Chapter 33

Clint Barton's eyes flicked around the bridge of the old helicarrier, taking note of exactly how many crewmembers were here and where they were located, from the two techs sitting at their stations near him to Commander Castillo herself, still standing over the engine specs monitor with her head so close to Natty's that their hair was nearly touching.

He was well-positioned for when the fight started, and now that Sammy had arrived on the bridge — her team presumably finished sabotaging the Quinjets on the deck — that fight was liable to break out any moment. He slipped one hand into the pouch at his belt, grasping between his thumb and forefinger the eyepiece Agent 45 had given him to help him identify who was a Hydra agent. He was going to need it.

Leaving Agent Ryker's side, Sammy walked casually over to Clint, leaned across him and plugged a memory stick into a drive, glancing up at him and briefly meeting his eyes as she did so. His eyes flicked down to the handwritten label on the memory stick as the drive lit up to read it: EDWIN.

He narrowed his eyes in faint confusion at Sammy, but she merely looked at him coolly as a man's voice came on over the intercom.

"Attention, all S.H.I.E.L.D. agents," he said, and Clint's eyes widened as he recognized the voice.

"This is Steve Rogers," the recording continued, and the crewmembers on the bridge stopped what they were doing and looked around the bridge in confusion. "You've heard a lot about me over the last few days. Some of you were even ordered to hunt me down. But I think it's time you know the truth. S.H.I.E.L.D. is not what we thought it was. It's been taken over by Hydra."

The crewmembers reacted visibly, many of them openly startled, their eyes shifting back and forth to the people standing near them, as if seeking confirmation in their expressions.

The tech sitting closest to Clint, on the other hand, suddenly looked sick, his body visibly jerking in his spinning chair as he turned to look at Commander Castillo from across the room. She was listening to the recording with a deep scowl on her face, and abruptly Agent Ryker strode down the steps to stand by her side near the front of the bridge.

"Alexander Pierce is their leader," Steve Rogers' voice continued. "The STRIKE and Insight crew are Hydra as well. I don't know how many more, but I know they're here. They could be standing right next to you. They almost have what they want: absolute control. They shot Nick Fury, and it won't end there."

Many of the crewmembers were looking openly alarmed now, and Clint could hardly blame them as his own heart began to hammer in his chest. Fury, shot? Was that true? Was this really Steve's voice? It sounded like him, right down to the inflections in his voice and the simple declarative sentences he favored whenever he was giving a speech. But Agent 45 had said he wouldn't involve Steve. How had he gotten this recording?

"If you launch the Insight helicarriers today, Hydra will be able to kill anyone that stands in their way, unless we stop them," Steve's voice said. "I know I'm asking a lot, but the price of freedom is high. It always has been. It's a price I'm willing to pay. And if I'm the only one, then so be it. But I'm willing to bet I'm not."

The intercom went silent. There was a long, uncomfortable pause as everyone on the bridge looked around at each other uncertainly. Many people were rising to their feet, bodies tense and eyes alert. But Clint kept his gaze locked on Commander Castillo, who was staring right back at him, a cold fury in her eyes.

She spoke two low words into the silence.

"Get him."

Without hesitation Agent Ryker raised his gun and pointed it at Clint.

But he never got off a shot. With one sharp chop of her hand, Natty neatly disarmed him and then side-kicked him for good measure, her form beautifully elegant yet powerful. Ryker went stumbling backwards, falling bodily across the bridge controls. Commander Castillo looked shocked for a second — it clearly hadn't occurred to her until this moment that Natty had only been pretending to be Hydra — but she recovered quickly and went for her own gun. In an instant Natty was on her, grappling for the weapon.

It had all happened in the blink of an eye. Already Clint had his eyepiece on and his hand was going back to grab an arrow. All around the bridge crewmembers were leaping into action, some of them ducking instinctively under their stations, some of them scrambling for the exit, some of them shouting at each other to back away from the controls. Clint could see at a glance through the eyepiece which of them were outlined in red and which were outlined in green. He took confident aim at a "red" who was pointing a gun at the head of a man outlined in green — who was spreading his arms protectively across his station, visibly panicking — and put an arrow in the aggressor. The red-outlined man fell across his intended victim and then crumpled to the floor. By then Clint already had the next arrow in place, his eyes locking on his next "red" target.

"Get him!" Castillo shouted again without taking her eyes off Natty, her deep voice booming across the bridge and easily cutting across the chaotic noise. In his peripheral vision Clint saw the tech who was sitting at the station behind him jump out of his seat up to throw a haymaker at him just as he released his second arrow.

