The bloodstain ended in a dead body.
It was the body of a SHIELD member. It slumped against the wall, head bowed, motionless. It sat in a pool of blood, surrounded by dark red liquid dripping from the wounds on its body. Even though his chin was on his chest, I could see the jagged wound on the side of his neck. A few droplets of blood worked their way out of his throat, but it was nothing compared to his other wound, the one that had definitely killed him.
I've never tangled directly with SHIELD, but I know plenty of people who had the misfortune to. Even their dress uniforms, the stuff they were during ceremonies and fancy dinner parties, are comprised of unstable molecules. I have no clue how the hell they work, or what the theory behind them is, or why the hell someone who want to wear something with the word "unstable" right there in the damn item description. Anything made of the stuff, though, is damn near impossible to damage. Rip? Tear? Blow a hole in? Light on fire? Good luck, man. And the guy on the ground wasn't in dress blues, but what looked like full on SHIELD assault armor, military-grade or better. Stuff meant to take a bullet, a super-powered punch, or even a fall off of a five story building. The poor guy would have a bruise the next few days, but nothing would get broken or squished in the process.
The chestpiece of the armor had been peeled apart.
Let me say this again.
The chestpiece of the armor had been peeled apart.
Not pulled off, not yanked away, not cracked, not shattered, but peeled. Silver and gray layers of Kevlar and unstable molecules pulled apart. The camera pulled away from Fury, focusing now on the poor schmuck for a second. He zoomed in on the chestplate. The edges were smooth and glittered a bit, but as the shot got closer, it revealed the guy underneath, past the armor and outerwear...
Remember Outback Steakhouse, and those fried onions they had? Bloomin' Onions. You'd have this peeled, cut onion that looked like a flower, and you'd pull off the little strands of fried onion to wolf down. The best way to describe what I was seeing right now, what the whole world was seeing, was if someone had eaten all of the pieces, save for the ones on the very edge, leaving behind this empty cavity where something edible had one been.
The guy's peeled chestpiece was the outer layer.
And his chest was the empty cavity.
Boomerang caught it first. I heard my friend suddenly choking as he spit out his beer. "Oh, Christ, he's missing his guts. They're clean gone."
"The hell are you..." The cameraman had kneeled down, trying to steady the shot. It improved the lightning of the scene, and it gave me a damn good view of the agent's bottom rib bones. Below that final bone, there was nothing. No skin, no muscle. At the very bottom of the hole, a long, pink cylinder was poking out. It was some part of the agent's digestive system. And the end was a stretchy mess, like someone had pulled the rest of it away.
My Omaha birthday steak almost shot right back up my throat at the sight. I had seen plenty of blood and guts in the course of my career, but nothing so visceral. The high-definition picture didn't make things any easier as well. It took a good pull of beer to keep the bile down, but I still ended up with the acidic taste of vomit in my mouth. "Jesus, did a grenade explode inside of him?"
"It would have to have been a shaped charge," Aleksei offered. "A really damn big one."
On screen, the shot suddenly turned. To his left, Fury was calling out to someone. The cameraman apparently stood up quick, and tried to refocus the shot. It steadied, and showed Fury with his gun out. Whatever the Colonel was aiming at, it wasn't in the shot yet. We could hear Fury speaking in a clear and loud voice, though. "If you don't show me your hands in the next five seconds, I'm going to put a bullet in you. Show me your hands!"
The cameraman slid to one side slightly. The shot now encompassed the entire width of the hallway. From the dead SHIELD agent on the right wall, a bloody smear crossed to the opposite wall. Hunched over, a figure in a white lab coat had its hands to its mouth. Its' head shook vigorously, bits of spittle flying in every direction. We could see that the front of the lab coat was covered in blood, one long line and several small dots. The microphone on the camera was picking up that tearing sound much more clearly now, making it very evident...it was coming from the lab guy sitting on the ground.
"Five...four..." Fury counted in a calm, even tone. On "three," the form looked up, turning his head slightly to show he was a middle-aged man. The look on the guy's face, it was like he was in some sort of trance. His eyes weren't focusing on anything, just staring in the general vicinity of Colonel Fury. His hands came down...his mouth was covered in blood. It dripped from his lips, and when it opened its mouth, making a noiseless gasp, his teeth were stained red.
Something dropped from its hands, just outside the bottom of the shot. The wet sound it made when it slapped into the tile floor sent a chill up my spine. One hand went to the floor, and as the man started to push himself up, the other hand reached out, fingers stretching towards Fury, clawing inward as...
*BANG*
I jumped in surprise as the sound of the gunshot. A single round hole appeared in the forehead of the guy, accompanied by an explosion of bone and brains from the rear. The shot never jerked, or wavered, giving the entire planet a perfect view of Nick Fury's execution of the scientist. The body fell forward, smacking head first into the ground, just in front of Fury's feet. As he looked down at the dead body, from behind the cameraman, a female voice yelled out.
