Chapter Text
PART TWO: ARROWS AND FISTS
A Few Months Before, Old Grave New York...
Bang. Thunk.
Bang. Thunk.
Bang. Thunk.
The ball ratchets through the air, smashing into the ceiling and crashing back downward. He catches it with one hand, snatching it out of the air. Rinse and repeat. He couldn't hear the sound of it hitting the ceiling, but he imagined it went something like this.
Bang. Thunk.
Bang. Thunk.
Bang. Thunk.
Clint Barton can't recall if anyone had ever told him the end of the world would be so damn boring. Sure, it had its downsides, including dead ones and a general lack of hygiene. Those were given at the end times. What no one ever talked about was how goddamn boring it would be. No television, no streaming, texting, or gaming. Most especially? No, nobody.
He's grown used to that part. Being alone.
A dart of motion to his right has Clint tilting his head to the side from where he lies on the ground. He looks over just as something big, golden, and fluffy slams into him, desperately smacking the ball out of his hand and giving chase as it bounces about the room. Clint lets out a grunt as the air is pushed from his lungs.
Maybe not so alone after all.
Clint watches as Dog dashes across the room, a trail of saliva in his wake, his long-haired tail waving behind him as he dives under the couch, chasing the ball down with single-minded determination.
Clint sits up, a groan escaping his lips. He aches in all the wrong places. His back pops and cracks, and he twists in place until his hips do the same. Last night's escapades hadn't done him any good. He is roadrashed and bruised. The Hulk tends to do that to a man.
Dragging himself to his feet, Clint glances around. He's in a high-rise apartment. It's nothing much, but he doesn't need much. It's cold with the edge of oncoming winter, though winter hasn't fully arrived yet. It had rained earlier that day, so everything outside their tiny oasis was covered in a wet sheen.
He doesn't have to look down below to know that the dead ones will be wallowing from the recent rain; they'll be slow and lethargic, which can only be a good thing in his line of work.
Movement by his side has him turning to look at Dog, as Dog comes up beside him and drops the now slobbery ball down at his feet. Picking up the ball, Clint throws it across the living room, aiming for the open door and the hallway just beyond it. The ball zips through the air, and for a moment, Dog looks like he might give chase. Then Dog stops, his head cocking to the side and his ears perking upright. Clint raises one eyebrow, looking at the dog and then at the ball.
Then he feels it. A thrumming in the air. Low and hollow on his deaf ears.
What the hell? Clint looks around, his eyes flashing everywhere. Dog rushes over to the window, leaping onto the back of the couch and staring out and up.
Up? What the hell could he be looking up for?
Clint follows after him, stepping up to the window pane and looking outside, even as he reaches up to his head and turns on his cochlear implant.
THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP!
BARK, BARK, BARK, BARK!
Clint flinches as he's suddenly inundated with sound from everywhere. He slams his hands over his ears, nearly falling to his knees, and lets out a choking sound as he dials back the volume on his implant.
And that's when he sees it. High in the sky, like some goddamn remnant from days gone by. A helicopter.
A helicopter?! It can't be. Clint stands, struck still with disbelief.
Then he realizes something else. It's heading right towards them.
No way. No goddamn way.
Then, half a moment later, they don't know. They don't know!
Clint snarls, gesturing for Dog to stay, and turns away from the window. He grabs his crossbow and bag off the table, and, running for the door, he slams it closed behind himself, leaving Dog safe inside.
He races down the hall, running for the stairwell. Beneath him, the ground begins to tremble. Clint slams into the stairwell door at the end of the hall and races up the stairs, his shod feet slamming against bare concrete, his lungs tight with growing apprehension.
He makes it up to the roof just in time to hear the Hulk rise from the ashes of its own making.
"RAWR!!" The bellowing howl shakes the very air itself.
Still, the helicopter proceeds, unhindered through the sky. Moving closer and closer.
Clint stumbles out into the bright light of day. Reaching into his bag, he digs around until he feels something gun-shaped and heavy land into his hand. Yanking out the flare gun, he double-checks that it's loaded and raises it into the air.
Bang.
The flare gun goes off, and with it, a bright red stream of smoke spews forth.
Warning. Warning. It urges.
Too late.
With a roar fit to shake the windows in their frames, the Hulk tears free from the ground and jumps through the air, arms flailing, limbs flying. Teeth gnashing as he leaps from building to building, up up up, into the air.
Clint reaches for his bow and draws an arrow from the quiver on his back. He raises it to the bowstring, pulls, and shoots. The arrow flies through the air just ahead of the Hulk's barreling form, and they meet mid-flight. A percussive boom rocks through the air.
Usually, that would have the Hulk running, but not today; today, he brushes the blast aside like it's nothing more than an annoying fly. He takes one more flying leap.
The helicopter sees him now and moves to evade, its blades whirring loudly through the air.
Too late. Too fucking late.
The Hulk's meaty fists wrap around the helicopter's tail, grabbing it from the sky like it's nothing more than a child's plaything.
