"Matthew D." (propatria) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-01-15 22:37:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, bucky barnes |
narrative: winter soldier
Who: Winter Soldier (Narrative)
What: Payback time.
Where: Washington DC, Secure Shield facility underneath Providence Hospital
When: Tonight.
Warnings/Rating: Violence, bad ideas?
South, he goes. South, jogging West to throw them off the scent, then East, East and South.
He mostly sleeps in parking lots and wooded side roads, catching a few hours in isolated places where there is no danger to listen for. He sleeps, and he has dreams where he is choking on his own vomit, where his brain is on fire and there is nothing in it shapeless ideas of what must be done. Perhaps they knew it was important to him, to do something that could be justified as righteous, however the logic turned to get it there.
He is carving a new age. He is a clean tool of a new order and he remembers smelling ozone and knowing that being a tool was a purposeful thing, a good use, and still searching, empty, for names that seemed so important to remember, until there was no longer a need, until there was no longer a want for anything, until there was quiet, sensory deprivation of the will, and he saw on the screen in the back of his mind things that he was told to.
Snatches, only. Words and snapshots of cables, bits and bridles of wire, nightmares of ice cold steel. Reaching for the window in a coffin, buried alive in snow.
SHIELD // CLASSIFIED // SURVEILLANCE FOOTAGE 19375 1/15/2015 20:39
A hallway in a busy DC hospital. Nurses wheel patients through, a child walks by, on his way back to his father's room.
Cut to another camera The camera in the entranceway. A man walks by wearing scrubs and an id badge with an indistinct photo on it, a medical mask covering his face, hands tucked into the pockets of his white coat. He wears a cap over his hair, apparently ready to go into surgery.
Camera cut He rounds the corner.
Camera cut He enters the elevator. He waits for the doors to close, then begins pressing buttons. They light, one after the other. He is careful with each one, as if remembering the sequence - 1 5 2 9 Open 2 Close. The elevator shudders and the camera shuts off.
Camera cut Here the video is of a different quality, full color and sharper definition, sound included. Still inside the elevator, but a slightly different angle. He keeps the mask on, and keeps his face turned away. He knows where the camera is.
The doors open.
Camera cut The hallway beyond. This is not the hospital, or it looks nothing like it. This lies far below, a slick hallway of black glass and polished steel, more like an office building than a medical facility, but with windows that show no light. The figure in the medical costume walks down the hall toward a doorway, leans near the lock with his hand flat on the door, and shows the lens his eye.
The door clicks open. He steps inside.
Camera cut The guard does not recognize the man who has just walked in. He stands up from his desk . "Identify yourself immediately." The figure in the scrubs walks up to the desk. The guard reaches for his gun, and the man in scrubs takes his arm and twists in backward, swift and simple as removing a cap from a bottle top. The guard flinches, the man pulls him forward, and he swiftly cuts his throat with the knife in his right hand. The guard bleeds down the front of the desk, streaking the burnished white wood with thick red stripes.
Camera cut Down the hall. A door opens and a woman steps out. She's well dressed and clearly thinking of something else, busy typing on her phone. There are pink earplugs in her ears, so she doesn't hear anyone approach. She looks up just in time to see hands grasping her head. Her neck is broken with a swift and brutal yank.
Camera cut Into the room the woman came from. A pair of men are leaning over a series of monitors that stand before a vast server bank, cooled by an even larger phalanx of fans. Their hair blows around their faces as they perform maintenance on the computers, wearing the same pink earplugs against the deafening fan blades.
The man in scrubs breaks the neck of the first researcher from behind, and the other turns around quickly enough to have his throat slit.
All quick, all quiet, no firearms thus far. Silver glints at his wrist. He leans over the monitors and begins to type.
Camera cut Now, security. Two men and a woman file quietly down the hallway, moving as quickly as possible without making a sound. No alarm has gone off, not yet, nothing to alert the intruder they know he's there. They position themselves outside the door. The man closest to the opening counts low to his fellows - onetwothree. He leans around the corner to take his shot, and takes a thrown knife to the throat.
The second agent pulls a grenade from his belt - better to kill the intruder and destroy their work than compromise it or let him live. He pulls the pin and tosses it inside. The camera picks up the crack of the grenade, and the shower of scorched wiring, casing, glass, and chip fragments that scatter into the hall.
Camera cut Back inside the room, there is no sign of the figure in scrubs, and several banks of computers are completely destroyed. They move in just far enough and he comes back into view, dropping down from atop one of the intact fan banks. He fires twice with an automatic pistol, headshots, point blank range.
08:45 - 08:56 The recording speeds up, cutting from camera to camera, showing the figure in increasingly tattered scrubs move in and out of rooms. He cuts down a wave of guards in this corridor, kills four unarmed researchers with a stolen machine gun who are hiding a side closet. As he nears the back of this office, this whatever it is, he starts taking out the cameras. Now he ducks in and out of blind spots, there and gone again.
Five minutes go by with no sign of him on any camera. Then, there he is, in the hallway, dragging an agent out by his collar. The man is strangely calm, speaking to the figure pulling him in a low voice. The camera's mic picks up Russian, of all things. "вы знаете, что вы находитесь. Вы помните Раскольникова?"
The man in the tattered scrubs pauses for a moment. He wavers against a tide invisible.
He reaches down and covers the agent's mouth with his left hand. He drags him forward, more slowly now, by the head. It must be painful, but the man under that cold grip cannot scream.
Camera cut Inside a dark room. The intruder bursts the lock with his shoulder. This place has been decommissioned, much of its contents packed away. In the back, though, attached to a bank of soviet era computers, there is a chair.
It hulks like a beast in the corner, partially covered with a drape. The intruder removes it and slams the agent in, locking the restraints. There are circular bruises around the man's mouth from those rigid fingers.
There isn't much left of the scrubs or the coat, torn from the shrapnel and from table edges, and the intruder drops what's left to reveal the black armor beneath, the gleaming sheen of his left arm in the dim light. There are hundreds of wires leading back to the machinery against the wall, all connected to the chair, and to a strange apparatus that hovers above it on a metal armature.
The man in the chair can't quite speak. His jaw was so badly bruised by the arm clenching on the joint that he tries to make his tongue form words and can't. The figure in black presses a button on the side of the chair. The machines behind it flare to life, and above, the dome hanging from the armature hisses and sparks.
The man in the chair is looking up now. This thing, whatever it is, must be almost fifty years old. It's an antique. Whatever it was designed for can't have been pleasant even when it was in fine working condition. Now, after years of neglect, the wires intermittently spit sparks that bounce across the ground. Electricity arcs and snaps across the top of the dome.
The figure in black reaches up, grabs the joint of the armature above, and brings the dome down hard over the agent's head. He presses another button on the side of the chair, then another. Like the elevator, he knows the sequence - remembers.
The machine fires to life. Gyros spin within, and a tape begins inside one of the towers against the wall, shrill and wavering with age, spinning into life, booming and incomprehensible. Is it words? Is it music? The agent in the machine might be screaming around his dead tongue as the dome lights flicker to life
// END RECORDING