"Sir! Are you ok?"
"I'm fine, Daniels. Damn it, where the hell is my containment team!"
"On it, sir! Command, Daniels, Colonel Fury wants to know...sir, 30 seconds out."
"Better then nothing! Now, where the hell is the specimen?" Fury had his pistol back up, aiming it down the corridor. "I am going to kill every single suit and tie who told us this was the best place to keep it until the CDC guys showed up..." He started forward again, stepping over the body of the dead scientist. Fury measured each step, his head turning in every direction, keeping close tabs on his surroundings. The shot stayed steady as well. The cameraman had kept the shot steady when Fury had put a bullet into the scientist. Now, it looked like he was content to stay where the hell he was. He just kept his camera on Fury as the old soldier looked for this "specimen."
"Guys...did we just see Nick Fury shoot a guy in cold blood?" Boomerang was glued to the screen, his jaw slightly dropped. "I mean, just bang, one shot, between the eyes?"
"Yeah, Fred. The guy was going for Fury," I countered, my own eyes locked to the scene in front of me.
"Huh...well, ain't no jury gonna convict us then for what we did earlier tonight, we did it in self-defense."
I could see Fred's angle, and inside, I felt a sense of relief. But right now, I wasn't thinking about criminal charges and involuntary manslaughter. Nick Fury was on the hunt, looking for someone or something that was directly tied to the scene of slaughter. I couldn't look away. I didn't want to look away. My ass would have been long gone if I had come across a dead shield agent missing his guts and some scientist covered in blood. I may have been a two-bit supervillain, but that didn't make me a damn fool. But here was Fury, playing hero, when he could have just waited for the backup...
He was passing another laboratory, when his head jerked to the right. Then, suddenly, Fury was diving backwards, leaping away from the window an instant before shards of glass sprayed into the corridor, as something big crashed through the opening. It filled nearly the entire corridor, a massive, hulking shape. Even flying backwards, Fury was firing his pistol, eight rapid shots in the space of about three, maybe four seconds. Several of them appeared to impact the huge shape, slamming into a meaty thigh and stitching several holes across its chest. Almost upon landing, Fury was slamming a new clip into his pistol. In the time it took for him to reload and aim, the cameraman was in action, zooming in to give the viewers a clear look at the bloody face of Fury's assailant.
It was a face I knew well, even without the purple mask.
Dirk Garthwaite.
The Wrecker.
X
If you ever wanted to talk about a case of right place, right time, Dirk Garthwaite was one of your top-five examples. Guy used to be a construction worker, got fired for violent tendencies, and then started looting places and leaving a crowbar as a calling sign. So one night, he's breaking into a hotel room. Turns out, Loki was renting the room at the time. Yeah, Loki. The Nordic God of Trickery. Not a guy pretending to be Loki. Loki. The guy had rented this room in an effort to get his powers back after Odin, had taken them away, and he's making a deal with some Nordic Queen to get them back. So Dirk breaks into his hotel room and knocks Loki out. Yeah, one punch, knocked out a god, a god without powers, but still...
So Dirk's looting the room, and he finds Loki's helmet. In a moment of pure whimsy, the guy puts the damn thing on...and in that exact same instant, this Queen appears and thinks Dirk's Loki, and next thing you know, Dirk's walking around with superhuman strength, stamina, durability, and his crowbar's the biggest damn baseball bat on the planet. I watched him knock down a Wal-Mart with one swing of his crowbar. Not part of the Wal-Mart, the entire damn store. Guy's dumb as a post, though. I always knock on Aleksei, but my friend's got a good sense of street smarts. Not Wrecker. There's a reason Thor kept putting him back in jail, because "hit it, hit it again, hit it again" doesn't work against the God of Thunder.
The two of us never got along, mainly because I was always jealous of the guy. I built my gloves out of bits of wire bedding, whatever I could get from the machine shop, and a couple of metal cafeteria plates, all while avoiding daily beatings and shower rape. Here's a guy who literally stumbles into godlike power and can't think of anything more to do with it then hit things. I plan heists, pull together resources, and go toe-to-toe with Spider-Man, all to be considered a laughing-stock by the hero community. Meanwhile, a guy like the Wrecker throws a tanker truck over the side of FDR Drive and he warrants a full response from the Avengers.
X
"SIR, STAY DOWN!"
The shot suddenly jerks to the side. You could hear the cameraman yelp in surprise at the sound of a submachine gun firing a few feet behind him. On the left edge of the screen, the bullets were slamming into the Wrecker's chest, making a neat, ragged circle in the middle of his dark-olive uniform. I counted two, maybe three bursts of controlled fire, shots that would have put any normal human being down for good.