But the man didn't even complete his swing before Sammy unexpectedly hooked her foot around his ankle and jerked his foot out from under him. The tech went down hard on one knee, and a second later she laid him out flat on the floor with a well-placed blow to the jaw.

Well. So Sammy wasn't just a hacker; she could handle herself in a fight, too. Clint could feel himself relaxing slightly as he nocked the next arrow. This was going to be easier to do without a non-combatant to protect.

"I got your six," Sammy said to him, not even breathless from the exertion as she took up a defensive position beside him. "Just keep shooting!"

A grim smile curved one side of Clint's mouth as he began to do exactly that.

Wincing with pain, Sharon Carter lowered Brock Rumlow's gun, blood streaming down her arm from his knife-slash as alarms blared around her in the operations room of Project Insight.

Technicians cowered under their stations. Agents lay scattered around the floor, groaning from their bullet wounds. Every screen in the room was flashing "OVERRIDE." And a fury unlike anything Sharon had felt before was pounding in her brain.

Hydra. Brock Rumlow was Hydra. He'd nearly shot Klein in the head right in front of her. He'd launched the Insight helicarriers that were programmed to kill Hydra's enemies. He'd just shot a bunch of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and tried to shoot her, too.

With her own gun, no less.

Sharon pressed her lips together furiously. She'd almost had him. She'd managed to get her hands on the gun Rumlow had dropped and gotten off four good shots, but he'd sprinted behind the bullet-proof glass just in the nick of time, along with what was left of his STRIKE team. Already he was out of sight.

She ached to chase him down. Plug a couple of bullet holes into his chest. Give back to him all the pain he'd just dealt out. And then tear her gun back out of his lifeless hand.

She even took a few determined steps toward the exit, intending to do just that. But immediately, Sharon's common sense kicked in, and she realized that the damage was already done; Rumlow was the least of her problems right now.

The helicarriers were launching. And the operations room was in utter chaos. A quick glance around told her that she was the only armed agent still on her feet. All the others had been wounded or killed in the shootout, and the techs were still crouched under their desks, frozen with fear.

Reluctantly, Sharon slid Rumlow's gun in her thigh holster. There was work to do here.

"Get every gun you can, get them out of reach!" she shouted at the techs authoritatively. "Secure the area! Come on, let's move!"

Some of the techs crouched there staring, motionless with terror or uncertainty, but Klein was the first one to move to obey. He scrambled out from under the desk and kicked a gun away from an injured man in STRIKE gear whose groping fingers had almost reached it, and suddenly it was as if a spell was broken, and all the techs began darting around the room, gathering up guns from the fallen agents and piling them by Sharon's feet.

"You three over there!" Sharon shouted, pointing. "Grab those filing cabinets and stack them up in front of the doors! You over there, barricade the other door! Use desks and chairs and whatever you can. We don't want any more people coming in! Everyone else, see if you can help the wounded!" She stopped Klein before he could go over to help them. "No, I need you. I need you here," she said breathlessly. "Can you stop the launch?"

"I- I- I'll try." Klein righted his fallen chair and sat back down at his station. Thankfully, his computer hadn't been shot out in the firefight. He stared at the screen intently and then tried several keystrokes, but it continued to flash "OVERRIDE." Sharon looked around and saw that the makeshift barricades were going up quickly. The remaining techs were trying to treat the wounded as best as they could, using shirts and jackets to stem the bleeding.

"I'm locked out," Klein said after a few beats, looking frustrated. "They must have had something pre-programmed, all ready to go. I- I- I mean, Rumlow wasn't even supposed to have access to the launch sequence, but somehow he managed to skip all the safety checks and everything. Even I can't do that. Here, let me try-"

He began to input a long, complex series of keystrokes. A couple more techs were suddenly there, looking over his shoulder, and the younger one, a woman, suggested something technical to Klein that Sharon didn't understand. The three of them began to consult with each other urgently, talking over each other in their haste, and then the other two sat at their own stations and began working on something as Klein gave them rapid-fire instructions. To Sharon's surprise, Klein was barely stammering at all, even though his curly hair was damp with sweat and his whole body was tense as he leaned forward to peer into his screen.

"I can't get into the nav system," the older man said, bringing both fists down on the desk in frustration. "Unbelievable. Just look at the mess they made of the code-"

Just then the other tech made a wordless sound of triumph.