No.
No!
As Clint watches, feeling like he's somehow trapped in a nightmare that he can't wake from, the Hulk raises the helicopter over its shoulder and brings it down into the adjacent building.
Blades and shrapnel go flying everywhere. A burst of smoke, a whole gully of it, fills the air with blackness and the taste of gasoline.
Clint raises a hand to cover his mouth. Stepping back, away from the edge of the building. That's when he hears it. Screaming. Open-mouthed cries of terror that aren't the sound of the dead below.
Someone's alive in there?!
The Hulk roars in success, smashing the side of the building some twenty floors up until it shakes from the sheer onslaught.
Unthinking, Clint reaches for his arrows. His biceps bulge as he strains back the string of his bow and fires off two arrows at a time. They fly true and smash into either side of the Hulk. This time, the blast is enough, and the Hulk finds himself falling through the air, landing on the ground with a vibrating thunk that takes out a couple dozen of the undead below him.
It's not a lot, but it'll have to do.
Looking at the distance between the buildings, Clint can immediately see that there's no way he's getting across the buildings in one jump. He has no grappling hook or anything that might aid the process.
That leaves him with only one option, and that? Is to run. So that's what he does. He turns and races across the roof, heading back inside, slinging his bag over his shoulders. There are hundreds of stairs between him and the bottom of the building. Instead of taking the stairs one at a time, he swings over the rail and drops down into the subsection between them. He's falling. Whenever his momentum gets too high, he reaches out and grabs onto the railing. Gravity yanks his body downward, but his arms hold him in place nonetheless.
Then he lets go again. Fall. Repeat. Until finally, he lands on the bottom floor with a thud of his boots. Inhaling a deep breath, Clint glances around, his hands going for the two blades he has at his waist.
He is in dead man's land now. And here he has to be careful, or it's his ass that's joining the horde. Clint walks over to the stairwell door and shoves the push bar open. He steps out into the main lobby of the building. It's gore-stained and blackened, a ghost of its once self. The lower levels are blasted to pieces, with no windows or doors. It's like this in every building here on Central.
Clint's done his best to fortify this particular building. He's covered the windows with the doors from inside the building, using them as giant sheets of plywood to protect himself from being swarmed by the horde. It works, for the most part. Still, stragglers manage to get in.
Clint exhales as he sees a dead one headed his way. It stumbles on the stumps of once legs and is skinny as a rail from starvation. Well, Clint's not looking to feed it now. He stalks forward, raising his knife over his shoulder and flicking his wrist. He sends it flying with exact proficiency. There's a hollow thunk; then the dead one goes down, its body collapsing under its own weight. Clint steps forward and yanks his blade out from its skull, quickly cleaning it on the dead one's clothes.
He makes his way over to his exit point. A door that he'd rigged up to swing outward rather than inward. He yanks from the lashing of wire holding it in place. Then twists the handles and steps outside.
The first thing he hears is the hot whine of the helicopter engine as it whirrs overhead. The second is the Hulk's roar as he angrily tears into the horde gathering around him. They are drawn to him by the haunting cries he makes. The screams of the injured person are silent from here, and Clint is not sure if that means he's dead or dying.
Clint glances left and right as he shuts the door behind him. The dead ones are weighted down with rain and otherwise occupied by the Hulk. They don't even seem to register him as he makes his way out from under the building, stepping in a puddle of slush on his way out the door. Thank god for the little things.
Clint grins, or grimaces, it's gotten hard to tell of late, and takes off into the crowd. Dodging and dancing between grasping hands, he takes down those who get too close, but there's no time to clean out the area. He needs to get up to that helicopter, and fast.
Well, as fast as his legs can take him, because there's no other way to get there than by his locomotion.
He's across the street in a matter of seconds, his eyes everywhere, his knives even more so. He ducks under a short overhang, and he's inside the building, his shoes cracking on glass, his breath coming in rapid exhales as he's faced with a dozen or so of the dead ones. The rain hasn't slowed these guys down. They've been sheltered from it by a nearby building. Clint lunges forward, twisting on one leg, and kicking out with his boot, aiming for heads and legs, taking them down as rapidly as he can. He's gasping for breath by now, and his lungs ache, but he doesn't care. He's got a mission to accomplish.
He makes it to the back stairwell more by luck than anything, and then it's just a matter of up.
His feet strike each stair with the timing of his heartbeat. Everything is loud, so damn loud. The exhale of his lungs, the screams of the undead, the roar of the engine. That sound grows louder with every floor he goes up until it's all but roaring in his head. And yet, there's one sound he doesn't hear: the pilot's screams. They've gone silent. Clint curses in his mind and wonders if he's too late. Of course, he's too late; he always is.
When the engine's whine is at its loudest, Clint turns off his cochlear implant. The world is suddenly tolerable again, and he lets out a gasp of relief, briefly closing his eyes. He gives himself half a moment to adjust.