The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (20 page)

Appendix

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30

Even a guy with the uncanny accuracy of Clint Barton needed quality equipment. And for his equipment he had once gone to a seriously top-secret NSA lab in West Virginia. But then he came in out of the cold, so to speak, and ended up with the Super Hero Ultimates gig, and now he went shopping for his gear at Stark Industries, which occupied a fine-looking skyscraper near Bryant Park. Nothing big or flashy by Manhattan standards: fifty, maybe sixty floors, glass and steel construction. It was underground that the place got exciting, because Tony had figured out some way to engineer a whole lot of subbasements that avoided subway tracks, utility conduits, and other existing basements. The whole setup was a marvel of engineering vision and ruthless graft. Clint often wondered what a three-dimensional schematic of the subterranean parts of Stark Industries would look like. Swiss cheese, maybe. Or, to use a comparison more apropos to current events, an ant farm. Clint had come to the ant farm to test out some new arrowheads and miscellaneous other doodads that the tech underlings at Stark were constantly working on whenever Tony freed them from their government projects. It seemed to Clint that the underlings had quite a bit more enthusiasm for Ultimates-related gimcrackery than for their standard cluster bombs and cruise missile gyroscopes. Today he was there to look at a prototype arrowhead that would, if it worked as advertised, deliver serious armor-piercing value even at the relatively low velocities an arrow could reach. This was apparently achieved by an extraordinary rotational velocity that caused initial penetration even into hardened steel, after which a high-explosive charge did the rest. It was the kind of battlefield performance fairly easily reached by a rocket-propelled grenade or high-caliber depleted uranium bullets, but you didn't always want to make your mark with those munitions. What if say, you wanted to punch a hole through the door of a hardened limo, but you didn't have any way to set up with an RPG or .50-cal?

And what if you just plain loved the feeling of the bowstring tautening as you held it back, and then back a little more... and then let fly?

Hell, I can shoot guns, Clint thought. I've spent more of my life looking through crosshairs than most people have spent eating cheeseburgers. But the bow. The handheld projectile. That was where his body found its true union with the weapon.

"So show me the new toy," he was saying to Arjun, the lead weapons tech in Stark's Low-Velocity Research Facility.

"You got it," Arjun said, and started a complicated sequence with a keypad to get them through a door, and that's when the first bomb went off upstairs.

Glint and Arjun looked at each other in shock. "Arjun," Clint said, "I don't care if they work to specs or not. Give me some goodies."

Another explosion shook dust from the ceiling. Arjun finished the keypad sequence and stood back as the door opened. "Locker's the first door to the right," he said. "Take what you need. I'm getting the hell out of here."

Which is as it should be, Clint was thinking as he headed back up toward ground level, bow in his left hand and forty-eight arrows in three quivers slapping against both hips and his left shoulder blade. Get the civilians out of the way. If there's fighting to be done, leave it to the soldiers. He wished he had some regular old arrows. If he was going to be shooting Chitauri with these armor-piercing shafts, they'd likely be sticking out the other side before the explosives got around to detonating. Gunfire to his left. Clint turned and shot before his conscious mind had identified a target. The arrow drilled through the head of the guy with the gun, right behind the hinge of the jaw, and then the charge went off and the guy's upper body turned into a big bloody loogie on the wall. 'Yikes," Clint said. He was loaded for bear here, and maybe only hunting squirrel. For a would-be perfectionist like him, being overequipped was almost as bad as being underequipped.

He took a second to raise Nick on the cell. "Nick," he said. "I just shot somebody in Tony's basement."

"Keep it up," came the reply. "We're on the way, but you and Tony are the only ones there right now, and he's not sure he can get to the suit."

Suit, Clint thought dismissivcly as he clicked off Anyone can be a hero inside a robot skin. And anyone can be a hero if he can grow to be sixty feet tall, but Hank Pym is still a loser. Me, all I have is the hand and the eye and the tool. And that's all I need.