"I have cams!" she said breathlessly. "I tapped into the cams in the launching bay. Here, let me get the feed-"

She sent the footage over to the big wall of screens spanning one side of the room, and everyone in the room paused what they were doing to watch.

Three enormous helicarriers were rising from the launch bay, their repulsor engines flaring white light against the blue sky. A hush fell over the room. Sharon could feel her heart hammering in her chest. Even S.H.I.E.L.D.'s old helicarrier had carried enough weaponry to level large buildings. These new ones were far bigger, better, and armed to the teeth. Who was in Hydra's crosshairs? The White House was only blocks away. And the Capitol Building. Even the Pentagon and New York City were well within range, thanks to the new satellite network linked to the helicarriers. Not to mention millions of civilians going about their lives in the metro area, unaware that they could have a gun pointed at their heads.

There could be one pointed at Sharon's head right now, for all she knew.

"Klein-" she said, her voice tense, turning to look at him. But he was no longer frantically typing at his keyboard.

"It's too late," he told her, putting his hands down slowly on the desk, looking sick. "They've reached a high enough elevation that the crews on board are controlling them now. There's nothing we can do from here."

"How high do they need to be before they can sync with the satellites and fire their weapons?" Sharon demanded.

Klein's face was pale. "3,000 feet."

"Now at 1,500 feet," the woman beside him said grimly.

"They're shooting, they're shooting!" someone in the room suddenly burst out, and Sharon whipped her head around to look at the bank of screens again. The helicarrier in the middle of the trio was in fact lit up from artillery fire on its deck. But the weapons fire was being launched upward, not at the ground.

"What the-?" the woman beside Klein muttered, and zoomed in on the center helicarrier.

Something was flying above the helicarrier, something that was being targeted by the artillery fire. Not a Quinjet or a helicopter. Something small, and nimble, and fast.

Sharon's jaw fell open as she realized it was a man. Wearing a jet pack that flared a bright fire against the blue of the sky, and long wings that dipped and swirled and turned him on a dime. Incredibly, he was managing to evade the thick cluster of explosions mid-air.

"Ever seen anything like that?" one of the techs asked faintly. No one bothered to answer. They hadn't... but whoever it was, Hydra didn't seem to like him, and that could only mean he was on their side.

"Maybe he can bring it down," Klein murmured with a tinge of hope. Sharon didn't know what to say to that. The helicarriers had to come down - they must come down - but if any of them came down, there was a very real danger they could land on or near the Triskelion itself. And while an evacuation alert was blaring through the speakers and presumably everyone except them was exiting the building right now...

What were the chances no one on the ground below would be killed?

The crowd of crewmembers on the bridge of the old helicarrier had thinned considerably. Quite a few were lying on the ground with arrows in them. Natty had taken out a fair few with her hands and feet; Castillo's crew seemed desperate to protect their commander from Natty's attack, even at the cost of taking a hit themselves. Several techs had fled into the corridors and Clint had let them go, seeing that they showed green in his eyepiece, marking them as non-Hydra.

Sammy had ensured that her "Edwin" program was still working on cracking the helicarrier's security protocols and then had gone after the fleeing crewmembers to find them a safe place to hide; they were technicians, not agents trained in combat, and they'd be better off hunkering down and staying out of the way until the fighting was over.

Clint could only assume there were fights going on in the other strategically important areas of the helicarrier: the engine rooms, the weapons center, the flight deck. Hopefully Agent 45 and Amanda and Aliyah and Rob had things under control there.

There were still half a dozen "reds" here on the bridge fixated on bringing down Clint, though, and they had all taken shelter and were popping out from time to time to take shots at him and then ducking back down before he could get an arrow off. Clint knew he couldn't use any of his explosives to blow them out; too much risk of damaging the equipment here, and Agent 45 had made it clear he wanted the helicarrier still operational by the time they were through purging it.

Nor could he offer Natty any help. She was now locked in close-quarter combat with Commander Castillo, and any arrow he sent in their direction would be just as likely to hit her as the Hydra leader. Clint hadn't exactly had the leisure to pay close attention to their fight as he'd had his hands plenty full putting arrows into Hydra goons, but he'd seen enough out of the corner of his eye to get a feel for how it was going.

It was an oddly mismatched fight, but not in the way he'd been expecting.

Castillo had lost her gun practically the first moment Natty had tangled with her, but now she had unsheathed a couple of knives, and Natty had whipped out a pair of collapsible batons in response. They'd been trading blows upon rapid blows ever since: Castillo a full head taller than Natty, with a much longer reach and a considerably bulkier build than Natty's slender figure.

