"Matthew D." (propatria) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-01-27 18:18:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *log, bucky barnes, steve rogers, tony stark |
quicklog: steve rogers, tony stark, winter soldier
Who:Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Winter Soldier
What: West Virginia Facility Breakdown
Where: SHIELD/Hydra facility, strip mall, nowheresville West Virginia
When: Today
Warnings/Rating: Violence.
[The ghost knew it was easier to hide in plain sight sometimes. Best to pull in the shingle from structures that would show suspiciously on satellite photography, and move in out in the open, like every other company did these days - by finding a spot for the franchise in a local strip mall.
It wasn't even a particularly nice strip mall. There was a dry cleaner, a Dairy Queen, a nail salon promising $9.00 manicures, a small pizza joint that wafted the scent of grease into the parking lot.
Occupying the spot at the end, in the large opening usually reserved for a grocery store, was a local bank branch. It proclaimed itself with a standard plastic sign, and the lobby was normal enough, industrial green carpet and pastel yellow walls. They'd help you get a car loan. They'd cash your paycheck. The hours printed on a sheet of computer paper and taped to the front window were irregular, but it was a bank. And weren't there a lot of employees going in and out, and didn't the cashiers seem to change almost every week?
The strip mall was placed at the limits of the small West Virginia town it technically fell in. Almost no one used the bank, preferring the branch closer to the square. The mall squatted, brown and ugly and ordinary, shored up in the boom of the early 2000s along with a few hundred others nationwide.
Of course there were the armored cars that pulled up in back, but it was a bank, after all. And if anyone had watched closely enough, some of the people who went in never left - not by the front door, anyway. The employees were part of the community, living quiet lives in motel rooms and trailer parks. Camouflage in the heart of America, at the edge of Appalachian poverty, quietly under the radar and within striking distance of the capitol.
At 6:30 pm on a Tuesday, the bank was closed. Of course it was. The front door was shuttered and the sign in the window was turned around. A flier reminded residents to come to the town's annual Valentines' single's brunch. The only cars in the lot clustered around the pizza place, open and buzzing with activity. Most of the spots remained blanketed with a thin carpet of snow, pocked lightly with the empty circles of stingy salting.
But down below the bank, down the 'employees only' hallway behind the front desk, past the vault, down the stairs, through several layers of security opened by a man now facedown on the cement, narrow hallways opened out onto broad underground chambers, built before the facade above was even conceived. Activity was everywhere - shouted orders, a shrieking alarm, and intermittent gunfire somewhere - somewhere.
How deep did this place go? What did they do? The sigil in the reception area had a large, cracked scar punched into it, but it was undeniably SHIELD's. The banks of rooms off most of the hallways held servers, monitors, and cords as thick as a man's arm. Some of the tech was practically ancient, but newly patched. Some was obviously scorched with burns, but had been salvaged. Much of it was now shattered and sparking.
There were already dead men. One was wrapped in live wires at the entry of a room, twitching, scenting the air with burnt hair. One was slumped against the wall, and then, further in, more. They were everywhere - slumped against the wall, thrown halfway through windows into server rooms, all in plainclothes and armed to the teeth. Efficiency was the name of the game, here. The environment had been utilized where available to save on ammunition (snapped necks, men disarmed and strangled). Some of those that had been shot were wearing armored vests. Apparently that hadn't mattered to the bullets.
Halfway down the second turn in the hall, a man in tactical gear was reloading his rifle and barking orders into a radio. You think I don't know? They were on his tail already, tactical's going to be here in five -
He looked up.]