She was far from an optimist. She called herself a realist, while Tony Stark had liked to call her 'Negative Nelly Natasha'. After all, they had come from different pasts. One was from a life of constant torture, order, and obeying commands, and the other from a privileged life with no rules or restrictions, though both grew up lonely.
Now, traversing across the contaminated and destroyed city, the last thing Natasha could be was optimistic. Seeing her second-favourite city in that state was a depressing sight. It was a ghost town.
Natasha hitched her heavy backpack up higher on her shoulders. There really was too much shit in that bag. Weapons, supplies, extra food. It all weighed her down.
"Any more of them?" she asked her partner, her voice muffled through her gas mask.
Clint quickly surveyed their surroundings again. "Nothing that I see. And I see everything."
"Yeah, I know, Hawkeye."
"Just saying."
They were on a mission to find survivors. Although very few, some survivors in the wastelands popped up on the radar, and SHIELD would drop them off at the quarantine zones. The less people within reach of the disease meant less infected.
What used to be the typically crowded Fifth Avenue now resembled nothing but a crumbling ghost town. Kicking around rubble in their paths, Clint stumbled across a lone high heel amongst the rocks.
He picked it up and held it in his gloved hand. "What would Prada think of his creations soiled like this?"
"'Thank God I've been dead for decades?'" Natasha responded. "And that's a Louboutin. You can see a hint of the red sole. It's a classic, dumbass."
"Pft, sorry." Clint tossed the shoe down. "Looks like a size ten anyway – Too big for you."
"Shit, that would've gone perfectly with my cat suit."
They turned onto another street (which street, they didn't know; the road signs were long gone). It was quieter in the city than the last time they'd visited, which made Natasha a little suspicious.
Last time, with a team of high-level agents, she had encountered groups of infected and hunters. They got split up, one agent with her, and the other two several blocks away. Their comms were working, so they knew where the other pair was, but the hordes of infected made it difficult for them to regroup.
Then, the other agents got trapped down in the subway. That was a kill zone, everyone knew that.
Natasha had gone down with three, and returned with half of one – that agent had lost a leg and a hand in their fight with some rebels and a mutt.
"I see movement a couple blocks down," Clint said, pointing to the ruins of a glass building. "Thought I spotted a gun, so keep your guard up."
"It's always up when I'm down here," Natasha muttered. She tapped her ear where her earpiece was hidden. "There's been radio silence for the past half-hour, Barton."
Clint snorted. "They probably forgot about us." Of course, that was far from the truth. Despite it having been four years since the disease broke out, not much had changed in terms of SHIELD's infrastructure. The infamous Black Widow and the Amazing Hawkeye were still two of SHIELD's best field agents. From up above in the helicarrier, there would always be a team watching over the two agents with trackers and infrared sensors.
Every ten minutes, there would be someone asking for an update on their status. Usually the reply would be along the lines of "no movement" or "killed an infected". The past couple trips to the wastelands had been less than eventful, with not a single hunter prowling about.
The radio silence on SHIELD's end made Natasha uneasy, but there was nothing they could do about it while they were on the ground.
"Two figures on our one o'clock," Clint said, nodding to an area to their right.
Sure enough, behind an overturned bus, a head was peeking up over a tire. Natasha knew what was going to happen a moment before it did, and just as she ducked for cover behind a rusted sedan, bullets cut through the air where she had been standing.
Clint was crouched down beside her, a grimace on his face. "Unfriendly hunters," he said. "Just great."
A hail of bullets rang out, piercing the body of the car and forcing the two to find new cover. Natasha hurried ahead to what was left of a concrete building, while Clint found a spot by a delivery truck close to the hunters. He caught eyes with Natasha, holding up three fingers.
Distract them.
She could do that. Pulling out her handgun, she began firing at the hunters. They quickly dove back into cover, only to be shot down by arrows piercing their heads.
Clint leapt down from the roof of the truck, securing his bow back around his rucksack. They met up behind the school bus.
"They were low on provisions," Natasha said after examining the bodies. The hunters looked younger than the usual ones, probably only in their early twenties. Their hollow cheeks and the scars on their faces made them look older.
Clint prodded empty shell casings. "Most of their ammo was just used up. Seems like they weren't going to last for too long." He pulled the arrows out of the hunters' heads. They were sticky with blood but otherwise undamaged.
With nothing to salvage from the hunters, Natasha tapped her earpiece. "Black Widow to base. Just ran into a couple hunters. We took care of them. Calling for extraction. Over."
All she received was silence. She frowned and tapped the earpiece again. Still, there was nothing.
"Hawkeye calling for extraction," Clint said, going through the same motions as Natasha. "Hawkeye to base, do you copy? Hello?"
In the distance, an inhumane shrieking began to sound. Along with it came the rustling of leaves – a flock of birds took off from a tree less than two hundred metres away.
"Oh, shit, Clint, we have to go." Natasha grabbed his arm and they sprinted down the road, turning onto a very familiar road. Just ahead of them stood Grand Central Station, which was at one point the last ground safe haven in Manhattan. Now it was just an empty shell, the infected having run loose in the place just two years before and killing, turning, or driving out the inhabitants.