By all rights it should have been over quickly, but for all of Natty's grace in movement, she was also quick as a viper, and Clint had caught sight of her managing to land some pretty good blows, even as she was forced to contend with a continual stream of Hydra crewmembers determined to come to their commander's aid.

She'd also taken some pretty hard blows each time she got swarmed. But none of them laid her out. Instead she just came back swinging without even taking a moment to recover. No sign of discombobulation. It took plenty of training and a high degree of mental toughness to overcome that response, Clint knew. Agent 45 must have done good work with her.

A Hydra agent plugged the partition Clint was crouching behind full of bullet holes with a deafening blat-blat-blat, and Clint got annoyed. Enough of this already. He took a quick peek out, evaluated the situation, and pressed the controls on his bow to switch to a trick arrow. Pulling it from his quiver and nocking it, he got into a stable kneeling position and leaned out just far enough to get a bead: not on the Hydra agent's position, but on the control panel protruding several feet behind him.

Clint let the arrow fly, and ducked back down without waiting to see it hit, thereby avoiding the next volley of Hydra bullets.

He heard the arrow hit the panel and clatter to the floor in a disappointing kind of way.

He pressed another button on his bow.

A thin hissing sound could be heard, and the man around the corner let out a startled oath. Clint waited patiently and began to count.

One... two... three... four... five...

There was a heavy thump, much like the sound a Hydra goon makes when he topples to the floor after inhaling a small but precisely aimed jet of tranquilizing gas.

That had gone over pretty well. Clint loaded up another one, peeked out again, and let it fly in another direction. Another clatter, another hiss, another five seconds, and another heavy thump. Hey. This was fun. He sent out a third and then a fourth.

Now there were footsteps running up the stairs near his position. Someone wasn't enjoying this as much as Clint was, and had no doubt left his shelter to come explain his feelings about it. Clint managed to get a fifth arrow off, the last in his quiver, and scrambled to his feet and snapped his bow into staff position just in time for Agent Ryker, fury blazing in his eyes, to fall upon him.

Ryker did his best. He really did. He'd managed to get his hands on a long wrench and he did his level best to first smash it into Clint's face, and then break Clint's leg, and then slam it across Clint's ribs with an admirable burst of vim and vigor.

Unfortunately for him, Clint blocked each blow before it landed, and then - as Ryker was still wobbling off-balance from his third desperate blow, he whipped his weapon across the man's smug Hydra mug with a satisfying crack.

Ryker fell to the deck insensible.

Clint rapidly scanned the bridge. Everyone was down except Commander Castillo. She was still blocking Natty's blows with a will, but she was beginning to look exhausted. Clint began striding toward the pair, snapping his bow back into position and stooping to recover an arrow from a body on the floor as he passed, when suddenly all the screens on the bridge went dark.

"All systems in lockdown," a man's voice said over the intercom in a crisp British accent. "Sealing bridge doors and awaiting instructions from authorized personnel."

Clint blinked with surprise: that had sounded an awful lot like Tony Stark's A.I. back at Stark Tower. What was its name? Jeeves? But this must be Sammy's A.I., the one she had dubbed "Edwin" and tasked with hacking into the helicarrier's security protocols.

Castillo shoved Natty away from her and backed up rapidly, looking livid at the announcement. "Open a line to the control tower!" she shouted, only to realize a beat later that there were no techs left on the bridge to obey her.

"Humor her, Edwin," Natty said with faint amusement playing on her lips. She still had her batons up defensively, although Castillo didn't seem inclined to resume the fight at the moment. "Let them have a little chat."

"If you insist," the A.I.'s voice said mildly. There was a pause, and then a single screen on the bridge flared to life and an image appeared, a middle-aged woman wearing a S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform and a headset.

"We've lost control of the bridge!" Castillo told her, backing away from Natty and Clint and keeping a wary eye on them both. "Initiate emergency procedures to transfer control to your tower."

"We don't have any access to command controls!" the other woman ground out. "All systems are down. We've been trying to contact you for assistance!"

Castillo looked alarmed. "Then send reinforcements!" she snapped. "At least three teams-"

"We're not in a position to send you anything!" the woman snapped back, her expression grim. "We're a little busy dealing with Captain America at the moment!"

There was a loud explosion in the background, and suddenly her image fizzled out and the transmission went black.

There was a pregnant pause. Castillo looked from the blank screen to Clint to Natty, open fear on her face for the first time.