He found a fire stairwell and got on the cell again, looking for Tony this time. "I'm a little busy," Tony said when he picked up.

"I'm in your basement," Clint said. "What should I be looking for?"

"Outstanding," Tony said. "Can you get to 2-B?"

Clint looked up the stairs. "I'm at 4-B," he said.

"Then go up two flights and kill anyone who might be an alien," Tony said. "I'll be there as soon as I can." Clint walked through his daily life with a part of his brain constantly assessing the manner in which he could kill anyone who passed through his field of vision. It wasn't a character trait he took any pride in, but it had kept him alive and made him invaluable to a certain type of unscrupulous or ideological bureaucrats until he'd woken up one morning, realized he'd killed nine people the day before without ever knowing what they'd done to deserve it, and felt nothing. He was out of black ops the next day, and what kept him alive was that all of the people in his former areas of employment were too scared of him to try to take him out. This was the only compliment any of them were ever likely to pay him. He got the all-hands-on-deck text message when he was waiting outside the door to 2-B. "Hmm," he said to the stairwell. "Wonder how long it'll take the gang to get here. All I got is forty-seven arrows left." The door was locked, and Clint cursed Tony loudly and without reservation until he decided just to blow the goddamn thing off its hinges. Which he did, the AP-HE arrowhead working admirably when it had a little more than human bone and tissue to work with. The doorknob and about eighteen inches of the jamb disappeared in a poof of smoke and a singing haze of shrapnel, and then Clint was into Tony's private lab, where Tony worked on the Iron Man suits. Clint had forty-six arrows and no idea who he was supposed to be killing. People were running in every direction, there was a hell of a lot of shooting, and smoke from a hole in the wall made it hard to see and breathe. During the hit on the skyscraper last year, they'd known everyone in the building was Chitauri. This was different. Who were the bad guys?

Chaos, man.

The hole made one aspect of target selection easier; anyone who came in through it got an arrow. Then anyone who reacted to that got an arrow. The explosions were outright deafening in the closed space of the lab, and something about the constant impacts on his eardrums slowed Clint's thinking just a touch. It took him much longer than it should have to figure out that the infiltrating Chitauri weren't going after Tony's suits. The ones already in the room were laying down suppressing fire to get the others through the lab and into the stairwell.

They want the amplifier
, Clint thought. Shit. Here I am trying to save Tony's suits, and they aren't the objective. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

He'd been firing from behind a lab table near the stairwell door where he'd come in, and now he ducked under the table and sprinted through the smoke and chaos to a bank of monitors and testing equipment, from which he had a better angle on the other stairwell door.

From somewhere overhead, a big explosion shook the building. Clint saw the shock wave propagate through the hanging smoke in the lab. What were they after? He fired until his arrows were gone, and then he swept two AK-47s up from dead Chitauri and switched them to single shot. God, the world was slow. It was a hundred feet or so from the hole in the wall across the lab floor to the stairwell door. A fast Chitauri in human guise could cover that distance in less than five seconds. Clint could draw a bead on a running target, squeeze off, and go to the next in a hundredth of that time. By the time the clips in the AKs were empty, the room was quiet except for the ringing in his ears and the panicked yelling of the techs who had survived the initial assault.

Clint snapped open his cell and called Tony. No answer. "Shit," he said. Next he tried Nick, and got him on the first ring.

"The lab is clear," Clint said. "But they weren't after the suits."

"We know," Nick said. "You still on 2-B?"

'Yeah."

"Load up and head for the ground floor. Fastest is through the subway tunnel."

"Subway tunnel?"

