored. He staggered backward again, tripping over Maria's outstretched leg and landing flat on his ass. A physical representation of how shocked he was.
He would have never done something like that on purpose.
It must have been the minerals they collected from the cliff the night before. He had never seen anything like it. It was clearly alien, clearly incredibly volatile. And no one should get their hands on it – not the bad guys, not the good guys.
Maria put her hand on his shoulder, almost speaking a few times, but stopping herself.
Both of them looked to the last surviving soldiers when they began to groan.
Maria said, "Clint…"
Clint hauled himself upright, his shoulder throbbing, ears ringing.
Everything was quieting now. The chaos was dying down, the flames and sparks retreating, the chaotic fireball winking into nothingness. It left behind scorched rocks, the dust eaten away, exposing the ancient bottom of the canyon. And its absence revealed what it had done to the first vehicle – melted it, leaving only the skeletal of the back axels fused with the rocks below.
Clint got just close enough to grab the vests of the groaning men. He dragged them backward, until the electric feeling on his skin faded.
Maria worked on prying their face masks off, asking them questions – who do you work for? – until they succumbed to the explosion. She was not unkind to them, her urgency earned, but Clint still felt guilty that their last moments were an interrogation.
He kept his thoughts to himself.
Maria returned to her rock, stretching her leg out, swaying even though she was sitting down. "I want them autopsied. I want to know exactly what that stuff is… what it did to them."
Clint sat beside her, saying nothing. He was fixated on the remains of the four-wheelers, on the bodies now cooling in the chilly January air.
Maria said, "You couldn't have known that would happen."
Clint had taken out a lot of bad guys in his day, taken a lot of life, and he didn't always feel bad about it. He thought some people deserved what they got, whether by his hand or another.
Maria tapped her boot to his leg. "You always told me not to take it personally."
"I'm not." He glanced over, to show her how neutral his expression was. "See? No tears."
"You're the best liar I've ever met," she said. "So forgive me if I don't believe you."
He shrugged.
"We know they want it for weapons, now, at least," she said, keeping her eyes carefully away from the wrecked four-wheelers, the bodies. She was clearly taking it personally, and projecting on him.
He said, "We saw weapons like theirs a few weeks ago in a Hydra base. But these are much more intense – and I haven't seen a forcefield like that since Loki had his scepter. We still haven't tracked it down."
"I'm sure Cap will be thrilled to hear all of this."
Clint said, "Some things never die, I guess."
It was ten minutes later, still early morning, still dawn, still smoking, when a helicopter flew overhead. SHIELD. Agent Burch was among them, standing at the rim of the canyon, trying to figure out how the hell to get them out. It was too narrow here to bring the copter down, and dropping a line would risk slamming them against the canyon on their way up. Burch suggested they move locations, but Clint turned him down. Maria was literally on her last leg. He could see her fading, no matter how much she insisted she could make the trip.
She ended up in a harness, and as she was pulled up the cliff wall, Clint walked alongside it, pulling her away from the rocks when she needed it.
When the helicopter took off, Maria laid her head on the back of the seat, stretched her leg out. Blood dripped through the black metal grates. Clint crouched in front of her, releasing his first tourniquet and putting another just below her knee, tight enough to make her whack him.
"Sorry," she said, when he slid into the seat beside her.
Clint knew the hospital was minutes away in a vehicle this fast – especially since Tony had equipped the SHIELD copters with excessive propulsion power – but her condition still made him nervous.
He nudged her. "Hey. I have a question."
She kept her eyes closed. "What?"
"If you weren't in a helicopter bleeding out right now, where would you want to be?"
She cracked her eyes, smiling. "Fiji."
"Let's go to Fiji, then."
"Are you allowed back?"
"It's been at least ten years. I think they've taken down the wanted posters by now."
Her voice was far away. "How about we sew up the holes in my leg first. And do me a favor and don't mention this to anyone. That goes for you, too, Burch."
Burch was sitting across from them. He straightened. "Of course, Director."
Maria winced. "Don't call me that."
Clint patted her knee, making her wince. "Stay awake. Not too far now."
She shut her eyes again. "You're not the boss of me."
Clint let her rest, but every thirty seconds or so he would tap her knee, make her stir. She groaned at him, trying and failing to scoot away. She was up against the wall, wedged securely by his knee.
He spent some time watching Burch, feeling him out. He ran through the final scene of the comic in his head, and then returned it.
"I liked it," Clint said. "But I have to ask, are you doing okay?"
Burch looked startled. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, the villain is clearly depressed."
Burch gave a small smile, shrugging, "I was trying to make him real."
"You did. I think you should publish that."
"I don't think anyone will ever bite. So many people are making comics about you guys now."
"They are?" Clint made a mental note to look into that. "It doesn't matter. I know a guy. I wrote my number in the cover – maybe I can tell you some real stories, for inspiration."
And then Clint said,
"What's your first name, Agent Burch?"
"Alan."
Clint shook his hand. "It's nice to meet you."
Alan Burch was really smiling now.
It was nice to feel like he had done one good thing today.