"What? You didn't think we only brought one Avenger, did you?" Natty asked her, moving toward her smoothly.

Castillo's face darkened, and abruptly she pulled something out of the back of her belt. For one tense moment Clint thought it was a second, hidden gun, and both he and Natty instinctively dodged to the sides, but she pointed it straight up and pulled the trigger. A grappling hook and line shot out, punching through what was apparently a false panel in the ceiling. In a flash, Castillo was jerked off her feet and sailing up through the hole, bits of styrofoam raining down in her wake.

As one, Clint and Natty ran to the hole and looked up just in time to see Castillo already at the top of a long vertical shaft, scrambling out of a hatch onto the flight deck and disappearing from sight.

Clint swore. Getting her to run away wasn't good enough; Agent 45 had been very clear he wanted Castillo as a captive. "Do you have a grappling line?" he asked Natty urgently, already pressing the control to deploy his grappling arrow.

"No!"

"Mine only holds one," Clint said shortly, nocking an arrow and taking aim at the edge of the shaft opening.

She didn't seem perturbed in the slightest. "Go get her. I'll meet you there."

Clint released the string, and in moments he too was shooting up the shaft and then scrambling out into the night air.

"Agent 13?" Klein said, looking up from his monitor, eyes bleak. "The helicarriers just reached 3,000 feet."

Sharon felt her heart drop to her stomach. This was it. It was over. Whatever Captain Rogers and his winged ally had tried to do on the helicarriers, they had failed. At this very moment, the Insight satellites were honing in on their targets, and there was no military on Earth that had the firepower to stop Hydra from killing whoever they chose.

She put one hand slowly up to cover her mouth, eyes locked on the screens. She didn't want to watch. She didn't want her last living moments to be spent in the grips of abject fear. But she couldn't seem to look away. Nor could anyone else in the room. A deep silence settled over them all as they stared up at the screens and waited for the end.

Fire bloomed in the skies.

Every single gun on all three Insight helicarriers, blazing away with heat and fire and destruction. Explosions boomed, so close to the building that the vibrations shook the floor beneath their feet. Death rained from above.

The seconds that followed were the longest and most agonizing of Sharon's life. It took an eternity of breathless waiting before she gradually realized that none of the weapons fire seemed to be reaching the ground.

In fact, all three helicarriers were now lit up by orange fires blossoming against their sides. Debris was raining down from them. Fuel tanks on board were exploding, and one helicarrier began to slowly, ponderously tilt to one side as one of its engines faltered. And still the barrage went on and didn't let up.

"They're shooting... each other?" Klein whispered uncertainly from beside her. Then his voice strengthened, and he was on his feet, hands going up to grip his sweaty hair in frantic relief. "They're shooting at each other!"

A loud crash of tinkling glass sounded, so close that both of them jumped. The other techs in the room suddenly cried out in alarm, backing away from the main entrance to the operations room. Sharon strode over to peer through the barricade they had hastily erected using the furniture in the room, and saw with horror that there were men in full STRIKE gear out in the corridor, armed with a battering ram. They had already shattered the glass door and now they were grabbing onto the stacked furniture from the other side, pulling the barricade down with rapid efficiency. She could see at least a dozen men, maybe more.

At this rate, it wouldn't take them long to get in.

"Everyone on the floor and against the walls!" Sharon shouted, and she heard gasps and cries of alarm as the techs behind her obeyed without question. Pulling Rumlow's gun back out of her holster, Sharon took aim through the gaps in the furniture, and opened fire.

The men out in the corridor began to fall, and there were frantic shouts and the sound of running feet. More STRIKE operatives came into view. More than she could easily count. Sharon emptied Rumlow's gun and crouched down to reload, her fingers quick and sure. "Everyone get a gun!" she yelled at the techs, gesturing at the pile of firearms they had gathered from the fallen agents. "I don't care if you don't know how! Just stay low and shoot at anyone who tries to come in!"

Her mind raced even as she began firing through the gaps in the barricade again. STRIKE must think there was a way to stop the helicarriers' attacks on each other from here in the operations room. She spared a glance and saw through the glass that men in combat gear had carried the battering ram around to the second barricaded door and were setting up now. Which meant that even if they managed to hold STRIKE back long enough for the trio of helicarriers to bring each other down without interference, they had just lost their escape route.

The moment STRIKE broke through, it was going to be a massacre.