Due to the amount of firepower it had taken to get rid of all the infected, Grand Central Station was falling apart. One part of the roof was collapsed from a bomb blast. An entire side of the station was gone from where a tank had plowed into it a couple years ago.
Clint spared a glance behind them, whipping his head around. "They're getting fucking closer!"
They could see the infected clearly now. Less than two hundred feet away, a horde of human-shaped creatures ran toward them, the growing loudness of their feral growls and piercing screams marking their proximity.
Natasha and Clint sprinted up the overpass and raced straight for the statue that was once Cornelius Vanderbilt but was now a crumbling, unrecognizable figure. They clambered through a hole in the window behind Cornelius. Once inside the building, they leapt onto piles of crates which created a steep staircase for them to descend without risking any broken bones.
Not daring to stop for a breath, they continued to head for a safe area. The infected could easily follow them through the large broken window or the half-broken fencing lining the tank-sized hole.
Grand Central Station had once been a safe house for hundreds of citizens a couple years before, and there was evidence of someone trying to set up a secure camp. Man-made barricades and collapsed floors lined all the doorways, while all reachable windows were boarded up with layers of thick wood. The escalators leading down to the trains were caved in, the upper balcony collapsed. The stairs leading to the Vanderbilt Avenue exit were completely destroyed.
Pylons littered the station, as well as some orange fencing, reminders of the very little time between the battle with the Chitauri and the outbreak. Various empty gun magazines were strewn all over the place, some near puddles of dried blood. The station reeked of death and decay, much unlike the smell of hotdogs and train exhaust typical of a time long past.
What was once a shining monument of historic architecture and an iconic landmark in old movies was now the stifling final resting place for so many. Not wanting to be one of the dozens of poor souls killed in the station, Natasha tried to find a way out of the main part of the building. With not much ammunition left, the last thing she wanted was to be trapped in a kill zone being pursued by a horde of infected. And with the sounds of infected getting louder by the second, Natasha began to feel an onset of panic, the sweat from her brow dripping into her eyes.
She hurried to the smaller waiting room, instantly regretting stepping foot in it. Bodies were strewn everywhere. Obviously whoever killed them either crowded all of them into one room for easier shooting, or they were courteous enough to prevent the bodies from being easily trampled.
Either way, the sight was difficult to see, so Natasha scanned the room as quickly as possible. There was a single unblocked exit at the end of the room, but it was guarded by a few decapitated bodies. Natasha called Clint in and together (with the help of a crowbar) they pried the bodies away and freed their exit.
They sprinted down the steps and out onto the pavement. Weaving around debris and abandoned cars, the pair dashed as fast as they could.
Natasha skidded to a stop as the road suddenly ended. She looked down at the fifty foot drop where a giant sinkhole had formed, taking with it dozens of cars and chunks of debris. The hole spanned across the whole road, collapsed buildings and tall heaps of rubble on either side of it.
There was no way she and Clint could get across that hole, and it looked like there was no way to go but backwards. Backwards was not a choice either, as they could hear the approaching infected just steps behind them.
"Barton, we have to get out of here," she said, wiping her brow impatiently.
"Everywhere is blocked off," Clint hissed, kicking aside a piece of concrete into the sinkhole. It landed on a car's hood. They had nothing powerful enough to make a hole in the blockades around them.
The clanging of limbs banging into cars and fallen steel beams, as well as the general groaning and slobbering of the infected grew louder.
The infected were less than twenty feet away from them. Clint readied his bow, notching one of his last arrows. His partner refilled her magazine with a click, and held her gun out with both hands.
"Nat, I- fuck!" He was tackled from the side by a running infected. Stumbling into a hunk of metal, Clint fended off the teeth chomping in his face. He grasped for a knife with one hand while pushing his attacker's jaw away with the other.
Just as his hand became loose with the slobber of the infected, a gunshot sounded and the body collapsed against him. Clint roughly pushed corpse off into the chasm, and then whirled back around to Natasha, who was already aiming and firing her gun at the approaching wave. One by one they fell, but more took their place.
He retrieved the arrow which had fallen from his grip during the tussle, and began picking off the infected. Finally, Clint reached over his shoulder, but all he grabbed was air. He was out of arrows.
The gun in the holster had been untouched since he'd gotten it as standard issue from SHIELD. With only a second of hesitation, he strung his bow around his body and whipped out the gun. He hated how loud it was, and that it would only attract more attention.
But the horde was mere feet away. He switched his gun for two wicked-sharp knives and began stabbing the necks of approaching infected. Natasha had a machete and was hacking the infected's heads off.
"How did we manage to get trapped?" Clint growled, plunging a blade into a man's jugular.
"Bad luck," Natasha shouted back.
"Nat, I wanted to tell you-"
But he was cut off by a spray of dark blood coating his face. His eyes and mouth squeezed shut as he stumbled back. He felt his feet begin to slip. The chasm's wide mouth was beginning to engulf him. Just as he began to fall, a figure grabbed his torso and lifted him away from his death.
And up into the air.
He was roughly dropped to the ground. The familiar sound of thrusters accompanied the gust ruffling his hair. Wiping the blood away with a sleeve, Clint could finally see his saviour as they began taking down the group of infected.
Iron Man.