"The hole in the wall that goes to the subway. Follow it to your left until you see a hole in the ceiling. Come up that way and you'll know what to do from there. Haul ass, Clint." Fury hung up, and Clint headed for the hole, scavenging clips where he could find them. They didn't fit very well in the quivers he was wearing, but sometimes a man had to improvise. He poked his head into the tunnel just as an outbound Long Island Rail Road train was roaring by, not nearly close enough to hit him but not nearly far enough away that he could avoid an instinctive flinch back into the lab. As the train's clack and thunder echoed away east, Clint wondered why the Chitauri hadn't blown the subway tracks, or one of the trains, if what they were really after was widespread chaos. Goddamn aliens, even when you understood what they wanted you still couldn't figure out how they'd go about getting it. "The world," Clint said, "was a better place when we were the only ones screwing it up."

Out in the tunnel again, he raced down a long-abandoned catwalk, finding a hole in the ceiling about seventy-five yards west. Hoisting himself through it, Clint came up into a supply closet with a nice clean hole blown through its west wall into what must have been level 1-B in Tony's building. He was in a long, white hall, lit only by emergency bulbs near the floor. A large number of dirty footprints, tracking in subway grime, led off to his left. It was suspiciously quiet, and when his cell phone pinged with an incoming message Clint had a moment of intolerable paranoia, imagining every rifle muzzle in the world picking out this one sound in the dim and silent hall.

He opened his phone and saw the message from Nick: STAY THERE. DON'T LET ANYONE OUT. Part of Clint was furious. He wanted in on whatever was happening. His blood was up, he'd logged maybe sixty kills already and wanted more. Why were they leaving him here? If the Chitauri got what they came for, they could leave any way they wanted. Goddammit.

Then the other part of Clint's mind, the one that lived only for targets and the choreography of eye and hand and tool, soothed him. Nick must know something, said the predator part of Clint's mind. He needs someone to seal off the exit, and there's nobody in the world better.

Nobody.

Clint settled himself just inside the hole blown into the hallway. He made himself still, keeping a firing position, timing his breath to the flicker of the emergency lights. Whatever came down the hall would never live to see the tunnel.

31

Steve got to Stark Industries the fastest way he could on a weekday afternoon. He ran. The four miles between Battery Park City and Tony's headquarters melted away, and the only reason Steve didn't run right on in the front door—through the cordon that had already formed outside on 34th Street—was that General Fury called his cell. "Steve, find the closest subway grate. Go through it and call me back." Fires burned in several of the building's lower floors, and Steve could hear small-arms fire through broken windows. As he watched, another window spider-webbed and then disintegrated under the impact of bullets. Fire crews were starting to respond, and there were so many sirens going off that it sounded like the last time Steve had been in an air raid over Germany.

"It's kind of loud out here, sir. Did you say to go through a subway grate?"

"That's what I said." Fury hung up.

Steve had gotten some odd orders in his time, but this one was right up there. "Yes, sir," he said, even though he was talking to himself, and he flipped up the first grate he saw. Dropping into it, he landed in a thick sediment of cigarette butts, falafel wrappers, tourist flyers, and the miscellaneous muck and scum that washed through the grates every time it rained. It smelled like the floor of a Coney Island bathroom, if that bathroom had recently been on fire. He called General Fury back.

"Okay, get down into the tunnel," General Fury said. "Cross to the north side of the track that runs under 34th Street and head east until you see a hole in the ceiling. Go through it, but sing out first."

"Am I hearing you right?" Steve asked. "You want me to announce my presence?"

"Are you going deaf?" General Fury snapped. Static flared over the phone, and Steve heard a boom from the street above. Some of the assembled crowd of gawkers screamed. "Yes, I want you to announce yourself, unless you want seven or eight bullets in your head. Clint's down there, and he's pissed off and jumpy."

Which turned out to be a fairly exact description. Steve found his way through and past holes in a couple of train tunnels, and when he got to the one in the ceiling where General Fury had told him to look, he called softly. "Clint? Steve here."

"Left hand through the hole, pinkie and thumb extended. Now."

Steve did it.

"Huh," Clint said. "You're pretty fast. If that had been a normal reaction time, I was going to take off the thumb just to be sure."