Sharon stopped to reload again, sparing a glance around. Techs were crouched by the walls holding guns in their shaking hands, training them at both doors. One of the agents who had been shot earlier, Jacobsen, had managed to drag himself into a sitting position and was preparing to fire, too. He was bound to be a better shot than the others, but his shirt was spattered with blood and it was probably his own; his face was a grimace of pain. She was, more or less, on her own.

She would keep firing until the very last moment. There was no question of that.

There was also no question that the very last moment wasn't far away.

The STRIKE operatives outside the second entrance shouted and charged at the door with their battering ram, and glass shattered as they broke through. In an instant, a swarm of them began tearing down that barricade, too.

"Fire! Fire!" Sharon shouted, and some of the techs obeyed, gunshots ringing out beside her with deafening retorts. The STRIKE guys were forced to duck and dodge, but they doggedly kept working. Aunt Peggy had often called Hydra a cult, but only now did Sharon begin to appreciate just how deeply they believed in their cause, insane as it was. They were willing, almost eager, to die for it.

If only she had more agents with her to help them on their way.

With a howl, a knot of operatives on the other side of the barricade drove their shoulders into a large filing cabinet stacked on top of another one, and it slid off with a shriek of grating metal and hit the floor with a crunch, leaving a gaping hole in the barricade.

A STRIKE guy leapt up onto the remaining file cabinet and then jumped down into the operations room, training his gun on the nearest tech... who had just dropped her gun in sheer terror. Sharon shot him twice in the chest, and he collapsed where he stood.

Another man jumped into the breach. Sharon threw Rumlow's gun aside - no time to reload - and launched a roundhouse kick at him, connecting with his shin. He lost his balance and staggered down into the operations room, but she was on him in a moment, felling him with a blow to his solar plexus and then stomping his exposed throat as he lay writhing on the floor.

A third man leapt inside, and Sharon whirled to face him... only to find herself unceremoniously slammed to the floor when the man on the floor managed to grab her ankle and jerk her down on her back, knocking the wind out of her. Sharon rolled to the side to buy herself a few seconds, desperately trying to suck air into her lungs and not exactly succeeding. But she had hardly focused her eyes back on the second man, who was clumsily scrambling toward her to try to get another hit in while she was down, when a single shot rang out and he dropped at her feet.

Surprised, Sharon turned to see that the tech who had dropped her gun earlier had managed to get it back... and had actually gotten a shot off. The woman was wearing exactly the kind of expression Sharon expected to see on the face of someone who had never shot anyone before. But she'd done it. A good solid hit.

The third man who'd jumped into the room kicked the tech on the inside of her thigh and she crumpled, gun clattering to the floor. Sharon staggered back to her feet, still struggling to breathe, willing herself to fight through the pain. But the man already had his gun trained on her.

Their eyes met. He was smiling.

An instant before his finger pulled the trigger, the man suddenly jerked as a gunshot rang out. He toppled into the operations room face-down and didn't move. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity out in the corridor: Men shouting, men grunting. Gunshots and crashes and clatters.

Seeing her chance, Sharon darted for Rumlow's gun once more and rapidly reloaded it, eyes flicking up to the hole in the barricade to make sure no one new appeared there, but STRIKE seemed to be distracted from their initial charge. Her mind raced with new possibilities. That last man had been shot from behind. There was someone out there in the corridor who was armed. Someone who wasn't with Hydra. Probably more than one person, judging by the ruckus out there.

Maybe this didn't have to be a massacre after all.

The activity out in the corridor reached a fever pitch. Every gunshot was accompanied by a shout of pain. The smell of gunpower wafted through the room. The techs shrank against the walls, clutching their guns, waiting for what came next, whatever that turned out to be. Sharon had finally caught her breath, and she batted her hair back from her eyes impatiently before taking a fresh grip on Rumlow's gun.

Gradually, the frenzy outside the room quieted down. There was one last heavy thump, and then a sudden silence fell, a relief to their aching eardrums after the barrage of gunfire. Heavy footsteps approached the breach in the barricade, and the techs shifted their weight where they stood, looking nervous.

"Agent 13!" a man called out.

Sharon's eyes widened with recognition. All the techs turned to look at her expectantly.

"Agent 13!" a different man shouted, and Sharon's heart leaped in her chest as she recognized that voice, too.

Eagerly, she darted over to the barricade and looked out. Instantly, a crashing sense of relief washed over her as her eyes focused on the newcomers.

Without hesitation, Sharon took hold of the last cabinet blocking the doorway and shoved it aside to let them in.

TO BE CONTINUED

Reviews welcome!