The Wrecker's response was to start moving forward. I'd seen the guy shrug off blows from Thor, so it doesn't surprise me that he's walking through a hail of bullets. In moving forward, the cameraman was able to focus directly on the Wrecker's face.
Or what was left of it.
The right half of his face was intact, though the eye was slightly clouded over. The left half, though, was missing everything. The outer layer of skin, from his chin up to his eye, and back to where his should have been, had been ripped away. I could see the muscle clearly, but it should have been dripping blood, instead of being dry. The edges of the massive wound were ragged, and his teeth, stained a cherry red, clicked as he lumbered forward. One hand...
As opposed to his face, dark blood dripped from his glove. It coated the purple material in its entirety. And I could make out the reflective threads of silver material in sharp contrast to the deep red all over the Wrecker's fingers.
One hand reached down towards the still grounded Fury. The Colonel had reloaded his gun, and took aim at the Wrecker. His growling voice shot from the speakers. "HEAD SHOTS, DANIELS, TAKE HIM DOWN!"
The stream of bullets from off-camera shifted upwards, joined by single shots from Fury's pistol. The three of us watched as what was left of the Wrecker's face disintegrated under the hail of gunfire. Which should have been impossible. The man took direct shots to the jaw from Thor's hammer, which had a lot more stopping power then a 9mm, and got maybe a bloody nose. Skin and muscle was flying off under the assault, but the Wrecker didn't seem to notice. He kept pushing on, still reaching for Fury. His mouth opened wide, the Wrecker's face nearly a skull as the tissue was shot away. The gunfire slackened a bit, as Daniels yelled "RELOADING!" It took maybe three seconds for the sound of semi-automatic fire to pick back up. The first burst from Daniels turned out to be the last. The Wrecker's left eye suddenly exploded as one of Daniels' bullets struck directly into the socket. Milky fluid squirted into the air, and for a split second, the Wrecker was perfectly still, one arm outstretched. When he started to fall over, Fury had to roll quickly to his right. The supervillain crashed into the tile floor, sending the overturned gurney a few inches to one side. Fury scooted backwards a few inches from the body, the pistol still aimed at the Wrecker's head. Dirk didn't move, though. Daniels' shot had put him down for good.
"God damn it," Fury breathed as he stared at the motionless Wrecker. "No one told me this..."
"Sir, to your right!"
Fury's head, and his pistol's aim, snapped to that side. The gurney's movement gave the cameraman a perfect line of sight to what Daniels had been warning her commanding officer about.
The SHIELD trooper was getting back on his feet.
A loud crash came from behind. Not on TV, but behind us. Rhino and I immediately spun around, and I found myself raising one of my hands in reflex. Boomerang had dropped the bottle of lager, and it shattered on the concrete floor of the warehouse. His gaze was locked on the TV, his jaw dropped in disbelief. "No way." Boomerang breathed in disbelief. "No way, mate, that guy's missing his guts!"
"Sir?" Daniels's voice held a cautious, inquisitive tone, asking for orders. Fury was getting to his own feet as the trooper's hand flailed in the air. It came to rest on the side of the gurney, and the guy used it to help leverage himself to his feet. He moved...almost like a marionette being controlled by an inexperienced puppeteer. One arm jerked, then his leg shot out, then his other legs buckled under. But he was getting to his feet. The trooper's gaze reminded me of the scientist's earlier (It had been about a minute or two, all caught in high-definition brought to you by Fox News) look...confused, almost trance like. At one point, the trooper was bent over, using his other hand to push off of the floor, fingers sinking into the pool of blood their had collected underneath him. The camera failed to catch it directly...luckily...but you could make out something fall from his chest cavity through the hole torn into his armor. The splashing sound it made, though, as it fell into the pool...
"Screw this," Fury said. He took a step forward, putting the pistol right to the soldier's head. That action seemed to finally grab his attention, and it was starting to turn its head when Fury pulled the trigger. Just like with the scientist, brain matter exploded from the back side of the soldier's head, and he slumped to the ground, his head next to the still unmoving Wrecker's. As we watched, Fury followed with a second shot into the soldier's head, along with one to the back of the Wrecker's. After a few seconds, he turned to face Daniels. The camera caught his side profile, jaw working, his eyepatch clearly visible. "Daniels, seal off this area, find out where that containment team is, and tell them to report to me for a serious ass kicking." She nodded, spinning around and going towards the airlock door. Fury followed, and, moving quickly, so did the cameraman. He caught Fury's statement, the words that pretty much blew the 'official' story out of the water before it got any traction whatsoever.
"Screw Norman Osborn and his suggestions. I am not going to allow motherfucking zombies in my motherfucking headquarters."