The General hardly needed to make such a command. Teddy and Billy had been a team for a long time (okay, maybe not very long to Nick Fury, but he was ancient), and Teddy intended to keep it that way. As long as they worked together, everyone would be fine.
That sort of positivity was difficult to maintain on the other side of the barrier. That had been the work of some kind of earth-shifting mutant, the pavement itself shoved from half a block away to stand with cracked and crumbling asphalt as a wall. So the trio stood in a stripped road, a dirt hole flanked by sidewalks, turning marshy by pipes that were ripped and still leaked and the mud absorbing all of the smells like a record of what no one wanted to remember happened there that week. It ws sickeningly sweet, then bitter, with rot and fear, thicker than the smell of the sweat and the smoke.
It got into Teddy's mouth when he opened it to speak, making him cough then lick his teeth before he started. "Where is everyone?" Because, while he could hear them shouting, no one else stood in the mud. All of the noise came from the same direction, and Teddy imagined they had been slowly sweeping from block to block, exploding on each street until every corner had been overtaken by the energy, then moved on. Well, they had to catch up. It was four steps later that he realized that the mud was squishy but not the sinking, sucking marsh he expected and glanced down, seeing ridges of white capping out of it, spidered and bluish. When he glanced back at General Fury, it was like he hadn't quite processed what that was but knew he was horrified, and it was another beat before he was skipping sideways away from where he was standing. Those white ridges that broke up the dark mud all shivered and shifted, and Teddy was pretty sure he could see an ear.